Fly Away Home (2 page)

“Oh my God,” Ceil whispered. “Are you watching?”

“Watching what?” Sylvie felt the first genuine smile of the afternoon on her face. There was probably some gossip about a star whose sex tape had leaked to the Internet or who’d been photographed exiting a limo, sans panties, or maybe more news about the Academy Award–winning actress whose husband was fooling around with a tattooed white-supremacist stripper, and her best friend couldn’t wait to discuss it.

When they’d met at Barnard all those years ago, Ceil Farraday had had a Mia Farrow pixie cut and a face as round and sweet as a bowl of rice pudding. She’d arrived at the dorm with a trunk full of Fair Isle sweaters and pleated plaid skirts that she’d taken to the nearest consignment shop as soon as her parents’ station wagon had pulled onto the West Side Highway. She’d spent the hundred dollars she’d gotten to buy black leggings, black turtlenecks, a pair of fringed suede boots, a woven Mexican poncho, and an eighth of an ounce of excellent pot.

At Barnard, Ceil had been a drama major who’d spent large portions of her college career pretending to be a tree, or the wind, or the embodiment of feminine anima. (“Or maybe I’m supposed to be Eve,” she’d told Sylvie, perched on the window seat, blowing Virginia Slims smoke out into the night. “The director says he’ll let me know Monday.”)

The two of them had bonded instantly. “You’re so exotic,” Ceil had said, taking in Sylvie’s tousled dark curls, her olive-tinged-with-honey skin, her hazel eyes and prominent nose. “Does exotic mean Jewish?” Sylvie had asked, bemused, and Ceil had beamed, clapping her hands in delight. “Are you Jewish? Well, that’s excellent! Come on,” she said, dragging Sylvie toward the bottom bunk, which her mother had made up with a flowered comforter and down pillows that smelled of sachet. “Sit down and tell me all about it!”

Sylvie had given her an abbreviated version of her life story, with Ceil’s wide eyes getting wider with every revelation. “Your mom’s a judge?” she said. “Wow. My mom ran for the PTA once, and she didn’t even win.” Sylvie told her roommate that her parents had both grown up working-class, in Brooklyn, both of them the children of immigrants—her father’s family from Russia, her mother’s from the Ukraine. They’d met at Bronx Science High School, two smart, fast-talking strivers who’d spent their childhoods translating for their Yiddish-speaking parents wherever English was needed—at the bank or the post office or the department store. Both Dave and Selma had been told, since they were old enough to hear and understand, that they were destined for great things in the New World—with the implication being, of course, that their children would do even better.

Selma had gone to Barnard, then Yale, and Dave had gone to Columbia on a full scholarship, then Wharton for business school. He’d made his first million in commercial real estate by the time he turned thirty, and he and Selma had made Sylvie the year after that. Sylvie was their only child, the repository of all their hopes and dreams, which were detailed and extensive. If Selma and Dave had been expected to succeed, to go to college and then graduate school, to become professionals, then Sylvie, her parents intimated, should at least be president by her forty-fifth birthday, if she hadn’t already been named empress for life. In the apartment on West Eighty-second Street where she’d grown up, expectation was like oxygen. It filled every breath she took, every particle of the atmosphere. Sylvie could have no more announced that she didn’t want to be a lawyer than she could have told her parents that she planned on growing a second head.

“So you’re rich?” Ceil had asked, in her guileless way.

Sylvie winced. Ceil’s mother, elegant and blond in a Lilly Pulitzer shift and pearls, and her hearty blue-eyed dad, who’d worn a cotton sweater tied around his shoulders, had just left the dorm, looking as if they were on their way to lunch at the country club. The Farradays were probably still on the staircase, with Sylvie’s mother, dressed, as usual, in a black skirt, white blouse, and flats—her philosophy was that money spent on clothing was a waste, because her robes covered everything—and her father, who stood just a shade over five foot three and always had a cigar clamped between his stained teeth. Sylvie wondered what they were talking about. She suspected that Ceil’s parents didn’t socialize with many Jews, and as for Selma and Dave, Shaker Heights, Ohio, might as well have been on the moon, populated by a race of bizarre aliens who’d encourage their kids to go to football games and drive-ins instead of the library.

