Bird in Hand (11 page)

“It’s quiet in here,” Robin said.

“She’s upstairs with the kids.”

“You want to tell her I’m here?”

“Yeah. Just a sec.” He bounded up the stairs and rounded the corner to the master bedroom. The door was slightly ajar, and he pushed it open all the way to reveal Alison, in sweatpants and a blue UNC sweatshirt (purchased at her fifteenth reunion last summer), her hair in a stringy ponytail, sitting cross-legged with Annie on the floor playing Sorry. Charlie peered into the dimness; the shades were drawn. Noah was sprawled on the floor with two small Thomas trains, conducting a conversation between them in a high-pitched voice.

“Hey. Robin’s downstairs,” Charlie said with forced cheer, opening a shade. He felt like a nurse, bustling in to wake up a patient.

Alison looked up, squinting into the cold daylight. “What time is it?”

Charlie gestured with his free hand to the alarm clock, then said, gratuitously, “Four-ten.”

“Your turn, Mommy,” Annie said.

Alison picked up a card and turned it over.

“Move forward ten or back one,” Annie read. “Forward ten is better.”

“Should I send ’er up?” Charlie asked.

“I’m disgusting,” Alison murmured. “I haven’t showered in three days.”

“You need a bath,” Annie said. “A bubble bath. Go, Mommy.”

Dutifully Alison picked up a green plastic Hershey’s kiss–shaped pawn and pushed it ten spaces with her index finger.

“You’re fine. She doesn’t care,” Charlie said.

Alison glanced up sharply, and he could tell she’d caught the impatience in his voice. Easy, he thought. He hadn’t known how much he wanted Robin to stay until that moment. He was, he suddenly realized, desperate for it.

“Hah!
Sorry!
” Annie squealed triumphantly, holding up a card. “Sorry, Mommy. You have to go back to start.”

Downstairs in the foyer with Robin, Charlie said, “You can go up.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah. She’s—it’s tough.”

Robin nodded. “I can only imagine.”

“It means a lot that you stop by. I think—people don’t really know what to do. Hell, I don’t know what to do.”

“Is there any news?”

Charlie wasn’t sure whether Alison had told her about the DWI, so he didn’t mention it. He said, “The boy’s funeral is tomorrow. Alison wants to go.”

Robin grimaced. “Do you think that’s a good idea?”

“No. But her mind is made up. She said she’ll take a bus if I don’t drive her.”

“A bus?”

Oh shit. So Robin didn’t know. “She doesn’t feel comfortable driving yet,” he said.

“Sure, of course. Where is it?”

“Patterson.”

“I could take her,” Robin said.

For a moment Charlie was tempted to accept. The last thing in the world he wanted was to go to the funeral—it seemed to him intrusive and inappropriate. What right did they have to share in that family’s private grief? And he feared that Alison’s presence could be seen as worse than inappropriate—it might come across as callous. The fact was that if Alison hadn’t been at that intersection—and perhaps, too, if she hadn’t drunk those martinis—the boy would still be alive.

But Charlie knew he couldn’t let Robin take his place. A line from the book he’d read to Annie and Noah the night before,
The Bear Went over the Mountain
, came to mind:
Can’t go over it. Can’t go under it. We have to go through it
.

He shook his head. “Thanks for offering.”

“I’ll watch the kids.”

Charlie smiled in tacit acceptance.

After Robin went upstairs, he unloaded and loaded the dishwasher with breakfast bowls, wiped the counter, picked toys off the kitchen floor. Then he stood in the hall and cocked his head, listening. He could hear the quiet murmur of voices. He took his cell phone out of his pocket and dialed Claire’s cell.

“Hey,” he whispered. “Where are you?”

“God. I’ve been waiting for you to call.”

“I couldn’t.”

“I know. I wasn’t expecting it. I just—hoped. I did leave a message for Alison a while ago.”

“I know. She mentioned it. That was—good of you. So where are you?”

“On the way to LaGuardia. Book tour, remember?”

“Oh yeah. Real life,” he said.

“Doesn’t feel like it.”

“Well, this sure doesn’t.”

She grunted. “What you’re going through is as real as it gets, right?”

