Bird in Hand by Christina Baker Kline Read Free Book Online Page B

percent.”
    Her skin prickled. “I didn’t know that.”
    “And that a little kid is. … ” His voice trailed off.
    She nodded helplessly, trying to shake herself into believing it and not wanting to believe it at the same time. Pushing, pushing the horror away. She tried to look in Charlie’s eyes, and he wouldn’t look at her. “Charlie, I had two drinks the whole evening, I swear. Two—two and a half. They were making these martinis—”
    “You don’t even drink martinis.”
    “I know,” she said miserably. “They were … blue. You know—the title of the book. Claire’s mother drinks these blue martinis, so. … And there wasn’t really any food; I didn’t eat dinner—”
    “Do you realize how fucking irresponsible—?” He shook his head violently.
    There was no point in responding. It didn’t matter anyway. Nothing she could say was going to change what had happened.
    ON THE WAY home from the police station, they were mostly silent. Charlie drove, deftly finding his way along back roads, through small towns, to the Garden State Parkway. Sitting in the passenger’s seat, Alison looked out the window at the passing cars and exit signs. Halfway home, she realized that her fingertips were numb; she was gripping the hard plastic of her seat belt buckle. A fluttery feeling in her chest made it hard to catch her breath. Charlie glanced over at her a few times, and once he asked if she was okay. She nodded, not trusting herself to speak.
    “There’s something I don’t understand,” Charlie said after a while. “Why didn’t you just pull off somewhere when you took that wrong turn? Why in the world would you just keep going ?”
    She tried to remember why. Why? She had driven up the East Side of Manhattan and sliced through the park to the West Side, all the way over to the river, and then she had snaked up to the George Washington Bridge. She knew that she was not quite sober—but sober enough to be in control; she felt in control, if she thought about each movement carefully as she did it. Recently she had taken Noah and Annie to the Big Apple Circus, where they’d seen clowns spin plates in the air, keeping them balanced and steady at the end of long poles, and she thought of this image as she drove. Before she knew it, just over the bridge, she had to make a decision. She passed signs with too many letters and numbers; her brain was foggy, and she seemed to have forgotten which way to go, how to choose among all the options. Ordinarily, at night, on the way back from the city, Charlie would have been driving. Now the dashboard clock said 9:41, and she had no idea how to get home.
    In a panic, she veered right with the traffic. Instantly she knew she’d made a mistake. The road was unfamiliar; she was clearly driving away from her sleeping children and quiet town, toward points unknown. She kept driving because she didn’t know how to get off; there didn’t seem to be an exit. She kept driving because she had turned right instead of going straight, and she began to wonder, somewhere in a place that wasn’t rational or even fully conscious, whether this might have happened for a reason. Perhaps there was something out there that she might not otherwise have gotten a chance to see. She was driving at night with two and a half strong martinis in her, and suddenly she began to feel that an unplanned detour might be exactly what she needed.
    It was the first time in a long time she had done something unexpected, something that defied common sense. And maybe, in that brief moment between making a wrong turn and a critical miscalculation, it felt good.
    Not so many years ago, she had been a single girl living with friends from college in a small apartment in the city. Now it was as if that life had happened to someone else. Now she made grocery lists and tyrannosaurus-shaped pancakes and the children’s beds. She kept the house and car running smoothly; she ran the 5K race for a cure, which