The morning that Alison’s parents were scheduled to arrive on a plane from North Carolina, Charlie woke up flooded with relief. He fed the kids breakfast and got Annie ready for school while Alison stayed in bed, flipping channels between talk shows on the tiny television they used for videos in the Volvo on long-distance trips. Noah was sick, with a double ear infection, and at the bus stop Annie threw a screaming fit and refused to get on the school bus—she flung herself on the wet sidewalk and wouldn’t get up. In a panic Charlie scraped her off the pavement and tried to shove her up the steps, but she was hysterical, and under the glare of the bus driver he quickly backed down.
Ed and June had planned to take a car service from the airport, but since Charlie had to stay home from work that morning anyway, he strapped the kids into their car seats and drove to Newark.
“What’s wrong with this poor child?” was the first thing June said as she got into the front passenger seat. Reaching between the bucket seats, she anxiously touched different parts of Noah’s face with the back of her hand.
“I’m thick, Dramma,” Noah said.
“Yes, you are. Poor baby. You have a fever. You shouldn’t be out in this weather.”
“He’s on antibiotics,” Charlie said, trying not to sound defensive. “It’s just an ear infection.”
“You know, antibiotics aren’t necessarily the best way to treat an ear infection. I sent Alison some information about homeopathic remedies that are less invasive. Maybe you haven’t had a chance to look at it. We still don’t really know what antibiotics do to young children.”
“Yes, we do,” Charlie said. “They cure ear infections.” Easy, he told himself; let it go.
“Hello, precious,” June was saying to Annie over her other shoulder. “Don’t you have school today?”
“I hate school. I’m never going to school again!”
“Nonsense. School is very important. Don’t you want to be a smart girl?”
“No,” Annie said.
June rose slightly and turned around in her seat. “Well, you may not,” she said, smiling determinedly at Annie, “but you are six years old. And last I checked, six-year-olds do not get to decide whether or not they want to go to school.”
“Listen to your grandma, Anna-banana,” Charlie said. “There’s been a lot going on, as you know,” he said quietly to June.
“Even more reason to stick to routine,” she murmured. “Children crave structure.”
“June,” Ed said from the backseat, “I think you’ve made your point. Anyway, I seem to recall that we weren’t so big on structure ourselves when Alison was a little girl.”
“Yeah,” June snorted, “and look at what happened.”
“June, please,” Charlie said, motioning toward the kids.
“No blaming,” Ed said. “We said we weren’t going to do that. Remember?”
“I remember. I remember. This is not about blame. This is about helping this family get back to normal—if that’s even possible.”
Charlie shot her an annoyed glance. Did she have to do this in front of the kids?
“I’m thick! I’m thick!” Noah wailed, flailing in his car seat.
When they arrived home, Alison had gotten dressed and was in the kitchen, loading the dishwasher with cereal bowls from breakfast. Her parents dropped their bags and went over to hug her, and she collapsed into their arms. Charlie shuffled the children into the living room and put on a Shrek DVD; he knew that June would remark on it, but he didn’t care. He looked at his watch: 12:20. If he didn’t take the next train into the city his entire workday would be lost. Already the client on his biggest account, the paper conglomerate PMRG, was leaving passive-aggressive messages on his voice mail: “Charles, I’m sure you’re a busy man with other things to do, but the clock is ticking on this campaign. We need to hear from you. I tried to reach you by e-mail, but perhaps you haven’t gotten my messages. If you can fit me into your schedule, I’d appreciate a call by the end of day today, thanks.” When Charlie thought about it, his stomach clenched.
“I need to catch the next train,” he said, coming into the kitchen.
“What?” said June. “You’re leaving? Is it even worth it at this hour?”
“I’ve got a three o’clock meeting,” he lied, then was immediately irritated at himself. Why should he lie? He had to go to work—he earned the money around here. It was as simple as that. Why did he suddenly feel like he was the one who’d done something wrong?
Alison looked at him blankly. Noah had come in and was whining for juice, sidling through her legs like a cat, but Alison didn’t seem to notice. “When will you be home?” she asked.
Charlie looked at his watch. The gesture was a visual signifier; he knew what time it was. “Well, I may need to stay a few hours later,” he said, calculating that he might be able to talk to Claire if he had some flexibility. Where was she? Somewhere in the South. All he wanted was to hear her voice, feel a brief connection. That would be enough for now. “I’m dealing with a major account.” He turned to Ed, his only potential ally in the room, to explain. “As you might imagine, things have been—difficult here. I’ve had to take quite a bit of time off.”
