Fly Away Home

by Jennifer Weiner

  “I just never thought,” she said, and then let her voice trail off, fidgeting with the painted glass beads at her throat. Jeff waited. Lizzie thought of what to say. If she talked too much about her father, she’d risk revealing things that Jeff didn’t know and that Lizzie didn’t want to tell him. Jeff still looked and thought and carried himself like someone in the army. He was so clean-cut, so upright, so moral, that she couldn’t imagine how he’d feel if he learned about some of the things she’d done, and the people she’d done them with. When he looked at her, when he stroked her hair, when he told her she smelled like cinnamon sugar, she could tell he really liked her, that he was enchanted by her, and she didn’t want to do anything to mess that up or reveal her true nature or remind him of his own mother.

  Jeff pulled her close until her cheek rested on his shoulder. “Have you talked to him?” he asked. Lizzie shook her head. Diana had talked to him, and she could see from her Missed Calls log that her father had tried to reach her, but she hadn’t called him back or even played his messages. What could he possibly have said? And what could she say to him? That she was disgusted by what he’d done? That she was disappointed? Couldn’t he tell her the same thing, a hundred times over?

  “Do you two get along? You and your dad?” Jeff asked.

  Lizzie thought. Milo was lying on his side, breathing deeply and steadily, as, on TV, the air traffic controller announced that he’d picked a bad week to stop sniffing glue. She knew how he felt.

  “We used to go get bagels,” she finally said. When she was a girl, every Sunday morning she and her father would get up early and walk six blocks to buy a dozen bagels. He’d carried her on his shoulders until she turned five or so, and then she’d walk beside him. Standing in the steamy, dough-and-garlic-scented air of H&H, as people pushed all around her, calling out their orders, pointing at what they wanted and telling the fast-moving, sweaty men behind the counter to bag the everything bagels separately, Lizzie would hold her father’s hand. Sometimes, she’d bury her face in his tweed overcoat and take a sniff, smelling the wool, and his aftershave. “Good morning, congressman!” the lady at the cash register would call, and people would turn to stare, to offer their own greetings, to ask questions about this vote or that bill and sometimes to offer dissenting opinions, to complain about traffic tickets or their taxes. Her father would listen for a moment or two, then say, “Excuse us. My little girl needs her breakfast,” words that would defuse even the most irascible New Yorker. He would order a dozen bagels to bring home, plus a bialy for Lizzie to eat in the park.

  She shut her eyes, remembering the warm roll in her hands, her father on the bench beside her, telling her the names of the trees, and in that instant she was six years old, Milo’s age, in the park with her daddy, when nothing had gone wrong yet, and nothing ever would. I want a pill, she thought. I want to smoke. I want to drink. I want to go to sleep.

  She must have done something—flinched, or made some noise—because Jeff, who’d been laughing at Striker trying to land the plane, turned and asked, “Are you okay?” In the darkness, Lizzie nodded, and forced herself to take a slow breath, remembering the mantra, which she’d learned in rehab that spring: HALT. When you were down and vulnerable, when you wanted to use, ask yourself: were you … Hungry? Angry? Lonely? Tired? Name the feelings instead of stuffing them down and hiding them away, her counselors had instructed. Address the feelings and move on.

  She wasn’t hungry—Jeff had made popcorn, and she’d nibbled at the fish sticks Milo hadn’t eaten for dinner. She wasn’t lonely. With Jeff, and Milo sleeping on the floor, she felt more connected and secure than she had in years. She wasn’t tired: she’d been sleeping well in her sister’s closet-sized guest room up on the third floor. That left angry. She supposed she was.

  She remembered the trip she and her father had taken to Minnesota after the ill-fated ransom attempt and her arrest (had Joelle been in the picture then? Lizzie wondered, then decided she didn’t want to know). Her dad had been home for the Senate’s spring break, and neither of her parents trusted Lizzie to get herself on a plane and get herself off at the correct destination. Besides, she would have been spotted at an airport. Someone with a cell phone would have snapped her picture, and the whole thing would have been in the papers again. So her mother had packed her bags, and her father had rented a car, and as strained and odd as the circumstances had been, they’d had a pretty good time. The car he’d picked was a giant SUV that Lizzie had nicknamed Rapper’s Delight. It was so high off the ground it came with its own step stool, and had spinning rims and a killer sound system and cream-colored leather seats with DVD players mounted into the headrests. Lizzie had draped herself across the backseat, pleasantly numbed by the Valium her primary-care physician had prescribed to get her from New York to Minnesota, with a plastic bag in her hands in case she got queasy as her body started to withdraw from the drugs she’d been feeding it for months.

