Fly Away Home Page 7

  Derek, big and substantial as an armored tank, led her through the heavy glass doors. Once they’d swung shut, the din subsided. The lobby was empty except for Juan the doorman at his desk. When she looked at him, he dropped his gaze. Sylvie wondered if Joelle had ever been here, whether Richard had snuck her up from D.C. for some afternoon delight while Sylvie was visiting that summer camp for kids with cancer or shopping at Bloomingdale’s or Saks for one more unremarkable suit she’d wear to one more event where she would stand behind her husband, nodding like one of those dolls she couldn’t remember the name of, the one cabdrivers sometimes kept in their back windows.

  “You gonna be all right, ma’am?” Derek asked.

  “Bobblehead,” said Sylvie. That’s what those dolls were called. Once, in the back of a taxicab, she’d seen one that looked like a Chihuahua. When Diana had been ten, she’d begged for a dog for her birthday, and Sylvie had said, “Someday.” Diana, ever the stickler for specifics, had asked when, and first Sylvie had told her when Lizzie was out of nursery school, then kindergarten, and by then Diana had wanted a pony more than she’d wanted a dog and had let the matter drop without forcing her mother to tell her one of the unpleasant truths of her marriage: she took care of Richard, and it was a job that left little room for taking care of anything else—not a dog, not herself. Sometimes not even her daughters.

  “Ma’am?” Derek was staring at her, the worry on his face plain to see. Sylvie felt suddenly, tearfully grateful. What had she done in her life to have a good man like Derek, a man with his own family and, she was sure, his own cares, worry about her?

  She took his hand—it felt big and warm as a hot-water bottle—and squeezed it. “Thank you,” she said.

  He nodded. “I’ll be praying for you and your girls.” Derek had driven her for the past five years, and this was she longest sentence she thought she’d ever heard him say. Her throat closed, and all she could do was nod. He pushed the glass doors open again—there were more shouted questions, a fusillade of flashbulbs, and then the doors swung shut and he was gone. Sylvie walked across the lobby’s black-and-white tiled floors, past the potted palms and gilt-framed mirrors, and punched the button that would summon the elevator.

  The doors slid open on the tenth floor. Sylvie stepped into their apartment, her heels clicking on the floors, seeing it as if for the first time and realizing that she’d created, over the years, a version of those fancy hotel rooms in which she and Richard stayed. Everything was correct, everything was attractive, everything was in its place and as it should have been, from the green-and-ivory botanical prints over the fireplace to the carved teak elephant (“Quirky!” her decorator had said. “Whimsical!”) in the center of the dining room table. She might have liked that elephant, with its sturdy legs and upraised trunk, if she and Richard had stumbled across it in some faraway flea market, or if one of her daughters had given it to them as a misbegotten anniversary gift, but now it was all she could do not to send it smashing to the floor. It had nothing to do with her, with them; and this apartment wasn’t a home, it was another version of Richard’s office, another place made for his use and his comfort.

  Feeling outside her own body, like this was all happening in a movie she’d rented and watched by herself, she made her way down the hall. The door to Richard’s office was shut, the television set was on, and she could hear a woman’s voice, her own voice, coming from the speakers. She grimaced, almost groaning out loud. That silly Valentine’s Day interview she’d given the Today show, when they’d talked to long-married couples about love. She hadn’t wanted to do it—she hated being on camera almost as much as she hated public speaking—but Richard’s chief of staff had convinced her that it would be good for Richard’s brand. Once, they’d said “image,” but these days it was all about the brand, and Richard’s needed some rehabilitation, ever since he’d been one of a handful of Democrats to vote against the financial regulation the president had tried to ram through Congress the previous fall.