“Maybe. I don’t know. Surreal, I’d say.” He suddenly felt very tired. He didn’t have the energy to say another word. He wanted to crawl into a hole and go to sleep for a very long time.

“I’m so sorry, Charlie,” Claire said.

For the first time since the accident, Charlie felt his throat constrict, his eyes blur with tears. He swallowed hard.

“It’s okay,” she said softly.

“It’s really not.” He choked, biting down on the words to keep his voice under control.

“I wanted to come out there, but I just—”

“I know. I didn’t—want you here.” He almost took it back, fearing that she would take offense at his bluntness.

But all she said was, “That’s what I figured. I’m sure it’s been hard enough.”

“Yeah.”

“I just—I wish I could see you.”

“I know.” His longing for her was so acute that it felt cancerous, deep in his bones.

“Ben wants to come. He’ll call.”

“Okay.”

“How is she?”

“She’s okay. I mean, what can I say? She’s devastated. She’s okay.”

“I know.”

“Enough about all this. I should be asking about you,” he said.

“No, you shouldn’t. Not now.”

“Later,” he whispered.

“Later,” she said.

CHARLIE DROPPED ALISON at the door of the funeral home and went off to park, then slipped into the maroon-carpeted chapel right before the doors closed. Alison was sitting alone in the back pew. The song “Tears in Heaven” was playing, an instrumental version heavy on the strings that Charlie guessed the funeral home must have had on a mix tape tailored for children. At the front, flanked by two large, heart-shaped flower forms as tidily patterned as frosting on a supermarket cake, was a small baby blue casket.

“It’s tiny,” she murmured.

“At least it’s not open,” Charlie said under his breath.

The chapel was more than half full; there were probably sixty people. When everyone was settled the minister talked about the senselessness of this kind of tragedy, but also about how God had a plan for each of us, and how it was not our place to question that plan. Other people, speaking in tear-choked voices, recalled Marco’s love of baseball, his collection of Matchbox cars, his uncanny ability to mimic advertising jingles from TV, the way he insisted on wearing his father’s leather tool belt around the house, even though it nearly tipped him over. They talked about how God would watch over Marco, and the angels would play with him, and how his grandfather, already in heaven, would teach him card tricks. Nobody mentioned the accident.

It would have been comforting, Charlie thought, to believe in fate now—that there was a reason for all this grief, that it was a test to soldier through, that the little boy’s death wasn’t simply a result of ill judgment and heedlessness but part of some kind of larger design, the details of which would become clear as the years unfolded. But it was impossible for him. A child was dead, and his wife was at least partially to blame. This child would never be four, or fourteen, or twenty-six; he would not graduate from high school or earn a driver’s license or have children of his own. He would not make his parents proud, or disappoint them. His career would be someone else’s career, his wife someone else’s wife. He would not take care of his parents in their old age, or continue the family name. His mother would spend the rest of her life wondering what he might have become.

It occurred to Charlie that the last time he had been to a funeral was when his own mother died. It was very different from this, of course; her struggle with cancer had been long and arduous, and though nobody wanted to believe it, they’d all known she was dying. She was cremated, and they scattered her ashes in the pond behind her home.

When the cancer had appeared the first time—she’d discovered a lump in her cervix, and underwent a year of chemo and radiation—Charlie’s mother had emerged from the ordeal physically diminished and emotionally transformed. Her thick blond hair, which she’d always worn in a conservative bob, fell out, and when it grew back, fine and gray, she cropped it short. She took trips with fellow cancer survivors to Tucson and Taos and became a devotee of Ashtanga yoga. She kept her food processor permanently on the kitchen counter and drank herbal potions in deep, earthy colors, green and rust and brown. And when the cancer came back, fifteen years later, in every lymph node and several of her bones, it was almost as if she was ready for it. In those years, as she confided to Charlie when he finally came to see her, she had done all the things she wanted to do—the things she’d spent the first forty-one years of her life wondering about: trying marijuana, having sex with a stranger, camping on a mountaintop, feeling the muscles and bones in her body move in ways she hadn’t known they could.

Near the end, lying in her hospital bed with tubes in her arms, her face scrubbed free of makeup, she’d grasped his hand and looked in his eyes. “Here’s what I have learned,” she said. “It’s not enough to hope that happiness will find you. You have to seek it. And another thing: no matter how complicated your life seems, you have the power to change it. Don’t make the mistake I did and waste precious decades because you’re too afraid to act.”

