Fly Away Home (21 page)

For a minute, Lizzie wasn’t sure what he meant. Once she realized, she started to tell him no, when the voice, the one she’d heard while looking in the mirror at Diana’s house, asked,
How long has it been?

She thought back. How many weeks had it been since she’d bought, or, more likely, borrowed Diana’s napkins and tampons? Rehab was a blur, Philadelphia wasn’t much better, and her periods had never been regular, which made it hard to keep track. Had she gotten her period at all this summer? And if not …

Her father was staring at her. “Lizzie?”

“Don’t worry,” she mumbled, through lips that felt frozen. “I can take care of it myself.”

DIANA

When she was in the thick of her residency, working thirty-six-hour shifts, then going home to a preschooler and a husband who was more inclined to complain about his own lack of sleep than to help Diana address hers, there was a patient, a repeater, whom she saw every few weeks in the ER. The patient’s name was Crystal, and Diana remembered her because she was exactly her age.

Crystal was a diabetic and an addict. Her drug of choice was crystal meth—Diana had occasionally wondered whether Crystal was actually her name or if she’d renamed herself after her favorite substance—but she’d take whatever she could get, or steal, or trade sex for. Heroin, cocaine, pills, pot, glue … every few months too much of one or all of the above would send her to the ER, stuporous, her blood sugar dangerously low. She’d shoot up, nod off, forget to eat, never mind monitoring her blood sugar, and she’d pass out, sometimes in an apartment and sometimes in a park or on a street. The cops knew her places. They’d keep an eye out, and if they found her, they’d scoop her up and bring her in.

On her first visit, Diana had mentioned rehab. Crystal had just laughed. “Forget it,” she said, her voice rough and slurred. She’d chipped one of her front teeth during the prelude to this last trip to the hospital, but she was still beautiful, with high cheekbones and lush lips. “You don’t think I’ve tried?” She shook her head, presumably in sorrow at Diana’s naivete. “And what is there for me, if I clean up? Some job?” Her voice soaked the last word in scorn. “Some man who’s gonna make an honest woman of me? Or do you think I’d go to college like you?”

“Maybe you could,” Diana answered. She was at the end of an eight-to-eight shift, so exhausted that the world had blurred and doubled in front of her eyes. She told herself that all she really wanted to do was get enough glucose into her patient that she’d stabilize, sober up, and be able to make her way to wherever she called home. “I don’t know what you could do. But I know it’s not going to end well if you keep doing drugs.”

Crystal threw her head back and laughed, “Be seeing you,” and waved a jaunty goodbye when Diana left her cubicle.

The next time Diana saw her, she’d been beaten badly, one of those high cheekbones shattered, a tooth knocked out, her lip split and requiring stitches. She wouldn’t say who’d done it, or why, and when Diana wheeled up on a stool and said that her internal had shown recent sexual activity and asked, gently, if she’d been raped, Crystal had merely shrugged and turned her face away.

“We could do a rape kit,” Diana offered, feeling sick and sad, knowing that it was her job to make the offer and knowing, even before she’d made it, that Crystal would refuse. She’d shaken her bandaged head, braids whispering against the pillow.

“Now what good’s that gonna do?” she asked. “I don’t know who I was with. How we gonna catch ’em?”

“The police,” Diana began, and Crystal hooted her rough laughter.

“I bet they’d make me a real priority,” she said, and shook her head some more. “They’d get those detectives working in shifts.”

The last time Diana had seen Crystal, there was a scar bisecting her lip, and a puffy mass of scar tissue over the healed cheekbone. She wore thigh-high boots, a hot-pink miniskirt, and a white lace top, underneath which her belly bulged like a basketball.

Instead of using a curtained-off exam cubicle, Diana took Crystal into the break room, pointed at a chair, and closed the door behind them. “Now you listen to me,” she said as Crystal looked at her with insolent eyes. “If you can’t get cleaned up for yourself, you need to do it for your baby. If that baby’s born addicted, I’m going to have to report it to social services …” At this, Crystal sucked her lips. “They are going to take your baby away,” Diana said, naming the worst thing that she could think of. “Do you hear me? Do you understand? They’ll take your baby.”

“You think I want this damn baby?” Crystal shot back.

“Yeah, I guess you do, since you’re still carrying it,” said Diana.

“You don’t know anything,” Crystal said with great finality. “Not anything about anything.”

