Fly Away Home (11 page)

She pulled her camera out of her purse and pointed at the window. “Can you stand right there?”

“Really?” Jeff seemed somewhere between shy and flattered. “I’m not going to have to take any of my clothes off, am I?”

It took Lizzie a second to realize that he was teasing her. “I promise they’ll be tasteful,” she said, and got him to stand right where she wanted him, in profile, with his face silhouetted against the thickly leaved trees and the moon. Not Superman, but Batman, she thought, clicking away, a superhero with a painful past and an affinity for the darkness. She climbed onto his bed, without a thought of what signals that might be sending, to get a better angle, thinking that there was something so intimate about taking a picture, capturing someone’s likeness and letting him see what you saw.

“These are really good,” said Jeff when they sat on the couch and she clicked through the images. “Really interesting.”

She looked at the clock, suddenly aware of the warmth of his leg against hers, and how he’d slipped his arm around her shoulders. “I should go.”

“Or you’ll turn into a pumpkin?” He was teasing her again, but it was without rancor, a kind, almost brotherly kind of ribbing. “Let me walk you down, Cinderella.” At the sliding doors at the front of the apartment building, he kissed her—gently and quickly, his lips warm on hers.
Nice
, she thought. This evening ranked as among the best she’d had. She wanted to see him again, even though once he learned the truth he probably wouldn’t want to see her. But maybe that could be postponed until they’d had a few more dinners, maybe a picnic in the park, or a night snuggled on his grandfather’s couch, watching movies, the way she’d heard normal couples did.

By the night the story of her father and Joelle hit the news, she and Jeff had been seeing each other for weeks. They’d had their walks and their dinners and their picnics, and had made out once on Jeff’s big bed. As soon as she left the hospital, holding Milo’s hand, her telephone rang. “We still on?” Jeff asked. It took her a minute to remember that they’d made plans, the three of them: Jeff was going to come over with a movie. After dinner, they’d pop popcorn, she and Jeff and Milo, and watch it together.

“Hey, listen,” she began, tugging Milo into the vestibule of the 7-Eleven. Jeff waited patiently, wordlessly, for Lizzie to begin. “Did you watch TV today? About the senator who was having an affair?”

If he’d said something disparaging, something mocking, she would have found a way to cancel their plans and maybe even avoid him for the rest of the summer. But Jeff said merely, “Yeah, I think I heard something about it.”

Lizzie gulped. “Well, the senator’s kind of my dad.”

Again, if he’d laughed, or joked, or said, “Kind of?” she would have hung up on him. But Jeff said calmly and kindly, “Wow. Are you doing okay? Do you still want to get together?” Lizzie thought about it, and realized that the answer was yes.

She was relieved that, so far at least, her revelation didn’t seem to have changed the way Jeff felt about her. She’d seen that happen before. A classmate or a classmate’s parent, a friend of a friend, or a nurse or an orderly would look at her face or read her last name, and there would be a click so clear it was practically audible.
Elizabeth Woodruff? Your father’s not … ?
First came the recognition, which was quickly followed by the classmate or acquaintance trying to figure out how to capitalize on this new information. Lizzie was constantly astonished by the manner and magnitude of the requests strangers would make. She thought sometimes that there was nothing, absolutely nothing, to which the average American did not feel entitled.

Could you … would you … do you think that maybe … ?
Sometimes the petitioners would feign interest in Lizzie in order to have a better shot at their prize: a handshake, a photograph, a bid on a government contract, or even just a moment with the great man, a chance to have a senator’s attention for the length of a drink or a dance or a meal. When she was a sophomore in high school, a senior from Collegiate named Glenn Burkey had asked her out. She’d been thrilled until the moment that boy had shown up at their door, barely kissed her hello, and then gone to the living room, where he’d spent twenty minutes debating alternative energy sources with her father, in a naked attempt to secure one of the coveted summer internship slots.

Sometimes the petitioner would want nothing more than a small favor or a piece of information she could dispense. Help with a parking ticket, a dispute with a landlord, a Medicare claim? Dad could hook that up, or at least steer the request into the proper channels. But sometimes, especially after Lizzie had started her slide, things got dicey.

