Falling Together (50 page)

The fancy resort marked the end of the strip, and, as they walked away from it, the beach grew darker. The moon had risen by now, though, and was nearly full—a big, silver, low-hanging plum—so there was still enough light to see by. Even so, Pen should not have been able to tell that it was Cat. Even with the moonlight above and its reflection on the water and the residual light from the strip behind them, it was too dim to make out much more than an outline—two small people, their arms linked—and still, without knowing how she knew (was it her walk? a fragment of barely heard conversation carried through the night air?), Pen knew.

“Will,” she said, and she grabbed his arm and started walking faster.

“What are you doing?” asked Will.

“Hey, guys!” called Jason from behind them. “Yo! Slow up!”

“Cat,” gasped Pen, pointing.

Will squinted into the dimness.

“Holy shit,” he breathed, and together they broke into an almost-run.

Their approach was quiet, their hearts pounding more loudly, or so it seemed to them, than their footfalls, which were muffled by the sugary sand. Still, Cat must have heard them coming because before they got to her, before they could call her name, she stopped, let go of the arm of the person she had been walking with, and turned around, and even though Pen had pictured herself finding Cat and running straight into her arms, had pictured it over and over again, as soon as she saw her face, she slowed down, tugging Will to a stop, so that the first time Cat said her name it was across a distance. The space between them might have been six feet, a body length, but it felt wider than that, and Pen felt suddenly shaky, filled with doubt. From where Pen stood, Cat’s face appeared completely impassive, chilly, registering nothing, not even bewilderment or curiosity. What if Pen had been wrong when she had told the Lolas that Cat would be happy to see her? Pen was still holding on to Will’s arm, and, as she looked at Cat across that distance, she held on harder.

Then, in a very small voice, Cat said, “Pen. Will. Oh, how can this be?” and she covered her mouth with her hands and sank to her knees in the sand.

“We came to see you,” explained Pen, but she found she couldn’t move, so it was Will who walked over to Cat, held her gently by the shoulders, lifted her to her feet, grinned, and said, “Hey, sweetheart.”

Cat came alive then, shouting, “Oh, my God,” and throwing her arms around Will’s neck, before dashing over to Pen, catching hold of both of her hands, and saying, “My sweet, sweet friend, my sweet, sweet, sweet, sweet friend,” before pulling her into a hard hug.

It’s okay,
thought Pen, overcome with relief.
She loves me.

Pen felt a tug on her skirt, and Augusta piped, “Mama, what’s happening?”

Cat froze in Pen’s embrace, and Pen extricated herself from the hug so that she could scoop Augusta into her arms.

“‘Mama’?” whispered Cat. She stared at Augusta, and her face blossomed into awe.

“My little girl,” said Pen, filled with awe herself, as sometimes happened at the sight of this glorious, full-fledged person who belonged to her but belonged mostly, and more and more, to herself, “Augusta.”

Slowly, Cat lifted one of her pretty hands (the sight of that familiar, flower-delicate hand brought tears to Pen’s eyes) and brushed the hair back from Augusta’s face.

“She is breathtaking,” said Cat, her eyes filling, too. “Imagine: Pen’s little girl.”

“Thank you very much,” said Augusta, and she leaned forward and kissed Cat on the lips.

Cat touched her fingers to her own mouth, and then told Pen in her old irresistible, teasing way, “She receives compliments so gracefully. Guess she got that from her dad.”

It was an old joke between the three of them, Pen’s embarrassed ineptitude at handling praise. Once, back in college, when she was dressed to go out and Will told her she looked pretty, she had erupted into such a red-faced, stammering series of self-reproaches, disavowals, and disclaimers that Will said, “How about you just hit me in the head with a hammer and we’ll call it even.”

“Hold on one red-hot minute!” cried Cat, snapping her fingers, whirling around, and pointing at Will. “Augusta. She’s not…?”

“No,” said Will. He shrugged. “I’d take her, though.”

“You can
borrow
me,” corrected Augusta.

