Falling Together Read online

  Falling Together

  MARISA DE LOS SANTOS

  WILLIAM MORROW

  An Imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

  DEDICATION

  For my first family,

  Arturo, Mary, and Kristina de los Santos,

  with all of my heart

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Praise

  Other Works

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  CHAPTER ONE

  PEN WOULD NOT USE THE WORD SUMMONED WHEN SHE TOLD Jamie about the e-mail later that night. Additionally, she would not say that the e-mail dropped like a bowling ball into the pit of her stomach, and at the same time fell over her like a shining wave, sending arcs of sea spray up to flash in the sun, even though that is precisely how it felt.

  Across from Jamie at dinner, forkful of rabbit halfway to her mouth, Pen would cock an eyebrow, cop a dry tone, and say, “Leave it to me to get the e-mail of my life while wedged between Self-Help and True Crime, listening to Eleanor Rex, M.D., recount her career as a paid dominatrix.”

  The truth is that Pen was not giving Dr. Rex her full attention, even though she should have been. She liked Eleanor. She liked her Louise Brooks bob, her large, smoky laugh, and her impeccable manners. In the nine hours she had spent driving Eleanor around to radio interviews, stock signings, and an appearance at an upscale but vampireden-looking private club called Marquis, Pen had come to view the dominatrix gig—no sex but a lot of mean talk and costumes—as an utterly valid and even sort of nifty way to put oneself through medical school. Even if she hadn’t, she should have been listening. As a general rule, she listened to all of her authors. It was part of the job.

  But this evening, Pen was unusually tired. She stood with her head tilted back against the bookstore wall, her ears only half hearing a description of how to single-handedly lace oneself into a leather corset (“There’s an implement involved,” she told Jamie later. “There always is,” he said.), her eyes only half seeing the otherwise lovely store’s horrible ceiling, paste-gray and pocked as the moon, while the weary rest of her began to fold itself up and give into its own weight like a bat at dawn.

  Yesterday, Pen’s daughter, Augusta, had come home from school with a late spring cold, and Pen had recognized, her heart sinking, that they were in for a rocky ride. Augusta’s sleep, disordered in the best of circumstances, could be tipped over the edge and into chaos by any little thing. To make matters worse, it was her first illness since Pen had purged their apartment of children’s cold medicine following newly issued, scarily worded warnings that it might be harmful to kids under the age of six. When Jamie got home at 2:00 A.M., he had found Augusta cocooned in a quilt on the sofa, wide awake, coughing noisily but decorously into the crook of her arm the way she had been taught to do in school, and a pale, wild-haired Pen staring into the medicine cabinet like a woman staring into the abyss.

  “I hate the FDA,” Pen had spat viciously. “And don’t tell me I don’t.”

  “I would never tell you that,” said Jamie, backing up. “Noooo way.”

  In the bookstore, Eleanor’s voice grew fainter and fainter, and Pen was so completely on the verge of sliding down the wall and curling up on the hardwood floor that she was planning it—how she would tuck her knees under her skirt, rest her head on a very large paperback book, possibly some sort of manual—when she felt her phone vibrate against her rib cage. Jamie, a sucker for gadgets, had given her the phone just a few days earlier—a “smartphone” he’d called it—and he had since realized what Pen had known the second he’d handed it to her: that it was far, far smarter than she required or deserved.

  A hummingbird, Pen marveled through her sleep fog, in my purse.

  A second later, she thought, Augusta, and then, Oh no, and her heart began to do a hummingbird thrum of its own. Generally, Pen’s girl was as healthy as a horse, and her cold had been of the messy but aimless variety. But anything could happen. A couple of months ago, Pen had sent Augusta to her father’s house for the weekend and, apparently seconds after Augusta had stepped over his threshold, her flimsy sore throat had flared like a brush fire into a serious case of strep.

  “Pustules all over her tonsils,” his wife, Tanya, had hissed. “Pustules. Everywhere! And you never noticed? I’ve got news for you, lady: strep can turn into rheumatic fever. Just. Like. That.”

  Anything could happen with children. No one had to tell Pen this. Anything could happen with anything. Pen didn’t even bother to check the message before she was punching in her home phone number and snaking her way through the small crowd of people who had gathered at the back of the store to hear Eleanor. In every bookstore audience, there were those who stood on the fringes instead of taking a seat, even when seats were plentiful, folks Pen called “lurkers.” Usually, this label was both unkind and unjust, simple snideness on her part, but in the case of Eleanor’s lurkers, perhaps not so much.

  One ring and Jamie picked up.

  “Jamie,” Pen whispered frantically into the phone. “What? Fever? Pustules? What? Just tell me.”

  “You,” Jamie told her calmly, “are insane.”

  Pen breathed, and her eyes filled with tears of relief. She swiped at them with her finger.

  “Well, you called,” she said, clearing her throat. “Naturally, I was worried.”

  “I called?” There was a brief pause and then Jamie said, “You didn’t check the voice mail, did you? You didn’t even check the number of the person calling, even though it was right there on the screen. Just hauled off and called me in a panic like a crazy person.”

