Fly Away Home (20 page)

She nodded, feeling relief as sweet as the rush of a drug hitting her bloodstream. She could be useful again. She could help. “Let me clean up in here,” she said. “Maybe you can go take a shower, and then we’ll figure out what to do next.”

He nodded—not the single firm up-and-down that she was used to, but a little boy’s rapid head-bob. Again she glimpsed that eagerness, a gratitude that struck her as more than a little pathetic, which was never a word she could have even imagined applying to her father. He’d always been the strong one, decisive, in command, in his suit and cologne, looking and smelling the part of the head of the house and a leader of men. And now … she watched him shuffle down the hall, his bald spot gleaming, picking at the drooping seat of his sweatpants, and felt an enveloping sadness as she saw, for the first time in her life, her father looking old.

She dropped her clothes in the bedroom she’d once shared with Diana, locating trash bags underneath the kitchen sink and filling four of them with old newspapers and magazines (if her father hadn’t read them, she reasoned, he could find the articles he needed online), the pizza boxes and grease-stained paper plates and paper napkins that littered the kitchen table and the coffee table, the soda cans and beer bottles and bottles of Smart-water.

By the time her father returned to his office, still barefoot but in a clean Columbia T-shirt and jeans, Lizzie had restored the room to order and was wiping the screen of the sat-upon laptop with a square of paper towel she’d squirted with Windex.

“Oh,” said her father, watching her. “So that’s how you clean it off.”

“I think so,” said Lizzie. Her father had always had her mother to clean up after him, and Lizzie had spent much of what should have been her adulthood in a fog. On drugs, you didn’t care much about clean clothes or hot meals, and in rehab, they’d been provided. A snatch of something she’d read during her first, aborted trip through college popped into her head:
faithful Penelope, always spinning
. Substitute
cleaning
and
shopping
and
straightening up
for
spinning
, and you had Sylvie Woodruff.

You can do this
, she reminded herself. “Are you hungry?” she asked.

“A little, I guess,” he said.

“I’ll make us something,” she said.

In the kitchen, Lizzie pulled on a pair of rubber gloves and attacked the refrigerator, where the vegetables her mother must have purchased before she’d left were liquefying in the crisper bin, and there were dozens of half-eaten containers of hardened pad thai noodles and General Tso’s chicken. When she was through, all that was left in the fridge was a crumpled half-loaf of bread, a tub of butter, a wilted cucumber, and some lox. The vegetable crisper was empty, and the cold-cut drawers were both full of beer.

That wasn’t promising. Lizzie located a can of chicken noodle soup and heated it up, and toasted four slices of the bread. She set the table and served her father, then poured herself soup in a mug from the teacher’s union—they’d endorsed her dad—and sat down to eat with him.

“So,” he said, and tried to smile. “You’re home early.”

“Milo decided to do computer camp after all,” she said, leaving out, for the time being, the conditions under which Milo had made this decision. She rested her toes on the frayed wicker bottom of the chair where her mother always sat and asked, “How are you doing?”

He pushed his spoon through his bowl. “I’m ashamed of myself. I love your mother. I love you girls. I never meant to do anything to jeopardize that.”

“Then why?” she asked.

He stared at his soup as if he was going to find the answer spelled out in the noodles.

“I don’t know if I have an answer for you.”

“She wasn’t even that pretty!” The words burst out of her mouth.

A ghost of a smile lifted the corners of her dad’s lips. “You would have liked her,” he said. “Under different circumstances.”

Lizzie shook her head. She’d heard enough about the woman—the good schools, the law degree—to know that she’d have nothing in common with her father’s ladyfriend.

Her father dropped his head, the smile gone. “She reminded me of …” His voice trailed off. “It doesn’t matter.”

She wondered how much any woman mattered to any man, whether they were all disposable. But Jeff hadn’t treated her as if she were a take-and-toss girl, she thought, feeling shyly proud. Jeff had acted as if she’d mattered. Of course, she assumed that would change as soon as he heard about what she’d done and why she’d left. She remembered the way he’d looked, the way his lips had tightened when he’d talked about his mother, and imagined he’d feel a similar disdain toward her.

