Bird in Hand (28 page)

“You know,” he said hesitantly, “the actual details are kind of irrelevant.”

“Really,” she said.

“Yeah. I just think … it’s not important what happened when, and all that.”

“Uh-huh,” she said. “So how was it?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, was she a good fuck?”

“Come on, Alison.”

“What? Is that irrelevant, too? I’m guessing it matters to you.”

“I just—I don’t think we need to be doing this.”

“Ummm.” She nodded, parodying amiability. “Yeah, you’re right. We don’t need to be doing this. You’re fucking my best friend—you say you’re ‘in love with’”—she knifed quote marks in the air with hooked fingers—“my best friend—
my best friend
—but you’re right, how rude, how impolite of me to ask you anything about it.” She bit down on the words, her voice rising with each syllable until she was practically shouting.

Jesus, she’s going to wake the children. Charlie wanted to stifle her somehow; he had to restrain himself from putting his hand over her mouth or telling her to shut the fuck up. He knew he didn’t deserve to be impatient with her; he had to hear her out, but
Christ
it was hard. He didn’t want to explain, pick over each detail, sit there and take it as the enormity of it sunk in and she got more and more furious.

“Yeah, that would be crass, wouldn’t it?” she continued. Now she was on her feet. “You fucking asshole! You low-life. You brought two children into the world, and now you’re going to abandon them.”

“No I’m not.”

“Yes you are.”

“I’m not, Alison. I wouldn’t do that.”

“Oh, okay. I see. Is Claire going to move in with us?”

“Alison, please.”

“I have given the best years of my life to you—that fucking cliché, it’s true,” she cried, spitting the words at him. “I devoted myself to you, to this marriage. To being a family.”

“I know, I know,” he said, patting the air with his hands, as if trying to tamp down her emotion. “And you are an amazing wife and mother. This may sound crazy, Alison, but I mean it—this is not about you.”

“Exactly!” she screeched. “
This is not about me
. It’s never been about me, has it?”

“Alison,” he said miserably.

“Stop saying my name.” She strode out of the room, and for a brief moment Charlie wondered if the conversation was over. Then she came back with a handful of tissues, which she pulled out of her balled fist one after another like a magician with silk scarves. She blew her nose loudly. Tears were streaming down her face. “Does Ben know?”

“I think so.”

“You think so?”

“Yes, he does.”

“How do you know?”

“Because … Claire called me.”

She hiccupped. “When?”

“Today.”

“When today? When you were ‘at work’?”

He nodded.

She shook her head. “I knew you were fucking lying about going to work today,” she sobbed.

“I wasn’t lying. I really had to go in.”

“How convenient, that she knew you ‘had to go in.’”

“She didn’t know. She called my cell phone.”

“Bullshit. Your cell phone was here.”

“Right,” he said, struggling to keep up with her detective work, “so then she sent me an e-mail on the off chance—Jesus, Al, what does it matter?” he said finally. “I wasn’t lying to you about today. I had to go to work. I didn’t see Claire. But … I have lied to you. I have been lying to you. I hate that part of it—”

“Oh, you hate
that part
of it?”

“Yes, I do. I hate lying to you.”

“Why are you doing this
?” she screamed. She collapsed onto the couch beside him and doubled over, as if in agony, clutching her stomach with one hand and sobbing into her wadded-up tissues in the other. “Why?
Why?
”

There was really no answer. He was doing this because he could not keep skimming along the surface of his life without one day crashing into something hard and unpleasant, a truth about himself he had long tried to avoid—that his inability to make difficult decisions was what had gotten him into this mess in the first place. He wanted both lives; he didn’t want to have to choose. He wanted this life with Alison and a parallel one with Claire, but that didn’t seem to be possible. He was doing this because he had finally realized that it took more of an effort to keep the chaos contained than it did to let it go.

And though he did, genuinely, love his children with his whole being, and hated the idea that they, like him—like Alison—would suffer through a divorce, he was convinced that he would only get one chance to feel this kind of passion, to express it, to
live
. In a way, it was as simple as that: you only get one life. And though his children were everything to him, sometimes he closed his eyes and wondered what his life would be like if he had claimed what he wanted from the beginning, if he had not given up so easily, and, as a result, had never made them.

