Leaving Haven (18 page)

Every year on Wren's birthday Liza made something for her—a wooden box covered with pebbles Liza had found at the lake, tie-dyed soccer socks, a wallet made of multicolored duct tape. Alice had always thought that Liza loved and admired Wren. Sure, they'd started to go their separate ways a little in seventh grade, but Alice had thought that was just because Liza was entering adolescence sooner. Why, Alice had even felt a little sorry for Liza over this past year because she'd grown so tall—long and lanky like John but without even John's minimal athleticism, so that she was always tripping over her own feet. And she was hopeless at sports but persisted in playing them anyway because all the popular kids played sports. Georgia often bemoaned the fact that Liza did so little with her artistic talent. But now Liza had used her creativity—albeit of a different sort—to perpetrate this awful prank on Wren.

Alice was on her fifth set of chin-ups when she decided that the thing to do was go to Georgia's house and talk to her. She had spent enough of her energy on the heavy bag and the pull-up bar; she could stay composed. She glanced at her watch. She had just enough time to go to Georgia's, have a calm talk with her about Liza, and get home to take Gremlin to the vet. She walked upstairs, grabbed her purse and car keys, and yelled up to Wren.

“Wren! I'm going to run to the grocery store and I'll be back in half an hour.”

No response.

“Wren! Are you all right?”

Alice walked upstairs, peered into Wren's room, and saw her asleep on her bed. Her eyelashes were still crusted with salty tears, and she had one arm around Beary, the stuffed gray panda she'd had since she was a baby. She looked so young and vulnerable. Alice wrote Wren a quick note, put it on the bed beside her, pressed her lips together in a thin line, and headed downstairs and out the door to Georgia's.

A
LICE
STOOD
ON
Georgia's familiar front porch, feeling her heart pound in her chest in a most unfamiliar way. Her hands were shaking, so she held one wrist tightly with her other hand. She heard footsteps from inside and took a deep breath. John opened the door.

“Well,” he said. “Hello, Alice.”

Damn,
she thought. John was not the person she wanted to talk to. “Is Georgia here?” she said.

His smile faded. “Georgia's in the Adirondacks,” he said. “With her sisters.”

“Oh, right. I forgot. I'm sorry. Never mind. I'll talk to her when she gets home. She gets back Monday, right?”

“Maybe,” John said. “She's in the hospital. I thought she might have called you.”

“What?” Alice's stomach lurched.

“She's going to be fine. She had a little bleeding, which is not unusual. Everything looks great on the ultrasound. She needs to be on bed rest for a few days, maybe limited bed rest once she gets home. But she's fine.”

“Oh, God.” Alice's mind whirled.
Poor Georgia
. But Wren! Alice couldn't talk to Georgia about Liza and the bullying now, with this uncertainty. But how could she
not
talk to Georgia about it, not
do
something? Alice, for the first time in her life, had absolutely no idea what to do. “What happened? Is she—”

“Don't worry,” John said. “Polly said the doctor there is great. Everything is going to be okay.”

Alice bit her lip.

“Listen. They ran a bunch of tests; nothing is wrong. Georgia is worried, of course, but that's Georgia. If she gets a splinter she's convinced some drug-resistant staph infection isn't far behind.”

Alice didn't smile. Her throat felt tight. “This is not hypochondria, John.”

“I know. I know. But there's no need to go running off to the Wailing Wall yet.”

“I'm not the Wailing Wall type,” Alice said, her voice dry, and John laughed.

“That's the understatement of the year,” he said.

Alice stood there on the uneven boards of the porch, trying to decide what to do. “Is Liza here?”

“Liza? No, she's at a friend's.” He looked at her, and must have seen something in her face, or caught the tension in her voice. “What does Liza have to do with this?”

Alice couldn't contain it. “She's been bullying Wren,” she said. “For months. She's been involved in a vicious, hurtful prank, and someone needs to rein her in.” She looked at him. “It's
Wren,
” she said. “Do you understand?”

“Liza?” John said.

“Yes, Liza,” Alice said. She spat the name.

“You better come in,” John said. He took her elbow and guided her inside. He sat her down at the old pine farm table in the kitchen.

“You want coffee?”

“Sure.” When she was nervous, as she was now, she had a habit of wrapping her left thumb and forefinger around her right wrist in a tight circle and then rolling her wrist back and forth within that circle as though trying to break free of handcuffs. She had tried for years to stop doing it. Holding something between her hands, like a mug, helped.

John poured a cup of coffee for her, brought it over, and sat down opposite her. “Tell me,” he said.

Alice, her voice tight, told him what Wren had told her just an hour or two ago, although it seemed like days or months now. There was before Wren had been hurt and there was after, and they were two different worlds.

“Shit!” John said, after she'd told him everything. “God, that's terrible.”

He looked so pained that Alice warmed to him, a little.

“How's Wren?” he said.

“Crushed,” Alice said. “Hurt. Betrayed.”

John shook his head. “I am so sorry.” He put his elbows on the table and rested his head in his hands. He sat back and shook his head again.

Alice was silent, letting it all sink in. It was odd to be sitting at this table with John. She had spent countless hours here, drinking tea or coffee or wine with Georgia, chattering away while Georgia mixed up cake batter or rolled out fondant. She couldn't remember ever once, in the last twelve years, sitting here with John.

“You're sure it was Liza?” he said. “Wren is sure?”

Alice nodded.

“But
how
do you know? Girls say things—,” he began.

“Oh, please. Wren would not lie about this. Why would she make this up? And I saw the e-mails. I don't have
proof
that Liza wrote them, although I'm sure we could find that proof on a computer in this house.”

