Fly Away Home

by Jennifer Weiner

  Name what you want, name what you need, and be specific, some New Age guru she’d caught five minutes of on Oprah had said. Diana had absolutely no use for New Age gurus—or, for that matter, for Oprah—but the idea of naming what you wanted made perfect sense. When she thought she had it clear, when she had it memorized, she turned and started walking back toward home.

  It was after two in the morning by the time she slipped her key into the lock. The block was dark, her virtuous neighbors tucked tight in their beds. Her own house was the only one still lit, the windows glowing warmly yellow. Gary was still awake, sitting in the living room, riding his recliner, his face bathed in the laptop’s blue glow.

  “Everything okay?” he asked.

  She didn’t answer as she set her box of belongings on the closet floor. Gary raised the remote and clicked the TV set off. “What happened?” He looked at her closely, really seeing her for the first time in weeks, maybe months—since Doug, anyhow—as she stood before him, numb fingers working at her coat buttons, shivering from the cold. “Diana, what’s wrong?”

  She opened her mouth to tell him everything: that she’d done something terrible, that she’d broken her vows, her promises, that she’d had an affair, that she didn’t want to be married anymore, and that, oh, by the way, she’d almost killed a small child and had come within inches of losing her job. “I …” she started to say. Nothing came out except a sad little gust of air. Diana put her hand on her throat experimentally and tried to make a noise, any noise, an Ah or an Ee or an Oh, as in Oh my God, I’m so sorry. No sound came.

  Gary’s expression became sympathetic. “Lost your voice, huh? Hang on, I’ll make you some sick tea.” Gary’s sick tea, which he insisted on brewing whenever anyone in the house had a cold or sore throat, was regular old Lipton, doctored with honey, lemon, and a generous slug of whiskey. It worked, too … and it sounded like just the thing, maybe the only thing, she could tolerate in her system at this particular moment.

  “Go to bed,” Gary called from the kitchen. He’d bring her the cup of tea. He would also leave the sticky, honey-coated spoon on the counter, and the teabag oozing in the sink … and did that matter so much? Spoons could be picked up, counters wiped off, teabags tossed in the trash. Her marriage would not be repaired so easily. When Gary found out—and Gary would find out, eventually—he wouldn’t forgive her. They had one night left; one night together, in innocence, as man and wife.

  “Diana?” Gary approached with a mug of tea steaming in his hands. “Whoa, you look lousy. You want to call something in for yourself?”

  Oh, Gary, I’m so sorry. Diana shook her head and let her husband lead her to the bedroom, where she took off her clothes, put on her flannel nightgown, drank her sick tea, and lay, for the last night of her life, in a bed beside him.

  SYLVIE

  If Tim knew the specifics of her story, if he had questions about what her husband had done, in all of their nights out and their meals together he’d never let on. They never talked about politics, and, while he’d asked her questions about Lizzie and Diana and their lives, he’d never once asked about Richard. Sylvie policed her own conversation carefully, and she didn’t think she’d ever said Richard’s name in front of Tim. My husband, she would say instead, relating some anecdote about moving Lizzie into the NYU dorms and how Richard had paid a pair of male students to haul her belongings onto the elevators, or how he’d believed that Diana’s college boyfriend was going to grow up to be a psycho killer. To Tim, she was Sylvie Serfer, a grown-up version of the tan and laughing teenager she’d once been, the girl who had gotten her braces off the spring before he’d kissed her and had spent much of that summer with her teeth constantly bared in a grin, or running her tongue over their newly smooth surfaces, marveling at the feeling.

  Up in the bedroom, she combed her wet hair with her fingers. The curl was coming back, along with the gray, but she found she didn’t mind so much. It was an interesting look, an interesting change … and besides, who’d be taking her photograph up here, or commenting on the weight she’d gained? She pulled on a black cashmere sweater set and dark-brown wool slacks with an elastic waist (the way she’d been eating, she knew better than to even attempt any of her regular pants). When she hurried downstairs in her stocking feet she had ten minutes left to set the table and bring the sauce to a simmer. That afternoon she’d pan-roasted duck, which had yielded, just as the recipe promised, startling quantities of fat. She’d used some of it to make an outrageously rich side dish of rice, and the rest to sauté bok choy. The sauce was one of the five-ingredient specials Ceil had tried to tempt her with: brown sugar, star anise, honey, fresh ginger, and five-spice powder. Sylvie dipped in a finger and sucked it clean, eyes closed, humming happily. Richard would love this, she thought, and then pushed the thought away.

