Then, in a thin, strained voice, Pen said, “He did come back one more time, though.” She started talking fast to get it over with. “He showed up at my dad’s funeral, which wasn’t a bad thing because I was a wreck that day, and Augusta was three years old and needed a parent who didn’t collapse into tears every five minutes.”
Pen swallowed. You got this far, she said to herself. Don’t fall apart now.
“He came back to Philadelphia with us, and somehow he just stayed.” She caught herself. “On my couch, I mean. He told me he was thinking he’d made a mistake, that he wanted to try again. I don’t know why, except that maybe I was such a mess that he thought I needed him, and he loves to be needed. I didn’t say yes or no. I hardly heard him. I was so tired and sick at heart. He took care of us for a week, maybe a little more, cooking and doing everything for Augusta, and then Jamie showed up, and got furious (you wouldn’t even have recognized him), and threw Patrick out, and took me and Augusta home with him, and sent some guys later to pack up our stuff. And we ended up staying. Somehow, it worked. It works. For now, anyway.”
Will didn’t say anything for so long that Pen began to get anxious. There she went again, handing everything over, entrusting, like a five-year-old, and to what end? Good grief. Did you really think, she asked herself, did you honestly think that you and Will could just pick up where you left off?
“Maybe we should go,” she said stiffly, and started to clean up, brushing crumbs off her bike shorts, balling up the white sandwich paper in her fist.
“Wait,” said Will. “Can I say something?”
Pen’s hands stopped moving at the sound of his voice, which was grave and formal. Oh, God, thought Pen. His jaw, his shoulders, even the skin around his eyes looked taut; he had the aspect of a man steeling himself. Just say it, say that this is all too much, thought Pen. Get it over with. Then he shook his head and laughed, a short, self-mocking sound, more like a bark than a laugh, but it did the trick, dissipated the tension and Pen’s worry, sent them evaporating into the bright blue air.
“I’m not used to being nervous when I talk to you,” said Will. “I’m not used to talking to you.”
“Well, and I threw a lot at you: the rise and fall of my doomed love affair, the birth of my illegitimate child, my near breakdown after my father’s death. My life as a Russian novel. Way to give a guy some breathing room, Pen.” Pen gave Will a quick glance, then began the careful and important project of unballing the sandwich wrapper in her hand and smoothing it flat against the grass.
“You don’t have enough names for a Russian novel. You need to have at least six names,” said Will.
“And three nicknames.”
“I wasn’t talking about that, the breathing room thing. I was going to say: no pressure, but—”
Pen looked up at him.
“You can say no to this,” Will started over, riffling his hair with the palm of his hand, “and if you were thinking we’d just hang out here and then go back to business as usual, post-reunion, that’s fine. Or not fine, but I’d respect it. I mean, of course, I would. But I was just going to say that I think I should meet Augusta, before she turns into one of those what-do-you-call-’ems, girls with ironed hair and Ugg boots, who text instead of talk.”
“Tweens,” Pen said. She smiled. “She already has Uggs because Patrick has no freaking idea of how to say no to her. But okay.”
“‘Okay’? That’s it?”
“If I said more it would be something like, ‘Your meeting Augusta is not only okay, but would right a grievous and cosmic wrong,’ which might sound overblown.”
Will shrugged. “I’m okay with okay.”
“Good,” said Pen.
THE BARBECUE WAS TURNING TO SAND IN PEN’S MOUTH.
“What if she’s sick? What if she has cancer? What if there’s some complication with her epilepsy? What if she’s crazy? Not Cat-crazy, but seriously mentally ill? We’ve been here an hour, Will. What if she doesn’t come?”
Pen’s voice was shrill, about to tip over an edge into frantic and desperate, but she couldn’t help it. The tent tonight was smaller, and, at some point earlier in the evening, humid air had rolled in from someplace, the Amazon rain forest maybe, and the party, just an hour old, had already hit the glazed-face, mosquito-y, warm drink, sticky-red-checkered-outdoor-tablecloth phase that every summer party gets to if there are enough people and if it goes on long enough. And still, no Cat, no Cat.
