Fly Away Home

by Jennifer Weiner

  “What is it?” she asked, smoothing her hair and stepping out into the hallway. “Is it Lizzie? Is Milo okay?”

  “No. No, honey, Lizzie’s fine. It’s …” He paused, which was strange. Her father was a practiced public speaker who could deliver an address on everything from the don’t ask/don’t tell policy to the cash for clunkers program with hardly a pause or an “um.” “I’m going to be on the news tonight.”

  This wasn’t unheard of, and it certainly didn’t merit a phone call. Usually his chief of staff would send an e-mail blast to friends, family, and key supporters (translation: big donors), telling them to set their DVRs when her dad was on the news. “Why? What’s up?”

  He cleared his throat. “Need to tell you something, sweetheart.”

  Diana felt nausea twist in her belly. Her father never sounded unsure of himself. Whether it was the time she’d fallen off her bike and needed stitches in her chin, or the televised address he’d given after the planes had hit the Twin Towers on 9-11, his voice was rich and resonant. He sounded reassuring, no matter what he was saying … but now he sounded almost frightened. Was he sick? Was that why he was calling her? She ran down a list of potential problems—heart disease, hypertension, enlarged prostate. Ugh. Her father cleared his throat, then kept talking.

  “Last year a woman came to work in my D.C. office as a legislative aide, and we … she and I …”

  Diana pushed the door to the break room open with her shoulder. It smelled, as usual, like the ghost of someone’s departed burrito, like sweat and adrenaline and, faintly, of what she’d come to think of as eau de ER—blood and urine and feces and vomit, the smell of illness and of fear.

  “What?” she asked, her voice loud in the empty room. “What are you saying?”

  “We had an affair. It didn’t last long, and it’s over, but I helped her get a job, and someone found out about it—about us—and it’s probably going to be in the news tonight.”

  Diana slumped against a row of pale-blue-painted metal lockers with the BlackBerry pressed to her ear.

  “It’s over,” her father repeated. “That’s the important thing. It didn’t last very long, and it … it was never … I wasn’t going to …”

  Her thumb hovered over the button that would have ended the call. She wanted desperately to press it, to silence her father’s voice, to unlearn what he’d told her. She wanted it to be five minutes ago. She wanted to be back in the exam room, on her knees, investigating Doug Vance’s mysterious swelling.

  “I wanted to tell you,” her father was saying, “before you heard it somewhere else. I’m sorry, Di. I’m sorry.” His voice cracked.

  She wondered where he was calling from. His office in Washington, with its big leather chair, family photos on the desk, and a framed copy of the Bill of Rights over the bookshelves? The back of a Town Car, with a briefing binder in his lap, the day’s papers folded by his side?

  Diana reached for the television remote and pointed it at the set bolted to the ceiling. It was tuned to CNN, and, as the picture came into focus, she saw her father walking somewhere—in D.C., she presumed—with his arm around the waist of a curly-haired, chubby young woman. The young woman smiled as her father bent his head, saying something in her ear that made her laugh. Sources are reporting, a voice coming from the set said, that Senator Woodruff may have paid lobbyists to get his former assistant and rumored mistress, Joelle Stabinow, a job at the D.C. branch of the New York City law firm where he was once a partner.

  “You got her a job? This woman?”

  “It wasn’t anything illegal.” Her father’s voice sounded calmer, more assertive. “She was qualified. She finished at the top of her class at Georgetown.”

  “Excellent.” She sounded brittle, like her mother after too long on a receiving line. “Tell her congratulations from me.”

  “Diana. There’s no need for that tone.”

  “Oh? Do you want me to sound happy?”

  “Of course not. I’m not happy about it. I really screwed up here.”

  “Ya think?” But really, she wasn’t in a position to say anything. How could she condemn him, given what she’d been doing when he called? Down on her knees in front of a med student, her student, a man who was not her husband, a man she had no business touching. At least she had the sense to be discreet, to lock the door.

  “It’ll pass,” her father was saying. “It’ll be a one-day story. There wasn’t any fiscal impropriety, no taxpayer dollars, no—”

  She cut him off. “Did you tell Mom?”

  “I’ve been trying to reach her,” he said. “She’s not picking up. Neither is Lizzie.”

