Leaving Haven (28 page)

Duncan was an adept water-skier, carving graceful turns on the slalom ski, sending giant rooster tails of water arcing overhead. Alice didn't water-ski—she didn't like speed unless she generated it herself with her own two legs, she said—but she was an expert swimmer, and would stand on the back of the boat, execute a perfect dive into the water, and glide down the lake in a crawl that looked almost effortless. She always dove out of the boat right before they headed home for lunch, and would swim back to their bay and their dock and arrive on the porch almost at the same time they did, because they had to fuss with tying up the boat and finding sunglasses and sunscreen and cell phones and hanging up wet towels and filling a bucket for everyone to dip their mucky feet in before walking in the door.

They spent the afternoons reading on the porch or napping in the hammock, admonishing the girls to use enough sunscreen, playing an occasional lazy game of cards. At dusk the four adults would head out in the boat again, with a cooler of beer and lemonade (since neither Georgia nor Alice was drinking alcohol), a loaf of crusty French bread, tangy Cheddar cheese, and sweet red grapes. John would cut the engine as they entered the narrows at the end of the lake, where the loons yodeled their beautiful, eerie cries to each other, and sharp-eyed eagles perched in the tall white pines, looking for trout. They didn't talk, really, during those cocktail hours, just listened to the boat brush against the lily pads as it drifted with the current, watched for elusive beaver, whose sleek brown heads could sometimes be spotted moving quietly across the water, breathed in the clear air. Once in a while John would brush a lazy finger up and down her arm, or wink at her and smile. Georgia felt as content as she ever had in her life.

They always saw herons there, walking on long legs in the marshes, like the one she saw now. Georgia could not believe that she had been that person, so happy and full and confident in the absolute rightness of her life, just last summer. It was a lifetime ago. Georgia's tears rose again, and she picked up her groceries and headed back into the cabin, into her new life, the one without a husband, without a best friend, and most definitely without a baby.

G
EORGIA
SPENT
THE
next two days reading, crying, expressing milk into the sink and the shower, and eating. She read two bad mystery novels her father had left on the bookshelf, books with wisecracking detectives who could all cook incredible meals and make love like porn stars and who had had emotionally traumatic childhoods. She ate an entire box of Freihofer's chocolate chip cookies, chewing mindlessly as she lay on the couch, turning the pages in whatever bad book she was reading. She ate an apple for dinner and drank two glasses of wine before climbing into bed and crying herself to sleep. When she awoke Friday morning she decided she had to do something normal and active, so she dug the canoe paddles out of the storage closet, walked down to the dock, blessed Glenn yet again for having the canoe in the water and ready to go, and paddled across the bay, looking for loons.

She was gone more than an hour. It was almost 10:00
A
.
M
. when she returned, with the sun high over the mountains, the firs casting short shadows across the grass. She didn't see the figure on the porch, not at first. But then she opened the screen door and saw Chessy standing there, holding Lily Blue.

Georgia jumped.

“I'm glad you're still alive,” Chessy said. Her voice was tart.

Georgia stepped onto the porch.

“I'm sorry,” she said.

Lily began to wriggle in Chessy's arms. Chessy shifted the baby to her other shoulder and patted her back.

Georgia put the canoe paddle in the corner, leaning against the wall, and dropped her life jacket on the floor next to it. “How did you know where I was?”

Chessy gave her a withering look. “Oh, please. Duh.”

“Does John know?”

“I don't think so. I know he's no rocket scientist but you'd think even
he
could figure it out.”

“It was a dumb thing to do, I know, to run away like that. I just didn't—” Georgia's eyes filled.

“Oh, God, Georgia, it's not
that
big a deal,” Chessy said. “Don't get so melodramatic. I should tell you now that if you're going to cry every five minutes I'm not going to be able to stand it. It's bad enough the babies cry all the time; I don't need it from the grown-ups in my life, too.”

“I'm sorry,” Georgia said. She wiped her nose on the shoulder of her sweatshirt. “I can't believe you came all the way up here to find me.”

“Polly drove,” Chessy said.

“Polly's here?”

“Yes. She dumped her kids with her sister-in-law. She's in town getting groceries. You've got nothing to eat here except apples and Freihofer's.”

“I know. I haven't felt like cooking.”

“You could microwave a cup of ramen noodles. Really.”

“Fine.” Georgia unzipped her sweatshirt. “Are you here to lecture me? Because I'm really not in the mood.”

“No, I'm not here to lecture you.”

Lily Blue wriggled in Chessy's arms, and Georgia was overcome with guilt.

“I'm sorry, Chess. It was really good of you guys to come. And you had to bring Lily, too, on that long car ride. It must have been a nightmare.”

“Lily?” Chessy said. “Lily's asleep in the living room, in the Portacrib.”

Chessy turned, so Georgia could see the bundle in her arms, which of course was a bundle much too small to be Lily, which indeed was so small that it could only be a very, very young baby, a newborn baby. Georgia flushed.

“It's
your
baby, you idiot,” Chessy said. “Who John named Haven after some baseball player, but I bet you can have it changed legally. At least it's better than Jeremiah, which was another name John mentioned. Then people would have sung that stupid bullfrog song to him his entire life.”

The baby turned his head and made a little snuffling noise, and at that Georgia's milk let down, soaking through her bra and her T-shirt.

Chessy arched her eyebrows. “I guess this means you're glad to see us,” she said. “Here.” She handed the baby to Georgia.

