Bird in Hand - Christina Baker Kline [94]
“Okay,” the father said, cutting her off, gripping his wife’s shoulder. She just stared at Alison, her expression impassive.
“I understand why you came. If there’s anything … ” Alison said helplessly.
“We just wanted to see who you were,” he said, and turned away.
Walking across the parking lot to the car—Robin’s Honda minivan—Alison looked up. Gray clouds moved fast across a pale blue expanse, and it seemed as if the land under her feet was moving equally fast in the opposite direction. She didn’t know which way she was headed. All the things that had seemed solid to her a month ago—a month ago, and all of her life until then—were crumbling. The ground had shifted; she’d lost her balance. She felt as if she were falling off the earth.
FOR WEEKS ALISON felt as if she were underwater, in a deep, murky place, struggling to make her way to the surface. She couldn’t believe anything Charlie said, anything Claire said. She didn’t know which of her friends were as ignorant as she was, and which might have known all along. She was learning that it was unusual for people to speak plainly to each other about painful or difficult things. We talk to each other, and about each other, but rarely are those conversations the same. We learn through years of living with white lies and self-deception that plain talk can ignite a powder keg of feeling, so we speak in euphemism and metaphor, steering clear of the flinty truth: Your husband doesn’t love you. Your best friend has betrayed you. You have been living a lie.
At the drugstore in town one day, Alison observed a young mother holding a child, apparently her daughter, about two years old. The mother was bending to sign a credit card bill at the counter. The girl’s legs were wrapped around her mother’s waist, her arms around her neck. They were molded together as one, and Alison wished for a moment that she had a camera. Then she realized that her inclination would be to give the woman the photo so that she might see something about her life she might not otherwise have known.
When Alison looked at photographs now of Charlie and her together, she studied them for clues. Is he looking off in the distance? Is she looking down? How close are they sitting, are they touching, is he turning toward her or away? She had taken thousands of pictures in her life, and most of them were collected in photo boxes labeled by year. Occasionally, after some self-contained experience—a trip, their wedding, the birth of a child—she organized the pictures into an album. But what story did those pictures tell? What did they hide or reveal about what was happening now?
It would have been easy to stick to the story of the wife who was betrayed and lied to and left; and some days, for Alison, that was the story of her marriage, the only one that mattered. When something happens in a marriage, everybody wants to blame one person or the other, as if an easy answer might make it more understandable and less sad. He was unfaithful—good riddance. She didn’t know how to love him—doesn’t he deserve better? But when you are one of the people in that marriage, you know how complicated it is. Perhaps he was unfaithful because you didn’t know how to love him, and perhaps you didn’t know how to love him because he never fully gave himself to you. Perhaps he was in love with someone else. And maybe you knew that—maybe you knew it long ago, before you were married, and you married him anyway.
CLEARING OUT THE clutter on a bottom shelf one afternoon, not long after Charlie left, Alison came across Blue Martinis. Annie was at school and Noah was taking a nap, so Alison sat on the floor, and, for the first time since it had arrived in the mail several months earlier, opened the book. Out fell a slip of paper with “Compliments of the Author” printed on it. On the title page she found an inscription, in Claire’s familiar scrawl, which she hadn’t known was there. “To Al—” it said, “Maybe the only person in the world who knows which parts of this are true and which ones I made up. I won