Fly Away Home

by Jennifer Weiner

  Eventually she’d stop, bent over, hands on her thighs, red-faced and gasping. She’d straighten up, lifting her arms over her head, do a few side bends, then touch her toes, and when her breath came a little more easily, when she didn’t feel as if she was going to hurl, she’d turn around and start running back home. She’d take a shower and collapse back into bed, sleeping like the dead until Milo woke her. Sometimes one run would be enough, but sometimes she’d need to go out again before dinner. Her second runs were on the street—for variety’s sake, she told herself, but really, it was because she was worried about people noticing her and talking, the way the moms at Milo’s bus stop had whispered about the obviously anorexic racewalker who’d pump her bony arms and pipe-stem legs for hours along the sidewalks. She’d race down the shell-covered driveway, pounding along Fairview’s narrow streets. It was three miles to the high school. She’d do sprints around the track until it got dark, then jog back home, jumping off the road if she saw a car approaching.

  She was losing weight. Her running pants hung loosely on her hips, and she could see her ribs through her skin. Sylvie was worried. She’d cook all day—her mother, in an apron! In front of a stove! Diana wouldn’t have believed it if she hadn’t seen it with her own eyes. At the dinner table each night there’d be bowls of mashed potatoes, plates of pasta, then, later, popcorn and hot chocolate, when Sylvie and Lizzie would sit together on Lizzie’s bed and watch movies on Lizzie’s little laptop.

  “Are you all right?” Sylvie asked, with Milo standing behind her, staring at his mother with his eyes dark and huge in his pale face.

  Diana answered lightly, saying that she was thinking about doing another marathon in the spring, maybe even trying to qualify for Boston. Secretly, she thought there might be other races in her future, ultramarathons that went for fifty or even a hundred miles, twenty-four-hour time trials where you’d run all day and all night. How far would she have to go before she could outrun the mess she’d made, the way she’d laid waste to her own life? Would fifty miles stop the nightmares? Would a hundred miles bring Doug back?

  A few terrible times each week, she’d have her hospital dream. In the dream, she would wheel her stool to the bedside of the girl whose face she could barely remember, the eight-year-old who’d come in semiconscious, with her insulin levels dipping dangerously low. She scribbled down the same incorrect dosage, only in the dream nobody caught the mistake, and she answered the phone in her kitchen to hear Hank Stavers telling her that the little girl had died. Then she’d wake up, covered in sweat, gasping for air, in the chilly gray of dawn, shove her feet into her sneakers, and go back to the beach.

  She knew she was only postponing the inevitable. There were things that needed doing, tasks that required her attention. Gary was getting impatient with just talking to his son. He wanted to see Milo; he wanted Diana to bring him home, and, he’d said he’d hire a lawyer to make it happen if he had to. But somehow she was always either running or asleep. The living room couch loomed, as inviting as a lover’s arms, with that cashmere throw draped seductively over its back, and she’d think, Just for a minute, and wake up three hours later in a puddle of drool, with her mother, this strange, new, solicitous version of Sylvie beside her, asking if she wanted some lunch, if there was anything she could do. She’d eat half a sandwich, drink a glass of milk—little-kid food, the kind she’d had for school lunches when she was Milo’s age—and then, with barely a sentence spoken all day, she’d go running again.

  She’d managed to take care of a few truly important things. The day after she’d arrived she called Milo’s school to let them know he’d be absent indefinitely. The secretary had faxed his records and mailed his textbooks to the house in Fairview, so that at least she’d have the option of enrolling him in school in Connecticut, if it came to that. For now, she’d assigned him homework—a chapter in each of his textbooks, plus independent reading and writing each day. Lizzie had elected herself his art teacher. She’d given him her digital camera and assigned him twenty minutes outside, taking pictures of the leaves, the water, the crushed-shell driveway. When he came back they loaded the pictures onto her laptop and talked about cropping and composition, shadows and light. In the afternoons, when his work was done, Milo would go down to the beach to stand at the edge of the water and throw his Frisbee into the waves until it got dark and Sylvie called him in to help set the table for dinner. Diana managed to rouse herself enough to read him a chapter of Harry Potter every night before he fell asleep. Then most nights she’d join her mother and sister in Lizzie’s bed. They would watch movies, she’d fall asleep.

