Fly Away Home

by Jennifer Weiner

  She’d given him a pared-down version of her story. She said that she was twenty-four, that she was working as a nanny for the summer, and that in the fall, she’d start a job as a photographer’s assistant back in New York City. She left out the part about flunking out of Vassar and getting kicked out of NYU, and the stints in rehab in between. She didn’t mention that her father was a senator and her sister was a doctor and she was the family’s dirty little secret, its resident hot mess.

  “How’d you get into photography?” he asked.

  Lizzie could barely remember a time when she hadn’t had a camera in her hand or her pocket or looped around her neck. Her first one must have been a birthday present from Marta, a little Instamatic, back when people still shot on film, and when her parents saw that she liked it, and that she could capture unexpected angles and surprising juxtapositions, they bought her nicer and nicer ones. At one point, they’d even offered to let her convert a walk-in closet into a darkroom. That was before she’d turned fourteen and decided she liked dope more than pictures.

  “I’ve always been doing it,” she told him. She considered the planes of his face, his square hands and his straight teeth, and thought she’d like to take his picture, in three-quarter profile, maybe with a cape billowing out behind him. It made her smile, which made him smile. Lizzie ducked her head, worried that he thought she was flirting, because she had no idea how to follow through if he got the wrong idea. She’d never hooked up with a guy when she wasn’t drunk or high or otherwise altered, and she wasn’t quite sure how it went. “Do you ever take pictures?”

  He shrugged. “I’ve got a digital camera, but I’m not very good. Everyone comes out with red eyes, and I never know … I mean, I’ve read a little bit, but I don’t know what makes one picture better than another. I guess you think that makes me a Philistine.”

  Lizzie watched the way his eyebrows lifted when he talked, the blond hair on his forearms. She didn’t know what a Philistine was—some kind of religious thing, she figured—but she knew what made a good picture. “For me,” she began slowly, “I guess it’s about seeing something new. Or seeing regular things in a way you never thought about them before.”

  He frowned, thinking this over. “Look,” she said, and raised her viewfinder so he could see it. While waiting for her malted, she’d leaned over the counter and snapped a close-up of two of the ice cream containers, a bin full of chocolate and one of mint chocolate chip. The way she’d framed the shot, with the lens practically touching the ice cream, they looked like gigantic vats of some extraterrestrial material, the terrain of another planet, with the ridges left by the scoop, the jutting shard of chocolate and the single feathery vein of ice crystals. “Whoa,” he said, staring. “It’s like … I don’t know. Like looking at the moon or something.”

  She smiled, delighted. “That’s exactly what I was going for.” They looked at each other a minute before Lizzie dropped her eyes again. She liked him … or, at least, she liked the way he looked, his hands with their clean, clipped nails, his blue eyes, his voice, which was quiet but confident and reminded her of her father.

  “How many kids are you watching?” Jeff asked.

  “Just one. Milo’s my nephew. He’s a little weird, but he’s a sweetheart.”

  “How’s he weird?” Jeff looked at her expectantly, and Lizzie explained about Milo’s thing with bugs—their identification and collection and eventual storage in the little plastic boxes he kept on his windowsill. She told him how Milo always wore a hat pulled down over his ears because, he said, sounds were too loud without it, and how she had to bribe him with television to get him to set one toe outside.

  “Rough,” Jeff said. “You should bring him to Independence Park sometime. I’ll give you guys the VIP tour.”

  “That would be great,” said Lizzie, taking one more look at those bright blue eyes. Jeff gave her his business card—it had a gold logo for the National Park Service embossed on its surface. Then he said, “Would you like to have dinner with me sometime?”

  She looked at him and wondered what he saw when he looked at her—a girl with droopy blond hair and an ice-cream-soaked skirt; a damsel in distress, when the truth was that Lizzie was more like a Trojan horse. She might look okay, like the kind of fancy, pretty thing you’d welcome into your city or your home, but inside, she was trouble. Jeff seemed like a nice guy. He didn’t deserve Lizzie.

  “Or have you got a boyfriend?” Jeff asked, but not in a jerky way. She thought about telling him that she’d never had a boyfriend in her life, but instead she just said, “I work most nights, is the thing.”

