Leaving Haven (40 page)

It
was
my heart's desire,
Alice thought.
To be noticed.
She patted the pockets of her hoodie for a tissue, but couldn't find one. She wiped her nose on her sleeve. “You did,” she said. “You did give me my heart's desire.”

Duncan went on, as if he hadn't heard her. “As I got to know you, you were so clear-cut about what was right and wrong, so capable and efficient. I admired that; I admired you. And I admit: it was pretty clear no one had really taken care of you before, and I wanted to be that person. I wanted to give you the things you'd never had before—not just things like a house or a car, but the feeling that your life was secure and stable.”

Alice stood very still. A flock of seagulls cried down on the beach, and a logging truck rumbled by on the road.

“But I couldn't please you after all,” Duncan said. “And maybe you didn't want to be taken care of. Maybe ‘secure' was boring. I don't know. I just know that I married one person, and you're not that person now.”

Alice took a deep breath. “I love you and I want you. Please give me another chance.” She waited.

He turned those blue eyes on her. “You know, Alice,” he said. “You went right from your mother's apartment to a college dorm and then to living with me. You've never lived alone, ever. Maybe that's what you need. Obviously we have Wren, and I'm not going to suggest she live only with me and not you. But maybe you need to be an adult on your own for a while.”

“I need my family,” Alice said.

Duncan turned, raised his hand to shield his eyes from the sun, looked down toward where Wren and Liza wheeled Haven from the tennis court across the grass. He turned back to her.

“Let's give it six months,” he said. “I'm going to move into the apartment above my office. It's only one bedroom but I can get a sleeper couch, so Wren can stay over. We'll figure out how to talk to her about it. It's something we need to try.”

“It's not something
I
need to try,” Alice said. “I know what I want. I want you, and Wren. I want us.”

“Maybe,” Duncan said. “But you didn't a few months ago when you slept with John Bing.”

The truth of his words hit her like a slap. The icy ball inside her radiated cold fingers up into her chest, her shoulders, her back. Duncan was going to leave her, and she had made it happen. And that was the truth.

She looked up at the cloudless blue sky. She could almost see the great dome of the universe, stretching around and over the sparkling lake, the craggy undulations of the mountains, the highways and rivers that poured their way back home. She would have to work more hours, so she could support herself if Duncan decided not to come back. She would have to hurt Wren—she squeezed her eyes shut at the thought—by telling her about the separation. She would have to figure out how to make friends, other friends, since she had lost Georgia, too. It was being left home alone at age six, all night long, with only a record player for company. It was everything she feared most.

She looked at Duncan. “You're right,” she said.

T
HE
LAST
TIME
Alice had seen Georgia was at the baby shower in April. Alice had offered to throw a shower as soon as Georgia's pregnancy was confirmed, but Polly insisted on hosting because, as she said, there would be no reason for a baby shower if it weren't for Alice and her generosity in donating her eggs. Georgia wanted to wait until she was far along in her pregnancy, confident nothing would go wrong. She chose a date in April, six weeks before her due date and, as it turned out, at the peak of Alice's affair with John.

Polly went all-out and held a daisy-themed shower in the big sunny living room of her house in McLean, complete with white chocolate daisies sprouting from chocolate flowerpots and jars of pale yellow lemonade and little bowls filled with lemon drops and yellow jellybeans. Alice tried several times to bow out, pleading the end-of-semester crunch, but Polly said she would reschedule to suit her because she was a guest of honor, too. So Alice had put on her new navy blue pants and a yellow silk blouse, even though she looked terrible in yellow, because Polly had requested they all wear “daisy colors.”

Alice had perched on the edge of Polly's big beige sofa, feeling as self-conscious and miserable as she had ever felt in her life. Polly had them play a game called Mommy's Secrets, in which Georgia had to write down the answers to questions such as “How did you tell your husband you were pregnant?” “Do you want a girl or boy?” and “If you could have your way, what would you want your child to be when he or she grows up?” It was a silly game—guests had to guess which were Georgia's “real” answers vs. a bunch of answers Polly had made up—and Alice had won the game by correctly guessing all of Georgia's real responses, right down to knowing she had told John she was pregnant by baking cupcakes with trinkets hidden inside—a baby shoe, a baby, a tiny rattle. John had almost broken a molar on the rattle because he wasn't expecting a trinket in his cupcake, but he'd gotten over it. Georgia had smiled a conspiratorial smile at Alice when she won the game, a smile that said,
Of course; you know me better than anyone
. And Alice had wished a meteorite would crash through the glass of Polly's elegant French doors and smack straight into her, obliterating her for all time because she was the worst person who had ever lived.

Then Polly turned the tables and had each guest write down a secret of their own. She read the secrets aloud and everyone had to guess which person went with which secret. Alice felt her skin flush when Polly explained the game. She remembered feeling that her secret must be visible to the entire party, a scarlet A of shame burned into her forehead. Georgia, who thought Alice was blushing because she was shy, had leaned over and whispered that Alice should make up an outrageous secret to show Polly how silly the game was.
I once danced naked in the moonlight on the school football field,
Alice wrote, because it was the most outrageous thing she could think of. If she had written the truth—
I'm having sex with my pregnant best friend's husband
—no one would have believed it in a million years. No one was that crazy.

A
LICE
HELPED
DUNCAN
strap Haven's car seat into his car, made sure Liza texted John to let him know they were going to Lake Con with the baby, and explained to Wren that she wasn't coming to Chessy's wedding because Ez was very shy and it was only Chessy's immediate family. The lie coated her tongue, thick and viscous. But Wren was distracted by the baby, and the excitement of the day, and paid little attention.

Alice hugged Duncan before he got into the car, wrapped both arms around the reassuring solidness of him, pressed her head against his chest. He patted her back. “I'll see you at home in three days,” he said. “We'll talk more then.”