“I know they’re going to take your baby,” Diana said again, and Crystal, laughing, slid around Diana and out the door, shouting across the room to the nurses’ station that somebody better find her a damn doctor who could help her, a real doctor, not this worthless white bitch.

Diana hadn’t been able to fathom it. Addiction had never made sense to her—not Lizzie’s, not Crystal’s, not the movie stars whose troubles she’d read about in the tabloids when she was getting her hair done; not the food addicts or the sex addicts, not any of it. How could a woman, a mother, continue to get high when her own child was at stake? What feeling could be so compelling that you’d risk your son or daughter to pursue it?

But now, at thirty, she had learned a shameful truth—that there were things in life you were simply powerless to say no to. For some people—her sister, she supposed—that thing was a substance, liquor or powder or pills. For Diana, it was Doug. He was the thing she was unable to resist or give up, even though she knew it was wrong, even though he knew she was married, even though he was her student, even though she was risking everything to be with him, she couldn’t stop or tell him no.

They did it in her office. They did it in a locked exam room with two of his fellow interns chatting not ten feet away. They did it in the backseat of the Civic, which Doug would park in the farthest corner of the lowest level of a parking garage on Broad Street. They did it in the handicapped stall of the women’s restroom at the Prince Theater. They did it—God help them—in a cemetery in Strawberry Mansion one hot afternoon, Diana leaning back on a tombstone, with her skirt hiked up around her waist, her panties (black lace ones she’d bought for thirty-eight dollars, which was more than she’d ever spent on underwear in her life) down around her ankles, and Doug kneeling in front of her, licking between her legs until she gasped and pleaded with him to stop.

In bed, sweaty and glowing, Doug would trace the line of her deltoids, her quads, her calves, licking the tender skin underneath her ear, whispering, “I love that you’re so strong.”

“I love you,” she’d whisper too softly for him to hear, while inwardly thinking,
This is the last time. After this, no more. Tomorrow, I’ll tell him goodbye
.

But that was a promise she’d been making to herself on a regular basis—say, every morning. Shaving her legs, blow-drying her hair, loading Milo’s lunch into his backpack for computer camp while Gary readied himself for the day, leaving a trail of wet towels, whiskers, and dirty dishes in his wake, she would list the things that she could lose: her marriage, her job, possibly even Milo. She could imagine Gary, tall and formidable in a suit and tie, standing in a courtroom, making his case for custody:
Your Honor, this woman carried on a flagrant affair with a younger man: a med student. Her student. What kind of mother does that?

What kind of mother
, Diana would ask herself, and promise that she’d stop. At the bus stop, waiting with Milo, she’d chat about the weather and the homework assignments and set up playdates with the other moms, some of them in business suits, others in workout wear, all of them ready to begin blameless days that would not involve torrid sex with a twenty-five-year-old in the backseat of said twenty-five-year-old’s mother’s car. Sick with guilt, she’d talk to them, her face a smiling mask as she voiced expected complaints about the school’s tuition and the bus driver’s habitual tardiness, while in her head she’d be promising to change. She’d take up hot-room yoga or Pilates, like Samantha Dennis, who came to the corner every morning in Lycra tights and a hot-pink sports bra that barely restrained her implants. Or maybe she’d quit medicine, pick up an MBA, and go for the big bucks like Lisa Kelleher, who did something with the stock market, and wore a Rolex as big as the Ritz. Diana could make a different life, a better life, a life that did not involve breaking her vows and betraying her husband and sentencing her son to a Wednesday-night-and-Saturday-afternoon father. Her whole life had been scheduled and correct—college and med school and marriage and motherhood, the house, the car, the career. Now she was off the map, off the grid, behaving like someone she didn’t recognize and of whom she would not approve.

Her resolve to give him up would last her until ten o’clock. That was usually when Doug would find a moment to text her. She’d be in one of the exam areas, scribbling down a history, taking a woman’s blood pressure or listening to a man’s lungs, when her BlackBerry would tremble in her pocket. She’d pull it out and read the words
HI PRETTY
, and she would melt, her pulse quickening, feeling hot and liquid between her legs. Had anyone ever called her “pretty”? The most Gary ever managed was a “you look nice.” By the time Doug texted
can I c u?
her mind would be churning with possibilities. Her office? His car? A room at the Society Hill Sheraton, where the clerks always seemed to be smirking at her when she checked in under the name Becky Sharpe and slid cash across the counter?