At the time the words had seemed to Charlie like New Age bullshit; he was living in New York and, he thought, doing pretty much exactly what he wanted. His mother’s middle-aged carpe diem conversion seemed both simplistic and a little unseemly—who was this woman with the short spiky hair and serious gaze, devoid of maternal softness, spouting slogans worthy of the posters for sale in the back of in-flight magazines? But these days her words haunted him. He had an image in his mind of his mother in that hospital bed, sitting up against stiff white pillows, her lips thin and bloodless, almost colorless, her eyes dark and bright. He thought of her like this at random times, when he was standing in line at the ATM machine or buying groceries, and his eyes would fill with tears. His mother had been right. She knew what lay ahead, and she warned him, and he—young, self-absorbed, ignorant of the myriad ways that life can beat you down—had humored, placated, and ultimately dismissed her. What fucking arrogance. If he had listened to her, might his life have been different? Would a courageous decision ten years ago have avoided a mess like this now?

As soon as the boy’s funeral was over, and “Wind Beneath My Wings” came on the audio system, Charlie nudged Alison, and they tiptoed out. She had wanted to go up and speak to the parents, but Charlie had convinced her that it would be inappropriate—it was the last thing he’d want, if he were the father of the boy. She lingered for a moment at the back, then followed him out the double doors to the parking lot.

On the way home in the car, she turned to Charlie and said tearfully, “I know you’re angry at me.”

“I’m not angry, Alison.”

“Yes you are. Say the worst things you’re thinking. That I’m irresponsible and stupid. A drunk. A murderer.” She almost spat the words at him, daring him to agree.

He looked over at her warily. In truth, he
was
angry at her—for the insecurities that he was certain had led her to drink too much at the party, for her poor judgment, even for the anguish she was expressing now.

He had both hands on the steering wheel, and he lifted one to rub his cheek. “You’re not a drunk. Or a murderer.”

She gasped a little, as if his words had caused her physical pain.

Charlie drove in silence, wondering at his own capacity for inflicting hurt. He felt a stab of regret. But he couldn’t shake this anger he felt toward her. And he knew that, really, her culpability wasn’t the issue—it was that he’d been on the brink of self-discovery, a quest that had nothing to do with her. It was separate from her, from the children, from their life in Rockwell. But this accident made it impossible for him to pursue it. He felt, now, at the edge of a feeling more powerful, more dangerous than he could ever remember having experienced—a bottomless despair.

Chapter Nine

October 2001

At dinner with Claire and Ben one evening in New York, Alison and Charlie made plans to go away with them for an October fall foliage bed-and-breakfast weekend upstate. Charlie made reservations at what turned out to be a dilapidated bed-and-breakfast he’d chosen from an out-of-date guidebook he’d found remaindered at the Strand—typical of him, as Claire said when they got there. “Charlie’s such a cheapskate,” she grumbled to Alison as they followed the ancient proprietor up the rickety stairs to their rooms. “We should never let him make the plans.” (Charlie was a cheapskate, but Alison knew that he felt acutely the difference between his nonprofit job and Ben’s salary as a corporate architect.)

Charlie had left work early and taken the subway to a bus to the least expensive car rental place he could find, near the river on Thirty-first Street. He secured a shiny white Ford Focus and drove up West End Avenue to pick up Alison. Meanwhile, she had packed their bag. He had left a sloppy pile of clothes on his dresser—khakis and a moss green sweater, boxer shorts and socks and a few white T-shirts, a leather utility case containing a frayed toothbrush, a flattened tube of toothpaste, and a sample-size yellow moisturizer from a makeup promotion. She scanned her closet for something, anything, that wasn’t black. They were going upstate. People wore colors there.

Alison was standing in the lobby, chatting with Frank, the part-time doorman, when Charlie pulled up in front of the building. It was a cold, windy day. Frank carried her bag despite her protests, and she rolled her eyes at Charlie as he watched them coming to let him know that she had no choice. Charlie was sensitive about treating their doorman like a serf.

“Frank,” he said, scrolling down the passenger’s window and leaning across the seat, “you didn’t have to—”