Georgia held her breath and took the baby in her arms. Her body curved around him, a parenthesis. He nestled into her, rooted at her collarbone, and began to cry.

“He's hungry,” Chessy said. “We've been giving him bottles but he's not too happy about it. None of us are very happy right now. That's a long freaking car ride with two babies. Polly is used to driving with screaming kids. But I'm not, at least not yet. Can you feed him?”

Georgia sat down in the nearest rocking chair. She could breathe again, now.

“Hello, you,” she said.

The baby squinted at her, then opened his mouth and began to cry. She pulled him to her and cradled him, pulled up her shirt and pulled down the front of her bra, and put the baby's head to her breast. He whimpered and she guided her nipple into his mouth and he latched on and began sucking, his fist opening and closing against her breast. It felt so natural, to have this baby in her arms. She knew him, after all those months and months of carrying him. He was as familiar to her as she was to him. She felt the tightness in her shoulders relax, the knot in her stomach begin to unfurl.

“Polly had this theory that if we left at two
A
.
M
. the babies would sleep for the first five or six hours. But no one told the babies that.” Chessy sat down in a chair across from Georgia and laid her head down on the table. “I hope you appreciate this.”

“I do.” Georgia sat back, still stunned. “I can't believe John let you take the baby.”

“Hmmm,” Chessy said.

“What do you mean, ‘hmmm'?”

Chessy sat up. “Well, that's the thing, Georgie.”

“What's the thing?”

Chessy looked up at the wooden beams on the ceiling. “John called after you left the hospital to see if we knew where you were. It was very confusing. Because we didn't know where you were, of course, but we didn't want John to know that. And the hospital needed your room. So John checked out with the baby and went home.”

“Yes?”

Chessy picked up the saltshaker from the table and played with it, turning it over and over in her hand.

“Well, John was freaking out. He couldn't handle the baby by himself; he claims he doesn't even know how to make a bottle of formula. He asked Polly if she or I would take care of the baby for a day or two.”

Georgia nodded. “Okay.”

“So yesterday we
finally
got Polly's kids all squared away.” Chessy rolled her eyes at the trouble caused by Polly's prolific breeding. “And then we brought him here.”

Georgia felt a sudden sense of panic. “You mean, you didn't tell John you were bringing him here? Did John expect him back?”

“That's not exactly clear.”

“What do you mean, ‘That's not exactly clear'?”

“John said, ‘Could you take him
for now,
' ” Chessy said. “But he didn't actually define how long ‘for now' is.” She looked at Georgia's stricken face. “And he didn't say, ‘You have to keep him in Virginia.' ”

“Because it never occurred to him you'd take the baby anyplace else!” Georgia looked down at the infant in her arms, at his perfect little face, then up at her sister.

“Chessy, if John decides he wants the baby back, he could come after you—us—for kidnapping. And you crossed state lines! Jesus.” Georgia tried to remember what she knew about kidnapping from watching
Law & Order.
“Oh, my God,” Georgia said. “It's a federal crime. We could be prosecuted for a federal crime for having the baby here.”

“I guess it's time,” Chessy said, “to make a plan.”

20

Alice

June 22–23, 2012

T
hey were home from the beach on Friday by dusk, with the fading daylight causing the old bricks of their house to glow orange, the trees with their new June leaves hanging still in the humidity. They dropped Wren's friend off at her house, and pulled into their own driveway in a silent postvacation dejection, a combination of too much sun and not enough sleep and the prospect of a return to the routine of everyday life. Nothing had changed at the beach, really. The possibility of divorce still buzzed in Alice's brain, a rattlesnake ready to strike. Duncan had not said he wanted a divorce; nor had he said he wanted to stay married. They hadn't talked at all about the baby, who haunted Alice's waking thoughts, whose absence in her life left her with the strange feeling that she was missing something vital, like a kidney.

She felt a little frantic about Georgia. She couldn't call John or Polly or Chessy to find out anything, and if she called one of their mutual friends, like Jen or Stacy or Karly, the entire town would be talking about why Alice Kinnaird and Georgia Bing were no longer on speaking terms, and they'd note that Georgia's husband had moved out last month, and
that
equation would add up in the blink of an eye. Then Liza and Wren, who had reached a tentative truce, would be the focus of so much gossip and scrutiny and divisiveness that they'd all have to move to Mongolia.

Alice admired Georgia's discretion. Georgia was intense and emotional and loved to gossip, and the fact that she had clearly not told a soul about the affair surprised Alice. But it was the only way to handle it without hurting Liza even more. Georgia was, at all times, the best possible mother.

Alice finished unpacking and picked up her little red Moleskine notebook, the one she carried everywhere so she could jot down things she needed to remember, items to pick up at the grocery store, calls to make, birthday cards to get. She had made a list while they were at the beach of all the things she needed to do to get her life in order. She was done with teaching for the summer, and now she could tackle the list item by item. She scanned the list:

To Do

1.  Do one thing to improve my marriage every day.

2.  Meditate for 10 minutes a day. [This one was not of Alice's choosing but had been suggested—no, demanded—by Dr. Jenkins, who felt that Alice needed to relax. And Alice, who had tried meditation a few times and hated it beyond words, had agreed to give it ten minutes a day for two weeks.]

3.  See the baby again.

4.  Do one thing to help Georgia every day. Do it in secret.

5.  Research legal options regarding the baby.

On the next page she had written a list of questions, things she needed to figure out—although not while she was meditating because that was when you were supposed to be thinking about
nothing,
which was a ridiculous mandate and, frankly, a waste of ten good minutes.