Leaving Haven (42 page)

“What are you doing?”

John stood at her elbow, with Haven strapped to his chest in a baby carrier. He wore the carrier uneasily, as if he felt it wasn't something a real man would do, but he also kept one hand pressed protectively against the baby's back.

“I was curious,” Georgia said. “I wanted to read all the wishes.”

She didn't want to read them with John watching her. She sat down in one of the white Adirondack chairs, and put the pile of wish flags on the arm.

“Well?” he said. “Any good wishes? Or is it the usual—health, wealth, fertility?”

“None of those are bad things to have,” Georgia said. “Neither is fidelity. Or trust. Or honesty.”

“You're right,” he said. “Okay. I deserved that.” He paused. “It was a nice wedding. I'm actually glad I could be here.”

Georgia was tired of being mad at John, mad at Alice, hurt and disappointed and confused. She wished she could just sit here forever with her toes in the warm stand and stare at the clear, still water.

“What did you wish for them?” he said.

Georgia shook her head. “I'm not going to tell you.”

The baby began to fuss, and John started to rock from side to side, trying to soothe him.

“I saw you wrote ‘umami,' ” she said. “No one is going to know what that means.”

“No one else has to,” he said. “I wrote it for you. I wrote another one, too.”

“What?” She looked up at him, curious.

His dark eyes bored into hers. “Joy.”

“Joy?” Georgia wished he'd stop staring at her like that.

“Yeah,” John said. “I had a lot of joy with you, and Liza. A lot of moments when I felt perfectly happy, like I didn't want anything more.” He paused. “I wish that for Chessy. She's a pain, but she deserves it.”

Georgia looked out at the lake, the surface still as glass in the twilight, reflecting the fading blue of the evening sky.

“You are the only one, Georgia,” he said, leaning forward. “The only one I have ever in my life felt that kind of joy with.
Ever
.”

She had felt it too, but she wasn't quite ready to tell John that.

The lake lapped at the beach, swirled around the pilings of the dock, rippled with the faint breeze.

“Could we work on it?” he said. “I don't have to move back in; I know it will take time. But we could get counseling. I could get someone to do dinners at the restaurant three or four nights a week so I could be home to help with the baby, and I could take him in the mornings, so you could work.”

The baby began to cry. John swayed some more and patted his back.

“Think about it, Georgia.” His voice was low. “We can work on being partners, for Liza, and for this little guy. And maybe, maybe, we could be a family.”

Haven's cries grew louder. John stopped swaying and extricated the baby from his carrier and held him against his shoulder. The baby continued to whimper. Georgia watched them for a few moments, watched John's dark head against the baby's, their hair the exact same shade of brown.

“Here,” she said. John looked up.

“I'll take him,” she said.

And she reached out her arms for her son.

P.S. About the author The Author Behind the Book Little-Known Facts About Kathleen McCleary That May Surprise Her Friends About the book The Story Behind the Book: A Conversation with Kathleen McCleary Read on More from Kathleen McCleary

About the author

The Author Behind the Book

K
ATHLEEN
M
C
C
LEARY
is a journalist and author who has also worked as a bookseller, bartender, and barista (all great jobs for gathering material for fiction). Her first novel,
House & Home
, was published by Hyperion in 2008. She has written articles for the
New York Times
, the
Washington Post, Good Housekeeping, Ladies' Home Journal
, and
USA Weekend
, as well as HGTV.com, where she was a regular columnist. She has taught writing as an adjunct professor at American University in Washington, D.C., and with Writopia Labs, a nonprofit creative writing group. She lives in northern Virginia with her husband and two daughters.

Visit
www.AuthorTracker.com
for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins authors.

Little-Known Facts About Kathleen McCleary That May Surprise Her Friends

•  At age twelve she was briefly considered for the lead role in
The Exorcist
, until her mother found out what the movie was about. (Her mom had a friend who was a casting agent.)

•  She majored in comparative religion in college.

•  She attended law school for a semester at Union University in Albany, which was very helpful in focusing her awareness on how much she did not want to be a lawyer.

