Fly Away Home

by Jennifer Weiner

  Tim stroked her hair. He told her, in the same calm voice he’d used when he’d seen her in the grocery store, teetering on the edge of hysteria with her two carts crammed with food, that it wasn’t her fault, that she’d made the best decision she could have with the information she had, that plenty of parents would have done the same. Sylvie listened, knowing he was wrong. At her age she knew that things were rarely clear-cut. Life was full of ambiguity, of compromise and shades of gray, but not in that case. In that case there had been a right thing to do and a wrong thing. She and Richard had chosen incorrectly, and now she would spend the rest of her life wondering whether if she’d done things differently, Lizzie would have grown up a different kind of girl.

  Oh, she’d tried to make it better, tried to take back that first, terrible thought. For weeks, months, after the incident she’d made sure that she was there when Lizzie came home from school, that she was available and present if Lizzie ever wanted to talk. But Lizzie hadn’t wanted to talk. For a while she’d gorged herself at night, in secret—Sylvie would wake up and find empty ice cream cartons or cookie boxes stuffed into the trash can every morning—but that hadn’t lasted. Lizzie had simply drifted away. She was silent when she was home, an expressionless, mute, moon-faced girl who dyed her pretty blond hair crow’s-wing black and styled it into matted, filthy dreadlocks, a girl who stole prescription drugs from her parents and jewelry from her grandmother, a girl who pierced her eyebrow and her nose and God only knew what else, a girl with a crowd of sullen, smoke-smelling friends who’d look at Sylvie with flat, incurious eyes, a girl who could not be trusted and was almost impossible to like. She and Richard had chosen the political over the personal; his ambition—and hers, too, she knew; at that point the two things were so intertwined it was impossible to tell them apart—over Lizzie’s need. They’d been paying for it for years, with every late-night phone call from Lizzie, drunk or high or lost somewhere, in need of bail money or rehab or help. Sylvie had paid for it at that rest stop, standing in front of the television set as pictures of Richard and Joelle looped across the screen. She was paying for it now. She would, she supposed, be paying for it forever.

  Eventually Tim fell asleep, curled on his side with his cheek pillowed on his hands. Sylvie lay stiffly beside him, watching the moon dip down to the sea. Slowly, the thought fluttered up in her mind, a thought that warmed her like the sunshine after a cold night alone in the dark. The thought that came to warm her was Maybe it isn’t too late. Maybe she could rebuild things with her daughters, with Lizzie, and with Diana, who, she supposed, she’d also failed in a hundred ways, large and small. Maybe she could fix it. At least she could try.

  Slowly, noiselessly, she worked herself out of the bed. In the bathroom, she took off the clothes she’d worn to dinner, put on a flannel nightgown, a bathrobe, and a pair of thick wool socks, and padded down the stairs to the living room, where she sat on the couch and wrapped herself in the afghan she kept draped over its back. Tim and Kathy had made a mistake and lost their daughter forever. She and Richard had made a mistake, but their girls were alive and well, and now she had time. She could try to fix things, try to repair some of what she’d done by always putting Richard first. She closed her eyes as she thought, I want a second chance.

  When she woke up it was morning, and she was lying on the couch. Tim had tucked the blanket in around her feet and left her a note on the coffee table. Sorry I had to leave so early, but duty calls. Thank you for everything.

  Sylvie stretched her arms over her head. The clock on the oven had it as just after six. She’d bake biscuits, and have one with her coffee. Then she’d go about trying for the second chance she wanted so desperately, figuring out how to set things right, how to get her daughters here, with her, so that she could try to make amends, so that she could care for them the way they needed to be cared for. They were grown, true, but even grown girls still needed their mother.

  In her bathrobe, in the kitchen, she laid out her ingredients: flour and sugar, both kept in her grandmother’s ceramic canisters; Crisco, baking soda, salt, the buttermilk she’d bought at the store the day before. She measured, then mixed them in a cold metal bowl, moving quickly, so as not to overwork the dough. She cut the biscuits into circles with a water glass, set them on a baking sheet, slid them into the oven, and picked up her telephone.

