Leaving Haven (20 page)

“I talked to Liza,” Georgia said.

Alice stiffened.

“And of course she told me there's nothing to worry about, but I can't help but worry. And I talked to John about it, or tried to, but he was so odd. He said he'd take care of it, which surprised me, because he usually wants nothing to do with this kind of ‘drama,' as he calls it. Did you talk to Wren?”

Alice nodded. “I'm sure there's a lot we don't know. I hope it will blow over.”

Georgia thought this was a ridiculous response from responsible, thorough, efficient Alice. “Blow over? But—”

“Georgia!”

Alice stood up at the sound of the front door opening, and Polly's voice.

“Are you decent? The gang's all here, and I mean
all
.”

Chessy came in first, wearing a flowing rust-colored top with a batik print and black leggings, with the baby in her arms. Polly was behind her, holding on to Teddy with one hand. Ez, who looked as though he hadn't slept in four days (and likely had not), hung back in the doorway, probably hoping another male might show up to mitigate the overwhelming estrogenic effect of Chessy, Polly, Georgia, and Alice all reveling over a new baby, and a female baby at that. Ez shot Teddy a quick look of solidarity, but Teddy was already on the floor trying to slide under the bed. Ez looked like he wished he could do the same.

Alice scooped up the lunch tray and took it over to the dresser, and Chessy sat down on the edge of the bed, leaning forward so Georgia could see the baby's face inside the bundle of blankets.

“She's so big!” Georgia said. She noted the baby's hair, a soft brown, and her eyes, a pale gray. Maybe her baby would look like this one, plump and brown haired and light eyed. Ez had dark hair and dark eyes, like John.

“Eight pounds, twelve ounces,” Polly said.

“She's fat,” Chessy said, “so she certainly doesn't take after Polly.”

“Does she have a name?” Georgia held her breath. She had hoped Ez would be willing to give up on the E-L-F naming tradition in the Fletcher family.

“Lily. Lily Blue Francesca Fletcher,” Chessy said.

“Lily Blue?”

“Yes. I love the name Lily and she was conceived during a blue moon. Lily Blue.” Chessy's voice dared her to argue.

Ez, still holding up the door frame, blushed at the mention of conception. Chessy shot him a look. “After the last thirty-six hours, Ez, you can't be embarrassed because I say the word
conceived.
I mean, you just saw—”

Ez raised a hand. “Yeah, I know what I saw.”

Georgia took the baby from Chessy's arms and held her, bent forward to sniff the top of the baby's head. “Oh, Chessy. She is so beautiful.”

Georgia held the baby for the entire half hour they all stayed. Alice tried to leave, but Polly waved her back, saying, “Oh, come on. You're family, too.” Alice did come over to admire the baby, who was fast asleep in Georgia's arms, but professed no desire to hold her. Georgia asked for details about the birth, at which point Ez turned pale and Chessy said, “Forget it. I vowed never to be a ‘birth story' person and I have no intention of going back on that vow.” Then Polly said she had to pick up Gracie, her five-year-old, from kindergarten, and Chessy said she had to go, too, because she had completely ignored Pickup Chicks while she was in the hospital and at least had to check her e-mail.

There was a lengthy search for Polly's keys, which were found in the basement after Teddy confessed to dropping them down the laundry chute. Chessy and Ez had to change the baby's diaper, which involved pulling way too many supplies out of an overstuffed diaper bag and way too much discussion about the best way to hold the baby's legs and wipe her bottom and fasten the sticky tape on the front of the diaper, until Polly finally said, “You could have negotiated peace in the Middle East in the amount of time it's taken you to change one diaper. Can we get going, please?”

Georgia felt buoyed by all of it, light with hope after the fear and boredom of the last few weeks. Here she was, pregnant with the baby she had so longed for, surrounded by her sisters and this beautiful, healthy baby of Chessy's and by Alice, her dearest friend. Her business was booming and she loved her work, and John was happy with Bing's, which was booming, too. Sure, Liza was a bit of a worry, but what adolescent wasn't? She had everything she had ever wanted, and more.

She flashed a smile as Polly bent to kiss her, as Ez held up the baby's tiny arm in a little wave good-bye. Even Chessy said, “I can't remember when I've seen you look so happy, Georgie,” and made some wry joke about labor and childbirth wiping the smile off her face. Everyone laughed—everyone, that is, except Alice, who had looked solemn throughout the entire visit.

But then,
Georgia thought,
if my child was a bully I'd probably feel kind of blue, too
.

13

Alice

Ten Months Earlier, August 2011

I
'm sorry,” the postal clerk said, “but the machine won't accept your debit card. Do you have another card?”

Alice stared at her, confused. She was paying for a roll of stamps, forty-four dollars, and could not believe their checking account was so depleted. She had paid the bills just two days ago, and Duncan's paycheck should have gone into the account this morning.

“Today is Friday, right?” Alice said.

The clerk nodded. “Do you have another card you want to use?”

In a daze, Alice handed over her credit card, rolling through numbers in her brain. Once she was back out in the car, she logged on to their checking account and there it was, in red letters: “Balance, -$115.43.”

She called Duncan. “I'm sorry, Alice,” he said, “but I can't discuss this right now. I've got to be in court at two.”

“Of course you do,” she said. For a minute she felt badly about being snippy with Duncan, who was never snippy, but then she thought:
Why shouldn't I be upset? Why do I have to figure all this stuff out?