  Tell us one of your favorite memories of your husband, the interviewer, a chic blonde with a discreetly lifted face, had asked. Sylvie, who’d known the question was coming, told the story that they were now rerunning on the news, the tale of a disastrous plane trip she’d taken from Miami to LaGuardia when she’d been a young mother, traveling with both girls. “Lizzie, my youngest, had gotten sick. She started screaming as soon as we left the runway, and the only time she stopped was to throw up. I felt like everyone on the plane was staring at me, thinking, Isn’t there something that woman can do? I felt …” Sylvie heard her television-self inhale. “I felt like a failure. Like I was the worst mother in the world.” The interviewer—childless herself, if Sylvie remembered right—had made a cooing, sympathetic sound and, Sylvie remembered, had leaned forward, patting Sylvie’s knee. “We got off the plane, and I handed Richard the baby, and I remember he hugged her, and me, and all of us, and said, ‘Don’t worry, it’s all going to be fine,’ and just the way he said it, the way Lizzie smiled at him, I believed it.”

  “Lovely,” the lady had murmured. Sylvie had smiled, thinking that she hadn’t actually felt reassured at that moment in the airport, dripping with sweat, in the puke-stiffened blouse that Lizzie had thrown up on somewhere over Virginia. What she’d actually been thinking was that she had married a man incapable of shame. She, herself, had been desperately embarrassed—by the woman sitting behind her who’d asked for earplugs, raising her voice above Lizzie’s shrieks, and the old biddy in the aisle across from them who’d commented, loudly enough for Sylvie to hear, that in her day children weren’t allowed to behave like that. She knew she’d remember those women’s faces, and everything they’d said, for days, possibly weeks, maybe even longer, and that Richard, if he’d been on the plane, probably wouldn’t have noticed them at all. He’d have simply bounced the baby in his arms and sung “New York, New York” to her, loudly and off-key, impervious to the stares and rolled eyes and loudly heaved sighs of his fellow travelers. You couldn’t embarrass Richard. He was immune to shame the same way some people never caught colds. It was why she thought he actually could be president someday—unlike the vast majority of people walking the earth, he could withstand a campaign, and all the things his opponents would say about him; he believed in himself, and no amount of criticism could convince him that he shouldn’t.

  “The senator’s wife, in her own words,” said the announcer. “A little ironic, given the events of the day.”

  Sylvie put her hand on the door to her husband’s office, breathed deeply, then pushed it open.

  DIANA

  “Leaving,” Diana snapped to the woman behind the desk—Ashley, or her replacement, she didn’t wait long enough to see—and stomped out into the steaming night. Ideally, she’d run, but she’d done eight miles already that day: her usual five in the morning, and then another three that afternoon, after she’d gotten the news. More running would mean no sleep, and she needed her rest. She was back in the ER again tomorrow.

  Her phone buzzed in her pocket. Gary again. “Yes?” she said. She hated the shrewish way she snapped at him, like he was the lowliest med student, but she knew that if she didn’t force him to get to the point—assuming, as ever, that there was one—she’d be listening to him clear his throat and sniffle for minutes that she didn’t have to waste.

  “Just making sure you didn’t change your mind.”

  She maneuvered around a clutch of stroller-pushing mothers. “I told you I’d call you if I did.”

  He paused. “If you’re sure …”

  “I’m sure,” she said, and hung up before he could tell her that he wasn’t.

  She walked faster and faster, wishing she could move fast enough to outrun her own unhappiness, and the bad thing she was doing. That June, she and Gary had celebrated their seventh anniversary. Maybe the thing with Doug was just the seven-year itch, a fling, a symptom of something so common and run-of-the-mill that there was actually a name for it. She consid
ered this thought and dismissed it. What she had with Doug was better than anything she’d ever had with Gary, which led, inevitably, to the question she found herself wrestling with more and more frequently: Why had she picked Gary in the first place?

  She blamed her parents. She recognized it as a cliché, that everyone these days blamed their parents for everything, but she knew that watching them had, inevitably, colored her own view of the world and influenced every decision she’d made, particularly the ones about love, about marriage, about the way she’d chosen to build her own life and her family.

