Fly Away Home

by Jennifer Weiner

  Gary was still staring at her, the towel drooping around his midsection, his eyes, and even, she thought, his nipples, all staring at her accusingly. “You don’t love me?”

  She lifted her face and said the only words that could possibly apply. “It’s not your fault. Really, it’s not. You didn’t do anything wrong. It’s not you, it’s me.”

  “You’re goddamn right it’s you!” He grabbed his razor and raked it over his face. Three tiny spots of blood bloomed on his cheeks. He grabbed a tissue, tore off three pieces, and slapped them to the wounds. “Look,” he said, sounding marginally calmer. “If you want to go into counseling, or whatever …” He dropped his razor next to his toothbrush, which lay on its side, dribbling white foam onto the countertop. “Is this about your father? What’s going on? Are you on your period?”

  “I’ve been unhappy,” she whispered.

  “And you couldn’t maybe have mentioned this to me? How was I supposed to know? I’m not psychic! Jesus, Di, what’d I do?”

  She dropped her head. She’d told him the truth. He hadn’t really done anything. Gary had simply been himself, and that would have been enough, more than enough, even, for a different kind of woman, but it was no longer enough for her.

  Gary, meanwhile, had started to cry. Tears ran down his face, threatening to dislodge the toilet paper. They cut through the shaving cream drying on half of his face and dripped off his jutting chin. God, thought Diana, feeling disgusted. He can’t even cry neatly. “I can’t believe this,” he said. “I can’t believe this is happening.” He moved toward her. She stood, frozen, as he wrapped his arms around her, snuffling into her neck, soaking her shirt. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Whatever I’m doing wrong, I can change. But I don’t want to lose you.”

  Tell him, she thought. Take the medicine, swallow the pill. Get it over with, and you won’t have to do it again. She pushed him away, holding his shoulders, and as he stared at her, open-mouthed and half-naked in his towel, Diana looked up into his eyes and said, “I’m in love with someone else.”

  Gary jerked back. “You’re kidding,” he said. Diana shook her head. “You … this other guy …” He took one step away from her, then another. “You had sex with him?” he yelled.

  Her heart broke as she nodded. Gary didn’t deserve this, she thought, as his eyes narrowed and his mouth twisted. Then his arm shot out and shoved her, not gently, in the chest, sending her staggering into the bathroom wall.

  “Get out of here,” he said.

  “Oh, Gary,” she said.

  “Get out! I mean it! Go be with your boyfriend, if that’s what you want!” His voice cracked on the word boyfriend, and he turned away, crying again, holding a hand towel over his eyes.

  Diana stood there, her back throbbing from where she’d hit the towel bar. This wasn’t how she’d imagined things happening. When she’d tried to picture it, Gary was the one to leave, manfully packing a bag, giving her a look that was equal parts love and regret before driving off into the sunset, or maybe just to the Sheraton. But at the moment it didn’t seem as though Gary was planning on going anywhere. “Get out! Get out! Get out!” he was shouting, still with the towel pressed to his face like a blindfold. “Go be with your boyfriend!”

  Struggling with her temper, she said, “Gary. I’m not leaving.”

  “Well, one of us is,” he said, a truculent note creeping into his voice. “And I’m not the one who’s been cheating.”

  “Gary.” Am I insane? she wondered. Didn’t the mother and the children, or child, always stay in the house? Wasn’t it always the father who left? “I was thinking that I’d stay here with Milo, and that you’d find another place.”

  “Forget it.” He crossed his arms over his bare chest, dropped the hand towel, and glared at her with reddened, puffy eyes. “I didn’t do anything wrong. I’m not going anywhere.” He glared at her a moment longer, then dropped his face and muttered, “Except I actually have to go to work.” With Diana staring at him in shock, he put his hands on her shoulders, pushed her out of the bathroom, then closed the door and locked it.

  She walked down to the kitchen, rage starting to build inside her. She pictured the meals she’d cooked, the snacks she’d prepared, the games of Sorry and Monopoly she’d played with Milo at the kitchen table while Gary hunkered down in the den, too busy watching the game to tend to his son. Fury simmered in her veins as she considered how she’d found this house, convinced Gary to come see it, how the bulk of the down payment had been the money Grandma Selma had given her. Now it was going to be his? Where would she and Milo go?

