Falling Together (29 page)

When she finally spoke, her voice was subdued, almost ashamed. “Remember how Jason said Cat took care of all the funeral arrangements after her dad died the same way she took care of everything?”

“I do remember that,” said Will.

“We babied her, didn’t we?”

“We took care of her,” said Will. “Everybody did. She was just that kind of person.”

“You know what Jamie said once?” said Pen with an embarrassed laugh.

“What?”

“He said that it was like we were the parents and Cat was our child.” Pen laughed again. “At the time, I wanted to kill him, but…”

Will didn’t know how to answer this.

Pen said, “Listen, maybe we took care of her, but if we did—and I’m really trying not to be defensive when I say this—it’s because she wanted us to. It was how things were, and it worked.”

“But you could see,” Will said carefully, “how it could have stopped being what she wanted. And how she couldn’t see any other way out of it but to leave.”

“Leave?” Pen said. “But we
loved
her.”

Pen’s voice filled the air inside Will’s car, and the pain and sincere bafflement in it sent Will to where he had, for so long, tried to avoid going: back to Pen’s tiny kitchen table, to her telling him, with that same painful confusion, that he could not leave—
how
could he leave?—when she loved him. The second he got there, saw her again, with her outstretched hands and her stunned disbelief, he realized that this was who Pen had always been, a person who believed that people who loved each other were different from everyone else, from the world in general, exempt from the usual pressures of time and change, of growing older or of growing up. When it came to love, Will’s friend Pen was that rare and dangerous thing: a true believer.

“I want us to find her,” said Pen resolutely.

“I figured,” said Will.

“Where did she go? Across town? Across the country? Not that any place is too far away to look.”

Shit,
thought Will, regretting so hard it felt almost like anger that he didn’t have an easier answer to give her.

“Across the world,” he said. There was nothing to do but say it. “Cebu City, where her dad was born. The Philippines.”

P
EN HAD SPENT TWO YEARS WAITING TO BE HAUNTED, AND IT
hadn’t happened. True, her father was always there, inside Pen’s mind, sometimes standing squarely in its center, everything else sidestepping or flowing around him, other times as a reassuring but nearly anonymous presence, like the lit windows of the apartment building across from Jamie’s that Pen would look at, parting the curtains of the window next to her bed for a quick glimpse, when she couldn’t sleep. Anything—a windbreaker, a bicycle helmet, a man with his hair parted a certain way, the joke the weatherman on Channel 10 made about fog—could send him flaring like a torch into a three-dimensional, walking, talking memory. But if these moments were vivid and if they bruised and embraced Pen at the same time, they were memories all the same, she knew, incorporeal, evanescent. Actually seeing her father or hearing his voice or feeling his hand on her shoulder, even sensing his physical nearness had never happened, no matter how patient she had tried to be, no matter how much she had longed for him to come back to her, even for a second.

The day she and Jamie brought their mother home, entered, for the first time in months, the house they had grown up in, was no different, though the house even looked sort of haunted, with every shade and curtain drawn and pale sheets over the furniture making a moonscape of the living room. Pen knew that the Wexlers next door had been coming over now and then to check on things and to adjust the thermostat so that the pipes wouldn’t freeze in the winter, and that they had been sending their teenaged son, Alec, to weed Pen’s mother’s flowerbeds and mow the lawn, but the house had the hollow, echo-filled atmosphere of a long untouched place. Standing in the dim entryway, Pen imagined cobwebs into the corners, even though she knew there wouldn’t be any because she knew that, just as Margaret Calloway would never have asked her friend Astrid Wexler to do a little tidying up from time to time, Astrid Wexler would never have not, from time to time, tidied up her friend Margaret Calloway’s house.

As she and her mother went room to room, dusting and vacuuming, raising blinds, lifting or cranking open windows so that light cut pathways across the floors and new air drifted in (with Pen dogged, the whole time, by the idea that doing so should have felt a lot more metaphorical than it did), Pen kept a part of her psyche (small, upright, and hyperalert as a meerkat) attuned to the possibility of her father’s presence. She had to admit that it made her feel foolish. She had never believed in ghosts, not even as a kid. It was only in bursts that Pen believed in an afterlife at all.

The thing was, though, that if the dead could come back to visit the people they loved, her father was exactly the kind of person who would do it. Alive, he had been a frequent just-to-hear-your-voice telephoner, a daily, one-sentence e-mailer, a base-toucher, a checker-in. Once, he had stopped in the middle of his crack-of-dawn bike ride to call Pen and tell her he’d just seen a flock of birds flying in the whooshing, shoal-of-fish manner that she loved. Pen believed in her heart that anywhere her father was now, even in the most replete and splendid of all possible heavens, he would miss them.

But all that day, he never showed up. Not when Pen opened her parents’ closet to hang up her mother’s clothes and saw the leather aviator jacket he’d had since college, not when Augusta came clacking out of the garage with her sneakered feet stuffed into a pair of his old bike shoes, not even when Pen opened the door of his office and the great, polished, barren rectangle of his desktop (no computer, no overstuffed folders, no scarred globe, no road atlases, or years-deep stacks of
Science
and
Sports Illustrated
) rose up to break her heart.

Overall, it was a good day. Pen and Margaret cleaned and talked, sometimes shouting, impractically, over the sound of the vacuum cleaner, the way they had always done. (“Will was crazy enough to suggest that we all fly out to the Philippines to find Cat!” Pen hollered. “How crazy is that?” “Not crazy at all!” roared Margaret. “Do it!” “Listen to you!” shrieked Pen. “Globe-trotter! Jet-setter!” “Why are you shouting?” shouted Augusta. “Because they’re insane! Total freaking nutjobs, and they’re trying to drive us insane, too,” yelled Jamie, unplugging the vacuum cleaner, and continuing to bellow into the quiet. “They must be stopped!” “Nutjobs, nutjobs, nutjobs!” sang Augusta at the top of her lungs. “Totally freaking out!”)

