Pen had been especially worried about this go-round because whenever Pen left, Augusta insisted upon knowing precisely where she was going, and, perhaps because she had so little in the way of a past, Augusta had had difficulty comprehending the concept of a reunion. In the end, this had probably worked in everyone’s favor, since, inside her imagination, Augusta had tidily substituted the unwieldy reunion idea with one of her own and decided that Pen was going to meet friends at the Union Street bakery in Wilmington where Augusta had loved to go with Pen’s mother.
Pen had driven Augusta over to Patrick’s in the early morning, with long, pink-stained clouds still floating low in the milky sky and with her child, bread-warm and messy-haired, sleeping in the backseat, and had prayed that the powers that be not mistake her recent uptick in leave-takings for a lack of love. This is it, she had vowed. It, it, it. For a long time, all summer; except for Patrick’s weekends, this is the last time I’ll spend a night away from her. On Patrick’s doorstep, as carefully as Pen had tried to make the transfer—one palm cupping the weight of Augusta’s head, the other arm supporting the curled rest of her—Augusta had awakened and reached for her. Pen had held her breath, but, instead of launching into a tantrum, Augusta had smiled, blinked extravagantly like a cat, and said, “You will bring me some jam-spot cookies like I like, right, Mama?” And Pen had asked Patrick, “How can I, how could anyone walk away from that?”
But she had. Because Cat had said that she needed her, Pen had left Augusta, and now here she stood, mute and rigid as a stump, her head full of noise, remembering the curve of her child’s perfect skull in her hand, and waiting for someone who was either taking her damn time (Pen hadn’t worn a watch in years and her satin wristlet bag was too small for her phone, so she didn’t know how long she had been waiting but knew it was unforgivably long) or who was never arriving at all. God, I must be insane, she thought, or stupid. And then she turned her face—what was it? fifteen degrees? ten? less?—and saw Will.
He wasn’t looking at her, was at such an oblique angle to her that his face was little more than a sliver, but she knew him at once. “It was like reading,” she would try to explain later, and she wasn’t talking about phonics. She didn’t break him into syllables—shoulders, hair, shirt collar, hand, nose, cheekbone—and put him back together again; she didn’t sound him out. He was a language she knew, and it was whole-word recognition: Will.
He looked at her and smiled, not a wry or wary smile, but an easy, sudden gift of a smile, like someone handing her a pear, a smile that only a crazy person would fail to return. But that’s just what Pen did. Not only did she fail to return it, but she stared at Will, frozen, for a long time, a fiery blush shooting up her neck and face, finally lifted one finger in a forlorn and inane gesture meaning I’ll be right back, then spun around and went careening—erratic, batlike—through the crowd of people and out the back of the tent.
Once outside, she kept walking, blindly, cursing herself, cursing the ridiculously high heels that sent her wobbling, knock-kneed, across the grass like a baby giraffe, then teetering down a brick sidewalk, clicks echoing like gunshots in the night.
“Idiot!” She bit the word out through clenched teeth. “Idiot, idiot.”
After a few more steps, she stood still, squeezed her eyes shut, and a thought came to her that was perfectly calm and in the voice of her mother, You are overwrought and you need to sit down. She opened her eyes and got her bearings: a long, beautiful serpentine wall made of bricks, a white gate. One of the university gardens. “Let it be unlocked,” Pen whispered, and it was.
Inside, plum trees stood in a row, flowers lifted their pale throats to the moon and stars, a magnolia held its tight-closed buds like white candles in its green hands. The place was so orderly, so full of grace that Pen hated to disturb it with her idiocy and her burning face and her raucous pulse, but then she saw a white bench, so she sat down.
She hadn’t walked far, but she felt like she had. The party was still there, right around the corner. She could hear it but not see it, and she took a few seconds to imagine it as a big, white, hoop-skirted ghost floating away over the grass or one of those Mississippi riverboats, its paddlewheel turning languorously in the brown water, carrying the music and laughter, the corseted women and wild-eyed gamblers farther and farther downstream. You are weird, girlfriend, thought Pen, shaking her head. As weird as they come. A closet weirdo. But the ghost and the riverboat called her back to herself enough so that she could sort out just what in the hell had happened back there at the party, to enumerate all the reasons (and she was sure there were legions of them) why she was an idiot.