  Her earliest memories were of waking in the predawn hours, the city still a gray lunar landscape outside her window, and listening to her father sneaking down the hallway. It’s the boogeyman, she would think, her body rigid in her bed, before her waking mind asserted itself and said, No, that’s just Dad leaving. She would hear a creaking floorboard, the refrigerator opening and shutting, the hiss of the coffeepot, the hinges of the closet door as he removed his topcoat and picked up his briefcase. These sounds would be joined by her mother’s lighter step, the sound of a cup clinking on the counter, a plate being set on the table. The two of them would talk, quietly, a murmur punctured by laughter, until finally she’d hear the front door open, then shut. A minute later, there would be more noises—water running, the refrigerator door again—and then her mother would go back to bed. Marta would come at seven, in a white shirt and cardigan and elastic-waisted polyester pants, with her big glasses and her gray bun. Marta was the one who would give the girls their breakfast, who would inspect their uniforms and make sure they’d brushed their teeth and escort them to the bus stop for school.

  This was what had defined her childhood—her mother, who doted on her father and had little time for Lizzie and Diana; and her father, who was gone so often, who’d miss Girl Scout dinners and soccer games and academic awards ceremonies. Once she’d asked him about it. “Daddy,” she’d said, standing in the doorway of his office, “why are you away so much?”

  He’d invited her to sit in the big leather armchair on the other side of his desk, and he’d closed the door and answered her seriously, as if she was an adult. He told her that he was doing the work of the people, and that sometimes serving the people—the big-P People—meant he was less available for the little-p people that he loved. “It’s hard for me,” he’d told her. Diana suspected he was lying. She’d seen the looks on her friends’ fathers’ faces—how some of them would yawn, or joke about spiking the Gatorade at the soccer games, how they’d sneak out to check the scores during the winter choral concert, and how one of them had actually fallen asleep and slipped right out of his folding chair during sixth-grade graduation. She thought that whatever her father was doing in Washington was maybe more fun than watching eight-year-olds chase a ball up and down a field, or listening to them sing Christmas carols (and one obligatory song about Chanukah) every December; that maybe her father’s work pleased him in a way his daughters didn’t.

  Back in her room that night, Diana had lain on her bed for so long that her mother came in to make sure she was all right. “Does your stomach hurt?” she’d asked, a worried look on her face. Diana had said no. “Is anything else bothering you?” Diana had shaken her head. Alone again. Breathing in the scent of Downy and cotton, she had arrived at two important decisions, goals that would shape her life. The first was that she’d be so outstanding, so remarkable, such a credit to her school and her team and her choir and her family that every parent would wish she was their kid. Her parents would be forced to pay attention. They’d be peer-pressured into loving her, shamed into it by the endless stream of straight A’s and coaches’ praise and how every other parent would offer Diana as an example of what their children could do if they just worked hard enough.

  The second was that when she was grown up, she would marry a man who didn’t have to worry about big-P People, who only had to take care of the little-p people he loved.

  By the time she met her husband, during the first year of medical school, Diana had lived up to the first promise. She’d been a standout student not because she was the smartest or the most talented, but because she worked harder than anyone else, putting in hours at the library, skipping parties and plays and shopping excursions to give her dioramas one more dusting of glitter, her papers one more round of edits, her clothes one more touch-up with the iron.

  She’d never be petite or sexy, with her sister’s flawless skin and honey-blond hair and the kind of adorable cuteness that naturally made guys want to protect her. She took after Grandma Selma’s side of the family—strong jaw, big nose, features that were unobjectionable but would never be described as pretty (she’d overheard “handsome” once, as in “Diana Woodruff’s a handsome woman,” and had spent years trying to forget it). The running kept her BMI in the healthy range. She couldn’t do much about her height—at five foot ten, she towered over some of the guys who would have been prospects otherwise. Nor could hard work shrink her big hands and big feet, but she could dress well, in dark-colored, well-cut clothes, and keep her thick hair long and dyed a pretty shade of auburn. She got facials and manicures, and put on her makeup before leaving the house—the black liner and shimmery cream eyeshadow and mascara that made her deep-set eyes look bigger and brighter, the lipstick that made the most of her thin lips.

  She’d met Gary at a bar, the one around the corner from her apartment, the one she’d fled to after Hal had dumped her.