  As soon as they were out of the city, her father had pulled into a rest stop and gotten two bags full of junk food—chips and candy, pretzel nuggets stuffed with fake cheese, beef jerky and soda and iced chocolate cupcakes. In his jeans and sneakers and baseball cap, he could have been any middle-aged father, strongly built and still handsome, and she could have been any daughter, a student or a waitress or a nanny, on a road trip with her dad.

  The two of them snacked their way across the country, listening to Lizzie’s music: Lucinda Williams, the McGarrigle sisters, Shawn Colvin, k.d. lang, and Patsy Cline. Along the way, he told her stories. Lizzie heard all about the senator who was so cheap that he kept an inflatable mattress in his office instead of paying to rent an apartment. Her father filled her in on the three freshman representatives whose shared living quarters were so notoriously filthy there’d been a rat living in their kitchen for weeks, and the congressman from Colorado, a Democrat and a devout Catholic, who seemed to get his poor wife pregnant every time he went home to campaign. “They’ve got five kids,” her father had said, “and I think he’s met each of them once.”

  She’d had her camera, of course, and had managed to raise it to the window every hundred miles or so and snap a shot of the world blurring by. There was a picture of a rest stop, the weedy, trash-choked yards that backed onto the highway access road, a shot of the Golden Arches that she’d taken while lying flat on her back in the backseat, and a picture of the sani-band that girdled the hotel’s toilet seat in the Best Western where they’d stopped for the night.

  They’d gone to a diner for breakfast the next morning. Lizzie, still queasy, and starting to feel the beginnings of the familiar nausea and bone-deep ache, had huddled in her hooded sweatshirt, sipping a glass of ginger ale. While her legs twitched and jerked, doing a crazy dance under the table as she sweated through her shirt, her father ate an omelet and talked about the time in college when he’d gotten mono and fallen asleep during a haircut, right in the barber’s chair. Finally, he dropped his napkin on his plate.

  “So listen, Lizzie,” he said, “what’s this about, anyhow?”

  She tensed her muscles, trying to get her legs to hold still. “Dunno.”

  “You gonna stop this time?”

  She rattled her fingers on top of the table without answering. She’d promised him—promised them both—that she’d stop prior to both of her previous trips to rehab.

  He sounded gentle as he asked, “Do you know why you started?”

  She looked away. She knew what he was thinking, what anyone would think: how a girl who’d had every advantage, money and private schools and parents who loved her, should have ever been tempted by drugs, let alone hooked. What did she need to escape from? What pain did she need to dull? She could never explain, especially not to him, what it felt like knowing she was a disappointment. She wasn’t smart like her sister or helpful like her mother or a leader like he was. She was just Lizzie, unremarkable, unexceptional Lizzie; a C student who couldn’t make varsity and couldn’t carry a tune, Lizzie,
who’d never amount to much, Lizzie, whose eyes were shut and mouth was open in every portrait of the family at her father’s inaugurations and victory celebrations. It was easier to hide in plain sight, which was what the Percocet and Vicodin (and, she supposed, her camera) let her do. She’d never answered, and her dad hadn’t pushed.

  He’d walked her to the bathroom, stood outside the door as she threw up, doled out the Valium and bought her celebrity magazines at the gas station where he’d filled the car’s double tank. “Brief me,” he’d call from the front seat, sounding as interested as he did in tort reform or Israel. “What’s happening with Spencer and Heidi?” She kept waiting for him to try to bring up the drugs again, to try to get to the bottom of why she was using, or maybe even to offer some pained and halting admission of how he and her mother had failed her, but he didn’t try, and Lizzie was grateful. As the sky got dark, she imagined that the two of them were in a space capsule, traveling through a vast, empty world, sole survivors of some planet-ending disaster, a father and daughter, out on their own. It sounded weird—so weird that she didn’t even try to explain it to Jeff—but those eighteen hours, when she had commanded her father’s complete and undivided attention, were among the happiest she’d had.