Flushed and tugging at the neck of his white T-shirt, Will said irritably, “What do you want me to say, Pen?”
Pen saw him, then, striding purposefully, eyebrows hawkishly lowered, toward them through the crowd. He was a little thinner than when she’d last seen him, softer bellied, but still big, blond, and boy-faced.
“Oh, for the love of God.”
Will didn’t turn around to look, but put down his knife and fork and stared at Pen. “Cat?”
“Cat’s husband,” said Pen drearily.
“Pen. Will. It’s been a while.” Same voice.
Will stood up to shake his hand. “Hey, Jason. You want to join us?”
“Oh, I do. Most definitely.” Jason pulled out a chair and sat down. Pen didn’t like the look on his face: smug, challenging, a little mean. She didn’t like his pink, short-sleeved button-down or his sunburned ears or his hammy forearms, either. How, oh how, could Cat have married this person?
“Where’s Cat?” demanded Pen.
At the question, Jason’s demeanor cracked, just briefly, a flinch, a flash of alarm in his eyes, before the bravado was back.
“You tell me,” he said. “That’s”—he made two guns with his fingers and pointed them at Pen and Will (God, you’re an idiot, thought Pen)—“why I brought you here.”
CHAPTER TEN
YOU.” PEN EXHALED THE WORD MORE THAN SPOKE IT.
“Yup,” said Jason, with an upward, confirming chin-jut jerk of his head. “Me.” He leaned back in his chair and crossed his freckled arms.
Pen wished with all her heart that she could say, “I knew it!” or “I thought so,” or at least, “I didn’t really believe that e-mail came from Cat,” or even, “As much as I wanted to believe Cat had written that e-mail, as much as I expected, every second, to turn around and find her standing next to me, I harbored, nevertheless, a small, slender, vaporous sliver of suspicion that it wasn’t really from her at all.” But none of those would have been the truth. The truth was that she had fallen for Jason’s trick hook, line, and sinker. The truth was weeks of happiness and worry and anticipation and nervousness and waiting and hope like a blazing light.
Pen wanted to hit him. Not just hit him. Pen who had never hit anyone in her life (since childhood anyway, and then it was only Jamie) wanted to slam Jason over backward in his chair, leap on him like a wolverine, and beat the crap out of him with her fists. She was picturing it, filling in the details (the clonk of his head against the ground, his nose fountaining blood), when, suddenly, she became aware of Will across the table, perfectly unmoving, his silence hissing like a live wire, his hands flat on the table at either side of his plate, and hitting didn’t seem like such a good idea anymore. Don’t, she thought in Will’s direction. He’s not worth it. You’ve come so far. Please don’t.
But when she forced herself to look at Jason, the urge to hit and for him to be hit came back. Belligerent and neckless, hair like toothbrush bristles. The way he lolled his head to one side and had his hands shoved under his forearms so that his biceps strained against the sleeves of his shirt made her want to scream. You are not LL Cool J, you posturing moron! she imagined herself yelling. You pink, doughy, unripe strawberry of a man! Yup? Yup?
“You shit,” she said instead. “You complete and total asshole.” She didn’t scream it. Her voice was low, but she could feel herself gathering steam. “You must be pretty proud of yourself, right? Sending us down here, worried out of our minds about Cat? What was it, some kind of joke to you?”
“P
en,” said Will.
“Some kind of sick game to get back at us for—what? Not liking you six years ago, you stupid overgrown baby?”
Jason’s face went from hostile to stunned to enraged. He turned alarmingly red, clamped his lips together, and began to breathe hard out of his nose. Bull! thought Pen.
“Pen,” said Will.
“I left my daughter. I left my job. I drove all the way the hell down here for some cat-and-mouse bullshit game?” When she said “game,” Pen slapped her hand down on the table, making the plates jump and her nearly empty plastic water bottle flop over and roll across the table. It stopped in front of Jason, who didn’t even look at it.
It wasn’t until Will put his hand over her hand to stop its trembling that Pen realized it was trembling, not only her hand, but her entire body. I am shaking with rage, she marveled.
