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Prologue

For Alison, these things will always be connected: the moment that cleaved her life into two sections and the dawning realization that even before the accident her life was not what it seemed. In the instant it took the accident to happen, and in the slow-motion moments after- ward, she still believed that there was order in the universe --- that she’d be able to put things right. But with one random error, built on dozens of tiny mistakes of judgment, she stepped  into a different story that seemed, for a long time, to have nothing to do with her. She watched, as if behind one-way glass, as the only life she recognized slipped from her grasp.

This is what happened: she killed a child. It was not her own child. He --- he was not her own child, her own boy, her own three-year-old son. She was on her way home from a party where she’d had a few drinks. She pulled out into an intersection, the other car went through a stop sign, and she didn’t move out of the way. It was as simple as that, and as complicated.

Something happens to you in the moments after a car crash. Your brain needs time to catch up; you don’t want to believe what your senses are telling you. Your heart is beating so loudly that it seems to be its own living being, separate from you. Everything feels too close.

As she saw the car coming toward her, she sat rigid against the seat. Shutting her eyes, she heard the splintering glass and felt the wrenching slam of metal into metal. Then there was silence. She smelled gasoline and opened her eyes. The other car was crumpled and steaming and quiet, and the windshield was shattered; Alison couldn’t see inside. The driver’s door opened, and a man stumbled out. “My boy --- my boy, he’s hurt,” he shouted in a panicky voice.

“I have a phone. I’ll call 911,” Alison said. “Oh, God hurry,” he said.

She punched the numbers with unsteady fingers. She was shaking all over; even her teeth were chattering.

“There’s been an accident,” she told the operator. “Send help. A boy is hurt.”

The operator asked where Alison was, and she didn’t know what to say. She’d taken a wrong turn  awhile back, gone north instead  of west, and found herself on an unfamiliar road. She knew she was lost right away; it wasn’t like she didn’t know, but there had been nowhere to turn, so she’d kept going. The road led to other, smaller roads, badly lit and hard to see in the foggy darkness, and then she came upon a four-way stop. Alison had pulled out into the intersection before she’d realized that the other car was driving straight through without stopping --- the car was to her right and had the right of way, but it hadn’t been there a moment ago when she had moved forward. It had seemed, quite literally, to have come out of nowhere.

Alison knew better than to explain all this to the operator, but in truth she had no idea where she was. Craning her neck to look out the windshield, she saw a street sign—Saw Hill Road—and reported this.

“Hold on,” the operator said. “Okay, you’re in Sherman. I’ll send an ambulance right away.”

“Please tell them to hurry,” Alison said.

She called her husband from the hospital and told him about the accident, about the car being totaled and her injured wrist, but she didn’t tell him that all around her doctors and nurses were barking orders and the swinging doors were banging open and shut, and a small boy was at the center of it, a small boy with a broken skull and a blood-spattered T-shirt. But Charlie knew soon enough. She had to call him back to tell him not to come to the hospital; she was now at the police station, and there was silence for a moment and then he said, “Oh --- God,” and whatever numbness  she’d had was stripped  away. She flinched --- told him, “Don’t come” --- and he said, “What did you do?”

It wasn’t the response she’d expected --- not that she had thought ahead enough to expect anything in particular; she didn’t know what to expect; she didn’t have a response in mind. But her sudden realization that Charlie was not with her, not reflexively on her side, was so profoundly shocking that she braced for what was next.

“Do we need a lawyer?” he said when it was clear she wasn’t going to answer, and she said, “I don’t know—maybe. Probably.”

“Don’t say anything,”  he said then.  She could tell he was flipping through scenarios in his mind, trying to lay things out in a methodical way. “Just wait until I get there.”

“But I already said everything. A boy is --- a little boy is --- they don’t know yet --- hurt.” She said this, although they’d already told her there was swelling on the brain. The police weren’t wearing uniforms, and they didn’t handcuff her or read Alison her rights or any of the other things she might have expected. The boy’s parents were weeping; the mother was wailing I let him sit on my lap; he was cold in the back and afraid of the dark, and the father was slumped with his hands over his face. The walls of the lobby vibrated with their sadness.