Once they went to his apartment. Doug and three other students rented a place on Tasker Street in a neighborhood poised on the border between seedy and hip. That afternoon, after he’d texted
come 2 me
, Diana pulled her raincoat’s hood over her hair, even though it was barely drizzling, and raced over and up two flights to his place. He opened the door and she threw herself into his arms, and, together, they tumbled through the living room (she caught glimpses of the expected beer bottles, and absurdly gigantic TV on the way) and onto Doug’s bed, breathing hard, so turned on that she could barely take time to do more than pull down her pants. They’d done it fast first, just to take the edge off, and then Doug had undressed her, slowly, sliding off sleeves and straps, nipping at her shoulders, the curve of her elbow, the small of her back, lavishing kisses over every inch of skin he touched. He hadn’t shaved, hadn’t brushed his teeth, either, but Diana found the prickles of his beard against her skin, the slightly sour taste of his mouth, unbelievably arousing. She was so wet, she could feel the insides of her thighs getting slippery with it, so hot she couldn’t keep from touching herself, her fingers gliding between her legs as Doug slid just the tip of his cock into her mouth, then pulled it out.

“Get on the bed,” he said. It wasn’t a request. Diana lay back on his rumpled sheets, spreading her legs as wide as she could.

“Please,” she whispered.

“What?” he asked, his voice rough. “Tell me. Tell me what you need.”

Diana could hardly believe the words coming from her mouth. She’d never been so aroused in her life, not with Hal, not with anyone. “Please fuck me, please fuck me, I need it so bad …”

“You want it?” he grunted, kneeling between her parted thighs, one hand sliding slowly up and down his cock.

Well, I think I made that clear
, she thought … but the part of her brain that was thinking that, the part of her brain that still could think at all was a small part indeed. Doug placed his other hand between Diana’s legs, slipping in one finger, then two, then three. “Please,” she panted, raising her hips higher, rocking them back and forth, trying to get him to push harder, more deeply. “Oh. God. Please.”

He pulled out his hand and slid his cock inside her. She made a high, whinnying sound and wrapped her legs around his waist, tilting her hips, squeezing her eyes shut, thinking that nothing mattered, nothing in the whole world mattered as much as this.

Twenty minutes later, she’d turned her panties back right-side-in, buttoned her skirt with trembling hands, and stood at the door, her mouth welded to Doug’s. “Tonight?” he whispered when they finally stopped kissing. She nodded. “You’re gorgeous,” he said, tucking a lock of her hair behind her ear. She clung to him, unable to speak, practically unable to move, until he put his hands on her shoulders and turned her toward the street.

She spent every day in a fever, trembling and dry-mouthed as she went through the motions of normal life. She’d tend to her patients and her charting, sit through Wednesday meetings about how to handle a potential flu vaccine shortage and a looming nurses’ strike with her thighs clamped together and her favorite scenes playing in her head. After work, she would push her cart through the grocery store, watching her hands pick up apples and milk and organic chicken as if she’d never seen such items, or even her hands, before. At home as she would unload the bags, restock the refrigerator, do the laundry, make the beds, and cut up apples for her son, she’d be overcome by a memory of Doug: she’d imagine the taste of his skin, the way he groaned “oh, baby,” when she curled between his legs and took his cock in her mouth, the way he looked, kneeling above her, stroking himself, saying, “You want it?” looking down at her as if she was the most gorgeous, the most precious and desirable thing he’d ever seen. She was strong—Doug often praised her body, the muscles of her legs, the grace with which she moved—but he was stronger, she thought, both physically and emotionally. He was the one making the decisions, telling her when they’d meet, and where. When they were in bed together, he’d move her as if she were as dainty as a doll, and it felt good to her, so good she could barely believe it, and could not imagine living without it, to have the man be the strong one.

Doug knew that she was married—she’d blurted out that information, teary and breathless, after their first night in the backseat. “So what’s your husband like?” Doug had asked. Diana had thought about how to answer that, about what anecdote or example she could give that would sum up the ways Gary had disappointed her. Finally, she came up with, “His fantasy football team is called Double Penetration.” Doug had laughed, and she’d hit him playfully on his chest. “It’s funny! I’m sorry,” Doug had protested, so she’d never bothered mentioning that when Gary commented on YouTube videos, his screen name was ItBurnsWhenIPee, because, probably, he would have laughed at that, too, and she’d never told him about Milo at all.