Falling Together (31 page)

She considered Jamie’s idea, that the living win, automatically. It wasn’t exactly what she had been thinking when she’d said what she’d said, but it was such an elegantly simple statement, so translucent and true, while what she had been thinking had been so scattered and unformed (although nonetheless urgent)—more an impulse than a thought—and also so potentially embarrassing to piece together and articulate in the presence of Jamie that Pen just nodded and said, “Right.”

W
HEN
P
EN CALLED
W
ILL LATER THAT NIGHT, WHEN SHE GOT TO THIS
part of the story, she added, “I said ‘right’ because Jamie was right, but that’s not really what I’d been thinking.” It came out in a rush, unplanned. Pen closed her eyes.
Blurter,
she thought with exasperation.
Spiller.

“Oh,” said Will. “So what were you thinking?”

“Will you promise not to make fun of me?”

“Can’t do it,” said Will.

Pen sighed.

“How about if I promise not to make fun of you
immediately.”

“Fine,” said Pen. It was more than she would’ve gotten from Jamie. And because she felt suddenly overcome by shyness, she launched into a little conversation with herself inside of her head:

You want to say this thing,
she said to herself.

Obviously. The question is why.

You have no idea why, but you want to say it. You need to hear yourself say it out loud.

But why now? And why to Will?

Because you just figured it out, and now is when you want to, and if you want to, why not to Will? He’s as good at listening to the things you say as anyone, isn’t he?

“Pen?” It was Will. “You still with me?”

“Yes,” said Pen decisively.

From where she was sitting on the guest-room bed, she could see a ladybug creeping up the white lampshade on the dresser, and she remembered a story Amelie had told her about ladybugs infesting her aunt’s house, how it became like something out of a horror movie, ladybugs everywhere, a scourge of tiny, lacquered bodies, a plague of cuteness. According to Amelie, they bit. Pen thought about telling this story to Will, along with Amelie’s interesting assertion that “
anything
in huge numbers becomes horrific,” but she realized it was no time to dither.
Just say what you have to say as clearly as possible,
she instructed herself.
How hard is that?

“What it comes down to is that I just don’t see it as a choice. I mean, not really,” she said.

“You don’t?”

“Well, of course, technically, it’s a choice. Free will and all that crap. Cartesian, right? Free will? Like the plane, I guess. René. It’s a name a man can only pull off if he’s French. But just because you get to choose doesn’t mean there isn’t one right choice. Right?”

“Descartes thought the pineal gland was the seat of the soul,” said Will.

“That’s disgusting.”

“It’s not what you think.”

“Of course, there are situations in which it’s the wrong choice,” Pen went on, “for the same reason that anything is the wrong choice: you hurt people, you break promises. Although I suppose that not everyone would agree with that.”

“Maybe not.”

“But if you’re not hurting anyone, then I think you have no choice but to, well, honor it.”

“Honor? What do you mean honor?”

“Acknowledge it. Follow it. Chase it. Hold on to it. Whatever.”

There was a silence on the other end of the line, during which Pen watched the ladybug fly, a black blur, from the lampshade to the curtain of the window next to the bed.

Will said, “All right, I give up.”

“What?”

“I’m not getting it. Your pronoun reference.”

“What are you talking about?”

“The ‘it.’ I need a real noun. The right choice, the thing you follow, hold on to, et cetera.”

“Love,” said Pen impatiently. “What else would I be talking about?”

Another silence.

Finally, Will said, “So you’re saying, ‘Love wins, automatically.’”

“No. Well, maybe. Except that makes it sound easy when it’s not. Or not most of the time. It’s stringent. Exacting,” said Pen. “I think love is an imperative. It obligates you.”

“You think that because your mother fell in love with this man, she should be with him, even if your father would not have approved.”

Pen recoiled from this, leaning back against the pillow propped against the headboard, but she said, “Yes. Even if it’s hard. My mother. This man. Anyone. And I’m not just talking about being in love. I mean any kind of love. You don’t mess around. You don’t walk away. You can’t.”

“Can’t. Can’t is hard-core.”

“It’s what we’re here for,” explained Pen. “It’s what we’re
for.”

Pen realized that her face was burning, that the phone was pressed so hard between her ear and shoulder that she would probably have bruises, and that she was clenching the quilt that lay spread over the bed underneath her until her tendons popped out. Deliberately, she relaxed, released the quilt, cradled the phone in her hand, but as the silence between her and Will stretched on, she began to get anxious, fidgety.

“I think this is the good kind of ladybug,” she said. “It’s a true red. Like a Red Delicious apple. Or lipstick. Porsche-red. I’m pretty sure the infesting kind are more orange. And anyway, it’s summer.”

“Pen.”

“They only go inside in groups in the cold weather. What’s the word for that?”

“Hibernation?”

“Overwintering.”

“You thought I would make fun of you?”

“Jamie would. Amelie would. Maybe even my mom would. They’d call me a romantic.”

Will laughed. “‘Love is an imperative’? Not exactly hearts and roses stuff. You make it sound like joining the army.”

“I guess.”

“And, hey, look at that,” said Will. “I was right.”

“About what?”

“About what your mom had to tell you. Remember when I was on my way to see Sam and I was talking to you?”

“On your Bluetooth phone,” said Pen quickly, “with both hands on the wheel.”

“Even if that’s not what she went looking for, it’s what she brought back and gave you.”

“What?” Then she said quietly, “Oh, I know. I remember.”

“What?”

“The meaning of life.” Pen looked up and caught her reflection in the full-length mirror on the back of the guest-room door. She was smiling. Not even the sight of her face, lit up and smiling into an empty room, made her stop smiling. Pen thought back to the conversation she had had with herself a few minutes earlier, when she’d said that if she had something to say, she might as well tell Will. As if she’d picked him at random. As if she could have told anyone else.

