For Alison, now, the world was a different place, and yet it was strangely the same. She was present and not present in her own life. She went through the motions of a routine—getting out of bed in the morning, herding the kids from their bedrooms to the bathroom to the kitchen and then out the front door to the bus and the car, but it was as if she weren’t there; she inhabited a shadow. She felt transparent, her mind a blank. She watered houseplants and separated laundry and even went to the grocery store, but she was playing a role; the real Alison was in bed with the shades drawn. She was tired all the time. She fantasized about sleep the way you might dream about a lover, yearning for the bliss of escape.
When, after several days, Alison went to get her wrist examined, Dr. Waldron asked her a series of questions:
“Are you sleeping?” No.
“Are you having trouble getting up in the morning?” Yes.
“Do you blame yourself for this?” Yes. Of course.
“Is your husband providing you with the support you need?” Yes. No. I don’t know.
Somehow, in the past few days, they had barely spoken about the accident. It wasn’t that they didn’t have the time; it was that the time was never right. The kind of talking they needed to do required a level of intimacy and trust that neither of them was sure they shared. Alison used to believe it was mutual respect that kept them from revealing themselves to each other all the time, that each was allowing the other autonomy and space. She didn’t think that anymore. Now she believed that there was too much at stake in talking, too much to risk. There was a fault line at the base of their relationship, and both of them were afraid that tapping at the surface would make it worse.
Dr. Waldron wrote out a prescription for Xanax. “We’ll monitor this closely,” she said. “But Alison, you really should see a therapist.”
She nodded.
“I’ll give you some names.”
Alison had been in therapy only once in her life, when, in college, she went to the women’s clinic to talk about a guy she thought she was in love with who made her crazy. The therapist wasn’t particularly insightful or even empathetic, and Alison barely lasted the ten sessions her insurance subsidized, but the process itself, as she remembered, was vaguely comforting—it was useful to have a place to go once a week to talk about the stuff she was either too embarrassed to tell her roommates or that they were sick of hearing. One time she said—in what felt like a moment of revelation—“I could make anything up about my life and you’d believe me,” and the therapist smiled and said, “And that would reveal something else, wouldn’t it?”
Whether it was time or therapy, Alison got over the guy. And she’d never had an inclination to go back.
But if ever there was a time to go to a therapist, she knew, this was it. Charlie kept nudging her. She suspected that he just wanted help—someone, anyone, to pull her out of this funk. It would reduce his burden, relieve his stress. But she resisted calling the numbers Dr. Waldron had given her. In some perverse, obstinate way, she wanted Charlie to have to deal with it, with her. She didn’t want to make it so easy for him to shake her off.
And perhaps, too, she was afraid of what she might uncover—what the therapeutic process might reveal. Perhaps she wasn’t prepared to learn how deep her unhappiness went. Maybe if she started talking about the ways she felt like a failure, how she’d burrowed into a life in which she sometimes didn’t even recognize the person she’d become, she would see things she didn’t want to face. Articulating the unspoken would make it real.
The drugs did what they were supposed to do. They made her numb. She didn’t feel better, exactly; she just didn’t feel as much. It didn’t help that the late winter sky was gray, opaque; the trees were bare, the streets damp with melting snow and intermittent rain.
In the mornings, after waving good-bye to Annie at the bus stop and dropping Noah at preschool, she’d often go to a nearby coffee shop. Leafing through the communal newspaper basket she’d find a Times Living section, then buy a four-dollar latte and sit at a small round table by the window, watching other people get on with their lives: a college kid at the next table, sketching a strange-looking bicycle on graph paper with a pencil, making a few strokes and stopping, resting his chin in his hand. A blind man in a hooded sweatshirt, carrying a gym bag, led by a Seeing Eye dog. An expressionless woman with kohl-rimmed eyes who nodded slightly as the man across from her made an emphatic point. A blond woman in a shiny red Jeep, parallel parking in front of the café. Picketers wearing sandwich-board signs standing on the corner, protesting labor practices at the gourmet grocery on the next block. Everyone appeared to be in a hurry, moving with purpose, except for an old man who wandered aimlessly down the sidewalk, as if he couldn’t decide which way to go.
Alison felt alone in a way that she couldn’t ever remember having felt, a sense of aloneness so profound that she couldn’t breathe. I have done this, she thought—I deserve this. I deserve to feel this way.
At night, after everyone else was in bed, Alison wandered from room to room without turning on any lights, pausing at the windows to gaze out at the quiet street. In the dim glow of a streetlight the bare branches of the tree in their front yard looked like the afterimage of a photograph, tangled in relief against the sky. She walked around the silent house and looked at the framed photographs that lined the mantelpiece and cluttered the bookshelves, wondering, Is this really my life? This collage of perfect moments, frozen in time? Every photograph seemed to her now a memento mori—a futile attempt to hold on to the past, a staged declaration of permanence in an impermanent world. They made her queasy.
When she did lie down, Alison replayed the accident over and over in her mind. She thought of the boy in the other car: his skin as soft as a ripe peach, his body solid on his mother’s lap. Though Alison had only seen him with his eyes closed, she imagined them wide open, a bittersweet brown. His breath warm and tangy, apple juice and graham crackers, fingers sticky with the lollipop bribe he’d been given to stay in his seat, the bribe that didn’t work. His dark, straight hair smelling of baby shampoo, as soft and fine as eyelashes against his mother’s cheek.
Alison imagined him leaning back against his mother, her arms enveloping him, offering comfort in the darkness. Squirming now, tired and cranky. He tries to stand and his mother scolds him—“Sit, Marco, stop moving around.” His father, distracted, just wants to get home. He has an early day tomorrow; he needs to get up at four-thirty to be at the building site by six. It’s a good job and he can’t afford to lose it—he needs it, they need it, after that hernia from the last job and no disability. There’s a decent foreman on this job; he’s a union man and always wanting to sign up the workers. Maybe so, the father thinks, maybe it’s time. If the papers come through in the next few months he’ll be legal and can get health insurance. It would be nice not to have to worry for a change.
The boy is moving around on the front seat. “Sit still, Marco,” the father says sternly. He looks over at his wife with annoyance. Why can’t she keep him down? And then his son catches his eye and reaches out, his plump, soft-nailed fingers splayed toward him—“Papa, Pa-pa,” he says sweetly, his voice a chiming singsong—and the father’s gaze lingers on him with affection. My boy, my only son.
In her mind Alison sees it clearly: the front of the car crumpling like foil, the boy moving forward, slipping from his mother’s grasp as she tries to hold on. The mother screams, the father cries out, but the boy is too startled to make a sound. There is just the sickening thud against the windshield, the smashing glass. For a moment there is silence. And then there is a keening wail, the only sound in all of this that Alison actually heard.
The boy hears the impact, feels himself being pulled forward, his mother’s hands tightening around his middle and then spreading open as he moves forward, closer to the raindrops on the windshield, the lights of the other car, the streetlights above and the darkness. He sees, out of the corner of his eye, his father turn toward him, and suddenly he is laughing. Daddy is home from work and freshly showered, damp and smelling of soap and toothpaste, wearing a clean, white T-shirt, throwing Marco into the air and letting him fall heavily into his arms, laughing and teasing, throwing him higher. The boy knows that he is in the air now, and he is safe; his daddy will catch him as he always does; the boy will fall into the warm cradle of his father’s arms.