Falling Together Read Online Free PDF

her neck. She had stood and spun around, searching through the crowds of people who had loved her father, for Will and Cat who had loved him as much as anyone. Nothing.
    After that, over and over, for two years, Pen had imagined what she would say to them if she ever saw them again, all the ways she would be angry or indifferent, clever or cool. But from the beginning, from the very first day each of them walked out and for every second since, what she would have said if she were speaking truthfully was this: “Since you left there’s been a you-shaped space beside me, all the time. It never goes away.”
    “All right, then,” whispered Pen into the darkness of Augusta’s room. “What the cluck. She wants me to be there, so I’ll go.”

C HAPTER F OUR

    W ILL COULD STILL CONJURE THEM UP . L IKE NOW , FOR INSTANCE , as he worked at his desk, he could look through the window and watch them emerge from between the guesthouse and the japonica bushes and walk across his backyard, past the weird village of staked birdhouses his mother had set up, past the crab apple snowing white onto the grass. Pen all spare, pliant lines, with her hair pulled back, her hard cyclist’s legs. Tiny, animated Cat with her usual bird-of-paradise plumage: lapis-blue scarf, flame-red dress, green shoes.
    Sometimes, he had nothing to do with it; they showed up out of nowhere, with the fast sting of a static electric shock. Just yesterday, after he’d gotten the e-mail, he had seen Pen’s long, oval-nailed fingers wrapped around a stranger’s coffee cup in the Bean There, Done That Café. These visitations didn’t happen often, a few times a year maybe, but they always left Will a little out of breath, the sudden yank backward through time: Pen’s surprising, childlike laugh bubbling up over restaurant noise or her almost comically perfect posture (“Tut, tut! Chin up, shoulders back, stiff upper lip,” Cat would tease in a very bad British accent. “For God and Empire, you know.”) inhabiting the back, neck, and shoulders of a woman across the room at a party.
    Once, a couple of years ago, as he stood in line for a movie, he had heard Cat’s voice, winsome, tinny, and unmistakably off-key, singing a song he didn’t know but that was exactly the kind of sappy love song Cat would adore. He had left his place in line to find the singer, who turned out to be teenaged and blue-haired with a nose piercing that looked fresh and painful, a detail that had annoyed Will unaccountably, almost to the point of anger. How stupid of him, he had thought, how moronic, after so many years, to look for Cat and find this silly, attention-hungry kid instead.
    Now, though, he let himself fall into the act of imagining them, of hearing Cat’s silver bangles add themselves to the morning music—birds and, already, a distant lawnmower—of watching them balance each other the way they always had, Pen shortening her fluid, stalking stride, Cat stepping fast and light, like a sandpiper, so that she seemed, from this distance, to just skim the ground.
    Will shifted his gaze to the bulletin board on the wall next to his desk. He had read Cat’s e-mail once, then printed it out and pinned it to the bulletin board. Pinning e-mails to the bulletin board wasn’t something he usually did, and he didn’t analyze his reasons for doing it now. “You’re trying to make it more actual,” his mother had said when she’d seen it. “You’re filling a space,” which was just the kind of thing his mother said these days, although in this case, as in others, he had to admit that she might have a point.
    Dear Will,
    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
    It didn’t sound like Cat. Will had thought this as soon as he’d read it. A flat, sparse e-mail from a girl (Will still thought “girl” when he thought of Cat) who was never either of those things. The Cat Will had