Time to tell the rest.

“You’d think that I would’ve gotten to enjoy it for a while,” she said. “Knowing the meaning of life. You know, rest on my laurels.”

“What happened?”

“It got put to the test. My meaning of life! Challenged! Tested! Can you believe that? After, what? Thirty seconds? How unfair is that?”

“What happened?” said Will again, and Pen knew that he wasn’t fooled by her joking tone, as he should not have been. Even now, nothing about what had happened next in her conversation with Jamie and her mother struck her as funny.

She told him, then, how Jamie had said, “Do we get to meet him?” and how something in her mother’s face after he asked it made Pen remember herself asking, “You met someone?” and her mother saying, “Yes. And no.”

Before her mother could answer Jamie’s question, Pen jumped in with, “What did you mean before: ‘Yes. And no’? What did you mean when you said you ‘found’ someone? Why ‘found’?”

Pen’s mother smiled at Pen, the lines of her face holding affection and worry and something that looked like pleading. “You know why, don’t you?” she said.

Pen was still sitting on the floor and she shifted, now, slightly away from her mother. “Why, but not who,” she said bluntly.

Jamie looked from his mother to Pen and back, confused. “Did I miss something?”

“I was seventeen when I met your dad,” said their mother. “It was my gift, my blessing to love him and no one else for forty years. If I had my way, that would have gone on forever.”

“You don’t even have to say those things, Mom,” said Jamie, surprised.

“I want you to understand.” She was looking at Pen.

“Okay,” said Pen. She knew it wasn’t enough, that the moment demanded more from her, but she felt so physically tense with waiting, her rib cage tightening and tightening, that it was hard to breathe. The name hovered around them. The air in the room was thick with it. She just needed it said.

“Who is he? Someone from high school? Someone you grew up with?” Pen asked, and she marveled at this for a moment, the possibility that someone you knew forty, fifty years ago could circle back into your life and make you fall in love with him.

Pen’s mother slumped a little at this. She shook her head.

“Could you please just tell us?” said Pen.

“Mark Venverloh.”

Pen stared at her mother. She opened her mouth, but no sound came out.

“Mr. V?” said Jamie in a choked voice. “You’re in love with Mr. V?”

It seemed impossible, but of course, it wasn’t. Pen didn’t know why it hadn’t occurred to her: that the man wasn’t someone from her mother’s distant past, that he was someone they all—even their father, their father
especially
—had known.

“Mr. Venverloh,” said Pen, who had never called him “Mark” and was only vaguely aware that it was his name at all. Saying the name out loud failed to make her mother’s loving him any more plausible.

To Will, Pen said, “Mr.
Ven
verloh. Can you believe that?”

“I can’t if you say I can’t,” he said. “But I don’t think I know who that is.”

Pen considered this and realized it was true. Her dad hadn’t started working for Mr. Venverloh until after Will and Cat had left. Unexpectedly, this realization filled Pen with sorrow, and for once in what seemed like forever, she wasn’t sad on her own behalf. Cat and Will had had their reasons for leaving, but whatever they were (Pen still didn’t understand them, only believed—still, eternally—that whatever they were, they weren’t good enough), they had nothing to do with Ben Calloway, who had loved them unreservedly, just as they had loved him. And they had lost each other all the same. Incidental loss. Collateral damage. But permanent. Will and Cat had missed out on the last four years of Ben’s life. Ben had spent the last four years of his life missing them. It was enough to break your heart.

“He loved you,” said Pen. “He missed you.” She hoped there was no reproach in her voice. She didn’t feel reproachful, only sad.

Will didn’t say, “Mr. Venverloh loved me?” He said, “I know. I wish I could see him again.”

“You know my dad was an environmental engineer for the city for years, mainly in the water department, and he liked it a lot. It suited him: part environmentalist, part science geek. Then Mr. Venverloh started riding bikes with my dad’s group about five years ago. He’s rich, crazy rich actually, owns a big estate nearby.”

“One of the baronets?” asked Will.

It was something she, Will, and Cat had always joked about, how little Wilmington, Delaware, birthplace of more than one gigantic corporation, was like something out of the nineteenth century or earlier, with a true landed gentry. “This place is more Middlemarchian than Middlemarch!” Cat had quipped.

“Yes,” said Pen, “but he has a real job, too. Some finance thing. Anyway, he and my dad got to be friends, and when Mr. V’s land manager retired, he asked my dad if he wanted the job.”

“Land manager. That sounds so—”

“Feudal. I know. But my dad loved it: sustainable agriculture, native plants, eliminating invasive species, and he got to be outside. You know he grew up on a farm.”

“I did know that.”

“So that’s my mom’s new boyfriend. Mr. Venverloh. Mark.
Mark.
God.”

“I can think of a lot of reasons why that might be tough for you,” said Will.

“It’s tough for Jamie, too. He didn’t let on to my mom, of course, but later he told me that he wished it were someone who hadn’t been in Mom and Dad’s life. Jamie said that even though he knew it didn’t really, he
felt
like it cast a shadow backward, memory-wise. He couldn’t really explain that, but I think I sort of know what he means.”

“Do you feel like that, too?”

“Not now, I don’t think. I don’t know. I think I like it that it’s someone who cared about my father, who knew him. My dad liked him, too. He’s nice, Mr. Venverloh. The thing that hurts—well, a lot of it hurts, to tell you the truth—but the thing that hurts right now—and I know this is probably stupid—is that, on paper, he—” It hurt even to say it.

Will bought her some time by saying, “Does he own a jet? That’s all I really want to know.”

Pen laughed. “My dad was the best man in the world, you know that, right?”

“Yep.”