Bird in Hand (6 page)

“Alison,” he said, and she heaved forward, a sob rising from her stomach into her throat like a wave that has been gathering underwater. He crouched down, and she pulled him toward her, clawing his shirt, wanting to climb into his lap, to hide herself there. “Easy, easy,” he whispered, but he didn’t move, and she burrowed closer. She gulped and choked and a noise came out of her, a low whine. In a distant part of her mind she could see herself as she must have looked to him: rodentlike with panic, scrabbling and desperate. She could sense him flinch, but it only made her cling tighter. She wanted to reassure him that she was all right, she would be fine; but she couldn’t speak. She felt poised on the edge of something deep and terrifying, vertiginous with fear and regret and anger—at herself, at the slick carnival of the evening, at the parents of the little boy who let him sit in the front seat. “This can’t be happening,” she sobbed, clutching at Charlie, and he stayed still for a moment, then reached up for her hands and held them firmly in his own.

“It is happening, Al,” he said quietly. “It is happening. And you need to pull yourself together.”

It was a rebuke, and it stung. She searched his face for any sign of compassion, but his expression was unreadable. She felt a creeping annoyance, like a teenager with a scolding father. “I know,” she said.

“So how’s your wrist?” He touched the bandage tenderly, as if to mitigate his harsh words.

“It’s just a sprain.”

“That’s good. How does it feel?”

She shrugged. “It hurts a little.”

He nodded, then rubbed his whole face with his hand. “Do you know anything—the boy … ?”

“They haven’t told me anything.”

“Jesus.” He filled his lungs with air and breathed out slowly. At a desk across the room, a clerk was typing on a keyboard, her eyes steadfast on a computer screen. The room had the claustrophobic feel of an underground bunker. Everything was gray: the carpeting, the desks, the computers and chairs. The room even smelled gray—fungal, with an overlay of disinfectant. Mildew and ammonia. The fluorescent lights overhead were encased in cages. Alison could not quite comprehend that it was almost midnight on a Friday, and they were there in that room.

All at once she thought aloud: “Where are the kids?”

“I called Robin,” he said.

Alison winced. Robin was a good neighbor, but not a close friend; Alison hated that she was involved. But who else could he have called?

“What did you tell her?”

“That there’d been an accident. That you hurt your wrist.” For the first time, he looked in her eyes.

The clerk got up from her desk and riffled through a file. She picked up the phone and dialed, waited a moment, and began talking quietly. Alison heard her say, “Not much. An accident report. Yeah, one. In surgery. A three-year-old male.” She shook her head. Then she caught Alison looking at her, and turned away.

“So what now,” Alison said to Charlie, trying to keep her voice even.

“I suppose you should tell me what happened.”

“I think you already know,” she said. “Don’t you?”

“Well, I know some things,” he said. “I know that your blood-alcohol level was just over the limit. Point oh-nine percent.”

Her skin prickled. “I didn’t know that.”

“And that a little kid is. … ” His voice trailed off.

She nodded helplessly, trying to shake herself into believing it and not wanting to believe it at the same time. Pushing, pushing the horror away. She tried to look in Charlie’s eyes, and he wouldn’t look at her. “Charlie, I had two drinks the whole evening, I swear. Two—two and a half. They were making these martinis—”

“You don’t even drink martinis.”

“I know,” she said miserably. “They were … blue. You know—the title of the book. Claire’s mother drinks these blue martinis, so. … And there wasn’t really any food; I didn’t eat dinner—”

“Do you realize how fucking irresponsible—?” He shook his head violently.

There was no point in responding. It didn’t matter anyway. Nothing she could say was going to change what had happened.

ON THE WAY home from the police station, they were mostly silent. Charlie drove, deftly finding his way along back roads, through small towns, to the Garden State Parkway. Sitting in the passenger’s seat, Alison looked out the window at the passing cars and exit signs. Halfway home, she realized that her fingertips were numb; she was gripping the hard plastic of her seat belt buckle. A fluttery feeling in her chest made it hard to catch her breath. Charlie glanced over at her a few times, and once he asked if she was okay. She nodded, not trusting herself to speak.

“There’s something I don’t understand,” Charlie said after a while. “Why didn’t you just pull off somewhere when you took that wrong turn? Why in the world would you just
keep going
?”

She tried to remember why.
Why?
She had driven up the East Side of Manhattan and sliced through the park to the West Side, all the way over to the river, and then she had snaked up to the George Washington Bridge. She knew that she was not quite sober—but sober enough to be in control; she felt in control, if she thought about each movement carefully as she did it. Recently she had taken Noah and Annie to the Big Apple Circus, where they’d seen clowns spin plates in the air, keeping them balanced and steady at the end of long poles, and she thought of this image as she drove. Before she knew it, just over the bridge, she had to make a decision. She passed signs with too many letters and numbers; her brain was foggy, and she seemed to have forgotten which way to go, how to choose among all the options. Ordinarily, at night, on the way back from the city, Charlie would have been driving. Now the dashboard clock said 9:41, and she had no idea how to get home.

In a panic, she veered right with the traffic. Instantly she knew she’d made a mistake. The road was unfamiliar; she was clearly driving away from her sleeping children and quiet town, toward points unknown. She kept driving because she didn’t know how to get off; there didn’t seem to be an exit. She kept driving because she had turned right instead of going straight, and she began to wonder, somewhere in a place that wasn’t rational or even fully conscious, whether this might have happened for a reason. Perhaps there was something out there that she might not otherwise have gotten a chance to see. She was driving at night with two and a half strong martinis in her, and suddenly she began to feel that an unplanned detour might be exactly what she needed.