  PART THREE

  Fly Away Home

  LIZZIE

  “Date of your last menstrual period?” asked the nurse.

  “Third week of June,” Lizzie said. Under better circumstances, she would have been proud that she’d been able, after long hours fretting over her calendar, to come up with an answer. But these circumstances were not good. These circumstances were terrible. That morning, Lizzie had woken up at seven, planning to get to an eight-thirty meeting before taking the subway to Queens … but, in the bathroom, she’d noticed blood, the kind that had once presaged her period, streaking the toilet paper.

  She was definitely pregnant even though she didn’t look that way or feel any different, except for an odd stiffness at the very base of her belly and a sudden aversion to eggs. She hadn’t been to a doctor yet, hadn’t even found one. It had been on her to-do list, but she’d kept putting it off until she made up her mind.

  There was plenty for her to do alone in her parents’ apartment, which she’d cleaned and where she cooked herself dinner each night. Three days a week she’d take the subway to a studio in Queens, where she’d work for a few hours creating a digital database of every photograph Warren Crispen had taken over the last thirty years. She’d pack her afternoons with meetings or trips to the swimming pool, and telephone calls with her mother in Connecticut and her dad down in D.C., and between all of that she’d postponed her decision quite nicely.

  Only that morning, when she saw the blood, it seemed that she’d made up her mind. She wanted the baby; was in fact sick at the thought of losing it. In a panic, she’d called Dr. Metcalfe, her old pediatrician, telling the nurse who’d answered that she was an old patient having an emergency. Once she’d explained the nature of the emergency, the service had referred her to an obstetrician a few blocks away from her parents’ apartment, in whose office she was now sitting, wearing a thin cotton gown open in the back, naked underneath it except for her socks.

  “So!” Dr. Gutierrez was short and round, with perfect white teeth, walnut-colored skin, and glossy black hair that Lizzie suspected was a wig. “The spotting’s been going on how long?”

  “Just since this morning,” Lizzie said. Her knee was bouncing up and down beneath her thin paper gown. She made herself be still and ran through her mnemonic—not hungry, not angry, not tired. Maybe a little lonely—Jeff had been calling and e-mailing, but she hadn’t answered. He would be sweet, she knew, and his sweetness would only make her feel worse about the thing she hadn’t told him; the lie of omission that lay between them. “Well, this morning was when I noticed it.”

  He asked her a bunch of other questions, his fingers warm on her wrist as he checked her pulse, then slid the gown off her shoulders so he could listen to her heart. Lizzie answered as best she could, admitting that she hadn’t seen a doctor yet, nor had she had an internal exam in years. Then there was the matter of her history. With her cheeks burning and her eyes on the floor, she gave a bare-bones description of everything she’d swallowed or smoked or snorted over the past six years, ending with her stint in rehab that June. Maybe it was for the best that she hadn’t told Jeff about the baby, she thought, now that it looked as if she was maybe going to lose it.

  The doctor took notes. “You haven’t used since you’ve been pregnant?”

  “Just Advil PM. Just once. Before I knew.”

  He nodded. “Well, we need to start you on prenatal vitamins and folic acid, and you need to eat a healthy diet, but I think you should be fine,” said the doctor.

  She looked at him, hardly daring to believe it. “The human body is resilient,” he said. “Drugs don’t
stay in your system forever. As long as you stay clean, and eat a sensible diet, and get some moderate exercise, you’ve got as good a chance at having a healthy baby as any other woman.”

  He washed his hands and pulled on a pair of rubber gloves. “We’ll do a transvaginal ultrasound to hear the heartbeat and take a peek. My guess is that everything’s fine, and I’ll put you on modified bed rest.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “Just what it sounds like.” He pulled up Lizzie’s gown. “You’ll stay in bed. You’ll be able to get up to use the bathroom, and you can go up and down stairs once per day, but mostly, I want you to lie down and rest, and we’ll see if the spotting stops.” He smiled, and his dark skin and white teeth gleamed under the room’s bright lights. “Take it easy. Get some movies from Netflix. Order in. Have your husband take care of you.”

