Fly Away Home (24 page)

But come Thanksgiving, Selma wouldn’t be impressed by her daughter’s adventures in the kitchen. Selma’s generation had been born a little too late for
The Joy of Cooking
, and too early for Martha Stewart to reinvent the home as a laboratory-cum-art gallery in which a woman could exercise all of her creative energies and scientific impulses by whipping meringues and hanging her own wallpaper. Sylvie’s mother saw the kitchen as a place of drudgery, a prison she couldn’t escape fast enough, and, as a result, her dinners had fallen into two categories: reheated and frozen. Thanksgiving was the only meal she attempted to cook from scratch, and she could ruin even catered meals by sticking them in the oven and forgetting they were there.

On the telephone, Selma was still talking. “I’ll send you my recipes,” she said.

“Yes, Ma.” Sylvie wondered whether the phrase
cook past the point of edible
figured prominently in the one for turkey.

Her mother’s voice softened. “Are you doing all right? You’re not lonely up there?”

“I’m fine,” Sylvie said automatically. For the first time since she’d fled to Connecticut she found herself wondering about Clarissa and Derek. They worked for her but they were on Richard’s payroll, Derek as a driver, Clarissa as a social secretary. She hoped that Richard had found them some other work, that he hadn’t laid them off, that there weren’t more people suffering because of what he’d done.

“I remember after your dad died, it took a long time before I stopped seeing him everywhere. I’d turn around and I’d catch a glimpse of him, out of the corner of my eye …” She paused. “Of course, Richard isn’t dead,” she rasped.

“True.” Nor had Richard spent much time in the Connecticut house. Sylvie had never gotten used to seeing him there, coming in from the porch with the paper, or rounding the corner into the kitchen with an empty coffee mug in his hand, so she wasn’t seeing him now. This was her house, her place, with her meals and her memories. She’d washed the curtains and waxed the floors, she’d made each bed and reorganized every closet. She’d thrown out the mouse’s corpse, and that, more than anything else made this place hers. “Can I ask you something?”

“Ask,” said the Honorable Selma.

“Do you think …” Sylvie tried to choose the right words.
Should I have seen it coming? Was it my fault?
In spite of the routines she’d strung together, in spite of Tim’s company, she still felt unmoored and desperately lonely. She’d lost her husband, her best friend, her personal and professional identity, not to mention her job, all in the span of a few terrible hours, and her daughters, for better or worse, were grown women. Who was she now? What was her purpose? “Was I a good wife?” she finally asked.

“Sylvie,” her mother said, her voice insistent and confiding. “You were a better wife than he deserved. You are a wonderful mother to your daughters.”

Sylvie made some noise of negation. Tears filled her eyes and spilled down her cheeks. “You are,” Selma insisted. “You did the best you could. That’s all any mother can do. You’ve got two good girls. You’re a good woman. And if Richard can’t see that … if he can’t treat you the way you deserve to be treated … if he’s not even smart enough to keep it a secret …”

“Oh, Ma,” Sylvie said. That wasn’t what she wanted: a husband who fooled around and covered it up, even though she knew, or at least suspected, that there were a number of women in her circle who’d made that very arrangement, who were willing to carry on being Mrs. So-and-So because the perks were so enjoyable, even if they had to look the other way when their husband was seen at a restaurant or a bar or a beach resort with a woman who was not her.

“Well, I’m sorry!” Selma cried. “But every man I know with something on the side at least had enough respect for his wife to make sure she never found out about it. Or at least they wouldn’t rub it in her face.”

Sylvie thought about that. The numbness she’d felt that day on the drive home from Philadelphia was seeping back into her bones. She didn’t want to ask, didn’t want to know, but the question felt as if it was swelling in her mouth, a terrible tumor that would burst if she didn’t say the word. “Daddy?”

Her mother answered instantly. “Oh, honey, no. Not him.” A pause. “At least, not that I ever knew about.” She paused again. “Although there was that Miriam Selkin. Remember her? With the bosoms?”