  Lizzie. Diana’s heart sank. Her father paused. “Do you think you can tell your sister, if I don’t reach her first? It’ll kill her to see this on the news.”

  “Fine,” Diana snapped. Here we go again, she thought, with her in her familiar role as responsible big sister keeping little Lizzie safe from the big, bad world.

  The break room door swung open and Doug Vance poked his head in. He looked at Diana, then up at the TV set, which was now showing a commercial for a weight-loss program. “Everything okay?” he whispered.

  “I’ll speak to you later,” Diana said to her father. She hung up the phone, slipped it back into her pocket, and turned to her … what was Doug, exactly? Her boyfriend? Her lover? Her man on the side?

  “Everything’s fine,” she said, and did her best to sound as if she believed it.

  Doug gave her a puzzled look. “Catch up later?”

  “I’ll text you.” That was how they communicated, by texts, like love-struck teenagers, all abbreviations and emoticons: Need 2 C U. UR MY HRT. Silly little things, and yet she cherished every letter, every emoticon. Doug moved her, in a way that no one, including her husband, ever had.

  As if to confirm that unhappy truth, her telephone spasmed in her pocket. She lifted the phone to her ear. “Hi, honey.”

  “Diana?” asked Gary, whose voice was low and rattly, due to his extensive allergies and the hay fever he seemed to have for ten months out of the year. He sniffled, cleared his throat, and said, “Um, did you hear about …”

  “I saw.”

  Gary paused, fumbling for the words. “Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine.” She crossed the room and opened her locker. There were her running shoes, a pair of shorts, a sports bra, and a ripe T-shirt that she’d shucked off after a lunchtime five-miler two days before. It would do. She tucked the phone under her chin and started unbuttoning her lab coat. “I’m fine,” she repeated. “Why wouldn’t I be? I didn’t do anything wrong.”

  “Well, right,” Gary stammered. A great stammerer was her Gary. “I mean, of course not. But it’s just …”

  “It’s a shock.” She shoved her feet into the sneakers, then bent and gave the laces a hard yank. “It’s appalling.”

  “It’s a surprise,” said Gary. “I thought your dad was one of the good guys.” Gary sounded as if he was on the verge of tears. No surprise there. Of the two of them, Gary had always been the crier. He’d cried at their wedding and when Milo was born, both occasions during which Diana had remained dry-eyed (although, to be fair, during the birth she’d also been heavily drugged). Gary, she’d thought more and more frequently as the years went by, was more of a girl than she was.

  “Listen,” he was saying, as Diana pulled the running bra over her head. “I know we were supposed to go out tonight …”

  “And we should,” she said, grimacing as the fragrant T-shirt settled over her shoulders.

  “Are you sure? We can reschedule.”

  She shook her head. This was typical Gary, looking for any excuse to stay home on the couch. “We can’t reschedule. We’ve already rescheduled twice, and the gift certificate expires next week.” They’d won the dinner at Milo’s school auction last year. She’d bid for it, paying too much money and not caring—it was for charity, and Gary would never take her anywhere fancy without some prepaid prompt
ing.

  His voice was very small. “You don’t think people will stare?”

  “Let them stare.” She banged her locker shut. “I have to go.”

  “I’ll see you at the restaurant,” he said before she ended the call. Instantly, her telephone started buzzing again. She reopened the locker, threw the phone into her purse, retrieved her iPod, slammed the locker shut again, and walked swiftly past the receptionist on duty, a pale, pie-faced thing named Ashley.

  “I’m taking my break,” she announced; Ashley cringed and nodded and started to say something before Diana cut her off.

  “I need you to call my sister,” she said. “Lizzie Woodruff. Her number’s on my contact sheet. I’ll be back in forty-five minutes. Please ask her to meet me here.”

  “Yes, Doctor,” Ashley whispered, and then Diana pushed through the door to the stairs, taking them two at a time, until she came out on the steaming, humid pavement. Then she went running down Spruce Street, east toward the Delaware River as fast as she could, with music pounding in her ears and her blood pounding through her body, until a stitch burned in her side and her breath tore at her throat and the pain pushed everything out of her mind except putting one foot in front of the other.

