Bird in Hand - Christina Baker Kline [26]
“You’re right. I’m not okay,” she said now.
Her mother was full of questions: How fast was the other car going? Was it a licensed vehicle? Was the road wet? Was Alison speeding? What in the world was that mother thinking, in this day and age, having the child on her lap?
After Alison hung up the phone she felt raw and light-headed. She’d been crying on and off for hours, but now her eyes were dry. It reminded her of how she’d felt after Annie’s birth: drained, bloodless, almost transparent, as if her body were little more than the empty husk of a cocoon.
WHEN SHE HEARD the knock at the back door, Alison was standing in the kitchen looking around at the detritus of Charlie’s effort to feed the kids breakfast—half-crushed Cheerios scattered across the floor, spilled milk on the table, the plastic jug open on the counter with its plug missing, sections of the Friday Times in piles, an apple with two small bites already turning brown on a chair. The coffeemaker was on, but the carafe was empty. She could hear Charlie and the kids in the playroom.
Somehow Alison had never gotten used to this. When she was with the kids, she was constantly picking up—wiping countertops, sweeping the floor, loading the dishwasher, folding mounds of laundry. Charlie just—played. And she came in later and cleaned up the mess.
Alison could see Robin’s curly blond hair through the small glass panes at the top of the door. She felt a quick panic—the last thing she wanted to do was talk to her neighbor. But it was too late; Robin had seen her and was tentatively waving the fingers of one hand, anemonelike, through the glass.
Alison took a deep breath and opened the door.
“Here. I made banana bread,” Robin said, handing Alison a foil-wrapped loaf. “It was all I could think of to do.”
The loaf was still warm, and somehow comforting in Alison’s hands: the solid heft of it, its mammal warmth. “Robin—thank you.” How kind. Alison felt a tickle in the bridge of her nose.
Oh no; she was going to cry.
“I won’t stay. I just—” Robin said.
Alison shook her head, clenching her jaw. Despite her efforts, her eyes filled with tears.
Robin took the loaf from Alison and placed it on the counter. Then she clasped her hand and led her to the table. “How about some coffee?” she said gently.
Alison nodded, unable to speak. She watched as Robin rummaged in the cabinet for filters, washed out the carafe, spooned coffee grounds from the bag on the counter into the filter, and then filled the carafe with water and poured it into the pot. Normally she would have talked to fill the silence, protested about being served, worried after her neighbor’s feelings, but she did none of this. She still felt hollowed out. Her eyes, her skin, her mouth and ears only an epidermal shell, the bones providing structure. Her brain reptilian, merely recording movement, sensing light and dark.
How could she go on?
Miraculously, Robin seemed to know exactly what Alison needed. She was quiet, watching the coffeemaker, glancing over to smile at her every now and then.
Robin was not Alison’s type. She was in the Junior League; her twin ten-year-old boys played golf; she and her husband belonged to the tony country club on the edge of town (though Alison knew, through the neighborhood grapevine, that Robin’s husband, a banker, had lost his job twice in the past three years). She was probably a Republican. Alison’s friends tended to be other women who felt adrift in some way, who’d gone freelance and were having trouble drumming up work, who found themselves unexpectedly pregnant again after a baby or two, who were as conflicted as she was about being a stay-at-home mother. Alison had often marveled at Robin’s seemingly unambivalent feelings about motherhood and work. She seemed preternaturally content—busy, involved in the schools (endlessly planning book fairs, movie nights, class parties), on the executive board of the PTA. Alison