“Still,” said Pen, “maybe we should check out his story. Maybe Cat’s safe at home, and he made all this up for a mean joke. Because he hates us.”
“After all this time?” said Will.
“Maybe,” said Pen. “Maybe the thought of us wanting Cat not to marry him rankled and rankled his soul for six years. Probably not, though.”
“I hope she’s safe at home,” said Will. Then, in a hesitant voice, he asked, “Do you know where home is? Do you know where Cat lives?”
Pen’s rib cage tightened at the question and her cheeks got hot. She looked down at her hands. “We weren’t supposed to look for each other. We weren’t even supposed to google. Those were Cat’s rules.”
“I remember.”
“I guess you could say”—Pen paused and took a breath—“I broke them.”
“Oh.”
“For the first year, I googled you both. Often. Obsessively often, I would go so far as to say. I didn’t know you’d moved to Asheville, but I know you ran a 10K there in March of 2004. For example.”
“How’d I do?”
Pen smiled. “Not bad, but not great. 42.47.”
“I was out of shape,” protested Will. “My friend Jack—I moved down there to work with him after I bailed out of Wharton—he made me do that race. I’m way faster now.”
“Sure, Will. Sure you are,” said Pen.
“What about Cat? You find out anything about her?”
“Not really. We knew she and Jason were moving to Tampa when they left Philly. I saw their wedding announcement, I guess, but after that, nothing, and, as I said, after a year, maybe a little more, I stopped. I started following the rules.”
“Any particular reason?”
“Augusta was born. I got busy, and also”—Pen gave a nervous laugh—“I was on the verge of becoming a stalker. I wanted my daughter to have a mother with a little more dignity than that.”
Pen could remember the day, typing Catalina Rogers (Cat had sacrificed her musical name for Jason’s, a semi-tragic misstep, in Pen’s view) into the narrow box, then looking down at Augusta asleep in her Moses basket next to Pen’s desk. Augusta had stirred, her arms flying outward, her hands startling open into two stars, and for some reason, that had been the sign Pen had been waiting for without knowing she’d been waiting. “Enough!” She had said it out loud and had not only deleted the name, but had turned the computer off altogether, then had rested her forehead on the desk in front of her.
“But then you went and became a famous writer,” said Pen, grinning, “and all bets were off.”
“You started stalking me?” Will asked hopefully.
“No, but I buy all your books, and I looked at your website a few times.”
“Yeah?”
“It’s nice, all those interactive games and great graphics, but there’s no picture of you. That was kind of disappointing.”
“Don’t want to scare off the kids.”
“Ha ha,” said Pen. “So, anyway, I don’t know if they’re still in Tampa or not.” Then, tentatively, she asked, “What about you? You ever break the rules?”
When he answered, Will’s voice was odd, tight and fast, as though he wanted to put the question behind him, get rid of it. “No. It seemed easier that way.”
“Oh.”
She waited for him to say more, but he didn’t, and Pen felt rebuffed, even though she couldn’t think why he would resent her question, when he had just asked her the same thing. In the brittle lull that followed, Pen watched a couple walk past about thirty yards away, coming from the direction of the reunion, the man talking fast and eagerly, telling some kind of story, his hands in motion, the woman walking with her head tilted back, languidly fanning herself with a newspaper. Give it up, Pen thought about telling the man. No way she’s interested. And because she was distracting herself from the little wall—not wall, she thought hopefully, hedge, low hedge—that had sprung up between herself and Will by imagining the inner lives of these strangers, she didn’t realize that the man walking a short distance behind them, his shoulders slightly bunched, his hands in the pockets of shorts, was Jason, until he was cutting across the grass toward them, a stone’s throw away.
“Jason,” she whispered to Will. “Behind you.”
When he got to them, he didn’t sit down, but just stood, a few feet away, and there was something about him, not his face, which Pen couldn’t really see, but his posture—duck-footed, slump-shouldered, backward leaning, his hands in his pockets, his elbows jutting—that was so old-mannish and forsaken that Pen wanted, almost, to hug him, to put her arm around him and lead him back to the bench.