Sylvie didn’t remember Mrs. Selkin, except as a friendly neighbor who’d always bought Girl Scout cookies from Diana, but she did remember her father, a swimmer and a crossword-puzzle enthusiast, a man she would always picture the way he’d been during his final years, round and bald and tanned the golden-brown of a roast chicken from ten years’ worth of winters in Palm Beach, with a sun-spotted scalp and a familiar, comforting smell of cigars and Gold Bond Medicated Foot Powder. Her father would slip notes under her pillow signed “T. Fairy” when she lost her teeth (he’d written them without bothering to disguise his handwriting, on his monogrammed business stationery. Sylvie pointed this out as soon as she was old enough to read, and her dad had shrugged and said, “Maybe T. Fairy just borrowed a piece”). Selma had thanked her husband at a dozen awards dinners as “my biggest supporter and my number one fan,” and Sylvie felt certain that he would never have done anything to disgrace his wife.

“When you get to be as old as I am, sex isn’t as big a part of your life,” Selma explained.

“Ma …”

“And your father, with his bad back …”

“Ma,” she managed. “Please.”

“I don’t know. Maybe if Viagra had come on the market earlier, things would have been different,” Selma mused. Sylvie held the phone pinched between two fingers. Somewhere in the world, there was surely a conversation taking place that she’d less enjoy hearing. Trouble was, she couldn’t imagine what that conversation might be.

“I’ve got to go,” she said, exactly the way Lizzie had said it to her. It was true—Tim was coming for dinner in half an hour, and the table wasn’t set.

“How are the girls?” asked Selma.

“They’re fine,” she answered, again, automatically, knowing in her heart that it wasn’t true, not with Lizzie sounding so strange and Diana not even taking her calls.

“I hope I didn’t upset you,” said Selma. “I just wanted you to know that you never know what’s going on in someone else’s marriage, behind someone else’s bedroom door. Nobody’s perfect,” Selma continued. “Not even your mom and your dad.”

After saying goodbye, Sylvie hung up the phone and hurried upstairs, into the shower, preparing herself for dinner with her … boyfriend? Was Tim her boyfriend? Could a woman her age, a woman who was still, technically, married, even have a boyfriend?

Whether he was her boyfriend or not, she’d been seeing a lot of Tim Simmons. In the mornings, while she did her shopping, there he’d be, conferring with the deli manager or going over an order with the organic produce guy, a young man who’d left Brooklyn in order to minimize his carbon footprint and consume only things he could make or grow himself. This had come to involve, Tim had told her, going toilet-paper free the year before, and making his wife use discarded athletic socks for her monthly cycle. “That poor girl!” said Sylvie, privately resolving to figure out where the young woman was living and anonymously deliver some tampons, the really bad kind, with nonbiodegradable plastic applicators.

Tim usually brought wine or dessert or something else he’d picked up—a novel he’d read about that he thought she might like, a sauté pan he thought she could use, cookbooks for Indian food and Greek food, a soup kit for her slow cooker. Best of all, he would come with stories about his sons—the ski trip Frankie and Ollie had taken, and how they’d decided to rent snowboards, even though they’d never tried them, and how Frank had gotten to the top of a run and then frozen, too terrified to attempt it, and had to unstrap his snowboard and walk all the way down the mountain. Or the time when Ollie had just gotten his license and was taking a turn behind the wheel on the family’s trip to Cape Cod, and had gotten stuck in a rotary and gone around and around and around it, the rest of the family screaming with laughter, until finally he’d worked up the courage to merge. Normally taciturn, low-key, and self-effacing (or maybe, Sylvie thought, any man would pale in contrast to charismatic Richard), Tim would become voluble and vivid when discussing his boys. His cheeks would gain color, his voice would rise, and his booming laugh would fill the kitchen. Tim had pictures, Tim had stories, and, best of all, Tim and his sons had all kinds of rituals and traditions. There was the fall kayaking and camping trip to Arcadia State Park, the rafting trips they were planning for the spring, and how they were already thinking about renting a big RV in a few years and visiting the state parks between Connecticut and Seattle.

