But he was the kind of father who was good in the flesh, but bad at a distance, who almost never returned Cat’s phone calls, who sent extravagant birthday gifts two weeks late, who forgot the classes Cat was taking, the names of her friends (“Persephone!” Cat told Pen once, hooting with laughter. “He thinks you’re the Queen of the Underworld!”), and, at least twice, the day and time of her arrival home for Christmas break (she called him from baggage claim, he sent a town car). “It’s not his fault. He never learned how!” Cat had once explained. “Blame my mother, who kept track of everything, everything, everything for him!” Later, alone with Pen, Will had said, “Cat’s mom died when she was two. The guy’s had seventeen years to learn how,” but neither of them said it to Cat.
“She said she thought they’d have a lot more time to get to know each other, but then he died. Plus, she said she was an orphan, which is big, having no family. There’s her mom’s sister out in Oregon or someplace, but Cat hardly knows her. So she was sad,” Jason went on. “For like forty-eight hours, she even let me take care of her, which you guys know isn’t easy for a person like Cat.”
Pen’s and Will’s eyes met, and Pen knew that he was thinking what she was thinking and that he was thinking it in the same way, without a trace of resentment, What was ever easier for Cat than letting someone take care of her?
“But then we flew to Houston for the funeral, and she was her old self and then some. Totally took charge of the arrangements, organized this big after-party at her dad’s house, ordered the food, flowers, talked to all the people, shaking hands like frigging Jackie O. No crying. She was amazing.” Even in the midst of her shock at hearing about this unfamiliar, take-charge Cat, Pen had to smile at “after-party.”
“That does sound amazing,” said Will.
“It does, right? And then I flew home and she stayed for another week or so, getting his estate in order and whatnot. Meeting with his lawyer, sorting through his stuff, getting the house ready to sell—”
Jason broke off, stared into his nearly full cup of beer, bolted it the way you’d bolt an espresso shot, and then stared into the empty cup. Pen waited for him to crumple the cup in his fist, but he didn’t.
“I couldn’t stay,” he said, looking at them defiantly. “Cat was a student, so she could leave for a week, get incompletes or whatever, but I had a job.”
“Makes sense,” said Will.
“I’m an accountant,” said Jason. “This was April, for God’s sake.”
“What was Cat studying?” asked Pen. She was surprised to hear that Cat had gone back to school because, as smart as she was, Cat had loved everything about college except school.
“Physical therapy. She thought about nursing, but it would’ve taken forever. As it was, she had to take a bunch of undergrad science courses before she could even think about PT.”
If Jason had said that Cat had gone back to school to be an elephant trainer or a pole dancer, Pen could not have been more flabbergasted. (In point of fact, pole dancing was a stretch only because it did not, as far as Pen knew, involve costumes covered with spangles and feathers; she wasn’t even sure if it involved costumes at all.) In Philadelphia, Cat had worked as a salesperson in an upscale men’s clothing store, a job she had adored. “It’s like a game!” she’d said. “A dance! A play!” And Cat wrinkling her nose at the fit of a pair of pants, recommending charcoal over navy as though the fate of humanity depended on it, saying, “You would be completely out of your mind not to buy that tie,” that was Cat. But Cat healing the injured? Cat laying her tiny, perfect hands on imperfect bodies? Cat taking science courses? Pen’s mind boggled. As a physical therapist, she would wear what? Sweats? Scrubs?
“Anyway, she came back different,” said Jason in a very tired voice.
“Different in what way?” asked Pen.
“Every way. She basically stopped eating. Not even candy. Not even pastries.”
Pen smiled, remembering Cat, sighing with bliss over éclairs, napoleons, palmiers, chocolate croissants, and, especially, scones, the ones from her favorite Rittenhouse Square bakery, hockey-puck-heavy, studded with currants, and blanketed in Devonshire cream.
“And she didn’t sleep,” said Jason. Cat, who could sleep anywhere, on a kitchen chair, on a subway, at a Phillies game, as instantly and peacefully as a cat in a shaft of sun.
