Leaving Haven (29 page)

Do I want to be married to Duncan? Do I want the baby? Do I want the baby even if adopting him leads Duncan to divorce me?

Alice read her list of questions, then drew a big X across the page. She was a doer, not a thinker, and was not at all comfortable with all this figuring things out and talking things over— and over and over and over. This had been one of the biggest surprises about therapy for her, the discovery that Duncan actually
wanted
to talk about his feelings and their relationship. She had thought they were alike in their happy reserve, content to live side by side without delving into who said or did what and what it meant and why and how they might have said or done it differently and whether or not it triggered something their mother or father had said or done or
hadn't
said or done. It was enough to drive anyone mad.

She loved Duncan; that she knew. And it wasn't something she knew after endless discussion and analysis; it was intuitive, like picking up a crying baby, or reaching out your cold hands toward a warm fire. She had loved him even when he walked through the kitchen door that day in April, his hair disheveled, his shirt untucked, cradling the bloody, swollen knuckles of his right hand in his left palm. Her phone was still in her hand, Georgia's voice still in her ear:
I know. Everything. Duncan knows, too
.

She had had a wild impulse to run, so she wouldn't have to face what she always had known was a possibility but had seemed until that moment a mirage, something remote and unreal. But this was real: Georgia knew, Duncan knew, and Duncan was standing in the kitchen, looking not annoyed (since he was not prone to strong displays of emotion) or even angry, but
confused
.

She had stood perfectly still when he walked in, her body taut as though poised to flee, her eyes wide, her heart beating so rapidly and so hard she felt the pulse of it in her fingers, her head, her ears.

“Georgia called you?” he had said.

She had nodded, her tongue thick in her throat.

And he had looked at her and said, “Well, of all the things I imagined in my life, I never expected this.”

She stood mute.

“He's so
messy,
” Duncan said. “You always said you thought he was a slob.” He looked bewildered, as though the fact that Alice had cheated with someone as sloppy as John was even more astonishing than the fact that she had cheated at all.

“I'm sorry,” Alice said. She felt light-headed.

“I just don't understand,” he said. He looked down at the tile floor, as though he might find an explanation written there.

“I don't, either,” she said. “I know that's no excuse, but I never expected anything like this to happen, either. It surprised me, too.” She paused, took a deep breath. “And I am so, so sorry.”

He raised his head to look her in the face. “
I'm
sorry, Alice. I must have let you down, or this wouldn't have happened. I didn't realize . . .” His voice trailed off.

She looked at him, the hurt and guilt—
as though he had anything to feel guilty about!
—as plain on his face as the bright blue “war paint” Wren had drawn across her cheeks and forehead for Spirit Week at school.

“Oh, no,” Alice said. “No, no. It wasn't you.”

She looked at his hand. Had he fallen? Had the shock of her betrayal sucked the air from his lungs, buckled his legs beneath him?

“Are you all right?”

“What?”

“Your hand.”

He looked down, at the blood on his knuckles, the bright red stain where his hand had grazed against the front of his white shirt.

“Yes.” He looked up at her. “I punched John. In the face.”

Alice winced. Duncan Kinnaird, the most gentle, gentlemanly man she had ever known, had punched someone in the face, because of her. And not only that, but now he stood here in the kitchen of their home, not blaming her or accusing her, but trying to figure out what
he
might have done to drive her away. It pierced her.

“I didn't even think about it. Georgia was sick—I was helping her, and he walked in and I just punched him.” He looked at his hand again. “It's not my blood; it's John's.”

A strange calm filled Alice, something cool and still. She stood erect, one hand on the counter, one hand at her side, in a room she knew was her kitchen, in a house she knew was her home, but seemed now like another country, a place she had never visited before. She bent to one of the drawers next to her and took out a clean dishtowel, taking care to choose dark blue, not white. She walked over to the sink and turned on the water, let it run until it was good and cold, and held the dishtowel under the faucet until it was soaked. She twisted it in both hands to wring it out, walked over to Duncan and took his battered hand in her own, held the cold, damp cloth against his knuckles, and curled her fingers underneath his palm. He flinched at her touch.

“I'm sorry,” she said. “I'm sorry. I am so sorry.”

She knew without even thinking about it that her infatuation with John was over. Something about the intensity of John's desire for her, the fullness of his attention, had made her feel wanted in a way she had longed for all her life. But it wasn't sustainable. She wasn't even sure she wanted that kind of attention and connection in her everyday life—it was too much.

One time when she had visited John in the restaurant he had made a little treat for her, bacon-wrapped figs stuffed with blue cheese. She had put the fig in her mouth and bit down, tasting something at once juicy and crisp, sweet and rich and salty—she knew right away it was the single best thing she had ever tasted in her life. Her eyes had widened with pleasure and John had laughed—yet you couldn't live on that, meal after meal, day after day.

So she had held Duncan's bruised hand that day in her kitchen and thought:
I'm done with John; I don't want that every day.
She didn't need meditation or a notebook of questions to figure that out.

Alice looked at her to-do list again. She drew a big X through that, too. Then she picked up her green pen, and started a new list, on a new page:

To Do

1.  Stay married.

Then Alice wrote one more sentence:
Everything else flows from that
.

W
HEN
DO
WE
get to meet the baby?” Wren said. She was practicing headstands against the wall in the living room while Alice folded laundry. Alice couldn't see her face, just her ribs outlined through the thin fabric of her maroon tank top, her slim hips and legs up against the wall.

“What?”

Wren tilted her feet away from the wall, tumbled over, and sat up. “The baby,” she said, her face red from the inversion. “Georgia's baby.”

Alice's heart hammered in her chest. “The baby?”

“Yes! Liza's little brother. She wrote me from camp. She won't see him till Visiting Day at the camp next week.”

