Leaving Haven (17 page)

“I'm fine,” Georgia said. “Just pregnant.”

“Need any help?”

“No. I'll be right down.”

Georgia went into the bathroom to empty the wastebasket and rinse out her mouth. She sat down to pee, still half-asleep. It wasn't until she stood up and turned around to flush that she saw the blood.

11

Alice

Eight Months Earlier, November 2011

W
ren's voice on the phone sounded odd, desperate. “Can you pick me up right now?” she said. “I feel sick.”

“Now?” Alice looked at her watch. “It's one fifteen.”

“I know. I feel sick. I need to come home.”

Alice sighed. She had two lesson plans to prepare for tomorrow's classes, as well as a quiz to write up, and she had to take Gremlin to the vet at three forty-five. “Are you in the clinic? Let me talk to the nurse.”

“I'm not in the clinic. I'm really sick so I'm in the bathroom and I need you to come to school and get me now.”

“What do you mean? Are you throwing up?”

“No. Yes. Yes. Come now.”

“Wren, I can't come to school and just drive away with you. You have to go to the clinic and get sent home, or I have to come check you out. You know the rules.”

“Mom”—Wren started to cry—“I have to come home before the bell at three. There's no way I can take the bus. Please, come get me now.”

Her voice was so insistent, so pleading, that Alice heard herself say, “All right. I'm coming right now. I'll go to the office and talk to Ms. Henderson.”

“Thank you. Text me when you get here and I'll meet you in the lobby.”

“Are you skipping class?”

But Wren had hung up.

T
HE
STORY
CAME
out all at once, so confusing that Alice didn't understand half of it, so Wren had to take some deep breaths and drink some vanilla hemp milk and then tell it again. They sat at the glass-and-chrome kitchen table, in the fine cherrywood chairs Alice had chosen so carefully. Alice leaned forward, her eyes glued on Wren. Wren sat on the edge of her chair, her words tumbling over themselves like water over stones.

For two or three months now, Wren said, she'd been exchanging e-mails with a boy at school, a boy who signed his e-mails “Alonzo All-Star Superman Briggs” or, as their correspondence progressed, “Al.” He'd e-mailed Wren initially in September, mentioning that he liked her cheerleading routine at the football game, and asking if she'd write him back. She had been flattered and of course had written him back, a friendly note of thanks, curious as to his identity.

“I don't want to tell you who I am,” he wrote back. “I'm kind of shy around girls and it's easier writing to you than talking to you.”

She wrote him again. They started to e-mail back and forth every day, then several times a day. He told her more and more about himself. His parents were divorced, he was an only child, and he loved basketball, football, baseball, and soccer, in that order. He hated the same teachers she did, liked the same books she did, and had even been to the Adirondacks and knew Lake Conundrum, where she vacationed with the Bings. She told him about her secret desire to go to the School of Performing Arts in New York, about how she felt like she didn't really fit in with the “popular” girls like Liza and Emilie, but didn't know where she did fit. He said he understood.

Alice tried hard to follow the story through Wren's hiccups and tears. Wren logged on to the computer and showed her bits of the correspondence. Alice was still incredulous that her daughter, who was not stupid, would pour her heart out to some unknown correspondent online.

“But, Wren,” Alice said. “How could you get so involved with someone you didn't know?” She felt a sudden clutch of fear. “How do you even know he was really a student at your school? Did you tell him where we live? Did he try to meet you in person?” She was completely unprepared for what came next.

“No, he didn't try to meet me in person,” Wren said, “because he wasn't real.” She lifted one elbow and wiped her nose on her shoulder. “It was someone else pretending to be Al. Al was totally made up.” She looked at her mother, her eyes full of embarrassment and confusion. “It was Emilie and Liza.”

“What?!”

“And today they told everyone at school.” Wren started to cry again. “And they made jokes about it.”

Alice felt her rage rise in her like a live thing. Her head pounded.

“Wren.” Alice leaned forward and locked her eyes on Wren's. “This was an unbelievably mean thing to do, and Liza and Emilie will have to be punished for it. It was cruel, it was wrong, and it may even be illegal.”

Wren's eyes filled. “I feel so bad,” she said. “I really liked Al. And he liked me.”

Alice stood up, walked around the table, and knelt on the floor in front of her daughter. She hugged her, hard. “I know you did. And I'm sorry.”

“Mom, you can't tell anyone,” Wren said. “If you do anything it will make it worse.”

“Worse?” Alice sat back on her heels. She still could not believe it. She wanted to smash something.

“Wren, this is bullying. I have to talk to Georgia, at the least, and I have to talk to the school.”

“Please,
no.
I can pretend I don't care, that it's not a big deal.”

“It
is
a big deal. It's a huge deal. We can't just ignore it.”

“
Please.
I only called you to come get me today so I wouldn't have to ride the bus. Don't tell. They'll hate me forever.”

“Wren.”

“Mom, please.”

Alice stood up. “Listen, I'll talk to your dad when he gets home from work. We'll figure out how to handle this, and we'll talk to you about it, okay? I won't make any phone calls—yet.” She put a hand under Wren's small, pointed chin and lifted Wren's face toward hers. “This is jealousy. You are a wonderful, trusting, talented, beautiful girl. I know this hurts, but don't let it crush you.”

Wren looked at her with those big dark eyes. “Will you make me hot chocolate?”

“Of course. Good idea.”

She gave Wren one more hug, and let her go.

“You promise you won't call anyone?” Wren said over her shoulder as she walked out of the kitchen.

But Alice pretended to be busy with the cocoa and didn't answer.

