Leaving Haven (26 page)

She stepped inside and flicked on the light. The pine walls glowed yellow. The oak coffee table was wiped clean of dust, the floors swept, the pillows on the old blue gingham couch fluffed and ready. She saw the wood box next to the fireplace filled with split wood and strips of birch bark and twigs for kindling. She could have wept with relief. She walked into the kitchen and turned on the faucet and the blessed water came out.
Thank you, Glenn
.

She went back to the front stoop to bring in the few things she'd bought in Albany—a toothbrush and some toothpaste, toilet paper, sanitary supplies, a bottle of water, an apple. She ate the apple standing on the screened porch, listening to the lake lap at the dock. She thought about the summer she
had
planned, before all this, about being here with Liza and Polly and Chessy and their kids and the new baby, her baby boy. Every time she thought of him the tears welled up and her arms ached. She would not think of him for five full minutes, she decided, and glanced at her watch: 1:25. She opened the screen door and tossed the apple core out into the night for the raccoons or the deer or whatever found it first.

She peered up at the stars, so clear and vivid here, and spotted the arcing handle of the Big Dipper, the long tail of Draco, the dragon. When she and Polly were little their father used to take them out at night in an old, flat-bottomed wooden rowboat, the oars creaking in the rusty oarlocks, until they were in the middle of the bay. They'd lie down on piles of beach towels and blankets and stare up at the stars while their father pointed out the constellations. He always brought with him a map of the night sky that he had ripped out of
National Geographic,
studying it with a flashlight and then peering upward over the rims of his eyeglasses. Draco was her favorite. Polly liked Cygnus, the swan, which was just like Polly, who loved everything girlie and sweet. Their father, like Georgia, preferred Draco.

It was funny to think now how much her father had wanted a son, because he'd been such a wonderful father to all three of his girls, as attentive and loving and protective as could be. She had wondered sometimes if he was lonely, living in that house full of estrogen, with his three daughters and two female cats. He had haunted her thoughts these last few months, once she'd found out the baby she was carrying was a boy. Frank would have loved having grandsons, would have taken them fishing, would have showed them how to shoot baskets, hammer nails, repair plumbing. Frank was the kind of man who was good at everything. But he'd died six months before Teddy was born. For a moment she was glad Frank was gone, so he didn't have to bear witness to her humiliation with John, her abandonment of this baby who bore no blood relationship to herself or her father, but who would have delighted him anyway.

She glanced at her watch.
Shit:
1:27. She couldn't even go two minutes without thinking about the baby. Her eyes filled with tears again.

“What am I going to do?” She said it out loud to the night sky.

But the sky had no answers. She let the screen door fall closed with a bang.

Then she went inside, took two of the Xanax she had stashed in her purse, pulled on a T-shirt of her father's she found in a dresser drawer, and went to bed. She slept then, slept as soundly as she ever had in her life, as if all these last few weeks had never happened.

Indeed, she slept as soundly as her newborn son, who lay in a bassinet five hundred miles away.

18

Alice

June 20–21, 2012

A
lice hated beaches, especially big beaches with boardwalks, like Rehoboth. She could not understand why—when it was hot and sticky and the weight of even a cotton T-shirt felt like heavy armor—anyone would want to join throngs of other hot, sticky people, bumping against each other, breathing in the scents of sweat and suntan lotion and hot dogs. And even if you carved out your own little space, sat under an umbrella at the edge of the sand, far from the water, you still had to deal with the masses of people walking by in their too-small shorts or swimsuits, rolls of flesh jiggling with each step. Just the thought of it made Alice's skin crawl. She had said as much to Wren, weeks ago.

“I can't go to Rehoboth,” she had said.

“Mom,” Wren had said. “It's
fun
. Please. I promised Nicole.”

Alice had looked at her daughter, the pale blue eyes, the thick fringe of dark eyelashes that gave her a look of wide-eyed innocence. Wren shared Duncan's Scottish features—high cheekbones, straight nose, those sea-glass-blue eyes. But sometimes Wren would flash a smile, or turn her head to the side, her profile silhouetted against the window, and Alice would have a moment of déjà vu and see herself in her daughter, her own cautious smile, her own long, slender neck. But it was just a moment. Wren was Duncan's daughter, through and through.

But Wren was also herself, as evidenced by her desire to go to the beach, a place both Alice and Duncan detested.

“How about if I take you to Smith Mountain Lake? Or Deep Creek Lake?” Alice said.
Anyplace that doesn't involve skee ball and bumper cars.

“Because the whole point is to go someplace where there's a boardwalk,” Wren said.

Long ago, back in the fall when the bullying first began, Alice had promised Wren a vacation, something to look forward to, to mark the end of middle school. “I want to go to the beach,” Wren had said, and Alice had agreed.
Of course. Anything to make this child happy, this child who has been mistreated so.

The bullying issue with Wren had been resolved, as so many of these things were, in a way that really was no resolution at all. John had talked to Liza. Alice had talked to the school guidance counselor and the principal. She had called Emilie's mom. The guidance counselor had talked to Wren and Liza and Emilie, separately and together. The girls had apologized; Wren had forgiven them. Since then the girls had maintained a wary truce—Wren and Liza polite, Wren and Emilie distant. Alice had been vigilant, and John had been surprisingly watchful, too, monitoring Liza's texts and phone calls, reading the computer over her shoulder. There had been blips—like the note from “Al” in Wren's locker—but then the girls had moved on to the next drama, the next machination.

