Fly Away Home (23 page)

“Whatever it is, you can tell me sitting down,” he said, patting the cushion again, but Lizzie knew better. Start on the couch, and end up in the bed. She took a deep breath, trying to still her jittery body … but when she opened her mouth she found that she could barely speak. All her good intentions had evaporated; all her words were gone.

He was staring at her. “What is it?” he asked again.

“I’m …” She swallowed hard, then said, “I’m an addict.”

Jeff’s face was as shocked as if she’d slapped him. “What?”

Lizzie bent her head, not wanting to see the way his eyes had widened and his mouth had dropped open. “I was in rehab this spring, before I started working for Diana.”

“So you’re okay now?” Before she could answer, he gave an unhappy laugh. “Never mind. Stupid question. If I told you how many times I heard my mom …” He pressed his lips together hard.

“Heard her what?” Lizzie whispered. Jeff got to his feet and walked to the window.

“Heard her say that she was fine. That she was done drinking forever. Forever was usually a couple of months. Then it would all start again.”

She was gripping the straps of her bag so hard that her knuckles were white. “I’m so sorry,” she whispered. “I should have told you.”

Jeff exhaled, shoving his hands in his pockets and finally turning toward her. “No. It’s … I mean, you were going to tell me eventually, right?”

“Of course,” said Lizzie, who actually wasn’t sure. She’d never thought in terms of
eventually
. She’d never had a guy hang around that long.

He turned to look at her. “So are you okay? Do you think … ?” His voice trailed off. He stared at her hopefully and she knew, looking at his open face, that she couldn’t go through with it, couldn’t tell him the rest of it. He’d had a drunk for a mother, and she had failed him, that was clear. How could Lizzie tell him she was pregnant, pregnant and, in Jeff’s mind, getting ready to start the same sad dance over again?

“I think I’m okay,” she said. “I think I’m actually done with it. I think I’m going to be fine.”

“Yeah?” Everything about him—the look on his face, the tone of his voice, the way his body had turned toward her—said that he wanted to believe it.
Time to go
, Lizzie thought.
Time to go before I tell him everything and break his heart
.

“What time is it?” she asked.

Jeff looked puzzled. “Five-thirty.”

“Oh my God! I totally forgot! I told Diana I’d pick Milo up after his chess club …” She slung her bag over her shoulder. “I’ve got to run.”

“Wait,” he said. “Hang on. You just got here! What about dinner?”

“I’ll come back,” she said.

He still looked puzzled as he held the door open for her. “I’ll walk you down.”

“No, no, I’ll be fine. I can just grab a cab on Walnut Street.” Poor Jeff looked astonished as he gestured toward the kitchen. “I can keep everything warm.”

Lizzie felt her insides cramp. No boy had ever cooked dinner for her before. The guys she’d been with, she felt lucky if they had a few bucks for a slice of pizza. “I’ll come right back,” she promised … and then she stepped forward, stood on her tiptoes, and kissed his cheek, choking back a sob because she knew it would be the last time she touched him, the last time she was in these rooms, the last time she saw him. “You’re a good guy,” she whispered.
Find someone else
, she thought.
Be happy. You deserve it
.

“Thanks,” he said … and then, before he could say anything else, she slipped past him, out the door.

•   •   •

Outside, it had started to drizzle. Rain spattered against her cheeks, mixing with her tears, and her sister still wasn’t answering the phone.
Perfect
, she thought. Just perfect.

She knew she should go to a meeting. There was one at six o’clock, in the church on Walnut Street. Attending a meeting was the absolute most important thing, protecting her sobriety, there was the ticket, because if she started making bad decisions it would be like dominoes falling, one after another after another until she was worse off than she’d been before her parents exiled her to Minnesota. Go to a meeting … but first, she wanted dinner. In spite of what had happened in Jeff’s apartment, in spite of her sorrow, Lizzie was starving. It didn’t make sense. Or maybe it made perfect sense. Maybe it was because of the baby.

The baby
. She thought of the words, then said them out loud. “The baby.” The woman walking along the sidewalk next to Lizzie turned sideways and gave her a strange look. Lizzie shut her mouth. An actual baby, growing inside her. What a concept.

