“We totally did,” said Lila, reaching out and giving her sister’s hair a gentle tug. “Can Augusta come back soon?”
“You know what? I was just about to talk to your dad about another visit. You think you could help Augusta change and get her stuff together, while we discuss it? That would be a huge help.”
“Definitely!”
Pen and Patrick watched the girls zigzag through the furniture and out of the room, hair flying.
“Lila’s a doll,” said Pen. “Aren’t they supposed to get mean by the time they’re nine?”
“Yeah, she seems to be sidestepping that stuff so far. Hope it lasts.” He folded his arms across his chest. “So what’s up? You need another weekend?”
“My college reunion, ten year. It’s in two weeks.”
Patrick smiled at her. “Ten year, huh? I forget what a baby you are.”
“Oh, come on. You’re five years older than I am, which is nothing.” Five years wasn’t nothing really, not necessarily, but Pen had never felt the age difference between them. Most of the time, she felt as though she were the one who was older.
“Hey, you think you’ll run into Cat? It’s been ages, right?”
Pen hesitated, then told him about the e-mail. He’d known what Cat had meant to her. It might give him some extra incentive to persuade Tanya to take Augusta for another weekend. Tanya liked Augusta, never failed to make her feel welcome, but she was fiercely protective of “family time” on weekends. On weekdays, too. She and Patrick both made a point of being home by 5:30 and ruthlessly screened incoming phone calls in the evenings. A couple of years ago, Tanya had asked Pen not to call, unless Augusta had a “life-threatening emergency.” Wincing at the phrase “life-threatening” appearing in the same sentence with her daughter’s name, Pen had quickly agreed.
“I think it’ll be fine,” said Patrick. “I’ll talk to Tanya. But I hope that Will guy won’t show up.”
“Oh, Patrick.”
“Seriously. I’ve heard enough about his temper to think you’re not safe around a guy like that.”
It was ridiculous, this protective posturing, this misplaced, leftover, and far too easy chivalry. When Pen had met Patrick, Cat and Will were newly gone, and Pen was still reeling, her sadness still fresh and shot through with anger. She’d told Patrick too much, probably, and he had fixated on Will in a way that she’d briefly found touching, but that made no sense. Not safe with Will. Will? With whom had she ever been safer?
“He never directed any of that stuff at me. He wouldn’t in a million years. You know I’ve told you that.”
“I’m not so sure. Sorry, but I just don’t think he’s trustworthy.”
What about you? You walked out on me and our newborn baby. You gave up custody of her because your wife made you. How trustworthy are you? Pen felt like saying these things, but mostly only because they were true, only to defend Will. She wasn’t really bitter anymore, not bitter-bitter, a fact that still surprised her.
“He probably won’t be there, anyway,” said Pen, although she knew that if Cat had written to him, too, he probably would be. Not probably. She didn’t know who Will had become in the past six years, but if he was now a person who could turn down a cry for help from an old friend, Pen would eat her hat.
“It’s been a long time. Do you still think about them? I mean, more than once in a while? Do you miss them?” said Patrick.
Lobster eater, thought Pen, shaking her head, lobster eater, lobster eater, lobster eater.
“Not really,” she said.
CHAPTER SIX
THE LITTLE BOY IN COUNTING BACK TO LIAM TURNS INTO A monster when he’s angry. The monster is huge and gloriously ugly, toothy as a shark, carpeted with spiky slime-green hair, sporting bat wings, stegosaurus plates down his back, and a head that is an amalgamation of buffalo, werewolf, and Gila monster. When a man walking in front of Liam and his mother down a city street unwraps his sandwich and throws the wrapper on the ground, the monster erupts into thundering life, charging down the sidewalk—clunking into innocent bystanders along the way—and confronting the man with a roar that shakes the buildings around them, shattering the window of a bakery storefront, toppling the cakes. Then the monster stomps on the man’s foot. The man is hopping and stunned. The people on the sidewalk are appalled and rubbing their elbows and heads and other places the monster has bumped. The mother’s head is drooping, her hand over her eyes, and in this gesture and in the wilt of her shoulders, there is a profound discouragement, a near hopelessness that tells the reader that this is not the first time something like this has happened.
