Bird in Hand - Christina Baker Kline [66]
“Noah, stop it,” she said. He thrashed and turned, trying to get her off. It was like wrestling a Komodo dragon. As he wrenched himself to one side he lost his balance and slid halfway down the side of the canopy, his head about ten feet from the ground.
Alison could feel her hands slipping, his shoes loosening on his feet, his legs sliding out of her grasp. “Help, Mommy,” he said, alarm in his voice now, a whimper in his throat. She let go with one hand and grabbed his pants leg, then wrapped the other arm tightly around both legs and slowly pulled him toward her. When she got his stomach to the edge, she grabbed around his waist and lifted him off, turning him around. He grasped her tightly with his arms and legs, nearly making her lose her balance on the small platform, but she braced herself and leaned against the railing.
“Oh, thank God,” her mother said from below, holding up her arms absurdly, as if she might have tried to catch them both.
“That child’s too young to be unsupervised on that slide,” one babysitter clucked loudly to another, who nodded and said, “Um hmm.”
All at once Alison was filled with rage—at the babysitters, who had no right to judge her; at her mother, whose distant, critical stance toward her grandchildren and son-in-law had precipitated this; at herself for neglecting her child. He could have fallen ten feet onto his head, he might have been killed.
She was a bad mother, a terrible mother—she didn’t deserve to have children of her own.
It was then that she realized she was furious with Charlie. Things between them were terrible, and had been for some time. When was the last time Charlie had told her he loved her? For months he’d been distant; he’d gone through the motions of being a good husband and father without actually engaging with her or with their children. And she overcompensated; she’d done half the work for him of pulling away. She made excuses for his absences; she’d given him every possible benefit of the doubt. He had a lot on his mind. He was stressed, he was tired. In some ways she had even appreciated Charlie’s distractedness, which gave her a little breathing room. The children were so close, sometimes suffocatingly close; it was nice—wasn’t it?—to have some space to herself.
But something was wrong. Deeply wrong. The fog of sadness that had enveloped Alison since the accident had obscured the trouble between them, but her blindness went deeper than that. She had feared from the beginning that Charlie was not truly in love with her, that she fit his idea of what he wanted in a wife but didn’t actually fit him. And what about her? The first time she’d seen Charlie, with his broad shoulders and good bone structure, Alison had thought: this man is good husband material; he will age well. Was he really the one person in the world for her, or had she just convinced herself that he was the closest she would get?
Before the accident, Alison would have said that she was happy, that her life was just as she wanted it. Charlie worked hard, brought home a paycheck, tucked the children into bed at night. Yes, he was distracted, but he also brought her flowers; he may have snapped at her with little provocation, but then he kissed her on the back of the neck. So many things happened moment to moment, day to day, good and bad—how was she to sift through, to separate the significant from the inconsequential? Marriage was hard enough—preposterous enough—in the best of circumstances. Two people, from different backgrounds, whose eating habits and tastes and educations and ambitions might be vastly dissimilar, choose to live in the same house, sleep in the same bed, eat the same foods. They have to agree on everything from where to live to how many children to have. It was sheer lunacy, when you thought about it. Alison’s marriage didn’t look that different from her friends’ marriages—husbands and wives in two distinct camps, their lives largely separate. Long fallow periods of coexisting interlaced with rare moments of connection. Everybody joked about it;