Bird in Hand - Christina Baker Kline [96]
They’d continue this litany of self-abasement until one of them said something uncomfortably close to the truth, and the other would feel compelled to reassure her with a painful earnestness: that’s not true at all, you’re gaw-jess, dah-lin’. This would dispel the illusion that, like witches repelling curses, they might banish these faults and fears by articulating them, and the game would be over.
Emma felt big next to Jill—too tall, with uncontrollable hair and oversize features, freakish, galumphing, too much. Slight and delicate, Jill was the kind of girl even the toughest boys behaved with, as if they sensed that in her reticence, her apparent vulnerability, a fairy tale–like transformation was possible. Emma had always thought that like Snow White or Cinderella, Jill would be the one who’d marry a prince someday.
Did Claire really feel this way about her? If so, Alison had never known. She thought about her mother’s reaction, how she’d warned Alison that she wouldn’t like the way she was portrayed. It was true that Jill’s major attributes appeared to be loyalty, naïveté, and a willingness to pick up the pieces when the main character went too far. If Jill was the innocent maiden, Emma was the savvy heroine whose calculated impulsiveness usually got her what she wanted.
Skipping ahead, to high school, Alison read:
Emma and Jill were sitting together on the brick wall outside the main entrance to the school, waiting for Emma’s mother to pick them up. Two guys they didn’t know—seniors, probably—were in a car, idling at the curb, looking over at them and smirking.
“That one’s cute,” one of the guys said loudly, pointing at Jill, “but the other one’s a babe.”
“Yeah, you might end up marrying her,” his friend answered, cocking his finger at Jill, “but she’s the one you’d want on the side.” He aimed his imaginary gun at Emma and pulled the trigger.
When Noah started calling “Mommy, I wake!” from his darkened bedroom, Alison said, “I’ll be right there,” and turned from the middle of the book to the end. Emma was eighteen now and had applied to colleges up north in secrecy. The day the acceptance letter came from Barnard, she started packing her bags. Jill was staying behind and going to a college in-state.
On her first night in the city Emma took the subway to Times Square. It was one of those summer evenings when the city seems to shimmer; the air has cooled, the light softened. Everybody’s away, in the Hamptons or at the Shore. Restaurants are half empty, taxis sail down Broadway, doormen idle under awnings. New York feels like a secret you’re privileged to know.
Wandering up Broadway, she squinted at the tall buildings, dazzled by the lights. If anyone caught her eye she smiled and said hello. She looked like a tourist, though she didn’t feel like one. She had only been in New York for six hours, but already it felt like home.
Emma’s past—Hatfield and everyone in it—was behind her now. As she walked around the city she could feel it: her past fading into memory. Real life, she knew, was just beginning.
And yet here Claire was, Alison thought, pretending the past back into existence. The difference was that now she could talk about it like an adult; she could look at it with cool and even ironic distance. She could be philosophical. Her past was real and not real, true and imagined. It didn’t really matter, did it? It was childhood, long ago.
I won’t tell if you won’t.
Alison closed the book. She could hear Noah singing the “Open, Shut Them” song to himself in his bed. She got to her feet and put the book back on the shelf, then went to her son, her own real life, in the next room.
part five
The only future we can conceive is built upon the forward shadow of our past.
—MARCEL PROUST
Chapter One
From where Ben is standing, on a hard-packed mound of dirt above the scooped-out dig, the tractors and yellow backhoes below look like toy trucks. It’s a boy’s fantasy come to life (not his fantasy, exactly, he thinks, but some boy’s). As he watches the machines lurch around