When the boy turns away from the man, he is Liam again, small in his T-shirt and jeans, shaky, drained of triumph, frightened by his own loss of control. In bed that night, he tells his mother, “I thought the man was bad, but maybe I’m the one who’s bad.” And his mother tells him, “You? No, you are my funny sonny, my curious, story-loving, cookie-sharing boy. That monster, he’s the one who’s bad.” And the boy says, “The monster makes me lonely. I mean he makes me feel alone.” “The monster makes me lonely, too,” his mother says.
Liam and his mother visit a wise woman. In the wordless illustrations that follow, Liam talks, sometimes laughing, sometimes sad, sometimes pressing his face into his mother’s arm, and the woman listens. Then she says, “I’m not a fairy godmother, you know. I don’t have a magic wand, and what a silly thing, to think that magic lives inside a wand!” “It doesn’t?” asks the boy. “Magic lives in here,” the woman says, placing one hand on Liam’s head. “And here,” she tells him, pointing to his heart. “And you are full of it and courage, too.” “Courage?” asks Liam. “I don’t think so. Me?” “Of course,” says the woman. “Now, listen: I think I know a way to get that monster gone.”
Pen read this book for the first time four months after her father died. She was sitting in Pollywogs, her favorite children’s bookstore in Philadelphia, a place to which she had escorted so many writers that she’d become friends with the owner, a Mrs. Piggle Wiggle look-alike named Selena Bass. Selena had invited her to come just after closing to help create some displays of new books.
It was one of Pen’s first ventures out of the apartment for anything other than work since her father had died, and she had walked the whole way there, a long walk. At first, she had almost turned back, shaky and tired, street noise loud in her ears, but after a few blocks, it had felt good to be out, walking among strangers, anonymous. She crossed streets, stopped at corners, shrugged her handbag more securely onto her shoulder, an oddly reassuring movement. On the busy sidewalk, she could have been anyone, someone who was grieving or not, had a father or didn’t. If Selena hadn’t been watching through the door of her shop, Pen might have walked right past it. She might have walked all night.
Inside, the shop was cozy and purple-walled. A former elementary-school teacher, Selena had whipped off freehand, typeface-quality signs with colored Sharpies, each sign featuring a quotation from a famous children’s book (one notable example from Winnie-the-Pooh: “If the person you are talking to doesn’t appear to be listening, be patient. It may simply be that he has a small piece of fluff in his ear”), while Pen had unpacked picture books, feeling moved and reverential, running a hand over each glossy cover before placing the books on the display shelf of the little backroom reading space called the Cuddle-upreadalotorium.
She was remembering a conversation with her father.
“Here’s what happened: you got fired, then you got discouraged. Who wouldn’t?” he had told her a few days before he died. “Then you started driving the writers around, you and that cute Amelie, and you liked it pretty well, and then you had Augusta, and you went with the flow. Makes sense. But my bet? You’ll be back in front of a classroom one of these days.”
“How do you know?” she’d asked him.
“I know because I know,” he’d answered.
Holding the new books in her hands, she missed teaching kids how to read.
She missed having someone know her the way her father had.
Pen didn’t see Will’s name on the front of the book at first. She had been too arrested by the cover: jewel and earth tones soaked in light, looking more like a Vermeer than like any children’s book cover Pen had ever seen, the monster standing with one vast, clawed hand over its eyes, the other hand in the air, three fingers raised, counting.
“Ooh, that’s a good one. Brand-new and bound for greatness. It’ll win every kids’ book award under the sun,” said Selena, glancing over. “Why don’t you sit down with it for a minute?”
Pen had sat. From the beginning, the language was wonderful, clean, vivid, leaping upward into poetry at just the right moments, especially in the second half of the book. Liam and his mother wait in line at the post office, their arms full of packages. Outside the window, low afternoon light rests on the snow-covered street; pearly caps of snow top fire hydrants and parked cars and the wool hat of a woman who bustles into the post office with her own tower of packages. Snow caps the tower of packages. “Excuse me,” the woman says huffily. “I’m late for a very important appointment! I’m sure you won’t mind!” And she steps in line in front of Liam’s mother.