“We do okay,” Sylvie had said, turning toward the closet and starting to hang up her clothes.

Ceil had persisted. “Do you live in a mansion?”

“An apartment,” said Sylvie, feeling relieved, because “apartment” didn’t sound ostentatious and Ceil wouldn’t think to ask a New Yorker’s follow-up questions—what neighborhood and how many rooms and did they have views of the park?

Ceil and Sylvie roomed together for all four years of college, much to Sylvie’s parents’ unspoken but palpable dismay (they called Ceil the shiksa princess behind her back and, eventually, to her face). After graduation, Sylvie went to Yale. She found a sunny apartment on Edgewood Avenue—she and a medical student named Danielle each had a tiny bedroom, and they shared the living room with its working fireplace, the bare-bones kitchen, and the seventy-five-dollar-a-month rent, but they never bonded the way Sylvie and Ceil had, probably because both of them spent so much time in the library (and maybe because her new roommate had no sense of humor at all). Sylvie ate Sunday brunch at the Elm Street diner and took yoga classes at the Y down the street. Ceil, meanwhile, realized her New York dreams. She moved to the Village and took classes in dance and movement and voice. She never landed more than bit parts off-Broadway and had a speaking part (in reality, it was more of a grunting part) in a single laxative commercial before making the transition to marriage, motherhood, wealth, and the complacent life of a lady who lunched, shopped, and wrote large checks to laudable organizations. Still, Ceil had never lost her ability to wrest drama from the most commonplace situations. Once, she’d sent Sylvie an urgent e-mail, the memo line—MUST SPEAK TO YOU NOW—written in all capital letters. It turned out that a married actor had left his movie-star wife for the nineteen-year-old nanny—had, in fact, announced his defection on that day’s installment of
The Howard Stern Show
, to which Ceil was addicted—and Ceil felt the need to discuss this development immediately, if not sooner.

“Is it juicy?” Sylvie asked, and adjusted her phone against her cheek. She had one of those space-age headpieces that fit inside her ear, but she’d never been able to figure out how to make it work reliably, and was too embarrassed to ask her daughters or her assistant to explain it again.

There was a pause. “You don’t know?” asked Ceil.

“I’m on the New Jersey Turnpike. What’s going on?” Sylvie settled more comfortably into the seat, readying herself for the soliloquy Ceil would doubtlessly deliver about New Jersey. Ceil hated suburbs and conformity and any place where people lived that wasn’t the right neighborhoods of Paris or Manhattan, even though she, herself, was leading as white-bread a life as possible, with her ex-Cornhusker husband named Larry, her twins Dashiell and Clementine, and the granddaughter named Lincoln whom she carted to Little Mozart music class every Tuesday (the normalcy of that, she insisted, was leavened by the fact that her daughter was a lesbian, and that Suri Cruise had attended one of Lincoln’s makeup classes).

“Oh, God,” Ceil said, and from the urgency in her voice Sylvie could tell she hadn’t called to gossip. “You need to find a television set right this minute. They’re saying …”

“What?” Possibilities raced through Sylvie’s mind—another terrorist attack? A bombing, a plane crash? An assassination? Something to do with her daughters? With Lizzie? (Even in her panic, she knew that Diana would never do anything that would end up on TV, unless she was being credited with some scientific discovery or medical advance that Sylvie would have to spend the rest of her life pretending to understand.) “You’re scaring me.”

“It’s Richard,” Ceil said, her voice shaking.

Icy bands tightened around Sylvie’s heart. “Is he all right?” But even as she asked the question, she assured herself that Richard was fine. If he wasn’t, she’d have been told. Her driver, Derek, or her assistant, Clarissa, sitting ramrod-straight, with her spine hovering inches from the seat, beside him—if something was wrong, really wrong, they would have been informed by now. There were procedures in place, calls she would have gotten. Ceil started talking again, speaking rapidly in her ear.