She walked through the rain, toward Diana’s house, passing a sushi restaurant. Sushi sounded good, but she remembered reading somewhere that pregnant women weren’t supposed to eat raw fish. Better to play it safe. The poor thing already had the deck stacked against it.

Burritos
, read a sign that glowed orange in the drizzly twilight. She could do a burrito. She’d get one with chicken, with black beans and extra cheese and guacamole, and a big soda (was soda okay for pregnant ladies? Was there an app that could tell her?), and a brownie for dessert if they had brownies, and if they didn’t she’d go find a place that did.

Ten minutes later, with a warm sack of food under her arm and her flip-flops squishy from the rain, Lizzie trotted down the sidewalk. Her sister’s house was two blocks away and Lizzie still had her key. She only hoped that Diana and Gary hadn’t been so disgusted with her that they’d changed the locks.

The rain was coming down steadily, and Lizzie was shivering, with her skirt pasted to her legs, as she pushed Diana’s front door open. “Hello?” Lizzie called. “Diana? Milo? Anyone home?”

From the sound of it, nobody was. A BlackBerry—her sister’s?—was plugged in and blinking on the little table by the front door. But the living room and kitchen were empty, the lights off. Gary’s laptop was shuttered on the coffee table. The TV set was dark, the room was quiet and still.

Lizzie crept upstairs. If no one was home she’d just go up to the guest room on the third floor, have her dinner, and then take a little nap. Maybe she’d sleep straight through until morning without anyone even knowing she was there, and slip out when they’d all left for school and work. She was edging past the master bedroom on the second floor when she heard giggling, and then a deep, male voice, a voice that definitely did not belong to Gary, say, “Open your mouth. Do it now.”

Lizzie froze. Oh, God. What if Diana was being raped? Except she’d been giggling, so maybe not. Except what if the rapist had told her to giggle, to act as if she was enjoying it, and Diana was, at this very moment, lying on the bed with a knife at her throat and some stranger doing horrible things to her?

Lizzie held her breath as her sister’s voice rose in a croon that could have been pained or ecstatic. “Oh, God,” Diana groaned. “Oh, God. Oh, God.”

“You like that?” The man’s voice was gloating, taunting. “Tell me you like it.”

Pained, Lizzie decided. And what if the guy had Milo and Gary tied up somewhere? What if they were in the house, Diana’s husband and her seven-year-old son, being forced to listen to this? The resounding smack of a slap made up her mind. She groped in her bag for a weapon. Finding only her burrito, she snatched the first thing she saw, which was an iron statue of the Buddha that Diana and Gary had gotten for their wedding from one of Gary’s fraternity brothers who’d just returned from some kind of vision quest trip to Tibet. Diana had been completely nonplussed. Opening the box during the morning-after brunch, she’d scowled at the plump, cross-legged Buddha and said, “I don’t think this was on the registry.” “Lighten up, Diana,” said Gary, who’d been hung over, and Diana had set the statue aside with a prissy little wince, mouthing
Get rid of it
to Lizzie, who instead had reboxed the Buddha and set it in a prime spot on the bookshelf when she and her mother were back at Diana and Gary’s house unloading gifts.

Clutching the Buddha in her right hand, Lizzie grasped the doorknob with her left and threw the bedroom door open. There was her sister, naked, with her hands tied at the wrist with silk scarves to the bedposts and a man kneeling above her with his penis sandwiched between her breasts.

“Get out!” Diana shrieked, and wriggled sideways, forgetting that her hands were tied. The Buddha that Lizzie had meant to hurl as hard as she could thudded onto the comforter and bounced against her sister’s hip. Diana hissed in pain as the man jumped off her and scrambled into his pants.

“Diana?” Lizzie said. Oh, God, this was horrible. Just horrible. She averted her eyes, but not before she noticed a livid hickey on the side of her sister’s breast. Diana’s hair was tangled, her pupils enormous, as if she’d been drugged. Maybe she had been drugged. Lizzie didn’t know where to look or what to do. Untie Diana? Call the cops? Brain the guy with the Buddha?

“Lizzie, get out of here,” Diana ordered.

