Fly Away (35 page)

Kate’s family, probably. A gorgeous man, a beautiful teenaged girl, and two mop-headed
boys.

Margie hugged Tully, who sobbed in her arms.

Dorothy stepped back into the shadows beneath the tree. She’d been an idiot to think
she had a place here, that her presence would help.

Her daughter
had
people who cared about her, and about whom she cared. They would gather together
on this day and ease their grief by sharing it. Wasn’t that what people did? What
families did?

It made Dorothy feel inestimably sad and old and tired. She’d come all this way, following
a beam of light that couldn’t be grasped.

*   *   *

It’s no good to pretend, you know. And we don’t have all the time in the world.
I hear Kate’s voice, and honestly, I wish I didn’t.
You see now, don’t you?

I am like a little kid, squeezing my eyes shut, certain that in my self-imposed darkness
I can’t be seen. That’s what I want right now: to disappear. I don’t want to do this
whole going-into-the-light/looking-back-on-your-life thing anymore. It hurts too much.

You’re hiding from me.

“Yeah. No shit. You dead people don’t miss a thing.”

I feel her coming closer; it is like firelight drawing near. Tiny yellow white stars
burst across the black expanse of my vision. I smell lavender and Love’s Baby Soft
spray and … pot smoke.

That takes me back.

Open your eyes.

The way she says it breaks my resolve. I slowly do as she asks, but even before I
see the poster of David Cassidy and hear Elton John singing “Goodbye Yellow Brick
Road,” I know where I am. Back in my bedroom in the house on Firefly Lane. My old
Close ’n Play is on the bedside table, along with a stack of 45s.

Dorothy. “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road.” The Emerald City. How had I missed all the obvious
clues in my life? I was always a little girl, lost in Oz, looking for a way to believe
that there was no place like home …

Kate is beside me. We are sitting on my bed in the house on Firefly Lane, leaning
against the rickety headboard. A yellow poster that reads
WAR IS NOT HEALTHY FOR CHILDREN AND OTHER LIVING THINGS
fills my vision.

You see now, don’t you?
Kate says again, more quietly this time.

I don’t want to think about it all—the day my mother showed up to “help” me with my
“addiction” and how badly I handled it. What else have I been wrong about? But before
I can answer her, there is another voice, whispering in my ear.
I’m sorry.

Oh, my God.

It is my mother. The bedroom dissolves around me. I smell disinfectant.

I turn to look at Kate. “She’s here? Or there? At the hospital, I mean?”

Listen,
Kate says gently.
Close your eyes.

September 3, 2010
4:57
P.M.

“Lady? Lady? Are you getting out?”

Dorothy came back to the present with a start. She was in the cab, parked in front
of the hospital’s emergency entrance. She paid the cabbie, giving much too big a tip,
and then she opened the door and stepped out into the rain.

The walk to the front door unnerved her. Every footstep felt like an act of unimaginable
will, and God knew her will had always had the strength of warm wax.

As she moved into the austere lobby, she felt self-conscious, a ragged old hippie
in a high-tech world.

At the reception desk, she stopped, cleared her throat. “I’m Doro—Cloud Hart,” she
said quietly. The old name pinched like a bad bra, but it was how Tully knew her.
“Tully Hart’s mother.”

The woman at the desk nodded, gave her the room number.

Gritting her teeth, fisting her cold hands, Dorothy headed for the elevator and rode
it up to the fourth floor. There, feeling her nerves tightening with every step, she
followed the whitish linoleum floor to the waiting room, which was mostly empty—mustard-colored
chairs, a woman at a desk, a pair of TVs on without sound. Vanna White turned the
letter
R
on-screen.

The smell of the place—disinfectant and cafeteria food and despair—hit her hard. She’d
spent a considerable effort in her life to stay away from hospitals, although she’d
awakened in them a few times.

Margie sat in the waiting room. At Dorothy’s arrival, she put down her knitting and
stood.

Beside her was that good-looking man who’d been Kate’s husband. He saw Margie stand,
followed her gaze, and frowned. Then he slowly got to his feet, too. Dorothy had seen
him from a distance at the funeral; he looked grayer now. Thinner.

