“Oh, you hate that part of it?”
“Yes, I do. I hate lying to you.”
“Why are you doing this?” she screamed. She collapsed onto the couch beside him and doubled over, as if in agony, clutching her stomach with one hand and sobbing into her wadded-up tissues in the other. “Why? Why?”
There was really no answer. He was doing this because he could not keep skimming along the surface of his life without one day crashing into something hard and unpleasant, a truth about himself he had long tried to avoid—that his inability to make difficult decisions was what had gotten him into this mess in the first place. He wanted both lives; he didn’t want to have to choose. He wanted this life with Alison and a parallel one with Claire, but that didn’t seem to be possible. He was doing this because he had finally realized that it took more of an effort to keep the chaos contained than it did to let it go.
And though he did, genuinely, love his children with his whole being, and hated the idea that they, like him—like Alison—would suffer through a divorce, he was convinced that he would only get one chance to feel this kind of passion, to express it, to live. In a way, it was as simple as that: you only get one life. And though his children were everything to him, sometimes he closed his eyes and wondered what his life would be like if he had claimed what he wanted from the beginning, if he had not given up so easily, and, as a result, had never made them.
He wouldn’t say any of this, of course. He couldn’t say it. So he put his hand gently on her back while she cried, and eventually she grew quiet.
Chapter Eight
November 1997
“Damn. I’ve forgotten to bring a pen. You don’t have an extra, do you?”
Charlie was standing in a dingy, narrow hallway in Queens College, waiting for an appointment with the graduate student advisor, Master Holcombe. It was the girl’s eyes that Charlie noticed first, an unusual greenish amber in her pale face, the color of a fallen leaf in the snow. She stared at him expectantly, with a frank intensity he found unsettling.
“Uh, let me check,” he said, rummaging in his bag. He came up with a fistful of writing implements and presented them to her on an open palm.
She chose one, and smiled. Her teeth were small and white. “Thanks,” she said. “You’re American.”
“How can you tell? I’ve barely said a word.”
She laughed. “You’re so American.”
“Why does that sound like an insult?” he said lightly, though it did. “You are, too.”
She squinted at him. She was wearing a short brown plaid dress and brown leather sandals. Her skin was pale; a smattering of freckles fell across her nose and chest and arms. He couldn’t tell much about her shape in that dress, which hung from her shoulders like a sack, but her bare legs were tanned and strong. She was tallish, and her curly cinnamon hair was pulled back in a clip. “Everything I say sounds like an insult,” she said. “So I’ve been told.”
Just then the door opened and a young man with a receding chin and strips of thin hair plastered to his forehead slipped out. He wore gray slacks and a flimsy white collared shirt, which had taken on a pinkish cast from the skin underneath. “Holcombe said to send in whoever’s next,” he said.
“I guess that’s me. Nice to meet you,” the girl said, offering Charlie her hand.
“But we didn’t,” he said. “Meet. I don’t even know your name.”
“Claire,” she said. “Ellis.”
“Charlie Granville.”
She smiled. “Why don’t you come to drinks after dinner at our place tonight? We’re rounding up all the Americans we can find.”
“We … ”
“Ben and I. My boyfriend. Fiancé, actually.”
Charlie nodded. He felt a suffusing prick of disappointment, like a bee sting.
“Thirty-two Barton Road,” she said. “Eight o’clock.”
He looked at her fingers; she wasn’t wearing a ring. “Thank you,” he said. “I’d like that.”
Chapter Nine
When something terrible happens, a lifetime of small events and unremarkable decisions, of unresolved anger and unexplored fears, begins to play itself out in ways you least expect. You’ve been going along from one day to the next, not realizing that all those disparate words and gestures were adding up to something, a conclusion you didn’t anticipate. And later, when you begin to retrace your steps, you see that you will need to reach back further than you could have imagined, beyond words and thoughts and even dreams, perhaps, to make sense of what happened.
Four weeks after the accident, Alison had to go in front of a judge to face the DWI charge. Robin not only offered to accompany her to the hearing, but she also helped Alison prepare papers for her lawyer, Paul Ryan, and wrote a letter of support to give the judge.
The courtroom was in a new municipal building. It was quiet and carpeted—like the funeral home chapel, Alison thought, designed to muffle dissonant expressions of anguish and despair. Its small windows, with short, burnt orange curtains, were set high on the wall, so all you could see were squares of sky and odd angles of other buildings. Alison had only been inside a few courtrooms in her life, one for a magazine article and one to protest a parking ticket. Both were in old buildings, formal, ornate spaces with enormous windows and raised wooden platforms for the judge—nothing like the room in which she now stood.