“It’s okay,” Lizzie said bravely, figuring that Diana didn’t want to be seen in this state. Keeping her eyes on the man as he struggled with his zipper, she flipped the covers up over her sister’s torso. “Don’t worry. I’ll call the cops—”

“No!” said Diana and the guy, at the same time. Lizzie looked across the bed, where the guy had gotten his pants up and a button-down blue cotton shirt on. There was a nametag clipped to his shirt pocket.
DOUG VANCE
. What kind of idiot rapes a woman with his nametag on, Lizzie thought confusedly, before the guy started talking.

“It’s okay,” he said. His fingers flew over the row of shirt buttons. He had dark hair, flushed, ruddy skin, and the blocky build of a football player. “Diana and I know each other.”

“You …” Lizzie stared at Doug Vance, then at her sister, still tied to the bed. Diana squeezed her eyes shut and rolled sideways, as far as the scarves around her wrists would let her.

“Could you excuse us for a minute?” Diana said.

Lizzie grabbed the Buddha off the bed and stepped outside the bedroom door. A few minutes later, her sister emerged, with her hair combed and her clothes on.

“Let’s talk in the living room.” There was a strange, pleading note in her voice. Lizzie followed Diana downstairs, where her sister, who rarely touched her, grabbed her hands. “You can’t tell Gary,” she blurted. “Please, Lizzie. You can’t.”

“Okay.” Lizzie knew it was ridiculous, and that it probably meant she was a terrible person, but she found herself delighted with this new turn of events. No longer was she the family’s number one fuck-up. Adultery. That was a bad one. So, of course, was pregnancy out of wedlock, but never mind that for now. Her perfect priss of a big sister, her married big sister, had a boyfriend! A kinky boyfriend!

“And don’t tell Mom,” Diana said.

“I think,” said Lizzie loftily, “that Mom has enough to worry about right now.” It was wrong, undoubtedly wrong to be tormenting Diana this way, but it was also an awful lot of fun.

Diana covered her eyes with her hands. “I feel like I’m losing my mind,” she muttered. Then she looked at Lizzie. “What are you doing here?”

Lizzie rubbed her hands together, as the reason she’d come to Philadelphia came rushing back. “Just visiting a friend.”

“That guy you were seeing?” Diana said. “Jeff?”

“Yep,” said Lizzie … and then, because she couldn’t resist, she said, “Maybe we can double date. Or would you have to bring Gary, too? Is that, like, a triple date?”

Diana balled her hands into fists, pressed them against her eyes and groaned out loud. The sound was thrilling and delicious. Without saying another word, Diana got off the couch and found her purse. As Lizzie watched, she started peeling off bills: twenty, forty, sixty, eighty dollars. “Here,” she said, pushing the money at Lizzie. “Why don’t you take yourself out to dinner?”

“I’ve got dinner,” said Lizzie, remembering her burrito. “I thought maybe I’d say hi to Milo.”

At the sound of her son’s name, Diana groaned again, only more softly. “Milo’s at the movies with Gary.” She held out the money again. “Please, Lizzie. I really need to be alone right now.”

“You’re not alone,” Lizzie pointed out, raising her eyes to the ceiling.

“Come on,” Diana snapped.

Slowly Lizzie collected her things. She tightened the straps of her bag, folded the money neatly, and slipped it into her back pocket while Diana twitched beside her, in an agony of anticipation for her to be gone. “What was that about up there, anyhow?”

“It’s none of your business.”

“Well, yeah,” Lizzie said. “I mean, under normal circumstances. But, given that I saw what was happening …”

Both women turned as Doug Vance, now fully clothed, came down the stairs. “I’ll see you at work,” he said to Diana, as casually as if they’d been having tea or playing badminton. He nodded at Lizzie—nodded! as if, not ten minutes ago, he hadn’t been doing unspeakable things to her sister!—and gave Diana one more lingering look before letting himself out the door. As soon as he was gone Diana jumped to her feet. “I don’t want to talk about it,” she said, in case Lizzie had been confused, and she stood pointedly by the front door until Lizzie had no choice but to walk through it, back out into the cold, rainy night, back to the train station and then back up to New York, back home.

SYLVIE

There was a transistor radio in a cracked plastic case on the windowsill above the kitchen sink. Her grandmother had listened to Red Sox games on that radio, carrying it out on the porch and angling the antenna just so. She’d sit out there with whichever children and grandchildren cared to join her, sipping a beer and cheering at every home run as moths beat their wings against the porchlight.

