Fly Away Home (3 page)

“Yes, Doctor,” Ashley whispered, and then Diana pushed through the door to the stairs, taking them two at a time, until she came out on the steaming, humid pavement. Then she went running down Spruce Street, east toward the Delaware River as fast as she could, with music pounding in her ears and her blood pounding through her body, until a stitch burned in her side and her breath tore at her throat and the pain pushed everything out of her mind except putting one foot in front of the other.

LIZZIE

It was a scramble getting Milo out of the brilliantly blue swimming pool, into the changing room, and then into his clothes: his khakis and boat shoes, the button-down shirt and the ski cap he insisted on wearing even in the summer heat. Lizzie ended up with no time to do anything but pull on her ribbed tank top and her long, lacy white skirt, slide her feet into her flip-flops, loop her old Leica around her neck and her purse over her shoulder, grab Milo’s backpack, and race through the swimming club’s door out to Lombard Street to hail a cab.

By the time they arrived at the hospital they were fifteen minutes late, and Lizzie was a wreck—pink-faced, frizzy-haired, with something unpleasant that she hoped was gum and feared was worse clinging to the sole of her shoe. Also, she’d forgotten her bra. She’d barely noticed, but it was the kind of detail that would not escape her sister. She was sweating, and the unpleasant taste of copper filled her mouth. Ashley hadn’t said what her sister wanted, but Lizzie had never been summoned to Diana’s workplace in the middle of the day and could only assume that the news was bad—that she’d screwed up something, that she was in trouble again.

Diana was waiting for her by the ER desk, perfect as ever, buttoned up in her lab coat, wearing a slim pearly-gray pencil skirt and matching high heels, as put together as she’d been that morning, except her face was beet red and her hair, slicked back in a twist, was wet.

“Are you okay, Mom?” Milo asked in his gravelly voice, and Diana softened, the way she only did for her son, and bent to brush her lips against his forehead and smooth his dark bangs out of his eyes.

“I’m fine. Did you bring your Leapster? Can you go sit in the waiting room by yourself like a big boy for ten minutes? Aunt Lizzie and I need to have an adult conversation.”

Once Milo was parked on the couch, playing some improving game, Diana pulled Lizzie into the empty break room and closed the door behind her.

Lizzie, who thought she’d figured out the reason for this impromptu visit, was prepared. As soon as the door was shut, she started talking. “Look, I know what you said about McDonald’s, and I read all the information you gave me.” This was a slight exaggeration—she’d glanced at one of the articles in the stack that Diana had left on her bed, but had gotten so grossed out by the descriptions of cattle mistreatment and beef preservatives that she’d shoved it in the drawer of the dresser and never looked at it again.

Diana lifted an eyebrow—Diana could do that, could lift her eyebrows one at a time. Lizzie plowed ahead. “He said he was the only kid in his class who’d never been there. And we only went once, and I paid with my own money, and he had the Chicken McNuggets with milk, not soda, and I got him a cut-up apple on the side …”

Diana cut her off with a wave of her hand. Her nails were perfectly filed, gleaming ovals. Lizzie snuck her own raggedy fingertips, with their bitten tips and peeling red polish, into her pockets.

“Dad called.”

Lizzie blinked. “What’s going on?” Her sister’s tone triggered a familiar sensation, the feeling of a trapdoor opening in her belly. For years, Lizzie had thought of her parents, and even her sister, as sort of like Greek gods—distant and capricious and unknowable, larger than life, or at least smarter than average, given to hurling their thunderbolts and their decrees down from Mount Olympus, not really caring what kind of damage they’d do to the normal people like Lizzie. Like savvy mortals throughout time, Lizzie had done her best to escape their notice. She was polite and cheerful when spoken to, and tried to keep a low profile the rest of the time.

Diana found the remote on the break room table and pointed it at the set. CNN came on the screen, and there was their father, Senator Richard Woodruff, D-NY, with his arm around the waist of a woman who was not their mom.

“Oh.” Lizzie stared at the screen. A sick feeling rose in her throat as she caught the words
extramarital affair
. She knew this feeling, that nausea, the clamminess in her armpits and the small of her back. At twenty-four, Lizzie Woodruff was well acquainted with shame. She’d just never had the occasion to feel it on behalf of another family member—not impeccable, brilliant, successful Diana; not her gracious, elegant, eternally appropriate mother; and certainly not her father, a man everyone looked up to, a man everyone respected. She swallowed hard, wiping sweat from her upper lip.

“Oh,” she said. “Oh, jeez.”