“I’m sure your colleagues are understanding, given the circumstances,” June said.
In fact, Charlie hadn’t told his colleagues. They might know about it, but the story hadn’t come from him. On Wednesday, having taken off Monday and Tuesday with a supposed stomach flu, Charlie had gone into the office of the senior partner and shut the door. “My wife was in a bad accident,” he said. “Someone ran a stop sign and plowed into her car. She’s all right, but a person in the other car didn’t make it.” He didn’t reveal that that person was a child. He omitted mention of the police station, the blood-alcohol content, the question of culpability.
“That’s terrible, Charles,” Bill Trieste had gasped, coming around his desk and putting a hand on Charlie’s shoulder. “Alison is all right, though?”
“All right. Shaken up.”
“Of course, of course. My God. I’m sure she’s needing your support right now.”
“We’ll get through it,” Charlie said automatically. Later he would reflect on his bland responses to expressions of sympathy. We’ll get through it. Would they? He wasn’t at all sure.
“If you need to take some time off, just let me know,” Bill said. “We can make arrangements for your accounts, if it comes to that.”
“No, no,” Charlie said hastily. The last thing he wanted was to be in the house all day, every day, with Alison. It was hard enough going home at night to face her—the weepy desperation in her eyes, her unspoken need for his absolution, as if he alone had the power to assuage her guilt. And the children, sensing her disconnection from them, were clingy and frantic. No, he didn’t want to take time off. He would hire Dolores for more hours; Alison’s parents would pitch in. The thought of becoming more enmeshed, just as he was beginning to disengage, made him flush with panic.
“She might want to talk to a grief counselor,” Bill said. “I can get you a name, if you want it. When my wife’s brother died, she saw this woman for a year, and I believe it helped her tremendously.”
“Thanks. That’s a good suggestion,” Charlie said. He looked at Bill, a trim, handsome man in his late forties, and wondered what he and his wife had been through. As far as Charlie could remember, this was the first time Bill had ever even mentioned a wife.
“Well, listen, take all the time you need,” Bill said, patting him on the back as he walked him to the door of his office.
“Thanks,” Charlie said. “Bill, I’d appreciate it if you don’t share this with anyone. Alison is a pretty private person, and I think she’d prefer to keep this quiet.”
“Of course. I understand,” Bill assured him.
Actually, Alison hadn’t said anything to Charlie about keeping it quiet. He was the one who didn’t want people to know. His wife had been drinking, and a small boy had died. A child—a boy like his boy—someone else’s son: dead. It was inconceivable. If he had been driving, this wouldn’t have happened, he was sure of it. He was more confident on the road, not to mention heavier; he would have absorbed the alcohol differently. Anyway, he wouldn’t have drunk two gimmicky blue martinis.
But to go to Claire’s party with Alison would have been unbearable.
Before the accident Charlie had wondered if it might be possible for things to continue as they were indefinitely; he and Claire could lead their separate lives and come together in a kind of biospheric space, outside the constraints of real life. Their relationship would exist beyond the realm of everyday concerns. Even at the time Charlie had known that this conceit was foolish; the delicate balance required to sustain such a precarious arrangement was bound to become upset. Either he or Claire would come to feel that it wasn’t enough; Alison or Ben would find out. Eventually things would have to change. But now he felt like those prisoners of war he’d read about who were strapped, alive, to the dead bodies of their fallen comrades and thrown into the river. He was bound to Alison in a way that he hadn’t been before—he was, or would have to be, the stalwart husband.
STANDING ON THE platform an hour later, waiting for the 1:17 train, Charlie pulled out his cell phone.
“Hey there, you,” Claire said in a groggy voice.
“Oh God, did I wake you?”
“It’s okay. I was napping,” she said. “I had to get up at the crack of dawn for a morning show.”
“Sorry. Where are you?”
He could hear the rustle of sheets, and he pictured her sitting up, turning on the bedside lamp in the hotel room. “Nashville. The weather is downright balmy. Flowers are blooming.”
“How’d the reading go last night?”
“Fine. An old friend from college lives here, so she rustled up a crowd. Otherwise it would’ve been a homeless man and three old ladies who heard me on Tennessee Public Radio yesterday afternoon.”
“How are you?” he asked, impatient with the details.
“Charlie, I’m fine. Fine, fine—it doesn’t matter. The question is, how are you?”
He inhaled quietly, filling his lungs with the cool spring air. A mile or so away, at the other end of town, the warning horn of the train sounded as it pulled into the station. He should’ve called her sooner. In a minute the train would be here.
