Bird in Hand - Christina Baker Kline [43]
Chapter Tweleve
For Alison, now, the world was a different place, and yet it was strangely the same. She was present and not present in her own life. She went through the motions of a routine—getting out of bed in the morning, herding the kids from their bedrooms to the bathroom to the kitchen and then out the front door to the bus and the car, but it was as if she weren’t there; she inhabited a shadow. She felt transparent, her mind a blank. She watered houseplants and separated laundry and even went to the grocery store, but she was playing a role; the real Alison was in bed with the shades drawn. She was tired all the time. She fantasized about sleep the way you might dream about a lover, yearning for the bliss of escape.
When, after several days, Alison went to get her wrist examined, Dr. Waldron asked her a series of questions:
“Are you sleeping?” No.
“Are you having trouble getting up in the morning?” Yes.
“Do you blame yourself for this?” Yes. Of course.
“Is your husband providing you with the support you need?” Yes. No. I don’t know.
Somehow, in the past few days, they had barely spoken about the accident. It wasn’t that they didn’t have the time; it was that the time was never right. The kind of talking they needed to do required a level of intimacy and trust that neither of them was sure they shared. Alison used to believe it was mutual respect that kept them from revealing themselves to each other all the time, that each was allowing the other autonomy and space. She didn’t think that anymore. Now she believed that there was too much at stake in talking, too much to risk. There was a fault line at the base of their relationship, and both of them were afraid that tapping at the surface would make it worse.
Dr. Waldron wrote out a prescription for Xanax. “We’ll monitor this closely,” she said. “But Alison, you really should see a therapist.”
She nodded.
“I’ll give you some names.”
Alison had been in therapy only once in her life, when, in college, she went to the women’s clinic to talk about a guy she thought she was in love with who made her crazy. The therapist wasn’t particularly insightful or even empathetic, and Alison barely lasted the ten sessions her insurance subsidized, but the process itself, as she remembered, was vaguely comforting—it was useful to have a place to go once a week to talk about the stuff she was either too embarrassed to tell her roommates or that they were sick of hearing. One time she said—in what felt like a moment of revelation—“I could make anything up about my life and you’d believe me,” and the therapist smiled and said, “And that would reveal something else, wouldn’t it?”
Whether it was time or therapy, Alison got over the guy. And she’d never had an inclination to go back.
But if ever there was a time to go to a therapist, she knew, this was it. Charlie kept nudging her. She suspected that he just wanted help—someone, anyone, to pull her out of this funk. It would reduce his burden, relieve his stress. But she resisted calling the numbers Dr. Waldron had given her. In some perverse, obstinate way, she wanted Charlie to have to deal with it, with her. She didn’t want to make it so easy for him to shake her off.
And perhaps, too, she was afraid of what she might uncover—what the therapeutic process might reveal. Perhaps she wasn’t prepared to learn how deep her unhappiness went. Maybe if she started talking about the ways she felt like a failure, how she’d burrowed into a life in which she sometimes didn