“Jesus Christ.”  Charlie breathed. And she thought of other times he’d been exasperated with her --- on their honeymoon, when, after two days of learning to ski, she suddenly froze up and couldn’t do it; she was terrified of the speed, the recklessness, of feeling out of control; she was sure she would break a limb. So she spent the rest of the time in the lodge, a calculatedly cozy place with a gas flame in the fireplace and glossy ski magazines on the oak veneer coffee tables, while Charlie got his money’s worth from the honeymoon. She tried to think of an experience comparable to what was happening now, some time when she had done X, and he had reacted Y, but she couldn’t come up with a thing. Eight years. Two children.  A life she didn’t plan for but had grown to love. Friends and a hometown and a house, not too big but not tiny, either, with creaky stairs and water-damaged ceilings but lots of potential.

Potential was something she once had a lot of, too. Every paper she wrote in college could have been better; every B+ could have been an A. She could have pushed ahead in her career instead of stopping when it became easier to do so. She hadn’t known she wanted to stop, but Charlie said, “C’mon, Alison, the kids want you at home. It’s a home when you’re home.” But after she quit, he complained about bearing the heavy load of responsibility for them. There was no safety net, he said; he said it made him anxious. He wanted her at home, but he missed the money and the security, and she knew he missed seeing her out in the world, though he didn’t say it. He saw her at home in faded jeans and an old cotton sweater, he saw her at seven o’clock when the kids were clamoring for him and strung out and cranky and he had just endured his hour-long commute from the city.

And yet --- and yet she thought  she was lucky, thought  they were lucky, loved and appreciated their life.

But tonight she was living a nightmare. Her friends --- some of them, at  least --- would  probably try to  comfort  her,  provide some  kind  of solace, but it would be hard for them, because deep down they would think that she was to blame. And it wasn’t that they couldn’t imagine being in her position, because every mother has imagined what it would feel like to be responsible for taking the life of someone else’s child.

But worse, every mother has thought about what it would be like to have her child’s life taken from her.

Alison could hear Charlie asking for her, out at the front desk. Polite and deferential and panicked and impatient --- all of that. She could read his voice the way some people read birdcalls. She almost didn’t want him to find her. As she looked around at the dingy lights, the dirt-sodden carpet, heard the clatter from the holding cells down the hall, she wondered what it would be like to stay here --- not here, perhaps, but in prison somewhere, cut off from other people, penitent  as a nun. Or in a convent, a place with stone walls, small slices of sky visible through narrow slits, neatly made narrow beds. A place where she could pay for this quietly, away from anyone who had ever known her.

You might expect that she’d have thought of her children, and she did --- peripherally, like a blinkered horse looking sideways; when she tried to think of them straight on, her mind went blank. Her own boy’s brown curls on the pillow, her six-year-old daughter’s twisted night- gown, her covers on the floor . . . Alison saw them sleeping, imagined them dead --- just for an instant.  Imagined explaining --- and stopped. The only thing she seemed able to do was concentrate on the minute details of each moment: the cold floor, hard seat, dispassionate officers tapping on keyboards and shuffling papers. The tick of the wall clock: 11:53.

Part One

At a four-way stop, every vehicle must come to a complete halt before proceeding one at a time across the intersection, regardless of whether there is any other traffic in sight or not.

If two or more vehicles draw up to one of these junctions and stop, waiting to proceed across it, then they should proceed in the same order in which they arrived. If two vehicles arrive at one of these junctions at precisely the same time, so that it is impossible to tell which arrived first, then in theory the vehicle on the right has priority. However, many drivers are unaware of this rule and there are complications due to all the possible permutations of turns.

 

—John Cletheroe, Driving in the USA and Canada www.johncletheroe.org/usa_can/

 

It had been a rainy morning, and all through the afternoon the sky remained opaque, bleached, and unreadable.  Alison wasn’t sure until the last minute whether she would even go to Claire’s book party in the city. The kids were whiny and bored, and she was feeling guilty that her latest freelance assignment, “Sparking the Flame of Your  Child’s Creativity,” which involved extra interviews and rewrites, had made her distracted and short-tempered  with them. She’d asked the babysitter to stay late twice that week already, and had shut herself away in her tiny study --- mudroom, really --- trying to finish the piece. “Dolores, would you mind distracting him, please?” she’d called with a shrill edge of panic when three-year-old Noah pounded his small fists on the door.

“Maybe we shouldn’t go,” she said when Charlie called from work to find out when she was leaving. “The kids are needy. I’m tired.”

“But you’ve been looking forward to this,” he said.

“I don’t know,” she said. “Dolores seems out of sorts. I can hear her out there snapping at the kids.”

“Look,” he said. “I’ll come home. I have a lot of work to do tonight anyway. I’ll take over for Dolores, and then you won’t have to worry.”

