Bird in Hand - Christina Baker Kline [92]
“Oh, you hate that part of it?”
“Yes, I do. I hate lying to you.”
“Why are you doing this?” she screamed. She collapsed onto the couch beside him and doubled over, as if in agony, clutching her stomach with one hand and sobbing into her wadded-up tissues in the other. “Why? Why?”
There was really no answer. He was doing this because he could not keep skimming along the surface of his life without one day crashing into something hard and unpleasant, a truth about himself he had long tried to avoid—that his inability to make difficult decisions was what had gotten him into this mess in the first place. He wanted both lives; he didn’t want to have to choose. He wanted this life with Alison and a parallel one with Claire, but that didn’t seem to be possible. He was doing this because he had finally realized that it took more of an effort to keep the chaos contained than it did to let it go.
And though he did, genuinely, love his children with his whole being, and hated the idea that they, like him—like Alison—would suffer through a divorce, he was convinced that he would only get one chance to feel this kind of passion, to express it, to live. In a way, it was as simple as that: you only get one life. And though his children were everything to him, sometimes he closed his eyes and wondered what his life would be like if he had claimed what he wanted from the beginning, if he had not given up so easily, and, as a result, had never made them.
He wouldn’t say any of this, of course. He couldn’t say it. So he put his hand gently on her back while she cried, and eventually she grew quiet.
Chapter Eight
November 1997
“Damn. I’ve forgotten to bring a pen. You don’t have an extra, do you?”
Charlie was standing in a dingy, narrow hallway in Queens College, waiting for an appointment with the graduate student advisor, Master Holcombe. It was the girl’s eyes that Charlie noticed first, an unusual greenish amber in her pale face, the color of a fallen leaf in the snow. She stared at him expectantly, with a frank intensity he found unsettling.
“Uh, let me check,” he said, rummaging in his bag. He came up with a fistful of writing implements and presented them to her on an open palm.
She chose one, and smiled. Her teeth were small and white. “Thanks,” she said. “You’re American.”
“How can you tell? I’ve barely said a word.”
She laughed. “You’re so American.”
“Why does that sound like an insult?” he said lightly, though it did. “You are, too.”
She squinted at him. She was wearing a short brown plaid dress and brown leather sandals. Her skin was pale; a smattering of freckles fell across her nose and chest and arms. He couldn’t tell much about her shape in that dress, which hung from her shoulders like a sack, but her bare legs were tanned and strong. She was tallish, and her curly cinnamon hair was pulled back in a clip. “Everything I say sounds like an insult,” she said. “So I’ve been told.”
Just then the door opened and a young man with a receding chin and strips of thin hair plastered to his forehead slipped out. He wore gray slacks and a flimsy white collared shirt, which had taken on a pinkish cast from the skin underneath. “Holcombe said to send in whoever’s next,” he said.
“I guess that’s me. Nice to meet you,” the girl said, offering Charlie her hand.
“But we didn’t,” he said. “Meet. I don’t even know your name.”
“Claire,” she said. “Ellis.”
“Charlie Granville.”
She smiled. “Why don’t you come to drinks after dinner at our place tonight? We’re rounding up all the Americans we can find.”
“We … ”
“Ben and I. My boyfriend. Fiancé, actually.”
Charlie nodded. He felt a suffusing prick of disappointment, like a bee sting.
“Thirty-two Barton Road,” she said. “Eight o’clock.”
He looked at her fingers; she wasn’t wearing a ring. “Thank you,” he said. “I’d like that.”
Chapter Nine
When something terrible happens, a lifetime of small events and unremarkable decisions, of unresolved