  She’d been desperately worried about her son—away from his house, his school, and his father. But as October slipped toward its end, Milo had proved surprisingly resilient. He loved Lizzie and his grandmother, and the truth that she’d never really wanted to acknowledge was that he’d never really liked school or the other kids there all that much. For him, Connecticut was a vacation. He could walk on the beach and look for sea glass and feathers and interesting pieces of driftwood. There were board games to play and books to read and marshmallows that his grandmother let him roast in front of the fireplace. Every night he’d talk to his father, carrying the portable phone into his bedroom and closing the door behind him.

  The days blurred together—the gulped juice, the protein bars, the running, the sleeping, waking to nightmares and running again. Losing Doug was like going through withdrawal. She felt, she imagined, the same way an addict must feel when you cut off her supply. The only thing that kept her sane, that kept her from flying down the highway, back to Philadelphia, and begging Doug to take her back, was that tiny ember that had kindled in her heart when he’d not only rejected her but rejected, implicitly, her son. Milo was not expendable. Crazy in love as she might have been, she would never have foisted him on a man who didn’t want him.

  One sunny afternoon, with the crisp tang of autumn leaves and apple cider in the wind, she sat at the living room window, looking down at the beach, watching her son as he tossed the white disk of the Frisbee into the foaming waves. Her whole body hurt. Shin splints, she thought. Plantar fasciitis. A sore hip. A sore heart. She wandered upstairs to her sister’s bedroom, where Lizzie was fussing with a tray Sylvie must have just brought up.

  “Hey, Diana. Want some tea?” Lizzie lowered her voice. “It’s Constant Comment. I hate that stuff. Mom made me a smoothie, too.”

  Diana sat on the edge of Lizzie’s bed. She picked up the mug of tea and wrapped her hands around it. Her wedding ring hung loosely on her finger. Lizzie, in contrast, was plump and curvy, glowing with good health in spite of her back pain.

  “I’m sorry about what happened this summer,” Diana muttered. She knew she owed her sister an apology, and this seemed as good a time as any to deliver it.

  “It’s okay,” said Lizzie. “Probably I would have thought the exact same thing if I were you. But just so you know, I wasn’t using anything when I was taking care of Milo. I would never have gotten in a car with him if I wasn’t safe to drive.”

  “I know,” said Diana, realizing, as she spoke, that she’d known it all along. Lizzie, even at her worst, would not have put a child’s life in danger. No, she thought, that was what she did. “I screwed something up at work.”

  Lizzie got very still. “What happened?”

  “Nothing. Thank God. One of the nurses caught it. I wrote down the wrong dosage for a little girl—a diabetic. She needed insulin, and if they’d given her the dose I’d prescribed …” She stopped talking, unwilling to even speak the words she could have died. Down on the beach, Milo’s Frisbee had gotten away from him. It bobbed in the waves, a tiny white dot, Milo stood at the water’s edge, shoulders slumped, looking as defeated as his mother felt. “I took a leave from the hospital. I’m on leave from everything, I guess.”

  Instead of gloating, instead of sneering, Lizzie rolled over and patted her sister’s knee, as tentatively as if she was checking to see w
hether a pan of Jell-O had set. “It happens. People make mistakes.” She gave Diana a wobbly smile. “I guess I’m, like, exhibit A of that.” They were quiet for a minute. Then Lizzie asked, “What about that guy I saw?”

  “That’s over,” Diana said. No need to go into detail on that front.

  “And what about Gary?” Lizzie’s voice was so kind, so far away from the needling, sarcastic tone she usually used when the subject was Diana’s husband.

  “I think probably we’ll get divorced,” said Diana. “I think I kind of lost my mind.”

  “You and Dad,” Lizzie murmured.