“But I want you there,” she said obstinately.  “I don’t want to go alone. I probably won’t even know anybody.”

“You know Claire,” Charlie said. “Isn’t that what matters? It’ll be good to show your support.”

“It’s not like she’s gone out of her way to get in touch with me.”

“She did send you an invitation.”

“Well, her publicist.”

“So, Claire put your name on the list. Come on, Alison --- I’m not going to debate this with you. Clearly you want to go, or you wouldn’t be agonizing over it.”

He was right. She didn’t answer. Sometime back in the fall, Claire’s feelings had  gotten  hurt --- something  about  an  article she’d submitted to the magazine Alison worked for that wasn’t right, that Alison’s boss had brusquely criticized and then rejected, leaving her to do the work of explaining. It was Alison’s first major assignment as a freelance editor, and she hadn’t wanted to screw it up. So she’d let her boss’s displeasure (which, after all, had eked out as annoyance at her, too: “I do wonder, Alison, if you defined the assignment well enough in the first place . . .”) color her response. She’d hinted that Claire might be taking on too many things at once, and that the piece wasn’t up to the magazine’s usual standards. She was harsher than she should have been. And yet --- the article was sloppy; it appeared to have been hastily written. There were typos and transition problems. Claire seemed to have misunderstood the assignment. Frankly, Alison was annoyed at her for turning in the piece as she did --- she should have taken more time with it, been more particular.  It pointed to something larger in their friendship, Alison thought, a kind of carelessness on Claire’s part, a taking for granted. It had been that way since they were young. Claire was the impetuous, brilliant one, and Alison was the compass that kept her on course.

Now Claire had finished her novel, a slim, thinly disguised roman à clef called BLUE MARTINS, about a girl’s coming-of-age in the South. Alison couldn’t bear to read it; the little she’d gleaned from the blurb by a bestselling writer on the postcard invitation Claire’s publicist had sent --- “Every woman who has ever been a girl will relate to this searingly honest, heartbreakingly funny novel about a girl’s sexual awakening in a repressive southern  town” --- made her  stomach  twist into a knot. Claire’s story was, after all, Alison’s story, too; she hadn’t been asked or even consulted, but she had little doubt that her own past was now on view. And Claire hadn’t let her see the manuscript in advance; she’d told Alison that she didn’t want to feel inhibited by what people from Bluestone might think. Anyway, Claire insisted, it was a novel. Despite this disclaimer, from what Alison could gather, she was “Jill,” the main character’s introverted if strong-willed sidekick.

“Ben will be there, won’t he?” Charlie said.

“Probably. Yes.”

“So hang out with him. You’ll be fine.”

Alison nodded into the phone.  Ben, Claire’s husband,  was effortlessly sociable --- wry and intimate  and inclusive. Alison had a mental picture of him from countless cocktail parties, standing in the middle of a group with a drink in one hand, stooping his tall frame slightly to accommodate.

“Tell them I’m sorry I can’t be there,” Charlie said. “And let Dolores know I’ll be home around seven. And remember --- this is part of your job, to schmooze and make contacts. You’ll be glad you went.”

“Yeah, okay,” she said, thinking,  oh right, my job, mentally adding up how much she’d earned over the past year: two $50 checks for whimsical personal essays on smart-mommy Web sites, $500 for a parenting magazine “service” piece called “50 Ways for New Moms to Relieve Stress,” a $1,000 kill fee for a big feature on sibling rivalry that the competition scooped just before Alison’s story went to press. The freelance editing assignment with Claire had never panned out.

“The party’s on East End Avenue, right?” he said. “You should probably take the bridge. The tunnel might be backed up, with this rain. Drive slow; the roads’ll be wet.”

They talked about logistics for a few minutes --- how much to pay Dolores, what Charlie might find to eat in the  fridge. As they were talking, Alison slipped out of her study, shutting the door quietly behind her. She could hear the kids in the living room with Dolores, and she made her way upstairs quietly, avoiding the creaky steps so they wouldn’t be alerted to her presence. In the master bedroom she riffled through the hangers on her side of the closet and pulled out one shirt and then another for inspection.  She yanked off the jeans she’d been wearing for three days and tried on a pair of black wool pants she hadn’t worn in months, then stood back and inspected  herself in the full-length mirror on the back of the closet door. The pants zipped easily enough, but the top button was tight. She put a hand over her tummy, unzipped the pants, and callipered a little fat roll with her fingers. She sighed.