  At six o’clock, when she opened the door, it was dark already, the clear night sky pricked with dozens of stars, the waves beating on the shore and a gentle wind stirring the treetops. Tim was dressed for the weather in a canvas jacket and a green sweater and plaid shirt, and there was a pleasing shyness about him, a stillness that Sylvie couldn’t help contrasting with Richard’s hale good humor, his incessant need to win over every person in every room. That night Tim brought her candles, a pair of elegant ivory tapers, and a jar of lavender honey, and something in a wax-paper bakery box. “Whatever you’re making, it smells great.”

  “Roast duck with five-spice sauce,” she said, uncorking the wine as he came over and kissed her cheek. In New York, Richard was always the one to open the bottles. Sylvie wasn’t sure she’d even known how. But she’d surprised herself, she thought, fluffing the rice, then scooping a bed of it onto one of her grandmother’s shallow serving dishes and arranging the pieces of duck on top.

  Usually Tim stuck to a single glass of wine over dinner. That night, with the moon a heavy ball of gold sinking into the ocean, they polished off a bottle between them and opened another, and each had two portions of the rice and the duck. By eight o’clock, they’d pronounced the meal a success, stacked the dishes in the sink, and brewed coffee to accompany the cannoli that Tim had brought. In her hurry to get dinner on the table, Sylvie had forgotten about the candles. Now Tim stuck them into her grandmother’s pewter candlesticks. He touched a lit match to their tips and said, “I want to talk to you about something.”

  At the sink, where she’d been rinsing her hands, Sylvie stiffened. He was going to tell her that he had, to use her mother’s parlance, done a Google, and now he knew exactly who she was, and what her husband had done.

  Instead, Tim found his wineglass and refilled it, and said, in a voice that was thicker than normal, “I wanted to tell you why I got divorced.”

  Well, thought Sylvie. This was unexpected. Tim picked up the candles, and she took the wine and their glasses, and together they walked to the living room and settled into their customary places on the sofa—Sylvie at the end near the kitchen, Tim closer to the fire.

  He sipped his wine and said, “It wasn’t that we grew apart. I mean, that was true, but there was more.” He drained the glass, then rolled the wineglass between his palms. Tim’s fair skin was flushed, his expression troubled. “Remember how I said we had three boys, that we’d always wanted a girl?” Without waiting for Sylvie’s nod, he said, “We had one. Janette. She died.”

  “Oh, Tim.” She reached for his hand, and Tim, who’d never been anything but gentle, jerked it away.

  “It was an accident. A long time ago,” he said, in a voice that was rougher than normal. “She was eighteen months old. She’d be twenty-three if she’d lived. But it wrecked us. Every time I looked at Kathy, and every time she looked at me, all we could see was …” He lifted his hands to his eyes.

  “What happened?” Sylvie made herself ask.

  One of Tim’s hands worked at the back of the worn couch. The other twirled the wineglass, sending the dregs spinning. “She drowned.”

  “Oh. Oh, Tim, I’m so …�
�� She reached out to touch his arm. He twisted away.

  “No,” he said, cutting her off. “I’m sorry, I just … everyone in town knows the whole story already, so I never have to tell it.” He took another breath. “I think you just have to let me tell it.”

  She nodded, then whispered, “Okay.” She wondered if it had happened at the beach where they’d swum as children and as teenagers, in the ocean that she could hear slapping at the sand beneath the house.

  “Well, we had—have—the boys. Eight, six, and four, they were. Janette was a … surprise.” He sighed unhappily. “Tell you the truth, I wasn’t too happy when it happened. Four kids through college? I thought, How are we ever going to do that? Kathy and I talked about … you know. Ending the pregnancy. But in the end, we talked so long that it was too late to do anything, and we decided we didn’t want to. Kathy was thirty-nine by then, and we figured, God gave us the baby, maybe there was a reason. And when Janette came, she was …” He swallowed hard. His hand made a rasping sound as he rubbed his cheek. “She was such a love. Just the sweetest girl, and so pretty, with big brown eyes, and these eyelashes.” He held his hand out in front of his own face to demonstrate.