“You know what? Don’t. Just never mind. Just come home. To my house, okay? Come straight here, and don’t watch the TV, Syl, promise me you won’t, just get here as fast as you can.”

“Ceil. Tell me.” Sylvie gulped, pushing the panic down. “You’re scaring me to death. Tell me what’s going on.”

From a hundred miles away, she heard her friend sigh. “I’m watching CNN right now, and they’re saying that Richard had an affair with one of his legislative aides. They’re saying that he went on vacation with her, to the Bahamas, and got her some cushy job in the D.C. branch of the law firm where he used to work.”

Ceil paused. Sylvie pressed her lips together, clutching the telephone in her right hand, pressing her left hand flat against her thigh. She felt as if she was in a roller coaster that had crested the steepest hill, and all the track was gone. She was in free fall. Not Richard. Not her Richard.

“Sylvie? Are you still there?” Ceil, cheerful, straightforward Ceil, who could get a whole room laughing with her reenactment of her stint as Anonymous Constipation Sufferer #3, sounded like she might have been crying. “Listen, honey, it kills me that I’m the one who has to tell you this, and I …”

“Let me call you back.” She punched the button that would end the call, and leaned forward, feeling her three waistbands—the skirt, the control-top pantyhose, and the girdle she wore beneath them—biting at her flesh vengefully, as if her outfit was trying to strangle her. “Can we find a rest stop?” she asked as the telephone burped and displayed her husband’s face. She ignored the call. There was a quaver in her voice, but, she hoped, not one obvious enough for the pair in the front seat to notice. And she’d asked politely. Sylvie was always polite. It was a reaction, she thought, to her frequently profane mother, who’d once made the papers for telling a plaintiff’s attorney that he needed to buy her dinner if he was going to treat her like he’d been doing, because she insisted on dinner before getting fucked. Sylvie had made a point of raising her own daughters, headstrong Diana and dreamy Lizzie, to be polite, to be considerate, to think of others, and to remember, always, that manners mattered. Even when Lizzie was in the throes of her drug use, Sylvie liked to think that her younger daughter had said please and thank you to her dealer.

In the front seat, a look passed between Derek and Clarissa, and in that look Sylvie saw that what her friend had told her was true … or was, at least, being reported as true. Sylvie felt a scream swelling in her throat, demanding release. Her husband. Another woman. And it was on TV. Her hands wanted to sweat, her knees demanded to quiver. She wanted to eat something: a warm chocolate-chip cookie, a strawberry malted, a square of baklava, dripping with honey, a bowl of oatmeal big enough to swim in, with melted butter pooling on top …
Calm down
, she told herself, and settled her purse in her lap.
You’re being Syllie
. That’s what Ceil said, during the rare instances when Sylvie gave in to emotion, and Ceil, drama queen Ceil, who would turn the opening of a can of soup into a ten-minute performance, complete with intermission, would tell her to calm down, to stop being Syllie.

She tapped at her assistant’s shoulder. “I really need to stop.”

Clarissa turned. Her eyes were so wide that there was white all the way around the blue-green irises. Her cheeks were flushed, and her honey-colored hair, normally smoothed into the sleekest chignon this side of the ballet barre, was sticking out in a tuft over her left ear.

“Please,” she said, speaking to Derek, telling him, in a tone that brooked no discussion, what to do and where to go.

DIANA

“Hello there,” Diana said briskly, opening the door of the exam room. The patient, a good-looking guy in his twenties, waited on the table. She looked over his chart and gave him a friendly smile. At her last evaluation, her students had given her excellent marks for her skills and her teaching, but they’d said her bedside manner needed improvement. “She scares me,” one of the little scut-monkeys had written, “and I’m not even sick!”

“Mr. Vance?” she said, making a point of using his name. “What brings you here today?”

He smiled back, his eyes intent on hers. In jeans and running shoes and a long-sleeved cotton T-shirt, he was the picture of ruddy good health, so unlike the majority of the people she saw, who usually looked wretched and exhausted from sitting for hours in the dingy, poorly lit waiting room. Usually they smelled bad, too, the hospital’s odor of antiseptic and body fluids clinging to their skin like an invisible film. But this guy, as she approached him, smelled like soap and spice and warm, male skin. “I’ve just been feeling weird lately,” he said.

