Fly Away Home

by Jennifer Weiner

  Milo and Lizzie were upstairs. Diana could hear water running in the bathroom, and her son’s laughter as Lizzie shepherded him out of his clothes and into the tub. Gary, thank God, was nowhere to be found. She felt herself relax as she set down her bags and walked up the stairs, knowing that she’d have a precious twenty minutes to herself to get ready for dinner before facing Gary and the rest of the world.

  LIZZIE

  She’d been pronounced clean and sober and been sprung from the place in Minnesota at the end of June. A taxi had been waiting to take her to the airport at noon—Lizzie had been bemused to learn that rehabs had official checkout times, just like hotels. There she’d sat in the Northwest waiting area until her five o’clock flight was called. She felt more visible than she had in years, although, in her long skirt and flip-flops, her tank top and her denim jacket, she could see that she didn’t look any different from the other young women in the terminal, the ones on their way to visit their grandparents or start their summer jobs. That was the thing about drugs—or, at least, it was the thing about painkillers, which had been her particular vice: taking them let her be present but absent, visible but gone. In the airport, sitting cross-legged on a black vinyl chair with her camera in her lap, she felt more obvious than she’d ever been before; as if she were gigantic, like everyone was staring at her, like she’d gotten a tattoo on her forehead, where no one could miss it, a scarlet A, not for adultery but for addict.

  She thought she’d be going home, to her parents’ place in New York City. Instead, her sister had grudgingly agreed to hire her for the summer. The plan, which had undoubtedly been cooked up by Lizzie’s mother, was for Lizzie to babysit Milo, but Lizzie knew the real situation: her parents wanted big sister Diana to babysit her. Lizzie would be on Milo duty from eight in the morning until six o’clock every night, with Tuesdays and Thursdays off, because those were Diana’s days home from the hospital. For her services, she was to be paid ten dollars an hour. “You know,” Lizzie said, when she was on the phone with Diana, “the going rate’s a lot higher.”

  “I’m aware of that,” said Diana, in her clipped, impatient tone. There were hospital noises in the background, and her pager was beeping, too. “It includes room and board. And I think that you’d find on the open market you wouldn’t get the going rate. Given your history.”

  Given your history. Trust Diana to find a way to remind her of it, to place her transgressions clearly in the forefront and keep the hierarchy clear. “Fine,” Lizzie said, and hung up. She’d packed up her stuff, said goodbye to the staff and the one counselor she’d liked. She’d spent her last afternoon in the facility shooting with her beloved Leica, a present her parents had given her for her twenty-first birthday. (“You have to take care of it,” her father had said, in a tone suggesting that she wouldn’t.) “Why you wanna take pictures of this place?” one of the other patients had asked, as Lizzie peered through the viewfinder at the scarred metal of the doorless bathroom stalls. “It’s so ugly.” Lizzie had shrugged, not bothering to explain that what she was in search of was what all the photographers she most admired had been after: not beauty, which was easy, but truth.

  She snapped shots of the meeting room with its cigarette-burn-scarred floor, the stained mattress of the narrow bed where she’d slept, a nurse’s tired face in the slanting light that crept in through the blinds as she doled out pills into paper cups. Then she’d flown up and out of Minnesota, and Gary, her brother-in-law, had met her in Philadelphia. From the look on his face, Lizzie figured she was the last person he wanted living in his house, caring for his son. She greeted him cheerfully, even made herself lean in and kiss his cheek, but Gary barely said a word as he heaved her bags into the back of the minivan and drove her to the row house on Spruce Street, just a few blocks away from the hospital where Diana worked.

