Fly Away Home (22 page)

Doug didn’t know she was a mother, and she was a good mother, maybe better than she’d been before things had started. When Milo came home from school on Tuesdays and Thursdays, trudging through the door with his heavy backpack over his shoulders, she’d take him on mother-son adventures, the kinds of outings Lizzie had taken him on, although Diana tried not to think about her sister, and whether Lizzie might have been telling the truth about the Advil, and whether Diana had kicked her out not to keep Milo safe but to ensure that her inquisitive little sister wouldn’t learn her secret. She’d let Milo leaf through the pages of one of the free weeklies (after she’d tossed the sex ads in the back) and pick out a place to visit, a museum or a gallery or a restaurant, or they’d go to his favorite, the Academy of Natural Sciences, where Milo would stare, entranced, at the dinosaur bones for as long as she’d let him. She’d loosened up a bit about his diet—she still made sure he got plenty of fresh, unprocessed fruits and vegetables, but she’d take him out for pizza once a week, and let him get the ice cream she knew Lizzie had given him after they stopped by Head House Books for the latest installment of the
Wimpy Kid
saga. At home, they’d put on their pajamas and watch DVR’d episodes of
American Idol
, sometimes even singing along. They’d play backgammon or Yahtzee, eating apple slices dipped in peanut butter, while Milo talked about his day. “Well, actually,” he would begin his sentences, or “Well, basically.” She suspected he had a crush on his teacher, Miss Pai, who was young and beautiful and wore gold bracelets and an alluring perfume, and they spent hours making her a card for her twenty-fifth birthday.

Milo was the only thing that could get her mind off Doug … but eventually, Milo went to bed, leaving Diana awake, moving restlessly through the house, refolding laundry, wiping down already-clean counters, running the half-filled dishwasher just to have something to do. The weekends were almost unendurable. Locked in the bathroom (“Diarrhea again?” Gary complained. “Seriously, Diana, can’t you prescribe yourself something?”), she’d text Doug, and then wait, frantic as a teenager, until he responded.
Adore u. Miss u. Can’t w8 2 C u
. If he went longer than a few minutes without answering, she was consumed with despair, and with jealousy, especially on Saturday nights, when she was stuck at home and he, she was sure, was out at parties, with beer and music and any number of young, pretty, available, appropriate girls who would love him and want him for all the reasons she did.

For weeks, she’d fall asleep with her head full of Doug, full of longing and fear, imagining what they’d done and what they’d do when they were together again. When Gary reached for her, as he still did once in a while, she’d make up an excuse: “I’ve got my period,” she would say, thinking that she was lucky it would never occur to him to notice whether or not there were tampons visible in the bathroom. Or she’d tell him she had a headache, ostentatiously swallowing Advil when he was around to see it.

Nobody knew except her friend Lynette, one of the RNs who worked in the emergency room. Three weeks into the affair—if such a dignified word could be applied to what Diana realized was a tawdry situation—she and Lynette had been on their way to grab lunch at the falafel shop when Doug had walked past them on the street. They’d said hello, nothing more, but Lynette had given her a sly grin. “A friend?” she’d asked. Something on Diana’s face must have given her away, because instead of staying in the shop with their salads, Lynette had tugged Diana back to the hospital and directly into the locker-lined break room, where she’d picked up a pen that read
VALTREX
, as if she was about to take notes, and said, “Tell me everything. Every single detail. I want to hear every single thing you’re doing with that luscious boy.”

“Nothing’s going on,” Diana had insisted … but she couldn’t keep herself from smiling.
Luscious boy
. That was Doug.

“Come on,” said Lynette, gathering her braids into a twist that she secured with the Valtrex pen. “I am forty-two years old and I don’t think I’ve slept for more than five hours straight in the last twelve years. The highlight of my week is Kevin’s poker night, when I can eat Chinese food and watch
Top Chef
. Throw an old lady a bone.”

Diana had perched herself on the edge of the chair. “You know,” she began, “that things with Gary aren’t so great.”

Lynette had nodded. “Yes, yes, you’ve lost that loving feeling; calls himself ItBurnsWhenIPee; go on, go on.”