“Weird?” Diana asked, setting his chart back into the plastic holder on the back of the door.

“Feverish,” he amplified. He was still smiling, his white teeth gleaming, radiating vitality. He had a head full of thick black hair, strong shoulders and long legs, an ease in his body as he sat eyeing her appreciatively, as if he could see right through the lab coat and the clothes underneath it, as if she was standing in front of him naked, or maybe just wearing her lacy black panties and bra.

“Well, let’s take a look.” She turned away, feeling like she was stepping out of a spotlight, and took a moment to collect herself as she pulled a thermometer strip out of the drawer and smoothed it over his forehead. “Unbutton your shirt, please.”

His fingers—long, capable-looking, a little bit of crisp black hair on the knuckles—moved lazily over the buttons. His eyes never left hers as he slipped the shirt over his shoulders. He was bare-chested underneath it. A mat of soft black curls, the same color as the hair on his head, covered his chest, and the smooth, tanned skin of his shoulders gleamed under the lights. Diana swallowed hard and checked the strip.

“No fever.”

He shrugged. “That’s strange. I’ve been feeling so hot lately.”

“Let’s take a listen.” She bent over his healthy, handsome body, sliding the bell of the stethoscope down his chest, listening to his heartbeat, steady and strong. She was so close that his breath rustled her hair. “Breathe in, please.” His chest rose as he did it. She slid the stethoscope over to his back. “Any other symptoms?”

“Well …” He paused, then took her wrist in his warm hand, pulling it down to the bulge at his crotch. “I’ve had this swelling.”

Her fingertips brushed the denim. She gasped, jerking her hand back, feeling her face flush. “Mr. Vance. Please! I’m a professional.”

But he was on his feet by then, his hot chest pressing against her crisp white lab coat, his arms circling her, the swelling between his legs pressed irresistibly against her belly. “Please, Doctor. You’ve got to help me.” He took her hand again, gently this time, and slipped it into the waistband of his jeans. She felt the heat of his skin, the coarse curls of his pubic hair before her fingers wrapped around the throbbing length of his erection.

“Oh, my,” she breathed.

“You see?” he whispered in her ear. “That’s not normal, is it? Do you think it’s a tumor?”

“I’m not sure,” she whispered back as he nuzzled the side of her neck, his big white teeth nipping gently at the skin. “Maybe I’d better have a look.”

“Oh, Doctor,” he sighed as she unbuttoned his fly and took his hot length in her hand. “Does my insurance cover this?”

“I’m sure we can work something out.”

She pulled his boxers down over his hips. His cock brushed the side of her face, hot and smooth and gorgeous. She rubbed her cheek against the silky skin, hearing him inhale.

“Suck it,” he groaned, his hands in her hair. Diana put her left hand on the delectable curve of his ass, cupped his balls in her right. That was when her BlackBerry started buzzing.

“Shit!”

“Don’t answer,” said Doug. “You’re on break, right?”

“I’ve got to take it.” She got to her feet, engorged and throbbing between her legs, and pulled her BlackBerry out of her pocket. But it wasn’t the front desk paging her to tell her that the food-poisoning lady needed fluids or that the guy with chest pains was crashing. Instead, a number with a 202 area code was flashing on the screen. Her heart, already pounding, seemed to pick up the pace even more. Her father knew how busy she was. He wouldn’t call her during her shift, on her cell phone, unless something major was happening.

My dad
, she mouthed. Doug nodded and rebuttoned his pants.

“I’ll see you later,” he whispered, and she waved at him, distracted. He breezed out the door—back to class, she figured. Doug was twenty-five, an intern she’d met three months ago in the very exam room they’d just been using. And she, Diana Katherine Woodruff, was a married mother of a six-year-old.
Never mind that
, she thought,
never mind that for now
, and lifted the phone to her ear.

