Bird in Hand - Christina Baker Kline [89]
“Awww, why can’t I have a bath?” Noah whined.
“But—” Charlie said.
“Charlie, you’re drunk,” she said quietly.
“I am not.”
“We’ll talk about this later,” she said.
“It’s nice to have the moral upper hand, isn’t it?” he said somewhat desperately.
She gave him a look of such cold fury that he stepped backward, bumping against the desk. “You would know,” she said.
AFTER FINISHING THE dishes—which were almost done, anyway; Alison was a marvel of efficiency—Charlie sank onto the couch in the TV room and flipped to CNN to watch the news. Unfortunately MarketWatch was on, which made him anxious (the fact that he’d never been particularly interested in the stock market was his secret; he knew it was his masculine duty to care, but now that the market was tanking, taking his 401K with it, he cared even less), so he flipped through channels, skipping from a family comedy from the seventies to a show with contestants eating bugs, before landing on The Simpsons.
This was more his speed. He watched the show, prone, with one wary eye. When the episode ended—a complicated story involving Clint Eastwood, mud pies, and the nuclear power plant where Homer worked—Charlie turned off the TV. The house was quiet; the children, he concluded, were in bed. He sat up, feeling groggy. Four beers weren’t so many; in college that amount wouldn’t have fazed him at all, but he wasn’t used to drinking that way anymore. And he hadn’t eaten much dinner. All he wanted to do now was go to bed.
He could hear Alison in the room directly above him—their bedroom—padding around. He knew he should go up there, but he didn’t want to.
He sat up. Fuck. There was a small mallet in his brain, hammering his cerebral cortex. With each throbbing pulse his head seemed to grow larger.
Lying down again, he closed his eyes. He might have even drifted off.
“So what was all that about?” a blunt, angry voice demanded from above.
Charlie blinked. Groggily he pulled himself onto one elbow and swung his legs over the side of the couch. He squinted up at the shadowy figure looming over him—Alison, wearing blue flannel pajamas (in April? An unseasonably cold April, but still). Her face, free of makeup and damp around the hairline, shiny with moisturizer, seemed strangely exposed, as if she’d not only washed her face but also scrubbed off an epidermal layer.
“What time is it?” he asked.
“Nine-forty-five.”
“Oh. Wow.” He rubbed his face.
She crossed her arms. “We need to talk.”
He frowned, as if surprised. He wasn’t surprised, but he didn’t want her to think he’d been waiting like a coward for her to make the first move—which was, of course, exactly what he had been doing. “Okay,” he said.
She sat down on the couch, close to the edge, as if she might skitter away at any second. She bit the corner of her lip, twisting her mouth into a grimace. “I just realized something,” she said. “You have been blaming me since the accident for killing that little boy.”
“Alison—”
“Stop. That’s not what I realized. What I realized is that I’ve been blaming myself, too. I’ve been blaming myself for killing that boy, and for the problems in our marriage, and for the fact that you’ve essentially absented yourself from our lives. I thought it was all my fault. But you know what?” Her voice rose in a sharp crescendo. “I wasn’t the one who ran a red light. I wasn’t holding my child on my lap in the front seat. Maybe if I hadn’t had two drinks I could’ve moved out of the way faster—but probably not; I’ve never had fast reflexes, especially driving, especially at night. Believe me, I’ll live with that memory for the rest of my life. But I will not live with your judgment and scorn.”
“Hey, hey,” he said gently, trying to calm her