  Lizzie had been determined to show her big sister that she wasn’t a fuck-up; that she was a responsible, mature adult who’d put her bad times behind her. She’d come prepared with guidebooks and bookmarked websites, lists of museums and activities suitable for children Milo’s age. She’d offered to shoot a family portrait, or a series of candids of Milo playing with his friends, something her sister could hang on her empty walls. But Diana nixed the idea. “We had a professional do a family portrait at Christmas,” she’d said. As for Milo, who never left the house without a hat covering his ears and his Field Guide to Insects in his pocket, as far as Lizzie could tell he didn’t have any friends. Nor was he impressed with Lizzie’s offers to take him to the Japanese teahouse in Fairmount Park, to the Please Touch Museum or the Franklin Institute or even the indoor water park in Cherry Hill, and he resisted her ultimate bribe, a chance to use her fancy camera to take his own photographs. All Milo wanted to do was stay holed up in the air-conditioning, reading the collected adventures of Captain Underpants, and Diary of a Wimpy Kid, occasionally venturing down to the corner, where he’d squat in front of a tree planted in a small square of dirt and look for bugs.

  After she’d been there for a week, watching Milo, dressed in shorts and a T-shirt and a ski cap with ear flaps, lying on the couch turning pages, waiting for him to dirty a dish so she could leave him alone long enough to wash it, he’d sat up and looked at her slyly. “Aunt Lizzie,” he whispered. “Do you think we could …” He glanced to one side, then the other. “… watch TV?”

  “Sure,” she said, wondering what had taken him so long. Milo whooped and bounded to the kitchen. He came back dragging a step stool, which he pulled over to the entertainment unit. Then he climbed to the top step, stood on his tiptoes, and pulled the remote off the uppermost shelf, where it had clearly been hidden away from him.

  Lizzie noted this with growing concern and tried to remember, amid the pages and pages of instructions she’d been given, what Diana had told her about her son’s entertainment options. She flipped through the five-page single-spaced alphabetized document and found nothing between SNACKS (organic only, fruits and vegetables preferred, absolutely nothing with high-fructose corn syrup, which was bullshit, because Marta had given her and Diana Little Debbie snack cakes every afternoon until they were in high school and the two of them had turned out fine, at least weight-wise) and TUCK-IN (two books, lights out at eight-thirty, and a bed check fifteen minutes later to make sure he was sleeping). Maybe there was something under ENTERTAINMENT, but best to go straight to the source. “Hey, Milo,” she said. “Are you allowed to watch TV?”

  His face fell. “Only thirty minutes of screen time every day, and it has to be educational.”

  “Ah.” Lizzie found a listing under SCREEN TIME and saw that he was right. Which was total hypocrisy. From the minute loathsome Gary walked through the door until the minute he went up to bed, he had the box on and blaring at a volume suggesting that there was an eighty-year-old man in the living room. “Did you have any, uh, screen time today?”

  He chewed on his lip. “I played Math Blaster on my Leapster.”

  Lizzie considered. “How about this? You get twenty minutes of TV, and tomorrow, first thing, we’ll go to the park.”

  Milo narrowed his eyes. “Deal.” He turned out to be impressively adroit with his parents’ fancy setup, manipulating the remote to get a bunch of screens and speakers working. Within minutes, he and Lizzie settled back on the couch to watch something called Yo Gabba Gabba!, a program that Lizzie decided had to have been produced by a bunch of supremely stoned teenagers (and she was uniquely qualified to know).

  “Who is that?” She peered at the TV set, where a skinny black man dressed in orange, with a towering fur hat on his head, capered into the screen’s center and opened a silver boom box.

  “DJ Lance Rock!” Milo crowed, showing more animation than he had during Lizzie’s stay so far. On the screen, DJ Lance Rock pulled a series of dolls out of a suitcase—there was a pink one, with a bow on its head, and a robot, and what looked like a green ball of yarn, with rubbery arms and legs.

  “That’s Foofa,”
said Milo, pointing. “And Plex, and Brobee.”

  “Jesus,” said Lizzie, as, onscreen, a red, ribbed rubber doll began to dance. “That one looks like a dildo!”

  Milo giggled. “What’s a dildo?”

  “Um.” This adventure was not, perhaps, getting off to the best start. “It’s kind of a grown-up thing. Hey, do you ever watch Sesame Street?”

