Christina Baker Kline - Bird in Hand

It is a queer and fantastic world. Why cant people have what they want? The things were all there to content everybody; yet everybody has the wrong thing.

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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 afterward, she still believed that there was order in the universethat shed 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. Hehe was not her own child, her own boy, her own three-year-old son. She was on her way home from a party where shed had a few drinks. She pulled out into an intersection, the other car went through a stop sign, and she didnt 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 dont 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 couldnt see inside. The drivers door opened, and a man stumbled out. My boymy boy, hes hurt, he shouted in a panicky voice.

I have a phone. Ill 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.

Theres been an accident, she told the operator. Send help. A boy is hurt.

The operator asked where Alison was, and she didnt know what to say. Shed 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 wasnt like she didnt know, but there had been nowhere to turn, so shed 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 shed realized that the other car was driving straight through without stoppingthe car was to her right and had the right of way, but it hadnt 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 signSaw Hill Roadand reported this.

Hold on, the operator said. Okay, youre in Sherman. Ill 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 didnt 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, OhGod, and whatever numbness shed had was stripped away. She flinchedtold him, Dont comeand he said, What did you do?

It wasnt the response shed expectednot that she had thought ahead enough to expect anything in particular; she didnt know what to expect; she didnt 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 wasnt going to answer, and she said, I dont knowmaybe. Probably.

Dont 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 isa little boy isthey dont know yethurt. She said this, although theyd already told her there was swelling on the brain. The police werent wearing uniforms, and they didnt handcuff her or read Alison her rights or any of the other things she might have expected. The boys 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 hed been exasperated with heron their honeymoon, when, after two days of learning to ski, she suddenly froze up and couldnt 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 moneys 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 couldnt come up with a thing. Eight years. Two children. A life she didnt 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 hadnt known she wanted to stop, but Charlie said, Cmon, Alison, the kids want you at home. Its a home when youre 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 didnt say it. He saw her at home in faded jeans and an old cotton sweater, he saw her at seven oclock 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 yetand yet she thought she was lucky, thought they were lucky, loved and appreciated their life.

But tonight she was living a nightmare. Her friendssome of them, at leastwould 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 wasnt that they couldnt imagine being in her position, because every mother has imagined what it would feel like to be responsible for taking the life of someone elses child.

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