  Diana wrapped her hands tightly around her mug. “It wasn’t like Dad. Or at least, it wasn’t like my understanding of how things were with Dad. It wasn’t like, ‘Ooh, there’s a cute guy, let’s hook up.’ It wasn’t about feeling entitled, or being tempted all the time.” She took another sip. “I was lonely.” She set the cup down on Lizzie’s nightstand. “And I was tired. Tired of working so hard, tired of pretending everything was okay when it wasn’t, tired of being unhappy with Gary, and disappointed with what the marriage turned out to be, tired of being the one who took care of the house and the shopping, and Milo, and …” She closed her eyes and flopped back onto her sister’s bed, feeling so exhausted, so enervated, that she couldn’t imagine ever running again, could barely imagine moving her body to the dinner table. “Everything.” Lizzie nodded. Diana went on, “I think Gary’s going to give me a hard time about the house. He thinks if I’m the one who was cheating and if I’m the one who wants out of the marriage, then I should be the one to leave. So I did. I just left.”

  Her sister’s reaction was gratifyingly swift. “What? That’s crazy! That’s Milo’s house! He’s going to kick out his own kid?”

  “I don’t know.” The house, she thought, seemed like the least of her problems. Her own broken heart, Milo’s having to survive his parents’ divorce, her having to find a new job, a new place to live, a new life for herself … she shut her eyes. It was all too much.

  “What can we do?” Lizzie was asking—Lizzie, who’d never done much of anything in the years that passed for her adult life, Lizzie, who’d always needed someone to do things for her. “We can’t let this happen. That’s your house! Yours and Milo’s.”

  “It’ll be okay,” Diana mumbled. The only thing she wanted was to close her eyes and sleep.

  “And you don’t think …” Lizzie spoke carefully. “There’s no chance you and Gary can work it out?”

  Diana shook her head. She couldn’t imagine loving him again. At this point, from where she stood (or, more accurately, from where she lay, curled up and probably fragrant in the running clothes she hadn’t changed out of), the thing to do was to acknowledge that, between them, they’d produced a remarkable, if socially awkward, little boy, and to move on as best they could.

  “Then you need a lawyer,” said Lizzie, reaching for the laptop next to her bed, and Diana, who no longer had the energy to form words, nodded her assent, then shut her eyes.

  It felt like only a few seconds had passed when she woke up to Lizzie shaking her shoulder. “Wake up!” she singsonged. “I got you a lawyer!”

  Diana sat up, blinking, feeling a little bit rested. At least she hadn’t had her dream again. “You did what?”

  “I e-mailed Grandma Selma. Don’t worry, I just said you were a friend.”

  Diana winced. Grandma Selma was a smart cookie, and what kind of friends did Lizzie have who came even close to fitting Diana’s description? What friends, she thought with a sad pang, did Lizzie have at all? “What’d she say?”

  “That the … hang on …” Lizzie paused, fiddling with her computer. “The presumptive standard is still that children do best with the primary caretaker. Which is you. That probably Gary will have to pay you alimony and child support, if you’re awarded primary physical custody. And probably you’ll get the house.”

  Diana narrowed her eyes, trying to suss out what had happened to Lizzie. “Are you okay?” she asked.

  Lizzie toyed with her ponytail. “What do you mean?”

  “Your back,” Diana prompted. Her sister’s back was the least of the changes she’d noticed, but it was a decent place to start.

  Lizzie brightened. “Oh, yeah! That’s fine! It doesn’t even hurt anymore.”

  “You don’t have to go in for a follow-up?”

  Her sister fidgeted with a thread trailing from her sleeve. “I did. I saw someone in town last week. My doctor gave me a referral. Mom drove me. You and Milo were on the beach, I think. It’s all good.” She consulted her computer again. “Grandma gave me three names. I e-mailed two of them, and the third one’s going to call me back, but here’s the one I liked best.” She tilted the screen so Diana could see a man’s face, bald and avuncular, with a list of degrees earned, honors conferred, and articles published beneath it. Diana knew, from the first moment Doug had taken her hand in that grotty bar, that it could come to this—to lawyers and court dates and custody arrangements, the unraveling of her marriage, the end of everything—but, now that she’d actually arrived at the place she’d been at once dreading and longing for, she was terrified. What would life be like without Gary? As a husband, he’d disappointed her, but he’d been there, another body in the house (or, at least, another body on the couch), someone who thought of her fondly … or, at least, someone who had once. Gary probably didn’t think of her fondly anymore.

