Leaving Haven (38 page)

“They look fine,” John said.

And because the waitress was standing there, blocking her view of the door, Alice didn't see them come in. She only heard Wren's voice.

“Mom? Mom! What are you doing here?”

T
HE
WAITRESS
TURNED
and Alice saw them then, Wren dancing toward her across the restaurant, Duncan still holding the door open, staring at Alice and John with a look of complete shock. Alice stood up. She wanted to yell, “It's not what you think!” across the restaurant to him, but she couldn't make a scene, especially not in front of her daughter, who had no idea about any of this.

“The baby! Oh, my God, it's the new baby! Has Liza seen him yet?” Wren came over and bent over the car seat to inspect the sleeping Haven.

“He's cute,” she said, straightening up. She slid into an empty chair on the other side of Alice. “Hey, John. I can't believe I got to meet the baby before Liza did! Don't tell her that, okay? I don't want her to feel bad. So, Mom, what are you doing here?”

“What are
you
doing here? I thought you were in Lake Placid.”

“We had a flat tire.” Duncan stood a few feet away from their table, as though he didn't trust himself to come any closer. Alice was still standing, one hand on the back of her chair.

“Yes!” Wren said. “And Dad changed it, but then I was starving so we stopped for dinner at that place in Chestertown—remember, that place with the great chocolate malts? And then it was crazy dark and we were worried about finding our way to Lake Placid, and then Georgia called Dad and asked him about coming to the wedding today. So we stopped for the night at that place with the cute cabins, Dun Roamin.' ”

Oh, my God,
thought Alice.
Next I'll find out that Georgia and Chessy and Polly and my mother and her new husband all spent the night there, too. And what wedding is she talking about?
But she had to act normal, be normal, for Wren. She sat down.

“I can't believe it,” Alice said. “
I
spent the night there! After you left yesterday I missed you, and I realized I should have come. So I threw some stuff in the car and came after you. I really, really wanted to be with you.” She spoke to Wren, but her eyes never left Duncan's face.

“Really.” Duncan's voice was clipped and tight.

John looked wide-awake now, his hands wrapped so tightly around the coffee mug that his knuckles were white. He shot Alice a look of utter helplessness and regret, a look that said,
I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry
. He looked up at Duncan. “I came up to see Georgia,” he said. “I was pretty surprised to run into Alice here.”

“I'm sure,” Duncan said.

Haven squirmed, yawned, and began to cry.

John sighed. “Hey, Wren. You want my breakfast? I have to feed the baby.” He pushed his plate toward Wren. “Best home fries in the North Country, or so I'm told.”

“No, thanks,” Wren said. “I hate runny eggs. Do they have waffles here? I'd love some waffles.”

Duncan still stood, unyielding. Alice turned to Wren. “Will you do me a huge favor? Run to my car—it's just down the street in front of the Laundromat—and bring me my heavy sweatshirt, will you? The blue one. This hoodie is too thin. I'll order waffles for you.”

John unbuckled the baby from his seat and lifted him to his shoulder, then bent to retrieve a bottle from the diaper bag at his feet.

“I want to watch John feed the baby.”

“You can feed the baby yourself when you get back,” Alice said. “It will take you ten seconds to get my sweatshirt. Please?”

Wren rolled her eyes but pushed back her chair and stood up. The minute the door closed behind her, Alice was back on her feet, one hand on Duncan's arm.

“This is
not
what it looks like,” she said.

“Alice,” he said, “I don't care.” His indifference frightened her more than his anger would have.

John now held the baby in his arms and was giving him a bottle. He looked up at Duncan. “We ran into each other by accident here,” he said. “I drove all night the other night to come up here and try to convince Georgia to come home with me, and the baby—without much success, as you can see. As soon as I finish feeding the baby, I'll get out of here. And, for what it's worth, I'm sorry, really sorry, for everything.”

Duncan drew his lips together, and Alice felt the muscles in his arm stiffen under his hand, felt the anger rise in him. “Screw you,” Duncan said.

“Duncan, please. Wren's here,” Alice said. “We can't make a scene. She doesn't know anything about any of this, and this isn't the time or place to fill her in.”

And because Duncan was a gentleman and a kind man who loved his daughter, he sat down. He edged his chair back, as far away from John as possible.

“What time are you picking up Liza?” Alice said. She wanted Wren to return to a normal conversation.

“I'm not,” Duncan said. “Georgia called me last night. She's getting Liza this morning. It seems Georgia's sister is getting married today, and they want Liza at the wedding. And because today is Liza's only official Visiting Day, it's Wren's only chance to see her. So Georgia invited us to the wedding.”

“She's getting married today? Here?” Alice said.

“On the beach at Lake Con,” Duncan said. “Georgia's sisters are here and the fiancé and Liza. And some friend of the groom's.”

At this news John looked around the small restaurant, as though he expected them all to walk in and wanted to be sure of his escape route.

“I didn't know Chessy was getting married,” Alice said.

“Neither did Georgia,” Duncan said. “I think the idea to get married here was somewhat spontaneous.”

“Chessy herself is ‘somewhat spontaneous,' ” John said. “To put it politely.”

Duncan shot him a look that made it clear he expected John to shut up for the duration of their enforced time together.

“What time is the wedding?” Alice said.

“Six o'clock. But we're meeting Georgia and Liza at the cabin at nine so the girls can spend the day together. I didn't expect to be up this early, but we didn't sleep very well.”

Alice glanced at her watch. She felt as though she had lived through an entire day since getting out of her moldy bed this morning, but it was only seven thirty.

