Over the next two days, in anticipation of the release in exactly a week of Bird in Hand, I am posting the prologue in two parts.
(*My publicist made me say that. He also made me promise to point out that if this excerpt intrigues you, the book is available for pre-order at indie.org and amazon.com.)
Bird in Hand
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 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 a while 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.