Free Falling Together by Marisa de los Santos Page A

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,