  Never mind. She pulled her hair back into a ponytail, shoved her feet into her clogs, and her arms into the sleeves of her cardigan, grabbed her purse and her phone, and hurried to the parking lot where she kept her car. It was almost eight. If she hurried she could probably catch Doug at his apartment. She reached for her phone—there were three missed calls, all from her mother. Diana ignored them and tapped out a text message: Nd 2 C U. Then she deleted it. Better to surprise him, to let him see her in person, to make him reject her, if that’s what he was going to do, right to her face.

  • • •

  One of Doug’s roommates, yawning in shorts and a T-shirt that read COLLGE, opened the door. “Is Doug here?” she asked, trying to sound sunny and upbeat and normal. The roommate squinted at her, rubbing one hand over his stubbly cheek.

  “Yeah, he’s upstairs.”

  Diana walked past him into the living room, which smelled like hot wings, and headed up the stairs. Doug’s doorway was at the end of the hall. She lifted her hand to knock, decided against it, and pushed the door open.

  He was sitting at his desk, looking pale and wan and miserable. He hadn’t shaved, or combed his hair, and was barefoot in sweatpants and a plaid shirt. Seeing him tore her heart open. It was all she could do not to rush to him, to tell him how right they were together and beg for another chance.

  He looked up. It took her brain a minute to make the cross-connection, to process what she was seeing and tie it in to a memory, years ago, of Hal’s face. It was a look that said that things were over, that he’d given her his final answer and that wasn’t going to change.

  She slumped against the doorway, feeling dowdy and ridiculous in her leggings and her ponytail, like an old crone trying to look like a teenager. Her whole body cramped as she looked at him. Oh, no, she thought, in words that sounded as if they were coming from the bottom of a very deep, very cold well.

  “Diana,” Doug said. He crossed the room and reached for her hand.

  “I left him,” she blurted. “I left Gary. I told him about us.”

  Doug sighed. “I wish you hadn’t.”

  She looked at him through her tear-blurred eyes. “We’re not going to …” Her voice trailed off. Doug, too, looked as if he was struggling not to cry.

  “It’s not that I don’t want kids. I do. It’s just …” In the silence, she imagined she heard what he couldn’t bring himself to say. I want my own kids, not someone else’s.

  She didn’t answer. What could she have said? No words, no amount of pleading, nothing could make him take her back. He’d told her the truth, not with words but with his sigh. There was no future in which they’d be together. She could possibly manage to leave with a few shreds of dignity, but she would not be leaving with Doug.

  “Are you going to be all right?” he asked.

  She looked at him coolly, considering handsome Doug Vance, his dark hair and ruddy cheeks, his smooth skin and perfectly formed body, with the curiosity she might extend to a patient in her exam room who’d presented with a symptom she’d never seen before—an interesting rash, perhaps, or persistent bad dreams. Was she going to be all right? That was a good question. She felt awful. She had, after all, lost everything. Except she hadn’t. Not quite. She might have lost her job, her husband, her boyfriend, even possibly her house, but she hadn’t lost Milo. And so …

  “Of course I’m going to be all ri
ght,” she said, in a tone suggesting that she was well practiced in this kind of affair—its beginning, its care and management, its inevitable end.

  “Well.” Doug reached for her hand again. Diana pulled her arm away. “Well, listen. I guess I’ll see you around.”

  She shrugged—of course he wouldn’t see her at the hospital, but she wouldn’t be the one to tell him that—and let herself out of his room, head held high, moving down the stairs like a teenage girl showing off her prom dress. Outside, she blinked in the sunshine. There was a park a few blocks away—she’d been there once with Milo. She managed to find it, and sat on a bench, unable to move, barely able to breathe. Time passed. Mothers came with children, dog walkers with dogs. Diana couldn’t think of what to do, of where to go.

  Finally, she pulled her phone out of her pocket and called the place where they had to take you in, the place you went when all other options were closed.

  “Mom?”

