Authors: Christina Baker Kline
“Welcome back, Mr. Downing. Will you be paying in cash today?”
Charlie was stunned: he’d only been to this small Midtown hotel four or five times in the past two months, but the desk clerk not only recognized him; but he also remembered his alias and preferred form of payment. “Uh—yes. Thanks.” He pulled out his wallet and extracted four fifties, laid them on the counter.
The clerk took the crisp bills with a deep nod. “Room 1121, as usual?”
It was the cheapest room in the hotel—as cramped and dark as a closet—but it suited their needs. “Yes.”
The clerk handed Charlie two key cards. “Have a nice day, sir.”
Slipping the cards in his back pocket, Charlie glanced toward the revolving door in the foyer. No sign of her yet. She’d said she might be a little late; she was meeting with her agent several blocks away to discuss details of her upcoming book party. He didn’t mind; he was happy enough to have a moment. To anticipate. He settled into a boxlike white leather chair and closed his eyes.
Charlie didn’t know how, exactly, but for the time being he seemed to have figured out how to make it all work. The key was concentration. As long as he was fully engaged in the activity of the moment—working on an account, meeting Claire at the hotel, coming home to see his family—he was amazed to find that he could pull it off.
He felt a strange kinship with those men you see on
Dateline
who have hidden lives that their families only learn about after they die. He’d always wondered how they did it, how they found the time and summoned the energy to deceive so many people. Now he knew. It didn’t take much energy, just sheer will. You had to compartmentalize each discrete part. It was surprising, when you thought about it, how little people really knew about one anothers’ lives anyway, and how easy it was to lie.
Charlie had never thought of himself as a particularly good liar; his father had always told him he was terrible at it, transparent as glass. Now it occurred to him that this was psychological bullying, typical of the old man. His father told him he was a bad liar so he wouldn’t lie. But he wasn’t actually a bad liar. As it turned out, he seemed to have a knack for it.
Of course, Charlie had always had a remarkable ability to shuffle his thoughts so as to avoid certain subjects altogether. It was a skill he’d acquired long ago, way back in his Kansas childhood, and it had served him well. It was what enabled him to excel in high school and then in college while his mother was undergoing treatment for cancer and his father was driving the family business into the ground. It was what propelled him to graduate magna cum laude and with a fellowship to Cambridge, as far away from the mess of his family as he could manage.
Charlie thought about his parents’ bland insistence that his father’s company was fine, until the day they announced that it was going under. Of course he’d suspected there was trouble—they all did. But nobody had said anything about it. And then, when his mother got cancer for the second time, though Charlie knew about the chemo and the radiation and the lymph nodes, it was months before anyone acknowledged how serious it was. She was dying by the time Charlie’s sister called and urged him home.
Charlie felt a hand on his shoulder and opened his eyes. Claire was leaning over him, her auburn hair brushing his face. She kissed him on the lips.
“Were you dreaming about me?” she whispered.
“Of course,” he said. “I only ever dream about you.”
The morning after
the book party, Ben was yanked into consciousness by the ringing of the phone.
“You get it. Probably your mother,” Claire groaned, turning over into her pillow and pulling the covers over her head. His mother, it was true, had an irritating habit of calling early in the morning. “I just assumed you’d be up by now,” she’d chirp with surprise when they complained. “The morning’s half over.”
“Hello,” Ben said flatly into the receiver, not bothering to check caller ID.
“Ben, it’s Charlie.”
“Oh, hey.” Ben shook his head to clear it. “What’s up?”
“Well, I’m—I’m—aah … ”
Something in his voice made Ben sit up. He pushed Claire’s shoulder, and she rolled over and looked at him, sleepy-eyed. “What is it?” he said into the phone.
“Alison was in an accident last night coming home from the party,” Charlie said.
“Oh, Jesus,” Ben said.
“What? What?” Claire demanded.
“Alison was in a car accident.”
“Oh my God,” she gasped.
“She’s all right,” Charlie said.
“She’s okay,” Ben reported.
“Is she … ?” Claire sat up, pressing against him. “Wait, I’ll get another phone.” She jumped up and ran into the living room. “Hi, Charlie, I’m here,” she said, her voice loud and breathless on the line.