“What? ”

“Oh, nothing,” she said. “Listen, Dolores will feed the kids, you just have to give them a bath. And honey, try not to look at your BlackBerry until you get them in bed. They see so little of you as it is.” She yanked down her pants and, back in the closet, found a more forgiving pair.

When Alison was finally dressed, she felt awkward and unnatural, like a child pretending to be a grown-up, or a character in a play. In her mommy role, she wore flat, comfortable shoes, small gold hoops, soft T-shirts, jeans or khakis. Now it felt as if she were wearing a costume: black high-heeled boots, a jangling bracelet, earrings that pulled on her lobes, bright (too bright?) lipstick she’d been pressed into buying at the Bobbi Brown counter by a salesgirl half her age. She went downstairs and greeted the children stiffly, motioning to Dolores to keep them away so she could maintain the illusion that she always dressed like this.

She went out to the garage, got into the car, remembered her cell phone, clattered back into the house, returned to the car, remembered her umbrella, made it back to the house in time to answer the ringing phone in the kitchen. It was her mother in North Carolina.

“Hi, Mom, look, I’ll have to call you later. I’m running out  the door.”

“You sound tense,” her mother said. “Where are you going?”

“To a party for Claire’s book.”

“In the city?”

“Yes. And I’m late.”

“I read her book,” her mother said. “Have you?”

“Not yet.”

“Well. You might want to.”

“I will, one of these  days,”  Alison said, consciously ignoring her mother’s insinuating tone. Then the children were on her. Six-year-old Annie dissolved in tears, and Dolores had to peel Noah off Alison’s legs like starfish from a rock. Alison made it out to the car again, calling, “I’ll be home soon!” and madly blowing kisses, and realized when she turned on the engine that she didn’t have a bottle of water, which was annoying, because you never knew how long it would take to get into the city, but fuck it. There was no way she could go inside again. Half- way down the driveway she saw Annie and Noah in the front window, frantically waving at her and jumping up and down. Alison pressed the button to roll down her window and waved back. As she pulled the car into the street, she could see Noah’s cheek mashed up against the glass, his hand outstretched, his small form resigned and motionless as he watched her drive away.

East End Avenue was quiet and damp in the shadows of early evening. Several blocks over, traffic swished and rumbled, but here Alison was the only one on the street. After easily finding a parking spot --- just in time for the changing of the guard from metered to free, a rare lucky break --- she locked the car doors and pulled her coat tightly around her. It wasn’t raining now, but the  air was chilly; bare trees creaked in the sharp wind like old bedsprings. The avenue, the buildings, even the cars parked along the street were, washed in dull tones. Early March --- not yet spring, though not still winter. A purgatorial season, Alison thought, when the manufactured cheer of the holidays has worn off, and desolation feels palpable. Or maybe just to her. She wasn’t sure, and had so little confidence anymore, in ascribing opinions to other adults. She seemed to have lost the ability to gauge what they might be feeling and thinking. (Children were a different  story; she had developed an uncanny ability to decipher their moods --- even those of the ones that weren’t hers.) She wondered if such an ability, which she used to pride herself on, was a social skill you could lose without practice.

The doorman, dressed in a navy blue uniform and standing just inside the small vestibule leading to the lobby, inclined his head and said, “Good evening, miss,” as Alison approached. “Miss” --- she liked that.

“Apartment five-twelve?” she asked, waving the invitation.

Holding the door open, he ushered her in. “Elevator straight ahead.”

“Thank you.” She nodded,  thinking, Oh yes, it’s like this; it’s this easy, and  walked through  the  gleaming, harlequin-tiled  lobby, past marble columns  and  inset  mirrors, glancing at her  reflection  as she passed. Her hair was windblown; she was wearing last year’s coat --- or did she buy it two years ago? It hardly mattered --- the cut was conservative, tasteful, unexceptional, made to last for years without drawing undue  attention.  Under the coat, she wore the loose black pants and a heather gray ribbed turtleneck  she’d bought at the Bendel’s end-of- season sale on a rare foray into the city a few weeks earlier. At home, in front of the mirror in the bedroom, she had toyed with a scarf, a Christmas gift from her mother in the luminous shades of a medieval stained-glass window, but ultimately decided against it: too . . . suburban. She’d tucked it back in the drawer.