Slowly, Pen had turned the page and winced to find what she’d been afraid she would find. The little boy Liam is gone, replaced by the monster, who begins to take a step toward the woman, his awful, thick green leg hooked in the air, his arms raised menacingly. And then, quite suddenly, he freezes, and he puts his foot back down, the effort that it takes to do this written on his face. Then he closes his wild eyes—red lizard eyes with the dash-shaped pupils of a goat—and in a few moments, the walls of the post office fall away, the people and their packages and the snowy city turn translucent and disappear, and there is the monster, standing in somebody’s backyard. It is early summer and the yard is flush with blooming; a sprinkler glitters in the background, a giant oak tree cradles a wooden tree house in its branches, purple pansies with their tiny, winking faces bloom in a pot beside the backdoor of the house, and framed by an open window—it seems to be a kitchen window—is the face of a woman, Liam’s mother’s face.
Liam’s mother smiles at the monster, who puts one hand over his eyes. He begins to count, and something amazing begins to happen. “Five…”—the monster shrinks to boy-size. “Four…”—his bristly fur silvers, turns to dandelion fluff, and blows across the sky. “Three…”—each stegosaurus plate along his back detaches, folds itself into an origami bird and flies away. “Two…”—the bat wings of the monster who is almost not a monster anymore close themselves like black umbrellas. “One…”—and then they are umbrellas and Liam holds one in each hand.
On the next page, Liam is back inside the post office in his winter coat, packages at his feet, and he takes the two umbrellas and slips them into the umbrella stand beside the post office door. Then he walks up to the woman who cut in line and taps her lightly on the arm. She turns disdainful eyes on him and asks him what he wants. Liam says, “Excuse me, but my mother and I have been waiting a long time. Our packages are heavy, just like yours. I think you should go to the end of the line. I think it’s only fair.” And, for a moment, the woman’s face twists in anger. She seems about to speak, then stops, closes her eyes, and takes a few deep breaths.
“You’re right,” she tells the little boy. “I’m having a hard day, but that is not your fault. Not your mother’s, either. And, yes, it’s only fair.” And she steps to the back of the line. Then Liam’s mother smiles as loving a smile as Pen had ever seen on any person, living or painted, and carefully bends her knees to set her bundles on the floor. She opens her arms to Liam, who fits himself inside them. “Liam 1,” she whispers to him, “Monster 0.”
Pen had not consciously known that Will had written Counting Back to Liam until she shut the book and saw his name on the cover, but what she would swear to be true forever after was that before she knew that she knew, she knew. About three-quarters of the way through the book, she had gotten the strange and specific sensation of a small light turning on inside her chest, lifting itself out of darkness like a miniature dawn, and starting to brighten and grow, so that by the time she’d found his name on the cover, she wasn’t stunned the way she might have expected she’d be. Her heart didn’t take off like a racehorse. Instead, she sat in the child-sized blue plastic chair and felt like one of the paintings in the book, imbued with a warm, lemon-colored radiance. It took her a few seconds to realize that what she felt was happy.
Good for you, Will, she had thought, hard. She meant for writing the book, which was wonderful, for writing it in spite of his father, who would never have given his blessing to such a thing, but more than that, she meant good for him for getting better, for learning how to get the best of his temper, which had been so nightmarish and had made him feel so bad. Because that’s what the book meant, Pen understood. She lifted the book and leaned her forehead on it, briefly, eyes closed, in honor of the promise it gave that her friend was okay.
“It’s gorgeous, isn’t it?” said Selena.
“Yes. It’s gorgeous and moving and funny. I love it,” said Pen. “I know him.”
“Will Wadsworth?” asked Selena. “Is he a friend of yours?”
“He was,” said Pen, but the words sounded wrong, so she added, “We went to college together.” Still wrong, too limited and small. It had seemed very important to find the right words to describe Will’s position in her life, but the story was too long to tell. “I adore Will, actually. Just haven’t seen him in a while.”