  “But … but …” Lizzie’s mind whirled with the logistics. Her father was down in Washington, her mother was up in Connecticut. She was in the apartment all by herself, and while there were no stairs, and delivery services that could bring everything from groceries to DVDs, there was also no one to help her. “I don’t have a husband.”

  “Boyfriend?” said the doctor.

  Lizzie bit her lip. “It’s complicated.”

  The doctor just nodded, then turned down the lights. “You shouldn’t be alone,” he told her. “Maybe a friend or a parent can come stay. Breathe deeply,” he said, and slid something inside her. Lizzie looked up at the screen and saw nothing but shifting gray swirls, like the Doppler map of a storm. “There,” said the doctor, pointing at something. “Nice, strong heartbeat. I don’t see anything obvious that’s causing the bleeding. Sometimes it just happens. So you’ll go home, and we’ll hope that it stops.” He scribbled a prescription for prenatal vitamins, handed her a pamphlet on bed rest, and told her to make an appointment in two weeks.

  Lizzie took a cab home instead of the subway. On the way she called Warren, the photographer in Queens, a willowy man with a high, sweet voice and quick, narrow hands, who didn’t seem too surprised or disappointed when Lizzie explained that a health problem would keep her home from work for the next few weeks. Probably her parents, who’d gotten her the job in the first place, had filled him in on her history. Probably he expected her to be a flake.

  Up in the apartment, lying on top of her girlhood bed staring at the neat rows of framed photographs—Diana at her wedding, her parents coming home from a party, Milo on the carousel—Lizzie considered her situation. She could call the counselor she’d liked in Minnesota, except Susan was married with two kids of her own and probably couldn’t drop everything to tend to Lizzie. She could call Jeff, except she hadn’t spoken to him in weeks and didn’t think she should restart their relationship by saying, “Hey, I’m pregnant, want to come to New York to make me sandwiches and rub my feet?” She could try to find Patrice, her old high school friend, except the last she’d heard Patrice had become a fundamentalist Christian who lived in Maine and homeschooled her stepkids.

  Her mother was at the beach, in that big old musty house at the edge of a cliff, a place Lizzie had hated since she was eight years old and Diana, posing on the porch in a striped sundress, had asked her to take her picture. “Back up! Back up!” Diana kept calling, as Lizzie held the Instamatic and tried to frame the shot. “You’re not going to get the whole house unless you move back!” With the viewfinder held up to her eye, Lizzie had kept taking giant steps backward until suddenly her sister had screamed, “Stop!” Alarmed by the shrill sound of her sister’s voice, Lizzie had frozen in place and looked over her shoulder. One more step would have taken her off the edge of the bluff, sent her tumbling down to the rocky beach, or maybe right into the water. The next time they’d come up to the beach there’d been a fence at the edge of the yard. The Lizzie Woodruff Is Stupid Memorial Picket Fence, Diana had called it.

  Mom was up in Connecticut; Dad was down in D.C.—and besides, honestly, what would the two of them do? Send her off to some home for unwed mothers the same way they’d shipped her off to rehab? Get her out of town before she could embarrass them again? That left Diana, her prig of a big sister, who’d gotten her sequence correct—first comes love, then comes marriage, then comes baby in the baby carriage. Wincing, Lizzie picked up her cell phone and was about to dial her sister’s number when the screen flashed her mother’s face.

  “Lizzie?”

  “Hi, Mom.”

  “Lizzie!” Her mother sounded strangely hesitant, her voice soft and uncertain. “I wonder whether you’d like to come up to Connecticut for a visit. You can call Warren, I’m sure he’d give you a few days off. I thought maybe it would be nice … it’s so pretty here, with the leaves changing, and there’s a great flea market on the town green and this vintage clothing store I know you’d like …” Lizzie looked at the phone suspiciously. Was her mother psychic? Had that nice doctor called her the minute Lizzie was out of the office? Wasn’t that illegal?