“Hey,” said Will gently.
She looked up at him and he gave her a little encouraging nod, so she took a deep breath and began to count backward from ten, like the child in Will’s book. By five, Will’s hand was gone—she wished it weren’t, even with all that was happening, she had the momentary presence of mind to wish it weren’t—and he was staring at Jason with piercing eyes. Pen remembered, then, how Will could narrow his already long narrow eyes an almost imperceptible bit and turn their gaze to steel. “Like Clint Eastwood looking down a gun barrel,” Cat used to say. “The eye equivalent of gritted teeth.”
“Cat left you,” said Will. Even before what he said sank in, Pen admired the flatness, the absolute, matter-of-fact calm of his voice.
Then what he had said sank in, and Pen thought, Of course, she left him! followed by, Wait. What?
“No,” Jason shot back viciously.
“She left you, and you thought she came to us.”
Pen stared at Will, bewildered. Then she heard it again, the part that had gotten lost in her outrage at Jason for tricking them into coming, in her sorrow at Jason’s being Jason instead of Cat: her own voice asking, “Where’s Cat?” and Jason’s answer, “You tell me.”
“You don’t know where she is,” said Pen in a wondering voice.
“You don’t know shit,” said Jason.
“She left you,” said Will again.
“Not me,” said Jason, pointing at his own chest with both forefingers. “She might have left, but she didn’t leave me. She thought I was”—he paused, searching for the word—“awesome.”
Will shifted his gaze from Jason to the tablecloth, the trail of water.
“We were happy,” said Jason. “You might not believe it, but fuck you. We were a happily married couple.” And at “happily married couple,” even Pen, who still hated him, had to look away because he sounded so querulous, querulous and defensive and about six years old.
Maybe he sounded this way to himself, too, because, with one windshield-wiper swipe of his arm, the water bottle flew off the table, and he was standing up.
“Forget it,” he said. “I don’t have to defend myself to you shitheads.”
But he just stood there, not leaving, breathing hard, rubbing his forehead with one hand, and staring out over the party, looking, with his sunburned ears, exactly like a guy in a lifeboat, scanning the ocean for land or boats or dorsal fins. As Pen watched him, she found herself remembering the e-mail, the words she had thought for so long were Cat’s, but were really Jason’s:
I know it’s been forever, but I need you.
“Wait,” she said to Jason.
“You wait,” he said. He jerked his arm back as though she’d touched him, even though she hadn’t.
Pen sighed. “Just—sit. Okay? Please.” The “please” was an afterthought, a giving in, a tiny offering to his childlike blustering and his sad red ears. But she didn’t think he would sit, not immediately, anyway. He was the kind of guy who would sit later, on his own terms.
“I need a beer,” said Jason. Pen watched him stomp his way toward the beer table in his shorts and loafers, his arms slightly bowed at the elbows, his hands in loose fists. She recalled his vow in his old apology letter to never drink again and wondered what other promises to Cat he might have broken.
“I can see what Cat sees in him,” Pen said, nodding. “Absolutely.”
“‘You wait,’” said Will. “Nice comeback.”
Pen slumped, cradling the sides of her face in her hands and looking wide-eyed at Will. “Holy, holy, holy shit.”
“I know.”
“I can’t believe it was him all the time.”
“Yeah. Not only did I think it was her, I thought she’d be here. Even when she didn’t come last night, I would have bet money she’d show up before it was all over.”
“You think we should’ve suspected?” asked Pen.
“I don’t know. I think we really wanted it to be her.”
“And not only is she not here, she’s missing.”
“She left,” Will said quickly. “That doesn’t mean she’s missing.”
“I hope not. He’s worried, though. You can see it in his face. And think about that e-mail. He’s scared.”
After a somber moment, Will grinned. “He should be scared. I thought you were about to jump up and break your chair over his head.”
“Remember that night when you lost your marbles and pounded him into the Crater? I miss that night.”
“Me, too. But maybe we should try to be nice, so he’ll tell us what happened to Cat.” Will shook his head. “What happened with Cat, is what I mean.”