“She’s all right,” Charlie repeated. “It’s just … somebody—in the other car … there was a boy … ”
“Oh, no,” Claire said, getting it before Ben did.
“We just got a call. As it turned out … he didn’t make it,” Charlie said.
“Oh my God.”
“My God,” Ben said, thinking even in that moment how inadequate their words were—how inadequate any words would be.
“Charlie,” Claire said, her voice strangely calm. “Oh my God. Charlie. What are we going to do?”
Her response was odd—the “we” too familiar, Ben thought. Why did she always have to go inserting herself into the center of other people’s dramas? For a moment no one said a word. Ben could hear them all breathing, as if they were trying to figure out what to say next. There was so much to say—there were so many questions—but it seemed both too soon and vaguely prurient to ask.
“We want to help,” Ben said finally. “Do you need—what do you need?”
“I don’t know. Thank you. Nothing.”
“Is—was—Alison at fault?” Claire asked suddenly.
“Umm—no. Not exactly. She’s being charged with DWI. We hope that’s the extent of it. We’re waiting for the police report.”
Ben lay back against his pillow, shaping it with his left hand into a hard pallet under his neck, holding the phone with his right. How many martinis had Alison had last night? One—or two—and was there another just before she left? “Does she need a lawyer?” he asked.
“Yeah,” Charlie said. “Yep.”
“Hey. My college roommate,” Ben said, leaping into the idea with relief. “This is what he does. Practices in Ridgewood. Let me call him.”
“Okay. I appreciate it.”
“Good, good,” Ben said, glancing at the clock, calculating what time Paul Ryan might be in his office, trying to remember where he’d stashed his number.
These things happened to people, Ben knew. They happened all the time. Every morning, over his cup of coffee, he read about scenarios far worse in the Metro section. Ex-husbands bent on revenge, half a dozen kids killed in a fire, construction workers plummeting to their deaths, carloads of teenagers in head-on collisions. But they didn’t happen to him or to anyone he knew. And now Alison had been in an accident, and a child was dead. It didn’t seem possible.
“She’s at home now?”
“She’s asleep. Took an Ambien. Two, in fact,” Charlie said. Then he blurted, “I should’ve gone to the party. I knew she didn’t want to go alone.”
“It’s not your fault,” Claire said. “It was raining, wasn’t it,” as if the rain were to blame. “I’m. So. Sorry, Charlie,” she breathed.
“We’re both sorry,” Ben said with annoyance, acutely aware in that instant that Claire’s empathy had shut him out.
And with a jolt he realized that this feeling—separated from Claire, by her choice—wasn’t unfamiliar. An almost imperceptible rift had developed between them, he thought, since her miscarriage several months ago—he wanted to try again and she didn’t, he was sure and she wasn’t. Claire had always been, by nature, somewhat moody and unpredictable, but after she lost the baby she was alternately withdrawn and overly solicitous. She often seemed to have something on her mind, but when he asked, she said she was simply tired, or thinking about a scene in her book. Ben had let these vague denials suffice, afraid of confirming what he suspected: she was becoming emotionally detached. She was pulling away.
But he told himself he was being silly. They were both caught up in their work; that was all. Truth be told, Ben had been so preoccupied with a project at his architectural design firm that he’d had little time to think about much else. Sloane Howard had gotten a new commission, a big one, in Boston, right on the harbor, and Ben was working hard to meet both the client’s mercurial needs and the arcane structural codes and limitations of downtown Boston. He wanted to create a structure that would put his small boutique firm on the map.
Sloane Howard made most of its money designing second and third homes for the very rich—homes that the next owner would likely as not tear down in pursuit of his own grandiose vision, a “bash and build” trend that Sloane Howard benefited from as much as it decried. But Ben, wooed to Sloane Howard from a larger firm as a junior partner a year ago, had greater aspirations. So when the chance came to bid on this ambitious, high-budget arts complex, with its large and small performance spaces, restaurants, offices, and conference center, Ben didn’t hesitate.
