Leaving Haven (14 page)

Alice pushed herself away from the tree she had been leaning against. “So, that's that. I've offered, and the offer stands, for however long you want to think about it.” She smiled at Georgia. “Now let's walk. If you have time, we can do the five-mile loop instead of the three-mile.”

Georgia stood up. She opened her mouth to say something, to say thank you at the very least, even though that seemed inadequate. But before she could summon the words, Alice reached out and grabbed Georgia's wrist with one hand.

“Hush,” Alice said, looking into Georgia's eyes. “I know. I want to. You're the closest thing to a sister I've ever had, or ever will have.”

And she let go of Georgia's arm and set off down the path, beneath the tender pink leaves of the white oaks and the yellow blooms of the tulip poplars. Georgia watched her, just for a second, and then scrambled to catch up.

9

Alice

Six Months Earlier, January 2012

I
'm going to teach you how to make an omelet,” John said.

“I can cook,” Alice said.

John smiled and shook his head. “Not like I can, honey.”

She looked at him and tried to suppress a smile. John was one of the most annoying men she had ever met, and yet—she understood better now why Georgia had married him. He was cocky almost to the point of arrogance, opinionated, messy—but he also was whip-smart, intense, and, when something really engaged him, surprisingly focused. When she had come to him about Wren's crisis in November he had listened, his eyes on hers, nodding, asking questions. He'd been defensive, of course—what parent wouldn't be?—but he had understood, really
understood
on a gut level, in a way Duncan had not. She had decided during that first conversation that the best way to deal with the whole thing would be for her to handle it with John, since Georgia was in no condition to handle anything and Duncan just did not get it.

So in the last six weeks Alice and John had spent hours together, talking and texting and e-mailing and meeting in odd places like the Great Wall Supermarket, where no one spoke English, and Alice looked at the live turtles and fish and snakes on display and walked the aisles with John as he searched for things she'd never heard of, like
kai-lan
and
galangal
. Sometimes they met in Alice's car, parked on the street in some unfamiliar neighborhood, with Alice leaning back against the driver's-side door and John, who hated the cold weather, hunched up in the passenger seat trying to stay warm.

The talk centered on only their daughters at first. What Liza had done to Wren was flat-out cruel. The feelings it aroused in Alice were something visceral that scared her with their intensity. She responded to this fear by forcing herself to focus on details, to gather evidence, to make a case of hard facts. She printed out all the e-mails that had been sent to Wren and organized them by date. She took notes during every phone call with Emilie's mother and kept those in another folder, also organized by date. She even took notes during her early conversations with John.

“God, you are one organized woman,” John said, when she showed him her folders.

Alice was embarrassed. It was true; she was not haphazard and fun like Georgia.

“I know,” she said. “It's a little compulsive, but I want to make sure I'm accurate. I don't want my need to protect Wren to keep me from thinking clearly, so—”

“Hey,” John said. “Being organized is not a bad thing. God, Georgia drives me crazy sometimes. Do you know what it's like to live with someone who can't remember where she filed the title for the car or her birth certificate, and who loses her credit cards two or three times a year?”

As the weeks progressed, their conversations centered less on Liza and Wren, and more on themselves. They were both perfectionists—John about his cooking, Alice about almost everything. They were both only children, something they talked about a lot, because John had hated being an only child, as she had, and had never wanted Liza to be an only. Alice even told him a little bit about her mother, something she rarely discussed with anyone. But John was a good person to talk to, someone who didn't take things as seriously as she did, worrying them over and over in her mind until they were chafed and worn.

She teased him about watching martial arts movies (something that annoyed Georgia no end) and he surprised her by telling her about getting beat up as a kid, watching Bruce Lee movies, and becoming fascinated with wing chun, a kind of self-defense. “It's all about being relaxed but focused,” he said, “so you can use an opponent's own energy against him.” Alice, who had spent a lifetime trying to learn to relax, told him about the joy she found in strength training, how she'd taught herself to do pull-ups by standing on a stepladder, gripping the bar, and lowering herself down slowly, until she built up enough strength to pull herself up. It required so much concentration that it drove everything else from her mind, for that moment at least.

They talked about the kids, about Liza's recklessness, Wren's naïveté. They talked about how funny it was that they had known each other for a dozen years but never really known each other. The only things they
didn't
talk about, other than in passing, were their spouses, something Alice hadn't even noticed until the last week or so.

Now, though, here she was alone with John in his restaurant at ten o'clock on a Tuesday morning, ostensibly to discuss what to do about Emilie and Liza, and realizing, with a growing clarity, that she had been lying to herself for quite a while.

“This is called a Poor Man's Omelet,” John said. “I can make it while we talk.”

He stood at the stove in the restaurant's small kitchen, with a black sauté pan on the burner in front of him. Alice stood at the side of the stove, trying not to lean against anything because she didn't want to get a grease stain on her new pants, which she had bought because she was now teaching an evening economics seminar for journalists and wanted to look even more professional than she usually did. So she had spent quite a lot of money on the pants, which were in a color called Nocturnal Sea and felt worth it to Alice because they made her somewhat athletic butt look much more curvaceous, although she chided herself for even having that thought.

“Two cups of cubed French bread,” John said, turning around to the cutting board that lay behind him, on the kitchen island. He picked up the cutting board and slid the bread cubes into the pan, where they began to sizzle in the hot olive oil. “Day-old bread is actually even better for this than fresh bread. It makes better croutons.”