Everyone laughed, and, afterward, a breathless, trembling silence swooped down upon Pen, Cat, and Will, as if each of them understood, in the same instant, that the three of them—Pen, Cat, and Will,
Pen, Cat, and Will
—were standing, in the year 2010, on a beach, in the Philippines, together. As they stood there, for the first time since she had seen her walking on the sand, arm in arm, with Cat, Pen became aware of the stranger. She stood a few feet away, a short, fine-boned woman, with long black hair and a bemused smile. Cat followed Pen’s gaze, gave a little jump, said, “I’m so sorry!” and held out her hand to the woman, who took it.

“Does anyone have a drum?” asked Cat mischievously. “Because not to undercut the solemnity of the moment? But this would be a really good time for a drumroll.”

“Nope,” said Will, holding his arms out to demonstrate his drumless state.

“Sorry,” said Pen.

“Um, Cat?” said Augusta. “We don’t really
have
drums on vacation?”

Cat gave a theatrical sigh. “Oh, fine,” she said. She let go of the stranger’s hand, took a step to the side, and made a sweeping arc with her arm.

“This is Marisol Ocampo,” she said, her face soft and starry-eyed, “my sister.”

Marisol was nodding her head, princess-fashion, a slow, wide smile emerging on her face, when a voice boomed, “Your
sister
?”

There was Jason. Pen realized that he must have been there all along. Of course he had, hovering behind them in the shadows, watching, probably gathering his courage, keeping quiet, even though his heart must have either leaped up or cracked in two at the sight of his wife. Caught up in Cat, Pen and Will had forgotten all about him.

Jason took a few steps forward and stopped, his shoulders back, his feet spread apart like a gunfighter or a football coach. Pen couldn’t bear to look at his face, but the sight of his hands alone was enough to make her heart hurt. They were clasped together in front of him, his fingers interlocked so tightly that, from where she stood, Pen could see the veins bulging in his arms. When she finally got up the nerve to look at his eyes, she saw that they were full of hope.

“I get it, now. You found out about her in your dad’s will, didn’t you? And you left home and came here to find her.” His voice was husky with tenderness.

Cat stood as still as if she had been turned to stone.

Jason unclasped his hands and reclasped them on the top of his head. “Aw, babe, you could have told me that. I would have understood.”

Cat did not tell him that her heart was melting at the mere sight of him, as he had predicted she would. With firm, deliberate steps, she walked until she was standing in front of him, and in a voice so cold that it didn’t sound like Cat’s at all, she said, “Jason, you don’t understand a single thing. You never have. And you should not have, you should
never
have come here.”

Pen wanted to tell Jason, “For God’s sake, just let her go!” She wanted to tell Cat, “Be gentle with him!” She wanted to step between the two of them, but she couldn’t be sure which person she wanted to shield from the other. In the end, she did none of these things because it was painfully clear to her that she shouldn’t even be there; none of them—Pen, Will, Augusta, Marisol—should be there. If the world worked as it should, Cat and Jason would be alone, with their shared, messy, intensely private story, the years upon years of plans and disappointments, love and anger, the trying and the giving up. This was a scene that wanted no witnesses. Still, there they all were.

Pen thought,
She didn’t call him “little boy,”
and when she looked at Jason’s face, white under the white moon, she saw that he didn’t look like a little boy at all, but like a man who had lost everything.

“O
NE
: I
MARRIED THE WRONG MAN, BUT YOU KNEW THAT ALREADY
. He’s a good, decent man, just abundantly, inalterably wrong for me. Honestly, not to place blame, but what were the two of you thinking, letting me marry him? Two: When my father died, I felt like that guy in the David Bowie song, floating in space, cut off from everything, as lost as lost could ever be. Loster. Three: To make matters worse, I found out about Marisol and that my dad had had this other life, another life, another wife, before I was born and that he had
left
his
child
. God, here I had spent the last five years trying desperately to have a baby—and I know what you’re thinking: why have a baby with a man I don’t love? But I thought, well, I would do it and have it and then I would leave, and we would raise her (I always felt in my heart that it would be a girl) together but apart, the way so many other people do because even though Jason was all wrong as a husband, I knew he would be an excellent, no, a
stupendous
father—and all the while, my own father, whom I spent my life worshipping, had walked away from his daughter, left her thousands of miles away and kept her a secret, and I was so angry at him. I was sick with fury and disillusionment. Four: But one day, it suddenly came to me that I needed to come find her, that everything happens for a reason and here was the reason: I was meant to find my sister. And I found her, but not just her, although she would have been enough all by herself; I found my home, my true home and my true family, the one I had yearned for all my life.”

