Leaving Haven (23 page)

“And she didn't even get an A,” the nurse said with indignation, as though a top grade for her daughter might have eased the sting of her husband's infidelity.

“Maybe if your ex was better in bed Olivia would have gotten the A,” one of the other nurses said, and they all laughed.

At that point, though, Georgia didn't give a shit about the nurse's ex-husband or his mistress or the nurse herself or even John, because she couldn't think about anything but the towering pain that was ripping through her now at such short intervals that she couldn't tell where one contraction ended and the next began. At some point Polly came in and took her hand and told Georgia to squeeze it, but Georgia didn't want to touch anyone or anything or
be touched
by anyone or anything. Chessy arrived shortly after that and came over and said, “I thought I could help, but honestly it's making my vagina hurt just to look at you. I'm still sore, you know.”

“Chessy, this is not about you,” Polly said.

“I
know
that,” Chessy said, “but you could still have a little sympathy. I gave birth six months ago to a kid with a head the size of a bowling ball. The memory is pretty fresh.”

“I'm sure,” Polly said, “but maybe you could get over it for just five minutes and support Georgia.”

“I
am
supporting Georgia,” Chessy said. “I'm here, aren't I? Even though blood and hospitals freak me out. Just because you have a wide pelvis and babies with small heads doesn't mean you have to be so unempathetic, Polly. Really.”

“Me, unempathetic?” Polly said. “Oh, that's rich. Just listen to—”

“Shut up!” Georgia yelled.
“I want drugs.”

Polly called the nurse, who paged the doctor, and the doctor came in and checked her and said, “You're too far along. It's too late.”

“You don't know what you're talking about!” Georgia yelled at her. The doctor smiled in what seemed to Georgia to be a very patronizing way. “It's not too late!” Georgia said. “You're wrong. Give me the epidural now!”

The doctor shook her head and smiled again and Georgia thought she had never hated anyone in the world as much as she hated the doctor and her smile at that moment, but then she remembered John and Alice and decided she hated them more. Just the thought of Alice and her long, lean, workout-honed body made Georgia feel like throwing up, especially as she looked down at her gigantic belly and swollen toes, which were all she could see of her feet. “I'm going to throw up,” she said, and the doctor stopped smiling and got a basin and held it for her while she vomited. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and tried to smile at the doctor to show she was sorry for screaming at her, but her smile must have come across as some kind of horrible grimace, because Chessy said, “Jesus Christ, Georgie, stop making that face or you're going to give me nightmares for the rest of my life!”

“It won't be long now,” the doctor said. “Another ten or fifteen minutes and you'll be ready to push.”

Georgia grabbed a fistful of sheet in each hand as the next contraction took hold, riding the wave of pain and waiting for it to peak. In some dark, unthinking part of her she was grateful for the pain, relieved to have something
physical
to wrestle with, to hate, to release.

Georgia had spent most of the last six weeks crying. Things had unraveled very quickly on that Black Tuesday when she discovered the text messages and Duncan arrived at her door. The shock of figuring out the affair had made Georgia sick, literally sick, and she had begun to retch, there at the kitchen table. Duncan—ever the gentleman, even in extremis—grabbed a wastebasket and held her hair as she threw up. The commotion had awakened John, who walked into the kitchen in his T-shirt and boxers, still groggy with sleep, to find Duncan Kinnaird soothing his pregnant wife. At the sight of John, Duncan stood up and threw what Georgia believed must have been the first punch of his life, which caught John on the cheek just under his left eye, opening a cut that bled like crazy. Duncan was so stunned by the success of his punch that much of his anger had dissipated, and he stood there watching the blood pour down John's cheek and saying, “Wow. Oh, wow,” over and over. Georgia had finally stopped vomiting and turned around and said to John, “You need to leave. Now.”

Duncan wouldn't leave Georgia until he was sure she was okay. He asked her where the kettle was and filled it while she rummaged through the drawers for a navy blue dishtowel (blood doesn't show on navy blue!), which she threw at John, who was in the bedroom trying to put his pants on with one hand while holding a bag of frozen peas to his cheek with the other hand. “Don't bleed on the bed,” Georgia said. “Or the rug. Take as much as you can pack because you won't be living here again.”

Every time John tried to say something, every time he said, “Georgia—,” she held up her hand and said, “Don't. Don't say my name. You don't deserve to say my name.” For some reason, she couldn't stand to hear him say it. She needed her name to be solid, real, consistent, because everything else about her self and her life felt unrecognizable now.

Duncan made her a cup of tea and sat at the kitchen table while she called Polly, told her about John and Alice, and asked her to pick Liza up after school and take her overnight while Georgia figured out how to explain to Liza that her father was moving out six weeks before her mother gave birth. John came into the kitchen, the bag of peas now wrapped in the blue dishtowel, his eye swollen almost shut. Duncan looked at once horrified and gratified by what his fist had done to John's face. “Georgia—,” John said once more, at which Georgia winced and Duncan stood up and said, “I think you better leave now,” and John had left.

“I'll wait until your sister comes,” Duncan said, but Georgia shook her head.

“You have your own life to deal with,” she said.

“I don't want to see Alice,” he said. “Not yet.”

“Do you want me to call her?”

“God, Georgia, no. Of course not.”

Georgia felt a strange calm. “I want to talk to her, if it's all right with you.”

“If it will help you, okay.” Duncan had put his arms around her then in an awkward gesture of comfort, an uneasy hug that was somehow redolent of their spouses' embraces. Georgia pulled away and cleared her throat.

“Thank you,” Georgia said. “I'm sorry.”

As soon as he left she called Alice. “I know,” Georgia said, when Alice picked up the phone.

“What?” Alice said.

“Everything.”