Alice had no desire to learn how to make an omelet—she was quite adept at scrambled eggs, thank you very much, since she had made them throughout her childhood for dinner at least three times a week while her mother was out on dates or with her bowling league or playing bridge. Alice didn't really like eggs now. She hated bridge, too.

“So, back to Emilie,” Alice said. “I called her mom, as we discussed, and explained that Emilie was the ringleader behind this bullying of Wren, and that if it happens again I'm going to the principal.”

John nodded, and reached over to grab a spatula from the metal canister on the counter next to the stove. His hand brushed against her arm.

“And you know what she said?”

John slid the spatula under the bread cubes and flipped them over with an expert twist of his wrist, and lifted his eyes to her face. “What?”

“She said, ‘
My
daughter? I still haven't seen any real evidence that there's a problem.' ” Alice waited a beat to let this information sink in. “And this is
after
I forwarded her all those e-mails. She said anyone could have written those from Emilie's computer. Seriously.”

Duncan had reacted to this anecdote with a placating remark about people wanting to believe the best of their own kids. But what Alice wanted was outrage.

“That's taking mother love a little far,” John said. “She doesn't want to believe her Precious is a conniving bitch.”

Which was exactly what Alice had been thinking but was too polite to say.

“Now,” John said, “add a couple cloves of minced garlic and tomato.” He picked up another, smaller cutting board and scraped the garlic into the pan with the blade of a knife. It sizzled and sent up a rich aroma, and he added a handful of chopped tomatoes. “Smell that?”

“Yes,” Alice said. “I love garlic. So I've been thinking about what I want to say to Dr. Lawson, the principal. If I tell her the whole story, it drags Liza in, and some of the other girls as well as Emilie.”

“I know. And you know I've talked to Liza. But that's the price she's going to have to pay for being part of this in the first place.”

“But if I go to the principal, Georgia will have to know this is more than the little blip she thinks it is.”

John sighed. “Right. And Georgia will be very upset, which is the one thing that can't happen right now.”

He reached for the large bottle of olive oil on a shelf above the stove and drizzled it over the croutons and garlic, then reached for a bowl on the counter. He poured several well-beaten eggs from the bowl into the pan and began to shake the pan as the eggs sizzled. Within what seemed like seconds he had slid a spatula around the edges, placed an inverted plate over the pan, flipped the whole thing over, and slid the omelet back into the pan, with the cooked side now up.

“Neat trick,” she said.

“That's what all the women say,” John said, and looked at her and grinned.

And there was something about that grin, and the look in his eyes, that made Alice realize that she did not really need to be standing in the kitchen of Bing's alone with John. She understood that these meetings with John, which had started out of a real need to do something about the situation with Liza and Wren, had become something more, and that she should not be here, dressed in too-expensive pants that made her butt look good.

“I have to go,” she said.

“What do you mean? I made you an omelet!”

“I hate eggs,” Alice said. “I should have told you.”

He looked at her with eyes that knew.

“Okay,” he said. “Till next time.”

There won't be a next time,
Alice thought.

A
LICE
HAD
MEANT
it, after that day at the restaurant. She would not meet with John alone again. But then Wren came home from school a week later and said, “They're still doing it.”

“Doing what?”

Wren put her backpack down on the stool at the counter, unzipped it, and reached inside. She pulled out a folded piece of paper and handed it to Alice. “I found this in my locker.”

Alice, who had been in the middle of reading a conference paper on equilibrium dynamics in economic growth models, closed her laptop. She opened the piece of paper. “Hey, babe,” it read. “Looking good today. Love the shoes. Your boy, Al.”

“That's it,” Alice said, standing up. Her throat felt tight, the muscles of her neck and jaw taut. She realized that both her hands were clenched into fists and uncurled her fingers. “Enough. This ends now. Do you know who it was?”

“Mom, I don't want you to tell the principal. Everyone will hate me.”

“
Wren
.” Alice walked over to her daughter, held her sweet, troubled face between her hands. “If you don't stand up to bullies, it
never
ends. It's not right. You don't deserve this.”

“I know,” Wren said, turning her head away from Alice so that Alice dropped her hands. “But you don't understand what it's like to be in seventh grade.”

Which was true, in a way. Alice in seventh grade had not been pretty or outgoing, like Wren, or good at dance or sports or English. She had liked math, which was the only thing about seventh grade that felt easy and natural. She wore no-name jeans and sweaters that looked like the popular Forenza sweaters but weren't, because she had to buy her own clothes at places within walking distance of the apartment and not at stores like Benetton and The Limited that were all the way out at the mall. Most of the girls talked to each other in ways Alice didn't really understand, a kind of code she hadn't been given. Her only friend was a boy named Selden Howard, a math genius with a sarcastic sense of humor and a passionate devotion to Bob Dylan.

And of course Alice had no idea, none, about how to
mother
a girl in seventh grade. Wren's adolescence had flummoxed her in a way she had never felt flummoxed before, because she had no road map for parenting a child Wren's age, and the guidebooks, as Alice thought of all the parenting manuals, were much less specific once a child left toddlerhood. Alice's memories of her own mother during those years included awakening and walking into the kitchen to make herself a piece of toast to find her English teacher (her
married
English teacher) drinking coffee at the kitchen table after spending the night with her mother. Since Wren had started seventh grade, Alice had done what she had always done since becoming a parent: (1) read how-to books and (2) studied other mothers, especially, irony of ironies, Georgia.