On a cool day in October, with a white crescent of moon still visible in the blue morning sky, Sylvie stood in front of the sink, flipped past the all-news stations, and found Frank Sinatra singing “Summer Wind.” Upstairs, the last of the sheets and down comforters clung to the barrel of the washing machine. Sylvie had made it a project over these past weeks, getting each of the bedrooms dusted and aired out, floors mopped and waxed, beds made with freshly laundered and ironed sheets and quilts. It kept her occupied during the days when she could have been, for example, listening to talk radio and crying, back when the Ballad of Joelle and Richard had still been news. It wasn’t anymore, as far as she could tell. Richard had been right. His transgression had been a one-day story. The media had moved on to the pop singer accused of doing vile things to underage girls, and a basketball player who’d been caught fixing games. Richard’s reputation and undoubtedly his approval ratings had sustained some damage, but he’d kept his job; that girl, Joelle, had presumably kept hers, too. What was it her daughters had said when they were young?
No biggie
. No biggie, she supposed, except to the people who were still living with it.

Sylvie kept her cell phone plugged in on her nightstand, and she’d check it every night before she went to sleep, counting the missed calls from Richard. Most days she got at least half a dozen. One Saturday there’d been ten. She never answered them. She wasn’t ready for that yet. She would take off her clothes, pull on her nightgown, and stretch out on the sheets she’d washed and hung to dry in the sunshine. Her sleep was sound and dreamless. She saved her worrying for the daylight hours.

Worry Number One was Diana, whom Sylvie hadn’t been able to reach for days. Diana’s home phone just rang and rang—no surprise there, though; Sylvie knew that she and Gary hardly ever answered it, preferring to communicate by cell phone or e-mail or text—but Diana wasn’t responding to any of those, either.

She talked to Lizzie regularly, but recent conversations with her youngest daughter had prompted Worry Number Two. Lizzie was back home, in their apartment, and she had started her job as a photographer’s assistant. Both of those things were good, both promising, but Lizzie did not sound right. She didn’t sound high or drunk, and that was a relief, but she sounded different in a way Sylvie couldn’t name, except for the fleeting thought that Lizzie sounded more like her sister than like herself. Was she going to meetings?
Yes, Mom
. Was her job all right?
It’s fine
. Was she taking care of herself? Eating well? Did she need someone to talk to? Was everything okay?

“Everything’s fine, Ma,” Lizzie said, in a tone that made it clear she had other things to do, other places to be.

“Have you talked to Diana?” Sylvie had finally asked the night before. “How is she doing?” She paused, then plunged ahead. “I haven’t been able to reach her in days. I’m worried about her.”

Lizzie gave a brief snort of laughter.

“What’s going on?” Sylvie asked, feeling bewildered. “Is Diana okay?”

“Diana,” said Lizzie, “is busy, I think.”

“Busy with what?”

Lizzie paused. “Maybe you should ask Diana what she’s busy with.”

“Or you could just tell me.” Sylvie tried to keep her voice pleasant, but it was a struggle. “For heaven’s sake, Elizabeth, don’t you think I’ve had enough surprises for one year?”

“Call her,” Lizzie said.

“I do,” Sylvie said. “She doesn’t answer. Are you talking to her?”

“I haven’t in a little while,” Lizzie said.

“Well, if you happen to speak to her,” said Sylvie, struggling with her temper, “would you mention that I’ve left her messages, and that I am concerned?”

“I’ll tell her,” Lizzie said. “I gotta go. I’m late.”

“For what?” But instead of getting an answer, she got a dial tone. One daughter wasn’t answering, and the other one was hanging up on her. That wasn’t good at all.

Of course, she could always call Richard. Maybe he’d spoken with Diana. Sylvie thought it over, eventually deciding that she wasn’t ready to brave a conversation with her husband … although at some point she’d have to. There was a sum just shy of ten thousand dollars in the joint checking account, which was the only account she could access. Ten thousand dollars could last her for a while, maybe as long as a year, if all she had to pay for were groceries and utilities and heating oil, but at some point, she’d need more money. She could try to get a job—but, realistically, who’d hire a fifty-seven-year-old attorney who’d been out of the workforce for decades? Her lawyering, she acknowledged, was more than a little bit rusty, and the skills she’d acquired during her years as a senator’s wife were not, as they said, readily transferable. Not unless she could locate another powerful man who needed his life run for him.

