Bird in Hand - Christina Baker Kline [24]
“I didn’t ask for this,” she whispered to Charlie, but of course she did, one way or another. What attracted her to Charlie was indefinable, a feeling in the pit of her stomach. She felt wild with him, spontaneous. But Charlie wasn’t inherently this way; if anything, he was more conventional than she was—leading a comfortable suburban life, shouldering the burdens of domestic responsibility without complaint. It was only the two of them together that felt unpredictable.
Why did she want this? Why did she need it?
Only two months ago, she had been pregnant. The miscarriage had been terrible, but when it was over she’d been strangely relieved. Ben was the one who had pushed for the baby—he wanted them to be a family, he’d said. She had gone along with it, but secretly she’d been ambivalent. Afraid of losing her autonomy, her ambition. Afraid of being a bad mother. Afraid of feeling trapped. When he asked, now—which he did every few weeks—and she said she wasn’t ready to try again; she didn’t know if she’d ever be ready, he half-nodded, chin up, like he was taking a blow without flinching. She knew that he would wait a while and try again. He believed his patience would trump her unreasonableness. What he didn’t know—and what she barely understood herself—was that she wanted to hurt him in small ways to toughen herself for hurting him worse.
Standing outside by the revolving door, Claire wrapped her coat tightly around her, though it wasn’t cold.
“How do you feel?” Charlie asked.
“Crazy. Guilty. Do you feel guilty?”
“This is between us. It has nothing to do with them.”
But of course it had everything to do with them.
Claire remembered falling in love with Ben—how unfettered they were, how young. Now she felt old and jaundiced. Cruel. She would have liked to talk to her best friend about it, but her best friend was Alison. She would have liked to talk to her husband, but that, too, was impossible. The only one she could talk to was Charlie, and he was as culpable as she was. They were bound together by deception, like two thieves on the run. Fleetingly she wondered if the passion she felt for him was merely a manifestation of her restlessness, if she had transferred the anxiety she felt about getting settled, stale, becoming her mother, perhaps, into this feeling propelling her into another kind of life, terrifyingly open-ended, the dissolution of everything good and proper and right.
Chapter Four
“Oh, Lord, Alison. How terrible,” her mother gasped when Alison called to tell her parents about the accident.
“Yes,” she said grimly.
“That poor family,” her mother said. “How awful. Just awful.”
Alison could feel a surge of tears against the dam of her rib cage.
“Are the police … Are you being charged with anything?” her father asked.
“DWI. I was just barely over the legal limit.” Alison cringed at her own need to say this. “I’m not—technically at fault, apparently.”
“Uhh,” her father said, as if he’d been hit in the stomach.
“I really should have said something last night,” her mother said. “You were so rushed and harried on the phone. I just—I had a feeling. Call it mother’s intuition, I don’t know—I could tell something was going to happen. I was pacing around all night. Wasn’t I, Ed? Don’t you remember telling me to relax and sit down?”
“I always tell you that,” Alison’s father said.
“No, but this was different. I feel sick about it. I should have—could have—”
“Mom, don’t,” Alison said. It was just like her mother to insist that her witchy powers might have saved the day.
“Well, okay, but I regret not saying something. I knew you were in no state to be driving into New York by yourself. You seemed absolutely overwhelmed.”
Did I? Alison wondered, unable, as usual, to connect her mother’s interpretation of