Tim and Sylvie would talk about current events, the latest scandal with the latest starlet, keeping far away from politics and from sex (the sex-addicted golfer and the movie star’s husband who’d fooled around with the tattooed white supremacist stripper were never discussed). Sylvie would finish cooking dinner, with Tim leaning easily against the counter, nursing a bottle of beer. They’d eat—Tim complimenting her cooking lavishly—and then they’d clear the table and do the dishes together. She’d make coffee; Tim would build a fire. Then they’d sit on the sofa, and he’d talk more about his boys … which, of course, made her think about her girls. Could she lure Lizzie and Diana, and Milo, of course, to Connecticut, with promises of kayaking or camping? Would those activities please her girls the way they’d pleased Tim’s boys? Maybe, she thought sometimes, when she’d added a bit of brandy to her coffee, she would marry Tim, and they’d be one big blended family, happily hiking and camping the years away. Maybe Lizzie would even fall in love with one of Tim’s sons!

Sylvie would listen to Tim, entertaining herself with these private reveries, for once not thinking of Richard. At the end of the night, usually by eleven, Tim would stand up and shove his hands awkwardly into his pockets. “Well, good night then,” he’d say. The first night, he’d shaken her hand and pulled her into a half-hug. The hugs had gotten less awkward with each meal, and a few times he’d kissed her cheek and once, briefly, her lips, but it never went beyond that.

Sylvie wondered about those kisses. Did he want more? Did she? She was beginning to think she’d like being with him that way—she’d like the warmth, the comfort of another body in her bed, and she could imagine that once the loving was over, Tim would be even more relaxed and tell her even more about his boys. Maybe the problem was that Tim couldn’t do more than kiss her—from friends and acquaintances, she’d heard that plenty of men their age couldn’t have sex, because of a variety of medical conditions, or because of the drugs they were taking to address them. She knew that he’d been divorced for sixteen years. His ex-wife’s name was Kathy. She’d worked as a school nurse in Rochester when they met. “It’s not much of a story. We grew apart,” he said the first time he’d come for dinner, sharpening her mother’s old knife, then carving the meat into rosy slices.

She supposed that she and Tim were dating. She supposed, even, that he was courting her. Such an old-fashioned word, such an old-fashioned concept. Sylvie had never been courted. She and Richard had, in the parlance of her children, hooked up (although she would die before telling Lizzie and Diana that). They’d noticed each other; they’d talked at that party, they’d tumbled into bed, and then they’d been a couple, which was, in her defense, how many of the couples she knew, including Ceil and Larry, had gotten together.

But Tim took her out on proper dates. “Got any plans for Friday night?” he’d ask when he saw her at the grocery store on a Tuesday morning. When Sylvie told him no, he’d ask if she was interested in accompanying him to a movie at the old, ornate single-screen theater in town, or a chamber music concert, or a high school performance of
Our Town
(she was certain the last one would be excruciating and amateurish, having suffered through a number of Lizzie’s high school shows and musicals, and was pleasantly surprised by the proficiency of the Fairview students. The girl who played Emily Webb was especially affecting). He’d always drive, and hold her door open before circling the car to climb in; he insisted on paying for dinner, at the French bistro or the wood-burning pizza place. “You’re spending a fortune on groceries,” he said, smiling his old, familiar smile, with his hands tucked into his pockets and his chin tucked into his chest. “It’s the least I can do.” But Sylvie wasn’t sure if this made him her boyfriend or even if a word like that could apply to two people in their fifties.

Never mind, she thought, and got herself off the couch and up the stairs, smiling, knowing she’d need to hurry if she wanted dinner to be ready by the time he arrived that night.

DIANA

She’d been with Doug for more than four months when she’d finally taken him to her house on that rainy October night. Doug’s mother had reclaimed her car, Diana was worried that they’d been spotted together once too often for anywhere in the hospital to be safe, and the Society Hill Sheraton, preferred hotel of all Philadelphia adulterers east of Broad Street, was vexingly completely occupied. He’d offered his apartment but she felt weird about going back there, where his roommates could see her and talk.

“Close your eyes,” she’d whispered, looking up and down the street before pulling him through her front door.

“Why?” he’d asked. “Is it messy?”