  All true, but Pen was not going to say that to Jamie, so instead she said, “Not that many people have this number, Jamie. It’s new, remember? You and Amelie and Patrick and Mom and Augusta’s school. The school is closed; Mom’s in Tibet or wherever the hell; Patrick never calls in the evenings; and I just talked to Amelie twenty minutes ago. That leaves you.”

  There was a small silence as Jamie considered this, then he said, a sly note sliding into his voice, “Let me ask you this.”

  “No,” Pen said. “Whatever it is, no.”

  “Did your phone even ring?”

  “It didn’t ring,” Pen corrected. “I’m in a bookstore. It whirred.”

  “Repeatedly? Or once? One long whir?”

  “Who knows? Could’ve been one whir. Maybe. So what?” She gave her phone an accusatory look.

  Jamie groaned. “E-mail.” He enunciated the word as though it were composed of three distinct syllables. “Didn’t we go over this? Check your e-mail, Penelope. We’re fine. Augusta’s fine. No fever and she ate like a champ. We had a long, and I’m talking about crazy-long, dance contest, and then she conked.”

  Pen swiped at her eyes again. “Oh. Well, thanks. Sorry.”

  Quietly, Jamie said, “The world doesn’t spin out of control the second you
turn your back, Pen.”

  Oh, yes it does. That’s exactly what it does. You know that as well as I do. Pen thought this, but she didn’t say it.

  Jamie sighed. “Listen, if she busts out in pustules, I promise you’ll be the first to know.”

  After she hung up, Pen almost didn’t check her e-mail. She glared at her phone and stuffed it into her handbag. Contrary to what Jamie probably thought, she knew how to check it, but anyone who needed urgently to reach her would call, and the mere thought of pecking out an answer on the phone’s microscopic keyboard made her fingers inflate to the size of baseball bats. Besides, she needed to get back to Eleanor.

  Pen was walking toward the rows of chairs when she heard someone ask, “So I know you’re, like, retired? But do you ever, you know, make an exception if the guy’s, like, really special? Like really cool or whatever?” The person’s voice had an unfinished, squawking quality: a boy, about twelve years old, thirteen at the outside. He was talking to Eleanor. Pen winced, stopped in her tracks, and there, in the heart of the Animals and Pet Care section, she checked her e-mail. The new one was from Glad2behere, an unfamiliar moniker but one that struck Pen as cheerful. Good for you, she thought.

  Dear Pen,

  I know it’s been forever, but I need you. Please come to the reunion. I’ll find you there. I’m sorry for everything.

  Love,

  Cat

  Pen did not draw a blank or have a moment of confusion or have to read the message twice. She didn’t think, Cat who? There was only one Cat. What she did was sit down on the floor between the shelves of books, shut her eyes, and press the cell phone to her sternum, against her galloping heart. Out of the blue sky and after more than six years of waiting—because no matter how hard she had tried not to wait, that is exactly what she’d been doing—Pen had been summoned. As soon as the merry-go-round inside her head slowed its whirling and jangling enough for her to think anything, she thought, Oh, Cat, followed by, Finally.

  CHAPTER TWO

  CAT WOULD BEGIN IT: “WE MET CUTE.”

  “No,” Pen would correct. “We met terrifying.”

  “And hostile,” Will would add.

  “I wouldn’t say ‘hostile,’” Pen would say.

  “You were yelling,” Will would remind her. “And swearing.”

  “And pushing,” Cat would add. “Although not that hard.”

  “How would you know?” Pen would demand. “And I wasn’t the only one swearing.”

  “I know,” Cat would insist. “You were hostile. I was cute.”

  “You were terrifying,” Will would correct.

  “Through no fault of your own,” Pen would concede.

  “But cute,” Cat would assert, “nevertheless.”

  And no one would disagree.

  This was the way they told their story.

  IT WAS THE FOURTH DAY OF THE FIRST WEEK OF THEIR FIRST YEAR OF college, immediately following a lecture on Beowulf.

  Weeks afterward, when their friendship had become an ageless and immovable fact, Will would remark that he had noticed Pen during the lecture, specifically the way her hair had looked all of a piece, a glossy brown object hanging next to her face as she tilted her head to write.

  “God,” Cat would say, grimacing, “don’t tell me you were checking her out. Don’t tell me that Pen piqued your sexual interest. Because the thought of that is just nauseating.”

  “Thank you,” Pen would say.

  “Nope,” Will would assure them. “It was just that hair. It was so brushed that it didn’t even look like hair. Who has hair that brushed?”

  “No one,” Cat would reply. “No one has hair that brushed. And no one cries over Beowulf. No one but Pen.”

  Pen had not cried exactly, not out and out cried, not during the lecture anyway. She had cried the night before when she had gotten to the part about Beowulf’s death. It wasn’t so much the death itself, since Beowulf had never, during the hours she’d spent reading the poem, felt particularly real to her. Instead, it was the moment immediately following his death, a still and private moment near the end of an epic’s worth of action and fighting, appearing suddenly and taking Pen off guard. The smoke cleared, and there was Wiglaf, the youngest of Beowulf’s warriors, exhausted and blood-spattered and out of options, sprinkling water on the face of his dead king to wake him up.