  “Ah. Well, it was nice meeting you.”

  “Thank you for …” She stood, pushed her chair in, and straightened the mess of her skirt. “Thanks for saving my camera.”

  “You bet.” He waved at her cheerfully. The bells on the door jingled as he left. She walked home slowly, listening to her iPod, the Be Good Tanyas singing about how the littlest birds sing the prettiest songs, thinking about whether, at some point in her future, she could ever be with a guy like that.

  The next day, while she was setting the table for dinner, Diana said. “You’ve got mail.”

  “Oh?” Sure enough, her sister handed her an envelope with her name—Lizzie—on the front. She opened it, and a newspaper clipping and a card fell out. The clipping was a review of an Italian restaurant that had excellent gnocchi and good Caesar salad. The notecard, with a pen-and-ink drawing of a red robin on the front, read, “In case you change your mind,” and was signed “Jeff Spencer,” with an e-mail address and a phone number underneath.

  She must have stared at the card for five minutes, turning it over in her hands, before she locked herself in the powder room and dialed the number. “How’d you know where I lived?”

  “I followed you home. Don’t freak out,” he said quickly, as if he could tell that Lizzie was getting ready to do that very thing. “It wasn’t like a stalker thing. I just wanted to ask you about dinner again. And I didn’t have your last name or your number, so …”

  Lizzie leaned against Diana’s perfectly arrayed hand towels and wondered whether the guy was a stalker, or if he was crazy, or if this was just the way normal men behaved when they were interested. She wished that she had someone other than her sister to ask.

  “Okay,” she finally said. “Dinner sounds nice.”

  “Tomorrow?”

  “Okay.”

  The next night Jeff picked her up at eight o’clock. Milo was in bed, Diana was still at work, and Gary, as usual, was parked in front of the boob tube with his laptop on his lap. “You look very nice,” Jeff had said. She’d worn another one of her mother’s old skirts, this one denim, with patches of paisley and plaid (a little big, but a belt had helped), with a sheer long-sleeved tunic, ropes of beads, and feathered earrings. As they strolled south along the sidewalks, she thought they made an odd couple—her in her bohemian getup, him in his pressed pants and button-down shirt—but he didn’t seem to notice, or, at least, he didn’t seem to mind.

  The restaurant had rough stucco walls painted white, red tiles on the floor, and a tiny open kitchen where two men in cook’s whites sweated in front of a wood-burning oven. At a wobbly table so small that she could feel his knees brushing hers, they ordered the gnocchi and Caesar salad, stuffed chicken breasts and the special fettuccine, and split a tiramisu for dessert. He’d brought a bottle of red wine in a brown paper bag and asked if she wanted any. “Oh, it’s so hot. I think I’ll stick to iced tea,” she said, and felt, when he’d nodded, that she’d passed some kind of test.

  He asked about her day, and she told him that she’d let Milo watch an entire hour of WordGirl in exchange for a visit to the paint-your-own pottery place on Bainbridge Street, where Milo painted a ceramic dinosaur and Lizzie decorated a spoon rest for Diana’s kitchen. Jeff told her about spending the day directing people to the restrooms and listening to terrible jokes about the Liberty Bell. “If I had a dollar for e
very time someone says, ‘Hey, it’s broken,’ I could retire right now,” he said.

  “So where are you from?” she asked.

  The answer was Philadelphia—not Center City, where Diana lived, but what he called the Far Northeast. He’d grown up with an older brother. Their father worked for the school district—Jeff didn’t say exactly what he did, and Lizzie didn’t ask. “What about your mom?”

  His face tightened. “She’s had some problems,” he said, and for the first time that night looked past her, over her head, toward the restaurant’s door.

  “Like health problems?” Lizzie asked.

  “A drinking problem, actually,” said Jeff.

  Lizzie swallowed hard. “Oh.”

  He turned to look at her again, his lips pressed together tightly. “She’s been trying to deal with it for years. She’ll do okay for a while, and then …”

  Lizzie said softly, “That must have been hard for you and your brother.” In her head, she was deciding that she wouldn’t see him again. A guy with a drunk for a mother was not a guy who needed, or would choose, an addict for a girlfriend. She would walk home with him, thank him for a nice night out—and it had been a nice night out, one of the nicest she could remember—and then make herself scarce.

