Falling Together Read Online Free PDF Page A

and worry, an expression no one should ever see on a four-year-old’s face.
    “I wouldn’t do that to Augusta again,” said Pen, more to herself than to Jamie.
    “You sure?”
    Pen rested her chin on her palm and looked at the vase of flowers in the middle of the table, tulips, barely open, like little folded hands in white gloves.
    “I didn’t get it,” she said. “For that whole first year, I knew that he was gone from us and how unfair and sickening and sad that was. But I didn’t get that what was worse, the very worst thing, was that he was gone from himself and all the things he loved. The day of the bike ride, it fell on me like an avalanche.”
    She looked up at Jamie and shrugged. “So now I know. And it can’t fall on me again.”
    Jamie got a bag of coffee beans out of the freezer and poured them into his expensive coffeemaker with its built-in grinder and timer. Pen listened to the oily click of the beans, waiting.
    “Your reunion doesn’t start until, what, a week, week and a half, after this year’s ride?” said Jamie finally. “So if you’re not planning to be incapacitated, why don’t you go?”
    Pen stood up, slapping crumbs off her skirt in annoyance. “Why are you so sure I’d want to see Cat, anyway? It’s not like I’ve been holding my breath until she and Will came back.”
    “Uh, actually, if you think about it, that’s exactly what it’s like.”
    “Nice,” said Pen. “Very nice. They walked out on me. Why would I want to see either of them?”
    “Because they’re Cat and Will.” Jamie flopped onto the sofa and snagged a remote control out of the bafflingly large collection on the coffee table. Before he began pushing buttons, he added, “And you’re you.”
    W HEN P EN WAS STILL NOT ASLEEP AT 3:00 A.M. , SHE GOT OUT OF BED and walked, as silently as she could, into Augusta’s room, a thing she almost never did. For Augusta, the state of sleep was a frail construction, something you could send toppling with a misplaced footfall or clearing of your throat. But every now and then, Pen risked it. Now, she closed the door behind her and stood, allowing her eyes to adjust to the powdered-sugar sifting of moonlight and streetlight on the windowsill and the thin blue glow of the nightlight that Pen allowed as a concession to Augusta’s fear of the dark, even though she’d read that nightlights could cause nearsightedness later in life. Glasses later, she decided, beats terror now, hands down.
    Augusta lay in one of her customarily untranquil positions, as though she’d been struck by sleep mid-snow-angel, her duvet and sheets heaped in drifts on the floor around her bed. Pen resisted touching her, but leaned in close to listen to her breath and smell her smell: honey soap, apple shampoo, and a fundamental Augusta scent that reminded Pen of dandelion stems.
    Without taking her eyes off her daughter, Pen lowered herself by increments into the chair next to Augusta’s bed and thought what she had thought so many times before: How can Cat and Will not know you? For weeks after Augusta was born, Pen had expected them to come, even though, when the three of them parted ways, first Cat leaving, then Will, they had all agreed to make it final, to never get in touch, not years later, not ever.
    “We’re all or nothing,” Cat had said, tears streaming down her face. “We can’t be fake or partial or now-and-then. That would be wretched.” Pen hadn’t been so sure, but she had agreed to it anyway.
    Even so, and even though she had no clear idea of how they would’ve found out about Augusta’s birth even if they had wanted to, she had waited for them to come. She had waited again after her father died. At the funeral, she had sat between her mother and Patrick, Augusta on her lap, feeling broken and absent, her body numb inside her black dress, and had suddenly felt them there, behind her, the certainty of their presence running like electricity along her shoulders and up