“She got really careless about her medication.”
“For the Cat we knew,” said Will, “that wouldn’t have been much of a change.”
“Yeah,” said Jason. “It’s not like she was ever great about it, but she got worse. In fact, she got really bad. I even yelled at her about it once, that’s how bad it got, and she just gave me this thousand-mile stare. It was spooky.”
Pen felt a pulse of something uncomfortably like affection for Jason, so obviously still riddled with guilt for having yelled.
“But if she wasn’t crying, she was like that, a million miles away, even when she was right there. Distracted. And then she’d leave for hours, say she’d been driving or at a friend’s. Then a few days before she left, she got better. Still really distant, but she got calm, started taking care of herself. And then whammo: she left me a note saying she had to get away for a while, to please not try to find her.”
“But you did.” Pen sounded judgmental, although she didn’t mean to. She wasn’t even sure if she felt judgmental. She knew from experience that just because someone wanted to be alone with grief didn’t mean they should be. But maybe Cat didn’t want to be alone; maybe—and this was abundantly easy for Pen to believe—she just didn’t want to be with Jason.
Jason’s face hardened. “Have you seen her? That’s all I want to know.”
Pen shook her head.
“No, man. Sorry,” said Will.
“And she didn’t tell you where she was going.”
Pen and Will shook their heads.
“I guess I have no choice but to believe you.”
“Guess so,” said Pen.
“Then it looks like my work here is done,” said Jason.
“Will you let us know,” said Will, “when you find her?” Pen could tell by Will’s face what it cost him to ask this favor of Jason.
“Oh, I’ll find her,” said Jason, lapsing into a cocky nonchalance that, again, filled Pen with the urge to slug him. “No worries there. I got it covered.”
He started to drum on the back of chair and look around the party. He actually yawned.
Why doesn’t he leave? thought Pen. What’s he waiting for?
In the midst of her exasperation, a thought began to take shape.
“Hold on,” she said. “Give me a second.”
Will and Jason looked at her. She closed her eyes.
“You know what?” she said to Will, opening her eyes.
“What?” he asked.
“It doesn’t make sense.” She reached across the table and took hold of Will’s wrist. “It doesn’t.”
“Okay,” said Will, waiting.
“Think about it,” Pen said, getting excited. “If he really suspected we were with Cat or had seen her or knew where she was, how could he have thought his trick would work? ‘I know it’s been forever, but I need you.’ See?”
Will looked puzzled; then his face cleared.
“We wouldn’t have believed the e-mails were from her,” he said, “because we would’ve been in touch with her.”
“That’s right! We wouldn’t have come down to see her if we were with her or knew where she was!” Pen dropped back in her chair, breathless.
“Everything happened so fast I didn’t even think of that,” said Will.
Pen’s heart started to race. What if Jason was insane? What if he had hurt Cat and was just pretending she’d left him? Then she remembered that the only reason she thought Cat was missing was that Jason had said so. Maybe she wasn’t. Maybe she was. Maybe Jason was a psychopath. Psychopaths existed. Maybe Jason was one of them. Pen felt sick to her stomach. But when she t
urned to face Jason, he didn’t look like a psychopath. She reminded herself that this didn’t mean he wasn’t one. But, red-faced and squirming in his seat, Jason looked embarrassed, near tears even, like a third-grader who has been caught in a lie.
“What the hell?” said Will in a flat voice.
Jason opened and closed his mouth a couple of times without saying anything.
“Did you do something to her?” blurted out Pen.
Jason’s eyes went wide. “No! Of course not. God!”
“What, then?” said Will.
“I figured that—” Jason ran a hand down the center of his sweating face. “I figured that if she was with you, she’d make you come, okay? To see who was pretending to be her. Except more than likely, she’d know it was me. Even though I didn’t use my own e-mail address, she’d figure sending that e-mail to try and find her would be something I’d do, and she’d send you to the reunion. Or maybe she’d even come with you.”
“Why would she do that?” asked Pen, whose head was beginning to hurt with trying to follow Jason’s train of thought.
