Falling Together (45 page)

As if Lola Lita had read Pen’s thoughts, she said, kind reproval in her voice, “I know you want to find Catalina, but who knows when you and your daughter will come back to the Philippines? So many people never get to go anywhere. Allow yourself to really be here. See what there is to see.”

Pen nodded thoughtfully. Ever since she had arrived in the Philippines, Pen had been dazzled by a sense of improbability.
We were there,
she had thought,
and now we are here
.
How could it be true?
But it was true. The world was big and Pen was in it. The least she could do was pay attention.

“Okay,” she agreed. “But can you tell me something?”

Lola Lita nodded her empress nod.

“Do
you
think we’ll find her?” Pen held her breath, waiting.

Pensively, Lola Lita narrowed her eyes, sending sunbursts of wrinkles shooting from their corners.
No one can see the future,
thought Pen, breathlessly.
But if someone could, this is exactly how she would look
.

“Yes,” said Lola Lita, “I do.”

P
EN DIDN’T KNOW WHAT WOKE HER, BUT SUDDENLY SHE WAS SITTING
up, her senses prickling, her chest full of rising, undefined emotion. In near perfect darkness, in the bed next to hers, Augusta shifted, sighed, and drew herself into a tight ball, like an armadillo. Pen waited for her daughter’s breathing to ease back into its cradle-rock rhythm and then noiselessly swung her legs over the side of the bed. They were in a tiny inner room, windowless and square. What light there was slid in over the tops of the room’s walls, which did not quite reach the ceiling. Pen knew that Will was sleeping in the matching room next door. All around her, in every room, enfolded in the same heat, the same velvet silence, people slept.

Pen found the closed door, sliding her feet across the smooth tiles, and walked out into the narrow hallway that she knew would take her to the front of the house. Light from the front windows turned the darkness gray. Uncertainly, Pen rocked on the balls of her feet in the center of the living room, weighed down by what she now recognized as sadness. She knew that she needed to sit down, to be someplace solid and solitary when it overtook her completely, so she let herself out the front door onto the narrow, L-shaped porch. Her body felt separate from her, like a brittle, wounded thing; with care, she set it down on a wooden bench. Then she stepped off an edge and into the sadness and was lost.

After several minutes or thirty or an hour—it was impossible to say—Pen was called back to herself by the sound of the front door opening. Someone sat down next to her, someone put an arm around her shoulders, someone said, “Poor child.” Pen wasn’t sure who it was and for a moment, didn’t think to ask or check. The person was pure kindness, consolation embodied, and Pen buried her face in the person’s shoulder until she was calm. The shoulder was the most comforting spot Pen had ever been. It smelled like baby powder.

“I’m so sorry you are sad,” said the person. Lola Fe.

Pen sat up and wiped her face but didn’t pull away. “I’m sorry I woke you up.”

“Don’t be silly,” admonished Lola Fe. “It is just what happens when you’re my age. Your body forgets how to sleep.”

“Does it also forget how to be tired?”

“No,” said Lola Fe with a chuckle. “That it remembers very well.”

They sat in companionable quiet, until a voice from the front yard, somewhere near the Virgin Mary statue, proclaimed, loudly, “Tuk-o!”

Pen looked at Lola Fe.

“Listen,” said Lola Fe, pressing her finger to her lips.

“Tuk-o, tuk-o, tuk-o!” The voice began to slow, stretching the space between the syllables, like a toy running down; then it squawked and started over again, “Tuk-o!”

“Was the Virgin Mary doing that?” asked Pen. She hoped it wasn’t a terrible joke to make.

Lola Fe laughed. “Not her. Her pet, our friend the tuko lizard.”

“I like him,” said Pen. “Or her.” The sound of the lizard was like so many other things in this place, completely strange and, at the same time, completely natural, even inevitable. She hadn’t felt the absence of the lizard before it began to sing, but as soon as it had sung, she understood that nothing would have been complete without it.

“My father died two years ago,” said Pen, breathing the words out in a long stream into the quiet that was somehow different from the pre-lizard quiet, more resonant.

“I am very sorry,” said Lola Fe. “You must miss him.”

“I do,” said Pen. “And this place, your home, makes me miss him more than I usually do. Even though he’s never been here. Isn’t that odd?”

“I don’t know,” said Lola Fe. “Maybe it’s a place he would like.”

“It is,” said Pen. “He would love it, maybe for the same reason I do.”

“The empanadas?” teased Lola Fe.

“Yes,” Pen said, smiling, but her thoughts were solemn. It seemed important for her to articulate to Lola Fe what this place meant to her. “I just feel that the way things are here is the way things should be.”

Lola Fe did not dispute this. She nodded and asked, “What do you mean?”

“A lot of things, but mostly I’m talking about the way everyone is together. Nobody leaving, nobody gone. Do you know what I mean?”

“I think so,” said Lola Fe. She smiled at Pen. “You’re wrong, of course. So many have left. Manuel and my sister Maria who died when she was just a girl and my parents and my cousin Gigi, who lives in New York, and my nephews and nieces who have gone to the States or to Canada or Dubai or Australia to live and work.”

Lola Fe turned her smooth face to the dark yard, her eyes alert and tender as though she could see all of the missing standing out there among the shrubs and flowers. Then she looked back at Pen and said, “But you are right that nobody’s gone.”

Pen nodded, wanting her to go on.

“What is that saying? Gone but not—?” asked Lola Fe.

“Gone but not forgotten,” said Pen.

“Yes, but it’s more than that. Gone but not gone.” Lola Fe laughed. “Gone but here. It must be why the house feels so small. We keep them all.”