  Lifting his water glass, Jeff drank, then shrugged. “We got out as soon as we could. Only thing we could do.” He drained his glass, and, with a palpable effort, gave her a smile. “Anyhow. What about your parents?”

  “My dad works for the government,” she said, which was true. “He’s away a lot. My mom did a lot of volunteer work. We had a nanny.” His expression let Lizzie know how different this was from his own childhood, and listened when she talked about her private school (which she’d hated), her ice-skating lessons (which she’d hated even more), and how, honestly, she was still kind of trying to figure out what she wanted to be when she grew up.

  After dinner, they’d walked to his apartment, in a high-rise building that overlooked Washington Square Park, ostensibly so he could show her a hilarious YouTube video of a cat who played the piano.

  “This was my grandfather’s place,” he explained in the elevator, which was populated, like the lobby below, by senior citizens. Jeff lowered his voice as the doors slid open. “He died last winter. My dad put it on the market, but I’m staying here until it sells. It’s kind of a mess,” he apologized, leading her into the living room, which wasn’t messy at all. Nor did Lizzie sense the presence of a departed elderly resident, either by sight or—she took a quick, surreptitious sniff—by smell. There were fishing magazines spread out on the coffee table, which Jeff quickly stacked in a pile, and a pair of running shoes, unlaced by the door. Framed family photographs—the grandfather’s, she guessed—hung beside brightly colored vintage posters for Italian ocean liners and Orangina that were probably Jeff’s. Lizzie had made her way to the window, drawn by the view of the park, with its richly green lawns bisected by wide slate paths, the fountain bubbling away in its center, underneath the starry night sky.

  Then she’d walked into the bedroom. “Oh,” she’d said, and looked around, delighted. The room was like a treehouse. She could hear the leaves rustle as the wind blew through them. Jeff’s bed was set in a corner by the window, a king-size bed with a dark-blue comforter. There was a small bookshelf filled with textbooks and spy novels, and a small, old-fashioned TV against the wall. A guitar leaned in one corner, and the air smelled sweetly of cedar from the closet.

  She pulled her camera out of her purse and pointed at the window. “Can you stand right there?”

  “Really?” Jeff seemed somewhere between shy and flattered. “I’m not going to have to take any of my clothes off, am I?”

  It took Lizzie a second to realize that he was teasing her. “I promise they’ll be tasteful,” she said, and got him to stand right where she wanted him, in profile, with his face silhouetted against the thickly leaved trees and the moon. Not Superman, but Batman, she thought, clicking away, a superhero with a painful past and an affinity for the darkness. She climbed onto his bed, without a thought of what signals that might be sending, to get a better angle, thinking that there was something so intimate about taking a picture, capturing someone’s likeness and letting him see what you saw.

  “These are really good,” said Jeff when they sat on the couch and she clicked through the images. “Really interesting.”

  She looked at the clock, suddenly aware of the warmth of his leg against hers, and how he’d slipped his arm around her shoulders. “I should go.”

  “Or you’ll turn into a pumpkin?” He was teasing her again, but it was without rancor, a kind, almost brotherly kind of ribbing. “Let me walk you down, Cinderella.” At the sliding doors at the front of the apartment building, he kissed her—gently and quickly, his lips warm on hers. Nice, she thought. This evening ranked as among the best she’d had. She wanted to see him again, even though once he learned the truth he probably wouldn’t want to see her. But maybe that could be postponed until they’d had a few more dinners, maybe a picnic in the park, or a night snuggled on his grandfather’s couch, watching movies, the way she’d heard normal couples did.

  By the night the story of her father and Joelle hit the news, she and Jeff had been seeing each other for weeks. They’d had their walks and their dinners and their picnics, and had made out once on Jeff’s big bed. As soon as she left the hospital, holding Milo’s hand, her telephone rang. “We still on?” Jeff asked. It took her a minute to remember that they’d made plans, the three of them: Jeff was going to come over with a movie. After dinner, they’d pop popcorn, she and Jeff and Milo, and watch it together.

