Bird in Hand - Christina Baker Kline [90]
“You’re gone most of the time,” she snapped. “You’re gone emotionally, too. And when you actually do spend some time with us you get drunk. You fucking hypocrite. You’ve basically checked out, haven’t you?”
He waited to see if she had more to say, but she just sat there, looking at the floor, her chest moving rapidly up and down in her flannel pajama top. That old philosophical question flitted through his mind: who breaks the thread, the one who pulls or the one who hangs on?
This is happening. There’s no turning back.
“Alison, you’re right,” he said, putting his hand on her arm. “You’re right. About all of it.”
An evolving expression slid across her face, like a cloud moving across the sun—relief to mistrust to defensiveness. “What do you mean?”
“I guess … I guess I have blamed you. Maybe I thought if I made you into a villain it would be easier.”
“What would be easier?”
Shit. “It would be easier to … say what I have to say.”
She recoiled, pulling her arm away. “I don’t understand.”
“I don’t know how to tell you this.”
“Oh God.” She put her hands over her eyes.
“I just—It’s nothing you’ve done.”
“I knew it,” she murmured.
“Knew what,” he said, trying to sound sympathetic instead of like he was fishing. How much did she know?
“That you weren’t—in love with me anymore.”
“It’s not that,” he said. “I do love you. I’ll always love you.”
“Please,” she said, holding up her hand.
“I don’t. … ”
“Just tell me.”
There wasn’t a single molecule of Charlie that wanted to be having this conversation. He felt as if he had been pushed out onto a tightrope, high above the ground; now all he could do was try to keep his balance and make it across.
“I’m—I think I’m in love with Claire,” he said.
He had heard the expression “the blood drained from her face,” but he’d never seen it before. Alison actually went white. “Wh-what?” she sputtered.
Charlie shrugged helplessly, deploying an old weapon, the equivalent of a girl flirting to get her way. If he could become a little boy in her eyes, naughty or willful or irresponsible, it might not be so devastating; she might even somehow forgive him. Unfortunately this tactic seemed to have lost all effectiveness.
“Claire Ellis? My-best-friend-from-childhood Claire?”
He didn’t respond. It hardly seemed necessary.
“You’ve got to be joking,” she said. “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me. Please tell me this is a joke.”
“It isn’t a joke.”
“What—how—” She shook her head, as if trying to wake from a bad dream.
“I think I’ve been in love with her since Cambridge,” he said haltingly.
She stared at him.
He looked down.
“Go on,” she said.
“She—Claire—didn’t want me then. I mean, she was already with Ben.”
“Jesus.” Alison’s lip curled in disgust. This, he could tell, was even worse—that Claire had first rejected him and then passed him along to her.
“And I thought the feeling would go away,” he continued. “I mean, I had a crush on her, but she was with Ben, and that was that. I liked Ben, too. I liked being with both of them. For a while I thought maybe it was that—I just wanted to be in their life, you know? Their life—their lives—seemed so much more interesting than mine. And then … you came.”
Alison’s body went rigid. She looked straight ahead, at some imaginary point in space halfway across the room.
“And you were so beautiful,” he said. “You are—you are so beautiful.”
“Don’t, Charlie.”
“I fell in love with you, I did. I had never met anyone like you. So poised and yet—I don’t know—open.”
He could see tears welling in her eyes.
“I wanted you. I wanted to marry you.”
“You were in love with her.”
“No, I—I wasn’t then. Or I convinced myself that I wasn’t, because there was nothing I could do about it.”
“So I was the consolation prize,” she said bitterly.
“No. No,” he said, “it didn’t feel that way.” He had intended to be scrupulously honest with Alison—he owed it to her; it was the least he could do. But she was right. The stark truth was that he would not have married her had Claire been free. And even though he did grow to love Alison—he had been,