  “Diana!” Her mother’s voice was high and happy, as if she didn’t have a care in the world. “Where have you been? I’ve been trying to reach you for weeks!”

  “Sorry.” She started plodding down the street, back toward her car. “I’ve been busy.”

  “Well.” Now her mother sounded shy and oddly formal. “I’ve been calling to invite you and Gary and Milo up to Connecticut. It’s beautiful here. We can drive around and look at the leaves … or there’s a big antiques market in Litchfield … and the beach, of course … and Lizzie’s going to come.”

  “Gary’s busy.” The lie slid off her tongue as if it had been greased. Ignoring her troublesome sister’s presence for the moment, she continued, “But I bet Milo would love to see you. And I could use a little break.”

  Sylvie paused, and when she spoke she sounded as if she could hardly believe it. “You’re not working?”

  “Nope.” The heartbreak was still there, manifesting itself as a miserable twitchiness, as if she could leap right out of her skin. Thinking of the future without Doug was like imagining life without sunshine, without oxygen, but there was also a strange recklessness that went along, Diana supposed, with having absolutely nothing left to lose. “I’m taking a little time off, actually, I’m rethinking my priorities.”

  “Well, that’s … that’s wonderful,” her mother said, although Diana didn’t know how Sylvie could think it was wonderful at all. “When can you come?”

  “How about tomorrow?”

  “Wonderful,” Sylvie said again. “I’ll get your rooms ready. I’ll be waiting.”

  Diana drove home and double-parked in front of her house, which already looked strange to her, as if strangers had bought it and furnished it, had eaten breakfasts at the kitchen table and sat on the couch watching TV at night. Moving fast, she threw her clothes into a suitcase, then spent fifteen minutes packing for Milo: pajamas and jeans and underpants, a week’s worth of school clothes, his favorite books, his chess set, his insect collection bottles, the photograph album her sister had sent, and Mister Buttons, the threadbare teddy he’d had since he was a baby. She grabbed her coat and scarf, her sunglasses, her cell phone and charger, her wallet and her car keys, and wrote Gary a note: Milo and I are going to Connecticut to see my mom. I’ll call you when I’m there. Then she threw her bags into the trunk and drove to Milo’s school.

  “He’s in gym class,” said the girl behind the reception desk. Dismissal wasn’t for another twenty minutes, so Diana scribbled an excuse about a dentist’s appointment onto the sign-out sheet, and went to collect her boy.

  The first grade was playing volleyball. Kids in red pinneys stood on one side of the net; kids in yellow on the other. Milo, pale and solid in his shorts, was on the sidelines, holding an ice pack against his nose. They’d made him take his hat off. She saw its pom-pom peeking out from his pocket.

  She hurried over. “Mom?” Milo looked up at her, blinking, relief spreading over his face (relief and confusion, most likely, because he’d never seen her out of the house without her hair done and her face made up).

  “What happened?” she asked, bending down to hug him.

  “I got hit by a ball.” He paused. “It was an accident.” Diana guessed that it probably wasn’t an accident, that one of those little pinney-wearing fucks had done it on purpose. “Come on,” she said to Milo, who was staring at her wide-eyed. “Let’s go.”

  She waved at the gym teacher, a Nazi in a tracksuit with a silver whistle dangling from his beefy neck. Grabbing Milo’s hand, she hurried him down the hall and out into the car, which she’d double-parked, hazard lights blinking, on the side of the street where the school buses lined up.

  “Where are we going?” he asked, after Diana drove past the street that would have taken them home. Diana steadied herself, with her hands tight on the wheel. Ideally, she supposed, she and Gary would be doing this together … but the situation was a long way from ideal.

  “Your dad and I are having some problems, and we’re going to spend some time apart. I thought that you and I would take a little vacation.”

  “Problems?” asked Milo. His voice was small and frightened. “What problems?”

  She waited for a red light and thought carefully about her answer. “Grown-up problems. None of it is your fault at all. We both love you.” She swallowed hard. “We love you very, very much.”

  In the rearview mirror his face relaxed, but his voice was still wavery. “What’s going to happen? Where are we going right now?”

  She pulled into a gas station, put the car in Park, and patted the empty passenger’s seat. Milo unfastened his seat belt and scrambled clumsily over the gearshift into the seat beside her.