“Yeah,” said Diana, lips curled. “Oh, jeez.” Lizzie was still staring up at the screen, which showed a picture—a photograph pulled from a computer, Lizzie thought—of the same woman, now dressed in a bikini, sitting cross-legged and laughing on the bow of a sailboat.

“Christ,” Diana muttered. “You’d think one of these bimbos would own a one-piece.”

“Did you talk to Mom? Is she okay?” Lizzie whispered. She twisted her hair in a knot and secured it with her elastic band, then started pacing.

Diana pulled her phone out of her pocket, hit a button, listened, then said, “Mom? Hang on. I’m going to conference in Lizzie.”

Lizzie’s telephone trilled its ringtone, the bouncy melody of Lady Gaga’s “Just Dance,” from the depths of the embroidered, sequined purse that she’d bought for ten dollars on Canal Street. Diana made a face—at the purse, or the ring tone, or Lizzie’s inability to locate her phone, Lizzie wasn’t sure. She rooted around, fingers brushing against lipstick and crumpled bills and Kleenexes and the cartridges for Milo’s Leapster, feeling dizzy and desperate to find someplace dim and fragrant with the smell of old beer and cigarettes and drink white wine, chilled so cold that the first glass would give her a headache, which the second glass would instantly cure, or maybe rum and Cokes, her old favorite, syrupy-sweet, so easy going down, making the world pleasantly blurry.

Finally, she found her phone at the bottom of her purse. “Hello? Mom?”

“Girls?” Sylvie’s voice was pinched and small.

“What’s going on?” Diana demanded.

“I don’t know,” said Sylvie. “I’m in a car, on my way back up to New York. I’ve spoken to Ceil, but other than that, I don’t know what’s happening.”

“I talked to Dad.” Diana’s words were clipped. “He says he was having an affair, and he got her a job. And he’s sorry. Which of course he’d say.”

“Oh, God.” Sylvie’s voice was a croak. “As soon as I speak to your father I’ll call you back. Until then, just wait. And be careful. I’m sure reporters will call you, and you shouldn’t say anything.”

Diana barked laughter. “Oh, really? You don’t think I should go down and make a statement?”

“Diana,” said Sylvie. Diana rolled her eyes. Her mother could be terrifying, and never more so than when she was angry.

“Maybe it was innocent. Maybe that woman just needed, you know, a father figure. Maybe it was nothing. Maybe they’re just friends.”

“Oh, for God’s sake,” said Diana. The scorn in her voice could have been bottled and sold as a chemical weapon. “Fifty-seven-year-old senators are not friends with their twentysomething aides.” She exhaled noisily. “I bet there’s e-mails. Or more pictures. Or something. There’s always something. Not to mention,” Diana continued, looking pointedly at her sister, “the press is probably going to write about all of us.”

Lizzie wondered when the details would come out and marveled at her sister’s ability to always see the worst in any situation … including, of course, Lizzie’s own. She remembered once, for her birthday, her parents had taken them to a state fair. Lizzie had been eight, almost out of her mind with excitement about the Tilt-A-Whirl she’d be allowed to ride and the cotton candy she’d be given to eat. Diana, at fourteen, hadn’t wanted to come at all, and had spent the ride upstate gazing out the window and heaving noisy sighs.

The day had been wonderful. A cheerful round man in a suit and bow tie, the mayor of Plattsburgh, had met them in the parking lot. “So you’re the birthday girl?” he’d asked, bending down with a soft grunt until he was eye level with Lizzie. The mayor had whisked them to the front of every line. He’d made sure that Lizzie sampled every delicacy—the grilled sausage and sweet peppers, the fresh-squeezed lemonade, the Steak on a Stake, the soft-serve custard and fried dough—and had squeezed her close, beaming, for a newspaper photograph.

Back in the car, sticky and sleepy and full, Lizzie had said to her sister, “This was the best day ever,” and Diana, with her face turned once more toward the window, had said, “You know the whole thing was a photo op.” Then she’d explained to her sister exactly what a photo op was, and how her father needed people in Plattsburgh to vote for him, which was why she, Diana, had been stuck wasting her Saturday in this stupid cow town when she could have been in the city with her friends. Lizzie had managed to hold back her tears until it was too dark for anyone in the car to see that she was crying. She’d thought the man had given her treats and taken her picture because it was her birthday; that she’d been the one they’d been fussing over.

Sylvie, meanwhile, was urging Diana to be patient, not to judge until they knew for sure what had happened. She gathered herself, asking, “Are you two all right? Lizzie, are you handling this okay?”