“To laugh at me. Why else? You three could have a big old chuckle together at my expense. But at least I’d get to see her, maybe talk her into coming home.”
Pen and Will sat staring at Jason for a long, stunned moment. Then Will said, “You sent e-mails to us pretending to be Cat so that Cat would know it was you pretending to be her and would come down here, even though she’d left and asked you not to look for her? Jason, that’s”—Will scratched his head—“pretty complicated.”
With wonder, Pen noted that there wasn’t a single mocking note in Will’s voice; more than anything, he sounded kind. Wow, thought Pen. Kindness? Now?
But Jason didn’t seem to hear it that way because he jumped up and hissed, “You know what? Go to hell.”
At this, Pen flared. “That must be some marriage you’ve got, Jason.”
“Fuck you, you condescending fucks,” said Jason, spit flying out of his mouth with each “f.” He threw his plastic cup on the table and left.
For at least half a minute, Pen and Will just stared at each other, or in each other’s general direction, since they were both lost in their separate, if overlapping, thoughts, with the party whirling to a blur around them. A woman came up and asked if she could take Jason’s chair, and Pen didn’t even look at her, just nodded.
“I think he likes us,” said Will finally.
Pen sighed. “I’m sorry.”
“Why are you sorry?”
“That last thing I said about his marriage. It was a low blow.”
“It wasn’t anything he didn’t know,” said Will.
“I know, but he’s a sad and desperate case, setting this whole thing up the way he did. He’s lost.”
“We believe him, then?”
“I don’t know,” said Pen. “I’m confused. I’m dumbfounded.”
“Maybe we should get out of here,” said Will, “take a walk. Unless you wanted to stay, hang out, have a beer, maybe go for a whirl on the dance floor.” He smiled.
“That sounds fun,” said Pen, standing up, and together they walked out of the tent.
“DO YOU MIND IF WE DON’T TALK FOR A LITTLE WHILE? MY BRAIN IS so full it hurts,” said Pen.
“Brain indigestion,” said Will.
Even outside of the tent, the air was so humid that Pen felt as though she were wearing the night like a coat of paint. They ended up at the university chapel, a small, stone Gothic Revival structure that Pen had always loved, perched moodily as it was, all its eyebrows arched, amid the gleaming neoclassicism. As if by agreement, she and Will stopped walking when they got there, Pen dropping onto a wooden bench, Will standing around awhile like a person waiting for a bus, then sitting on the brick walkway in front of her, elbows hooked over his knees, arms dangling.
“We’re mosquito bait,” he said. “You know that, right?”
“Little vampires.” Pen sighed heavily. “I’m too discombobulated to care.”
“You want to talk about what we’re thinking?”
“Maybe,” said Pen. No.
“What are you thinking?”
“You first.”
Will leaned back on his elbows and looked at the sky. Pen waited for Will to start the conversation about Cat and Jason but wished he wouldn’t. She wanted to keep it at a distance for a few more minutes.
Will said, “I’m thinking it’s way too muggy for June. That moon looks like it’s suffocating.”
Pen looked at the hazy moon. “It looks like an Alka-Seltzer dissolving.”
“You’re right. So what else are you thinking?”
She closed her eyes and rested her head against the back of the bench. “I’m thinking how I’ve always liked this chapel.”
“And your little friend who lives in it,” said Will. Pen could hear him smiling.
“Edith,” said Pen.
For the most part, the chapel’s stained-glass windows were lovely but generic, sporting geometric patterns or expressionless religious figures with blue robes, iconic noses, and bony, rectangular feet. But the first week Pen had arrived at college, before she met Will and Cat, when she was homesick and drowning in lonesomeness, she had wandered into the chapel and found herself drawn to one high, almond-shaped window (she’d find out later that it was called a mandorla, a beautiful word) that seemed different to her: a girl’s face, intimate-eyed and human and looking straight at Pen. Pen figured that she was supposed to be an angel, but to Pen, she looked like a regular person, a girl like herself, shy, brown-haired, smart, out of breath, slightly lost. Something about the girl, about being alone with her in the dim, high-ceilinged hush of the chapel made Pen feel less lost, befriended even.
