Falling Together (6 page)

“I finished the last painting,” she said. Jokingly, she threw her arms out to the side and said, “It’s brilliant!”

“Same as always. Thanks, Mom.”

She leaned over and kissed the top of his head.

“Have I told you lately how I adore you?”

“Yep.”

“Adore,” she said. “Not just like a lot.”

“Adore. Got it.”

“Good.”

“You still need to do the book cover,” Will reminded her, “for the novel.”

“I’ll come back,” she said.

She turned to face the bulletin board, and Will knew she was reading the e-mail again.

“It still says what it said the first five times, Mom.”

“You know, it’s really too bad Cat ever left in the first place,” she said.

“She wanted to get married,” said Will. “It seemed like a fair enough reason to go.”

His mother turned around and said suddenly, “You know, I thought that after she left, you and Pen might fall in love.”

Will leaned back in his chair, startled.

“Oh, yeah? I never knew you thought that.”

“I guess it wasn’t in the cards, though?”

Will straightened some papers on his desk. He could feel her watching him.

“Nope. We were friends.” He gave a half-baked smile. “Until we weren’t.”

His mother’s cheeks reddened, and she made a gesture with one hand, as though she were brushing away the past.

“Anyway, I think you should go.” She tapped a finger against the e-mail on the bulletin board. “Cat needs you. That’s not a small thing, is it? Even after so long?”

“No,” admitted Will.

“You never could say no to Cat. You and Pen. Could you?” She was smiling.

“I don’t know. No,” said Will, with a shrug, “I guess we never could.”

A
S
P
EN PARKED HER CAR AT THE CURB IN FRONT OF
A
UGUSTA
’
S
father Patrick’s house, or in front of the uniformly rainforest-green ocean of lawn on which Patrick’s house floated like a distant ship, Pen thought what she had thought the very first time she had seen the house and every time since: Patrick was living the wrong life.

Although it’s true that this thought initially came to her during a time in her own life when thinking such a thing was suspiciously convenient, she persisted in thinking it long after she’d stopped wanting Patrick to live a different life in a different house with a radically different wife, a thing Pen had wanted ardently for a while there, or at least had thought she wanted. It was clear to her now: she had been confused and only
thought
that she wanted to be married to Patrick—although she had to admit that, at the time, thinking and actually wanting felt like one and the same.

But Pen couldn’t imagine anyone who knew Patrick reconciling him—perpetually messy, boyish, slouchy Patrick—with all this newness and gleam: the dazzlingly white driveway lined with still-scrawny trees, the landscaping carefully choreographed for staggered, three-season blooming (crocuses, then forsythia, then tulips, then azaleas, then a bewildering sequence of flowers and flowering bushes, then, finally, dahlias and mums, and somewhere in there, for years, twined delicately around the mailbox, clematis—starry, purple, and hopeful—until Tanya had declared it “folksy” and had it yanked).

The first time Patrick had shown her the house, Pen thought he was joking. She had given his shoulder a playful shove and said, “Yeah, right. Now take me to the real house.”

“What do you mean?” he’d asked, with what Pen had assumed was faux surprise. “That’s it. That’s our house.”

This remark would only sting later, after they’d driven back into the city and she was lying next to him on his simultaneously rock-hard and rickety Ikea futon in his small, unbeautiful, rented South Philly row house, watching him sleep. He had only been living in the house for a few weeks before Pen met him, but already it looked more lived-in than the apartment a few blocks away where she’d lived for years: houseplants on the kitchen windowsill,
New Yorker
cartoons stuck to the refrigerator door, a grove of candle stumps above the imitation fireplace, the mantel studded with coins of wax.

“That
was
our house,” he should have said, or “That’s
her
house,” or even better, “That’s the house I barely remember living in for two years, if you can call what I was doing before I met you living.”

Pen had watched his eyes move under the heartbreakingly thin skin of his eyelids and tried to remember what she knew about REM sleep. He was dreaming, right? Watching things invisible to her. It seemed possible that in such a state, his brain might be especially susceptible to suggestion. “You live here,” she had whispered fervidly. “Got that?
Here
.”

But because at the time, sitting next to Patrick in the car, Pen thought the whole thing was a joke, she had laughed and said, “Trust me, that is not your house.”

“It is,” he’d insisted. “I lived in it for two years.”

“Please,” she’d said, rolling her eyes. “You did not live there.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because people don’t really live in houses like that. It’s not possible.”

“Houses like what?”

“You know like what. Like oversized and soulless and planted in the middle of what used to be someone’s cornfield.”

They both looked at the house. Because Patrick had slunk down in the passenger seat to hide from the neighbors (although why he bothered was a mystery to Pen, since the neighboring houses were set so far away that, unless the people living in them had high-powered binoculars, they couldn’t have seen a 747 landing in Patrick’s yard, or what Patrick was pretending was his yard, which was almost large enough to accommodate such a landing, should one ever occur), he had to scoot himself up so that his eyes were just above the base of the window.

It had been July, just after twelve noon, and the high white sun pounding down wasn’t doing the house any favors. Pen remembered imagining how, in mellow afternoon light, the stucco might have looked buttery instead of bad-teeth yellow and the tall windows might have seemed welcoming rather than flashing and blind. Despite her old-house snobbery, Pen might have found it sort of pretty or at least impressive. As it was, the house appeared creepily phony, like an enormous photograph thumbtacked to a vast blue wall. Even the flowers looked plastic.