Diana’s blush deepened. Was her marriage that predictable and sad, that easy to sum up? She made a mental note to limit herself to a single glass of wine the next time she joined the nurses for karaoke Fridays, and continued. “Well, the thing is, Doug … Doug and I …”

Lynette, meanwhile, was curving her fingers into cat’s claws and making
mrraow! mrraow!
sounds—the universal mating call of the cougar.

Diana buried her face in her hands. “He’s not that much younger,” she said in a muffled voice. “And I know. It’s awful. But I can’t …” She peeked through her fingers to find Lynette staring at her.

“Oh my God,” she said. “Are you in love?”

Diana wasn’t sure if this was love or just a desperate infatuation. “It’s pretty intense,” she said. “Pretty …” She was remembering the time in the graveyard, the marble warm underneath her bare thighs, Doug’s tongue quick and hot between her legs. “I’ve never felt like this before in my life,” she blurted.

“Oh my God,” Lynette said again—she was, Diana thought, turning out to be surprisingly devout. “Tell me about his body. Is he a good kisser? Ooh, I bet he’s a good kisser. Where do you guys go?”

Diana curled up in her chair and told her—not the gory details, or the embarrassing ones, not about sitting next to her son in bed, reading to him while Doug’s semen trickled out into her panties, but about the in-love feeling that had been absent for so long in her life. From the avid way Lynette listened, she thought maybe she wasn’t the only woman quietly withering away in a marriage that looked all right from the outside—the house, the kids, the cars—but inside felt as arid as a locked room in an abandoned building.

“Well, I can’t say I’m surprised,” Lynette finally said. “It happens a lot.”

Diana nodded glumly. She’d seen it, too: the distinguished cardiothoracic surgeon who had to be almost seventy and who took one of his fellows as a mistress every July and dumped her, firmly but courteously, the following June; the gastroenterologist so notorious for luring nurses into his office and asking them to take off their tops that he was now required to keep his door open at all times. Except in all the examples she could think of, it was always the male docs who treated the hospital as their personal harem, never the ladies.

She also knew what it could mean if someone found out she’d been messing with an intern. She’d get a reputation, not the kind any lady doctor wanted, and the plum assignments and promotions wouldn’t come her way. Just add it to the pile, she thought bleakly. Add it to the list of things she was willing to sacrifice on the altar of love, or lust, or whatever it was she had for Doug Vance.

“Just be careful, Diana,” Lynette said, with all the joking gone from her voice. “You’re my friend, and I don’t want to see you get hurt.”

Diana nodded. She was, of course, being careful already. She deleted every text she sent and received, and erased Doug’s number from her call log if they spoke on the phone. Theirs would not be an affair of love letters and long weekends and public displays of affection. They couldn’t even share a meal—the times they’d tried to grab a burger or sushi or even takeout Chinese, they hadn’t been able to keep their hands off each other long enough to take more than a bite or two. What they had—all they’d have—were snatched moments in semipublic places, afternoons in hotel rooms that smelled like the last person who’d stayed there, and texts that used abbreviations and emoticons to express the words they could not say. There was no future.

Diana decided her only hope was that this would burn itself out, that there would be some natural end to it. Passion like this couldn’t last. They’d get caught, or they’d both starve to death. Already she’d lost six pounds, the inevitable by-product of having sex instead of lunch (the good news about that was, it gave some credence to her claim of chronic diarrhea). Doug would meet someone else, someone appropriate, maybe one of his fellow med students, and that would be that; he’d move on and she’d be brokenhearted, but eventually, the madness would loosen its grip and she’d be free once more to become the woman she’d always been.

LIZZIE

Before she started and stopped two colleges, before she was ransomed and sent away to rehab, before she moved to Philadelphia, before she met Jeff, Lizzie and her best friend Patrice had discovered a television program called
I Didn’t Know I Was Pregnant
. The show, true to its title, featured a series of women, represented in dramatic reenactments, who did not, in fact, realize that they were pregnant until they went into labor, which they universally failed to recognize as labor, and surprised themselves and their loved ones and sometimes the paramedics by pushing out a baby.

