Bird in Hand - Christina Baker Kline [15]
Claire—
He took a deep breath. Alison, with whom he had fallen in love and married, who had borne him two children, would now carry a burden of guilt and remorse. And he, who was no longer in love with her, who was, in fact, in love with someone else, would have to help her get through it, would have to be the good husband for—how long?
He didn’t know.
Was he up to it? He didn’t know.
He was the one who had talked Alison into going to that damn party. He knew she wasn’t comfortable driving at night, in the rain, in the gnarl of traffic moving to and from the city. Why was he so invested in her going? What did he think it would prove? Claire had called him earlier in the day to make sure he was coming, and he hadn’t called her back to tell her he wasn’t. It was complicated; his chest had felt tight all day. The truth was, Charlie wanted Alison to go to the party because these days when he allowed himself to feel anything at all for her, he felt overwhelming sadness and pity, and he didn’t want to feel that anymore. If only for a night, he wanted to nudge her back into the world she had been a part of, the one she’d given up for him, for the children. He wanted her to be happy.
And maybe in some small, terrible way, he wanted her to get used to the idea of being alone.
He turned on the radio to keep from thinking. He stared at the road ahead. For some reason what came to mind were generic moments from his childhood: smacking a ball with his wooden bat high and hard and rounding the bases on a hot afternoon, kicking up dust the whole way home; staring at a clock, portentous as a full moon, in a chalky-smelling middle-school classroom. Even when he tried, he couldn’t remember much specific detail about his adolescence. In Charlie’s memory his parents were always the same age, in their late thirties, his mother smiling and his father joking with his sister and flipping burgers on the grill, an endless family barbecue under a wide Kansas sky.
According to the radio station, 1010 WINS, the tunnel was as clear as the bridge. He got on Route 80 toward New York and took exit 7, as instructed, to the station house in Sherman where Alison was—waiting? Being held? He hadn’t asked.
As Charlie drove along in the preternatural brightness he started thinking about how he’d responded when Alison called—how his reaction had been impatience, not empathy, and how differently he might have felt even a few months ago. You would think that two people who had built a life together over eight years, who’d seen each other at all hours of the day and night, who were raising two children together, might know each other better than anyone else in the world. But Charlie had the peculiar sense with Alison that he might never know her. She’d always been a kind of mystery to him. He could sit down next to a woman at a dinner party and feel, after thirty minutes, that he understood her better than he did his own wife.
Marrying Alison had been a slow-motion dive into an untested body of water. He wasn’t sure, he had never been sure, but then he had never really been sure about anything or anyone. Getting married seemed brave and important. But now he wondered if it was the opposite—a form of cowardice, a lack of ambition, a capitulation to his most conventional and conservative impulses.
Charlie’s love for Alison was like a rubber band; it always snapped back to its original size. And now, when it mattered, he realized that it didn’t stretch at all.
Chapter Six
“Your husband is here,” a female officer said, not unkindly. “How’s that wrist?”
Alison looked down at it, this thing in her lap wrapped in a soft beige bandage and secured with two metal butterfly clips, and thought, with a strange sense of disconnection, that it actually