  “That’s for babies,” Milo said, as the puppets, who’d somehow magically become life-sized, did a dance and sang a song about sharing. “Dildo, dildo, dildo,” Milo chanted under his breath, and Lizzie giggled—she couldn’t help herself.

  “Um, Milo?” she said, when she’d managed to stop laughing. Her nephew looked up at her, all innocence and trust and fake-fur-lined hat, and Lizzie decided that the bigger deal she made about the forbidden word, the more he’d probably say it. “Nothing,” she said. “Never mind.” She left him in front of the TV and went to the kitchen to make his dinner—organic chicken nuggets Diana had shown her in the freezer, strips of red pepper, a bunch of green grapes, and half a sweet potato that she cooked in the microwave, then mashed with butter and cinnamon. She arranged everything on a plate, found a placemat and a napkin, and congratulated herself on how nice it looked. Milo was halfway through dinner when the door swung open and Diana marched through it.

  Lizzie held her breath as her sister bent to kiss her son. “Did you have fun today?” Diana asked, and Milo swallowed a mouthful of sweet potato, nodded vigorously, and said, “Hey, Mom? What’s a dildo?”

  Diana glared at her, lips pinched and eyes narrowed. “Excuse me. I must use the facilities,” Lizzie murmured, and slipped upstairs, deciding that it would be prudent to give Diana and Milo some alone time, and maybe take herself out to dinner. She pulled off her overalls and grabbed one of the relics she’d unearthed from the trunk in the back of her mother’s closet: a long white cotton skirt, only slightly frayed and yellowed with age. She added a pale-pink tank top, the bangles and the beaded necklace she’d also liberated from her mother’s closet, then pulled on her sandals, looped her camera around her neck, and swept her hair in a loose bun that left tendrils tickling her cheeks. She tiptoed past Milo’s bedroom door, holding her breath as she listened to Diana explaining that some words were grown-up words, and scribbled a note—“back soon”—to leave on the kitchen table. Then she grabbed her purse, and stepped out onto the street lined with three-story red brick row houses that looked the same as they must have a hundred years ago, minus the streetlights and the skateboarders.

  She wandered west for a few blocks, moving slowly, bangles chiming with each step. She bought a slice of pizza on Pine Street and ate it as she walked toward Independence Hall, drawn by the noise of chanting and singing. Some kind of demonstration was taking place. It was a warm, sultry night, and the wind carried the sweet scent of pot. Lizzie could make out the winking firefly light of a joint passing from hand to hand. She turned her head, struggling not to remember the slowed-down syrupy sensation a few bong hits could bring, and fired off a few quick shots of the crowd—a girl and a boy entwined on a blanket, a burst of fireworks flaring against the black sky. Then she strolled down Market Street until she came to a place called the Franklin Fountain. Its wooden sign was painted in an old-fashioned font, and its menu featured phosphates and malteds. She peeked through the window and was charmed by the pressed-tin ceiling, the marble counters with an antique cash register, the glass jars of pretzels, and the boxes of vintage gums and candies, and how one of the men scooping ice cream had an actual handlebar mustache. A malted sounded like just the thing. Lizzie could almost hear the clink of the long-handled spoon against the sides of the chilled metal cup, and she had money in her pocket, her pay for the week.

  Bells jingled as she walked inside. Ceiling fans paddled lazily through the warm air, and the tiled floor felt cool beneath the soles of her sandals. After buying her drink and pocketing her change, she’d made her way to the back of the shop, where a table for two sat empty. Unfortunately, the table beside it was taken by a pack of four noisy guys in T-shirts and khaki shorts. College kids, or maybe even high school boys.

  “Well, hey there,” one of them had said, looking her up and down, taking in the long skirt, the beads, her mother’s scarf, which she’d pulled out of her purse and twisted around her hair on the way. She’d given him a neutral smile and taken a seat, poured herself a glassful of her malted, and looked at the camera’s square display screen, mentally editing the shots she’d taken on her way down.

  “Nice camera,” one of the T-shirt boys said.