“I’m glad you’re back,” said Pen kindly. “We were just talking about you.”
“Yeah, I bet,” said Jason. “My ears were burning.”
Because his attempt at belligerence was so halfhearted and because she remembered that his ears really were burned, hot pink and peeling, Pen’s heart softened a little bit more, and she said, “You want to sit down?”
“That’s okay,” said Jason. “I just want to say something.”
“Go ahead,” said Pen.
“The thing I told you back there, about why I e-mailed you. It wasn’t the real reason.”
“We wondered about that,” said Pen.
“You know, I thought there was an off-chance all that would happen, that she’d know it was me and come down here with you. An off-off-chance. But really what I wanted—” He pulled a hand out of his pocket and slapped at his arm. “Damn mosquitoes are out for blood tonight,” and then he looked at Will and Pen and smiled. “Literally. Since they’re mosquitoes, right?”
“The little suckers,” said Will.
Jason chuckled. “So anyway. It was the reunion that made me think of it, of getting in touch with you guys. After Cat left, I happened to find the stuff about the reunion that came in the mail, and thought, Okay, so maybe this is the way to go.”
“The way to go?” asked Pen.
“Backward, I guess,” said Jason. “Into the past. Because the present wasn’t really panning out.”
“What do you mean?” asked Will.
“I’m really worried about her,” said Jason. “Running off that way, all distraught.”
“That is worrisome,” said Pen. “I agree.”
Jason squatted down next to the bench. “So the deal is I was hoping you could help find her.”
Pen and Will looked at each other.
“I guess I’m wondering,” began Will carefully, “why ask us? We haven’t seen her in a long time.”
“Trust me,” said Jason sardonically. “If I hadn’t exhausted all my other possibilities, I wouldn’t have. I talked to a cop buddy of mine, but there’s no sign of foul play, and he said that a wife’s allowed to leave her husband, not that that’s what this is. Anyway, they might’ve checked into it, but she got in touch with this friend of hers, who told me she’s okay.”
“She did?” Pen said, startled. “Well, then why don’t you just ask her friend where she is?”
Jason snorted. “It’ll shock you to hear that Cat’s friends aren’t all that fond of me. Samantha won’t tell me a thing, apart from that Cat’s supposedly safe.”
“Jason,” said Pen, “maybe she just needs a little time. Maybe you should just wait for her to come home.”
Jason squeezed his eyes shut and shook his head. “The best I can explain it to you,” he said, “is that I have a sense of foreboding.”
“You do?” asked Pen, impressed at his use of the word foreboding.
“Look,” said Jason, standing up again, “you guys knew her better than anyone. I think she’s in trouble. I want your help.” He took a deep breath and held out his hands in a gesture that could only be called beseeching. “I’m asking for your help. Please.”
Ten, maybe twelve seconds went by, a few heartbeats—Pen and Will looking from Jason to each other, getting their bearings—before Jason was taking off across the grass so fast he wa
s almost running.
“You know what?” he yelled over his shoulder. “Forget it. My bad.”
“Jason!” called Pen, jumping to her feet. “We’ll help!”
Jason slowed to a walk, then stopped, his back still to them, his arms hanging at his sides.
Pen turned to Will, saying, “We’ll help, right?” but he was already moving past her. She watched Will run his long, loping run to where Jason stood, watched him put a hand on Jason’s shoulder, talking to him, turning him around, bringing him back.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
KIKI CALLED,” SAID AMELIE, “WANTING TO KNOW WHETHER the three of you, um, connected.”
She lifted one sculpted eyebrow and smiled.
“Ha,” said Pen. “Kiki’s never used a euphemism in her life. What’d she really say?”
Amelie sorted through the phone messages, which were written on random scraps of paper, napkins mostly, a few receipts, the front page of the Philadelphia Inquirer. It was one of Amelie’s quirks: to be meticulously organized in some ways and almost pathologically messy in others. Once, Pen had found a used paper coffee cup on her desk with “Call your (yummy!) brother” scrawled across it in lipstick, along with the precise time and date he had called.