Wren came in with Alice's sweatshirt and slid into the remaining empty seat at the table. “Did you order my waffles?”

“No,” Alice said. “I forgot.” She looked around for the waitress. And then, because her life now was not a normal life but something out of a movie, something unbelievable, the door to the restaurant opened again and Polly walked in with Liza.

27

Georgia

June 26, 2012

W
hy aren't they back yet?” Georgia said. She stood in the kitchen doorway with one arm wrapped around a mixing bowl, beating together butter and sugar for the cake she was making for the wedding. Chessy had eschewed a traditional wedding cake—she had been serious about getting a Carvel ice cream cake—but Ez had finally admitted he loved the chocolate velvet groom's cake Georgia had made for a wedding in April, so she was making that. Baking at least gave her something to do, something else to think about.

Polly had left at six thirty to pick up Liza at camp. It was almost nine now, and given that Camp Pokomac was twenty-two miles away, Georgia couldn't imagine where they were.

“Maybe they ran into traffic,” Chessy said. She sat at the table on the porch, cutting out large squares of bright-colored cloth for something for the wedding.

Georgia shot her a look. “On the Adirondack Northway? Oh, please.”

Ez, who was sitting nearby in a rocker with Lily in his lap, said, “Maybe Liza wasn't ready at seven
A
.
M
.”

“True. She's not much of a morning person,” Georgia said. Then she immediately felt guilty because until last night she had temporarily forgotten she even
had
Liza—more evidence that she was indeed beyond the all-encompassing need to nurture that had characterized her entire life until now.

Georgia had called Duncan last night with the last-minute change of plans. She felt terrible that he and Wren had planned this week around Liza's Visiting Day, only to have Chessy's wedding mess it all up. She couldn't think of a way to make it up to them other than to invite them to the wedding, which Chessy said was fine with her as long as Duncan and Georgia weren't going to be in terrible, cynical moods because their own marriages were such a mess. So Duncan and Wren were to meet Liza here at Lake Con at nine. The girls would spend the day together, and Duncan could stay for the wedding or go back to Lake Placid if he wanted.

Georgia felt a little awkward with Duncan at the same time that she felt a deep kinship with him. Until that fateful day in her kitchen, Georgia and Duncan had had the kind of relationship most people had with the spouse of a best friend or the best friend of a spouse. They shared a love of their shared person. They had vacationed together, seen each other in their pajamas, laughed over family jokes, commiserated over raising kids, and occasionally talked about something significant, like the death of Georgia's mother. But they didn't
know
each other. Now they were sharp reminders of the pain they both carried, as though they each had the word
BETRAYED
tattooed across their foreheads in special ink, visible only to each other. Still, Duncan had held her hair while she retched in the kitchen, and punched John in the face. He held a special place in Georgia's heart.

No, seeing Duncan was not an issue. The bigger problem, the one that had kept Georgia awake most of the night, was the fact that Liza was now on her way to Lake Con, where she expected to see her new baby brother. And since said baby brother was God knows where with John, Liza's imminent presence raised all kinds of complications.

Georgia had tried calling and texting John for the past twelve hours, asking him to
please
come back with the baby just for the day, but his phone went directly to voice mail and he didn't respond to her texts. At some dark hour of the morning she wondered if he had been in an accident, fallen asleep at the wheel and veered into the guardrail, a pole, an oncoming truck. Her heart raced at the thought of shattering glass, crumpled metal, the baby in his car seat, so small and vulnerable.

Haven's absence dominated her thoughts, even her body. She couldn't get over the constant sense that she had lost something. It was as though she had written down some vital phone number—one she could never get again—and then misplaced it. Every time she sat down she'd think:
I should be searching
. But then she'd remember that the thing she was missing was the baby, and he was gone, not lost. It didn't help that her breasts were producing so much milk she had to express at least a little every three or four hours, or that every time she heard Lily cry her milk let down.

Her sisters said the same things over and over:
We support you no matter what. We know you would be a great mother to Haven, but if it's going to wreck your life, don't do it. Don't listen to John; what happened in your marriage is not your fault
.

But some of it was, if not her
fault,
then her responsibility. She couldn't stop thinking about what John had said, about how he felt useless, superfluous, lonely. She
had
cut him out of much of the care for Liza. It was so much easier to do things herself than to suffer through his fumbling attempts to bathe the baby, or diaper the baby, or hold her in the right position to soothe her colicky stomach. Then it became ordinary, natural, that Georgia was the one to deal with whatever came up with Liza at every stage, right up until now. It was true, too, that she had been preoccupied—or, to be honest,
consumed
—with the effort to have another baby, for years and years and years. And why?

Chessy looked up from her fabrics. “You're good at sewing, right, Georgie?”

Georgia stopped her hypnotic stirring of the butter and sugar. Her arms were exhausted. The lack of an electric mixer here was a problem. “Oh, please, Chess. You're getting married in seven or however many hours. You can't expect me to sew something today.”

“Fine,” Chessy said. “I'll use pins.”

Georgia decided not to ask—if Chessy's wedding dress was going to be held together by safety pins, so be it—and went back to her stirring.

“I can sew,” Ez said.

Chessy flashed him a look, a look that said,
Of course you can, you incredible man, and I love you like crazy
. Georgia felt a jolt of recognition, remembering a moment when she had walked into Truscello's during those heady early days with John, and he had looked up and caught sight of her across the restaurant and smiled and clasped both hands to his chest and spun around as though he'd been shot through the heart. It was theatrical and silly, and it had made her feel desirable and powerful and beloved all at once.