Margie came forward, her hands outstretched. “I’m glad you got my note. I had to have
Bud pin it on the door. I didn’t have time to go looking for you.”

“Thank you,” Dorothy said. “How is she?”

“Our girl is a fighter,” Margie said.

Dorothy felt a squeeze of emotion—longing, maybe.
Our
girl. As if she and Margie were both mothers to Tully. Dorothy wished it were true—but
only Margie could claim that connection, really. She started to say something—she
had no idea what—when
he
approached them. At the shuttered anger in his eyes, Dorothy’s voice turned to ash.

“You remember Johnny,” Margie said. “Katie’s husband and Tully’s friend.”

“We met years ago,” Dorothy said quietly. It was not a good memory.

“You’ve never done anything but hurt her,” he said in a soft voice.

“I know.”

“If you hurt her now, it’s me you’ll be dealing with. You got that?”

Dorothy swallowed hard but didn’t look away. “Thank you.”

He frowned. “For what?”

“Loving her.”

He looked surprised by that.

Margie took Dorothy by the arm and led her down the hallway, and into a bright ICU
enclave with glass-walled rooms that fanned out behind a central nurses’ station desk.
There, Margie let go of her long enough to go speak to the woman at the desk.

“Okay,” Margie said when she returned. “That’s her room right there. You can go talk
to her.”

“She won’t want me here.”

“Just talk to her, Dorothy. The doctors think it helps.”

Dorothy glanced over at the glass window; inside, a utilitarian curtain shielded the
bed from view.

“Just
talk
to her.”

Dorothy nodded. She stepped forward, shuffling like an invalid, her fear expanding
with every step, filling her lungs, aching. Invalid. In valid. That was her.

Her hand was literally shaking as she opened the door.

Dorothy took a deep breath and went toward the bed.

Tully lay there, surrounded by buzzing, thumping, whooshing machines. A clear plastic
tube invaded her slack mouth. Her face was misshapen and scraped and bruised. She
was bald and a plastic tube went into her head. One arm was in a cast.

Dorothy pulled a chair up to the bed and sat down. She knew what Tully would want
to hear. It was what her daughter had come to Snohomish for, what she’d asked for
in a thousand ways over the years. The truth. Dorothy’s story. Their story.

She could do this. At last. She
could
. This was what her daughter needed from her. She drew in a deep breath.

“When I was a kid, California was beautiful citrus groves instead of parking lots
and freeways. Oil derricks pumping continually up and down on the hillsides, like
giant rusty praying mantises. The first Golden Arches. I remember when they started
building Disneyland and my father thought Walt was ‘bat shit crazy’ for pumping so
much money into a kids’ carnival,” she said quietly, slowly, finding her way word
by word.

“We were Ukrainian.

“Did you know that?

“No, of course you didn’t. I never told you anything about my life or your heritage.
I guess it’s time now.

“You’ve always wanted to know my story. So here goes.

“As a girl, I …

thought it meant “ugly”—Ukrainian—and it might as well have. It was the first of the
secrets I learned to keep.

Fitting in. Not standing out. Being Americans. This is what mattered to my parents
in the plastic, shiny world of the fifties.

You can’t understand how this could be, I’ll bet. You are a child of the seventies,
wild and free. You grew up around people who wore a whole different kind of headband.

In the fifties, girls were like dolls.

Extensions of our parents. Belongings. We were expected to be perfect, with nothing
on our minds except pleasing our parents, getting good grades, and marrying the right
boy. It’s hard to think now, in this modern world, how much it mattered that you marry
well.

We were to be nice and pliable and make cocktails and babies, but neither until after
marriage.

We lived in one of the first cul-de-sacs in Orange County. Rancho Flamingo, it was
called, a horseshoe plan of ranch-style houses set on identical lots, with green,
well-tended lawns out front. If you had
really
made it, you had a swimming pool.

Pool parties were all the rage. I remember seeing my mother’s friends clustered by
the pool, wearing bathing suits and flower-dabbed rubber swim caps, smoking and drinking
as the men drank martinis by the barbecue. They were all drunk by the time someone
finally jumped in.