  Hal had been her boyfriend at Columbia, a tall, pale-skinned, freckled, drily witty boy who sat in the back of the psychology class she’d taken as a respite from the hard sciences. Hal was rumored to be one of the editors of the wickedly funny underground humor magazine that appeared at irregular intervals in stacks on the steps of Low Library. Out of my league, she’d thought, and tried to keep from looking too long at his lanky body, and thinking about how soft the feathery hairs at the back of his neck would be if she touched them. One day after class, Hal had surprised her. “Excuse me, Diana,” he’d said. His voice was surprisingly deep for someone so skinny, and her heart fluttered at the sound of it—she had no idea he even knew her name! “I’ve got a proposal for you.”

  “What’s that?” She tried to sound cool, but her mouth was instantly dry and her palms just as instantly sweaty, as Hal explained himself: they needed a girl to pose in front of a urinal to illustrate a story in the magazine, and would she be interested?

  Diana had laughed out loud. “You need me to stand in front a urinal? Why?”

  “Ironic juxtaposition,” he’d said, and she’d laughed again and agreed to do it. After the photo shoot, which had involved Hal squinting through the viewfinder of his Nikon and saying things like, “Could you try to look a little more desperate?” he’d taken her out for coffee, touched the tip of her nose with his finger, and said, in his deep voice that resonated right through her, “That was very convincing.”

  With one brush of a fingertip she’d felt her whole body heat up. Oh, she thought, looking at him mutely, feeling something that was almost desperation quickening her pulse. She liked him in a way she’d never liked a boy before. “Hey,” he’d said, and she’d felt herself turning toward his face like a flower toward the sun. From the way he looked at her, half smiling, she could see that she wasn’t imagining this; she knew that he liked her, too. “You want to see a movie Friday night?”

  Just like that, in the manner of college students, they became a couple. They’d walk around the Columbia campus with their fingers interlaced. After classes, they’d go to his dorm room, a tiny single, and have sex, two or three times, and sleep curled in his narrow bed.

  Hal could surprise her into bursts of laughter. He could make her weak in the knees just by kissing her cheek and could make her breathe hard just by nibbling the back of her neck. They’d dated from Halloween of senior year through the hell of finals and papers and the whirlwind of graduation, and into a blissful summer of trips to the Hamptons and the Jersey Shor
e, picnics in Central Park, and sex wherever they could find a little privacy. Then she’d gone off to Philadelphia for med school, and he’d stayed in New York City to be a paralegal by day, stand-up comic by night. They talked on the phone for six weeks until she had two free days in a row and took a train to Penn Station, armed with zinc and vitamin C for the cold he’d been complaining about.

  Instead of taking her to his apartment, which she’d heard about but hadn’t seen, Hal walked her to a pizza shop, sat with her at a booth in the back, blew his nose into a paper napkin, then took her hands and said that they were through.

  “But … but what happened?”

  “I’m not sure.” Hal looked anguished, pale and exhausted. “I’m just not feeling the same anymore. It’s like my brain changed. Maybe it’s the drugs.”

  Her heart jumped. “You’re on drugs?” Oh, God, she thought, her mind flashing to images of all the nights she’d found Lizzie puking or passed out, the trips to rehab and family therapy sessions with well-meaning, soft-voiced PhDs.

  “You know I’m on drugs.” Now Hal just sounded impatient. “The Sudafed, and the Claritin.”

  Diana stared at him as her fantasies of forcing herself to hold his hand while he confessed to trying marijuana for the first time at eleven swiftly receded. “The Claritin changed the way you feel about me?” He toyed with a pizza crust and didn’t answer. “I know I haven’t been studying medicine for that long, but that strikes me as improbable.” She waited for him to smile, and when he didn’t, she said, “I’d feel a little better if it was at least something illegal that made you not love me anymore. And you don’t, do you?” She paused, waiting for him to say, Of course I still love you! Hal said nothing. “You don’t love me,” Diana repeated. She felt as if her body were collapsing, crumbling in on itself. She should have gone to med school in Manhattan. She should have come to see him sooner. She should have …