She sighed, wiping the sink and squeezing out the sponge. The telephone burped. She let herself hope it was Diana, returning her messages, telling her she was all right, before seeing her mother’s picture—her official portrait, in judicial robes and a lace collar—flash on the screen.

“Did you call a lawyer yet?” Selma said, in lieu of hello. Her New York accent made the word sound like
loy-uh
.

“Not yet,” said Sylvie.

“Well, what are you waiting for?” Selma demanded. “You think he’s getting any more faithful while you’re up there ironing the sheets?”

Sylvie sighed. Telling her mother about her adventures in laundry had clearly been a mistake. “What can I do for you?”

“We should talk turkey,” said Selma, her voice raspy and insistent. When Sylvie didn’t respond, Selma said, “Thanksgiving? Hello? Happens every year?”

“Of course,” Sylvie said. Her mother always hosted Thanksgiving, first in the big apartment she’d shared with her husband, then in her smaller but still impressive apartment at the Davidson Pavilion, the assisted-living place where she’d moved after Dave had had his first stroke. Diana and Gary and Milo and Lizzie and Richard and Sylvie would watch the Thanksgiving Day parade, choke down Selma’s dry turkey and stuffing the consistency of spackle, and then adjourn to the living room for dessert: your choice of instant coffee along with pies from Sarabeth’s, a homemade pumpkin pie that would be ignored by everyone but Richard, and a mixed-berry tart in a buttery crust. She remembered when the girls were little, combing their hair into ponytails, helping them into their Polly Flinders dresses and ribbed tights and Mary Janes. She recalled the year that Diana got tangled up in the curtain of beads her mother used to have hanging between the dining room and the kitchen, and the time Lizzie smoked some pre-parade pot and giggled nonstop while scooping pumpkin-pie innards directly from the pie plate into her mouth. She also had vivid recollections of the fellow Lizzie had brought with her that year. He was called Chuck or Chad, some name like that, a rich boy in a beautiful tie and a French-cuffed shirt who’d nodded off at her mother’s table. “He’s just tired!” Lizzie had insisted, and Diana, in her third year of medical school, had said, “If by ‘tired’ you mean ‘high,’ then yes, Lizzie, he’s very tired.”

Then there was the time Sylvie hated to think about, when she’d gotten back to the apartment—with a Tupperware container full of leftover turkey that she intended to toss immediately into the trash—to find the telephone ringing. “I don’t want to alarm you, dear,” Selma had said, “but I seem to be missing my pearls and my wedding ring.” Sylvie had found the jewelry in her daughter’s pocket, after Lizzie had tossed her jeans in the hamper and fallen asleep (“passed out,” Diana said, with her hands on her sister’s wrist, checking her pulse) in just her panties and a Barclay Prep T-shirt.

“Sylvie!” her mother was yelling. “Are you still there? Hello?”

“Yes, I’m here,” she said.

“Well, are you coming?” her mother asked.

“I thought,” said Sylvie, struck by a sudden inspiration, “that we could do Thanksgiving here.”

Sylvie could practically hear her mother’s canny brain turning. “No Richard?”

“No, no Richard.” Maybe Tim, though. Tim was a possibility. But how would she tell her mother, not to mention her daughters, that she’d been seeing someone?
Another man, Sylvie?
she could hear her mother sigh.
Really, do you think that’s going to fix you? Is that the answer here?

Tim wasn’t an answer, she thought stubbornly. Tim was a reward, a reward for what she’d suffered. Listening to his stories about his sons, the trips they’d taken, the time they’d spent together, was like storytime at the library, where she’d taken the girls a few times when they were little. They’d sit cross-legged on the carpeted floor and listen, entranced by stories of magic beanstalks and houses made of candy. She listened the same way when Tim talked.

“If you really want to do it.” Selma sounded dubious. “I’ll bring the turkey.”

“No!” The word burst out of Sylvie’s mouth, a little more vehemently than she’d intended. “No. Just come. I’ll take care of everything.”

Selma sounded amused. “So now you’re a cook?”

