Leaving Haven (31 page)

“A text? Saying what?”

“I think it began, ‘Dear unspeakable prick,' ” Chessy said.

Polly shot her sister a look. “Would you back off, for a few minutes at least?”

She turned to Georgia. “The note said we were taking Haven for a few days to give John a break, and that we had been in touch with you and you were fine but understandably depressed.”

“And—?”

“And that's it,” Polly said. She speared a piece of sausage with her fork. “I don't believe in overexplaining.”

“So John has no idea you brought the baby up here?”

Polly popped the sausage in her mouth and shook her head.

“Has he called you since he got the note?”

“He texted Chessy. She's never been his favorite, as you know—no offense, Chess—but I think he's deeply scared of me right now.”

Georgia turned to Chessy. “What did his text say?”

“‘Thanks for babysitting,' ” Chessy said.

“‘
Thanks for babysitting
'? That's it?” Georgia stared at her sister, incredulous. “Wow.” She put down her fork and stared through the screen at the lake, unseeing. “Maybe
he
doesn't want the baby. And if I don't take him and John doesn't take him, then what will happen to him?”

Nobody spoke for several minutes. A cry from the other room broke the silence. Georgia pushed her chair back from the table.

“I'll get him,” she said. She walked into the living room, where the baby lay crying in his car seat. She scooped him up and cradled him against her chest, his face against her collarbone.
Haven
. It was a silly name, but it was growing on her. “
Shhhh,
” she murmured, her lips against his head. She began to sway in the easy, unconscious rhythm of motherhood. “Hush, little peanut,” she whispered. The baby squirmed.

She walked back out to the porch, and Chessy grinned at her. “See? He
is
your baby. You knew it was him crying, and not Lily.”

“He's a newborn. They have a different cry. It doesn't take some maternal homing instinct to figure that out.”

Chessy shrugged. “Fine. I'm just saying.”

Georgia sat down and cradled the baby with her left arm, so she could pick up her fork and eat with her right hand. But he began to cry. Georgia didn't want to nurse him again—nursing was one more step on the slippery slope of growing too attached—but her breasts were so full and so sore that she told herself she was doing it for
herself,
and unbuttoned her shirt. He latched on right away.

“Stop looking at me like that,” Georgia said to her sisters, who both wore smug expressions. She looked down at the baby. What if John didn't want him? What then?

The baby stopped nursing and wriggled, cried again. Georgia put down her fork.

“Here,” Polly said. “I'll take him. You need to eat.”

Polly reached over, picked him up, and sat him in her lap, facing the table. She wrapped one arm around him, under his armpits; her other hand patted his small back. “He's a good burper,” Polly said. “And he hasn't spit up yet, unlike my kids, who did nothing
but
spit up.”

“Maybe he's inherited John's cast-iron digestive system,” Georgia said.

She leaned forward over her plate to take a bite of spaghetti, her eyes on the baby. “Hello, you little man,” she said.

He opened his eyes wide and looked at her. His eyes were a pale gray. His eyebrows, light brown, didn't quite match, with the left eyebrow arching up while the right one was almost straight. A tiny wrinkle formed above his nose as he stared at her in concentration. Georgia felt a sudden shock.

Oh, my God
, she thought. All at once she saw Alice's face, looking up from fixing the broken drawer front in Georgia's kitchen, her blue eyes open wide, her brown eyebrows that didn't quite match, the little furrow between her brows as she focused on their conversation.

She put down her fork and stared at him for a moment. This child was not hers. And what she felt, when she gazed into those familiar eyes, was not love.

Georgia thought she might be sick.

G
EORGIA
WALKED
DOWN
to the dock and watched the light fade over the trees across the lake, watched the sky darken from pale blue to indigo to almost black.

In the eight weeks since John had moved out, Georgia had raged, mourned, exulted, despaired. Her anger had almost consumed her at first; fury not just at what John had done to her and to their marriage, but at what he'd done to Liza, to the unborn baby, to their
family
. Over and over again she imagined John stroking Alice's lean thighs, John pressing his lips against Alice's, John's eyes gazing into Alice's eyes as he moved inside her. It was sickening. The rage she felt shook her body, twisted her gut, made her dizzy.

She had seen him exactly twice since the day she had discovered his infidelity: once at a meeting with the lawyers to draw up the legal terms of their separation, and once when he had stopped by to pick up Liza for an overnight. He had called her many times, but she never answered the phone. If she picked up by mistake, she hung up as soon as he said, “Georgia?” He texted her; he e-mailed her; he even wrote her a letter that arrived one day in the mailbox, addressed in John's looping, almost unreadable scrawl. She had found his handwriting charming once because it was bold and messy and unrestrained, like John. Now she found it hateful, more proof of his reckless nature, and she ripped the letter into pieces and threw it in the garbage without reading it.

“I made a mistake, Georgia,” he said to her the day he came to pick up Liza. Liza was already in the car. “A big mistake. But it was
one
mistake, and I—” She had held up her hand to silence him. “Don't,” she said. “I don't want to hear it, and I don't care.”

But she did care; of course she cared. When she wasn't angry she grieved, a grief so raw and ugly it made her feel like some kind of animal. She cried in great, gulping sobs until her eyes were swollen; one day she cried so much she burst a blood vessel in her eye. She knew John had loved her, really loved her, when he had married her and for a long time after that; it was possible he loved her still.