It wasn’t. During the length of their affair Diana had become a more obsessive housekeeper and a more devoted runner who’d shaved a minute and a half off her previous 10K personal best. She was even, she thought, taking better care of Milo, and Gary, too, now that she had a secret life, a secret self to nurture, which somehow gave her more energy to tend to her son and her husband. She didn’t need Doug to shut his eyes because her house wasn’t clean. She needed him to close them because she didn’t want him to see the picture propped on the mantel that she’d taken the previous Christmas, of her and her husband and the son she’d never told him about, the three of them smiling for the camera and looking as if everything was fine.

When Lizzie had shown up and found them in bed, Diana had been convinced that it was the beginning of the end. What was it Benjamin Franklin had said?
Three can keep a secret if two are dead?
“Don’t worry,” said Doug, whose relationship with his own little sister was, it seemed, very different from Diana’s with Lizzie. “What’s she got to gain by ratting you out?”

Diana turned her face away. She couldn’t explain it, couldn’t tell him that she’d always been the family’s straight arrow, the superstar, the senator’s presentable daughter; that Lizzie had always been the failure and the fuck-up, and that the chance to reverse those roles, even temporarily, would be too much for her sister to resist. Diana had spent the next twenty-four hours in an agony of dread, convinced that Lizzie, either accidentally or on purpose, would say something to their parents. Either that or she’d go straight to Gary, and her world would come crashing down.

A week went by, then another, and Diana didn’t hear from her sister. Not a phone call, not an e-mail … and, of course, she was too scared to try to contact Lizzie herself. She ducked her mother’s calls and felt too guilty to exchange more than ninety seconds’ worth of pleasantries with her dad, who, she knew, missed her. She was in no position to console him or censure him. All she could do, she thought unhappily, was compare notes.
Did you and Joelle ever do it in a parking garage? How’d you keep it a secret from Mom?

She told herself that maybe it would be all right, that she and Doug could continue indefinitely, aided by her husband’s extreme cluelessness. As long as they were careful, as long as Lizzie kept her mouth shut, maybe they’d be okay.

What finally happened wasn’t Lizzie tattling, or anyone else from the hospital catching them together. What happened was, one perfectly autumnal Sunday morning, she and Gary and Milo went out to brunch.

They had decided on a place called Green Eggs in the Italian Market neighborhood. Milo had chosen it because he’d liked the name and Diana had agreed because they had quinoa porridge on the menu, and Gary had shrugged and said, “Sure, fine.” They’d just rounded the corner onto Dickinson Street when Diana spotted Doug and two of his roommates walking toward them. The guys were dressed in jeans and sweatshirts and running shoes—play clothes for a day off. Doug carried a football, and one of the roommates had a white paper sack of bagels in his arm. Time seemed to slow down. Diana’s legs trembled beneath her, and she felt her face turn red. It was as if a spotlight was aimed at her, as if the word
GUILTY
had appeared on her forehead, written in indelible red ink for everyone to see.

Would he speak to her? He wouldn’t, she thought, as they approached each other. If he said hello she’d be forced to introduce him to Gary and Milo, to say, “This is Doug. He’s an intern at the hospital.” He wouldn’t want that. He wouldn’t do that to her.

Doug walked past her without a word, seemingly without a glance. Diana exhaled in a shaky rush. Milo looked at her strangely, and Diana forced herself to smile as she took his hand and tweaked the bill of his baseball cap. They walked the few remaining blocks to the restaurant and took their place in line. “Are you all right?” asked Gary, sounding somewhere between concerned and annoyed, when he noticed the beads of sweat on her face.

“I’m fine,” said Diana, in a voice that barely sounded like her own. “Just a little dehydrated.”

“Mom ran ten miles this morning,” Milo said. This was true. She’d run ten miles at a sub eight-minute-mile pace, and she’d finished her run on Tasker Street, breaking her own rule about Doug’s apartment, ending her workout, sweaty and glowing and breathless, tangled in Doug’s disreputable sheets, wrapped in Doug’s arms.