  During the lecture, Pen had waited for the professor to cover this moment, its bottomless sadness, but he had not even mentioned it. Still, while he spoke in cool tones about Beowulf’s death marking the beginning of the end of an entire civilization, Pen had envisioned the boy’s cupped hands full of water and had not burst into sobs, thank God, but had felt her eyes flood with tears. Her embarrassment at displaying emotion in front of what appeared to be hundreds of strangers was compounded by the fact that she was wearing mascara for the second time in her life. Her high school boyfriend, Mitchy Wooten, had liked her lashes “plain,” but he had abruptly broken up with her fewer than twenty-four hours before they’d left for their respective colleges. Mascara was part of the new, college Pen, but as her dampened eyelashes began to gum, Pen vowed to throw the stuff away forever, a vow she would keep.

  However, before its absolute exit from her life, the mascara had a role to play because when the professor ended the lecture a half hour early so that the class could break into small groups and meet with their respective teaching assistants, Pen did not go directly to her assigned classroom. Instead she wandered through the belly of the old, neoclassical, externally gracious, internally dank building in search of a bathroom in which to repair her smeary eyes. It took some time, but she found one, and as soon as she opened the door, she found Cat.

  The bathroom was tiny, just two stalls, one sink, a paper towel dispenser, a trash can, and a large radiator. Lying on the scarred black and white tiles, face-up, her head jammed against the radiator, was a small girl in big trouble. Pen did not immediately identify the exact kind of trouble because the second she opened the door, the scene slammed into her senses, scattering them: a spill of black hair, limbs in terrible motion, a rigid face, a gasping, prolonged moan, a banging, banging, banging.

  Pen yelped and fell back against the paper towel dispenser. For a few seconds, her hands flapped stupidly. Then she squatted down and took hold of the girl’s thin ankles. She had expected them to stop moving, but they bucked inside her hands like two animals.

  “Oh, God,” Pen squeaked. “It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay.” But it wasn’t.

  Pen leaped up, wheeled around, and shoved open the bathroom door.

  “Help,” she said, not as loudly as she’d meant to. She saw a sweatshirt, grabbed it, and pulled it into the bathroom. Inside the sweatshirt was a boy.

  “Shit,” the boy said breathlessly and with what Pen would later discover was a relatively rare display of profanity. “She’s seizing.”

  “Of course she is!” Pen shrieked, even though, before the boy said it, she had not hit upon a name for what the girl on the floor was doing. “We have to call 9-1-1!”

  “Wait,” said the boy.

  “Wait?” squealed Pen.

  “She’s got one of those bracelets.”

  “A bracelet? Are you insane?”

  The boy was insane she decided. Insane and useless. She yanked open the zipper of her backpack, fished wildly inside it, and snatched out a pen.

  The boy pulled off his sweatshirt.

  “Oh, great. Are you getting warm?” yelled Pen. “Are you a tad uncomfortable?” She pushed past the boy and leaned over the girl.

  “What are you doing with that pen?” demanded the boy.

  “You’re supposed to put something in her mouth, so she doesn’t swallow her tongue.”

  To Pen’s amazement, he grabbed the pen out of her hand.

  “That’s a myth, the tongue thing,” he snapped. “You’ll hurt her.”

  Pen launched into a rant about the boy not being a doctor, damn it, and about how everyone knew the tong
ue thing was true and about how he needed to return her pen right now, this second, but the rant petered out before it really got started because what the boy did next was drop to his knees and tuck the sweatshirt under the girl’s head, placing part of the shirt on the floor, part of it between her head and the radiator. It was among the most restrained and gentle gestures Pen had ever seen.

  “Look,” the boy said softly. “She’s stopping.”

  Pen and the boy stayed still, waiting, and in a few seconds the noise emptied out of the room and was replaced by an opalescent quiet.

  Eventually, the girl’s eyes batted open. She looked from the boy to Pen, bewildered. She turned her head to the side, looked at the base of the sink, and groaned.

  “Oh, bloody hell,” she said hoarsely. “Give me a minute, okay?”

  “Sure,” said the boy, and Pen added, ridiculously, like a person on TV, “Take all the time you need.”

  Minutes passed. The girl might have fallen asleep, she lay so still. Her blouse was gauzy and peacock blue, scattered with yellow flowers. Pen caught sight of her own reflection in the mirror and gave a start at how haggard she looked, before she realized it was mostly because of the smudged mascara. Surreptitiously, she touched her forefingers to her tongue and rubbed under each eye. It helped a little.

  When the girl opened her eyes again, she said, “So tell me who you are.”

  Relief and the sudden sound of the girl’s clear voice sent Pen’s adrenaline flowing again.

  “Pen,” she said. “Penelope, actually. Calloway. My grandmother’s name. Penelope, I mean. Not Calloway. She was my mother’s mother, so you know, different last name.” The words hopped out one by one, flip flip flip, like goldfish out of a bowl. Pen sighed.

  The girl smiled, and Pen noted that the smile managed to look exhausted and sparkling at the same time. “Got it,” the girl said.

  The boy wiped his hand on his gray T-shirt and held it out.

  “Will Wadsworth,” he said.