It was the first time in a long time she had done something unexpected, something that defied common sense. And maybe, in that brief moment between making a wrong turn and a critical miscalculation, it felt good.

Not so many years ago, she had been a single girl living with friends from college in a small apartment in the city. Now it was as if that life had happened to someone else. Now she made grocery lists and tyrannosaurus-shaped pancakes and the children’s beds. She kept the house and car running smoothly; she ran the 5K race for a cure, which the Junior League sponsored every spring; she organized the fall harvest bazaar at Noah’s preschool. She hired people to clean the house twice a month, to tend the yard, clear the gutters, paint the sunroom. She took the kids to school, Charlie’s shirts to the dry cleaner, took care of all the myriad details that gave her life, in some vague, intangible way, direction and meaning. In her former life, she had seen herself as one small part of a large and complex organism. There was freedom in that view. She was not responsible for, or to, anyone. Now she was at the center of a complicated universe of her own; she kept the planets spinning.

But sometimes a small piece of her rebelled against the way her life had evolved. She wondered if maybe she should have tried harder to work out a balance. She knew women who did, who stayed at the magazine and had full-time help and lived in two-bedroom apartments in the city. Sometimes she envied their choices and their freedom, their ability to slide in and out of identities, to be different people at different times of the day. But she hadn’t wanted that life, the stress and conflict of it. She didn’t want the feeling of being yanked in several directions at once. Sometimes she wished she could lead two lives at the same time, or perhaps consecutively—one with children and one without, one in the city and one in the suburbs, one married to Charlie and one … Alison pulled up short. No—Charlie wasn’t part of the dilemma. She would want to be married to him, wouldn’t she, no matter what?

They arrived home in the yellow-gray light of early morning. Stepping out of the car onto the familiar driveway felt strange and wrong, the way it feels, Alison thought, when you know you are dreaming and imagine that you could wake yourself at any time. Her head was clear, now, and she had a faint ache behind her eyes. She hadn’t really drunk enough to be hungover. The officer they’d spoken with at the station said that from what he understood about the accident, Alison didn’t appear to have been at fault. “We don’t normally charge people for not getting out of the way quick enough,” he’d said, looking down at the report and stroking his black mustache. “If that is, in fact, what happened. We’ll have to wait for the full report to find out.”

As Charlie and Alison reached the back door, Robin pushed it open. “I heard you drive up,” she said, ushering them inside. She gave Alison a quick, gingerly hug and exclaimed over the bandage on her wrist.

“It’s nothing,” Alison said. “It’ll be fine in a few days.”

“Well, thank goodness. I’m sure it could’ve been a lot worse.”

The compassion in Robin’s voice made tears spring to Alison’s eyes. She bit her lip and turned away.

“It’s been a long night. We need to get this girl to bed,” Charlie said in what struck Alison as an actor-y voice. “We appreciate your coming over, Robin.”

“Of course. Anytime,” she said as she turned the door handle, stepped outside. “What are neighbors for?”

The kitchen was gloomy and shadowed, but they didn’t turn on any lights. A hazy glow from the motion-sensor floodlight in the backyard washed over the countertops. On the fridge the day before, Alison had posted a drawing of Annie’s with a teacher’s prompt—“I am happy when”—above Annie’s response: “Mommy and Daddy are hugging me.” In the drawing Annie was a blond-ringleted smiley face wearing a triangular pink dress, with two jellyfishlike giants looming over her, misshapen red hearts rising from their skulls. Noah was out of the picture.

As Alison gazed blankly at the drawing, Charlie came up behind her. “She wanted me to sing lullabies tonight,” he said. “ ‘Bye Baby Bunting’ and ‘Mockingbird.’ I couldn’t remember all the words, but she knew every one of them.”

“It’s funny that she wanted baby songs.”

“She was missing Mommy.”

“Did she say that?”

“No,” he said. “She didn’t want to hurt my feelings. But I could tell.”

Alison knew what Charlie was doing—chiding her for being gone (though he’d encouraged it), suggesting that if she’d stayed home none of this would have happened, and letting her know that she was needed and loved, all at the same time. They often spoke in this kind of code, by way of discussing the children. Anecdotes were crafted with an instructive purpose, like Bible stories, and meant to be interpreted on several levels. At an elemental level, these stories were a way of connecting when they felt most alienated from each other. There was always something to say about Annie and Noah. And they both knew that they were the only two people in the world who could sustain this degree of minute interest in them.

Alison nodded slowly. “Well, I’m going upstairs.”

“I’ll lock up,” he said. “Be there in a minute.”

When Charlie opened the bedroom door she pretended to be asleep. In the darkness she could hear every sound of his undressing: the muffled clink of his buckle and the whoosh of his belt as he pulled it off, the soft buzz as he unzipped his pants. He hopped on one foot to take off a sock. He drew in his breath and mumbled, “Fuck,” and she had to stop herself from sitting up to ask what was the matter. It might be something physical, like hitting his shin. Then again, it might be something else.

The bed groaned slightly as he eased onto his side. He sat there for a moment, then glanced over at her. “Alison,” he said. It wasn’t quite a whisper. She stayed still. He pulled down the covers and slid in.

Even from the other side of the bed, she could feel him. He emanated heat like some large animal, a dog or a bear. When he was asleep she thought of him like that: as a big slumbering mammal. But he wasn’t asleep now. She could hear his shallow breathing. “Al,” he said, and touched her arm.

A marriage hinges on these moments. Does she answer, or does she lie still? All Alison could feel was an overwhelming dread. She did not want to know what he had to say. She remained quiet; the moment passed, and she drifted into sleep.

part two

Confusion is perfect sight and perfect mystery at the same time.

Chapter One

February 2009