Last spring, when she and a bunch of friends had been trying to make a buy in the Village, the dealer had recognized her. This was a piece of bad luck: as Diana said, when she’d heard about it, usually there was very little overlap in the Venn diagrams of “people who watched enough CNN to recognize their senator’s daughter” and “people who sold crystal meth out of apartments with holes in the floor.” But that night she’d been spectacularly unlucky. “Holy shit,” said the guy, a bug-eyed wraith in acid-washed jeans and a dingy wifebeater. “That’s Senator Woodruff’s kid!” Lizzie had gotten herself up off the floor, where she’d slumped when the rush had hit her, but she hadn’t been moving very quickly. In fact, she’d barely been moving at all. The dealer and one of his buddies had tied her to a chair—with the dealer’s girlfriend’s ripped fishnet stockings, she recalled—and used her cell phone to call her parents and demand the immediate payment of ten thousand dollars, or else they’d send cell phone pictures to TMZ. Instead of sending the money, her parents sent the cops. The dealer and his girlfriend, who’d been smart enough to try to ransom Lizzie but not smart enough to hide their wares, fled into the bathroom to try to flush their stash down the toilet, while her drug buddies scattered. They’d all been arrested, Lizzie included, and it had been in the paper, a little squib in the Metro section of the
Times
, which had gotten picked up by Page Six and then a couple of the gossip blogs, and the next thing she knew, she and her dad were driving to Minnesota, on a road trip that had ended in rehab.

She gave Milo his bath and his dinner. Diana hurried out the door on her way out to a rare date with Gary, and by seven-thirty Jeff was there, with a bag of popcorn kernels and an edited-for-TV version of
Airplane!
He put the movie on, popped the popcorn, and brought it into the living room, along with a pitcher of iced tea.

“You doing all right?” he asked quietly, on the couch beside Lizzie, as Milo, lying on the floor in a fleece ski cap and his pajamas, howled with laughter at the opening scenes.

“I just never thought,” she said, and then let her voice trail off, fidgeting with the painted glass beads at her throat. Jeff waited. Lizzie thought of what to say. If she talked too much about her father, she’d risk revealing things that Jeff didn’t know and that Lizzie didn’t want to tell him. Jeff still looked and thought and carried himself like someone in the army. He was so clean-cut, so upright, so moral, that she couldn’t imagine how he’d feel if he learned about some of the things she’d done, and the people she’d done them with. When he looked at her, when he stroked her hair, when he told her she smelled like cinnamon sugar, she could tell he really liked her, that he was enchanted by her, and she didn’t want to do anything to mess that up or reveal her true nature or remind him of his own mother.

Jeff pulled her close until her cheek rested on his shoulder. “Have you talked to him?” he asked. Lizzie shook her head. Diana had talked to him, and she could see from her Missed Calls log that her father had tried to reach her, but she hadn’t called him back or even played his messages. What could he possibly have said? And what could she say to him? That she was disgusted by what he’d done? That she was disappointed? Couldn’t he tell her the same thing, a hundred times over?

“Do you two get along? You and your dad?” Jeff asked.

Lizzie thought. Milo was lying on his side, breathing deeply and steadily, as, on TV, the air traffic controller announced that he’d picked a bad week to stop sniffing glue. She knew how he felt.

“We used to go get bagels,” she finally said. When she was a girl, every Sunday morning she and her father would get up early and walk six blocks to buy a dozen bagels. He’d carried her on his shoulders until she turned five or so, and then she’d walk beside him. Standing in the steamy, dough-and-garlic-scented air of H&H, as people pushed all around her, calling out their orders, pointing at what they wanted and telling the fast-moving, sweaty men behind the counter to bag the everything bagels separately, Lizzie would hold her father’s hand. Sometimes, she’d bury her face in his tweed overcoat and take a sniff, smelling the wool, and his aftershave. “Good morning, congressman!” the lady at the cash register would call, and people would turn to stare, to offer their own greetings, to ask questions about this vote or that bill and sometimes to offer dissenting opinions, to complain about traffic tickets or their taxes. Her father would listen for a moment or two, then say, “Excuse us. My little girl needs her breakfast,” words that would defuse even the most irascible New Yorker. He would order a dozen bagels to bring home, plus a bialy for Lizzie to eat in the park.

