Bird in Hand (20 page)

“Yes, they are.”

“Why? Why are their hands mittens?”

nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals

the power of your intense fragility: whose texture

compels me with the colour of its countries,

rendering death and forever with each breathing
…

The words were magical in their strangeness, vibrating with loss and hope and wonder, a rubric for her own tangled emotion. She could not have expressed, out loud, to Charlie or her parents or anybody, what she was feeling, but these words gave her access to it.

“But why?” Noah persisted.

“That’s just how they’re made,” she said. “Why do you have brown eyes and brown hair?”

“Because I look like you.”

“Oh,” she said with surprise. It was true—he did look like her. “Well—right. And the mommy Teletubbie has mitten hands, too,” she said, pleased with herself for following his logic.

He nodded. “But where is the mommy Teletubbie?”

“She’s there,” Alison said. “We just don’t see her.”

“Why?”

“Why do you think?” she asked, resorting to a default tactic familiar to parents and schoolteachers.

“I think because … umm … because the mommy has a headache. The mommy is sleeping.”

nobody, not even the rain
…

“Yes, she’s sleeping,” Alison said. She looked at the boy settled beanbaglike in her lap, staring up at her, and she thought about how dependent and trusting he was, how aware and yet blessedly ignorant. This boy, here, now, in her lap, breathing with his entire body, like a puppy, every fiber of him quivering with life—this child who needed her.

“Big hug,” she said in a Teletubbie voice. He reached up and sang, “B-i-i-ig hug,” holding her as tightly as a three-year-old could, his hot sweet breath on her neck, his fingers in her hair.

“SO HOW ARE things with Charlie?” her mother asked the next day. She and Alison were at a local park with Noah, sitting on a park bench watching him go down a tall slide, run around to the steps, scamper up the narrow staircase and go down again. Charlie had been up and out of the house before anyone else was awake that morning. By now he was probably on a plane to Atlanta; he’d taken a taxi to the airport from work.

“Oh, you know.” Alison shrugged. “Careful, Noah!” she called, half rising off the bench.

“I am,” Noah grunted as he slid to the bottom and trudged around the slide to the stairs.

Her mother, looking intently at Alison, didn’t even glance over at Noah. “Actually, I don’t.”

“Things are—fine. As well as can be … ”
expected
. Everything she could think of to say sounded trite. It’s a hard time for both of us, but we’ll get through it. “He’s been very supportive,” she said finally. And hadn’t he? He’d gone to the boy’s funeral, held her in his arms while she cried, let her crawl into bed as soon as he got home from work. Twice he’d brought her Sleepy Time tea in bed. He’d rubbed her shoulders. They’d only had sex once since the accident, but he seemed to be following her cues, and except for that one time she had been uninterested, unresponsive.

But last night, before he left, in a rare moment of clarity Alison had suddenly realized—what?—that he wasn’t fully present. Over the course of the evening she had watched him, talking to her parents with the least amount of effort or interest possible not to seem rude, dealing with the kids on a superficial level. It seemed as if he was biding his time, waiting for something. For what?

So how were things with Charlie? Fine, good, okay. She really had no idea. How long had it been since they’d engaged in a real conversation? In the evenings, preparing food together in the kitchen or watching TV, they made small talk, or didn’t talk at all. Now that she focused on it, she remembered little things: Charlie’s quick impatience that rose seemingly out of nowhere and disappeared as suddenly, a Loch Ness monster of emotion, its appearance fleeting enough that Alison thought she might have imagined it. Alison had never been suspicious, but something about his behavior was off-kilter. Or was it? How would she know?

“Maybe it’s none of my business,” her mother said, “but he seems—I don’t know. Out of it.”

“The accident has been a lot to deal with,” Alison said.

“Yes it has,” her mother agreed. She was silent for a moment, as if considering how to proceed. “But it seems like there’s something more. I don’t really know Charlie that well, Alison, so this could just be—I don’t know—the way he is. But.” She took a deep breath.