  Sylvie put her wineglass on the coffee table and forced herself to be still, knowing that it didn’t matter; that Tim was so lost in the story he might have actually forgotten she was there.

  “Kathy was giving Janette a bath and she heard this crash downstairs, and then Ollie started screaming. Janette could sit up by herself by then—she was trying so hard to keep up with her brothers, she could do all that stuff, pulling up, crawling, walking, all of it, pretty early. Kath left her in the tub with her tub toys, and she ran downstairs. Turned out Ollie had pulled the television set down, and by the time Kath got the TV off him and made sure he was okay … it was two minutes, maybe three, but by the time she went back upstairs …”

  They both were quiet. Sylvie shuddered as she pictured the scene—a little girl, facedown in the shallow water, with a rubber ducky drifting near one chubby hand.

  “It happens,” said Tim. His voice was flat. “That’s what the coroner told us.” He gathered himself. “He told us that it happens more than you’d think.” He was quiet again. “That wasn’t even the worst part. The worst part was the trial.”

  Sylvie interrupted, hardly believing what she’d heard. “The trial?”

  Tim gave a thin smile. “The prosecutor had political ambitions. He was tough on crime. Especially child abuse.”

  “But it was an accident, not child abuse!” She felt her face flush, her body thrum with fury.

  “That’s what the judge said. He threw the case out, read the prosecutor the riot act. Said no jury, no jail, could punish us worse than we’d been punished already.” He turned to her, still wearing that terrible smile. “He was right. Every time Kathy and I looked at each other, all we saw was our little girl. And every time anyone looked at us, there’d be this … sympathy, I guess, but also a kind of there-but-for-the-grace-of-God-go-I thing. I guess a lot of people take a chance sometimes—they’ll leave a kid in the bathtub for a minute, or look away while a kid’s on a swing, or run into the dry cleaner’s with a baby in the car seat. Everyone’s done something like that, and it’s almost always fine. If you’re lucky. Looking at us was like looking at their worst-case scenario.”

  Sylvie nodded, swallowing hard against the lump in her throat, aching for Tim. She knew what it was like to be a walking worst-case scenario; she’d grown familiar with looks that mixed sympathy and secret relief. On the couch beside her, Tim buried his face in his hands. His shoulders were shaking, but he made no sound. She couldn’t imagine what he was feeling, couldn’t imagine the pain of it. She’d come close, closer than any parent should have, with Lizzie’s misadventures. But Lizzie had survived, almost in spite of herself, where Tim would never see his daughter start nursery school or kindergarten or get dressed for a dance or graduate from high school. His daughter would never grow up to break his heart, but he’d never get to hope for her, or see her dreams come true. Sylvie knelt down and took his hands in hers.

  “Come with me,” she said, pulling him gently to his feet. Tears were streaming down his face. She wiped them with her sleeve, then led him upstairs to her bedroom. By the light of the lamp by the bed she slipped his sweater over his head, unbuttoned his shirt, untied his shoes and pulled them off his feet. She worked at the clasp of his belt, pulled his pants off over his hips. When he stood before her in his T-shirt and boxers, she pulled back the covers, the fluffy down comforter she’d washed, the crisp cotton sheets that she’d dried in the salt and the sunshine. “Lie down,” she whispered, and kissed his cheek … and then she lay down beside him, letting him gather her body in his arms, his chest warm through the fabric of his shirt, solid against her back.

  “I’ll bet you were a wonderful mother,” he whispered. Sylvie lay in the darkness, with Tim’s body warming the bed, the moon spilling silver light through the window, the wind sighing through the trees.

  “No,” she said. “I wasn’t.”

  She’d never told anyone the story—not Ceil, although her best friend would have listened without judgment; not her mother, although Selma would have listened, too, then offered hardheaded advice. The story belonged to the four of them—Diana and Lizzie, Sylvie and Richard. Now, she supposed, it would belong to Tim, too.