  “Hey.” Jeff was looking down at her, smiling. Lizzie blinked. The end credits of Airplane! were rolling, and Milo was snoring on the floor. “You getting sleepy, too?”

  She nodded. “A little bit.” She hadn’t expected to sleep at all that night, not with her mind churning, regurgitating the pictures she’d seen of her father and that Joelle, wondering how to square the man who’d lied and cheated with the father who’d driven her all the way to Minnesota and made himself fluent in the storylines of The Hills and, once, held her hair back when she’d puked.

  Jeff took Milo up to his bedroom, then scooped Lizzie in his arms and carried her to the third floor. “My hero,” she murmured as he settled her onto the bed, pulling the light cotton comforter up to her chin and sliding her sandals off her feet. He kissed her lightly, first her lips, then her forehead. She slipped his glasses off his face, folded them, set them on the little bedside table and stretched out her arms.

  “Come here,” she whispered. Diana and Gary would be gone for at least another hour, and Milo slept like the dead. She drew Jeff down onto the high, narrow bed, feeling none of the doubt and the hesitation that usually accompanied intimacy. The first time she’d been with a boy, it hadn’t ended well, and ever since then, there was a fear that the guy would suddenly turn on her, grab her wrists, and force his mouth down on hers, too hard. But Jeff would never hurt her. Jeff liked her.

  “Lizzie,” he breathed. She ran her hands across his shoulders, then down the length of his back, delighting in the feel of him, the heat and the solidity, and his stillness, the way he kept himself perfectly immobile, holding her in his arms as if he could stay that way forever. Eagerly she worked at the buttons of his shirt, tossing her own tank top to the floor, until they were skin to skin.

  She ran her fingertips over the muscles of his chest, the ridges of his abs, until he’d pressed himself against her, kissing her until she was dizzy. He pressed his erection against her belly. She spread her legs, pushing her hips toward him.

  “Is it safe?” he murmured. Lizzie nodded without giving the question careful consideration—her periods had never been regular, and she couldn’t exactly remember when she’d last had one—but this felt too good to stop.

  “Sweetheart,” Jeff murmured, sliding inside of her. “Beautiful Lizzie.” She held him, burying her face in his neck, rocking against him, letting the terrible day slip away from her, thinking that maybe she didn’t need drugs as long as she had this.

  SYLVIE

  The door to Richard’s office swung open. Sylvie recognized everything there, every piece of furniture, Richard’s diplomas, the painted cup that Diana had made him in kindergarten, where he kept his pens; everything down to the framed photograph of Lizzie’s fifth birthday party, and the shot of the two of them dancing beside the president and first lady at the Inaugural Ball.

  Her husband was on the couch, still in the blue suit she’d watched him put on in their hotel room that morning. (“All clear?” he’d asked, and she’d run a lint brush over his shoulders and lapels before sending him on his way.) He sat slumped, with his tie loosened, his hands hanging at his sides, and Joe Eido, his chief of staff, an unpleasant little rabbity man, bald and bitesized with pale, red-rimmed eyes, beside him. Joe turned off the television set. Richard looked up at Sylvie, then wordlessly looked down at his lap.

  Sylvie stared at him with that strange numbness still suffusing her. How did this go, she wondered, for husbands and wives who didn’t have a chief of staff to act as witness and referee? What did they say when they knew there was no chance of the fallout happening in public, when it was just a man and a woman alone in a room? How did the conversation start? Was she supposed to yell at him, or throw something, or just wait?

  She stared at her husband until finally Joe spoke up. “Let me leave you two alone,” he said.

  “No,” said Sylvie. “Stay.” She laughed, a strange, choked sound. “If the entire country gets to see me being humiliated, we might as well start with you.”