  “Thanks,” she said, without lifting her eyes, flicking through images of fireworks and treetops and the couple on the blanket. My summer in Philadelphia, she thought, a little sadly. When she looked up, the boy was still staring at her.

  “You wanna take my picture?” he asked.

  “I don’t really do portraits.” In a flash of inspiration, she added, “And I’m almost out of film.” Maybe he wouldn’t notice that it was a digital camera. She could be wrong, but he didn’t strike her as a connoisseur of the visual arts.

  “Aw, c’mon! I’ll pose for you.” The guy lifted his shirt, displaying a hairy chest and disturbingly pink nipples, as his friends whooped and high-fived.

  Lizzie set her camera on the table and got to her feet, thinking that she’d have the server pour her malted into a to-go cup and head back to Diana and Gary’s house, but the boy grabbed her camera and aimed it at Lizzie. She heard the click of the shutter and felt her throat tighten. The camera was expensive, and it was pretty much the only nice thing she owned that she hadn’t trashed or lost or traded for drugs.

  She held out her hand. “Can I have that back, please?”

  The boy sneered and raised the camera above his head, affording her an unobstructed view of his sweat-stained armpits. Ick. Behind the counter, one of the clerks said, “Sir, give her the camera back.”

  “Not until she takes my picture,” said the boy. He turned and started snapping shots of his friends, who were also pulling up their shirts, egging him on.

  A man at another table got to his feet. He walked over to the boy, stood right in front of him, and said, in a low, carrying voice, “Give her the camera back.”

  The camera thief looked the man up and down. Instead of shorts and a T-shirt, the man wore khaki pants and a button-down khaki shirt with a green tie. A patch depicting Independence Hall was sewn to the shirt’s breast pocket. He had a round face, short brown hair, and wore wire-rimmed glasses.

  “Or what?” the sweaty boy snarled.

  “Or,” said the man in khaki, “you and I are going to step outside and I’m going to ask you again.”

  The boy studied his opponent, perhaps noticing, as Lizzie did, that even though he wasn’t particularly tall, he had broad shoulders and muscular forearms. “Screw it,” the boy muttered, and lobbed the camera onto Lizzie’s table. She grabbed it before it could fall, and managed to knock her malted onto the floor. The cup landed with a clang, and the boys burst out laughing. Lizzie knelt down to clean up the mess. On her knees, with cold ice cream soaking into the hem of her skirt, she felt her eyes burn. All she’d wanted was a little break, a little time by herself before she had to go home and deal with her sister’s lectures, her brother-in-law’s presence, and poor Milo, who’d probably had all his screen time for the summer taken away, thanks to Aunt Lizzie’s vocabulary lesson. Why was it always like this for her? Why did it all go so wrong?

  She squeezed her eyes shut, and when she opened them the troublemaking boys were filing out the door and Lizzie was looking into a pair of kind blue eyes behind wire-rimmed glasses. The man who’d saved her camera had square shoulders and a square jaw, like Dick Tracy or Clark Kent, like someone imagined by a comic-book artist instead of a real guy. “Hey,” he said. “Are you okay? Can I give you a hand?”

  Her throat felt thick. “I’m fine.”

  He got down on the floor to help her gather the sodden napkins. The ce
iling fan stirred the air above them, lifting his hair from his brow as he stood up and lifted the camera, turning it in his hands. “Looks okay,” he said, and gave it to Lizzie. Over her protests, the man behind the counter made her another malted, and the guy who’d helped her carried his banana split over to her table after asking, politely, whether it was okay for him to join her. “I’m Jeff Spencer,” he said, and extended his hand.

  “Lizzie,” she answered, bunching her soaked skirt in one hand and shaking his with the other. He sat down, and as they ate their ice cream, he told her that he was twenty-eight, that he’d been in the army for six years before going to college, that he had a degree in environmental science and was earning his master’s in recreation management at Temple while working as a ranger in the Independence Hall park in the daytime.

  “So what brings you to Philadelphia?” he asked, after learning that Lizzie was from New York.