Leaving Haven (9 page)

She must have fallen asleep at last, because the next thing she knew she heard the sharp tap of her mother's heels across the wood floor in the living room.

“Ally?” Her mother came into the bedroom. “What are you doing in here?”

Alice sat up. She was stiff and cold from lying on the floor, and her cheek felt funny where the nubby beige rug had pressed into it. Pale morning light streamed in through the window. “You didn't come home,” Alice said.

“I lost track of time, honey. I thought you'd be asleep and would never notice, and I'd be home before you woke up. I knew you were fine locked in here.”

Alice's eyes filled with tears. All the worry and fear of the long, long night—combined with the utter relief that her mother was alive and here—rose up and washed over her. She hated to cry, but she couldn't help it. She was too tired to be brave.

“Oh, Alice.” Her mother knelt down. “It's not a big deal,” she said, “nothing to be so upset about. You were safe locked in the apartment. Okay now?”

Alice nodded. But she never forgot the night her mother didn't come home. That was the thing about Duncan. He always came home—on time.

F
RIDAY
NIGHT,
THEIR
anniversary, marked the start of a true new year in their marriage for Alice. From the moment she had ended her affair, with that text message on Monday, the weight of her guilt began to recede. Now she could reach out and put her hand on Duncan's arm across the dinner table again, without feeling that her fingers would sear him with their dishonesty. Now she could leave her phone on the kitchen counter without panicking when she realized it wasn't in her briefcase, hidden from Duncan and Wren. It was a terrible thing she had done, but she understood herself in a different way now. It would never happen again.

But her fresh start on Friday did not go as planned. Duncan acted odd from the moment he got home from work, staring at her as though she had some spinach stuck in her teeth, asking the strangest questions.

“I have a great date planned,” she said, as he walked in the door, his briefcase in hand. “You remembered we're going out tonight, right?”

She smiled at him. She was wearing jeans, a new pair of ankle boots, a pink top, and the gold hoop earrings with tiny ruby drops he had given her on their ninth anniversary.

He looked her up and down. “You look nice,” he said.

“Thanks.” She was so happy to be with him without the weight of her terrible secret that she felt happy and playful in a way she hadn't felt for a long time, even before her affair. She spun around in front of him. “It's a new shirt. I don't usually wear bright colors, but I loved this pink.”

“Isn't pink
Georgia's
favorite color?” he said.

Alice stopped spinning. She heard his emphasis on the word
Georgia.
“I guess,” she said. “Why?”

Duncan put his briefcase down on the floor and tossed his coat across one of the chairs. “How is Georgia? When was the last time you saw her?”

“Georgia?” Alice felt a clench of fear. “She's fine. I haven't seen her in a few weeks because my schedule's been crazy and she's been spending a lot of time with Chessy, but—”

“I see,” Duncan said. He stared at her for a moment. “You haven't seen her in a few weeks.”

“No. I've talked to her. She's okay.”

He nodded. “I'm going to change,” he said.

Alice poured two glasses of wine while Duncan was upstairs, and sliced a pear into neat sections, which she put on a plate with a hunk of Brie. He came back in the kitchen and looked at the glass of wine.

“I think I'll have a beer,” he said.

“I'm sorry, I thought—,” Alice began.

“It's fine,” he said, walking over to the refrigerator. “I'm just in the mood for a beer.”

Alice could not remember that Duncan had ever interrupted her before. Her heart began to beat faster, and she could feel her pulse pound in her temples.

“Is something wrong?”

Duncan turned from the refrigerator, a bottle of beer in his hand. “Wrong? Why?”

“I don't know. You seem, I don't know, a little upset or off or something.”

He shook his head. “I'm not upset.” He reached up and opened the cupboard and took out a large mug, made of blown glass with a heavy base, one of a set of six his best friend had given them as a wedding gift. He twisted the cap off the beer and poured it into the mug, tilting it as he poured. He sat down on a stool at the kitchen counter.

“So you really didn't have any boyfriends before me?” he said.

Alice's pulse beat everywhere now, her head, her throat, her stomach. “That's an odd question,” she said. “What brought that up?”

He took a sip of his beer and shrugged.

“No, I didn't have any other boyfriends,” Alice said. She put her hands on the counter, looked him in the eye. “You're the first man I ever even kissed.”

“The first man you ever kissed,” Duncan repeated.

He knows. He knows. He knows.
Alice had a wild urge to run from the room, to run out the door, up the driveway, down the street to the bike path, and to run and run in the twilight, until she disappeared.

“Why are you asking me about Georgia and my boyfriends?”

“I'm curious.”

“Do you want to go to a movie tonight?” Alice changed the subject, took a sip of her wine. “I made dinner reservations at nine at Founding Farmers for our anniversary, but we have time before that to see an early movie. Then I have a surprise.”

She had booked a room (an extravagance on their budget these days) at the Hay-Adams for the night. Wren was in Montreal on a field trip with her French class, a trip Alice had agreed to with reluctance but that was, according to Wren's latest text,
awesome!!!!!

“There's that new movie with Julia Roberts,” she said. “What do you think?”

Duncan wrapped both hands around his beer glass. “You like Julia Roberts?”

Why was he acting so odd? “Well, I hated
Pretty Woman,
as you know, but I think she's beautiful and a good actress.”

Duncan arched one eyebrow. “You think she's beautiful.”

“Yes. Why are you repeating everything I say?”

“For clarity. I'm a lawyer.”

Alice was tired of oblique conversations and half truths, her own and Duncan's.