“I’ve made a few things.” Driving aimlessly through Fair-view’s streets early one Saturday morning, she’d passed a tag sale, where there’d been a box full of dozens of old issues of cooking magazines,
Gourmet
and
Saveur
and
Bon Appétit
. “You can have them all for five bucks,” said the woman, and Sylvie, who’d been prepared to offer twenty, eagerly handed over a five-dollar bill and loaded the box into her trunk. “They were my mom’s,” the woman said, and Sylvie knew without being told that the woman’s mother had died … that her death might, in fact, have been what occasioned the tag sale, the boxes of cloth napkins and racks of blouses and coats; the piles of word-search and Sudoku books arrayed on the woman’s lawn.

She’d taken the magazines home and spent much of the weekend, when she wasn’t waxing the upstairs floors, poring over their stained and spotted pages. Some of the recipes had been dog-eared, and some had notes written in the margins: “needs more butter” beside a recipe for raspberry cobbler, “Bill likes” next to a chicken-and-sausage stew.

By Sunday night Sylvie had paper clipped a dozen things she thought would be good and, better, would be things she could make, if she got the right ingredients and followed the steps carefully.

Every morning, she’d wake up, feeling tiny and adrift, alone in a queen-size bed with the ache for the life she’d lost threatening to subsume her. The temptation would be to lie in bed all day, feeling sorry for herself. Instead, she’d force herself through her routines: up, out of bed, into her clothes, down to the kitchen. She’d drink coffee, brush her teeth, push her hair back from her face with a terrycloth headband that some cousin or tenant had left behind in the bathroom, loop her recycled shopping bags over her shoulder, and walk to Simmons’s with her shopping list in her pocket. She’d buy her ingredients, maybe stop for tea and a muffin at the coffee shop downtown, then walk home and spend the afternoon in the kitchen, with the radio playing and the sunlight warming the linoleum. Most nights, Tim would come for dinner. It wasn’t anywhere near as busy as the life she’d left behind, with eight
A.M.
board meetings and luncheons that stretched past three, sessions with the trainer and the daily barrage of e-mails and phone calls, but still, she filled the hours, she kept moving; and she tried as hard as she could not to think about Richard with Joelle, or about Richard alone, which was, somehow, worse.

The first Monday after she’d found the magazines she made soup, roasting butternut squash with sea salt, a slick of olive oil, and a drizzle of maple syrup, then scooping the flesh out of the shells and pureeing it with chicken stock and a bit of cream. Ceil had been thrilled to hear that Sylvie was continuing with her cooking and had offered (“threatened” was probably closer) to send Sylvie her immersion blender. “Picture Richard’s face when you’re whipping,” she’d said. “Or maybe not his face.” Sylvie had declined the offer. The next morning, she’d walked out onto the porch and bumped into a cardboard box from Federal Express, and opened it to find that Ceil had sent her one anyhow.
Every woman needs a room of her own
, the note with the box had said.
You’ve got room, so here’s a blender
.

Since the blender’s arrival, Sylvie had produced a credible lentil stew, cinnamon rolls from Ceil’s recipe (lopsided, but still delicious), an approximation of her grandmother’s fried chicken, and Indian pudding, after she’d woken up with an inexplicable craving for it one morning. She’d eaten two bowls of that, with heavy cream on top, and then scraped most of the remaining pudding into a Tupperware container and given it to Tim to take home, along with a half-gallon of French onion soup for which she’d made the stock, from beef bones, by herself. His sons, Frankie and Ollie, were coming for a weekend—they’d go camping, Tim said, the way they did every year. Normally Tim Junior came with them, but he was busy with the baby.

Cooking was a comfort. Making herself a good meal, food that would please her—not a trainer or a picky daughter or her husband—felt good, too. So did the rote work of cleaning up—the warm water on her hands as she washed her pots and pans, the satisfaction of spritzing a countertop with cleanser, then using a rag to wipe away all traces of her work. Arranging a bouquet she’d bought at the farmer’s market that was held on the town green every Saturday, straightening the haphazard stack of cookbooks that had collected in the beach house over the years (including one that had to have been a gift to her Uncle Freddie and featured only recipes with beer), even the donkeywork of polishing the silver was satisfying.