She remembered odd, small things, like the note he had written with her Christmas gift the year Liza was born, or the dinner he had made to surprise her for their anniversary one year—Javanese roasted salmon with crispy fried leeks, a salad with pears and walnuts, a dessert of warm chocolate soufflé cake with honey-vanilla ice cream. He had fussed so, wanting to include every one of her favorite flavors in the meal. Another time, when Georgia was taking a woodworking class, he gave her a lightweight hammer with a smooth wooden handle that was the perfect size for her small hands. Her hands were blistered from the too-big hammer she had been using, and she thought the little hammer was the most romantic, thoughtful gift she had ever received. She still had that hammer, only now when she looked at it she wanted to pick it up and smash something.

On top of all the anger and the mourning, she missed him; that was the damnedest thing. She hated him, she couldn't stand the sight of him, and yet she missed their life together, his whistle from his office in the basement, his chef's clogs left in inconvenient places all over the house, the way he would come into the kitchen when she was working on a cake, swipe a finger through the icing in the bowl, then dab it on her nose and kiss it off. John had taken up a lot of space in the house and her life, with the trail of tennis balls and chef's jackets and books he left littered everywhere, his booming laugh, and the way he'd greet Liza—even now, even teenage Liza—with “Hey, Doo,” the nickname he had bestowed on her as a newborn when he called her Liza Doolittle (because she lay there in her crib and did so little) and then just Doo.

In many ways, John had been a good husband and partner. But then he had focused all that tenderness and affection and attention on someone else. And
that,
to Georgia, felt like a greater betrayal than the sex.

When she had looked at the baby tonight across the dinner table, she had looked into Alice's eyes, seen Alice's face, and realized with complete clarity that this child was not hers. The baby she had wanted was part and parcel of the family she had wanted, the family she hadn't had, because her own mother had died. Before Liza was born she had thought that becoming a mother would fill the emptiness she had felt ever since Evy's death, but it hadn't. Then she thought another child—a sibling for Liza—would make things complete. But that wasn't it, either. The emptiness was something inside her. Georgia had spent her entire life defining herself through her caretaking. As a teenager and young woman she took care of her father and Polly and Chessy; as an adult she took care of John and Liza, too. She mothered her nieces and nephews, her friends and her friends' children; she mothered the brides whose cakes she baked. She was a caretaker, a nurturer; it was who she was and what she did.

But now here she was, smashed up against the limits of her own maternal nature. From the moment she had gazed into the baby's eyes tonight, every ounce of maternal feeling she had for him had died. She did not love this baby; she did not want to mother this baby. In fact, she couldn't stand the sight of him.

For the first time in her life, the
only
person she wanted to nurture was her own howling, wounded self.

22

Alice

June 24, 2012

T
he one thing Alice had learned since her affair was that no matter how well you thought you knew someone (whether another person or yourself), you could still be surprised,
very
surprised.

The first surprise came Sunday afternoon, when Duncan drove her home after church, parked next to the curb, walked her to the front door, and said, “I have something I have to do. I'll be back in a few hours.”

“Okay,” Alice said. She didn't ask where he was going; his manner seemed to say
Don't ask any questions
. He did come inside and change out of his suit, as he usually did after church on Sundays, but instead of putting on his Levi's and a polo shirt, he put on a pair of clean, pressed khakis and a button-down shirt, and picked up his briefcase. Alice wondered why, if he was going to work, he didn't just
say
he was going to work, but there it was.

“Is everything all right?” she said.

He nodded. He stood for a minute in the kitchen and looked at her, and he looked so sad—all his features sliding downward, as though whatever joy and hope lived in him was melting—that it pierced her. She started toward him, arms outstretched, but when she drew near he flinched and said, “I've got to go. I'll see you later.” He turned and walked out the door.

Alice stared after him and wished, not for the first time, that Duncan had even one good friend she could talk to, someone to guide her through the darkness of his spirits in this postapocalyptic phase of their lives. But she and Duncan were both loners and had always been loners. As a child Duncan had been preternaturally smart. Numbers and even abstract mathematical concepts organized themselves quickly and neatly in his brain; he had never scored less than one hundred percent on any math test (including the SAT, GRE, and LSAT) in his life. He was shy and reserved like his father; polite and soft-spoken like his mother, a socialite who drank too much, a fact that Duncan and his father and his siblings went to great pains to ignore or, when it couldn't be ignored, to hide. When Alice first met Duncan that day in the bookstore she had felt a flash of recognition—the same solitariness, the same wary look, the same set of the shoulders, tensed and pulled upward as though in anticipation of a blow, that she saw in herself.

It had been wonderful, finding someone like her, someone else who knew the feeling that all those laughing people in bars and cafés were in on some secret you had never been told. But she and Duncan were
too
much alike. At nineteen, she had been thrilled to find someone cautious and careful and responsible and reserved—the opposite of everything she had known in life with her mother. Now, at thirty-four, she wondered who she might have become if she had spent some time on her own, been forced to seek out friends, support herself financially, participate in the world without Duncan as her safety net. Maybe if they had had a wider circle of friends, those shared hardships and joys and jokes would have been like the plaster that filled in the little cracks that characterized every marriage, preventing it from crumbling.

Alice put down her coffee cup. For a long time she had believed that their friendship with the Bings was all they needed. She and Georgia were best friends; Wren and Liza were best friends; and John and Duncan got along well enough, and if they weren't truly close, well, that's because they were men. But the Bings had always had other close relationships, too, with Georgia's sisters and their families, friends from John's restaurant, brides or mothers of brides Georgia had gotten to know over the years.