  LIZZIE

  It was a scramble getting Milo out of the brilliantly blue swimming pool, into the changing room, and then into his clothes: his khakis and boat shoes, the button-down shirt and the ski cap he insisted on wearing even in the summer heat. Lizzie ended up with no time to do anything but pull on her ribbed tank top and her long, lacy white skirt, slide her feet into her flip-flops, loop her old Leica around her neck and her purse over her shoulder, grab Milo’s backpack, and race through the swimming club’s door out to Lombard Street to hail a cab.

  By the time they arrived at the hospital they were fifteen minutes late, and Lizzie was a wreck—pink-faced, frizzy-haired, with something unpleasant that she hoped was gum and feared was worse clinging to the sole of her shoe. Also, she’d forgotten her bra. She’d barely noticed, but it was the kind of detail that would not escape her sister. She was sweating, and the unpleasant taste of copper filled her mouth. Ashley hadn’t said what her sister wanted, but Lizzie had never been summoned to Diana’s workplace in the middle of the day and could only assume that the news was bad—that she’d screwed up something, that she was in trouble again.

  Diana was waiting for her by the ER desk, perfect as ever, buttoned up in her lab coat, wearing a slim pearly-gray pencil skirt and matching high heels, as put together as she’d been that morning, except her face was beet red and her hair, slicked back in a twist, was wet.

  “Are you okay, Mom?” Milo asked in his gravelly voice, and Diana softened, the way she only did for her son, and bent to brush her lips against his forehead and smooth his dark bangs out of his eyes.

  “I’m fine. Did you bring your Leapster? Can you go sit in the waiting room by yourself like a big boy for ten minutes? Aunt Lizzie and I need to have an adult conversation.”

  Once Milo was parked on the couch, playing some improving game, Diana pulled Lizzie into the empty break room and closed the door behind her.

  Lizzie, who thought she’d figured out the reason for this impromptu visit, was prepared. As soon as the door was shut, she started talking. “Look, I know what you said about McDonald’s, and I read all the information you gave me.” This was a slight exaggeration—she’d glanced at one of the articles in the stack that Diana had left on her bed, but had gotten so grossed out by the descriptions of cattle mistreatment and beef preservatives that she’d shoved it in the drawer of the dresser and never looked at it again.

  Diana lifted an eyebrow—Diana could do that, could lift her eyebrows one at a time. Lizzie plowed ahead. “He said he was the only kid in his class who’d never been there. And we only went once, and I paid with my own money, and he had the Chicken McNuggets with milk, not soda, and I got him a cut-up apple on the side …”

  Diana cut her off with a wave of her hand. Her nails were perfectly filed, gleaming ovals. Lizzie snuck her own raggedy fingertips, with their bitten tips and peeling red polish, into her pockets.

  “Dad called.”

  Lizzie blinked. “What’s going on?” Her sister’s tone triggered a familiar sensation, the feeling of a trapdoor opening in her belly. For years, Lizzie had thought of her parents, and even her sister, as sort of like Greek gods—distant and capricious and unknowable, larger than life, or at least smarter than average, given to hurling their thunderbolts and their decrees down from Mount Olympus, not really caring what kind of damage they’d do to the normal people like Lizzie. Like savvy mortals throughout time, Lizzie had done her best to escape their notice. She was polite and cheerful when spoken to, and tried to keep a low profile the rest of the time.

  Diana found the remote on the break room table and pointed it at the set. CNN came on the screen, and there was their father, Senator Richard Woodruff, D-NY, with his arm around the waist of a woman who was not their mom.

  “Oh.” Lizzie stared at the screen. A sick feeling rose in her throat as she caught the words extramarital affair. She knew this feeling, that nausea, the clamminess in her armpits and the small of her back. At twenty-four, Lizzie Woodruff was well acquainted with shame. She’d just never had the occasion to feel it on behalf of another family member—not impeccable, brilliant, successful Diana; not her gracious, elegant, eternally appropriate mother; and certainly not her father, a man everyone looked up to, a man everyone respected. She swallowed hard, wiping sweat from her upper lip.

  “Oh,” she said. “Oh, jeez.”

  “Yeah,” said Diana, lips curled. “Oh, jeez.” Lizzie was still staring up at the screen, which showed a picture—a photograph pulled from a computer, Lizzie thought—of the same woman, now dressed in a bikini, sitting cross-legged and laughing on the bow of a sailboat.