Weekends were a movable feast; one tropical-themed pool party after another. The weird
thing is, I only remember watching the adults. Children were to be seen and not heard
back then.

Honestly, I never thought much about it when I was little. I blended into the woodwork.
No one paid me any mind. I was an awkward girl, with frizzy hair and thick eyebrows
that overshadowed my face. My dad used to say I looked like a Jew—he would swear when
he said it, and I had no idea why it bothered him—why
I
bothered him—but it was obvious I did. Mom told me to just stay quiet and be a good
girl.

I did.

I kept quiet, so quiet I lost the few friends I’d had in grade school. By junior high
I was an outcast, or maybe not an outcast, maybe just invisible. By then the world
was changing, but we didn’t know it. Terrible things—injustices—were happening all
around us, but we didn’t see. We looked away.
They
—black people, Hispanics, Jews—were “them,” not “us.” My parents never mentioned our
own ethnicity as they spewed their racism over cocktails. The first time I asked if
Ukrainians were like Communists, I was fourteen years old. My dad smacked me across
the face.

I ran to my mother. She was in the kitchen, standing at the avocado-green Formica
counter, wearing an apron over her pale blue housedress, smoking a cigarette as she
poured onion soup mix into a bowl of sour cream.

I was crying so hard snot was leaking into my mouth and I knew a bruise was forming
on my cheek.
Dad hit me,
I said.

She turned slowly, a cigarette in one hand and that empty soup mix packet in the other.
She stared at me through her jeweled, cat’s-eye black glasses and asked,
What did you do?

Me?
I drew in a great, gulping breath. She took a drag of her Lucky Strike in its holder
and exhaled.

That’s when I understood it was my fault. I’d done something bad. Wrong. And I’d been
punished. No matter how much I thought about it, though, I couldn’t figure out what
I’d done that was so bad.

But I knew I couldn’t tell anyone.

That was the start of me falling. I don’t know how else to describe it. And then it
got worse. In the summer, I began to change physically. I started my period (
You’re a woman now,
my mother said, handing me a pad and belt,
don’t embarrass us or get in trouble
), and my breasts developed and I lost layers of baby fat. The first time I showed
up at a pool party in an Annette Funicello two-piece, I heard Mr. Orrowan from next
door drop his martini glass. My father grabbed me by the arm so hard it felt as if
the bone snapped as he hauled me into the house and pushed me into a corner and told
me I looked like a tramp.

The way he looked at me was worse than the slap across the face. I knew he wanted
something from me, something dark and inexplicable, but I didn’t understand.

Then.

*   *   *

He came into my room one night when I was fifteen. He was drunk and smelled like cigarettes
and he hurt me. I don’t think I have to say any more about that.

Afterward, he said it was my fault for dressing like a tramp. I believed him. He was
my dad. I was used to believing him.

I tried to tell my mom—more than once—but she avoided me now, snapped at me over the
smallest things. She was constantly telling me to go to my room or go for a walk.
She couldn’t stand the sight of me. That was obvious.

After that, I tried to disappear. I buttoned my sweaters to my throat and wore no
makeup at all. I talked to no one, made no new friends, and lost the few I’d had.

My life went like that for months. My dad got drunker and angrier and meaner, and
I got quieter and more depressed and more hopeless, but I thought I was okay. You
know, handling it, until one day in class when a boy pointed at me and laughed and
everyone joined in. Or I thought they did. It felt like that scene in
Suddenly, Last Summer
where the boys turn on Liz Taylor and the guy she’s with. Ravenous and hungry and
pushing. I started screaming and crying and pulling at my hair. The classroom went
silent. I heard the quiet and looked up, horrified at what I’d done. The teacher asked
what was wrong with me and I just stared up at her until she snorted in disapproval
and sent me to the principal’s office.

Appearances. That’s what mattered to my parents. They didn’t care
why
I’d cried in class, or pulled out my own hair, just that I’d done it in public.

Twenty-one

They said the hospital was for my own good.

You’re a bad girl, Dorothy. Everyone has problems, why are you so selfish? Of course
your father loves you. Why would you say such terrible things?