“Ahh. Not so great,” he said. Leaving the house, he’d run into Alison’s father in the kitchen, sitting at the table eating a tuna sandwich and reading the Times. Charlie had said a quick hello and ducked back into the hall to get his laptop bag, but Ed got up and stood in the doorway with his glass of milk.
“I know this is tough,” Ed said. “Maybe as tough as it gets.”
Charlie had nodded, gathering his keys, BlackBerry, silver iPod from the bowl on the hall table and putting them in various pockets in his bag. “I’m glad you’re here, Ed,” he said, and he meant it. Charlie liked Ed, liked his quirky sensibility and mild good humor. Ed was the one who constructed elaborate train tracks for Noah, using every odd piece of the Thomas the Tank Engine track that had been collected over the years. During his previous visit, he had made Annie a set of fairy wings out of coat hangers and pink mesh, and took both children to the local museum and ice cream shop for the afternoon. Ed was curious about Charlie’s work, in an anthropological way, and sent him books on Thomas Jefferson, in whom they shared an interest—books that Charlie rarely got a chance to finish, but still. Charlie, in turn, had walked Ed through his first computer purchase and set up his e-mail account, and then periodically e-mailed him newsworthy tidbits from the Internet he thought Ed might appreciate.
Charlie’s feelings about Alison’s mother were more complicated. He didn’t like her much, and it wasn’t just because he found her self-absorbed and grandiose. June was tuned in to him in a way that made him uncomfortable. She, alone among her husband and daughter, seemed to have sensed from the beginning that Charlie was not entirely engaged, that he had always been, on some level, distracted, even when he didn’t yet know it himself. She seemed to be constantly watching him. For a long time he thought it was unfair. He complained to Alison that he didn’t think he’d ever be able to please her mother, that she expected the worst from him. “That’s nonsense, she thinks you’re wonderful,” Alison had said (smoothing things over as usual, ignoring the obvious, making peace). Now it occurred to Charlie that June’s suspicions—that he was not devoted enough, involved enough with his fledging family—were in fact dead-on. Perhaps she understood him in a way that no one else did. Ed’s generous spirit and Alison’s willful denial had kept both of them in the dark. June alone saw him as he really was.
Standing at the station, with Claire on the phone, Charlie looked down the tracks to the train, some distance away, speeding toward the platform. Commuters were folding newspapers, snapping shut cell phones, rummaging for train passes. The whistle sounded, a low, sonorous noise that seemed to hang in the air.
“I can’t stop thinking about what happened—how terrible it is,” Claire said. “Alison never called me back, and I don’t want to bug her. But—”
“She’s not calling anybody right now.”
“I just want her to know—oh, shit. I guess it doesn’t matter.”
“No, it does. It matters,” he said, not paying attention to the words, trying to put an end to the topic. Charlie didn’t want to talk about Alison with Claire. The only way he was getting through this was by keeping the two of them separate in his mind.
“I feel like this is my fault … ridiculous blue martinis … and to tell you the truth I was kind of avoiding her; it just felt—well, you know, we hadn’t spoken in a while … that dumb article … if I’d been more welcoming—if I’d thought about how she might feel … And this damn book … I know she feels betrayed … And you. Jesus, Charlie—you. … ”
Every other word she said was drowned out by the train as it pulled into the station, and Charlie shut his eyes, relieved by the intrusion. “The train’s here,” he said. Now he felt irritated by Claire—her self-absorption was getting on his nerves. He had forgotten this about her, or maybe he just hadn’t noticed lately, overwhelmed as he was by other, more primal concerns: the firm weight of her breasts in his hands, the curve of her naked hip. …
“God, I’m a narcissist.” It was almost as if she was reading his mind.
“No,” he said, stepping on the train and finding a seat. He couldn’t bear to reassure her; it was hard enough responding to Alison. And he had his own guilt to deal with, even as he dreamed of escape … the baby-soft skin of her inner thigh … waited for Claire to return from her book tour.
Or maybe—maybe—could he go to her?
He handed his monthly pass to the conductor, awkwardly cradling the flat phone against his jaw. “Where will you be on Monday?” he asked Claire, nodding at the conductor as he passed.
“Umm … Atlanta, I think,” she said.
Charlie took a deep breath. “How would you like company for a night?”
“Are you serious? How could you?”
“Her parents are here,” he said, finding the pronoun easier than Alison’s name. “They’re staying for five or six days. Maybe these new clients of mine need some hand-holding.”
“Oh, yes,” she said. “They do need hand-holding. Come.”