“Mommy, look a’ me!” Noah yelled. He had hauled himself up on top of the molded plastic sunshade covering the slide and was balanced there on his stomach like a surfer.

“Ohmigod, Noah,” Alison said, jumping up. She ran over to the slide. Other mothers and grandmothers and babysitters looked over with concern. Bad mother. “Noah, stay right where you are. I’m coming up.” She sprinted up the steep steps to the slide, holding on to both metal railings, and grabbed his feet. “Okay, back up,” she said.

“No!” He tried to inch forward, and she grasped his legs harder. “Mommy, you’re
bothering
me. Leggo!”

“Noah, stop it,” she said. He thrashed and turned, trying to get her off. It was like wrestling a Komodo dragon. As he wrenched himself to one side he lost his balance and slid halfway down the side of the canopy, his head about ten feet from the ground.

Alison could feel her hands slipping, his shoes loosening on his feet, his legs sliding out of her grasp. “Help, Mommy,” he said, alarm in his voice now, a whimper in his throat. She let go with one hand and grabbed his pants leg, then wrapped the other arm tightly around both legs and slowly pulled him toward her. When she got his stomach to the edge, she grabbed around his waist and lifted him off, turning him around. He grasped her tightly with his arms and legs, nearly making her lose her balance on the small platform, but she braced herself and leaned against the railing.

“Oh, thank God,” her mother said from below, holding up her arms absurdly, as if she might have tried to catch them both.

“That child’s too young to be unsupervised on that slide,” one babysitter clucked loudly to another, who nodded and said, “Um hmm.”

All at once Alison was filled with rage—at the babysitters, who had no right to judge her; at her mother, whose distant, critical stance toward her grandchildren and son-in-law had precipitated this; at herself for neglecting her child. He could have fallen ten feet onto his head, he might have been killed.

She was a bad mother, a terrible mother—she didn’t deserve to have children of her own.

It was then that she realized she was furious with Charlie. Things between them were terrible, and had been for some time. When was the last time Charlie had told her he loved her? For months he’d been distant; he’d gone through the motions of being a good husband and father without actually engaging with her or with their children. And she overcompensated; she’d done half the work for him of pulling away. She made excuses for his absences; she’d given him every possible benefit of the doubt. He had a lot on his mind. He was stressed, he was tired. In some ways she had even appreciated Charlie’s distractedness, which gave her a little breathing room. The children were so close, sometimes suffocatingly close; it was nice—wasn’t it?—to have some space to herself.

But something was wrong. Deeply wrong. The fog of sadness that had enveloped Alison since the accident had obscured the trouble between them, but her blindness went deeper than that. She had feared from the beginning that Charlie was not truly in love with her, that she fit his idea of what he wanted in a wife but didn’t actually fit him. And what about her? The first time she’d seen Charlie, with his broad shoulders and good bone structure, Alison had thought: this man is good husband material; he will age well. Was he really the one person in the world for her, or had she just convinced herself that he was the closest she would get?

Before the accident, Alison would have said that she was happy, that her life was just as she wanted it. Charlie worked hard, brought home a paycheck, tucked the children into bed at night. Yes, he was distracted, but he also brought her flowers; he may have snapped at her with little provocation, but then he kissed her on the back of the neck. So many things happened moment to moment, day to day, good and bad—how was she to sift through, to separate the significant from the inconsequential? Marriage was hard enough—preposterous enough—in the best of circumstances. Two people, from different backgrounds, whose eating habits and tastes and educations and ambitions might be vastly dissimilar, choose to live in the same house, sleep in the same bed, eat the same foods. They have to agree on everything from where to live to how many children to have. It was sheer lunacy, when you thought about it. Alison’s marriage didn’t look that different from her friends’ marriages—husbands and wives in two distinct camps, their lives largely separate. Long fallow periods of coexisting interlaced with rare moments of connection. Everybody joked about it; everybody knew. Maybe they were all unhappy, and maybe all of the marriages would end in divorce.