As Alison walked down the wide center aisle, she was surprised to see the mother and father of the boy sitting in the far corner, on the right. Ahead, on the left, Paul Ryan was talking quietly to a young woman in a navy blue suit—the prosecutor, Alison supposed. Robin put an arm around her shoulder, gently urging her forward.
The court was kind to Alison, kinder than she would have been to herself. The judge revoked her driver’s license for three months and assigned her to twelve hours at an Intoxicated Driver Resource Center. There would be nearly $1000 in fines and fees, as well as several thousand dollars in insurance surcharges over the next three years. In her statement, the judge said that while Alison hadn’t caused the accident—the investigation revealed that the boy’s father had driven through the intersection without applying his brakes—she was nonetheless partially at fault. Her blood-alcohol level grazed the legal limit. Her reflexes were impaired; she might otherwise have reacted more quickly and averted the crash. She would have to live with the knowledge that her drinking may have been a contributing factor in the boy’s death.
The judge glanced at Robin, the loyal friend, sitting behind Alison. She looked Alison up and down. She said she hoped Alison had learned a lesson from this. She implored Alison to think, really think, about what she had done. She said that if there was one thing she’d learned as a county judge, it was that life hinges on small moments and seemingly trivial decisions.
Across the aisle sat the father of the boy, wearing a Mets cap and a blue windbreaker, and his wife, with her hair pulled back in a tight bun. At the funeral her hair had been long and flowing. Now she clutched a Ziploc bag of what appeared to be Ritz crackers, and stared straight ahead. The father’s arm was stretched across the wooden pew-like bench behind her. The drumming of his fingers was a muted percussion in the quiet room.
Neither of the boy’s parents looked at Alison, though she kept glancing at them. She had written a letter to them expressing her regret and sadness, but they’d never responded. She didn’t know if they had even received it.
When the hearing ended, Paul Ryan leaned over and said quietly, “Now you can put this behind you.”
“Thank you for everything you did,” she said.
Robin gave her a hug. “Ready to go?”
“In a minute,” Alison said. “I want to speak to the parents.”
Paul, stacking papers in his briefcase, grimaced. “I’m not sure that’s a good idea.”
“I need to,” Alison said. As she made her way over to Marco’s parents, she caught the husband’s eye. He put his arm protectively around his wife, who shrank back aga
inst him.
“I am truly sorry,” Alison said. “I have two children myself, and I—”
“Okay,” the father said, cutting her off, gripping his wife’s shoulder. She just stared at Alison, her expression impassive.
“I understand why you came. If there’s anything … ” Alison said helplessly.
“We just wanted to see who you were,” he said, and turned away.
Walking across the parking lot to the car—Robin’s Honda minivan—Alison looked up. Gray clouds moved fast across a pale blue expanse, and it seemed as if the land under her feet was moving equally fast in the opposite direction. She didn’t know which way she was headed. All the things that had seemed solid to her a month ago—a month ago, and all of her life until then—were crumbling. The ground had shifted; she’d lost her balance. She felt as if she were falling off the earth.
FOR WEEKS ALISON felt as if she were underwater, in a deep, murky place, struggling to make her way to the surface. She couldn’t believe anything Charlie said, anything Claire said. She didn’t know which of her friends were as ignorant as she was, and which might have known all along. She was learning that it was unusual for people to speak plainly to each other about painful or difficult things. We talk to each other, and about each other, but rarely are those conversations the same. We learn through years of living with white lies and self-deception that plain talk can ignite a powder keg of feeling, so we speak in euphemism and metaphor, steering clear of the flinty truth: Your husband doesn’t love you. Your best friend has betrayed you. You have been living a lie.
At the drugstore in town one day, Alison observed a young mother holding a child, apparently her daughter, about two years old. The mother was bending to sign a credit card bill at the counter. The girl’s legs were wrapped around her mother’s waist, her arms around her neck. They were molded together as one, and Alison wished for a moment that she had a camera. Then she realized that her inclination would be to give the woman the photo so that she might see something about her life she might not otherwise have known.
When Alison looked at photographs now of Charlie and her together, she studied them for clues. Is he looking off in the distance? Is she looking down? How close are they sitting, are they touching, is he turning toward her or away? She had taken thousands of pictures in her life, and most of them were collected in photo boxes labeled by year. Occasionally, after some self-contained experience—a trip, their wedding, the birth of a child—she organized the pictures into an album. But what story did those pictures tell? What did they hide or reveal about what was happening now?
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.”
br /> 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.