Bird in Hand - Christina Baker Kline [31]
“What’s keeping you from going?” Dina pressed her.
“For one thing, I’m flying to Birmingham tonight.”
Dina wrote something on the pad of paper she always had in her lap. “Uh-huh.”
“It’s my tour. It’s important.”
“It is.” Dina nodded.
“I could have canceled this session, I guess. I could’ve gone this morning. But I needed to see you. I just—I can’t face her like this.”
“Like what, Claire?” Dina asked gently.
Claire looked at the oil painting above Dina’s head of the Maine coast, a picture so familiar to her that she was sure she could identify every rock. She had asked, once, where it was from, and Dina told her it was Spruce Harbor, the village she disappeared to for four weeks every summer. Beginning in May, it changed, in Claire’s mind, from a soothing seascape to a provocation, a reminder that Dina had a life outside the office, far away from here.
“The whole thing is so—ironic.”
“In what way?”
“Alison is the most cautious person I know. In high school she was always the designated driver. I was the one who did stupid things.”
“Like what?”
“Drinking and driving.” Tucking her legs under her, Claire sat back in the deep couch. She took a breath and let it out slowly. “Sleeping with someone else’s husband.”
“Ah.”
“Ah.”
Dina placed the notebook on the small round table beside her. “And not just anyone else’s husband.”
Claire nodded.
“So when you say that you can’t face her—”
“It’s really awful, isn’t it?”
Dina just cocked her head.
Claire looked at the thick slabs of blue and gray in the painting, the bold strokes of green. Orange, red, ochre: how did the artist see all those colors in the rocks? “I guess I feel that, deep down, Alison has to know about Charlie and me, whether it’s conscious or not. I introduced them to each other, you know. I set them up. I think she knew that there was kind of a—flirtation between us.”
“Were you jealous when she and Charlie got together?”
“No, I don’t think so. I saw myself as having given her a gift—the gift of his love.”
“So how do you see it now?”
“Uhh.” Claire sighed through her nose. “I don’t know. Maybe the truth is I wanted to keep him around—and giving him to Alison was the only way I could imagine holding on to him.”
Dina shifted in her chair. “That’s quite an admission.”
“You must think I’m an awful person.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Because I would, if I were you.”
“Why?”
Claire took a deep breath. “Well, for one thing, this accident.”
“Do you feel responsible for this accident, Claire?”
“No. I don’t know. I mean, maybe partially. Charlie was supposed to meet her at the party and drive home, but he didn’t come because—because of the awkwardness of it, I guess. And she had those martinis—and then I wouldn’t even let her come to dinner. Ben invited her, but I didn’t want her to come.”
“And you feel badly about that.”
“Yeah. It’s just all so—complicated.”
“It is,” Dina agreed.
The windows rattled, and though the shades were drawn, Claire knew a city bus was going by; she could feel it rumbling under her legs. “I can’t stop thinking about this time in high school with Alison, when I was driving drunk.”
Dina nodded, picking up the pen again.
“We were at someone’s house, and I had a few beers. We decided to go to this swimming hole called Grover’s Gulch. I remember Alison asking me if I was okay to drive, and I said, Sure, of course. I did think I was. I was driving a bunch of people, and she was in the car behind me. It was just getting dark. The road went up and down”—Claire demonstrated, gliding her flat hand over imaginary ripples—“with these slow, steep inclines and long, coasting descents. Halfway down a hill I could see these blurry white shapes, stretching across the road. I slowed down, but I was going too fast. I felt this thump under the wheels. Thump thump. It was sickening. Nobody in my car even noticed; they were all laughing about something. But when we got there, I pulled Alison aside and told her I thought I might’ve hit something. Something white.
“I remember