  “Hey, listen,” she began, tugging Milo into the vestibule of the 7-Eleven. Jeff waited patiently, wordlessly, for Lizzie to begin. “Did you watch TV today? About the senator who was having an affair?”

  If he’d said something disparaging, something mocking, she would have found a way to cancel their plans and maybe even avoid him for the rest of the summer. But Jeff said merely, “Yeah, I think I heard something about it.”

  Lizzie gulped. “Well, the senator’s kind of my dad.”

  Again, if he’d laughed, or joked, or said, “Kind of?” she would have hung up on him. But Jeff said calmly and kindly, “Wow. Are you doing okay? Do you still want to get together?” Lizzie thought about it, and realized that the answer was yes.

  She was relieved that, so far at least, her revelation didn’t seem to have changed the way Jeff felt about her. She’d seen that happen before. A classmate or a classmate’s parent, a friend of a friend, or a nurse or an orderly would look at her face or read her last name, and there would be a click so clear it was practically audible. Elizabeth Woodruff? Your father’s not … ? First came the recognition, which was quickly followed by the classmate or acquaintance trying to figure out how to capitalize on this new information. Lizzie was constantly astonished by the manner and magnitude of the requests strangers would make. She thought sometimes that there was nothing, absolutely nothing, to which the average American did not feel entitled.

  Could you … would you … do you think that maybe … ? Sometimes the petitioners would feign interest in Lizzie in order to have a better shot at their prize: a handshake, a photograph, a bid on a government contract, or even just a moment with the great man, a chance to have a senator’s attention for the length of a drink or a dance or a meal. When she was a sophomore in high school, a senior from Collegiate named Glenn Burkey had asked her out. She’d been thrilled until the moment that boy had shown up at their door, barely kissed her hello, and then gone to the living room, where he’d spent twenty minutes debating alternative energy sources with her father, in a naked attempt to secure one of the coveted summer internship slots.

  Sometimes the petitioner would want nothing more than a small favor or a piece of information she could dispense. Help with a parking ticket, a dispute with a landlord, a Medicare claim? Dad could hook that up, or at least steer the request int
o the proper channels. But sometimes, especially after Lizzie had started her slide, things got dicey.

  Last spring, when she and a bunch of friends had been trying to make a buy in the Village, the dealer had recognized her. This was a piece of bad luck: as Diana said, when she’d heard about it, usually there was very little overlap in the Venn diagrams of “people who watched enough CNN to recognize their senator’s daughter” and “people who sold crystal meth out of apartments with holes in the floor.” But that night she’d been spectacularly unlucky. “Holy shit,” said the guy, a bug-eyed wraith in acid-washed jeans and a dingy wifebeater. “That’s Senator Woodruff’s kid!” Lizzie had gotten herself up off the floor, where she’d slumped when the rush had hit her, but she hadn’t been moving very quickly. In fact, she’d barely been moving at all. The dealer and one of his buddies had tied her to a chair—with the dealer’s girlfriend’s ripped fishnet stockings, she recalled—and used her cell phone to call her parents and demand the immediate payment of ten thousand dollars, or else they’d send cell phone pictures to TMZ. Instead of sending the money, her parents sent the cops. The dealer and his girlfriend, who’d been smart enough to try to ransom Lizzie but not smart enough to hide their wares, fled into the bathroom to try to flush their stash down the toilet, while her drug buddies scattered. They’d all been arrested, Lizzie included, and it had been in the paper, a little squib in the Metro section of the Times, which had gotten picked up by Page Six and then a couple of the gossip blogs, and the next thing she knew, she and her dad were driving to Minnesota, on a road trip that had ended in rehab.

  She gave Milo his bath and his dinner. Diana hurried out the door on her way out to a rare date with Gary, and by seven-thirty Jeff was there, with a bag of popcorn kernels and an edited-for-TV version of Airplane! He put the movie on, popped the popcorn, and brought it into the living room, along with a pitcher of iced tea.

  “You doing all right?” he asked quietly, on the couch beside Lizzie, as Milo, lying on the floor in a fleece ski cap and his pajamas, howled with laughter at the opening scenes.