Leaving Haven (24 page)

But now—now the baby was here and Alice couldn't help but wonder about him. Did he have her long hands and feet, her oval face, her fine, straight hair? Was he solemn and watchful, the way Wren had been? Did he look like John?

Alice paid for her groceries in a trance. She was shocked when she pulled into her driveway and turned off the engine to realize that she was home; she hadn't even been aware she was driving the car. She sat there for a moment, with the windows open, the warm June sun streaming in through the windshield, listening to a squirrel rustling in the hydrangea bushes along the side of the driveway. Georgia, John, Duncan, Wren, the baby—so many people pushing themselves into her thoughts, and yet the person she couldn't stop thinking about was her mother.

Rita would love to know she had another grandchild—of sorts. But of course Alice hadn't told her about the egg donation. Rita had left for Chile in February, almost four months ago. And now that she was gone, Alice missed her more than she could have imagined. Maybe she could have visited her in Ohio, talked to her about this whole sorry mess. At the very least, Rita would not have judged her. She had made far too many mistakes of her own to look harshly on the mistakes of others—something Alice had not understood or appreciated until now.

Alice was as lonely as she had ever been in her life, and she had been a lonely child. She had lost her only real girlfriend in losing Georgia; she had lost John, who had been her closest friend throughout the bullying ordeal; and she might still have lost Duncan. She had earned every one of her losses through her own choices, and she knew it. Even Rita—Alice had spent her life judging Rita for her many lapses, keeping her at arm's length, feeling superior. And now Rita was gone, too, at least for the foreseeable future. But Alice had a daughter to care for, a job to execute, a household to manage, a marriage to salvage. All that was left for her was to pick up the pieces and go forward.

Alice wiped the tears from her cheeks with the palms of both hands. She cried all the time now—she, who until this year could have counted on both hands the number of times she had cried. With Duncan and Wren she was as possessed as she had always been, at least most of the time. (She
had
cried in front of Duncan that night last month when she had sprained her ankle.) But when she was alone—in the car, in the shower, in her tiny, windowless office at AU—she wept and wept. Now that she had started crying, at the ripe of old age of thirty-four, her supply of tears seemed bottomless. Alice sighed and opened the car door, got out, lifted the bags from the trunk, and carried them into the house.

When Duncan walked in the door after work, she waited for him to put his briefcase down by the back door and riffle through the stack of mail on the counter before saying anything. At last, when he put the mail down and looked over at her, she said, “Georgia had her baby. A boy.”

“Really.” His voice was a statement, not a question. Then, “Is she all right?”

“I think so. I found out only because I overheard someone at Harris Teeter talking about it.” She didn't want him to think she'd been in touch with John. She wondered if John had seen his son yet. She had had no contact with John or Georgia after that one brief, awful phone call from Georgia, on the Day Everything Fell Apart. She didn't know anything about either one of them, other than what she heard in passing at PTA meetings or track meets or from Wren. She knew only that Georgia had not told anyone in town about Alice's affair with John, and she knew it because people in town still smiled at her and spoke to her and called to ask if she could help out with field day or the bake sale.

“Well,” Duncan said. “They have a lot to figure out.”

Alice nodded. This was yet another thing she had lost, in her mind: the right to talk about Georgia or John to Duncan.

“What if she doesn't want to keep the baby?” Duncan said.

The air in the room was still in the sultry heat of the June afternoon; Alice hadn't turned on the air-conditioning for the summer yet, hoping for a few more days of open windows and fresh air. She had thought of this. It was hard to imagine any woman wanting to raise such a baby, a baby who would be a constant reminder of the greatest betrayal and heartache of your life.