  “I called Derek,” her mother was saying. “He can give you a ride. Call him whenever you’re ready. Just pack some gloves and sweaters, because it gets cold at night.”

  Derek decided it. Derek had always been nice to her, even after the time she’d thrown up all over his backseat. Lizzie said, “I can leave Tuesday.” It was Friday now. That would give her a long weekend, three days for the bleeding, hopefully, to stop.

  “I’ll have him come get you whenever you want. Oh, Lizzie, I can’t wait to see you. I think it’ll be so good to be together.” Lizzie, feeling stunned, as if the gift she’d been longing for had landed in her lap, said that being together sounded good to her, too.

  DIANA

  Diana woke up at just after seven o’clock. For a moment, she was happy, caught in the afterglow of a pleasant dream of swimming in the ocean, paddling lazily through the clear salt water as waves nudged her toward the shore. Then she lay sick and motionless as the memories of the day and night before flooded her body. She’d lost Doug. She’d left her job. Now she had to do the worst part: tell Gary.

  She forced herself out of the empty bed. Gary had actually gotten up before her and was in the bathroom, where he’d be shedding wet towels and whiskers and leaving a crust of toothpaste and shaving cream in the sink. She pulled on leggings and a T-shirt, her bathrobe and her clogs, and hustled Milo out of bed and into his clothes. She fed him breakfast, handed him his backpack, pulled on a long, belted cardigan, and walked him down to the corner, where the other mothers, who’d never seen her without her hair combed and her makeup on, looked at her strangely.

  “Sick,” she rasped, and pointed to her throat. One of the other women, who lived in fear of illness, cringed away, using her body to shield her child, but she thought she saw Lisa Kelleher lift an eyebrow at one of the kindergarteners’ mothers … which meant, she thought, that the word might be out.

  She practically shoved Milo up the bus steps and racewalked home. Reflexively, she checked her cell phone, which she’d left charging in the clean, empty kitchen. Nothing from Doug. Her heart knotted. She’d known, from the first time they’d kissed, that there was no future, yet somehow she’d let herself hope for one: the two of them, plus Milo, and maybe a baby of their own. Waking up every morning in bed with someone she loved. Could it really be over? Hadn’t Doug loved her at all?

  Gary was in the bathroom, a towel wrapped around his scrawny midsection, shaving. “Hey,” she said. He stared at her impatiently, all traces of the previous night’s goodwill gone.

  “You feeling better?” he said.

  “Better,” she croaked. The truth was, she felt awful. “We need to talk.”

  “What’s up?” he asked. “I’ve got to get moving.”

  “It can’t wait. We need to talk. Right now.”

  “Okay,” he said. Shaving cream dotted his cheeks and chin, and his chest hair clung wetly to the slack flesh of his chest. “So talk.”

  She shuddered. How could she tell him? And how on earth had she
married him in the first place?

  “I,” she began, and could go no further.

  “You,” Gary prompted. He frowned. “Don’t you need to go to work?”

  “I’ve been thinking …” Her voice trailed off. Gary picked up his razor.

  “Look, I’ve got a meeting at nine o’clock sharp, and I—”

  “I don’t love you anymore,” she blurted, then clapped one hand over her mouth, as if the words were a flock of birds that had exploded out of a tree.

  Gary put his razor down next to the uncapped can of shaving cream and stared at her, openmouthed. “What?”

  She drew a deep breath of the steamy air. “Gary, I’ve been feeling for a long time …”

  “Are you kidding me?” he shouted. “You don’t love me? And you’re telling me this now?”

  She dropped her eyes. He had a point. The timing was less than ideal. But maybe if she told Gary that their marriage was over … if she went to Doug and told him she was free … if he met Milo, spent time with him, got to know what an interesting little boy he was …