“
I’m
fine,” said Diana. She sat down in a metal chair and crossed her toned, tanned legs, swinging the right one hard over the left. “Thank you for your concern.”

“I’m okay,” said Lizzie, who knew why her mother had asked about her first. Of course Diana was all right. Diana was always all right. The world could be crumbling to rubble at their feet and Diana would be going for a run through the ruins. Lizzie took an experimental breath as, once more, the television set showed footage of her father with his arm around that other woman.
Sources report that the senator gave Stabinow significant raises during her employment, then helped her find a six-figure job at a prominent D.C. law firm
, said the voice on the screen, as the video dissolved into a still shot of the woman graduating from somewhere, beaming in her cap and gown. “I’m all right,” Lizzie said more strongly.

“You’ll be sure to go to a meeting tonight?” asked her mother. Diana recrossed her legs and glared at the row of lockers as if they, too, had offended her. Diana was not a believer in meetings, or in what she called, with quote marks you could almost hear, “the culture of recovery.” Diana thought that if you had a problem, you dealt with it on your own, with willpower and cold showers and fast five-mile runs.

“I’ll go,” Lizzie said, trying to sound like her sister, solid and smart and in control.

“I’ll call you soon. I love you, girls,” said Sylvie, and Diana and Lizzie answered that they loved her, too, before Diana broke the connection. She put her phone in her pocket and snapped the television off.

“I can’t believe this.”

Lizzie couldn’t, either. Couldn’t, and didn’t want to. “Maybe it isn’t true.”

Diana rolled her eyes again. Her talent for dashing Lizzie’s hopes, for puncturing Lizzie’s balloons, hadn’t diminished at all in the years since they were girls. “Of course it’s true! Dad said so.”

“Not to me,” Lizzie said stubbornly.

“And there’s video.”

“Maybe it was Photoshopped.” Such things could happen. Hadn’t there been some kind of movie-star sex tape later proven to be a fake? And what about the time that talk-show hostess’s head had appeared on a magazine cover on top of someone else’s body?

“It wasn’t. God!” Diana bounced back to her feet.

Lizzie edged toward the window, turning away from Diana’s rage. She looked at her phone—her father had called her twice, probably while she’d been coaxing Milo out of the water, and it was almost five o’clock. “Milo needs dinner.”

“Fine,” Diana snapped. “Take him to McDonald’s again. Take him to Wendy’s. Get him pizza. Whatever he wants. I don’t care.”

“Are you going to tell him?” Lizzie asked.

Diana lifted one hand to her face and swiped at her forehead, and when she spoke, she sounded, for the first time, unsure. She walked to the window to stand next to Lizzie. The blue of the sky had deepened, and the angles of her face, the line of her lips were lit by the twilight glow. Lizzie reached for the camera that hung against her chest, then stopped her hands. Diana hated having her picture taken, and now was definitely not the time, even though she didn’t think she’d ever seen her sister looking so beautiful, or so sad. “I don’t know,” Diana said, and then startled Lizzie by asking, “Do you think he needs to know?”

Lizzie thought it over. If Milo was in school or camp, surely the other kids would have overheard their parents’ conversations and would possibly be talking about it. But school was out, and Milo had refused to go to computer camp or cooking camp or, heaven forbid, sports camp, which meant that he went for days without talking to anyone but his parents and Lizzie. He hardly watched TV—his mother carefully monitored his screen time, and what he did see was mostly nature documentaries, which Diana approved of, and cooking shows, which Milo loved.

“Maybe we shouldn’t tell him yet,” said Lizzie.

Diana gave a brisk nod, herself again. “Okay,” she said. “Give him dinner. I’m going to stop at home to change. I’m going out with Gary tonight, remember?”

Lizzie slipped her phone back in her purse. The two of them walked into the waiting room and found Milo sitting with his Leapster abandoned on his lap and his gaze trained on the television set.

“I think we’ve all got scandal fatigue,” said a redhead in a sweater that struck Lizzie as too low-cut and clingy for TV, or for someone who was old and emaciated. “Giuliani, Spitzer, Edwards, Sanford … what’s surprising at this point is the politician who doesn’t have something on the side.” She gave a bright little laugh as the screen filled with a shot of Milo’s Grandpa Richard, murmuring into the curly-haired woman’s ear. “The only interesting thing at this point is how the wife’s going to behave. If she’s going to stand up at the press conference or make him go sleep in the barn.”

“Those are the options?” The host sounded amused. “Stand by your man or go sleep in the barn?”