Bird in Hand - Christina Baker Kline [2]
Alison could hear Charlie asking for her, out at the front desk. Polite and deferential and panicked and impatient—all of that. She could read his voice the way some people read birdcalls. She almost didn’t want him to find her. As she looked around at the dingy lights, the dirt-sodden carpet, heard the clatter from the holding cells down the hall, she wondered what it would be like to stay here—not here, perhaps, but in prison somewhere, cut off from other people, penitent as a nun. Or in a convent, a place with stone walls, small slices of sky visible through narrow slits, neatly made narrow beds. A place where she could pay for this quietly, away from anyone who had ever known her.
You might expect that she’d have thought of her children, and she did—peripherally, like a blinkered horse looking sideways; when she tried to think of them straight on, her mind went blank. Her own boy’s brown curls on the pillow, her six-year-old daughter’s twisted nightgown, her covers on the floor … Alison saw them sleeping, imagined them dead—just for an instant. Imagined explaining—and stopped. The only thing she seemed able to do was concentrate on the minute details of each moment: the cold floor, hard seat, dispassionate officers tapping on keyboards and shuffling papers. The tick of the wall clock: 11:53.
part one
At a four-way stop every vehicle must come to a complete halt before proceeding one at a time across the intersection, regardless of whether there is any other traffic in sight or not.
If two or more vehicles draw up to one of these junctions and stop, waiting to proceed across it, then they should proceed in the same order in which they arrived. If two vehicles arrive at one of these junctions at precisely the same time, so that it is impossible to tell which arrived first, then in theory the vehicle on the right has priority. However, many drivers are unaware of this rule and there are complications due to all the possible permutations of turns.
—JOHN CLETHEROE,
Driving in the USA and Canada
www.johncletheroe.org/usa_can/
Chapter One
It had been a rainy morning, and all through the afternoon the sky remained opaque, bleached and unreadable. Alison wasn’t sure until the last minute whether she would even go to Claire’s book party in the city. The kids were whiny and bored, and she was feeling guilty that her latest freelance assignment, “Sparking the Flame of Your Child’s Creativity,” which involved extra interviews and rewrites, had made her distracted and short-tempered with them. She’d asked the babysitter to stay late twice that week already, and had shut herself away in her tiny study—mudroom, really—trying to finish the piece. “Dolores, would you mind distracting him, please?” she’d called with a shrill edge of panic when three-year-old Noah pounded his small fists on the door.
“Maybe we shouldn’t go,” she said when Charlie called from work to find out when she was leaving. “The kids are needy. I’m tired.”
“But you’ve been looking forward to this,” he said.
“I don’t know,” she said. “Dolores seems out of sorts. I can hear her out there snapping at the kids.”
“Look,” he said. “I’ll come home. I have a lot of work to do tonight anyway. I’ll take over for Dolores, and then you won’t have to worry.”
“But I want you there,” she said obstinately. “I don’t want to go alone. I probably won’t even know anybody.”
“You know Claire,” Charlie said. “Isn’t that what matters? It’ll be good to show your support.”
“It’s not like she’s gone out of her way to get in touch with me.”
“She did send you an invitation.”
“Well, her publicist.”
“So Claire put your name on the list. Come on, Alison—I’m not going to debate this with you. Clearly you want to go, or you wouldn’t be agonizing over it.”
He was right. She didn’t answer. Sometime back in the fall, Claire’s feelings had gotten hurt—something about an article she’d submitted to the magazine Alison worked for that wasn’t right, that Alison’s boss had brusquely