It had happened fast. What had happened fast? Will had done a small, normal thing: he had looked at her and smiled. But as soon as he did it, the instant Pen really and truly saw him, she was overtaken, sucker punched, not once but twice: first by a terrible, rawboned loneliness, then by desire. For Will. Desire for Will. Although desire was too breathy a word for what she felt, and too narrow. Because it wasn’t just sexual desire (although it was that, too), but a voluminous, all-purpose longing. If Will hadn’t, by the grace of God, been too far away to hear her, she might have said it out loud: “I want you in every way a person can want someone.”
“Holy shit,” Pen whispered, panicked, into the stillness of the garden. “What have I done?” And then she remembered that, apart from running out of the party like a lunatic, she hadn’t really done anything. “Calm down, sweetheart,” she told herself, doing her best to channel her mom. “Chill the cluck out. Think.”
After briefly undertaking what she imagined to be yoga breathing, she did think, taking on the loneliness first, touching it cautiously, examining it, and she discovered that the loneliness was nothing new, but had been there all along. It was just that, before the moment at the party, she hadn’t been aware of its magnitude. She hadn’t been conscious of all the pieces of it—loneliness upon loneliness—all at the same time: her lost friendships, her misbegotten hopes for Patrick, her father’s dying (and, for a bad split second, sitting in the garden, she was that woman again, her father’s girl, kneeling next to him, asking him to wake up), her lonely windswept desert of a heart at her father’s funeral, the lost, folded-in-on-itself solitariness she felt when she rode her bike, the way she missed her mother, the way she missed Augusta every time she left her.
Stop it, she told herself, disgusted. Cut the crybaby crap. You have Jamie. And Amelie. You have Kiki and plenty of other people. And for God’s sake, you have Augusta.
It was true that there was no way to be with Augusta and to feel alone. Just the sight of her girl holding a cup with her two hands, just the sound of her voice in the hallway outside their apartment not only connected Pen to Augusta, but turned Pen’s boundaries deliquescent, let some of the world flow in. But the rest of the time? The rest of the time, Pen understood, startled, I am outside of life. I am sad. I spend so much time missing people. She turned the idea over, parsed it out, tried it on—“Penelope Calloway is a sad and lonely person”—and found that it fit. How in the world had she let this happen?
For a few bleak seconds, she reeled, before snapping back to herself, or to herself-as-her-mother, or, more specifically, to herself-as-her-mother-on-an-especially-impatient-day. Don’t be silly. You will fix it, she told herself sharply. Of course, you will. It’s not too late. Pen would do whatever people did to fix themselves, and even though she had no clear idea of what this was or where to start, just thinking the word fix—the short, no-nonsense briskness of it—made her feel competent. She sat up straighter on the bench. She clapped her hands together like Mary Poppins: spit-spot, that’s done.
As for her wanting Will, just because something felt like a revelation didn’t mean it was one. Wanting a man she hadn’t set eyes on in six years? You don’t even know him, she told herself meanly, but she didn’t really believe it. In any case, whether she knew him or not, whether the desire was a fleeting or a permanent condition, wanting w
asn’t nothing, but it wasn’t all that much, either. It wasn’t love. You have always loved Will, a voice in her head reminded her. That’s different, she shot back with fierce practicality. And you know it. Then the garden gate creaked and there he was.
Neither one of them said hi. After a single, superfast, peripheral glance, Pen didn’t look at him, not even when he sat down on the bench next to her. She sat gazing vacantly at the flowerbed, unmoored, possibly not breathing, thoughts fluttering like moths through her brain—Are those daylilies? Are daylilies supposed to bloom at night? Who are you, the daylily police?—and listening to what might have been a mockingbird braid its long, rippling strands of shine in the magnolia tree (Were mockingbirds supposed to sing at night?), but mostly listening to the annoying bass line of her heart in her ears. Will was so still that, for all Pen knew, he might have been doing the same (daylilies, bird, even her own heart because it was that loud).