On the other hand, the woman at the heart of this drama was
Georgia,
the most natural, loving mother Alice had ever known, the woman who could pick up a red-faced, screaming baby and stare and coo as though she were gazing at something exquisite and beautiful. Why, once she and Georgia had been out walking and had run across a woman wheeling a sleeping infant in a stroller. Georgia had stopped and asked if she could peek at the baby, and the woman—a pretty enough woman, with blond hair and blue eyes—had pulled down the blankets from around the baby's head to reveal the ugliest baby Alice had ever seen. The baby had a sloping forehead, and so much hair not only on her head but also around her temples and at the base of her neck that it looked like fur. Her eyebrows were thick and furry, too, and she had squinty little eyes and a flat nose. Alice had been wide-eyed with surprise, speechless, but Georgia had squealed and said, “Oooh, she's gorgeous. Look at that perfect little rosebud mouth. I could just eat her up.” And it was true, the baby's one redeeming feature had been her mouth, something Alice hadn't even noticed in her shock at the baby's overall beastliness.

Alice felt a small trickle of sweat at her temple, and wiped it away with one hand. “I don't know what will happen if Georgia doesn't want to keep the baby,” she said.

“You might want to think about that,” Duncan said.

“What do you mean?”

“You signed that egg donation agreement. The agreement said that you did not intend to parent any children born as a result of the egg donation, and that you did not want physical or legal custody.”

“I don't,” Alice said. “
I
don't want the baby. It's not
my
baby; it's Georgia's. I've never felt like it was my baby.”

Duncan's blue eyes held hers, and he didn't look away. He hadn't looked at her like that in a long time. “How would you feel if John and Georgia decided to put the baby up for adoption?”

Alice felt her gut clench, her heart thump hard against her ribs. “I don't know,” she said. “They wouldn't do that.”

“Wouldn't they?”

Now Alice's whole body grew hot. She felt sweat dampen her armpits, the small of her back, felt a flush across her chest.

“Why are you asking me all this?”

Duncan sat down on one of the leather bar chairs at the kitchen counter and looked at her again.

“Alice, this is the reality of your—our—situation right now. You might as well think about all the possibilities so you're not surprised when they become realities.”

“They would never put the baby up for adoption.”

Duncan's glance was at once bitter and sympathetic. He pushed his chair back from the counter and stood up. “You never know what people will do,” he said. “Even the people you know best will surprise you; isn't that true?”

Alice could only nod.

T
HE
NEXT
DAY
she was making meatballs when the phone rang. She had deleted “Jane” from her contact list long ago, so she didn't recognize John's number when it appeared on the screen. At the sound of his voice her heart began to race and she felt the now-familiar ache in her throat that meant she was about to cry. She missed him, and it was terrible to miss him.

He told her Georgia had disappeared, had left the hospital and the baby less than forty-eight hours after giving birth. Alice heard the baby screaming in the background. And then he asked her to come over.

“John, I can't.”

“Alice, this is about
the baby,
” John said. “It's not about anything other than taking care of this baby, who needs someone
right now
. If Georgia were here asking you for help you would drop everything and come over.”

“I can't,” she said.

“Alice, I am begging you. Thirty minutes, that's all. Please: come help Georgia's baby.”

Georgia's baby.

“All right,” Alice said. “I'll be there in ten minutes.”

A
LICE
CAME
BACK
from John's house still in shock over the sense of
familiarity
she had had when she held the baby, a moment of déjà vu. It was as though the baby were a beloved and long-lost friend, someone she had been waiting and hoping to see again, and now here he was at last, exactly where he was supposed to be and should have been all along. She had never, in her wildest imaginings about what might happen once the baby was born, thought she would feel such a
bond
with him.

She debated whether or not to talk about it at their counseling appointment that evening. Duncan had finally agreed to see a marital counselor, and they had met with Dr. Jenkins three times now. Alice had approached the first appointment in terror. After all, she was Alice the Evil Adulteress and Duncan was Duncan the Good, the Wronged Husband. Dr. Jenkins had asked Duncan about his hurt, listened to him, understood him, even drawn out of him the somewhat astonishing—to Alice—information that he had not only punched John in the face but had punched a hole in the wall of his closet, too.