They gave their name to the hostess and stood in the mild sunshine, waiting for a table to open up. Milo played his Leapster. Gary shifted his weight from foot to foot and remarked to the air that there were plenty of places in their neighborhood that served brunch. Diana stood, feeling as if she’d been carved from wood, until the hostess led them inside. They’d just placed their order—pancakes for Milo, the porridge for Diana, something called the Kitchen Sink, involving fried eggs and biscuits and sausage cream gravy, for Gary—when her BlackBerry thrummed in her pocket.

“Work,” she said, and raised the screen to her eyes. It wasn’t work. It was Doug, with the text she’d been waiting for since he’d glimpsed her walking with her husband and her son:
i don’t think i can do this anymore
.

“Excuse me,” she said.

Gary sighed noisily. “Mommy’s got the poops again,” he said as Diana walked to the bathroom, without bothering to tell him to watch his mouth. There, trembling, crouching on top of the toilet, she punched in Doug’s number and pressed the phone to her ear.

He picked up on the third ring. “Hey, Diana.”

“Can we talk about this?” she whispered. She knew what the problem was, or she thought she did—he’d seen her with Gary and assumed that he was breaking up a happy marriage, when, in fact, her marriage was anything but happy. She needed Doug. She couldn’t imagine her life without him. He couldn’t leave her. He loved her. She knew he did.

“I don’t think there’s much to say.”

She pressed her arms tightly against her sides and jammed her quivering legs together. “Doug. Listen. I know what that looked like. But the truth is …”

“You’ve got a little boy,” he said dully. “You never told me that.”

“Look, things with us have nothing at all to do with him. I’m a good mother,” Diana said. “It’s not like I’m taking time away from Milo to see you.”

She could hear him sigh. “I can’t do this to a little kid.” His voice dropped. “I’m sorry. But we should never have started. And we’ve got to stop now, before someone really gets hurt.”

“Doug.” What about her? What about her getting hurt? Diana dropped her head between her knees, she felt dizzy, and sick, and someone was knocking on the bathroom door, knocking and calling, sweetly, “Everything all right in there?”

“Doug?” she whispered desperately into the phone. “Doug!” There was no answer. He’d hung up.

She clutched her belly and groaned, a sorrowful sound that would have sent her running to the exam room if one of her patients had made it. She sounded like she’d been mortally wounded … which, she thought, was true enough. After a minute, she made herself get to her feet. She flushed the toilet and washed her hands and went back to the table, to smile at her son and swallow a few mouthfuls of porridge. Her shift started at two. She texted Doug before she left—
call me pls. Need 2 talk
. But by the time she arrived at the hospital he hadn’t called, and she didn’t think he ever would.

At her desk, she started frantically reviewing the charts that had piled up, scribbling orders. Coumadin for the lady who’d come in with a suspected stroke, insulin for the eight-year-old with type 1 diabetes, IV antibiotics for the girl whose infected labial piercing had resulted in a nasty case of sepsis.

Lynette stuck her head into Diana’s office. “You okay?” she asked, and Diana had nodded, her mind whirling as she tried to rearrange the puzzle pieces of her life in a shape that made sense. Maybe she’d leave Gary and go to Doug a single woman. Maybe they could make it work. Maybe …

She ran through the scenarios of divorce and separation, and staggered through her day like a sleepwalker, checking on patients, taking temperatures and blood pressures, writing prescriptions, asking questions and writing down the answers without really hearing. She checked her BlackBerry every minute or two, but heard nothing from Doug. When she came back home after her shift ended at midnight, Milo was sleeping, Gary was in front of his computer, the television was blaring, and the kitchen was a mess. From the box on the counter, the grease-stained napkins and paper plates, Diana surmised that there’d been pizza for dinner, and even though she’d asked Gary to cook, and had made a point of showing him the tenderloin and the fresh zucchini she’d bought at the farmer’s market.

She was folding the pizza box into the recycling bin when the telephone rang. Her heart leapt—maybe it was Doug, Doug calling on the home line to announce himself, to tell Gary that he didn’t deserve her and that he, Doug, was on his way over to claim Diana and Milo as his own.