  “When Lizzie was in sixth grade, she got a job babysitting for the Ritsons. Carl and Amanda. They lived on eight, two floors down. We were friendly with them—maybe not friends, but acquaintances. The father ran a hedge fund, and he was a big political contributor. The mother was his second wife, and there was a seventeen-year-old son from the father’s first marriage. But we never saw that boy. He was away, up in New Hampshire, at boarding school.” She waited until she felt Tim’s nod, then continued. “They had a little girl named Victoria. Tori. She adored Lizzie, and Lizzie loved her, too, so when Amanda asked Lizzie to babysit, we all thought it sounded fine. She’d be two floors away, and they never kept her past ten o’clock, and they paid her really well—ten dollars an hour, which was a lot back then for a twelve-year-old. Especially since most of the time Tori was asleep.” Sylvie smoothed the pillowcase, remembering Lizzie at twelve, her silky blond hair in a French braid down her back, her cheeks and upper arms still plump with baby fat, with buds of breasts pushing at the front of her school uniforms. She’d been so excited, telling her parents about the job, and Sylvie had been thrilled for her, thinking that maybe this was something Lizzie could excel at. Already, she was struggling in school, doing work that was barely adequate in everything but her art classes. She wasn’t going to be an athlete or a musician or a leader of student government, but maybe she had an aptitude for caring for small children, and maybe this would shape the rest of her life. She could be a teacher, a child psychologist, a nanny or a pediatric nurse or a mom. Lizzie and Sylvie had made lists of activities that Lizzie could do with Tori, and Lizzie had purchased, with her own allowance, something called The Toddler’s Busy Book, which was full of simple games she could play with Tori and foods they could prepare.

  “Richard and I were out at a party one night—a fund-raiser, a black-tie event for one of the museums. Lizzie was babysitting, but Diana was home, so we thought it would be fine. The man’s son, Kendall, came home that night and found Lizzie there. He …” Sylvie’s hands were clenched into fists, her short, unpolished fingernails digging into her palms. She and Richard had come home late, the tiniest bit tipsy. They’d been kissing in the elevator, and Sylvie had been flushed and giggling as they’d walked down the hall, hand in hand. She wanted to get out of her dress and her heels, she wanted to be in bed, naked, with her husband. When she’d unlocked the door and found Lizzie weeping on the couch next to her sister, her face flushed and tearstained, her sweater misbuttoned, her hair coming loose from its braid, her first reaction was one of impatience, of frustration. Oh, God, what now? she’d thought … and then, unforgivably,
that of course it was Lizzie who’d need her, Lizzie, still babyish at twelve, who’d spoil her evening. Of course it was Lizzie, not Diana.

  “The boy had done things to her,” she told Tim. “Or, I guess, made her do things to him.” That was almost as much as she knew. Lizzie had whispered the details of what had happened to Diana, and Diana was the one who’d told them, her voice clinical and cool, that there had been no penetration, but that the boy had made Lizzie do things to him.

  “Richard and I talked it over, and in the end we decided not to go to the police. We—well, Richard, mostly—we thought it would be better for Lizzie to handle it quietly. Lizzie was always sensitive, and we thought that putting her through the process, having her make a statement, go to the police station, to have it end up in the papers, to have everyone know …” She took a shuddering breath, knowing that the truth was that she’d certainly considered what was best for Lizzie, but, as always, she had also given a great deal of thought to what was best for Richard. “I got her into a warm bath. Richard went down to talk to the family. We never even saw the boy. He wrote Lizzie an apology, and she hardly ever talked about it after that, but I wondered … I always wondered …” She shut her mouth, remembering the worst parts of that night: her first thought of Oh, God, Lizzie, what now, and then, later, the sight of her youngest daughter in the bathtub, strands of wet hair clinging to her cheeks, her eyes filled with a terrible, drowning hope as she’d wiped her tears and whispered to her mother, “Do you think he wants to be my boyfriend?” It was a long moment before she had her voice under control enough to speak again. “The husband had raised tens of thousands of dollars for Richard’s first Senate campaign, and, after this all happened, he gave half a million dollars to the state Democratic party. Five hundred thousand dollars,” she said. “That’s how much I sold my daughter for.”