When the mockingbird finished singing, Will said, “So, are you gonna eat that?”
For the first time, Pen noticed that she still had the small Chinet plate. It sat in her lap. A piece of ham the size of a silver dollar sat on the plate, all that had survived her mad rush from the tent to the garden. Intrepid ham scrap, was her desultory thought. Scrappy scrap. She envisioned herself, trailing hors d’oeuvres; then as her mind cleared enough for Will’s question to register, she smiled.
“It’s all yours.”
“Awesome.”
She laughed and gathered herself and looked at him. To her relief, she wasn’t gobsmacked by desire. She didn’t burst into tears. There was Will, sitting on the bench, chewing ham, and the sight of him made her happy.
When he finished, he grinned a semi-shy, close-mouthed grin and said, “Hey, Pen.”
At the sound of her name, Pen flashed back to the Pen of a few minutes (five? twenty? more?) ago, hightailing it out of the tent in her cocktail sandals, and groaned.
“What?” Will asked.
“I guess I was hoping you wouldn’t recognize me.”
“You? Oh.” And then he smiled his true, guileless, transfiguring smile, the one he had given her back in the tent and so many times (how many?) before that, back when his smile was just an ordinary part of her life, like her books or her coffeemaker or the view from her window. “I would know you anywhere. Sorry about that.”
Pen shrugged. “It’s okay.”
“But, hey, did you see that woman back at the party? Blue dress? Ran out of there like a jackrabbit.”
“Whew.” Pen rolled her eyes. “Total nutjob.”
“Maybe, but fast. Her speed, and not just her speed, her acceleration was very impressive.”
“You think?”
“Oh yeah. In heels? And with a death grip on that little white plate? Not a lot of people could’ve pulled that off.”
Pen considered kissing him, then, not kissing him-kissing him, which would have been madness, but leaning over and kissing the plane of his cheek because, with an impossibly light touch, he had gotten them through it, set them both safely down on the other side. Not kissing him-kissing him, but kissing him because he was kind and funny, because he was a man who deserved to be kissed. Ha! Forget it, Pen told herself, derisively. I don’t trust you as far as I can throw you.
Instead of kissing Will, she placed her hands in her lap, fiddled with the tassel on her satin bag, and said, “Have you seen her?”
“Not yet. Have you?”
“No.” Then Pen had a thought. “You mean you haven’t seen her here or you haven’t seen her since she left?” She’d almost said “left us” but stopped because it sounded both too plaintive and too final. “Left us” made it sound like someone had died. “I mean, since she moved away.”
“Both.”
Pen let slip a sigh, a drawn-out sigh, an oceanic sigh, of relief.
“Hey,” said Will, surprised. He looked at her until she looked back. “You didn’t really think we were out there somewhere being friends without you, did you?”
“Oh, no. Of course not.” But she found that her voice was shaky. “Okay, maybe. Once or twice, in my darkest hours.”
Will didn’t say anything. Then he said, “I’m sorry.”
“It’s not your fault.”
“No. I’m sorry you had darkest hours.”
Pen swallowed. This wasn’t the time or place to talk about her darkest hours. There might be a time and a place later; she even hoped there would be, but not here in this serene and otherworldly garden, not now.
She said, “I just got an e-mail from out of the blue. It didn’t say much.”
“Mine said, ‘I know it’s been forever, but I need you.’”
Pen’s eyes widened. “‘Please come to the reunion. I’ll find you there.’”
“‘I’m sorry for everything.’”
“What did she have to be sorry about?” asked Pen, and immediately wished that she hadn’t, since who among them should be sorry and for what were untouchable topics, the very last ones she wanted to discuss.
Maybe Will felt the same way because he jumped in quickly with, “Weird how she sent us identical e-mails.”
“It is weird. And that e-mail just didn’t sound like her.”
“I thought the same thing.”
“It was flat.”
“And colorless.”
“And not at all long-winded.” Pen and Will exchanged a quick smile because Cat’s long-windedness was legendary, but then Pen frowned. “Honestly, the way she said what she said worried me more than what she said.”
