Bird in Hand - Christina Baker Kline [47]
“She might want to talk to a grief counselor,” Bill said. “I can get you a name, if you want it. When my wife’s brother died, she saw this woman for a year, and I believe it helped her tremendously.”
“Thanks. That’s a good suggestion,” Charlie said. He looked at Bill, a trim, handsome man in his late forties, and wondered what he and his wife had been through. As far as Charlie could remember, this was the first time Bill had ever even mentioned a wife.
“Well, listen, take all the time you need,” Bill said, patting him on the back as he walked him to the door of his office.
“Thanks,” Charlie said. “Bill, I’d appreciate it if you don’t share this with anyone. Alison is a pretty private person, and I think she’d prefer to keep this quiet.”
“Of course. I understand,” Bill assured him.
Actually, Alison hadn’t said anything to Charlie about keeping it quiet. He was the one who didn’t want people to know. His wife had been drinking, and a small boy had died. A child—a boy like his boy—someone else’s son: dead. It was inconceivable. If he had been driving, this wouldn’t have happened, he was sure of it. He was more confident on the road, not to mention heavier; he would have absorbed the alcohol differently. Anyway, he wouldn’t have drunk two gimmicky blue martinis.
But to go to Claire’s party with Alison would have been unbearable.
Before the accident Charlie had wondered if it might be possible for things to continue as they were indefinitely; he and Claire could lead their separate lives and come together in a kind of biospheric space, outside the constraints of real life. Their relationship would exist beyond the realm of everyday concerns. Even at the time Charlie had known that this conceit was foolish; the delicate balance required to sustain such a precarious arrangement was bound to become upset. Either he or Claire would come to feel that it wasn’t enough; Alison or Ben would find out. Eventually things would have to change. But now he felt like those prisoners of war he’d read about who were strapped, alive, to the dead bodies of their fallen comrades and thrown into the river. He was bound to Alison in a way that he hadn’t been before—he was, or would have to be, the stalwart husband.
STANDING ON THE platform an hour later, waiting for the 1:17 train, Charlie pulled out his cell phone.
“Hey there, you,” Claire said in a groggy voice.
“Oh God, did I wake you?”
“It’s okay. I was napping,” she said. “I had to get up at the crack of dawn for a morning show.”
“Sorry. Where are you?”
He could hear the rustle of sheets, and he pictured her sitting up, turning on the bedside lamp in the hotel room. “Nashville. The weather is downright balmy. Flowers are blooming.”
“How’d the reading go last night?”
“Fine. An old friend from college lives here, so she rustled up a crowd. Otherwise it would’ve been a homeless man and three old ladies who heard me on Tennessee Public Radio yesterday afternoon.”
“How are you?” he asked, impatient with the details.
“Charlie, I’m fine. Fine, fine—it doesn’t matter. The question is, how are you?”
He inhaled quietly, filling his lungs with the cool spring air. A mile or so away, at the other end of town, the warning horn of the train sounded as it pulled into the station. He should’ve called her sooner. In a minute the train would be here.
“Ahh. Not so great,” he said. Leaving the house, he’d run into Alison’s father in the kitchen, sitting at the table eating a tuna sandwich and reading the Times. Charlie had said a quick hello and ducked back into the hall to get his laptop bag, but Ed got up and stood in the doorway with his glass of milk.
“I know this is tough,” Ed said. “Maybe as tough as it gets.”
Charlie had nodded, gathering his keys, BlackBerry, silver iPod from the bowl on the hall table and putting them in various pockets in his bag. “I’m glad you’re here, Ed,” he said, and he meant it. Charlie liked Ed, liked his