“It wasn’t about her.” Now her dad was practically groaning, rubbing at his eyes with the heels of his hands. “She made me feel … important.”

“Is it over?” Lizzie asked, and again, he nodded.

“It was never going to last. It was never about your mom and me. It was just …” He raised his hands, palms up, then let them fall to the table.

“Did you do this before?”

His answer came immediately. “No. Never.”

“So why?” she asked. “I thought you and mom loved each other!”

“We do, Lizzie. Of course we do. We love each other, we love you girls. It was just …”

Meaningless
, Lizzie imagined him saying. She lifted a spoonful of noodles and broth, then set it back in the bowl, untasted.
Just some girl
. It was, perhaps, the same reason a man would attempt any number of stupid, dangerous undertakings: because it was there. Because he could. Because he saw something and wanted it, and was used to getting everything he wanted. She remembered accompanying Diana and Milo to Nuts to You, the candy and dried fruit store on Walnut Street in Philadelphia, when Milo was a little guy, three or maybe four. Diana had been after flaxseed to put in her morning oatmeal, but as soon as Milo saw the bins and bags and boxes crammed with every manner of treat, he’d started grabbing at everything he saw. Licorice ropes, chocolate-covered macadamia nuts, raspberry jelly rings, foil-wrapped kisses, pillowy marshmallows, lollipops, taffy, gum-drops, wrapped hard candies.
I want! I want! I want!
he’d wailed, until Lizzie had gotten him out of the door. If you were a man like her father, the world was a kind of candy store, where anything you wanted was yours for the asking.

“Your mother and I,” her father began. She looked at him—his pallor, the slack flesh of his cheeks, a streak of stubble on his chin that he’d missed while shaving—and braced herself, praying that he wasn’t going to launch into some confession about their sex life. But instead of talking about how they didn’t sleep together anymore, or how Sylvie was frigid or he was impotent with any woman who didn’t dress up in black vinyl or a Smurf costume, her father said, “We’ve known each other a very long time. With … with her, it was a little like being young again. Before …” Before kids? she wondered. Before her? But instead, her father said, “Before anything went wrong.”

She wondered what he was talking about. Was she the thing that had gone wrong, or was there something else, something she didn’t know about and couldn’t guess?

Her father got up from the table, taking his bowl with him. “I’m going to take a nap. I haven’t been sleeping too well these days.” She sat at the table, in front of her soup. Behind her, she could hear the water running, hear the click of a bottle cap landing on the granite counter and the glug-glug noise of beer being poured into a glass. Beer had never been her thing, but her father still wouldn’t drink one in front of her, which was a little insulting but kind of sweet, too.

She washed their dishes and put them in the dishwasher and thought. What would happen for Thanksgiving? They had all these traditions: dinner at Grandma Selma’s, which tasted awful but was, at least, traditional. They’d go to Chinatown Friday night, and out to a Broadway show afterward, and walk around Rockefeller Center on Saturday, looking in the shop windows, having tea at Takashimaya. On Saturday, Marta would come over, bundled in a down coat and a fur-trimmed hat, and she and the girls would always spend Saturday afternoon baking Christmas cookies, tray after tray of pfeffernussen and gingerbread men. Lizzie would have her camera, and she’d snap candid black-and-white shots of them in the kitchen, shots of the Christmas tree and the ice-skating, the turtles and the sea lions in the Central Park Zoo, and, sometimes, homeless men on grates, even though it made Diana roll her eyes and her mother look worried. One of her counselors in Minnesota—the same one, now that she thought about it, who’d said that both of her parents owned the decisions they’d made with regard to Lizzie—said maybe her picture-taking was a distancing strategy. “If you’re taking pictures, it takes you out of the story,” she’d said. “It turns you into an observer instead of a participant.” Lizzie had disagreed. She thought her camera gave her something to do, a role to fill: the family historian, which was a lot better than being the family disgrace. But now she wondered whether there was something to it, whether having a lens between herself and her family, their apartment, their world, wasn’t her unconscious way of keeping herself apart from them, and safe.

Lizzie kicked the dishwasher shut, the way Diana did, and decided not to worry about November now. For now, there was the empty refrigerator to contend with. She’d make a shopping list, ask her father for a credit card. After her summer with Milo, she could cook some basic stuff: organic chicken broth with noodles and cut-up bits of carrot, organic chicken nuggets and sweet-potato fries, oatmeal and fresh fruit.

