Bird in Hand - Christina Baker Kline [72]
An hour later, sitting in a coach seat next to a man in a cheap suit reeking of drugstore aftershave, Claire sat back and closed her eyes. Her brain was skittish and wandering; it skipped off the point and had trouble finding it again. All through school Alison had been her best friend—the skinny girl with dark eyes, elfin face, and warm smile. They’d weathered middle-school taunting and high school comparisons; they’d been maid and matron of honor at each other’s weddings. They had been friends for nearly thirty years. Moving to New York ten years ago had smoothed Alison’s rough edges, but when Claire looked at her she still saw a bird-boned ten-year-old with long skinny legs, dark kelpy hair tucked behind her ears, freckles baked across her nose, and crusty scabs on her shins from sliding into first during kickball games at recess. When they were kids, Alison had reminded Claire of one of those plucky heroines of young adult novels, the kind who doesn’t let the calamitous things that keep happening to her dim her sunny worldview.
When Claire and Charlie had parted at the airport, he’d grasped her hands. “I mean what I said. I want to spend the rest of my life with you.”
“I don’t think you can propose to a married woman,” she said. “A few other things have to happen first.”
But those things were terrifying. Claire thought of Ben—dear Ben—completely in the dark. What was she supposed to do now—go home and tell him she was in love with Charlie? It was inconceivable, impossible. And Alison she couldn’t even think about. The rift between them now was essentially meaningless, Claire had to admit, a cover for her betrayal, nothing more. How could she do this to Alison? Alison would never have done this to her.
Claire was in love with Charlie, yes, but how much did that matter, really, in the grand scheme of things? Maybe, she thought, we are on our way to ruining everything: the two of us and the four of us.
She didn’t know what she was going to do.
She felt the plane beneath her lumber down the runway, a heavy body on tiny wheels, gathering speed and then, incomprehensibly, lifting into the air, all forty tons of steel and metal and flesh and blood, rising up to soar through the clouds. It made no sense, it made no sense—and yet here they were, taking flight.
Chapter Two
February 1998
Alison, Claire had written in her lazy scrawl, you must come visit us at Cambridge. It’s cold and gray and horrifically overpriced here—and Ben has a chronic sinus infection—but we are having an incredible time.
Alison glanced up at the gray cubicles that spread out around her like an enormous maze. Out of the corner of her eye she could see her boss, Renee Chevarak, through the glass wall of her office, talking loudly in the general direction of the speakerphone, filing her nails, and checking her lipstick in the hand mirror she kept propped on her desk. She caught Alison’s eye and pushed the intercom button. “Al, would you come in here?” the box on Alison’s desk blared. Alison got up, grabbing a spiral notebook, and went to the door.
“I need to talk to you. Shut,” Renee said, waving her nail file at the door. “So,” she said when Alison had complied. “I want you to be the first to know. But this is. … ” She ran the nail file across her closed mouth, simulating, Alison was to understand, a zipper.
Alison nodded.
“I’m in negotiation with another magazine.” Renee sat back, dropped the file, and ran her hands through her short blond hair. “It’s time for me to move on. You understand.”
Alison nodded again, feigning empathy. She was twenty-three years old, less than a year out of UNC,