But Alice knew what girls could be like; she had often enough been the target of their susurrations in the hallways in middle school when she walked by in her baggy sweaters, her no-name jeans. When she would turn to look one of them in the eye there would be only a sweet smile, a “
Love
your sweater, Alice,” and giggles as she walked away. And she had witnessed often enough Rita's stealthy, almost indifferent cruelty, her casual lies to her many boyfriends, to Alice herself.

No, females were tricky, not to be trusted. The only woman Alice had ever loved and trusted was Georgia, whom she missed now with all her heart.

“What did your father say?” Alice had asked.

“Dad said he'll do whatever you want,” Wren said. She brought her laptop over to where Alice sat at the kitchen counter. “See? Look at this place I found! You and Dad can read books or something while Nicole and I hang out on the boardwalk.”

Alice peered at the screen. She saw a sunny kitchen, a living room with a big window facing the beach, an outdoor shower. Better to be there with Duncan, perhaps, than here, where their very bed was a reminder of Alice's treachery.

“Okay,” Alice said. “We'll try the beach.”

So Alice took her sensitive daughter and her failing marriage and her longing for a baby she couldn't have to a place she couldn't stand. Welcome to Rehoboth.

D
UNCAN
CAME
ALONG
reluctantly. “You could take the girls on your own,” he said. “I've got a lot of work.”

“It might be good for us to get away,” Alice said. “It's only three days.” She told the truth: “It will be lonely for me without you. The girls will be off on their own on the beach and the boardwalk.”
I don't want to practice being single, not yet
.

He shrugged. “All right.”

Duncan had barely spoken to her since they had returned from their visit to Dr. Jenkins, since he had put that harsh word out in the space between them.
Divorce
. Dr. Jenkins had tried to get them to talk about it, in the ten minutes before their session ended, but Alice had said, “I can't.” Of course she had thought about it and feared it and, yes, brought the possibility of it into being, from the moment John had pressed his lips against hers there in the front seat of her car. But it had been a ghost, an image, a vapor on the horizon. Now it had taken shape, a clear outline, solid and dense and black.

“I don't think the baby is the issue,” Dr. Jenkins had said. “Whether or not you decide you want to adopt the baby isn't the issue.
Your relationship
is the issue. Everything else flows from that.”

They had driven home in silence; they had avoided each other in the time since. But now here they were, together for seventy-two hours, day and night.

Of course they couldn't afford the lovely rental Wren had found online, with the living room overlooking the beach. Instead they had a tiny two-bedroom apartment over a garage, two blocks from the ocean. But it had a sunroom all along one side with big windows and comfortable armchairs, a turquoise rug on the floor. It was clean. Nor could they afford an expensive weekend rental, so Duncan agreed to take a few days off and they rented the place from Wednesday to Friday.

The first day unfolded pleasantly enough. Wren and Nicole woke by ten and they all walked to the beach, which wasn't too crowded yet. They rented boogie boards and tried to ride the waves, like the other boarders they saw. Wren got the hang of it first—timing the wave just right, pushing down slightly on the nose of her board so the wave would lift her up, skimming across the surface of the water. Duncan, too, figured it out quickly and soon was doing tricks, shooting across the front of a wave, rolling the board and popping back up to finish riding the wave. Alice forgot sometimes that he had been an athlete, someone who had known exactly how fast to sprint to plant the pole for maximum lift, how to take off, how to arch his body just so over an unforgiving bar.

He still was in fine shape, something else she hadn't thought about in a long time. For years he had awakened early every morning and gotten dressed in the dark, headed outside to run, and then come home to lift weights in the basement. She looked at him now and wished she could pull him to her, press herself against his lean chest, his solid shoulders, not for sex—although she felt herself thinking about that, too—as much as for the reassurance of the steadiness of him, the consistency of him.

They had not had sex since last November, more than six months ago. Duncan's new job, the changes in Alice's body from the pills and injections she had to take to donate her eggs, the bullying—one thing after another had crowded into their life together, each one more urgent than the last, demanding every ounce of attention, time, and love they each had to offer. They had nothing left for each other. She had said something about it once, months before she began her affair with John, when Duncan had come home late yet again from his new job, tired, distracted, interested in nothing more than gulping down a warmed-over bowl of leftover beef stew and falling into bed.

“We never have sex anymore,” she had said. “I miss it.”

Duncan's face had flushed, even his neck turned red. At first she thought he was angry, but his voice was soft, apologetic, and she realized he was embarrassed. “I'm tired, Alice,” he said. “I'm sorry. But I'll try to make time for it.”

She didn't know how to respond. Was this what happened after a decade of marriage, that sex became a chore to cross off the weekly to-do list? She thought back to the early days of their marriage when Duncan would come home from work, ducking his head as he came inside the front door of their tiny apartment in Georgetown, and grin from ear to ear at the sight of her there, reading some textbook at their unsteady kitchen table, as though he couldn't believe his good fortune that she was still there and hadn't disappeared during the day, a phantom he had conjured in his mind.

She would say, “I'm almost done with this chapter; give me fifteen minutes,” and he would nod but stand behind her, his hands resting on the back of her chair, the tops of his fingers barely brushing her shoulder blades. She would feel her body grow warm, feel her nipples swell and harden, feel the dampness between her legs. She would read a sentence over and over, trying to focus, aware of nothing but Duncan behind her. Sometimes he would bend forward and brush his lips lightly against the back of her neck or her shoulder, then stand up again, waiting. She would turn the page of her book with a careful concentration, as though she were hardly aware of his presence. Still he stood there, his breath deep and quiet, his body warm.