Jamie got on the phone and had the mail, which had been forwarded to his apartment, unforwarded, restarted the newspaper delivery, telephone service, Internet service, and cable television, upgrading his mother to a premium package on this last one and having the bill sent to him, so horrified was he at her paucity of channels. In the afternoon, he shopped with Augusta, for whom a trip to the grocery store with Uncle Jamie was heaven on earth, and the two of them cooked dinner, noisily, drinking cranberry juice out of wineglasses (Augusta explaining to Pen solemnly and in an uncanny echo of Jamie’s voice, “Because you gots to drink-a while you cook-a.”). Augusta stood on a kitchen chair, wrapped like a burrito in Pen’s father’s barbecue apron, and sliced mushrooms with a butter knife, stopping only to literally dance with joy when Jamie did an extended impersonation of a hibachi chef, a performance that occasioned Pen to predict, “You will either chop off your hand at the wrist or drop dead from cultural insensitivity.”

Later, after she had sat in the egg chair in her old room with Augusta and read aloud almost a whole chapter of
The Trumpet of the Swan
(after attempting to read a chapter of
Sideways Stories from Wayside School,
which had made Augusta laugh in an unbridled way that Pen feared would spell sleep-doom if it went on for long), and after lying down in the lower bunk with her and singing “Baby Mine” in her best Mrs. Jumbo voice, twice through, and after, in blatant defiance of every “help your kid learn to sleep” book she had ever read, staying with Augusta until she fell asleep, Pen went downstairs and out into the backyard and found her father.

She was headed, a Tupperware container of vegetable peelings in hand, for what had been her enthusiastic father’s but was now her reluctant mother’s compost tumbler. Like Jamie, Pen’s dad was a gadget man, irresistibly drawn to peanut butter stirrers, bagel guillotines, and ergonomic snow shovels as Jamie was drawn to tiny bike handlebar GPS devices and anything with a lowercase “i” at the beginning of its name. A month before he died, Ben Calloway had come home with a contraption that he regarded as being “as pretty as any yard sculpture out there” but which Margaret thought looked like a giant blueberry with legs. The neighborhood association (and Pen, although she never said so) agreed with Margaret, so that the composter sat in the very back of the backyard, near the brick wall of the detached garage, half-hidden much of the year by a Texas beauty queen ball gown of a weeping cherry.

When Pen was about ten feet from the garage, the motion-activated floodlight attached to its roof came stunningly to life, and so as not to be blinded, Pen turned her face away and found herself staring at a creature of such astounding gorgeousness that it took her a few seconds to register what it was. It burned against the green grass, an impossible long, lean pour of orange (
neon paprika,
Pen thought afterward), with a glorious puffed tail as long as its whole body and nearly as big around. A fox.

Pen felt an instinctive jolt of fear, but then the fox turned its head and looked at her, and something happened that she found difficult to describe later, even to herself. It was nothing so simple as looking at the fox and seeing her father. The fox was altogether foxlike and other: precise black nose; extravagantly upright ears; white fur spilling down its front like milk. What regarded Pen through tilted amber eyes was not threatening or alarmed or even particularly wild, but it was surely not Ben Calloway.

However, as Pen and the fox stood with their eyes locked, Pen was suddenly rushed and lifted by the certainty that her father was with her, and this certainty came not only from the fox itself but from the ground under her shoes and the pulse of crickets and the stones of the garage wall behind her. The feeling effervesced delicately as fireflies in the rosebushes and slid with a startling
whomp
off the canted back roof of the house and into the yard, like sheets of snow. The air was alive with it. Not with it, with
him
just as Pen knew him: funniness, geekiness, bravery, a reserve that wasn’t so much shyness as a deep sense of privacy, genuine interest, kindness like an ocean. She felt him prickle along her forearms and down the back of her neck. She felt him everywhere.

Joy was a high-pitched vertiginous singing in Pen’s ears.

“Daddy,” she said and dropped the Tupperware container.

The fox turned and walked into the trees, dragging its tail with the offhand elegance of a duchess dragging her train, and it was over. Pen stood, shaking, in the empty yard. When she could think enough to move, she leaned over, picked up the container, and stepped away from the garage so that the light snapped off and darkness dropped like a sheet over a birdcage. She sat down on the back steps, container on knees, fists on container, forehead on fists, and breathed.

“Are you sick or praying or just weird?”

Pen gave a convulsive start that sent the Tupperware container flying off her knees onto the walkway in front of her and looked up, a little wild-eyed. It was Jamie, back from his evening run.

“Whoa!” said Jamie, pulling the earbuds out of his ears. “Little jumpy tonight?”

“Stop sneaking up on people.” Pen picked up the container and threw it at him. It bounced off his knee.

“Ow,” said Jamie amiably. He sat down on the grass and pulled his T-shirt by the collar up over his face, wiping off sweat.

“That grass is probably full of mosquitoes,” said Pen. “I hope they bite you to bits.”

“Nah. They don’t like me. You’re the one they like.”

This was true, and as soon as he said it, Pen felt one bite her upper arm. She slapped at it.

“See?” said Jamie. “What are you doing out here, anyway?”

Experiencing miracles, Pen thought about saying. Instead, she shrugged and said, “Taking the stuff from dinner to the composter.”

“Really? Because it looked like you were sitting on the steps in the fetal position.”