Alice didn't speak for a long, long moment. “You mean about Liza and Wren?”

Liza and Wren?
“No,” Georgia said. “I mean about ‘Alec' and ‘Jane.' ”

“Oh, God.”

“Duncan knows, too. And I'm just wondering why,
why
—” Georgia stopped. What did it matter? What did any of it matter? Alice and John had betrayed her, her marriage was over, and that was the reality of Georgia's life now. “Forget it, Alice,” she said. “I don't know why I called.” And she hung up.

On some level, Alice's betrayal hurt even more than John's. It made no sense, she knew, to feel that way, but there it was. Alice was her friend, her confidante, the person she would have turned to in this crisis for love and empathy and the kind of sensible, objective counsel her sisters couldn't provide because they were so angry. And in some ways Alice's betrayal surprised Georgia more than John's. For years Georgia had devoured the daily advice columns in the
Washington Post,
which had to do with infidelity of some sort four or five times a week. She remembered the year before when she had called Polly because she had some vague sense John was interested in Amelia. These things happened sometimes in long-term marriages. But they didn't happen in long-term
friendships
.

Alice was her rock, her true north, steady and unwavering. Things were clear-cut with Alice; there was right and there was wrong and you did what was right and didn't make excuses. Alice's betrayal was the greatest mystery Georgia had ever encountered in her life.

After that Polly and Chessy arrived, the cavalry charging in, and the next day Georgia had to sit down and talk to Liza. And as much as Georgia hated John, she loved Liza more, and she was not going to poison her against her father. Georgia explained that sometimes people went a little crazy, especially when they were middle-aged, like John.

“Being in your late forties is kind of like puberty,” Georgia said. “People can do strange things. Dad has been feeling restless and he needs some time apart so he can think more clearly and then settle down with us again.” Of course hell would freeze over and the skies would rain red drops before she would ever let John move back in, but Georgia thought it best to take things one step at a time.

She explained how much they both loved Liza. She reassured Liza that
it was not her fault,
not even one-tenth of one percent her fault. She didn't say that John was such an incomparable asshole that his visage should grace the marquee of the Asshole Hall of Fame. She didn't mention Alice, and she didn't say anything about the baby, because of course Liza had no idea that her soon-to-be sibling had been conceived via a donor egg.

Liza had been upset; of course she'd been upset. But Polly and Chessy came by and talked to her; over the next few weeks her friends rallied around her. And to tell the truth, it was something to be so central to the drama that everyone in their small town was talking about, about Georgia and John Bing's sudden separation, with that poor Georgia seven and a half months pregnant. Liza was the center of a lot of attention.

It was messy; it was distracting. Georgia was grateful for Liza's distraction because it meant she failed to notice the most basic things, like the fact that Alice never came around, even though she was Georgia's best friend and this was the biggest crisis of Georgia's life. But given the unpleasantness between Wren and Liza earlier in the year, maybe that didn't seem so strange.

Georgia had had just one brief conversation with John in the last six weeks, a phone call that lasted long enough for her to let him know that she would not say anything negative about him to Liza; that he should find a new—and permanent—place to live; and that she had already hired a very good lawyer.

“I'm sorry,” he said.

“Oh, well, that changes everything,” Georgia said, her voice thick with rage.

“What about the baby?” he said.

Georgia didn't know. She didn't know what to do with the fact that this baby she knew and loved already with all her heart was the baby of her husband and his mistress. She was so conflicted she couldn't talk about it, not even to Chessy and Polly.

“I just want to get through the birth,” she said. “I can only cope with this one little piece at a time.”

But now the baby was here. Georgia wanted to yowl with the pain, and did. She hated John, she missed John, she wanted John. She felt the same way about Alice. She loved the baby; she hated the baby; she didn't want to see the baby; she couldn't wait to hold the baby. More than anything, she wanted her mother, who had been dead now for more than twenty years, or her father, who had been dead for four.

At last, with a long, guttural scream that was so animal-like Georgia did not even recognize it as her own, she pushed the baby out of her body and into the harsh, glaring world.

16

Alice

June 18–19, 2012

A
lice heard about her son at the grocery store. It was one of the strangest moments of her life, standing in the checkout line at Harris Teeter, fumbling in her purse for her frequent buyer card, and hearing a woman two people behind her say, “Do you know Georgia Bing? She had her baby. A little boy.”

Alice had been in meetings all day, and stopped at the store on the way home to pick up something for dinner. At the mention of Georgia's name, she looked up to see someone she recognized vaguely from PTA meetings, Sophie, with a last name Alice couldn't remember, whose son was in the same grade as Wren and Liza. She was talking on her phone, one hand resting on the handle of her grocery cart.

“Right,” Sophie Something said. “They're separated. It's sad. We're setting up a dinner brigade. I'll e-mail you the sign-up.”

Poor Georgia,
Alice thought, thinking of the succession of lasagnas likely to descend on Georgia's doorstep. And then she felt a flush spread through her body, an electric tingle that started at the top of her head and radiated down her arms and legs. A baby that was half Alice was out in the world now, a boy, a son—hers, but not hers at all.

All along, Alice had believed that Georgia's baby was Georgia's baby. “It's like donating blood or a kidney,” Duncan had said. And in some ways, to Alice it seemed even less real than that. Why, when you gave blood you could sit there and watch it flow out of your vein and into the plastic tubing and on into the bag, red and rich and real. Alice had never seen the eggs she'd given to Georgia; never seen the embryo one had become. And Georgia's burgeoning belly had felt like it had nothing to do with her, Alice, at all. It was Georgia who threw up every day for three months, Georgia who gained all those pregnancy pounds, Georgia whose ankles swelled, whose back ached, whose skin grew dappled with faint, silvery stretch marks. It was not Alice.