When Alison had lived in the city and worked as a magazine editor, she’d observed the fashion editors for ideas about what to wear. She’d never been particularly creative herself, but their  example wasn’t hard to emulate: a wardrobe of black basics, with several fresh pieces mixed in each season to keep it current. A short pleated plaid skirt, a plum-colored poncho, round-toed satin shoes. But now that she no longer knew which trends to follow, even these small flourishes were risky. And besides, the person she’d become had little use for them. When was the last time she’d worn a short pleated skirt or satin shoes? Now she dressed in clothes that didn’t gap or expose too much, that absorbed mess and fuss and a child’s handprints that could as easily be worn at a playdate as at a meeting of the planning committee of the preschool fund-raiser. After they’d moved to the suburbs she’d added a little color to her wardrobe so she wouldn’t come off as too “New York” --- unfriendly, severe --- but she balked at the bright costumes some women wore, holiday-themed sweaters and socks, matching headbands. These women scared her as much as the trendiest New Yorkers did, at the opposite end of the spectrum --- possibly more. She was less afraid of being judged by them than she was of becoming them. She didn’t know how that might happen, but she feared it could be as simple as prolonged exposure, a wearing down of discernment  and a fun house– mirror questioning of her own judgment. It was happening already, in so many ways. Here she was, at the threshold of this party, doubting the drab cut of her coat, her risk-averse turtleneck, whether she had a right to be there at all.

As the button flashed and the elevator doors finally opened --- it had taken forever; she  might as well have walked up  the  stairs --- Alison heard the clickclickclick of high heels on the tile floor of the lobby. She turned to see a woman striding toward her, her flapping coat exposing a lime green lining. “Hold it!” the woman commanded.

Alison stepped into the elevator and pushed the door open button. The clicking sped up, and then, in a staccato clatter, the woman was inside the elevator, too. “Thank you,” she said without looking at Alison, one polished fingernail poised over the panel of small circles designating the floors. She paused over 5, and then, seeing that it was lighted, dropped her hand. Out of the corner of her eye, Alison watched  the woman compose herself. Like a preening bird, she made fine adjustments: she touched the back of her head, unfastened the buttons of her quilted silk jacket. She slipped a finger into the waistband of her skirt and smoothed it. Alison observed all of this with a benign curiosity. So this is how a woman prepares for a party, she thought; these are the small modulations that give her shape and identity.

Since she was a child, Alison had made these kinds of minute assessments of other females, searching for clues that  would show her how to act, how to carry herself, how to pull off being a woman. Her own mother was uninterested  in social niceties; when Alison was growing up, her mother wore paint-spattered  T-shirts for days in a row and tied her hair back with rubber bands. She went barefoot all summer and wore sneakers when it got cool. It was almost worse that she was effortlessly beautiful; she had no tricks or techniques to pass along to a shy and insecure daughter. In fact, it puzzled her that Alison was interested in learning those things she so assiduously avoided. “Why do you buy these trashy rags?” she’d ask, pausing over a stack of Seventeens and Glamours on the floor of Alison’s bedroom. “They perpetuate such absurd stereotypes.”

“I like them,” Alison would say, snatching the magazines from under her mother’s inquisitive gaze. “There’s a lot of information --- ”

“About the crap they want you to buy.”

“Not only that,” Alison would say, without the tools or the fortitude to make a reasoned defense. Her mother was right, but it wasn’t the point. However unrealistic or unattainable, the paint-by-numbers makeup guides and ugly-duckling before-and-afters gave Alison a sense of possibility. They made her feel that she might one day transform herself into the kind of woman she dreamed of being --- confident, savvy, sure.

How ironic, she thought now, fleetingly, as the elevator ground to a hesitant stop at the fifth floor before it settled into the right notch and its doors lurched open, that for a while, when she lived in New York, she actually was that woman --- or a reasonable imitation --- and now she was feeling as vulnerable and insecure as she had back in high school. It takes so little to strip the gears, she thought, to find yourself pedaling in place when you thought you were moving forward.

“Are you a friend of Colm’s?”  the peacock said suddenly, turning around as they stepped out into the hall.

Colms.  Colm.  Alison panicked for a moment;  the  word sounded made up, like the name of a Star Trek alien. Oh, yes, Colm --- the name on the invitation, Colm Maynard; it was his apartment. “No,” she said. “I’m an old friend of Claire’s.”

“From Bluestone?” Alison nodded.

The peacock narrowed her eyes and gave Alison a once-over. “Fascinating.”

 Even from halfway down the hall, the buzz of the party was audible, with an occasional shriek of laughter rising above the din. Pushing open the door to 512, the peacock exclaimed, “Darling!” in the general vicinity of a cluster of twentysomething publishing types, throwing up her hands and disappearing into the crowd.