“Liza is writing you?”

“Mom”—Wren, who was not prone to exasperation, rolled her eyes—“would you stop repeating everything I say? Yes, Liza wrote me. She doesn't have a cell phone or computer at camp so she writes letters. I wrote her back; she loves getting mail there. We always write when she's at camp.”

Alice put down the towel she had been folding. “That was before,” she said. “I didn't know you and Liza were writing each other. I thought things with you two were different now.”

Wren made an
arrghh
sound, deep in her throat. She sat with both legs stretched out straight in front of her and leaned forward, until her forehead touched her knees. “I cannot believe how you hold grudges,” she said.

“I do not hold grudges.”

“Yes, you do. You've been mad at Liza since the ‘Al' thing, and that was over
months
ago. You don't even hang out with Georgia anymore. If
I'm
over it, you should be over it.”

Alice tensed at the mention of Georgia's name. “The ‘Al' thing was pretty awful. What Liza did was terrible.”

“Mommy . . .” Wren sat up and looked at her. She called her this to tease—or annoy—her sometimes, because Alice was not the type of woman anyone would call “Mommy.”

“What?”

“You don't know everything about what happened with Liza. A lot of it was Emilie; some of it was me, because I was hanging out with Nicole all the time.” Now Wren stretched her legs out to the side in a wide V and leaned forward, touching her forehead to the carpet in a dancer's stretch.

“Wren!” Alice leaned over from the couch to touch her daughter's ankle.

Wren sat up and looked at her mother, arched one arm overhead, and leaned to the side in another stretch. “What?”

“None of that bullying was you. You did nothing to deserve that.”

“I know. But I'm just saying, there was a lot of stuff going on then with all the girls and we're over it now. You should be, too.”

Alice looked at her and thought,
I will never understand females
. She wished she could call Georgia, tell her everything, get Georgia—who had grown up with sisters—to interpret for her the strange thoughts and feelings of her own gender.

Wren sat up again, and tucked a stray tendril of dark hair behind one ear. “And Liza is having a really hard time because her parents split up, like, totally suddenly. Liza's not even sure if she and the new baby will stay with their dad on weekends, or what's going on. It's hard.”

Alice closed her eyes. She had broken the first rule of being the decent person she had always wanted to be, the considerate person who was nothing like Rita:
First, do no harm.

“I'm sure it's very hard,” Alice said.

“That's why I want to be there for her.” Wren lay flat on her back on the floor, put her palms on either side of her head, and pushed herself up into a bridge. Alice had never been that flexible in her entire life.

“I can't believe you can trust her after what happened. How can you just pick up your friendship?”

“Because Liza and I have been friends forever. The ‘Al' thing started out as a joke, and then Emilie started getting into it. Liza tried to stop her.”

“But she
didn't
stop her. And she didn't come to you about it.”

“Right. She made a mistake. I kind of ditched her this year for Nicole, so her feelings were hurt, and she was mad.”

“None of that justifies Liza's behavior.” Alice found Wren's upside-down face as disconcerting as her words.

“Mom”—Wren lowered herself onto her back and sat up—“I forgave Liza. You should be able to, too.”

Alice was silent.

“And I want to be there at the lake when Liza gets out of camp. It's going to be really weird because this is the first time in Liza's entire life that John won't be at the lake.”

“But, we're not going to the lake this year, Wren. We talked about that.”

In May, after everything fell apart and it was clear the Kinnaird and Bing families would never vacation together again, Alice had explained to Wren that they were going to skip their annual summer trip to Lake Conundrum, which always fell in mid-July, and do something else. Alice had suggested a trip to the Grand Canyon, or Yosemite, someplace western and dry and different from the Adirondacks.

“But
why
?” Wren had asked. “We always go to the lake.”

Alice had given some vague reply about the demands of a newborn and the Bings' need to spend time together as a family, but canny Wren had questioned everything she said. Finally Alice had said, “We can't take
every
summer vacation with the Bings. Sometimes we need to focus on our own family,” which was true enough.

But now Wren seemed to have forgotten those earlier conversations. “That was before. Liza needs me.”

Alice shook her head.

“Mom. You and Dad don't have to go. But Liza said I can come, and she said Georgia
wants me to come
.”

“When did Georgia say that?” Alice's mind whirled.

“I don't know. Before Liza went to camp.”

Before the baby was born. Before Georgia disappeared.

“Dad said it's fine. He said maybe you guys would drive me up there and drop me off and then go spend a weekend in Lake Placid or something.”

“He did?”

“Mom!” Wren rolled over and stood up and faced her mother. “You're acting like someone who is totally stupid or something. Everything I say, you either repeat or you say, ‘What?' ‘He did?' ‘She did?' What is your problem?”

“I don't know,” Alice said. “I didn't get enough sleep last night.”

“Well, talk to Dad,” Wren said. “Or call Georgia. Because I really want to go to the lake.”

Over my dead body,
Alice thought.

C
AN
YOU
EXPLAIN
why you want the baby?” Dr. Jenkins said.

Alice sat alone on the soft beige couch in Dr. Jenkins's cream-colored office on Saturday morning. She understood that everything in Dr. Jenkins's office was calculatedly neutral, a room that was supposed to make you feel like you were encased in soft cotton wool, so you felt safe enough to sink back in the cushions and talk about your dark, vivid secrets, your rage and frustration and failure and desire. Duncan had had his own solo visit with Dr. Jenkins last week; now it was Alice's turn.

“Georgia doesn't seem to want him,” Alice said. “And John never wanted a second baby as much as Georgia did, and he can't raise this baby alone—I don't think he wants to. So nobody wants him, the baby.”

Dr. Jenkins nodded. Alice wished she could feel better about this whole therapy thing, which Duncan had taken to with such surprising devotion.