“Here it is.” Amelie plucked a take-out menu from the pile. “‘Need details on the group sex, pronto, Henny Penny. Hope you didn’t turn chickenshit on me.’”
“Charming,” said Pen. “Subtle.”
Amelie tapped her pencil lightly against her pursed lips and looked at Pen.
“What?” said Pen. “No!”
Amelie put the pencil down and sighed. “No?”
“No. I told you the whole story. Cat wasn’t even there.”
“So you’re saying that if she had been there—?”
“No!”
“Fine,” said Amelie lightly. “Fine, fine, fine. The subject of you, Cat, and Will is officially closed.”
Sure it is, thought Pen. She waited, watching Amelie pretend to sort through the phone messages, then to examine her fingernails, which were perfect. She looked up at Pen, opened her mouth, closed it, then searched for a pencil and tucked it behind her ear.
“Oh, for crying out loud,” growled Pen. “Just say it.”
Amelie leaned back in her chair and folded her hands on the desktop. “I think you should tell me what happened between you and Will, way back when, why you stopped being friends. I think it’s time.”
“You do, do you?”
“Not for me,” said Amelie, her eyes widening with empathy. “For you.”
“Gosh,” said Pen, “you’re so thoughtful.”
The weird thing is that Pen found that she wanted to tell. She had never, in six years, told anyone, not Jamie or her parents, not the therapist she had seen a handful of times in a tired, haphazard, halfhearted (not even half: quarter-hearted, sixteenth-hearted?) manner at her mother’s insistence after her father’s death, not Amelie all the other times she had asked. But suddenly, she felt like telling.
She didn’t know why. Maybe it was because, after the reunion, the story of the end of Pen’s friendship with Will was no longer the story of the end of Pen’s friendship with Will. Maybe it was because she needed to set the story free from her own head, where it had circled for so long like a fish in a bowl, getting bigger and bigger and more and more neurotic, and send it swimming out into the narrative of her life with everything else. Maybe she needed closure or release or absolution so that she could move forward. Mostly, what she felt was, “Oh, go ahead and tell, for cluck’s sake.”
Pen knew that, in the grand scheme of things, it wasn’t such a terrible story, not especially shocking or sordid. Even so, it was the story of the worst thing Pen had ever done. If she could go backward in her life and change one thing (excluding—oh, God—everything she had done, everything everyone had done on the day her dad died), it would be pushing Will away, even though, she reminded herself, the real problem hadn’t involved pushing away, but pulling toward (her hand against the back of the man’s neck, her fingers in his hair), when she should have done anything but.
A COLD MARCH, CAT TWO WEEKS GONE, TWO WEEKS OF PEN FEELING as empty as Cat’s closet, as relinquished and obsolete as Cat’s twin bed, which drifted, with its flower-splotched Marimekko comforter, like a parade float in the middle of her empty room. Pen avoided her (their) apartment, went to classes in sweatpants, sat through gloomy meals of take-out food and self-blame with Will. With sadness, she noted that the two of them, unused to being the two of them, were awkward around each other for the first time ever. “Patience. You will adapt,” Pen’s mother assured her, and Pen believed her. He was still Will, after all; she was still Pen. But it hurt her, how moments of quiet between them felt, for the first time, like silences.
Things got better in the car. Even though Cat’s absence rode along with them the way her presence always had, unbelted, leaning forward between them from the backseat, even though the bottle of wine in the paper bag in the trunk was Cat’s favorite Pouilly-Fuisse (she’d left it in their refrigerator, further proof, Pen told Will glumly, of her eagerness to get the hell away from them as fast as her little legs could carry her), Pen and Will regained something like their old ease.