In the long entry corridor, people were juggling drinks and business cards. They barely acknowledged Alison muttering “Excuse me --- pardon --- excuse me” as she nudged past, inching her way into a large, dimly lit room. Stepping back against the beige linen-covered wall, she looked around. The apartment was enormous, rooms leading into other rooms, all of which seemed to be filled with people. She could see a bar at the far end of the living room, set against the panoramic backdrop of the East River, with a young man in a starched white shirt with rolled- up sleeves mixing drinks. Several fresh-faced women --- moonlighting college students, Alison suspected --- were circulating trays of teeny-tiny brightly colored hors d’oeuvres.  The crowd was dense and animated, densely animated; for a moment, Alison saw it as one breathing organism. She shook her head, dispelling the illusion. That was an old trick from childhood, a way to transform an intimidating situation into something remote and featureless that she could observe from a distance.

Claire’s hardcovers were piled in stacks on tables around the room. The cover, hot pink with white letters, featured a slightly blurry photo of a martini glass, tipping sideways, splashing droplets of blue liquid around the spine and on the back. This wraparound style was, Alison knew, the signature of Rick Mann, a graphic designer whose book jackets were everywhere this season. Sidling over to a table, she flipped the book open to see the author photo. Claire was half in shadow, her molten hair as timelessly sculpted  as an Irving Penn landscape,  her expression a pensive gaze into the middle distance. The photographer, Astrid Encarte, was another trendy name. Evidently the publisher had spared no expense.

Turning the  book over, Alison skimmed the names on the back cover—a roster  of young, self-consciously renegade  authors  delivering a predictable staccato of lush adjectives and arcane phrasings --- “Nebulously  brilliant  wanderings  of an  incandescent  mind  over the pitted minefield of an American childhood,” one said. Another exclaimed simply, “Wow. Yes. Hello!”

Across the room, Claire was holding court. Wearing a sheer lace dress over a spaghetti-strapped black sheath that accentuated  her toned biceps, the toes of her pointy green heels poking out from under the hem like the snouts of baby crocodiles, she bent forward with the flat of her hand  across her stomach,  her other hand  flapping theatrically in the air. “Oh, behave!” she exclaimed. The man who’d provoked this admonishment whispered in her ear, and she looked up at him flirtatiously, in that flagrant way that is only possible with a gay man, and said, “Trevor, you are terrible.”

Despite their long history, Alison was hesitant about approaching her. Several months ago, she had extended an olive branch by inviting Claire and Ben to dinner in Rockwell, but Claire remained as distant as ever. It occurred to Alison that their falling-out was somehow bigger than she’d realized; it seemed unlikely that a trivial magazine assignment alone could have ruptured  a lifelong friendship. But Alison was afraid to ask.

For years, growing up, the two of them had spent much of their time together,  exploring  provocative questions and ambivalent  answers --- about the world, about other people, about themselves. But the better you get to know another person, the more you risk with each revelation. More than once, as teenagers, when Claire was passing along gossip about somebody else, Alison wondered if all this time spent together might be insurance against Claire’s hating her someday. At the time, Alison didn’t know why she even imagined it --- she just had the feeling, deep down in some barely acknowledged place, that Claire’s friendship might be provisional.

Why are you so distant? Sometimes, Alison thought, you don’t ask the obvious question because you don’t want to know the answer. And it’s not only that she might not tell you—it’s that the truth is layered and complex; it is no single thing. Perhaps she does believe, as Claire had said, that you don’t have much in common anymore; she doesn’t want to intrude in your busy life; your children are so present and take up so much of your energy. But what she means by saying that you don’t have much in common is that you are inconvenient to get to and clueless about the latest movies, and you hold your child over your head to sniff his diaper. She means that she is ambivalent about having children, and the simultaneous mundanity and chaos of your life repels her. She finds your daughter’s constant questions tiresome; she is sick of those dinners in the city when you become skittish and distracted around ten-thirty and start looking at your watch because you have to get home for the babysitter’s midnight curfew. The truth is, she can sense your impatience with the details of her life, too --- her quest to find the best dim sum in Chinatown,  her exhaustion from jetting off to Amsterdam for the weekend, her analysis of the latest off-Broadway play. What good did it do to articulate the ambivalence? In therapy, maybe a lot. In real life, Alison wasn’t sure.

Claire had a glamorous future to look forward to, at least for the next few months, and she also had an intriguing, and now very public, past. Alison was just an anonymous suburban housewife who’d grown up in a small southern town --- nothing special about that.

