Bird in Hand (32 page)

Authors: Christina Baker Kline

BOOK: Bird in Hand

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On weekend mornings in Rockwell, Alison often goes on long walks with Robin—power walks, Robin calls them. Alison drops her kids off to watch cartoons with Robin’s kids and groggy, coffee-slurping husband, Robin clips her pedometer to her moisture-wicking T-shirt, and off they go down the street. On these excursions they pass other clusters of power-walking women who call out cheery greetings; Robin seems to know them all by name and asks specific questions such as, “How is Trevor liking St. Luke’s?” and “Did Liz come through with the Rangers tickets for the auction?” Clearly Robin has dozens, even hundreds, of friends. A whole world exists in this town, Alison is beginning to realize, that she knew nothing about. Trotting along (Robin walks so fast!), Alison feels vaguely like a wildebeest on the plain encountering other beest from the herd. Once she might have recoiled from such associations, but now she is comforted by the idea. There is a herd, and she is a part of it. Not only a part of it—she is the sidekick of an alpha female. (Alison thinks about high school, where she inhabited the same role. Does nothing ever change?)

Her life isn’t perfect. It is far from perfect. But it isn’t as awful as Alison had imagined it would be. In some ways it is not only better than she’d feared, but it is also better than it had been when Charlie was home, when she thought things were fine between them. It has been shocking to realize how absent Charlie was from their day-to-day lives; some days, now, the children barely notice his absence. Many of the things Alison thought she needed him for—taking out the trash and recycling, paying the bills, small home repairs, sex—she finds she can do just as well on her own.

Maybe not just as well. But well enough to counterbalance the wrenching loneliness she feels some nights, the tiredness in her bones, and the dull awareness that she has to summon the strength the next morning to do the whole routine all over again—waking before daylight to shower and dress and get the kids to camp and day care and herself to the train, spend a long, stressful day in the city, and come home to two tired children at night. Alison doesn’t spoil the kids anymore; she simply doesn’t have time. Annie sets the table for dinner, helps clear it while Alison does the dishes, runs the water for bath time, and helps her brother get ready for bed. After bedtime stories and good night kisses, Alison is ready to collapse into bed herself.

Late at night she thinks about the child she never knew, as real to her as the ones she does. Her own anguish is only a small piece of what his parents must suffer, and yet it has taken her on a journey toward something deeper and more profound than she has ever experienced. Each moment of loss, she has come to believe, contains within it the possibility of a new life. When the unimaginable happens, and your life changes irrevocably, you may find along with the pain a kind of grace. And in the place of certainty and fear—the fear of losing what you had—you are left with something startling: a depth of empathy, a quivering sensitivity to the world around you, and the unexpected blessing of gratitude for what remains.

Now, when the children are asleep, the house is quiet. Alison pads around softly in her bare feet, straightening pillows, changing lightbulbs, restoring order, and feels oddly at peace. Charlie’s needs, stresses, and preoccupations had taken up so much space. It is lovely not to hear him stomping around upstairs, or to have to think about what to feed him, whether his laundry is clean, whether his seemingly endemic distractedness is a cover for irritability. Will he snap if she asks him a question? For a long time they coexisted in this house without sharing much of anything. Now he’s across the river, making a new life for himself with the only other person in the world who knows Alison as well as he does.

It makes her heart lurch, when she thinks about it. And just under the sadness are more complex emotions, anger and jealousy and hurt. So Alison tries to concentrate on the here and now. It is three-fifteen on a Monday afternoon, and she has a new job. In New York, as a senior editor at
HomeStyle
magazine. That’s pretty good. Even better, she has a theme, just in time for the meeting: Focus on Quiet. A favorite book, a sleeping child, the tick of a clock in a still room, solitude. Peace. She stands up, closes the folder, and makes her way down the hall to the conference room.

acknowledgments

I am privileged to work with Katherine Nintzel, the kind of editor that writers dream of, and the entire magnificent group at William Morrow. I want to thank Beth Vesel, my longtime agent and friend, for her vision and wise counsel; the English Department at Fordham University for supporting my creative work; and my close tribe of sisters, Cynthia Baker Zeitler, Clara Lester, and Catherine Baker-Pitts, who sustain and inspire me.

The Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation gave me space and time to write. Anne Burt, Alice Elliott Dark, and Pamela Redmond Satran, who read some or all of the manuscript several times, form the core of my community of writers and friends. Karen Sacks, Executive Director of Volunteer Lawyers for Justice, paved the way for me with New Jersey legal experts, including Marvin Adames, Chief Municipal Prosecutor of the City of Newark; Clyde Otis, a municipal prosecutor; Alix Rubin, a partner at Entwistle & Cappucci; Nicole Masella at Hack, Piro, O’Day, Merklinger, Wallace & McKenna; and Carmela Novi at Casha & Casha. Thanks also to John Cusolito at Liberty Mutual Insurance Company.

I am grateful for the support of my parents, Bill and Tina Baker, and my mother-in-law, Carole Kline. Finally, my husband, David, and sons, Hayden, Will, and Eli, are at the center of everything; they make my life rich.

also by CHRISTINA BAKER KLINE

FICTION

The Way Life Should Be

Desire Lines

Sweet Water

NONFICTION

About Face: Women Write About What They See When

They Look in the Mirror
(coedited with Anne Burt)

Room to Grow: Twenty-two Writers Encounter the Pleasures

and Paradoxes of Raising Young Children
(editor)

Child of Mine: Original Essays on Becoming a Mother
(editor)

The Conversation Begins: Mothers and Daughters Talk About Living Feminism

(coauthored with Christina Looper Baker)

“somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond” excerpt copyright © 1931, 1959, 1991 by the Trustees for the E. E. Cummings Trust. Copyright © 1979 by George James Firmage, from
Selected Poems
by E. E. Cummings, Introduction and Commentary by Richard S. Kennedy. Used by permission of Liveright Publishing Corporation.

This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

BIRD IN HAND. Copyright © 2009 by Christina Baker Kline. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

FIRST EDITION

branch illustration from iStockPhoto

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Kline, Christina Baker, 1964–

Bird in hand: a novel / Christina Baker Kline.—1st ed.

p. cm

ISBN 978-0-688-17724-9

1. Marriage—Fiction. 2. Friendship—Fiction. 3. Domestic fiction. 4. Psychological fiction. I. Title

PS3561.L478B57 2009

813’.54—dc22

2008049966

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