Though she knew that having an imaginary friend at the age of eighteen meant she’d hit a point so humiliatingly low that she must never, ever tell anyone about it, one night, she told Cat and Will. They made fun of her, of course, but they liked it, and, straightaway, the two of them, especially Cat, wove the girl into the fabric of their friendship. “Edith says hi,” Cat would say, or “I couldn’t finish my sandwich, so I gave half to Edith.” On the bench under the fizzy moon, Pen held Cat’s voice in her head, cradled it in the palm of her memory.
“I miss her,” Pen said sadly, a sob in her throat. “I was so sure I would see her.”
“It’ll be okay,” said Will quickly, and Pen remembered how worried he’d always gotten when anybody cried.
“I know it will,” said Pen, rubbing her eyes and sitting up. “You know I was always a crier.”
“You always were,” he agreed. “I was sure we’d see her, too.”
“You want to know the truth?” Pen said. “The truth is that, all these years, I have missed both of you more than I can describe. I have pined for you. I wanted you back the whole time.”
Pen felt lighter after she’d said it. She had not planned to say it. In fact, she had planned not to because what in the world would be the point? To make herself as vulnerable as a newborn chick? To make Will uncomfortable? To put him on the spot? And still: this lightness. Something about the night, about having listened to all that Jason had said and to be sitting in this precise spot under this precise sky thinking about Cat with Will made saying what she harbored in her heart feel natural. She didn’t expect him to say it back or to even acknowledge it. She just wanted him to know.
“You know what,” said Will after a long moment. “I was in town for my friend Gray’s wedding a couple of years ago, not at the chapel, at an inn down the road, and I stopped in to see Edith.”
“You didn’t.”
“Yep. I did, and there happened to be a tour going on, so I asked the tour guide about her.”
“You asked about Edith?”
“Turns out she’s special.”
“Of course, she is!”
“Hers is the only Tiffany window in there. The others were made by someone else. And it also turns out that she’s a real person.”
<
br /> “Of course, she’s a real person.”
“I mean, she was. The window’s a portrait of a real girl. Who lived.”
Pen considered this information. “Was her name Edith?”
“No.”
“Then don’t tell me about her. I don’t want to know.”
“Well, yeah, I was pretty sure you wouldn’t.”
Pen thought about Will stopping in to see Edith, asking about her, two years ago, four years after Pen and Will had last seen each other. She thought about how there was more than one way to say, “I missed you, too.”
“Thank you,” she told Will, “for checking on her.”
“No problem.”
“Do you believe Jason’s story?” Pen asked. Time to dive in.
“I think I did, until you pointed out that his reasons for getting us to come down here made no sense. That made me doubt everything he’d told us.”
“And the thing he said afterward. When you described it back to Jason—how he pretended to be Cat so that Cat would know it was him pretending to be her, et cetera—it sounded so convoluted. Convoluted to the point of crazy.”
“Can you think of another reason, though? His real motive for setting us up?” asked Will.
“No. I tried. It made my head hurt.”
“I had one idea,” said Will slowly. “It’s pretty far-fetched, though, and grim.”
“You think he hurt her?”
“It’s probably just too much Law and Order, but I had the thought that if he did something to her, looking for her afterward would be a way to make it look like he hadn’t done it.”
Pen shivered and wrapped her arms around herself. “Do you think he would hurt her?”
“Do you?”
Pen thought about this and said, “No. I don’t, and not just because I can’t stand to think it. Remember that letter he wrote after he left her in the Crater? As much as I loathe being around him, I think he’s decent at the core. What do you think?”
“I think he loves her,” said Will. The word love coming out of Will’s mouth caused a brief fireworks display to go off in Pen’s chest. She ignored it. “When he was talking about her, that’s the impression I got. It’s what I always thought about him: he’s a huge pain in the ass, but he loves Cat.”