Maybe it was the act of putting the city in which they’d been a trio (the word they had long ago agreed upon, less loaded, God knew, than triangle or threesome [although threesome got Cat’s exuberant vote], less commanding, but more accurate than triumvirate, Pen’s personal favorite) behind them. Maybe it was the near impossibility of face-to-face conversation, of reading each other’s eyes. In any case, Will’s old red Saab, which, even in their college days, had hovered somewhere between being a classic and a piece of crap, was on its best behavior, and as they flew along the road, the still-bare trees and billboards and pearl gray sky streaming by on either side, Pen was glad that Will had suggested going to his family’s summerhouse on Boston’s North Shore for a few days. “It’ll be colder than here and grayer than here,” he’d said. “It might suck. But at least it won’t be here.”
They talked. Their conversation veered and backpedaled and bounced and stalled out and, from time to time, rocked to a rest, featherlike, before taking off, herky-jerky, in some unforeseen direction, which is to say that it was, for them, an ordinary conversation, apart from the fact that it was between two people, instead of three. Pen realized that others had often found the way she, Will, and Cat talked to each other annoying. “It’s like goddamn conversation bumper cars,” one of Cat’s boyfriends had said. “I get motion sick just listening.” But for Pen, talking this way with Will, the faint, familiar, pleasant-bad cracked-leather-dusty-attic-with-a-hint-of-street-vendor-peanuts smell of the car around them, the chilly air wailing through the permanently one-inch opened right rear window, was relaxing. More than relaxing. A homecoming. For the hours of the car ride, Pen was a creature in her natural habitat.
And though they didn’t exactly skirt the subject of Cat, they didn’t do what they’d been doing nearly every day back in Philadelphia: wallow in it, throwing around anger and sadness and what-ifs until the very furniture seemed saturated with regret. They talked about Cat, yes, but also about Roald Dahl, their favorite smells (Pen: the cold cream her mother used and bread baking; Will: coffee and the ocean), dyslexia, whether watching television makes kids overweight, Lance Armstrong, the Salem Witch trials, and why some people love horror films while others don’t.
When a solemn, smoke-colored dusk began to fall, Will brought up the subject of his parents’ marriage, a drawn-out, ugly thing that had recently begun coming to what would surely be a drawn-out, ugly end.
In mid-January, while Will’s father, Randall, was on a three-day business trip to San Francisco, in a burst of initiative and activity that shocked everyone who knew her, Will’s mother, Charlotte, had changed the locks on the family home, hired a lawyer, and enrolled in a painting course at the local arts college. She was two weeks sober, which didn’t sound lik
e much, Will said, until you considered that it was two weeks longer than she had ever stayed sober before.
“Two weeks!” Pen had blurted out, then, “Do they recommend that, making so many life changes so fast? She didn’t waste any time cleaning house, did she?”
“Not unless you count the thirty years she spent married to the guy,” snapped Will.
Since then Pen had trodden lightly. Will had visited his mother in Connecticut twice, and both times had come back bearing a hopefulness in his face that was so simultaneously glowing and cautious that it broke Pen’s heart a little to see it. But right after he got back from the second visit, Cat had left, and, as they rode in the car together now, as Will said, “So Tully says the lawyers have made it so my dad can’t get anywhere near my mom’s money. Which is going to kill him,” Pen realized, with shame, how long it had been since she had asked about his mother, the extent to which she’d let Cat’s leaving usurp every other thing.
“You sound pretty busted up about that,” said Pen.
“We all are,” said Will. “Philip actually opened a bottle of champagne. I just wish I’d been there to see my dad’s face when he got the news.”
“No, you don’t. Remember: he was there when he got the news.”
“You’re right. I wish someone had taken a picture of his face and sent it to me.”
Even as Pen saw Will’s smile flash in the growing darkness, she noticed his right thumb thrumming against the steering wheel, always a sign that something was wrong.
“How’s your mom?” she asked.
“It’s getting cold in here,” said Will. “You want to stop and get your jacket out of the trunk?”
“I’m wearing it,” Pen said, holding out her arm to show him. “You got it out for me at the last rest stop, remember? You said, ‘Pen, time for this.’”
“Your teeth were chattering, and your lips were turning blue. Science tells us that these are signs it’s time for a coat.”