“You need clarity on my feelings about Julia Roberts?” She put her wineglass down on the counter. “Duncan, what is going on?”

He turned his head, angled his face away from hers. “If you want to know, I was wondering if you'd ever been attracted to another woman.”

This was so unexpected that Alice lost her words, opened her mouth in a round O of astonishment.

He looked at her. “We've been married a long time; our sex life has dropped off lately; you're very athletic—”

“I'm very ‘athletic'? Are you kidding me? I wear pants, too. Does that make me a lesbian? What is
wrong
with you?” She paused, reconstructing their conversation of the last few minutes in her mind. “And you think I'm having an affair with
Georgia
?”

“You and Georgia are
very close,
” he said.

His voice was defensive, but his shoulders slumped, and the pain of what she had done to him, even if he didn't know about it, flooded through her. She walked around the counter, and put her arms around him. “I've been distracted lately,” she said, propping her chin on his shoulder. “I'm sorry. But that's
all
it is. Don't worry.”

“You just always seem dissatisfied,” he said. “I don't know what I'm supposed to do to make you happy.”

“This,” she said, burying her face in his neck, taking in the familiar scent of him, of Dove soap and starch. “This makes me happy, okay?”

“If you say so,” he said. He pulled away and smiled at her, a little half smile of reassurance.

But the smile, she noticed, never reached his eyes.

6

Georgia

A Year Earlier, May 2011

G
eorgia meant to sit down and talk to John about donor eggs right after lunch. But then Chessy, who had stopped by to pick up a five-tier white almond wedding cake with mango mousse, called to say she had dropped the cake on the sidewalk in front of the National Museum of Women in the Arts.

“Oh, my God.” For a moment, Georgia couldn't breathe. “Chessy!” she began, then stopped. “I thought you were meeting someone there who was going to help you,” Georgia said. “No one could lift that cake alone.”

“I
didn't
try to lift it alone,” Chessy said. “I'm not a moron. And honestly, it wasn't my fault. Ez met me here, and he took one side of the board and I took the other, and after we slid it out of the truck he started walking kind of fast. I told him to slow down, but he slowed down too much and I tripped on the curb and—oh God, never mind. I'm sorry, okay? What do you want me to do now?”

“Who's Ez?” Georgia said.

“That guy I know from theater class. I told you about him. He's helping me out with Pickup Chicks. He's apprenticing to be a plumber, too, but he's really a terrific pianist. We're kind of seeing each other.”

This was a lot of news for Georgia to absorb at once. But that was Chessy; her mind ricocheted from one topic to the next like a squash ball. If Chessy had been born in the 1990s, Georgia often thought, she would have been diagnosed with ADHD or ADD or ODD or some other condition characterized by a lot of letters ending in
D
, so everyone knew it was a disorder. Liza's first-grade teacher had suggested once that Liza should be “tested.” John thought it was ridiculous. “I'll tell you what Liza has,” he said to Georgia. “She has NFCD—Normal Fucking Child Disorder.”

“Ez is a strange name,” Georgia said. It was easier to think about Ez than to contemplate the enormous disaster of the smashed cake.

“It's short for Ezra,” Chessy said. “Ezra Lazar Fletcher. E-L-F. Elf. All his siblings have E-L-F names, too.”

“Seriously?” Georgia said. “Good God. And he
tells
people that? I'd just hope nobody noticed. Anyway, it's great he came to help you, but
what
happened?” She paused. “Are you wearing high heels?”

“I'm wearing sneakers, if you'll recall. White Converse. It figures you would try to make this all my fault.”

Georgia did remember the sneakers now, which she'd noted because they looked so, well,
funky
with the dress Chessy was wearing, which was short and black and covered with little white skulls and crossbones. She wondered briefly if a child conceived from one of Chessy's eggs would grow up to have Chessy's eclectic fashion proclivities.

“I'm not trying to make this all your fault,” Georgia said. “I know it was an accident. I'm sorry. But I don't know what I'm going to do now.” She pictured the cake (all those hours of work!) lying in a pile of broken crumbs and torn fondant and messy mousse filling on the pavement. The roses alone—twenty-nine perfect sugar gum roses from tiny buds to full-blown blooms, in pale shades of peach and cream, trailing up and down the sides of the cake—had taken her a day to make. Even John, who rarely noticed such things, said he thought it was one of the most beautiful cakes she'd ever made. And now she somehow had to make/find
another
cake and get it to this wedding, which was
downtown
on a Friday night, no less, with all the traffic that entailed.

The back door opened and Liza walked in, her cell phone glued to her ear. She wore a pair of jeans that were too tight and a blue tank top that didn't quite cover the straps of her red bra. She was wearing way too much eye makeup, which drove Georgia crazy. It had started last year, when Liza had become friends with that Emilie, who was a competitive cheerleader and wore so much black eyeliner and mascara that Georgia wondered why her eyes didn't stick shut every time she blinked. Once in a while Georgia wished Liza were a teeny bit more like Wren, who still liked to bake cupcakes and doodle with gel pens and read
Ella Enchanted
over and over.

“Hi, sweetie,” Georgia said.

“Hi, sweetie to you, too,” Chessy said. “What about the cake?”

“I was talking to Liza. Hold on.”

Liza dropped her backpack on the floor, walked over to the cupboard and pulled out a bag of pretzel crisps, tucked it under her arm, and took a bottle of iced tea from the fridge, listening to whoever it was on the other end of the phone the whole time.

“
If
that is true,” Liza said into the phone, “she is in so much trouble. Seriously. I'm going to kill her. She never should have said that.”