Two more side-leg circles and then breathe.
Pilates were fine, but she wasn't going to do yoga if she could help it - only in a class setting when Aynsley pressured her into going. Even then it was torture. But left on her own with one of those DVDs, she never made it past the second downward-facing dog before cracking open a bottle of wine and whipping out her coupon binder. It was soothing, the scissors slicing the through the thin paper. Much more soothing than forcing herself to do breathing exercises in a room with fifteen other sweaty women. It reminded her of ballet class when she was younger. The competitive, pre-adolescent tension in the air that stopped being fun when she stopped being the best at it.
And no matter how much the instructor encouraged her participation, the cool-down at the end never actually helped with that gnawing tightness that constantly pulled in Alison's chest. Only the wine helped with that. And sometimes the coupons.
She was sure, she resolved as she did her donkey kickbacks, that Donnie thought she did nothing all day. But really, Alison Hendrix never got a moment for herself while running the household. So, in the brief twenty minutes she had to spare before the plumber came to look at the guest bathroom, she would do some pilates.
Back to the side-leg circles. Five more and then breathe. One. Two. Three. The phone rang.
"Probably the plumber," she groaned. "Calling to say he'll be late." And so while she'd initially planned to run errands in about an hour, she'd have to stall because of the plumber and wait maybe two hours. By that time the kids would be coming home. These contractor types were never punctual and it always threw her entire day off. Still, the phone wasn't going to answer itself.
She dabbed at her brow with a little towel and tip-toed towards the landline.
"Scarborough Elem. School," the caller ID read. "Hm," Alison squeaked.
"Hendrix household."
"Hello, Mrs. Hendrix? This is Vice Principal Sanders from Scarborough Elementary. Your daughter is on her field trip today and - "
"My baby, is she okay?"
The panic was already knocking on Alison's ribcage.
"Everything's fine, ma'am."
"I didn't ask if everything was fine. I asked if my baby was okay."
"Your daughter is perfectly fine. We're just calling the parents of the students on the trip to let them know that there has been an incident downtown near the museum that they're visiting."
"An incident."
"One man shot another man. But they've both been obtained by the police and everything is - "
Alison's shriek pierced into the phone and through the Vice Principal's skull.
"Not at the museum. Near the museum. The bus has turned around and is picking the children up immediately from a nearby cafe. The cops have secured the area. We assure you that everyone is fine. We have the situation handled and we're sorry for any upset this has caused."
Alison felt her breath grow shorter and shorter, as if someone were binding her chest and pulling tighter and tighter with each go-round.
"Thank you for calling," Alison said between sharp breaths. "I'll be heading over there."
"There's no need, Mrs. Hendrix. The bus will be arriving any moment now. You can pick her up from school if you'd like."
"You can't tell me where I can and cannot pick up my own child."
"I understand your frustration, Mrs. Hendrix…"
"Next time, please don't organize a school field trip to a downtown murder."
Despite the searing pain of the acid threatening to rise in her throat, Alison hung up the phone lightly. She emptied her glass of wine as if it were a deep intake of air, zipped up her bubble vest, and grabbed the keys to the minivan.
She called Donnie from the car but he didn't answer. Not surprising. He was in meetings all day. She left him one or two panicked messages about how they should've owned up to their tax bracket and put the kids in private school like her parents had done with her. Then the kids would've been taken to one of the uptown museums. She knew she wasn't making any sense and yet she was declaring these things as if they were the the most solid of axioms.
Alison almost never went downtown, but she thought about making the trip much more than she'd ever be willing to admit. The culture, the nightlife, the jagged architecture. Sights and sounds that didn't register on her radar. As a boy, Donnie grew up downtown, so he'd experienced some of that world. Alison never had. She wondered sometimes - not often - if she would've enjoyed the sort of childhood her husband had had, the kind other women had had. What that other life would've been like. If she would've married Donnie. If she would've adopted. The choices were overwhelming, really, when given one body and one mind to govern. It's only one out the billions of others in the world, and yet it's the most daunting task. To hold yourself responsible for your own decisions. To be the only driving force behind this singular being, capable of so much - creation, destruction, burning bridges, building families - but not producing new life. She would only ever be Alison. Never would she look into the eyes of another human borne from her DNA.
Her temples swelled with the stress of introspection. This is why she never drove downton. She flipped on the radio to drown out her thoughts and sent herself into a spiraling panic as the news blared at her from the dashboard.
Once there, Alison parked a few blocks away from the commotion. She would've driven straight into the crime scene were it not for the yellow tape. She wandered frazzled for a couple minutes, letting the chaos swallow her whole. A cop car swept in front of her, its flickering lights calling her attention to her daughter's class seen through the glass window of a coffee shop just ahead. For the first time in what felt like hours, she took an actual deep breath.
Alison jumped into a power walk towards her destination, the sight of her daughter's pink backpack guiding her through the mess. Her determined gaze was only obstructed twice. Once, when the plumber called her phone and she ignored it. Then again as a blurry figure sprinted towards her in uniform, rushing at the yellow tape. This disruption was not as easy to dismiss. Alison noticed something strange about the woman's mannerisms as she came running. About her body, the tics that betrayed the presence of a little too much substance coursing through the bloodstream. Things she'd noticed about herself after a hard day.
"Can't be," she thought. "She's a cop on the job."
The hurried figure crossed Alison's path in a huff. Still running, the woman glanced back at Alison to make sure she hadn't hit her by accident. She hadn't, so no harm done. But her eyebrows furrowed anyway, as if Alison had caused her some injustice. That's when Alison saw that it wasn't just the way she moved that signaled something strange. It was her face. A face that looked too much like her own, though admittedly more haggard and less made up.
Alison recounted only one glass of wine. Maybe one and a half. And that was merely to calm her nerves. Perhaps it was the stress that made her see herself in this other woman's eyes. Anyway, she was gone now, rushing to the scene, ready to help with the witness statements. And Alison had her own little bystander to claim. She proceeded towards the backpack and the welcoming shouts of "Mommy! Mommy!" but, no matter how hard she tried to focus, she couldn't get that woman's presence out of her mind.
Directly in front of the coffee shop, Alison stopped someone she could only describe as an "urban" man running up behind the strange woman. She startled him and asked which district those cops were in, pointing to the crowd that encircled her mysterious acquaintance. He told her that that team belonged to the next precinct over and was just providing reinforcement. She made a mental note and decided that once she got her daughter home safely, she'd pursue the lead.
"Are you a witness ma'am?" he asked her.
"No, i'm picking my daughter up from a field trip. A field trip to a crime scene, evidently."
"I'm sorry, ma'am. I'm going to need you to step away from the scene. We'll have many more vehicles coming this way."
Alison pursed her lips and lifted her hand lightly to scratch the hair behind her ear.
"You should not organize homicides at school field trips," she said, as if he'd personally orchestrated the event.
He gave her a horrid look that would've permanently been stamped in her mind if that mental real estate were not already taken up from the strange woman's face.
After heading into the coffee shop and extricating her offspring, she packed her daughter into the minivan, shut the door, and turned her wheels right around in the direction of three-car garages, the memory of her own distorted reflection confronting her with every blink.