It was the morning after they had found her. As they had planned before they had left her and Jason alone on the beach, they were having breakfast at Cat’s resort. Marisol was sitting in the sun, reading, on the other side of the endless pool, in which Augusta swam, loping like a dolphin through the water, blissfully untouched by the adult drama that had unfolded around her. Before they had left to meet Cat, Pen had peered through the window of Jason’s villa and had been relieved to see him there, sleeping.

After she told her story, Cat tilted her head thoughtfully and said, “I think that’s it. The bare bones, I mean,” and she scooped a forkful of sticky rice from her plate and popped it into her mouth.

Helplessly, dizzily, internally reeling with myriad, conflicting emotions, Pen looked at Will, who was smiling. She kicked him under the table.

“Ow!” said Will.

“What is the matter with you?” demanded Pen. “That was heart-wrenching!”

In truth, heart-wrenching was only one of the things Pen thought it was. Disturbingly cold-hearted (
husband as sperm donor?
) was another. Even as she thought this, though, she knew that it didn’t change anything. Cat was flawed. So what? They were all flawed. Cat was a person Pen loved.

“I know!” said Will. “My heart’s wrenched. It’s just funny.” The smile came back.

Cat was smiling, too, a smile, like Will’s, full of barely contained laughter.

“What’s funny about it?” asked Pen.

“Six years in four sentences. She really thinks that was four sentences.”

Cat made a face at him, nose wrinkled, tongue out.

Pen gave them both a disapproving glare.

“Come on, Pen,” said Will, “don’t be mad.” He started to reach for her, but stopped and set his hand down on the table.

“Oh, go ahead!” scoffed Cat. “Like I couldn’t tell from the very first moment I saw you.”

“You could?” asked Pen, too stunned to be embarrassed.

“Heck, yeah. I noticed, however, that you both left it out of your four-sentence biographies. It was all the more conspicuous for its absence, too. The unspoken fifth sentence: we are in love.” She fluttered her lashes and sighed.

“All right, all right,” grumbled Will.

“Cat. Be serious,” said Pen. “Is it okay? With you, I mean?”

“That matters to you?” said Cat. “After all this time?”

Pen considered this. “Yes,” she said, then added apologetically, “not that there’s anything we can do about it, if you don’t like it.”

Cat smiled. “I do like it. There was a time, of course, when I would have hated it, when it would have seemed like the end of the world.”

“‘Total friendship apocalypse,’” supplied Will.

“Exactly. But I knew that it would happen, once I left.”

“Six years after,” Will pointed out, “give or take.”

“Slowpokes,” said Cat, smiling. “Even so, I knew it would happen.”

“No, you didn’t!” said Pen, dismayed. “How could you have thought that?”

Cat turned her face to Pen, a face full of affection and entirely, exclusively Cat’s.

“You never saw how things were,” said Cat sweetly. “That’s part of what made you so wonderful. You thought we all loved each other in the same way.”

“We did,” insisted Pen, suddenly near tears. “You make it sound like our friendship wasn’t what it seemed to be.”

“Our friendship was the best thing under the sun,” avowed Cat. “I was wrong when I said that I had only just now found my family because you and Will were my family. You were the lights of my life.”

“Oh,” said Pen, wiping her eyes.

“But even in families, people have roles, spots that they fill. You and Will were the wonder twins. You were so in tune with each other, so connected.” Cat linked her forefingers together, the forefingers that Pen had loved, as she had loved everything about Cat.