“I think it’s fake,” Pen had said in a stage whisper. “I think if you went up to it and pushed it with one finger, it would fall down flat.”

“I guess I can see how it wouldn’t be everyone’s cup of tea.” Something in his voice caught Pen’s attention because it sounded like sadness. But before she could ask him about it, the yard was suddenly alive, blossoming with tiny, silvery, geranium-flower-shaped fountains and crisscrossed with rainbows.

“Whoa,” breathed Pen.

“Hey!” said Patrick, sitting up in his seat. “That’s not supposed to happen.” He didn’t sound sad anymore; he sounded concerned.

“I guess it’s the sprinkler system. For the grass?” said Pen, figuring it out. She felt a bit deflated. For a few seconds there, the lawn’s abrupt transformation had seemed like a minor miracle.

“Yeah, but it’s set for morning and evening. If you water in the heat of the day, the sun soaks it all up. Tanya must have set it wrong before they left for the beach.”

Pen stared at the back of Patrick’s neck.

Crap,
she thought,
crappity crap crap shit
.

“Um,” she said in a small voice. “So, gosh. You really did live here, in this place I just completely demolished?”

“Until I was thrown out on my ass, yes.” He turned and smiled at her. “Demolished? You doused that sucker with gasoline and set it on fire.”

“I’m sorry. I really and truly didn’t think it was yours.”

Patrick took off his ancient Phillies cap, put it in his lap, and looked at it.

Pen said, “Guess I was pretty harsh.”

Patrick looked back at the house, “You really think it’s soulless?”

Absolutely and entirely soulless,
thought Pen,
barren and treeless and pretentious and soulless
. “I shouldn’t have said ‘soulless.’”

“Because that’s the house Lila’s growing up in, you know?”

At the time, Pen hadn’t yet met Lila, who was three years old, and whenever Patrick mentioned her, Pen experienced an odd and intense mix of reverence, curiosity, jealousy, and irritation. It was just the way she had felt back in elementary school, when her devoutly Catholic friend Shelby talked about the Blessed Virgin. (“We have the Virgin Mary, too,” Pen could remember protesting. “You don’t pray to her, do you?” Shelby had shot back. “And if you don’t pray to her, you don’t have her. You have God and Jesus, that’s
it
.”)

Pen looked at Patrick’s longish curly hair, the stubble on his face. His T-shirt was transparent in spots and so decayed that the figure on the front looked more like a Cat in the Hat zombie than the Cat himself, and his Phillies cap was a dull pink, the ratty white buckram poking through all along the brim.

“I don’t know. I guess I just can’t imagine you in that particular house,” ventured Pen finally.

“Why not?”

“Patrick, you shave once a week, tops. And look at you. Every single edge on you is frayed.”

Patrick looked down at himself, fingering the hem of his khaki shorts.

“I’m clean, though. I make a point of being clean.” He smiled at her, but his eyes weren’t happy.

“You are. You do.”

“I let Tanya pick the house. She cared, and I really didn’t. Besides, it was mostly her money.”

Pen wasn’t sure that this was true. Despite his threadbare appearance, Patrick was a partner in a marketing and design firm that even Jamie (who had loathed the Patrick situation from the beginning) had grudgingly acknowledged “did well.” But Patrick liked to think of himself as a “regular Joe,” a trait Pen had found endearingly down to earth, initially, and annoyingly affected later. (“I should have known he wasn’t trustworthy,” Pen told her friend Amelie, after Patrick had broken off their engagement and gone back to Tanya. “The first time I saw him in a mechanic’s shirt with another man’s name on it, I should have known.”)

The house seemed to suit Patrick no better now, almost six years after he’d left her and gone back to it the first time, two since he’d gone back to it for good, than it ever had, but now Pen had her own reasons to regret calling it soulless, since, for one weekend out of every month, Augusta was growing up here, too.

Before she got out of the car, Pen smoothed her already smooth hair and put on lip gloss, stabbing at her mouth with the sponge-tipped wand and cursing herself between clenched teeth for caring, even a little, about Patrick’s and Tanya’s opinions of her. She started to check for food in her teeth, then stopped.
Enough,
she thought,
enough, enough, for God’s sake,
and she set off briskly down the long driveway,
pat pat pat,
her dark red ballet flats flashing against the white. It was strange, Pen thought, how coming to this house never got any less awkward, especially strange when you considered that she hadn’t hated Tanya for a long time, not for years, and was ashamed that she ever had.

The trouble was that Tanya still hated Pen. She hid it, most of the time, or, rather, camouflaged it as cold dislike or stony indifference or mocking disdain (the woman had Joan Crawford eyebrows and knew how to use them), but then, as sudden as a slap, it would hit Pen: a blazing, palpable, ever-fresh hatred that whipped around and raged inside Tanya’s eyes like twin electrical storms.
If you ever get diagnosed with terminal cancer, if you get hit by a freight train or just drop dead for no reason at all,
the look told Pen,
I would rejoice in my soul
.

Certainly, this was disturbing, but Pen had to admit that she found it kind of admirable. She could imagine sustaining certain emotions at that pitch for that long—love absolutely, grief probably, guilt maybe—but hatred was exhausting and gave so little back. Once, after her father died, Pen had tried to keep hatred alive, but it kept losing its firm shape, kept smudging and blurring until it became an immense, black, impossibly heavy sadness that lived inside her body and made it hard to move, so she had given it up. Sometimes she missed it, though.