Bird in Hand (29 page)

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’t tell if you won’t. Love, Claire.”

The next page held an epigraph: “As if … what was actual, as opposed to what was imagined, as opposed to what was believed, made, when you got right down to it, any difference at all.” It was from
Charming Billy
, by Alice McDermott.

So it didn’t matter, apparently, which parts of Claire’s book were true. The story was real and it wasn’t real, the facts as arbitrary and malleable as fiction.

Alison had a strong urge to close the book and put it away, but she hesitated. Her unwillingness to face things head-on was, it seemed, part of the problem.

Leaning against the wall, Alison turned to chapter 1 and started reading.

The opening of the freezer door. Clink of heavy glass. Ice in a silver shaker. When Emma heard those sounds she pricked up her ears like a cat hearing the grind of a can opener. She wandered downstairs to find her mother pouring blue liquid into two martini glasses, setting the shaker on the Formica countertop and licking her fingers, wiping her hands on a linen towel. Twisting a strip of lemon peel into each glass. Handing one to Emma and raising her own.

Cheers
.

Sometimes—Emma could tell by the violent smear of lipstick already present on the rim—her mother would be starting on her second when she invited Emma to join her
.

Reading and skimming for the next two hours, Alison entered a world both familiar and foreign, a fun house version of reality. She’d been prepared to dislike the book, but she found herself drawn in, seduced by descriptions of places she recognized and sketches of people she knew.

In a small town there are too many people watching and judging, too many ways to be recognized. Not enough allowances. There is no escape; you are defined and labeled before you’re even aware of yourself as a “self”—before you have anything, consciously, to do with it. You make one mistake or two, say one thing to one person, and everybody knows it. Everybody thinks they know who you are, even if you’re not sure, yourself
.

Emma’s home was a desolate and lonely place. Cool darkness: heavy drapes pulled shut across sliding-glass doors. Her father was a looming presence, using up all the oxygen, making the air in the house thin and difficult to breathe. Her mother’s unhappiness—creeping, etheric—poisoned what air was left. When Emma walked in the front door her father would give her a blank look, her mother peered through the scrim of her five o’clock cocktails, and Emma would become as indistinct to herself as she was to them
.

It wasn’t a novel in the way Claire insisted it was; the details of their real life were accurate, down to the crumbling stone patio behind Alison’s house and the cocktail dress Claire wore to school when she was thirteen to exasperate her mother. The story wasn’t so much fictional as it was partial—a piece of their lives, a fragment of the tale.

Emma didn’t remember much about life before Jill, and she didn’t remember meeting her. All she knew was that when Jill arrived in her life, sometime in the first grade, it was as if she had been there all along
.

It was in Jill’s attic room, with its twin beds, that their friendship was forged. With the lights out, each girl was in her own narrow confessional; the darkness yielded secrets that daylight hid. On summer nights, under cool sheets, they teased apart jealousies and grudges, analyzed the flirting techniques of boys at school, critiqued other girls’ boyfriends. Emma would fall asleep listening to Jill’s shallow breathing in the bed beside her, Jill’s leg flung over the side like a Raggedy Ann, cherry stains around her mouth
.

The next morning, the two of them would stand side by side in front of the oval vanity mirror, so close that their shoulders pressed together, squeezing into the frame
.

“You’re lucky your hair is straight,” Emma would say
.

“It’s horrible. Dirt brown.”

“At least it’s not curly. Boiing!” Emma would demonstrate, pulling on a strand and letting it spring back
.

“Just be glad you don’t have this nose.”

“Yeah, thank you Lord for giving me freckles instead.”

“My hippo hips don’t even fit in the mirror.”

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.

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 in the mud Ben spies a bird, probably a sparrow, perched on one of the teeth of a loitering digger. He remembers a story he loved as a child, about a baby bird that falls out of its nest and sets off in search of its mother, though it doesn’t know what she looks like. “Are you my mother?” the bird asks everything it comes across—a digger, a crane, a dog, a flower.

This is a little how Ben feels at the moment—lost, without direction, unable to find his way because he doesn’t know what he’s looking for.

Are you my wife?

It doesn’t do any good to recount the details, but Ben can’t help it; he keeps running over things in his mind. For all the time he has spent replaying it, he honestly can’t make any more sense of what happened than he could in those first slow-motion minutes when he saw the shape of his future, and Claire’s, and realized that they were not the same.

He feels as though he’s living someone else’s life. It’s as if he’d been watching a show on TV and then, with the click of a remote, changed the channel. There’s no continuity and no flow; it’s just a whole different story.

A week or so after Claire left, Ben had called Alison.

“Did you have any idea?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” she said. “But I didn’t want to know.”

They were quiet for a moment. Then she said, “They could’ve saved us both a lot of time.”