John was silent for a long time. At last he said, “God, this is a mess. I can't tell Georgia; this would upset her beyond belief and she can't be upset right now.”

“You can't do
nothing,
” Alice said.

“I know that,” John said. He looked at her for a long time, then looked down at the table. He began to play with the edge of the blue place mat there, curling the edge up and unrolling it, over and over again.

“I was bullied when I was thirteen,” he said. “I don't like to think about it, and I don't like to talk about it. I was skinny and my ears stuck out and I was not very athletic and I loved to cook. Believe me, none of those qualities make you popular among adolescent boys. It got worse and worse. I used to hide in the bathroom during lunch. One day they tackled me in the boys' room, stripped me, took all my clothes, and left me there buck-naked. They also left a girl's dress. So my choice was to walk out into the hallway naked, or in a dress. I chose the dress, of course. I tried to outwait them—I waited forever after the bell rang for everyone to go back to class after lunch—but they had kids lined up and down the hallway.” He sighed. “I changed schools. My father wanted me to be an engineer, and I told him the math teachers were terrible and he switched me to a science magnet school in our district. I hated science, but it was better than my old school.”

Alice looked at John and saw him not as the easygoing, insouciant, reckless man she had always pictured him to be, but instead as the boy he must have been at twelve or fourteen—tall and thin, with arms and legs too long for his body, those ears that stuck out, uncomfortable in his own skin, terrified and trying not to be.

“So you know,” Alice said simply.

“Yeah,” John said. “But I can't believe that Liza would do this. Why?”

“I don't know. I've been asking myself the same question.”

“I'm not even sure how to handle this,” John said. “This is the kind of thing Georgia would handle. She'd know what to do.”

“
I
don't know what to do,” Alice said, “other than to make sure Wren isn't bullied anymore. Duncan doesn't even know about all this yet.”

“I can't tell Georgia,” John said. “She's supposed to be resting and not worrying.”

“Agreed,” Alice said. “So you have to talk to Liza.”

John sighed. “Yes, I have to talk to Liza.”

Alice pushed back her chair and stood up. “Honestly,
I'd
talk to her but I'm so angry I can't be around her, at least for a little while. I'm sorry.”

“Don't be sorry. Look, I'll call you.” He stood up and pulled his phone out of his pocket. “What's your cell number?” He looked up at her and smiled. “Funny to think you and Georgia talk every day and I don't even know your phone number.”

“Right,” Alice said. “And I don't know yours.”

“Give me your phone,” John said. “I'll put mine in your contact list.” He took the phone she handed to him and started to punch in his number.

“Wait,” Alice said. “Sometimes Wren picks up my phone. I don't want her to know you're texting me or calling me, because she's going to think I've told you about Liza. She really, really didn't want me to talk to you and Georgia, at least not yet.”

John shrugged. “I'll change my name.” He finished typing and handed it back to her. “There. I'm Jane. What's your number?”

She told him.

“Okay. You're Alec on my phone, for the same reason. That way if Liza picks it up and sees a text from you she won't wonder why we're in touch.”

“Very James Bondish of you,” Alice said. She put the phone in her pocket.

John smiled and raised one eyebrow at her. “What's life without a little intrigue?” he said. His smile faded.

“Alice, I'm sorry,” he said. “I am.”

His eyes were so dark brown the pupils almost disappeared, making his eyes look black, bottomless. She remembered Georgia's voice saying,
“Most people—well, at least most men—are uncomfortable with a lot of eye contact. But John, he'll stare into your soul.”
Alice shivered.

“Thank you,” she said. Then she turned and walked out the door, and went home to her husband and child.

12

Georgia

Seven Months Earlier, December 2011

S
he is amazing,” Polly said. “Honestly, I wouldn't have expected it.”

“It kills me I can't be there,” Georgia said.

She was sitting propped against the old oak headboard of her bed at home, wearing yoga pants and one of Liza's hoodies, with the phone pressed against her ear. After her bleeding episode in the Adirondacks, she had been ordered on “limited bed rest” for the duration of her first trimester, which was ending in one more agonizing week. Everything was fine; the bleeding had stopped almost as soon as it had begun. Still, better safe than sorry, Dr. Gopal said. So Georgia had spent the last six weeks in bed, getting up only to go to the bathroom, brush her teeth, and fix herself lunch. She had moved through every stage of emotion—fear, anxiety, depression, anger, boredom—and now the boredom, the
crushing
boredom, was blooming into furious frustration because Chessy was in labor and Georgia wasn't there.

“Ez is a champ,” Polly said. “He's in with her now. She's refused all meds—she hasn't even had Tylenol, for God's sake—and she's doing this focused breathing that I always thought was bullshit, to tell you the truth. But then, I signed up for an epidural the minute the anesthesiologist said hello.”

“God, I want to be there,” Georgia said. Georgia herself had eschewed all pain medication when she'd given birth to Liza. Of course John—the man who hated blood and needles and couldn't even look at ear piercings too closely—thought she was crazy. “It's some macho female thing,” he had said. “I don't really get it. But it's your body. Your choice.” And he had stood by her head and told her to keep breathing and tried not to look too shocked when she'd let out those otherworldly screams there at the very end. She would have been able to help Chessy so much!

“I want to talk to her,” Georgia said. “Can I talk to her?”

Georgia heard footsteps, a door opening, someone panting, a curse. Polly's voice returned. “Georgie? I'm sorry. Things are getting kind of intense right now. I'll call you as soon as I can. I'm sorry you can't be here, too. Focus on
your
baby; that's your job right now. Love you.”