Lizzie’s memories of the past decade were patchy, a moth-eaten lace doily hanging together by threads, but she had an indelible recollection of the last time she and her friend had watched the show. “This is bullshit,” Patrice had said, setting down her MegaGulp and picking up the bong. “
I didn’t know I was pregnant
. I mean, excuse me, but how are you not gonna be knowing some shit like that?”

Lizzie had giggled. Lizzie was a great giggler and snorter even when she wasn’t high—and, she’d learned in the years following her twelfth birthday, dope made almost everything funny.

“Bullshit,” Patrice repeated, wrapping her lips around the glass pipe. “Bull. Shit.” Patrice was eighteen and lived in the Pembroke House apartment building, with her nephrologist mother and neurosurgeon dad, both of whom were constantly on call and neither of whom kept careful track of their prescription pads. Patrice had spent her summer vacation at the Well-spring Center, dealing with the eating disorder that had left her at seventy-eight pounds, with every ridge of her rib cage and bump of her kneecap or clavicle visible beneath the covering of fine blond fur that her body had grown to keep itself warm. Lizzie reasoned that Patrice’s parents knew their daughter was a pothead—her clothes and hair always had that telltale skunky reek—but maybe they didn’t mind. Pot equaled munchies, and Patrice’s weight was back into the triple digits, so probably they figured it was an acceptable trade-off. Potheads didn’t drop dead of heart attacks. They just watched dumb TV shows and laughed a lot, and okay, so maybe they weren’t the most productive members of society, but she and Patrice weren’t hurting themselves (at least not that much), and they definitely weren’t hurting anyone else.

“My periods had never been regular, and I went on the pill, so I thought we’d be safe. One night, my stomach just started killing me, but I thought it was bad sushi,” said the girl on the screen, holding her nine-month-old surprise visitor in her arms.

“Bad sushi,” Patrice said, and passed the bong Lizzie’s way. “Baaaad suuuushiiiii.”

Lizzie laughed and laughed, choking on the smoke. Patrice smacked her leg. “Pay attention!” she cried. “The baby’s coming!” Lizzie set the bong on the coffee table, and the two of them leaned forward as the actress portraying the episode’s ignorant pregnant lady crouched on the toilet.

“I was trying to have a bowel movement,” the real-life lady reported, in case there was any doubt about what all that straining and grunting were meant to convey. “I thought if I could just have a bowel movement I’d feel better and I’d be able to go to sleep.”

Patrice squinted at the screen. “You know,” she said, “that’s actually kind of harsh. I mean, someday her kid’s going to see this and know that his mom thought he was a bowel movement.”

“Harsh,” said Lizzie, who thought she knew a little bit about what it was like to feel like a less-than-wanted, less-than-ideal child. The actress sat on the toilet, bracing her arms against the walls, and pushed with all her might. “And then I heard a splash …” said the mother’s voice-over.

“A splash!” Patrice and Lizzie cried.

“… and a thunk,” she continued.

“Oh, Jesus,” Lizzie murmured. She hated this part. “Thunk!” Patrice was laughing so hard that she’d rolled herself into a hundred-pound ball on the floor. “Thunk!”

“I turned around, and I saw this cord …”

“Ew!” Patrice and Lizzie shrieked, as the actress, looking shocked, turned on the toilet and followed the swollen, purplish-blue cord down into the blood-spattered bowl and retrieved a slimy, white-streaked baby (Lizzie knew it was probably a doll, but it looked so real!).

“And that’s another thing,” said Patrice, catching her breath. “They shouldn’t call this show
I Didn’t Know I Was Pregnant
. They should call it
I Pooped a Baby
.”

“Patrice!” said Lizzie. She flopped back on the couch, accidentally knocking the bong to the floor. Bong water—the stinkiest liquid known to mankind—instantly soaked the carpet.

Patrice had scrambled to her feet and was standing on top of the couch, gazing down at the spreading, stinky brown puddle. “Oh,” she said. “Oh shit. Hey, Lizzie, we should clean that up, right?”