He hired two new associates, fresh out of the M.I.T. graduate architecture program, who hadn’t yet been seduced by the boldfaced names on the Sloane Howard client list into bowdlerizing their talent. He wanted unconventional thinkers whose designs were so radical as to be unworkable, bold ideas that would inspire him to greatness. As it turned out, the boy he hired was smug and pompous, and the girl so dismissive of Ben’s peers at “Drone Coward,” as she and the boy quickly nicknamed the firm, that Ben felt duty-bound to stick up for the other partners, a position he’d never dreamed he’d find himself in. At one point Ben came across an e-mail the boy had sent the girl in which he complained about Ben’s pedestrian taste. Talk about biting the hand! But Ben didn’t say anything. He knew that the two of them would move on in a few months, and he was determined to extract what he could out of them before they left.
The three of them stayed late into the night, took field trips to look at pioneering buildings, studied other architects’ models, sought inspiration in museums and theaters around the world. The design Ben submitted three months later was original but not radical: huge panes of glass sloping toward the water, creating the illusion of a continuous liquid surface, joining in a series of connected cubes, the largest of which contained a magnificent concert hall. When the design was picked as one of the four finalists, a
Boston Globe
headline asked, “Sloane Who?”
The other finalists were suitably pedigreed: the best-known Boston firm, a major New York powerhouse, and a New Haven group fronted by a big-name guru. But to the surprise of virtually everyone, including Ben, the Sloane Howard design was chosen. “This structure will be a beacon of light and beauty,” declared Philippa Boyd, the eighty-three-year-old philanthropist whose name would be on the building, in her reedy, wavering voice at the press conference: “a clear symbol of hope on the harbor for the noblest aims of humanity.” A little overwrought, Ben reflected, standing behind her at the podium—but certainly preferable to “stylish.” He’d taken a huge risk on his vision, his dream—and now it looked like that risk was actually paying off.
In the meantime he hadn’t been home much. He felt as if he were back in grad school, working on a term paper—the hours spent focusing on a single topic, trying to understand it, to create a thesis that would hold up under scrutiny from experts in the field. He didn’t think of eating until he was ravenous, and then he grabbed whatever was close by; he didn’t go to bed until his bones ached with fatigue, or until he realized he was reading the same sentence over and over because he was drifting in and out of sleep.
Claire had been understanding—incredibly so, he thought. She’d always called herself “high maintenance,” though he wouldn’t have said that, necessarily. Anyway, he liked to take care of her; he took deep pleasure in it, a pleasure that only intensified as he got older without children. He needed some object for his paternal feelings, and they both agreed they didn’t have the lifestyle for a dog (though he would have liked a dog—he’d always wanted one, even as a kid, a Boston Terrier, maybe, or a beagle—a scrappy, energetic little beast). But lately he hadn’t had time to care for himself, much less anyone else, and though he’d expected Claire to complain about his late hours and inconsistent schedule and semipermanent state of distraction, she hadn’t said a word. In fact, lately she’d been surprisingly nurturing herself. She left notes on the counter about soup or a roasted chicken she’d picked up at Fairway for him and put in the fridge; he’d find PowerBars in his briefcase. When he called to say he’d be working late she always said she understood; she knew what a huge project it was. He showed her his designs, and she responded thoughtfully. She rubbed his shoulders in bed at night, brought him green tea to clear his head, retrieved his shirts from the dry cleaner without complaint.
When Ben really thought about it—which, frankly, he didn’t often; he just didn’t have the time—there were things that gave him pause. The forced cheer in Claire’s voice, flight-attendant polite; the restless tapping of her fingers as they sat together late at night watching TV; the times he’d wake up at 3 a.m. to find her side of the bed empty, and would hear her out in the living room, pacing around. But surely these were normal responses to having a miscarriage. When Claire had gotten pregnant, Ben had envisioned a whole new life stretching ahead for them. Wasn’t this the reason for existence—this primal urge to reproduce, to care for young, to continue the species?
But Claire lost the baby. And things got complicated.
He looked up at her now as she came into the bedroom, cradling the cordless phone against her cheek as Charlie told them more details about the accident. Ben caught her eye and she shook her head slowly.
“So terrible,” she said. “I just can’t believe it.”