“Diana?” Gary, in sweatpants, entered the kitchen. The telephone was in his hand and there was a concerned look on his face. He coughed wetly into his fist, then said, “Hank Stavers for you.”

Diana felt the blood rush out of her extremities. Hank Stavers was the chief of staff. She took the telephone in one cold hand.

“Dr. Stavers?”

“Dr. Woodruff.” His tone was clipped, his voice as cool as she’d ever heard it. “We need you back at the hospital immediately.”

She could barely find the breath to say, “Of course.”

“My office,” he said. “Frank Greenfeldt will be waiting.” Frank Greenfeldt, Diana knew, was the hospital’s attorney. She knew him by reputation, but she’d never met him, never had a reason to meet him. With shaking hands she buttoned up her coat. Had Doug told them what was going on? Had he suggested that she’d behaved improperly somehow? Did she need her own lawyer? A sob caught in her throat as she grabbed her purse and her keys. At that moment, she missed her father desperately. He’d always been great in a crisis, assured and decisive. He could have told her exactly what to do.

“Hey,” said Gary, sounding irritated. “Where are you going?”

“Emergency,” she whispered, and bolted out the door.

They were waiting for her in Hank Stavers’s immaculate mahogany-and-leather office up on the fifth floor, a world away from the blood and mess and noise of the ER. Diana bit her lip to keep it from trembling as Stavers said, “Please sit.”

Late as it was, Frank Greenfeldt was wearing a suit, navy blue, with a lavender tie. Diana wondered whether he’d gotten dressed especially for this, or been called away from something else that night. He slid a folder across Hank’s desk and tapped at a line with the tip of a silver Montblanc pen. “Read this, please.”

Diana bent and read out loud the orders she’d written that night: “Insulin, 100 milligrams.”

“Is that the correct dosage for a sixty-five-pound eight-year-old?” Greenfeldt’s tone was neutral, but his jowly face was flushed.

“No. It should have been …” Diana’s voice failed. She’d written down a dosage ten times what it should have been, and if the little girl had gotten 100 milligrams …

She looked up, her eyes wild. “Oh my God,” she blurted. “Is she …”

“The drug was never administered,” said the lawyer. “The nurse on duty, Lynette Arnold, noticed the error in time.”

“Thank God,” Diana whispered, hearing blood rush in her ears. “Oh, thank God.” She should never have been working. Distracted as she’d been, her thoughts bouncing between her boyfriend and her husband, she had no business taking care of patients. No business at all.

Somewhere, far away, the hospital’s lawyer was talking. Diana wiped her sweaty palms against her skirt and forced herself to focus. “… the seriousness of an error of this nature.”

“I’m sorry,” she blurted, her voice too loud, her face too hot, as if those words could make a difference, as if they could undo what she’d done. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I can’t … I just can’t believe that I …”

“You’ve had a lot on your mind lately,” said Hank Stavers, speaking for the first time. Diana found herself nodding. A lot on her mind. Yes indeed. That didn’t begin to cover it. “Given your …” He paused. “Family situation?”

For a minute she thought he was talking about her and Doug. Then she realized he meant her father. She nodded again. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t know what else to say except how very, very sorry I am.”

“We got lucky,” said the lawyer. “This time.”

“I’m going to recommend that you take a leave of absence—paid, of course. Certainly, the administrators at Philadelphia Hospital understand that there are …”—Stavers paused again—“circumstances that arise that make it difficult to perform up to the best of one’s abilities.”

The best of one’s abilities
, she thought. Even an idiot, even a first-year medical student knew the difference between 10 and 100 milligrams. It was an unforgivable mistake. She sent up a quiet, fervent prayer to Lynette, who’d saved her life—hers and the little girl’s. Then she straightened in her chair, squared her shoulders, and looked at the men on the other side of the desk. “For how long,” she asked politely, for she had been raised with good manners, “would you like me to leave?”

Once the arrangements were made, the dates agreed to and the forms signed, Diana took the stairs down to the emergency room. Lynette was waiting behind the reception desk, looking haggard underneath the fluorescent lights. She got to her feet as soon as she saw Diana getting off the elevator.