He wouldn’t say any of this, of course. He couldn’t say it. So he put his hand gently on her back while she cried, and eventually she grew quiet.

Chapter Eight

November 1997

“Damn. I’ve forgotten to bring a pen. You don’t have an extra, do you?”

Charlie was standing in a dingy, narrow hallway in Queens College, waiting for an appointment with the graduate student advisor, Master Holcombe. It was the girl’s eyes that Charlie noticed first, an unusual greenish amber in her pale face, the color of a fallen leaf in the snow. She stared at him expectantly, with a frank intensity he found unsettling.

“Uh, let me check,” he said, rummaging in his bag. He came up with a fistful of writing implements and presented them to her on an open palm.

She chose one, and smiled. Her teeth were small and white. “Thanks,” she said. “You’re American.”

“How can you tell? I’ve barely said a word.”

She laughed. “You’re so American.”

“Why does that sound like an insult?” he said lightly, though it did. “You are, too.”

She squinted at him. She was wearing a short brown plaid dress and brown leather sandals. Her skin was pale; a smattering of freckles fell across her nose and chest and arms. He couldn’t tell much about her shape in that dress, which hung from her shoulders like a sack, but her bare legs were tanned and strong. She was tallish, and her curly cinnamon hair was pulled back in a clip. “Everything I say sounds like an insult,” she said. “So I’ve been told.”

Just then the door opened and a young man with a receding chin and strips of thin hair plastered to his forehead slipped out. He wore gray slacks and a flimsy white collared shirt, which had taken on a pinkish cast from the skin underneath. “Holcombe said to send in whoever’s next,” he said.

“I guess that’s me. Nice to meet you,” the girl said, offering Charlie her hand.

“But we didn’t,” he said. “Meet. I don’t even know your name.”

“Claire,” she said. “Ellis.”

“Charlie Granville.”

She smiled. “Why don’t you come to drinks after dinner at our place tonight? We’re rounding up all the Americans we can find.”

“We … ”

“Ben and I. My boyfriend. Fiancé, actually.”

Charlie nodded. He felt a suffusing prick of disappointment, like a bee sting.

“Thirty-two Barton Road,” she said. “Eight o’clock.”

He looked at her fingers; she wasn’t wearing a ring. “Thank you,” he said. “I’d like that.”

Chapter Nine

When something terrible
happens, a lifetime of small events and unremarkable decisions, of unresolved anger and unexplored fears, begins to play itself out in ways you least expect. You’ve been going along from one day to the next, not realizing that all those disparate words and gestures were adding up to something, a conclusion you didn’t anticipate. And later, when you begin to retrace your steps, you see that you will need to reach back further than you could have imagined, beyond words and thoughts and even dreams, perhaps, to make sense of what happened.

Four weeks after the accident, Alison had to go in front of a judge to face the DWI charge. Robin not only offered to accompany her to the hearing, but she also helped Alison prepare papers for her lawyer, Paul Ryan, and wrote a letter of support to give the judge.

The courtroom was in a new municipal building. It was quiet and carpeted—like the funeral home chapel, Alison thought, designed to muffle dissonant expressions of anguish and despair. Its small windows, with short, burnt orange curtains, were set high on the wall, so all you could see were squares of sky and odd angles of other buildings. Alison had only been inside a few courtrooms in her life, one for a magazine article and one to protest a parking ticket. Both were in old buildings, formal, ornate spaces with enormous windows and raised wooden platforms for the judge—nothing like the room in which she now stood.

As Alison walked down the wide center aisle, she was surprised to see the mother and father of the boy sitting in the far corner, on the right. Ahead, on the left, Paul Ryan was talking quietly to a young woman in a navy blue suit—the prosecutor, Alison supposed. Robin put an arm around her shoulder, gently urging her forward.