She had always felt proud of her egalitarian marriage and her egalitarian husband, the man who cleaned up the kitchen every night after dinner, who reorganized the pantry and tossed out any can or carton past its due date, who ironed his own shirts. When some of the other women in her book group or fitness class complained about their husbands, Alice was notably silent. She didn't have anything to complain about. Duncan noticed when she was tired; he noticed when things needed to be done; he pitched in and helped all the time. She was lucky.

But things had been less egalitarian since he had started this job with the Innocence Project. Little chores that had been his domain had fallen to her, like booking the rental house for their summer trip to the Outer Banks, or collecting all the recycling on Tuesday nights, or untangling all the doctors' bills and insurance claims. It hadn't seemed like much at first, but over the past four months the list of things Alice had taken on so Duncan could save the world had become a little overwhelming, and the resentment she felt was beginning to seep into all the corners of their life.

Their finances had taken a hit, too. Alice wasn't afraid of living on a tight budget—she had spent most of her life doing without—but she did feel that Duncan should at least have talked it over with her before making this huge change. She said as much after dinner that night, once Wren had gone up to bed and she and Duncan were in the living room in their usual spots, Duncan in the armchair with his feet up on the ottoman, his computer on his lap, Alice on the leather sofa, folding laundry.

“You know our checking account is overdrawn,” she said. She stood up so she could fold one of the big flat sheets from their bed, careful that it didn't brush against the crystal vase on the coffee table.

“Right. I'll figure it out,” he said.

She put the folded sheet on the bottom of the empty laundry basket. “I didn't realize things were that tight.”

“It's just juggling,” he said. “Sometimes I mail a bill and it gets there faster than I thought, before our paychecks go in. I'll take care of it.”

Alice felt an edge of irritation. “Maybe I should handle the bills,” she said. “Because you're so busy these days.”

“This is the first time we've been overdrawn,” Duncan said. “It won't happen again.”

“It never happened when you were at Covington,” Alice said.

Duncan looked up from his laptop. “And what's your point?”

Alice pushed the laundry basket away. “We are living paycheck to paycheck now, and we haven't done that for
years
. To be honest, I'm still surprised that you made this job change without discussing it with me first.”

“You knew I hated my job at Covington.”

“Yes. But a lot of lawyers hate their jobs. It's not that I expected you to stay there forever if you were unhappy, but why didn't you talk to me about it?”

“I did. I told you about that case I worked on, with that woman from Dynergy. She should never have been convicted.”

Alice nodded. “Right.”

“It just wasn't fair.” Duncan shook his head. “And I hate that.”

“I know,” Alice said. “But it's quite a leap from working on
one case
that ended badly to quitting your job as partner to work for a nonprofit. And I admire the work you do—I do. I believe in it. But why didn't you talk to me before you jumped?”

“Because I thought you knew how I felt.”

“How could I know how you felt if you didn't talk to me?”

“Because you're my wife.”

Duncan said this with a certain stubbornness, the same way you would say “Because the sky is blue” or “Because the earth is round” or something else that was so obvious it shouldn't require explanation.

Alice raised her eyebrows. “And—?”

“And you knew I wasn't the kind of person who would be happy forever representing investment companies in insider trading investigations. I made a leap to doing something that really matters to me.”

“I understand that.” Alice didn't know how to make her point without sounding selfish, as though she didn't care that some poor sod spent nineteen years in jail for a crime he didn't commit. “Of course I want you to have work you love, but you made a leap from a job that paid a lot of money to a job that pays a lot less money and that requires you to work more hours. I'm not saying that's wrong, but it's affected our life quite a bit.”

His pale blue eyes caught hers. “Our mortgage is small because we bought the house in 1998, and we're both fairly thrifty—or ‘Scottish,' as my mother would say. I didn't think it would be a problem.”

“You still should have talked to me,” she said. To Alice, this whole issue revealed the downside of his desire to protect her, to guide her, to watch over her. She had loved his protectiveness at nineteen; now that she was in her thirties she didn't want to be protected quite so much.

“I don't question your decisions,” he said. “What made you decide you wanted to donate an egg to Georgia? That came out of the blue, in my opinion.”

“I talked that over with you,” she said, throwing the unfolded pillowcases back in the basket. “We talked about it for weeks.”

He shrugged.

Alice couldn't really explain—not even to herself—why she wanted to donate her eggs to Georgia. But the minute Georgia had mentioned the idea of donor eggs, back in April, Alice's first thought had been
Mine. Georgia could have my eggs
. The idea had lurked in her mind even before that, on days when she and Georgia would run across a mom with a young baby in Starbucks or at the mall, and Georgia's features would shift, her smile would dim, and sorrow and longing would color her whole being.
I would give you a baby
. She was six years younger than Georgia, healthy, fit, in her prime childbearing years. But she was an uncomfortable mother; Georgia was a natural.

Part of it was her own yearning for the kind of mother she had never had, as well as her yearning for the kind of mother she would never quite be. Part of it was her longing for a sister, for someone who would be her friend and confidante and adversary and yet linked to her forever through a fierce, shared love. Part of it was her yearning to do something worthwhile, something more meaningful than teaching bored eighteen-year-olds the fine points of Keynesian theory. She had explained all that to Duncan, and to the counselor at the fertility center. Duncan had been fully on board.

“Do you
not
want me to donate my eggs?” she said to him now. “Because I've been on birth control pills and Lupron injections and FSH injections and am about to burst with eggs. If you've changed your mind, now is the time to tell me, not next week.”

“I haven't changed my mind,” he said. He turned his eyes back to the computer in his lap. Alice watched him for a moment, trying to read his face as he read. The longer she looked at him the more unfamiliar he seemed, like saying a word over and over and over in your mind until it loses all meaning and begins to sound like nonsense.