It wasn’t that Alison wanted to  be  Claire --- she  didn’t.  But she admired her tenacity and clarity and single-mindedness, particularly compared with her own indecisiveness. Alison had been living for other people for so long that she could barely identify what she wanted for herself anymore. She’d find herself paralyzed with indecision in the strangest places --- the grocery store, for instance, where she roamed the aisles with a rising panic, even as she clutched a list in her hand: What would her kids eat? What would her husband want? She rarely asked herself what she wanted. It seemed irrelevant.

In front of Alison, now, was the drinks table. Martini glasses stood in rows like cartoon soldiers; on the other side of the table stood the second unit, ordinary wineglasses for the spoilers who weren’t in the spirit. Alison wasn’t at all sure that  she was in the  spirit, and she’d never really liked martinis; but  to ask for a chardonnay  or, worse, a club soda, seemed cowardly. She watched as the bartender  poured a midrange Swedish vodka, in its distinctive ink blue bottle, into a large shaker of ice. He added Curaçao and shook it, then strained the liquid into a martini glass and added a twist of lemon peel.

“One  of those, please,”  she said, and the student-bartender, more charming than experienced, flashed her a grin and sloshed blue-tinted alcohol all over the tablecloth before handing her the sticky glass. She took a sip. The martini tasted lemony, with a medicinal aftertaste, mouthwash  fresh. The next sip was sweet; the  taste  of the  Curaçao melted away, overwhelmed by the alcohol. She was beginning to like it.

Emboldened now, holding her glass out like a calling card, Alison made her way over to a group of strangers and introduced herself.

 

 

Where is Charlie? Claire scanned the room for a glimpse of his sandy hair and broad shoulders, but no one remotely resembled him, not even from the back. Out of the corner of her eye, she’d seen Alison wandering alone through the  crowd a few minutes earlier, but that didn’t necessarily mean Charlie wasn’t there. Maybe he’d been waylaid in the foyer.

That morning, he had called Claire from work. “It’s your big night,” he said. “Excited?”

“A little nervous. I’m glad you’re coming.”

“I want to. I’m going to do everything I can.”

“What do you mean?” she said, struggling to keep the irritation out of her voice. “This is important  to me. Why can’t you just say you’ll come?”

He sighed. “It’s complicated. The kids, Alison . . . I’ll try. I’m just not a hundred percent sure.”

“But I’ll be really disappointed.”  She knew she sounded petulant, but she didn’t care.

“Me, too.”

“It won’t be any fun without you.”

“Oh, come on, Claire --- you’re going to have a great time, whether I’m there or not.”

“No, I won’t,” she said stubbornly.

“Claire,” he said. “I do want to come. I want to be there for you. But I’m no good at hiding my feelings; you know that better than anyone. With Alison there, and Ben . . . Frankly, it seems dangerous.”

“Don’t be so dramatic, Charlie. It’s a big party, with lots of people.”

“But I won’t be able to keep my eyes off you.”

“That’s okay; I’m supposed to be the center of attention.”

“Not to mention my hands.”

She laughed. “Stop. Promise you’ll come.”

He had promised, but she wasn’t sure she believed him. This would be the first time the four of them would be in a room together since that night out in Rockwell, three months ago. Once or twice in the past few months, Ben had remarked that they hadn’t seen much of Alison and Charlie; but everyone was busy, and it didn’t seem particularly strange. The falling-out with Alison, Claire had to admit, made it easier to do what they were doing.

“Claire, this  guy’s  important,”  her  publicist,  Jami with an i, said sotto voce, startling Claire out of her musings. Jami motioned toward a man with wolfman sideburns who was bearing down on them, snag- ging a martini from a waiter without breaking his stride. “Jim Oliver. He’s a reviewer for People.”

“Hello,” Claire said as he joined their small group. “I’m Claire.”

“I deduced that,”  he said. “Though I must say you look livelier in person than in that ice-princess author photo.”

“Thank you. I guess.”

“We’re all so proud of her.” Jami beamed, squeezing Claire’s waist. “Did you hear we made a hard/soft deal with Japan today? And her agent is talking to Dreamworks? And she got a great review in EW this week? It’s all happening so fast!”

Claire felt ridiculous, standing there  listening to Jami inflate the facts. She had a mental image of her 230-page book literally puffing up and floating away on its own hot air. The Japan deal was for a paltry $5,000;  Claire’s agent had managed to slip the book to Dreamworks because her neighbor was a minor executive there; the “great” review in Entertainment Weekly was actually an okay B+. But this, Claire knew, was the game.