A
LICE
HAD
BEEN
stunned to find herself pregnant after her honeymoon, two months before she graduated from Georgetown. They had planned to wait at least five years to have a baby, to give Alice time to get her master's. Alice loved school—she'd spent the last four summers taking courses, hence her graduation in just three years—and couldn't wait to start graduate school. And she needed time to adjust to the idea of having a baby—something Duncan had made clear he wanted from their third date. She had no confidence she'd be a good mother—look at the role model she'd had.

“This is a terrible time for us to have a baby,” she had said to him. “I'm supposed to start graduate school in the fall.” She was so terrified that she even suggested, once, that maybe they should consider giving the baby up for adoption, wait to have a family until she was finished with school, more ready and capable than she was now. Alice had wanted to be a teacher her whole life; she wanted to get her graduate degree. She had seen what being an unwilling parent had done to her own mother and didn't want to be that mother to her own child.

“Oh, Alice,” Duncan had said. “You'll be a great mom. You're the most competent person I know. You'll be able to handle school and the baby. I'll help. It will work out.”

But then, Duncan was almost thirty, settled into a good career at Covington, ready for a family. And so Alice found herself on an unexpected train, hurtling toward motherhood. She spent her last trimester working on her master's, poring over texts and writing papers on micro- and macroeconomic theory, econometrics, economic history. At night, charts and numbers danced through her dreams, mingled with dreams about babies falling downstairs.

None of her friends were even married yet, let alone pregnant. They liked to go out drinking or dancing or prowling for guys after work, all things Alice couldn't do now. Duncan worked long hours. Alice spent a lot of time alone, trying to come up with ideas for her thesis and ignoring her burgeoning belly. The first time she felt the baby kick was in summer school, in Professor B.'s quantitative economics class. The kick startled her so much she almost fell out of her chair.
Oh, my God, it's alive!
she wanted to shout, like someone in a bad horror movie. But this wasn't a horror movie; it was Alice's life.

When Wren was born, after ten hours of a textbook-perfect labor and delivery, Alice's first thought was that she was so
small
. She weighed barely six pounds, less than a sack of grapefruit. Her skin was so pale Alice could trace the fine, threadlike veins in her eyelids, see the quick throb of her heartbeat at her temples. She looked so vulnerable and yet so exquisite in her tiny perfection. Alice felt a rush of love and terror like nothing she had experienced before or would ever experience again.

“She looks like a little bird,” Duncan said.

The baby opened her mouth and began to cry.

“ ‘A shrill clamor rises like jingling from tiny, high-pitched bells,' ” he quoted.

“What?” Alice said.

“From a poem. ‘Baby Wrens' Voices' is the name of it.”

“She's a wren,” Alice said.

Duncan smiled. “That would be a good name for her.”

Alice thought he was mad.
Wren
was not a name for a child. Alice wanted to give her daughter a reasonable, human being name, a name like Emily or Beth.

Duncan continued the poem: “‘Who'd have guessed such a small house contained so many voices? The sound they make is the pure sound of life's hunger.' ”

Alice looked at the baby in her arms—who really did look like a wren and who was certainly screaming with the “pure sound of life's hunger”—and was filled with love for Duncan, who held things like this poem in his mind, and with love for this tiny, precious baby, the most unusual and special creature ever born, who should have an unusual, special name.

“Okay,” she had said. “Let's name her Wren.”

She bent to the infant in her arms. “Hello, you,” she said, trying to get over the fear she felt. “I'm your mother.”

T
HE
FIRST
THING
Alice did after taking Wren's cocoa upstairs was walk down to the basement, pull on her red boxing gloves, and punch the heavy bag hanging in the corner as hard as she could. She hit the bag with a succession of eight or ten hard punches, then turned slightly and gave it a couple of solid roundhouse kicks for good measure. She stood there for a minute, panting, and realized that she had not even begun to expend her anger. She took off the gloves and walked in circles around the big room in the basement for a few minutes until her heart stopped racing, then walked over to the pull-up bar, reached up, and did five quick chin-ups. She walked in more circles.

She did not want to be this angry; she couldn't think clearly, and she hated not thinking clearly. She should call Duncan; she should call Georgia; she should call the school guidance counselor, and the principal. But she couldn't, because she was so angry that she was liable to lose her temper and start yelling or—even worse, burst into tears.

Liza
. That was the thing that made this betrayal so deep. Liza and Wren had known each other for all of their twelve years. They'd napped together in each other's cribs while Georgia and Alice drank tea; played and hugged and bickered and made up together; and spent every birthday and Christmas Eve and July Fourth together. Sure, they'd always been different, almost like the sisters in the fairy tale “Snow White and Rose Red,” because Wren was so quiet and pale and Liza so rambunctious and rosy. But they had seemed such perfect complements to each other. Wren was the graceful, natural athlete who patiently taught Liza dance steps and cheers, applauding when, after hours and hours, Liza would master something that Wren could do in her sleep. Liza was the fearless adventurer who encouraged Wren to jump off the high dive at the pool, and taught her how to drive the little outboard motorboat at the lake, demonstrating for her how easy it all was, why there was nothing to be afraid of.

And Liza was so creative! One time Alice and Georgia had taken the girls out to lunch for Wren's sixth birthday. The waiter brought over pages for the girls to color, a picture of a boy with a pail gathering blueberries. Wren had colored her page with great care, choosing dark blue for the berries, green for the leaves, light blue for the boy's overalls, yellow for the sun. Liza, in turn, drew strawberries and watermelons on the blueberry bushes, colored them in with furious scribbles of red and bright pink, colored the boy's overalls purple, and drew bright orange stripes on them. She drew pale lavender clouds in the sky, colored in a sunrise with yellows and pinks, filled every square inch of the page with color so there was not one dot of white space left. Her picture was crazy, but beautiful. Alice, who would never have colored outside the lines herself, had been awestruck.