  “I’m not sure what’s going to happen,” she said, even though that wasn’t true, she was almost entirely certain what came next, and it started with a D and ended with ivorce. “But what’s happening right now is that you and I are going to stay in a hotel.” Milo’s face lit up. He loved everything about hotels, from the miniature bottles of shampoo and body gel to the room-service menus and pay-per-view movies. “Tomorrow we’re going to drive to Connecticut to visit Grandma Sylvie for a while. Sound good?”

  “Sounds good,” he said, and when she squeezed his hand he squeezed back.

  When she’d been making her grand descent down Doug’s stairs, Diana had decided that she and her son would spend the night at the St. Regis in New York City, a place she’d walked by dozens of times on shopping trips to Saks, or visits to the Elizabeth Arden salon with her mother. She’d once had drinks with Hal in the King Cole Bar, but she’d never spent the night. Staying in a place like that, as opposed to a cheaper hotel or her parents’ apartment, would make Milo feel, correctly or not, that they were on a kind of adventure.

  In that spirit, Diana had treated Milo to lunch at McDonald’s. He’d almost fainted in delight when she’d said he could have a cheeseburger and fries. They’d stopped at a Target on Route 1 for toiletries and a DVD of Monsters, Inc. It was close to five o’clock by the time they arrived in New York City.

  “One key?” asked the woman behind the high marble counter, and Milo, who’d been staring, entranced, at the bellmen in their green-and-gold overcoats, had dashed up to Diana, whispering, “Two, please.” (Among the hotel amenities that Milo especially loved were hotel key cards.) Diana slid her American Express onto the leather blotter. For one terrible moment she was convinced that Gary had canceled their credit cards, that he’d frozen their bank accounts, that maybe he’d even called the cops and told them Milo had been kidnapped. But the card went through. The woman handed Diana two room keys, and came out from behind the desk to escort them to the elevator.

  “Your butler will show you to your room.”

  “Butler?” Milo whispered, his eyes wide beneath the brim of the hat he’d worn to school, and Diana smiled as he slid his hand in hers. No matter what else she’d lost, she hadn’t lost her son.

  The butler who met them on the eighth floor turned out to be a woman, a woman in a tuxe
do who showed them how to control the temperature, how to open the curtains, and how to use the remote to get the television set, which was concealed in the bed’s footboard, to rise up. “I would be happy to bring you complimentary coffee or tea, and press any items of clothing,” she said.

  “Hot chocolate?” asked Milo, and the butler said she thought that would be all right.

  Milo spent the next ten minutes making the set go up and down while Diana called Gary’s cell phone.

  “Are you doing okay?”

  “Oh, I’m great,” he said, in his clogged foghorn voice. “I’m just fan-fucking-tastic.”

  “Milo’s fine.” She paused, unsure of what to say to him, how much she should try to comfort him. “We’re in New York. I thought we’d go to Connecticut for a few days and visit my mother.” Gary sighed and said nothing. “Do you want to talk to him?”

  She could picture her husband, slumped in front of his laptop, trying to pull it together. He’d minimize the screens filled with YouTube videos and sports news and gossip, he’d sit up straight and roll up his sleeves. “Of course I want to talk to Milo.” Diana handed over the phone, then sat on the blue satin couch, sipped at her cup of tea, and thought that at least she had this tiny piece of her future planned out and under control.

  Later, after they’d shared a room-service dinner of pizza and ice cream and watched Finding Nemo on the pay-per-view, Diana fired up her laptop, and pointed and clicked until she found what she was looking for. “Hey, Milo,” she said—he was lying under the covers, thumbing through one of his insect books. “Want to see where we’re going?”

  Milo propped his chin on his hands and studied the photographs she’d found on the town of Fairview’s website, which displayed a single shot of the big white house on a bluff overlooking the ocean. His finger traced the edge of the water. “It’s probably too cold to go swimming.”

  She stifled a sigh—was the glass always half-empty with this kid?—and said, “Yes, but I bet it’s cozy. There’s fireplaces. And Grandma Sylvie’s up there. She’s excited to see you.”