“I know. I don’t like to think about what might have happened to Cat to make her write a flat, colorless, short-winded e-mail.”
Pen shivered and said, “You know what? We should…,” but before she finished, they were both standing up.
“Yeah,” agreed Will. “We should go back to the party, see if she’s there.”
But as they left, first Pen, then Will, and as Will closed the gate behind them, Pen felt her heart sink a little.
“I like that garden,” she said, picking her painful, tottering way across the bricks. “I could live in that garden. Pitch a tent under that big magnolia tree and live there. Just so you know.”
Will nodded. “I can see how you would. Although if you’re planning to live in a tent, you should probably consider some different shoes.”
Pen said, “Ha ha, very funny,” and slapped Will’s chest with the Chinet plate, and poof, there they were, the Pen and Will of ten years ago, twelve years ago. Then, without breaking stride or making a big deal about it, Will offered her his arm, and because when someone offers you his arm, you take it, that’s what Pen did.
IF WILL LEAPING, AFTER SIX YEARS, INTO A FULL-BODIED, RADIANT being out of the chaos of a party was one thing, Will leaning back on his elbows in the grass under an ordinary noon sky turned out, to Pen’s profound relief, to be quite another. Longing didn’t jump up and seize her by the throat; she was not a voice crying in the wilderness; the “come live with me and be my love” nonsense from the night before did not evince itself for a second, having been washed out, apparently, by a flood of normalness and daylight. Even when she checked in with her body (like a person poking a rattlesnake with a stick, she thought), it seemed to be behaving itself.
It wasn’t that he didn’t look as good in the light of day. Pen knew that his austere angularity wasn’t everyone’s cup of tea. (Once, in the throes of taking Intro to Architecture, Cat had declared Will’s looks as “either totally Bauhaus or totally Frank Lloyd Wright!” “Better figure that out soon,” Will had advised. “I will be on the midterm.”) Strictly speaking, he wasn’t even Pen’s cup of tea, since her taste in men had always leaned toward the lush-featured and swarthy. But, in a detached way, on the rare occasions when she’d thought about it, she had always found him oddly beautiful. Now, plopped down next to him on the grass, she had to admit that, while pretty much anyone could look good in a moon-soaked garden, Will was holding his own in the sunshin
e, and still, no fuss, no lust. All she felt was happy.
Cat never had shown up the night before. But, after sidling uneasily up to the party, an interesting thing had happened to Pen and Will: they had had fun. They’d eaten; they’d mingled. Will had run into a hallmate of his from freshman year, a guy they had all called Huey and whose dual claims to fame had been wearing cowboy hats and the ability to quote Raising Arizona—not bits and pieces, but the entire script—by heart. Now, Huey went by his given name, Paul, was a nurse-anesthetist with Doctors Without Borders, and was headed, in three weeks, for a two-year stint in Sierra Leone.
“You make me feel like a deadbeat, Paul,” Will had said.
“Don’t worry about it, man,” Paul had replied. “I make everyone feel like a deadbeat.” Then he squinted his eyes and drawled, “‘Son, you got a panty on your head.’”
“Thanks,” said Will. “That helps.”
Pen spoke with three separate women named Jennifer, one of whom now owned a designer resale shop in Richmond called Déjà Ooh!, a woman named Lane Lipton whom everyone had known would become a high-powered Washington attorney and was one, and a very drunk redhead whom Pen remembered not at all, but who tearfully apologized for having told “at least ten people” that a friend of a friend of hers had walked in on Pen, Cat, and Will having a threesome.
“Forget about it,” said Pen.
“I can’t!” the woman wailed. “Were you? Having them?”
Afterward, in the sleepy, easy quiet of Will’s walking Pen to her car, Will said, “I hate to even say this, but what if she doesn’t—” and Pen cut him off, saying, “I know. I hadn’t even considered that. I mean, until right now.”
“She’ll come,” said Will.
They walked a few more steps and Pen said, “My stupid feet are on fire,” and she stopped and slipped off her shoes, and, fleetingly, considered throwing them at something, the streetlamp by the side of the road, a passing car.