Gone but here,
thought Pen. “How?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” said Lola Fe with a touch of crustiness. “How not? It’s how things are. Just because someone happens not to be here doesn’t mean he is lost.” She said it as though the very idea of people being lost was ridiculous.

“Oh.”

“You just make room for more. Always room for one more!” She laughed her wonderful, sandpapery laugh again.

“So you keep everyone?” asked Pen.

“Sure,” said Lola Fe with an impatient shrug. “What else?”

I
T WAS EVEN BEFORE SHE WAS ACTUALLY IN THE OCEAN
,
BEFORE
she was surrounded on every side by streaming, swirling, darting, infinitely varicolored glory, while she was still riding in the snow-white water strider of a boat (delicate outriggers arching over the blue water) that took them from Alona Beach to Balicasag Island that Pen realized it: sometimes there is nothing to do but surrender yourself to wonder. You must stop searching for one small, dark-haired woman in a world of small, dark-haired women. You must stop missing your father. You must stop measuring—over and over—the line between loving and being in love. You must offer yourself, whole, to the cobalt starfish (and the orange one and the pale pink one and the biscuit-colored one with the raised, chocolate-brown art deco design) and to the clear, clear water and to the sweep of shining sky and to the silver scattershot of leaping fish (an entire school skipping across the ocean like a stone).

It’s what they were all doing, Pen could tell. Will with his legs stretched out and his face to the wind. Augusta, who had, that morning, sobbed inconsolably upon learning that the naked children—hair bronze-streaked, skin mahogany from a lifetime of living outdoors (“
Badjao,”
a woman next to Pen had whispered. “Sea gypsies!”)—standing in small
banca
boats, hands outstretched, begging (there was no other word for it) the people boarding the ferry to Bohol for money or food were naked because they owned no clothes, was now consoled a thousand times over, her face singularly radiant, as she tilted it over the edge of the boat to look into the translucent ocean, searching for stars. Even Jason, who had grown brooding and taciturn since they’d left the Lolas’ house, in spite of their being so close to finding Cat, or maybe because of it, was happy under the brim of his baseball cap, waving at passing boats with a broad, magisterial, welcoming smile, as though he owned it all: boat, sky, country, the sea and everything in it.

By the time they got to the coral reef off the edge of Balicasag (“coast” seemed too large a word to apply to Balicasag, which was tiny and, as their captain, Pedro, told them, “round like a
peso
” and boasting a single restaurant, owned by Pedro’s cousin Nonoy), Pen had plunged so deeply into the beauty of the day that when it came time to plunge into the ocean (or at least to float on its turquoise surface), she found she had no room in her heart for fear. Even if she had been afraid, it wouldn’t have mattered in the face of Augusta’s cute but unconquerable desire to “snorgle with Mama.”

There was no snorkel small enough for Augusta, so she held her breath and wore a pair of ordinary swim goggles, the kind she wore for the swim lessons she had been attending regularly, if sometimes wildly reluctantly, since before she turned three. Pen was grateful that Augusta was water-safe because it was clear that there was no keeping her out of that ocean. As soon as they landed at Balicasag, Pedro’s friend Jing Jing appeared with a little paddle-powered
banca,
a pink peapod of a boat, to take them to the reef (it was a fish sanctuary; no motors allowed), and before the boat was even fully stopped, Augusta was lurching over its side, and Pen had to hold her back.

They snorkeled holding hands. The water was so salty that they almost didn’t need to swim, just bobbed on its surface like corks, kicking slightly to propel themselves from one spot to another. The first time Pen put her face in the water and opened her eyes, her senses were so thoroughly and instantly overloaded that she emitted an involuntary yelp, which was a mistake, considering her snorkeled and undersea state. She lifted her head and coughed so long and hard that Jing Jing leaned over the boat to give her a considerate, if ineffective, underwater clap on the back.

The second time, more prepared, she stayed long enough to understand that the coral reef off Balicasag Island packed more gorgeousness per square centimeter than any other place she had ever been. At the same time that it was exactly like something she had seen on a nature show, it was like nothing she had seen on a nature show because everything—from the imperious butterfly fish trailing their scarves to the brown undulating ribbons that Pen assumed were eels (but might not have been; it frustrated her not to know) to the neon blue coruscations, so penny-small and quick that they might have been tricks of light—each thing, every individual scrap of embodied beauty, was palpably, unmistakably
alive
.

So were Pen and Augusta, alive and in the thick of it. Pen had expected to look down and see fish, and she did, but when she looked to the side, there they were, too, suspended next to her face or flowing by in iridescent streams, and, when Will swam over to take Augusta to see an anemone clownfish and Pen dove downward, the fish were above her as well. She knew that she was an intruder, but she didn’t feel like one. She felt like just another living creature, glowing and streamlined among the corals, corals like ferns and hair and platters and Queen Anne’s lace. She stayed as still as she could and watched a parrotfish glide by, stippled, striped, and marbled with so many luminous pastels that it looked like a fish-shaped painting by Monet.
Showoff,
thought Pen and wanted to laugh with joy.

Later, Jing Jing paddled them into the deeper, darker waters beyond the steep drop-off in the coral reef wall, and, without warning, stopped. They all looked at him, and without actually understanding why, Pen was immediately, spine-tinglingly aware of vast movement under the water.

“Jackfish!” said Jing Jing excitedly. “Very good to eat!”

He pointed and they all looked down and saw them, under and around the boat, a great, circling body of bodies, lithe and flashing platinum, and, suddenly, the thought that had been skirting the edges of her consciousness since they’d boarded Pedro’s boat at Alona Beach—and probably before that, maybe as soon as they had arrived in the Philippines—hit Pen with the force of an epiphany, knocking the breath out of her. She turned to Will, who sat behind her. One glance at her face and he was pushing his sunglasses to the top of his head.