  At that, Richard opened his mouth. “Sylvie.” His voice, normally full, almost booming, a voice for addressing an unruly crowd or a pack of reporters, was barely a whisper. She didn’t respond. She just stood in the doorway, looking. Every part of him was so familiar to her—his big hands, his fingernails, the bald spot that, to his dismay, had gradually taken over the back of his head. She knew how he sounded, how he tasted, how his cheek felt when he’d just shaved it first thing in the morning, or the whiskery rasp of it against her own when he kissed her before they fell asleep. “I am sorry,” he said. “I am so, so sorry.”

  After a long, squirmy silence, Joe got off the couch and stepped forward with his fingers interlaced. “We’re planning a press conference for Monday morning,” he announced in his wispy voice.

  Sylvie ignored him. “How could you?” she asked her husband. There it was—her first line. She’d expected her voice to crack or wobble. After all, this was her life falling apart, the life she’d believed was a happy one, this was sadness mixed with visceral shame at not being enough of a woman for her man, because wasn’t that, ultimately, what cheating meant? A man went looking for another woman when his own wife couldn’t keep him happy. But the numbness kept her voice steady: she sounded as calm as she had when she’d addressed the ladies-who-lunch of Philadelphia in her two-thousand-dollar suit, her lips lined, her brow smooth, her hair just so, everything about her as perfect as if she’d been ordered from a catalog for politicians’ wives.

  Richard on the other hand, looked gratifyingly wretched, as bad as he did when he got the flu, which he did every spring. He would take to his bed in the townhouse in Georgetown, moaning and clutching his head, complaining about the aches and the fever. She’d take the train down and spend a week bringing him tea and chicken soup and the tissues with lotion that he liked. She’d turn off the telephone ringer and handle any pressing business that came up until he was better again.

  “How could you?” she asked again, and again, he gave no sign of answering. Three quick steps brought her inches from him, his face at eye level with her belly. She lifted her hand, then brought it down hard, palm open, whapping him against the ear—boxing him, she thought, that was probably the proper term for what she was doing. She was boxing his ear.

  “Hey, hey,” said Joe Eido, who sounded alarmed but made no move to stop her. “Not the face, okay?”

  She ignored Joe and hit Richard twice more, once on the left side, once on the right. There was no satisfaction in it other than the sound, the meaty slap of her palm against his ear and cheek, the cheek she’d cupped, the ear into which she’d whispered I love you and deeper and the names of their daughters, just after they were born. “You bastard!” she cried, and let her hands
drop to her sides. She’d spoken her lines, she’d hit him. What now? Screaming? Throwing things? Telling him that she’d sue the socks off him, that she’d go first to a divorce lawyer and then to 60 Minutes, that he was disgusting and a disgrace and a cliché, no better than the other cheating politicians, or that golfer, that fine upstanding young man she’d met at a White House luncheon for the Leaders of Tomorrow who’d turned out to have a dozen different girlfriends, porn stars and pancake-house waitresses and club promoters, whatever they were?

  She stared at her husband. Had he really used his influence or done something improper to get her a job? Were there more Joelles? Would she and her daughters be subject to an endless stream of revelations, one surgically enhanced bimbo after another? Or was it worse than that? Was there just one other woman, not some beautiful bimbo but a lawyer, spunky and smart rather than sexy, a woman Richard was serious about? Would he leave her and their girls? And where would she be without him? She’d given herself to Richard as completely as any nun had ever pledged herself to God; she’d devoted her life to him, his wants, his needs. Everything she’d done, every piece of clothing she’d worn, every diet she’d undertaken and exercise class she’d endured, every time she’d sacrificed her own desires, and her daughters’, it had all been for him, for his career, his future (and, of course, her certainty that she’d have a part in that future). What would she do if he replaced her? Where would she live, what would she do all day? Who would she be if she wasn’t Mrs. Richard Woodruff, the senator’s wife?

  She stared at the shot of Hillary and Bill waltzing, looking perfectly in love. She felt herself trembling: her skin, her flesh, even her bones, echoing with the force of the slap, and the silence that filled the room Sylvie had vacuumed and dusted and straightened hundreds, maybe even thousands of times during their long life together.