“He’s a hard man to be nice to.”
“Just until he tells us about Cat. Then you can clobber him.”
“Here he comes.”
This time, Jason didn’t just sit, he yanked the chair around backward and straddled it, a startling gesture that would have been more impressive had it not placed him too far away from the table to put his beer down. After one attempt, he propped it on his knee instead. Stumpy arms, thought Pen. T-rex.
“Sorry I lost my temper,” she said, attempting a smile of mollifying self-deprecation. “It was a shock, you showing up instead of Cat.” At least this was true.
“Yeah, I’ll bet,” snorted Jason. “You guys always hated me.”
Pen almost said, “And this is all about you.” Instead, she didn’t confirm or deny what he’d said. Neither did Will.
“Please tell us what happened,” said Pen.
“Her dad died, like, six weeks ago, give or take,” said Jason, darting his eyes from Pen’s face to Will’s, as though watching for their reaction.
Instantly, Pen’s eyes filled with tears, both because her eyes always filled with tears at the mention of dead fathers and because the dead father in question belonged to Cat.
“She was crazy about her dad,” said Will.
“How did it happen?” asked Pen, trying not to picture her own father, curled on his side, his cheek slack against the cement.
“Heart attack,” said Jason. He squinted at them. “You’re telling me you didn’t know? Her dad died and she didn’t tell you.”
“How would I know?” said Will. “I haven’t talked to Cat in six years.”
“Neither have I,” said Pen.
“Yeah, right,” said Jason snidely. “I forgot.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” asked Pen.
“It means I don’t believe that, no matter what Cat said. I’m not an imbecile. Not one phone call? Not one e-mail?” said Jason. “It means I think you’re all a bunch of liars.”
“Cat, too?” snapped Pen, forgetting to be nice. “Cat who thinks you’re awesome and would never leave you? You’re calling her a liar, too?”
Jason tensed and opened his mouth, but nothing came out. His right knee started to jitter, causing his beer to slosh out of the glass and down his leg. “Fuck.”
Will handed him a napkin, and he slapped at his leg with it.
“Her dad died,” prompted Will. “Go ahead.”
Jason tossed the napkin onto the table and sa
id, “She lost it. It was weird.”
“Weird to lose it when your dad dies?” said Pen. Will shot her a look.
Jason glared at her. “Believe it or not, I was sensitive to the fact that she was grieving. I was there for her. And, at first, you know, she was dealing with it the way you’d expect.”
Pen tried to imagine how Cat would deal with something as big and final and grim as death, Cat of the twinkling eyes and sly sweetness and witty quips. Cat, who so much of the time, had seemed to float.
“I don’t know what I’d expect,” said Will. “I haven’t seen her in a long time, and when I remember her, she’s usually laughing.”
A cloud passed over Jason’s face. “Well, you know, she’s an adult now. No one stays like that.”
“So tell us,” said Pen, “how she reacted.”
“When she first heard, she was sad. Understandably, right? She said stuff about how she didn’t know him that well, even though he was the only family she had. Which was true, by the way. She thought he was the greatest thing since sliced bread, and I guess he was charming and all, but he wasn’t exactly a guy who showed up, if you know what I mean.”
Pen thought that she did. She and Will had only met Dr. Ocampo twice (which in itself said a lot), once at their graduation and once in Philadelphia when he came to lecture at a medical conference at Penn, and both times, Pen had liked him. It was impossible not to. He had been one of those compact people who fill up a room, a person who shimmered with charisma. It was there when he shook your hand, there in conversation, when he talked and even more when he listened, giving you his steady, absorbed attention, his eyes alive with intelligence. She still remembered the conversation they’d had about neuroscience and teaching kids to read. “You have learned, through experience and fine-tuned observation,” he had told her, so animated he seemed to crackle, “what science is only just beginning to give us!” Pen had felt understood, cherished, and at the same time, gleeful, like a baby tossed into the air, and all the while, there had been Cat, rapt, flamelike and flickering in her father’s presence, her face full of dazzle.