•  She enjoys crafting things and has, over the years, learned how to knit, hook rugs, sew, carve wood, make dovetail joints with hand tools, blow glass, and make butterscotch pudding from scratch (which is very, very good).

•  She is fascinated by remote places and has visited Scotland's Outer Hebrides, Alaska, the San Juan Islands, the Appalachians, and the Adirondacks, among other wild places.

About the book

The Story Behind the Book
A Conversation with Kathleen McCleary

Where did you get the idea for
Leaving Haven
?

I was in New York having coffee with my agent when she said, “I always thought that if I wrote a novel, I'd open it with a scene in which a woman gives birth and then walks out of the hospital and leaves her baby behind.”

“Wow,” I said. “What made you think of that?”

“Because I had identical twins two years after I had my first baby, and the thought of walking away did cross my mind, just for a second,” she said.

My agent, Ann Rittenberg, in addition to being a brilliant agent, is a devoted mother to her three daughters, who are now out in the great wide world of college and beyond. And I will admit there was a moment early in my own parenting career when I got so frustrated with my kids that I ran outside and locked myself in the car for a few minutes. But
I did not drive away
. Still, it's one thing to get frustrated with toddlers or teenagers; it's another to leave a newborn. What would make someone do that?

We finished having coffee and I didn't see Ann again for six months, and I didn't think at all about the woman who gives birth and leaves her baby behind, either. Until one day my husband and I were driving along a road somewhere in Virginia. Out of the blue I sat up very straight and said, “I know why. I know why she walks out of the hospital and leaves her baby behind.”

“I have no idea what you're talking about,” my husband said.

I told him the story of the woman whose best friend donates an egg so she can get pregnant, and who then finds out, eight months into her pregnancy [SPOILER ALERT], that that same best friend is having an affair with her husband.

As soon as we got home I called Ann and said, “Remember that idea you had? About the woman who leaves her baby in the hospital? Could I steal that?”

“I wanted you to steal it,” she said. “That's why I told you.”

Did you have to do research for a book like this, a book that's mostly centered on characters and what happens to them?

As a former journalist, I research
everything
. For this book I did a lot of reading on secondary infertility, and I read countless articles and books about infidelity and recovering from infidelity. I spent an hour with an attorney, David Roop, who specializes in family law in Virginia, to discuss various scenarios with him—what if Alice wanted to keep the baby? Could John prosecute Georgia or her sisters for kidnapping? What if Georgia wanted the baby after abandoning him, but John didn't want her to have the baby? Talking to David helped me focus on what had to happen in the book.

What's your writing process like?

I'm not a plotter; I don't outline. I start with a character and something they want very badly—in this case a woman who wants a baby—and then I go forward from there. As more characters come into the book, I try to figure out that one thing about each of them—what they want that they can't have, or don't have. And while I don't outline, this book was so complex that I did have to keep a detailed
time line
as I wrote, so I knew what events happened when. I had the time line written out in a notebook on my desk, all color coded for different characters and different months and different years. I lived in fear that my husband or kids would pick up that notebook to jot down a grocery list or something and I'd never see it again, so there were warnings written all over it: DO NOT TAKE THIS NOTEBOOK.

I write in the mornings, as soon as I drop my daughter off at school, and try to write a thousand words a day. I usually write at least six days a week; often seven. There's a lot of “fermenting” time, too, when I'm walking or showering or lying in bed staring at the ceiling, but it's all moving the novel forward. I have an old gray cashmere sweater with several holes in it that I wear when I'm writing—my equivalent of Jo March's “thinking cap,” for any
Little Women
fans out there.

What role does your editor play?

My editor, Tessa Woodward, has played a key role in shaping my last two books. With this one, I wrote the prologue and first three chapters very quickly. I had written four chapters, all from Georgia's point of view, when I realized that the book would be much more intriguing with two points of view. I also liked the challenge of trying to make Alice—who does something really awful in betraying her own husband and her best friend—sympathetic, or at least someone whose motives and behavior you can understand even if you don't agree with her choices.