Bird in Hand - Christina Baker Kline [44]
The drugs did what they were supposed to do. They made her numb. She didn’t feel better, exactly; she just didn’t feel as much. It didn’t help that the late winter sky was gray, opaque; the trees were bare, the streets damp with melting snow and intermittent rain.
In the mornings, after waving good-bye to Annie at the bus stop and dropping Noah at preschool, she’d often go to a nearby coffee shop. Leafing through the communal newspaper basket she’d find a Times Living section, then buy a four-dollar latte and sit at a small round table by the window, watching other people get on with their lives: a college kid at the next table, sketching a strange-looking bicycle on graph paper with a pencil, making a few strokes and stopping, resting his chin in his hand. A blind man in a hooded sweatshirt, carrying a gym bag, led by a Seeing Eye dog. An expressionless woman with kohl-rimmed eyes who nodded slightly as the man across from her made an emphatic point. A blond woman in a shiny red Jeep, parallel parking in front of the café. Picketers wearing sandwich-board signs standing on the corner, protesting labor practices at the gourmet grocery on the next block. Everyone appeared to be in a hurry, moving with purpose, except for an old man who wandered aimlessly down the sidewalk, as if he couldn’t decide which way to go.
Alison felt alone in a way that she couldn’t ever remember having felt, a sense of aloneness so profound that she couldn’t breathe. I have done this, she thought—I deserve this. I deserve to feel this way.
At night, after everyone else was in bed, Alison wandered from room to room without turning on any lights, pausing at the windows to gaze out at the quiet street. In the dim glow of a streetlight the bare branches of the tree in their front yard looked like the afterimage of a photograph, tangled in relief against the sky. She walked around the silent house and looked at the framed photographs that lined the mantelpiece and cluttered the bookshelves, wondering, Is this really my life? This collage of perfect moments, frozen in time? Every photograph seemed to her now a memento mori—a futile attempt to hold on to the past, a staged declaration of permanence in an impermanent world. They made her queasy.
When she did lie down, Alison replayed the accident over and over in her mind. She thought of the boy in the other car: his skin as soft as a ripe peach, his body solid on his mother’s lap. Though Alison had only seen him with his eyes closed, she imagined them wide open, a bittersweet brown. His breath warm and tangy, apple juice and graham crackers, fingers sticky with the lollipop bribe he’d been given to stay in his seat, the bribe that didn’t work. His dark, straight hair smelling of baby shampoo, as soft and fine as eyelashes against his mother’s cheek.
Alison imagined him leaning back against his mother, her arms enveloping him, offering comfort in the darkness. Squirming now, tired and cranky. He tries to stand and his mother scolds him—“Sit, Marco, stop moving around.” His father, distracted, just wants to get home. He has an early day tomorrow; he needs to get up at four-thirty to be at the building site by six. It’s a good job and he can’t afford to lose it—he needs it, they need it, after that hernia from the last job and no disability. There’s a decent foreman on this job; he’s a union man and always wanting to sign up the workers. Maybe so, the father thinks, maybe it’s time. If the papers come through in the next few months he’ll be legal and can get health insurance. It would be nice not to have to worry for a change.
The boy is moving around on the front seat. “Sit still, Marco,” the father says sternly. He looks over at his wife with annoyance. Why can’t she keep him down? And then his son catches his eye and reaches out, his plump, soft-nailed fingers splayed toward him—“Papa, Pa-pa,” he says sweetly, his voice a chiming singsong—and the father’s gaze lingers