The court was kind to Alison, kinder than she would have been to herself. The judge revoked her driver’s license for three months and assigned her to twelve hours at an Intoxicated Driver Resource Center. There would be nearly $1000 in fines and fees, as well as several thousand dollars in insurance surcharges over the next three years. In her statement, the judge said that while Alison hadn’t caused the accident—the investigation revealed that the boy’s father had driven through the intersection without applying his brakes—she was nonetheless partially at fault. Her blood-alcohol level grazed the legal limit. Her reflexes were impaired; she might otherwise have reacted more quickly and averted the crash. She would have to live with the knowledge that her drinking may have been a contributing factor in the boy’s death.

The judge glanced at Robin, the loyal friend, sitting behind Alison. She looked Alison up and down. She said she hoped Alison had learned a lesson from this. She implored Alison to think, really think, about what she had done. She said that if there was one thing she’d learned as a county judge, it was that life hinges on small moments and seemingly trivial decisions.

Across the aisle sat the father of the boy, wearing a Mets cap and a blue windbreaker, and his wife, with her hair pulled back in a tight bun. At the funeral her hair had been long and flowing. Now she clutched a Ziploc bag of what appeared to be Ritz crackers, and stared straight ahead. The father’s arm was stretched across the wooden pew-like bench behind her. The drumming of his fingers was a muted percussion in the quiet room.

Neither of the boy’s parents looked at Alison, though she kept glancing at them. She had written a letter to them expressing her regret and sadness, but they’d never responded. She didn’t know if they had even received it.

When the hearing ended, Paul Ryan leaned over and said quietly, “Now you can put this behind you.”

“Thank you for everything you did,” she said.

Robin gave her a hug. “Ready to go?”

“In a minute,” Alison said. “I want to speak to the parents.”

Paul, stacking papers in his briefcase, grimaced. “I’m not sure that’s a good idea.”

“I need to,” Alison said. As she made her way over to Marco’s parents, she caught the husband’s eye. He put his arm protectively around his wife, who shrank back against him.

“I am truly sorry,” Alison said. “I have two children myself, and I—”

“Okay,” the father said, cutting her off, gripping his wife’s shoulder. She just stared at Alison, her expression impassive.

“I understand why you came. If there’s anything … ” Alison said helplessly.

“We just wanted to see who you were,” he said, and turned away.

Walking across the parking lot to the car—Robin’s Honda minivan—Alison looked up. Gray clouds moved fast across a pale blue expanse, and it seemed as if the land under her feet was moving equally fast in the opposite direction. She didn’t know which way she was headed. All the things that had seemed solid to her a month ago—a month ago, and all of her life until then—were crumbling. The ground had shifted; she’d lost her balance. She felt as if she were falling off the earth.

FOR WEEKS ALISON felt as if she were underwater, in a deep, murky place, struggling to make her way to the surface. She couldn’t believe anything Charlie said, anything Claire said. She didn’t know which of her friends were as ignorant as she was, and which might have known all along. She was learning that it was unusual for people to speak plainly to each other about painful or difficult things. We talk to each other, and about each other, but rarely are those conversations the same. We learn through years of living with white lies and self-deception that plain talk can ignite a powder keg of feeling, so we speak in euphemism and metaphor, steering clear of the flinty truth: Your husband doesn’t love you. Your best friend has betrayed you. You have been living a lie.

At the drugstore in town one day, Alison observed a young mother holding a child, apparently her daughter, about two years old. The mother was bending to sign a credit card bill at the counter. The girl’s legs were wrapped around her mother’s waist, her arms around her neck. They were molded together as one, and Alison wished for a moment that she had a camera. Then she realized that her inclination would be to give the woman the photo so that she might see something about her life she might not otherwise have known.

When Alison looked at photographs now of Charlie and her together, she studied them for clues. Is he looking off in the distance? Is she looking down? How close are they sitting, are they touching, is he turning toward her or away? She had taken thousands of pictures in her life, and most of them were collected in photo boxes labeled by year. Occasionally, after some self-contained experience—a trip, their wedding, the birth of a child—she organized the pictures into an album. But what story did those pictures tell? What did they hide or reveal about what was happening now?