They’d gone to the kitchen for rags and Comet, which, Lizzie reasoned, was what you wanted for a tough and smelly stain. They’d sprinkled the Comet on the rug, and laid the rags on top, and stood on top of them, sopping up the mess until another un-suspecting pregnant lady came on TV. This one thought she was too old to get pregnant, and figured that the growing bulge in her midriff meant she was eating too many carbs, so she’d gone on a diet, until the fateful day when she’d rushed to the hospital with crippling stomach pains, certain that she was dying of cancer, only to discover …

“Lizzie?” Lizzie looked up from the couch, where she’d fallen into a pleasant doze, to find her mother staring at the two of them. Sylvie wore a Chanel suit—black, with beige trim on the pockets, and matching beige pumps. A leather attaché case was under her arm, and she looked tired. Lizzie struggled to remember what she’d been doing—some luncheon, some speech, some something—as Sylvie sniffed the air. “What’s going on?”

Quickly Lizzie used her foot to roll the bong underneath the couch, while Patrice, under the guise of helping herself to a handful of chips, grabbed the lighter.

“Nothing!” Lizzie said brightly. “We’re just watching TV.”

“No homework?” Her mother’s nose wrinkled. Lizzie took a surreptitious sniff. It still smelled pretty bad in the living room. “Did you spill something?”

“Just a little soda,” said Patrice.

“What’s that smell?” Sylvie asked. She bent and took off one high-heeled shoe, then the other.

“Mother,” Lizzie hissed, shooting Sylvie a stern look, one she hoped her mother would interpret as a cue not to ask too many questions about smells when Patrice was around. For a while, in the throes of her eating issues, she’d allowed herself nothing but kimchee, and her farts could clear rooms.

Sylvie looked at them for another long moment before walking, barefoot, down the hall, to Lizzie’s dad’s office, where she’d probably plan another party, a picnic or a parade or a Rotary Club sit-down, a street fair or a Jewish holiday where Diana, in her second year of med school, would be trotted around like My Pretty Pony, and to which Lizzie would most likely not be invited.

“Close call,” breathed Patrice, retrieving the bong, wrapping it in a towel, and tucking it into her bookbag. Lizzie thought of explaining that she could have been shooting heroin in front of her mother, her arm tied off with surgical tubing, the needle right there in her vein, and Sylvie would have chosen not to notice.
Oh, it’s just vitamins
, Lizzie would say, and Sylvie would give a vague wave, then retreat to the office to do something else for Lizzie’s dad.

Patrice scooped up the snacks, and shook her head once more at the screen, where yet another hapless mother was recounting giving birth on the toilet. “Tell you what,” she said. “If I was pregnant, I’d be knowing that shit.”

I’d be knowing that shit
, Lizzie thought. At the Duane Reade on Seventy-second Street she pulled her baseball cap low over her forehead, on the off chance that someone would recognize a disgraced senator’s daughter shopping for sundries at eleven o’clock in the morning. Grabbing a plastic basket from a stack by the door, she loaded it with shampoo and deodorant, lip balm and skin cream, ponytail holders and razors … and then, in the Feminine Needs aisle, she bought tampons, napkins, and two home pregnancy tests.

I’m wrong
, she thought.
I’ve got to be wrong. We just did it that one time. No one can be so unlucky
. Up in the apartment, she walked through the entryway lined with family photographs: her father at his inauguration, her father with the president, her parents all dressed up, dancing at some ball. These were all pictures other people had taken. She’d taken shots of her parents over the years, getting ready for parties or returning from them, but they’d never hung her work. They’d thank her and lavish praise on the framed pictures, but Lizzie didn’t know where they put them—only that she’d never seen them hung.

She dropped her purse on the table by the door and locked herself in the bathroom where she’d spent large swaths of her adolescence, rifling through the medicine cabinet, or puking, or under the influence, studying the fascinating topography of her face in the mirror. She read the instructions, then squatted over the toilet with first one indicator stick, then the other, beneath her, counting to five, then setting the sticks on the side of the sink and squeezing her eyes shut. One Mississippi, two Mississippi … after two minutes, she wiped, flushed, washed her hands, and looked at the sticks. One of them had two bright, distinct blue lines. The other had a plus sign. And even Lizzie, who’d nodded out in health class and skipped out on science, knew exactly what that meant.