“Oh,” said Selena. She had smiled, head tipped to one side, and blinked her twinkly eyes. You need a hat, thought Pen, thinking of Mrs. Piggle Wiggle, a boater hat and an apron. Because she was picturing this, it took her a moment to process what Selena said next, “Then you must know his mother?”
Will’s mother. Mrs. Wadsworth. Pen had flashed back to her, then, seeing her as she’d been the few times Pen had met her: flushed, faintly smiling, extremely quiet except for, now and then, a surprisingly witty remark, the fact of her drunkenness revealed only in her occasional shaky and incongruous bursts of laughter and in her clumsy hands. Pen had eaten three meals with the woman in her life, and at all three, she had knocked over a glass. But mostly, she was so lacking in presence, so overshadowed by Will’s father that it had been hard to tell that she was drunk at all.
“If I didn’t know your mom was an alcoholic,” Cat had said once, “I wouldn’t know she was an alcoholic. I don’t think I’ve ever seen her drunk.”
“You’ve never seen her not drunk,” Will had said dryly. “Trust me on that.”
The last time Pen had seen Will’s mother, she had been different. It was at the summerhouse, not long after Cat had left, the only time Pen had ever been there with Will’s mother and without Cat, a weekend that had started out calm and lovely and that had ended in disaster. She had been newly separated from Will’s father (Mr. Wadsworth, Pen always called him, even though he had asked her more than once to call him Randall), and there was something wild in her. Pen remembered her as loud and frenetic, in constant motion, laughing, whirling across the living room, sitting on the lap of a man just a few years older than Will, a painter she had met in an art class. Damon Callas.
Pen’s face had felt hot as she answered Selena, “I didn’t know her. Not well. She and Will weren’t really close.” Again, her words felt wrong. Will and his mother hadn’t been close the way Pen and her parents had been. There was no confiding, no easy camaraderie, and none of the starry-eyed hero-worship that marked Cat’s regard for her father, but what was written all over Will’s face whenever he spent time with or talked about his mother, while it might have been broken and sad, was clearly love.
“No?”
“You sound surprised,” said Pen. “Do you know her?”
“Oh, no,” said Selena. “But the illustrations and the words, they’re so wonderfully matched, so one with each other. It’s surprising to hear that they
’re not close.”
Pen felt confused, trying to make sense of Selena’s pronouns. Then she looked down at the cover of the book again and saw what she had missed the first time. There, below Will’s name: “Illustrations by Charlotte Tully Wadsworth.” Pen read the name again, tracing it with her finger. What a wondrous thing.
Pen had gone back and paged through the book, then, through each glowing, intricate, color-drenched illustration, and had stopped at the picture of the monster, mid-transformation, the dandelion fluff touched by the sun into a kind of filigree, each feathery filament of each tiny blowing seed parachute precisely shining, the whole picture full of an almost palpable lightness. Pen looked, next, at the mother’s watching face in the kitchen window. The illustration had blurred, as Pen’s eyes filled. She smiled. If Charlotte Tully Wadsworth had walked into the bookstore right then, Pen would have hugged her, something she had never done in real life.
“You’re right,” she’d said to Selena, nodding, her fingertips resting on the beautiful thing that Will and his mother had made together. “Something must have changed a lot for her to be able to do this.”
Selena capped her Sharpie with a flourish. “Good. Better than good. The world could use more of that, couldn’t it? Kids and parents getting closer, instead of breaking apart and losing each other.” Then Selena pressed the back of her hand to her mouth for a few seconds and shook her head. “Oh, God. I’m sorry, dear heart,” she said. “I wasn’t talking about you and your dad, who were as close as any people could be. I didn’t mean—”
Pen reached out and squeezed Selena’s hand. “I know what you meant. And it is better than good. That’s just exactly what it is.”
AFTER PEN HAD SPENT TEN MINUTES INTERCEPTING DIRTY LOOKS from her fellow diners, including one from a child in an Elmo T-shirt who feigned gagging himself with his finger, and watching Kiki Melloy, nonstop talker and bestselling mystery author, try to simultaneously talk nonstop and cut her enormous rib eye without losing her grip on the unlit cigarette chopsticked between two fingers of her left hand, she said, “Kiki, maybe you should just put that thing down.”