“Dad?”

“Diana?” Her father’s voice sounded shaky.
Lizzie
, she thought, her hands clenching. A familiar, impotent fury filled her. Something had happened to her sister Lizzie again, or Lizzie had done something stupid and gotten in trouble … and Lizzie was minding her son.

“What is it?” she asked, smoothing her hair and stepping out into the hallway. “Is it Lizzie? Is Milo okay?”

“No. No, honey, Lizzie’s fine. It’s …” He paused, which was strange. Her father was a practiced public speaker who could deliver an address on everything from the don’t ask/don’t tell policy to the cash for clunkers program with hardly a pause or an “um.” “I’m going to be on the news tonight.”

This wasn’t unheard of, and it certainly didn’t merit a phone call. Usually his chief of staff would send an e-mail blast to friends, family, and key supporters (translation: big donors), telling them to set their DVRs when her dad was on the news. “Why? What’s up?”

He cleared his throat. “Need to tell you something, sweetheart.”

Diana felt nausea twist in her belly. Her father never sounded unsure of himself. Whether it was the time she’d fallen off her bike and needed stitches in her chin, or the televised address he’d given after the planes had hit the Twin Towers on 9-11, his voice was rich and resonant. He sounded reassuring, no matter what he was saying … but now he sounded almost frightened. Was he sick? Was that why he was calling her? She ran down a list of potential problems—heart disease, hypertension, enlarged prostate. Ugh. Her father cleared his throat, then kept talking.

“Last year a woman came to work in my D.C. office as a legislative aide, and we … she and I …”

Diana pushed the door to the break room open with her shoulder. It smelled, as usual, like the ghost of someone’s departed burrito, like sweat and adrenaline and, faintly, of what she’d come to think of as eau de ER—blood and urine and feces and vomit, the smell of illness and of fear.

“What?” she asked, her voice loud in the empty room. “What are you saying?”

“We had an affair. It didn’t last long, and it’s over, but I helped her get a job, and someone found out about it—about us—and it’s probably going to be in the news tonight.”

Diana slumped against a row of pale-blue-painted metal lockers with the BlackBerry pressed to her ear.

“It’s over,” her father repeated. “That’s the important thing. It didn’t last very long, and it … it was never … I wasn’t going to …”

Her thumb hovered over the button that would have ended the call. She wanted desperately to press it, to silence her father’s voice, to unlearn what he’d told her. She wanted it to be five minutes ago. She wanted to be back in the exam room, on her knees, investigating Doug Vance’s mysterious swelling.

“I wanted to tell you,” her father was saying, “before you heard it somewhere else. I’m sorry, Di. I’m sorry.” His voice cracked.

She wondered where he was calling from. His office in Washington, with its big leather chair, family photos on the desk, and a framed copy of the Bill of Rights over the bookshelves? The back of a Town Car, with a briefing binder in his lap, the day’s papers folded by his side?

Diana reached for the television remote and pointed it at the set bolted to the ceiling. It was tuned to CNN, and, as the picture came into focus, she saw her father walking somewhere—in D.C., she presumed—with his arm around the waist of a curly-haired, chubby young woman. The young woman smiled as her father bent his head, saying something in her ear that made her laugh.
Sources are reporting
, a voice coming from the set said,
that Senator Woodruff may have paid lobbyists to get his former assistant and rumored mistress, Joelle Stabinow, a job at the D.C. branch of the New York City law firm where he was once a partner
.

“You got her a job? This woman?”

“It wasn’t anything illegal.” Her father’s voice sounded calmer, more assertive. “She was qualified. She finished at the top of her class at Georgetown.”

“Excellent.” She sounded brittle, like her mother after too long on a receiving line. “Tell her congratulations from me.”

“Diana. There’s no need for that tone.”

“Oh? Do you want me to sound happy?”

“Of course not. I’m not happy about it. I really screwed up here.”

“Ya think?” But really, she wasn’t in a position to say anything. How could she condemn him, given what she’d been doing when he called? Down on her knees in front of a med student, her student, a man who was not her husband, a man she had no business touching. At least she had the sense to be discreet, to lock the door.

