Fly Away Home: A Novel by Jennifer Weiner

Author:Jennifer Weiner [Weiner, Jennifer]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, General, Literary, Contemporary Women
ISBN: 9780743294270
Google: Um6VWhXvliEC
Amazon: 1442350199
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Published: 2010-07-13T04:00:00+00:00

DIANA

When she was in the thick of her residency, working thirty-six-hour shifts, then going home to a preschooler and a husband who was more inclined to complain about his own lack of sleep than to help Diana address hers, there was a patient, a repeater, whom she saw every few weeks in the ER. The patient’s name was Crystal, and Diana remembered her because she was exactly her age.

Crystal was a diabetic and an addict. Her drug of choice was crystal meth—Diana had occasionally wondered whether Crystal was actually her name or if she’d renamed herself after her favorite substance—but she’d take whatever she could get, or steal, or trade sex for. Heroin, cocaine, pills, pot, glue … every few months too much of one or all of the above would send her to the ER, stuporous, her blood sugar dangerously low. She’d shoot up, nod off, forget to eat, never mind monitoring her blood sugar, and she’d pass out, sometimes in an apartment and sometimes in a park or on a street. The cops knew her places. They’d keep an eye out, and if they found her, they’d scoop her up and bring her in.

On her first visit, Diana had mentioned rehab. Crystal had just laughed. “Forget it,” she said, her voice rough and slurred. She’d chipped one of her front teeth during the prelude to this last trip to the hospital, but she was still beautiful, with high cheekbones and lush lips. “You don’t think I’ve tried?” She shook her head, presumably in sorrow at Diana’s naivete. “And what is there for me, if I clean up? Some job?” Her voice soaked the last word in scorn. “Some man who’s gonna make an honest woman of me? Or do you think I’d go to college like you?”

“Maybe you could,” Diana answered. She was at the end of an eight-to-eight shift, so exhausted that the world had blurred and doubled in front of her eyes. She told herself that all she really wanted to do was get enough glucose into her patient that she’d stabilize, sober up, and be able to make her way to wherever she called home. “I don’t know what you could do. But I know it’s not going to end well if you keep doing drugs.”

Crystal threw her head back and laughed, “Be seeing you,” and waved a jaunty goodbye when Diana left her cubicle.

The next time Diana saw her, she’d been beaten badly, one of those high cheekbones shattered, a tooth knocked out, her lip split and requiring stitches. She wouldn’t say who’d done it, or why, and when Diana wheeled up on a stool and said that her internal had shown recent sexual activity and asked, gently, if she’d been raped, Crystal had merely shrugged and turned her face away.

“We could do a rape kit,” Diana offered, feeling sick and sad, knowing that it was her job to make the offer and knowing, even before she’d made it, that Crystal would refuse. She’d shaken her bandaged head, braids whispering against the pillow.

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