  She made herself breathe through the wave of dizziness that rolled over her, and put her bare feet on the floor. Baby steps, she told herself. She’d take a shower, get dressed, call the lawyer.

  “Hey, Diana?”

  Diana turned, one hand on the door frame. Her sister was fiddling with her hair, a gesture Diana remembered from when she was little and had ringlets—she’d pull one curl straight, then let it boing back into position. “People do this, you know?” said Lizzie. “People do this every day, and nobody dies of it.”

  Diana stared at her sister, wondering, once more, when the aliens had taken over her body. “Thank you,” she said. What happened? she was thinking. Lizzie, what happened to you?

  She found a towel and a washcloth, a toothbrush and toothpaste, and got herself cleaned up. After she took a shower, she made her way back to the bedroom, where her bed had been made, the pillows plumped, her cell phone plugged into its charger in the wall, and the lawyer’s information and telephone number on the printout placed at the center of the bed. Diana hung up her towel, got into her clothes, picked up her cell phone, and walked out to the porch and sat with her legs crossed on the glider that looked out over the sea. “Diana Woodruff calling for David Bascomb,” she said. When the receptionist said that Mr. Bascomb wasn’t in, but could she take a message, Diana spelled her name and recited the digits of her cell phone number, and when the woman asked, “What is this regarding?” she found that it was, if not easy, then at least not impossible for her to say the words, “A divorce.”

  Once that was done, she put the phone in her pocket. She had hoped, she realized, as she walked down the lawn, breathing in the brisk fall air, that simply calling a lawyer, simply speaking the word divorce out loud, would be enough to cause some kind of transformation to take place. Magical thinking, she decided, kicking through a drift of bright, sweet-smelling leaves. Making the call, saying the words, telling her sister what had happened was a start, but it was far from the end.

  Diana pulled out her cell phone again. Once, at summer camp, she’d climbed to the top of the ten-meter board because one of the boys had dared her to jump off. From the water, with the big kids doing jackknives and half gainers into the deep end, the high board didn’t seem that high at all, but after you’d climbed the ladder and were standing at the edge, the concrete rough underneath your feet, looking down into the blue depths of the water, it seemed as if you were perched on top of the world, and that voluntarily stepping off the edge was nothing short of madness.

  Still, Diana had made hersel
f do it. One, two, three, she’d chanted in her head, forcing herself to the edge of the board and then off into space for the plummet that seemed to leave her stomach hovering ten meters above the rest of her before she plunged into the water. One, two, three, she chanted once more as she stood on the lawn and punched in the button that would connect her to Gary.

  He picked up on the first ring. “Diana?” His voice was its usual wet rattle, which always made him sound as if he was on the verge of hocking up something horrible. I never liked his voice, Diana thought. There was a measure of relief—small, but present—in that realization, in being able to think it, even just to herself, and not have to hurry to suppress it, to tamp it down or paper it over or counter it with the ten things that she did like about him.

  “I just wanted to check in …” She paused. What did she want to tell him? “We’re still in Connecticut. Milo’s fine.”

  “I know.” Gary paused, then said a little reluctantly, “He sounds good.” Another pause while he blew his nose. “When are you planning on bringing him home?”

  “Do I have a home to come to?” Diana asked, and Gary sighed.

  “Of course you do. Look. What I said about staying here … if we can’t live together, we’ll work something out.”

  Diana felt as if she’d been bracing for some blow, a punch to the gut, and she’d been hit with a pillow instead. Gary sounded as if he was suffering from the same kind of heartsickness that had afflicted her. “Just come home,” he said. “We can talk about it. You probably didn’t even get a chance to say goodbye to your boyfriend.” He gave the last word a nasty spin.

  “That’s over,” she said. When Gary didn’t answer, she said, “I knew that it was wrong—of course I did—but … but I was very lonely.”

  “Right,” he said. “Lonely. With me sitting right there.”

  Diana didn’t take the bait. There would be plenty of time for accusations, plenty of blame to go around, plenty of time to tell him, if she decided it was wise, that it was entirely possible to be lonely with someone else in the room.