“It’ll pass,” her father was saying. “It’ll be a one-day story. There wasn’t any fiscal impropriety, no taxpayer dollars, no—”

She cut him off. “Did you tell Mom?”

“I’ve been trying to reach her,” he said. “She’s not picking up. Neither is Lizzie.”

Lizzie. Diana’s heart sank. Her father paused. “Do you think you can tell your sister, if I don’t reach her first? It’ll kill her to see this on the news.”

“Fine,” Diana snapped.
Here we go again
, she thought, with her in her familiar role as responsible big sister keeping little Lizzie safe from the big, bad world.

The break room door swung open and Doug Vance poked his head in. He looked at Diana, then up at the TV set, which was now showing a commercial for a weight-loss program. “Everything okay?” he whispered.

“I’ll speak to you later,” Diana said to her father. She hung up the phone, slipped it back into her pocket, and turned to her … what was Doug, exactly? Her boyfriend? Her lover? Her man on the side?

“Everything’s fine,” she said, and did her best to sound as if she believed it.

Doug gave her a puzzled look. “Catch up later?”

“I’ll text you.” That was how they communicated, by texts, like love-struck teenagers, all abbreviations and emoticons: Need 2 C U. UR MY HRT. Silly little things, and yet she cherished every letter, every emoticon. Doug moved her, in a way that no one, including her husband, ever had.

As if to confirm that unhappy truth, her telephone spasmed in her pocket. She lifted the phone to her ear. “Hi, honey.”

“Diana?” asked Gary, whose voice was low and rattly, due to his extensive allergies and the hay fever he seemed to have for ten months out of the year. He sniffled, cleared his throat, and said, “Um, did you hear about …”

“I saw.”

Gary paused, fumbling for the words. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine.” She crossed the room and opened her locker. There were her running shoes, a pair of shorts, a sports bra, and a ripe T-shirt that she’d shucked off after a lunchtime five-miler two days before. It would do. She tucked the phone under her chin and started unbuttoning her lab coat. “I’m fine,” she repeated. “Why wouldn’t I be? I didn’t do anything wrong.”

“Well, right,” Gary stammered. A great stammerer was her Gary. “I mean, of course not. But it’s just …”

“It’s a shock.” She shoved her feet into the sneakers, then bent and gave the laces a hard yank. “It’s appalling.”

“It’s a surprise,” said Gary. “I thought your dad was one of the good guys.” Gary sounded as if he was on the verge of tears. No surprise there. Of the two of them, Gary had always been the crier. He’d cried at their wedding and when Milo was born, both occasions during which Diana had remained dry-eyed (although, to be fair, during the birth she’d also been heavily drugged). Gary, she’d thought more and more frequently as the years went by, was more of a girl than she was.

“Listen,” he was saying, as Diana pulled the running bra over her head. “I know we were supposed to go out tonight …”

“And we should,” she said, grimacing as the fragrant T-shirt settled over her shoulders.

“Are you sure? We can reschedule.”

She shook her head. This was typical Gary, looking for any excuse to stay home on the couch. “We can’t reschedule. We’ve already rescheduled twice, and the gift certificate expires next week.” They’d won the dinner at Milo’s school auction last year. She’d bid for it, paying too much money and not caring—it was for charity, and Gary would never take her anywhere fancy without some prepaid prompting.

His voice was very small. “You don’t think people will stare?”

“Let them stare.” She banged her locker shut. “I have to go.”

“I’ll see you at the restaurant,” he said before she ended the call. Instantly, her telephone started buzzing again. She reopened the locker, threw the phone into her purse, retrieved her iPod, slammed the locker shut again, and walked swiftly past the receptionist on duty, a pale, pie-faced thing named Ashley.

“I’m taking my break,” she announced; Ashley cringed and nodded and started to say something before Diana cut her off.

“I need you to call my sister,” she said. “Lizzie Woodruff. Her number’s on my contact sheet. I’ll be back in forty-five minutes. Please ask her to meet me here.”