“It’s at the top of my pile,” Jim Oliver said, taking a swig from his glass. He held it aloft and squinted at it, as if contemplating a toast. “So what’s with the blue martinis?”

 

Claire held up a copy of her book and wagged it at him.

“Well, that clears it up,” he said. Jami, whom Claire had gotten to know well over the past few weeks, elbowed her in the side.

“It was my mother’s drink,” Claire said. “Curaçao is like heroin to her.”

“And she was --- you know --- depressed,” Jami interjected with a meaningful nod.

Claire looked across the room at her mother, Lucinda Ellis, there in the flesh, chatting amiably with Martha Belle Clancy, the safety blanket she’d hauled up from North Carolina. The two of them, wearing floral dresses and beige pumps and Monet pearls, looked like stage props for Claire’s book. Every now and then Ben would bring someone over to meet Lucinda, and she’d gush in a way that tended to startle New Yorkers but that came as naturally to her as breathing.

As she looked around,  Claire’s gaze fell on Alison, standing at the drinks table, accepting a blue martini from a boy with a tattoo of thorns ringing his forearm, and looking around for someone to talk to. She seemed unsure of herself, out of place. In Claire’s former role, the role she’d played all her life, she would have rushed over to introduce Alison to someone, but now she decided to let her be. Claire’s therapist was helping her to separate, to stop feeling responsible for other peoples’ feelings at the expense of her own; it was part of her decision to write the book, to put off having kids, to take time to figure out what she wanted in her life.

To get involved with Charlie.

Claire glanced at her watch: 8:44. “Will you excuse me for a moment?” she said to Jami. “I’ll be right back. It was nice meeting you,” she added to the People guy, who tapped the book and grinned.

In the bathroom, with the door locked, she pulled her cell phone out of the little bag she was carrying and pushed number nine, speed- dialing Charlie’s cell phone.

“Hi,” he said, picking up after several rings. “This is a surprise. Aren’t you ---?”

“I escaped,” she said. “I’m in the bathroom.”

“Who’s that, Daddy?” she heard a child say, and Charlie replied, in a muffled voice, “Nobody, honey, just --- work.”

“‘Nobody’?”  The  word stung,  even though  Claire  knew she  was being irrational. She sighed. “You’re not here.”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I should’ve called. At the last minute --- ”

“I knew you weren’t coming.” He didn’t say anything, so she continued. “It’s okay. It’s just . . . boring without you.”

“I don’t believe it. This is your moment.”

“It doesn’t feel like my moment.  It all feels very --- removed, some- how.”

“It’s a damn good book. You know that, don’t you?”

“What book?” Claire could hear Annie asking in the background. “Nothing, sweetie,”  he  answered, his voice muffled  again. “Just something I read. Go help Noah with the train tracks. I’ll be there in a minute.”

“You finished it already?” Claire asked.

“Just this afternoon, on the train.” He paused, and Claire guessed he was waiting for Annie to leave. Then he said, “It’s  an incredible story. It makes me --- oh, never mind. We’ll talk about it later.”

“Tell me.”

“Honestly—it makes me like you even better.” “Oh.” She smiled into the phone.

“So relax. Enjoy this.”

“Urrr.” She groaned. “I’d rather be with you.” She held the phone to her ear, listening to the static between them. “When can I see you?”

“Soon.”

“When?”

“It’s the weekend,” he said. “I don’t think I can get away.”

“Before I leave on tour? Monday?”

“Yes,” he said.

“Charlie . . .”

“What?”

“I just . . . I want to be with you.”

“Yes,” he said again.

When the call was done, she clicked off and held the warm phone to her chest for a moment, as if it were a piece of him. Then she slipped it back into her bag and opened the  door. Surveying the  room, she watched as Alison caught Ben’s eye and he nodded and held one finger out --- wait --- so that the person he was with couldn’t see. After a moment,  he extricated himself with a deft turn and started  to make his way over to her. Claire saw Alison’s features soften and her shoulders drop. Now she could relax --- Ben wouldn’t desert her until she found her footing.

All evening, Claire had watched Ben work the room as only Ben could, seeking out the uncomfortable and the socially awkward, refilling drinks and matchmaking commonalities. Every now and then, he’d look over at her and lift his glass, offering to refill hers, or raise his eyebrows in a bid to rescue her if she needed it. More than once, feeling the warmth of his gaze, Claire wondered how it could be possible to love someone as much as she loved Ben, and yet no longer be in love.

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