But Dr. Jenkins had surprised Alice by asking her what
she
was mad about.

“I'm not,” Alice had said. “I'm sad. I'm guilty. I feel terrible about what I've done.”

Dr. Julia Jenkins looked at her with a face full of empathy. She was more than six feet tall, with blond hair cut into a short, shaggy bob, chiseled cheeks, a wide, generous smile, and warm brown eyes. She was in her late sixties, Alice guessed, but dressed in boot-cut jeans and wedge sandals and a long, slim-fitting black tunic. She emanated calm, compassion, understanding. Alice wanted Dr. Jenkins to be her mother. Actually, she wanted to
be
Dr. Jenkins, so she could radiate that kind of peace, too.

Alice wanted to be a good therapy patient, just as she had always wanted to be a good student, a good daughter, a good citizen, a good teacher, a good mother, a good wife. But she wasn't mad.

“Okay,” Dr. Jenkins had said. “Just think about it.”

And over the next few days, Alice thought about it. Of course she was mad, but how could she say she was angry that Duncan was so patient and responsible and kind? How could she say she was furious that he was working so many hours for so little pay when he was doing something so meaningful, so selfless? How could she say she was mad that he protected her, took care of her, guided her? She couldn't.

“You know, Alice,” Dr. Jenkins had said when Alice came to see her alone. “Good people have affairs, too.”

“Good people like Duncan don't,” Alice had said.

She took full responsibility for her affair; it was a choice she had made with her body and heart but also with her mind. She knew what she was risking, but some part of her had never believed the risk was real. She had not allowed herself to imagine that they would be caught. But she also knew that her affair had bloomed because she had felt something vital was missing from her life, because John was rain on thirsty earth.

Something about the way John had looked at her, locking his eyes on hers while they made love, had made her feel
seen
for the first time in a long time. It was as though the Alice she always presented to the world—careful, competent, controlled—had been stripped bare and thrust onto a stage, terrified and vulnerable, and John had said, “
That one.
That's the Alice I want.” She had never imagined that anyone would want that Alice, certainly not Duncan, who kept his eyes closed when they made love, who admired nothing more than competence and calm, who didn't feel a need to discuss things with her, even things as important as his career. John's attention had made her realize that another Alice existed, and that she had been locked up too long and had to get out.

Now here was yet another Alice, one she hardly knew, one who had fallen in love at first sight with a three-day-old infant that was hers but not hers. Was she supposed to lock that Alice away, too?

Alice had made a list of all the reasons she should not even think about keeping the baby, from the legal issues to the complicated question of how to explain it all to Wren, but no matter how many cons she wrote down on the left-hand side of her paper, she kept coming back to one thing:
I am his mother, and I love him
. The feeling was as clear and pure and direct as the rays of early morning sun streaming through the kitchen window onto the bamboo floor. And Georgia didn't even want him; that was the thing.

Alice waited until they were in the counselor's office to talk about it.

“I'd like to talk about the baby,” Alice said. “About the possibility of keeping the baby.” She said it straight out, without preamble, because it was such an outrageous thing to say that to try to soften it with explanations or excuses would be insulting, she thought. Better to lay it out there, raw and whole. She had no right to ask Duncan to consider it, and she knew it. His loyalty already was more than she deserved, and she knew that, too.

“What?” Duncan sat next to her on the soft beige chenille couch. Dr. Jenkins sat across from them in some kind of ergonomically correct white leather armchair. A painting of white clouds in a bright blue sky hung on the wall behind her. Alice had stared at the painting every session, studying the clouds. They were probably there to get people's minds off the all-too-earthly problems they brought to Dr. Jenkins, Alice thought, all the mud-bound grief and infidelities and terrors.

“Have you
seen
the baby?” Duncan said.

“I saw him this afternoon. John called in a panic and asked me to come over. He brought the baby home from the hospital and couldn't get him to stop crying.”