  “Christ,” Diana muttered. “You’d think one of these bimbos would own a one-piece.”

  “Did you talk to Mom? Is she okay?” Lizzie whispered. She twisted her hair in a knot and secured it with her elastic band, then started pacing.

  Diana pulled her phone out of her pocket, hit a button, listened, then said, “Mom? Hang on. I’m going to conference in Lizzie.”

  Lizzie’s telephone trilled its ringtone, the bouncy melody of Lady Gaga’s “Just Dance,” from the depths of the embroidered, sequined purse that she’d bought for ten dollars on Canal Street. Diana made a face—at the purse, or the ring tone, or Lizzie’s inability to locate her phone, Lizzie wasn’t sure. She rooted around, fingers brushing against lipstick and crumpled bills and Kleenexes and the cartridges for Milo’s Leapster, feeling dizzy and desperate to find someplace dim and fragrant with the smell of old beer and cigarettes and drink white wine, chilled so cold that the first glass would give her a headache, which the second glass would instantly cure, or maybe rum and Cokes, her old favorite, syrupy-sweet, so easy going down, making the world pleasantly blurry.

  Finally, she found her phone at the bottom of her purse. “Hello? Mom?”

  “Girls?” Sylvie’s voice was pinched and small.

  “What’s going on?” Diana demanded.

  “I don’t know,” said Sylvie. “I’m in a car, on my way back up to New York. I’ve spoken to Ceil, but other than that, I don’t know what’s happening.”

  “I talked to Dad.” Diana’s words were clipped. “He says he was having an affair, and he got her a job. And he’s sorry. Which of course he’d say.”

  “Oh, God.” Sylvie’s voice was a croak. “As soon as I speak to your father I’ll call you back. Until then, just wait. And be careful. I’m sure reporters will call you, and you shouldn’t say anything.”

  Diana barked laughter. “Oh, really? You don’t think I should go down and make a statement?”

  “Diana,” said Sylvie. Diana rolled her eyes. Her mother could be terrifying, and never more so than when she was angry.

  “Maybe it was innocent. Maybe that woman just need
ed, you know, a father figure. Maybe it was nothing. Maybe they’re just friends.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake,” said Diana. The scorn in her voice could have been bottled and sold as a chemical weapon. “Fifty-seven-year-old senators are not friends with their twentysomething aides.” She exhaled noisily. “I bet there’s e-mails. Or more pictures. Or something. There’s always something. Not to mention,” Diana continued, looking pointedly at her sister, “the press is probably going to write about all of us.”

  Lizzie wondered when the details would come out and marveled at her sister’s ability to always see the worst in any situation … including, of course, Lizzie’s own. She remembered once, for her birthday, her parents had taken them to a state fair. Lizzie had been eight, almost out of her mind with excitement about the Tilt-A-Whirl she’d be allowed to ride and the cotton candy she’d be given to eat. Diana, at fourteen, hadn’t wanted to come at all, and had spent the ride upstate gazing out the window and heaving noisy sighs.

  The day had been wonderful. A cheerful round man in a suit and bow tie, the mayor of Plattsburgh, had met them in the parking lot. “So you’re the birthday girl?” he’d asked, bending down with a soft grunt until he was eye level with Lizzie. The mayor had whisked them to the front of every line. He’d made sure that Lizzie sampled every delicacy—the grilled sausage and sweet peppers, the fresh-squeezed lemonade, the Steak on a Stake, the soft-serve custard and fried dough—and had squeezed her close, beaming, for a newspaper photograph.

  Back in the car, sticky and sleepy and full, Lizzie had said to her sister, “This was the best day ever,” and Diana, with her face turned once more toward the window, had said, “You know the whole thing was a photo op.” Then she’d explained to her sister exactly what a photo op was, and how her father needed people in Plattsburgh to vote for him, which was why she, Diana, had been stuck wasting her Saturday in this stupid cow town when she could have been in the city with her friends. Lizzie had managed to hold back her tears until it was too dark for anyone in the car to see that she was crying. She’d thought the man had given her treats and taken her picture because it was her birthday; that she’d been the one they’d been fussing over.