She shut her eyes, remembering the warm roll in her hands, her father on the bench beside her, telling her the names of the trees, and in that instant she was six years old, Milo’s age, in the park with her daddy, when nothing had gone wrong yet, and nothing ever would.
I want a pill
, she thought.
I want to smoke. I want to drink. I want to go to sleep
.

She must have done something—flinched, or made some noise—because Jeff, who’d been laughing at Striker trying to land the plane, turned and asked, “Are you okay?” In the darkness, Lizzie nodded, and forced herself to take a slow breath, remembering the mantra, which she’d learned in rehab that spring: HALT. When you were down and vulnerable, when you wanted to use, ask yourself: were you … Hungry? Angry? Lonely? Tired? Name the feelings instead of stuffing them down and hiding them away, her counselors had instructed. Address the feelings and move on.

She wasn’t hungry—Jeff had made popcorn, and she’d nibbled at the fish sticks Milo hadn’t eaten for dinner. She wasn’t lonely. With Jeff, and Milo sleeping on the floor, she felt more connected and secure than she had in years. She wasn’t tired: she’d been sleeping well in her sister’s closet-sized guest room up on the third floor. That left angry. She supposed she was.

She remembered the trip she and her father had taken to Minnesota after the ill-fated ransom attempt and her arrest (had Joelle been in the picture then? Lizzie wondered, then decided she didn’t want to know). Her dad had been home for the Senate’s spring break, and neither of her parents trusted Lizzie to get herself on a plane and get herself off at the correct destination. Besides, she would have been spotted at an airport. Someone with a cell phone would have snapped her picture, and the whole thing would have been in the papers again. So her mother had packed her bags, and her father had rented a car, and as strained and odd as the circumstances had been, they’d had a pretty good time. The car he’d picked was a giant SUV that Lizzie had nicknamed Rapper’s Delight. It was so high off the ground it came with its own step stool, and had spinning rims and a killer sound system and cream-colored leather seats with DVD players mounted into the headrests. Lizzie had draped herself across the backseat, pleasantly numbed by the Valium her primary-care physician had prescribed to get her from New York to Minnesota, with a plastic bag in her hands in case she got queasy as her body started to withdraw from the drugs she’d been feeding it for months.

As soon as they were out of the city, her father had pulled into a rest stop and gotten two bags full of junk food—chips and candy, pretzel nuggets stuffed with fake cheese, beef jerky and soda and iced chocolate cupcakes. In his jeans and sneakers and baseball cap, he could have been any middle-aged father, strongly built and still handsome, and she could have been any daughter, a student or a waitress or a nanny, on a road trip with her dad.

The two of them snacked their way across the country, listening to Lizzie’s music: Lucinda Williams, the McGarrigle sisters, Shawn Colvin, k.d. lang, and Patsy Cline. Along the way, he told her stories. Lizzie heard all about the senator who was so cheap that he kept an inflatable mattress in his office instead of paying to rent an apartment. Her father filled her in on the three freshman representatives whose shared living quarters were so notoriously filthy there’d been a rat living in their kitchen for weeks, and the congressman from Colorado, a Democrat and a devout Catholic, who seemed to get his poor wife pregnant every time he went home to campaign. “They’ve got five kids,” her father had said, “and I think he’s met each of them once.”

She’d had her camera, of course, and had managed to raise it to the window every hundred miles or so and snap a shot of the world blurring by. There was a picture of a rest stop, the weedy, trash-choked yards that backed onto the highway access road, a shot of the Golden Arches that she’d taken while lying flat on her back in the backseat, and a picture of the sani-band that girdled the hotel’s toilet seat in the Best Western where they’d stopped for the night.

They’d gone to a diner for breakfast the next morning. Lizzie, still queasy, and starting to feel the beginnings of the familiar nausea and bone-deep ache, had huddled in her hooded sweatshirt, sipping a glass of ginger ale. While her legs twitched and jerked, doing a crazy dance under the table as she sweated through her shirt, her father ate an omelet and talked about the time in college when he’d gotten mono and fallen asleep during a haircut, right in the barber’s chair. Finally, he dropped his napkin on his plate.

“So listen, Lizzie,” he said, “what’s this about, anyhow?”

She tensed her muscles, trying to get her legs to hold still. “Dunno.”