Just tell him
, Lizzie thought to herself, the way she’d been thinking for the two weeks since she found out she was pregnant. She got off the train at the 30th Street station and followed the crowd of passengers up the escalator and out to the street. Telling him was the right thing, the adult thing, to do. At least she was pretty sure that was the case. She would tell Jeff it was a mistake. God knows it was the truth, she thought, as she plodded along the sidewalk. She hadn’t been trying to trap him or trick him. It had just happened … and she would take care of it herself.

Jeff had sounded happy to hear from her the night before when she’d told him she’d be in town to visit her nephew and her sister. She’d been avoiding his calls ever since the positive pregnancy test, certain that if she spoke to him she’d wind up blurting out the news. When she finally called he’d asked if she was mad at him; if he’d done something wrong. “No,” she’d said, trying to sound as if she meant it. “No, I’ve just been busy. I’m not mad. Everything’s fine.”

“I’ve missed you,” he said, his voice warming. “Are things okay with your sister?”

“I think so,” she said.

He paused, then asked, “Do you want to stay over?” It was all Lizzie could do to keep from groaning out loud. If this hadn’t happened, she would have loved to spend a night in his sweet-smelling treehouse of a bedroom, snug in bed with him, warm and happy. But now … “Let’s play it by ear,” she said, even though she was pretty sure that once she gave him her news, the last thing he’d want would be her company. Probably he’d be angry at her, she thought, remembering how his jaw had tightened when he’d talked about his mother … and here she was, another irresponsible female, messing up his life.

She’d packed a bag, just in case, and then, steeling herself, she’d called her sister, leaving the same message on her home phone and her cell phone and her e-mail and her pager:
I’m sorry for the misunderstanding
(not that the misunderstanding was her fault, but she could afford to be the bigger person here—she knew the voice that had told her
You can do this
would concur on this matter).
I’m coming to town. I would like to see you and Milo
. None of her messages had gotten a response.

She walked through the gathering clouds all the way to Washington Square, which took her almost forty minutes. It was a gloomy gray day with a brisk wind blowing, and she wished she’d brought a sweater, and worn jeans and actual shoes instead of billowy cotton pants that ended mid-shin and flip-flops. She took the elevator up to Jeff’s apartment on the eleventh floor, making her way slowly down the hallway with her bag over her shoulder. She’d barely finished knocking when the door swung open, and there was Jeff, barefoot, in jeans and a collared shirt, with his hair still wet from the shower.

“Lizzie,” he said, and pulled her into his arms for a hug. They stepped into the apartment, with its family photos on one wall, its bright posters on the other, and—she squinted, making sure—the photograph she’d taken of him, the first night she was over, in a frame on the kitchen table. She looked over his shoulder, through the big window. From eleven floors above the street, the park looked like a puzzle, with wedges of green and lines of gray and the round fountain splashing in its center. “You look great,” said Jeff.

She doubted that this was true. Whether it was the hormones or the stress, she had a major zit on her chin, and her hair, in its customary bun, had gotten tangled on her way over. Holding her hand, Jeff walked her to the couch—she could see he’d fluffed the pillows and folded the blanket draped over its back. She wondered whether he’d planned on pulling her onto his big, soft bed for a predinner quickie. She could smell something cooking in the kitchen, the rich smells of garlic and onions and chicken, she thought, roasting in the oven, and all she wanted to do was take off her clothes and be with him on that big blue-quilted bed. Was this normal? Were pregnant ladies even supposed to get horny? Maybe there was something wrong with her.

Jeff leaned in for a kiss. Lizzie turned her head away. “Can I talk to you for a sec?” she asked.

Looking puzzled, Jeff shrugged and stepped aside, letting her walk past him. “Sure thing.” Lizzie pulled her bag off her shoulder and pressed it against her midriff. Jeff sat on the couch while she stood by the window that looked out over the cloudy sky and the clean-angled lawns of the park, and spoke without turning to face him.

“So listen,” she said.
Soonest begun, soonest done
, Grandma Selma always said. Lizzie’s hands and knees were trembling, the muscles in her legs were twitching. She wanted to move, to hurry back out into the hallway, down the elevator, out onto the street, to run away from what she had to tell him.