Then she had to let go.

After they drove off she crossed the street to where her car was parked in front of the Laundromat. She didn't know where to go. She sat down on a white wooden bench by the door, listening to the rhythmic swoosh of water churning in the washers, the whir of the big fan inside. She had never in her life cried in public—she could count on one hand the number of times she'd cried in front of Duncan—but she cried now. She pressed her lips together so she didn't make a sound. The tears ran down her face and then her nose got so stuffed up she had to open her mouth to breathe. She wiped her nose on her sleeve.

“Hey,” a voice said.

Alice looked up. Georgia stood on the sidewalk in front of her, in black capri leggings and a man's red flannel button-down shirt. A baseball cap covered her hair.

Alice wiped the tears from her cheeks with both hands.
Of course
. She felt as if she had known for years that she was scheduled for execution and now that the day was here, so be it.

“I suppose I should ask what you're doing here, in the Adirondacks, but I'm not sure I want to know,” Georgia said.

“I came after Duncan and Wren,” Alice said. “I had no idea you were here, or John, or your entire family. I'm sorry.”

“Sorry you're here, or sorry in a bigger sense?” Georgia's voice was tart.

“Sorry for everything,” Alice said. “For every single damn thing that's happened since November.” It was true.

Georgia held up a hand. “I don't want to know what happened when.”

Alice thought of Georgia holding out her arms to ten-month-old Wren and cajoling her to take tentative steps across the floor. She thought of herself cheering wildly at the sidelines of Liza's soccer game the day Liza scored her first goal, at age six. She thought of the countless sleepovers, from age three or four onward, with Liza and Wren wrapped around each other like puppies, forgetting where one ended and the other began. She thought of the joy she had taken in knowing that she had given Wren not just one but
two
families, two mothers, two fathers, a sister—all those people to love her. She remembered something she had not thought of in years—that she and Duncan had named John and Georgia as Wren's legal guardians in their wills.

This is my fault,
Alice thought.
All of this. I have to make it right.

“I made a huge mistake,” Alice said. “Everything about it was wrong, and I'm sorry. I can't really explain how or why it happened. I was upset about Wren.” She stopped. “John loves you.”

“I don't need you to tell me what my husband feels.”

Alice closed her eyes. “You're right; I'm sorry.”

Silence filled the space between them. Alice heard the wind rustle the trees down by the lake, heard the
thump-thump-thump
of something heavy in one of the dryers inside the Laundromat.

“I hate you for doing this to my family,” Georgia said. “And I hate you for doing this to
us
. I trusted you; I loved you. I thought you were like one of my sisters.”

“I love you,” Alice said. “You are the best friend I've ever had.” Alice felt tears rise in her throat again. She missed Georgia with all her heart. “Duncan and I are separating. We haven't told Wren yet.”

“I'm sorry,” Georgia said. “For Duncan.”

The pain Alice had caused was like a hurricane, something that grew and grew and grew and destroyed everything. But at the center was a still, small hope: Haven.

“Do you really not want the baby?” Alice said.

For the first time in their conversation, Georgia looked flustered.

“He looks just like you,” Georgia said. “Polly said even the waitress at the restaurant noticed.”

“But how could you give him up?” Alice said. “What would you tell Liza? She's so excited about having a brother—”

“I know!” Georgia said. “And it would have been nice if you or John had thought about that before you screwed each other, wouldn't it?”

Alice felt the dishonesty drain from her body, felt the burden of all those months of cheating and lying leave her. She could have floated right up into the clear blue sky. “If you really don't want to keep the baby, we'll tell Wren and Liza the truth,” she said.

Georgia stared at her. “What truth?”

“
All
the truth,” Alice said.

For the first time in a long time she felt certain, as though she had finally reached solid ground after making her way from tussock to tussock through a bog.

“We'll tell them I donated my eggs to you because you are my closest friend and I wanted to help you. Then we can tell them I made a mistake, that I spent too much time with John in a way that was bad for my marriage and hurt you.”

Georgia stared at her. “You think we should tell the girls about you and John?”

“If that's what we need to do, yes.”

Georgia rolled her eyes. “Dear God, it's all or nothing with you, isn't it?”

“What do you mean?”

Georgia pulled off her baseball cap and looked up at the sky in exasperation. “I mean you are
so
black-and-white about everything; you always have been. It's ridiculous to ‘confess' about your affair to Wren, or to Liza for that matter, who's already upset that her father moved out, let alone trying to deal with the knowledge that he's a
cheater
. I understand you feel you need to do some kind of penance, but I don't want you to involve
my
daughter in that, and frankly, I don't think you should involve Wren in that, either.”

“I'm tired of lying.” It was the truest thing Alice had ever said.

“Oh, poor you,” Georgia said. “For Christ's sake. There are lies you tell that are hurtful”—Georgia glared at her—“which you should know
plenty
about, and there are lies you tell to prevent hurt. And lying about your affair to Liza and Wren falls into the second category.”

Georgia sat down on the wooden bench next to Alice. “It's getting warm,” she said, her voice cross. “I hope it's not insanely hot for this wedding.”

Alice sat still, feeling like someone who has returned to her most beloved and familiar place, only to find it strange. She didn't know the language of this new country.

“So we'll tell them about the egg donation,” Alice said.

“Yes,” Georgia said. “As long as you don't make yourself out to be Saint Alice for donating the damned egg.”

“God, no.”

“And not today—Chessy's getting married today. We'll figure out a way to discuss it with them once Liza gets home from camp.”

“Will John raise him?” Alice's heart beat faster thinking about what might happen if John didn't want the baby, either. He certainly hadn't sounded as though he felt capable of raising Haven as a single parent.