“Hey, Dad,” she called. “What’s up with the laundry?”

He came into the kitchen, looking embarrassed. “That’s been kind of piling up.”

Kind of piling up
turned out to be a sorry understatement. The wicker hamper in the master bedroom was overflowing with gamy sweatpants, socks, ripe-smelling T-shirts, button-down shirts and ties spotted with sauces, inside-out suit pants with boxer shorts still inside them … one pair of pants even had a shoe stuck in one of the legs. He stared at the pile helplessly. “I guess usually your mom takes care of this. Or gets someone to come in for August to help.”

Lizzie pulled two pillowcases off the pillows on the bed and began sorting the laundry into piles of machine-washables and dry clean only. She sat cross-legged on the bed with her back against the headboard and her father standing beside her, holding up items for her inspection.

“So,” her dad asked, when they were about halfway through the mountain of soiled clothes, “heard from your mom much?”

“A little bit,” she said carefully.

“I worry about her,” Richard said. “Up in that big house all by herself.”

“You should go up there and tell her you’re sorry,” Lizzie counseled … and wasn’t this rich? Her, giving advice to an actual grown-up, her dad, a senator. She wished, for a minute, that Diana could be there to bear witness … but Diana thought she was still the same irresponsible junkie, and that she’d put Milo in danger.

From the living room, the telephone trilled. “Lemme grab that,” her father said. From the way he hurried to pick up the phone she guessed he hoped it was Sylvie. Lizzie gathered the laundry in her arms. Normally she’d use the machines in the apartment, but there was so much of it she thought maybe she should just take it to the wash-and-fold place around the corner. She’d drop off the dirty clothes and buy the things she’d cooked at Diana’s house. That, at least, would be a start.

For three weeks, Lizzie took over her mother’s duties, shopping and straightening, cooking simple meals, extracting her father’s schedule from his Outlook Express, printing it out each morning and leaving it in a folder on the kitchen counter. She went to a meeting first thing in the morning, then collected the daily briefing binder that Joe Eido dropped off each morning and made sure her father read it. She kept track of his phone calls and appointments, his meetings with lobbyists and staffers, and kept the reporters who still occasionally called the house phone at bay. “I’m sorry,” she would say in a coolly adult voice that sounded like her sister’s, “the senator is unavailable.” When she wasn’t cleaning and cooking, she noodled around, editing the pictures she’d taken in Philadelphia. There was Milo, grinning and bare-chested in a spray of rainbow-sparkling droplets, after she’d coaxed him into going down the waterslide at Dutch Wonderland, and Milo riding the carousel at Franklin Square, standing on tiptoe in the wooden horse’s stirrups, stretching one arm up to grab the brass ring while Jeff stood behind him. She put together a booklet of her best shots, had it printed on heavy, high-gloss paper, and sent a copy to Diana in Philadelphia. No note, but she thought her sister would know it was a peace offering. At night she talked briefly to her mother, and at length to Jeff. “Miss you,” he said. “When are you coming back here?”

“Soon,” she said, lying on her childhood bed with her camera balanced on her chest, feeling peaceful at the sound of his voice in her ear, and proud of the way she was helping her father. “I miss you, too, but right now, my dad really needs me.”

At the start of the third week, with her father packing to start the congressional session, he called her into the office, sounding excited.

“Look what I found!” he said. Instead of using the sat-upon laptop, he had the desktop computer up and humming—a feat in itself, given that he was practically computer-illiterate—and he was pointing at something on the screen. Lizzie slipped beside him and looked at the “Welcome!” banner for FreshDirect. “Her whole shopping list is on here!” her father crowed, thumping at the keyboard and getting several “error” messages before, indeed, Sylvie’s grocery list appeared. “All we have to do is point and click, and everything she got every week is just going to show up at our door.”

They scanned through the list, murmuring items out loud: cheeses and crackers; cranberry juice; green grapes, one pound; fabric softener sheets and Tide detergent. With the arrow hovering over the “health and beauty” button, her father cleared his throat. “Do you need any, um, feminine things?”