Fly Away

She feels a little woozy, a nice feeling, like being wrapped in a warm blanket. But when she comes to, it isn't so nice. She is slumped in a restroom stall, tears drying on her cheeks. Outside, in the spitting rain of a Seattle night, she walks barefoot on the dirty sidewalk until a pink martini bar sign catches her eye. Inside, she orders tequila, a straight shot. A man in an expensive suit sidles up beside her. “I'm Troy,” he says. “I'm Tully Hart,” she replies. He already knows. When he kisses her, she wants to lose herself, to dissolve like candy. But even as he presses his body to hers, she feels herself starting to cry, a pathetic pleading she hasn't heard in her own voice since she was a little girl with her nose pressed to a window, waiting for her mother to return.

At home in her condominium, the silence is unbearable. “Damn you, Katie Ryan,” she whispers to the best friend who isn't there, who is gone. Dead. That is what started it all, this plummet she can't pull out of. On the coffee table, a pile of mail hides a magazine. Her own face stares up from the corner, beneath a single, terrible word: Addict. Her hands shake as she reads the story inside. Her goddaughter, Marah, has sold a story, confirming that Tully has been abusing drugs and alcohol. The betrayal hurts so badly she can't breathe. The pain she has held at bay for years roars to life, sucking her into the bleakest, loneliest place she has ever been. Staggering to her feet, she reaches for her car keys. She can't live like this anymore.

Grief is a sneaky thing. For Marah, it comes out in thin red lines. In the months after her mother's death, she finds a strange comfort in the sharp tip of a blade against her skin. Blood bubbles up, beautiful and rich, and with it, every bad emotion falls away. When her cutting is discovered on the day of her high school graduation, Tully takes her in. “I'll be with you every step of the way,” she promises, but in a therapist's waiting room, Marah meets someone else who understands. Paxton, a boy with golden eyes, heavy black guyliner, and scars that run like an equal sign across his wrist. He sees her, the real her, hiding behind baggy clothes and a curtain of hair. “You're afraid of me,” he says, a slow smile spreading across his face. “Nice girls like you should stay in suburbia where it's safe.”

Johnny Ryan knows he should have seen the signs. After Kate's death, he moved his family to Los Angeles, hoping a new view would help them heal, but it only fractured them further. Marah, once so vibrant, becomes a ghost in their house. When Tully takes her to Seattle for the summer, he trusts her, but it is a mistake. He and Tully find Marah in her dorm room, high, her hair streaked with purple, her eyebrow pierced. Paxton is with her, a bong in his hand. “She knew we were sleeping together,” Paxton says with a small smile, and Johnny's gaze turns to Tully, cold as ice. “How dare you not tell me?” he seethes. “Kate would not forgive you for this.” When Marah runs away with Paxton that night, Johnny turns his back on Tully for the last time. “Stay the hell away from my family,” he says, and walks away.

In a darkness so complete she wonders if she has been buried alive, a voice whispers, “Talk to me, Tul.” It is Kate, her best friend, her other half, gone for four years but here now. She is a shimmering, translucent light, and she pulls Tully back through the years. They are girls again, riding bikes down Summer Hill in the dark, arms outflung. They are in Kate's closet, packing for college, and in the newsroom where they all worked for Johnny. The memories are a balm, but Kate is insistent. She makes Tully remember the pain, too: walking away from her TV show, the career she sacrificed everything for, only to find herself unemployable. The panic attacks. The prescriptions for Xanax and Ambien. The loneliness that has become her only companion. “I ruined everything,” Tully says, and Kate's spirit sighs, a whisper of lavender and bubble gum.

At the hospital, a woman with wrinkled gray skin and fingernails brown with dirt arrives. “I'm Dorothy,” she says. “I'm her mother.” She has not been a mother to Tully, not in any way that matters, but when she went into rehab five years ago, she began the long, slow work of becoming someone new. She learned to live one day at a time, to find peace in the soil of her small garden. Now, she sits by her daughter's bedside, holding a hand she has no right to hold. To the still, broken woman in the bed, she finally tells the story Tully has waited a lifetime to hear - a story of a girl named Dorothy Jean, of abuse and a secret love, of a dark-eyed boy named Rafe, and of a baby named Tallulah Rose.

The family that shattered after Kate's death begins to piece itself back together in the sterile quiet of the hospital waiting room. Johnny, Margie, and the boys are a constant presence. And Marah, seeing Paxton for the thief he is, finally leaves him. She walks back into her childhood home on Bainbridge Island and into her father's arms. The pink hair is gone, the piercings have healed, but the guilt remains. She knows Tully's accident is her fault. Every day, she sits by Tully's bed, waiting for a miracle, but after almost a year, hope has worn thin. “I promised Mom I'd read this with you when I was ready,” she whispers, her hands shaking as she opens the journal Kate left behind. “I'm not really ready, and you're not really you, but it's time.”

As Marah reads her mother's words aloud, her voice fills the quiet room. She reads of a lonely girl meeting the coolest girl in the world, of a friendship that spanned thirty years, of a love for a husband and children that was a life's work. “Forget the fights, baby girl,” she reads, her own voice thick with tears. “Remember how I loved you, every single bit of you… Love. That's what we remember.” In the bed, Tully's hand twitches. Her fingers curl around Marah's. Slowly, her eyes flutter open. “Your voice,” Tully whispers, her own voice a dry rasp, “brought me back.”

In the light, Kate is waiting. “It's time,” she says. “Do you want to go back?” Tully looks at her best friend, the girl who took her hand all those years ago and never let go. She sees the love Kate has for all of them, a love shiny with both hope and loss. Tully knows what she wants. “I want another chance,” she says, and the choice gives her strength. “Say goodbye to me,” Kate whispers, and Tully understands. She has to let go to live. “I love you,” she says, the words tearing from her soul. “Goodbye.” The light fades, and she is climbing, fighting her way up a steep black hill toward a voice that calls her name.

In the months that follow, Tully learns to walk again, to talk again, to live again. She learns that her mother, Dorothy, cared for her through the long, silent year of her coma, and in the quiet hours of the night, they talk. Dorothy gives her a faded photograph of a young man with long black hair and Tully's smile, holding a baby. “Your father,” Dorothy says. “He loved you.” Marah goes off to college, strong and whole at last, her mother's journal tucked safely in her bag. One evening, as Tully sits on the porch with her mother, watching the sun set over Firefly Lane, a man comes to visit, a book in his hand and slippers for her feet. She feels a breeze, soft as a butterfly's wing, and for a moment, she hears music, and laughter, and a voice in her ear. She knows she will be okay. Life will go on as it must, but she will always remember them - two girls who became best friends, a lifetime ago.