If not, why not?

As Noah clung to Alison, sobbing, she made her way down the steep metal stairs to the bottom of the slide, falling into her mother’s ineffectual if vaguely comforting embrace. They walked most of the way home in silence, Noah still holding on tight. As they got close to the house, Alison’s mother turned to her and said, “I don’t blame you. For what happened.”

Alison’s stomach tightened. She nodded.

“But I wonder … ,” her mother said.

“Mother—”

“Alison, let me finish. Your going alone to the party—and drinking too much—”

“Please,” Alison pleaded. “Please stop. Noah is right here.”

“Oh, he doesn’t know what we’re talking about. Do you, Noah?” her mother said, bending to look in his face.

“Mommy drinking too much.”

“Too much what?”

“Too much juice.”

“See?” Alison’s mother said.

“Too much juice make a tummy ache.”

“Yes, it does. Your mommy had a big tummy ache.”

“Yeah. She was sad.”

“Yes, she was. She still is a little sad.”

“Yeah.”

“That’s why you need to be especially nice to your mommy right now.”

“Oh, for God’s sake,” Alison snapped.

“Yeah,” Noah said. “For God’s sake.”

Alison’s mother smiled at her, wanting to share the joke, but Alison looked away.

“Anyway, I don’t know what’s going on with Charlie,” her mother said, “but something
is
going on with Charlie, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” Alison said. She held Noah tight, tighter than he wanted; he squirmed and wriggled down. “I think he’s going to leave me.” As soon as she said the words, she knew they were true.

“Oh, Alison,” her mother said. She put her arm around her shoulders and Alison started to cry. Her mother pulled her close, the way she had sometimes when Alison was a child, and Alison felt both the desire to resist and the desire to submit, to be held, to let go.

“Why Mommy crying?” Noah asked, looking up at the two of them, his arms around their knees. When he got no answer he mumbled, “Juice make a tummy ache,” and nodded his head. Juice make a tummy ache; a tummy ache make Mommy sad. It wasn’t so hard to understand if you really thought about it.

part four

Do I dare

Disturb the universe?

In a minute there is time

For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.

Chapter One

Sitting at a
table in a Barnes & Noble in Atlanta at eight-thirty Monday evening, after her reading, making small talk with the staff and signing books for a few stragglers, Claire felt a rising impatience. Earlier, between appointments, she had called Charlie’s cell phone to give him the name of the hotel. His flight had been scheduled to land at 7:49 P.M., too late to make the reading, so he was taking a cab to the hotel, and would meet her in the bar. Now he’s in the cab, now he’s arriving at the hotel, now he’s ordering a drink
.
… She imagined running her hand down the front of his pants, feeling him stiffen in anticipation as he unzipped her jeans and slid his finger inside her. …

“Can you just write ‘To my good friend Ursula’—that’s
U-R-S-U-L-A
— and, oh, I don’t know, ‘Good luck with your own novel,” said the woman standing in front of Claire, holding out a copy of
Blue Martinis
.

Claire blinked. She took the book and opened it to the title page.

“It’s five hundred pages, Times New Roman double spaced. I was wondering if you can recommend an agent? I’m gonna need one soon. Everybody who’s read it says my book has ‘best seller’ written all over it, so I need someone who really knows the biz. By the way, can I have your e-mail address? I can send it to you as an attachment, and maybe you could look it over, tell me what you think.”

No, no, and no, Claire was thinking as she dutifully transcribed onto the title page exactly what the woman had dictated. “Uh—there are a lot of great resources for writers on the Internet,” she said, skirting Ursula’s requests as she closed the book and handed it back. “Try literarymarketplace.com, for starters. You could also check the acknowledgments of books you think are like yours, to see if those authors thank their agents. Then you can Google those names to get their addresses.”