Leaving Haven (33 page)

He stood up. “I don't know where Georgia is or how she's doing, but I'm assuming she would want me to go ahead and bring Wren up to see Liza, as we had planned.” He looked at Alice, who still sat on the ottoman, mouth agape.

“And I think you need some time alone to figure things out.” He shrugged. “For that matter, so do I. I can't raise John Bing's son, Alice. So if that's what you want, we need to talk about the next step.”

He walked to the bedroom door and paused, one hand on the wrought iron doorknob.

“Good luck,” he said.

23

Georgia

June 24, 2012

S
o Ez and I are getting married,” Chessy said the next morning. She sat between Georgia and Polly on a towel on the little town beach, with Lily sitting between her legs, halfway on the sand. Lily held a pink plastic trowel in one hand, and was banging it with enthusiasm against an overturned blue bucket.

Georgia and Polly both turned to look at Chessy.

“
Married?
” Georgia said. “When did you decide that?”

“Last month,” Chessy said. “He's been asking me forever but I wanted to be sure he wasn't marrying me because of the baby.” She smiled. “I'm pretty convinced he likes me. The baby is just gravy.” She bent forward and squeezed one of Lily's fat thighs with one hand. “You're gravy, aren't you?”

“That's great!” Polly said. “I like Ez.” She nodded in approval.

Georgia agreed. Ez would be a good partner to Chessy. For one thing, he adored her. More than once Georgia had caught him watching Chessy as she sat at the dinner table telling some story, her face animated, her voice loud and lively, one hand reaching up to flip her dark hair back behind her shoulder. He looked, at those moments, amazed, as though he couldn't believe this vivacious, intelligent, beautiful woman was with
him
. But he was stubborn, too, and where Georgia and Polly and their father had spoiled Chessy—the motherless infant—Ez would not. Back in March they had all been together for dinner one night at Georgia's, and Chessy had bemoaned the fact that she and Ez couldn't go to some all-day concert in May, featuring six of her favorite bands.

“I'll babysit for you,” Georgia had said. “I could take Lily for the day.”

Chessy had squealed with delight and jumped up from the table to hug Georgia, but Ez had sat stony-faced and silent.

“That's very generous,” he said at last. “But we can't accept. You've already had complications with your pregnancy, and you'll be almost at your due date then. It's too much.”

“She'll be fine,” Chessy had said. “John will help. Liza can help.”

Ez shook his head. “Lily is our responsibility. We'll go to WMZQ Fest next year.”

Georgia had been impressed—John would never have thought about the fact that babysitting for twelve hours at that stage of her pregnancy might be hard. Another time, during her fifth or sixth week of bed rest, out of her mind with boredom and frustration, she had broken down in tears as Ez and Chessy were leaving after stopping by with Lily.

“This is like some form of torture,” she had sobbed. “I just lie here and worry I'll never have a healthy baby like Lily.”

Chessy had murmured some platitudes, but the next day Ez had shown up with his electronic keyboard. He set up the keyboard in a corner of her bedroom and played for more than an hour—Rachmaninoff and Chopin and something by Franz Liszt that was so lovely Georgia completely forgot her achy pregnant body and her terrors and felt the tense muscles in her shoulders relax, the stiffness in her neck start to loosen. She had loved Ez ever since.

“It's wonderful you're getting married,” Georgia said. She put one arm around Chessy and hugged her, hard. She tried not to think of her own marriage, of all the hope and confidence and exuberance she had offered up at the altar. She remembered her wedding night, lying in bed with John wrapped around her, thinking,
How could anyone get divorced after the power of those vows?
She had been so young and naïve. She hadn't pictured the years of infertility, the squabbles over cleaning up the kitchen or whose turn it was to get up with the baby, the creeping boredom, the irritation that could slide so easily into anger or, even worse, contempt. She had never imagined lies, betrayal, adultery.

“When's the wedding?” Polly sat up and reached forward as Lily grabbed a fistful of sand and brought it to her mouth. “Oh, no, you don't.” Polly pried open Lily's small fist and brushed the sand away. “Here.” She handed Lily another plastic trowel before she could begin to squawk her outrage.

“Tuesday,” Chessy said.

“Tuesday when?” Polly looked up at her.

“Tuesday. June twenty-sixth Tuesday.”

“What?” Georgia and Polly said it in unison.

“That's the day after tomorrow,” Polly said.

“I know,” Chessy said. “But it makes sense to do it now, since we're all here. I always thought that if I ever got married I'd want to get married here, in the meadow next to the cabin. And then have a picnic.”

“That's crazy,” Polly said.

“Oh, don't look like at me like that. This is not a big affair like your wedding; it's casual, just the immediate family. Ez is coming up tomorrow. Ez's friend Harris is coming down from Burlington, so he'll have someone here. I thought Liza could take a day off camp and be my bridesmaid. Her camp is, like, an hour from here, right?”

Georgia stared at her, speechless. Chessy turned to face Polly. “And if you want Teddy and Jane and Sara and Grace in the wedding, too, that would be great. If they could get here by then.”

“
I
didn't plan to be here by then,” Polly said. “I thought the plan was we were driving up here to get Georgia and bring her home. No one said anything about a wedding.”

“Well, when are we all going to be together up here again?” Chessy said. She picked up Lily, who had started to cry, brushed the sand off her bottom, and sat her in her lap, then fished in the bag behind her for a bottle.

Georgia hadn't thought beyond lunch, which was about all the future planning she could handle these days. “Chess, I just gave birth five days ago. I'm not exactly in wedding shape.”

“It's not
your
wedding,” Chessy said. “Don't worry; it's casual. Ez is wearing khakis and a white shirt but no tie; I have that white dress I got in Mexico, remember? I bought a couple dresses for you and Polly, too. Or you can wear whatever you have.”

“I'm not worried about what I'm going to
wear,
” Georgia said. She felt hot and cross all of a sudden. “I'm worried about my
life.
We have this baby here”—she gestured toward Haven, still asleep in his car seat under the mosquito netting—“who you stole from John and who belongs to I don't know who. For all I know, I'm wanted for kidnapping now. I'm in the middle of divorcing my husband, who has been sleeping with my best friend, who, by the way, is the biological mother of this baby. I'm trying to figure out how I'm going to explain to my thirteen-year-old daughter that the little brother she was so excited about isn't genetically related to me and is not going to live with us, not to mention the fact that said little brother is actually the little brother of her sometimes best friend. On top of all that, I have to get back to running my business so I actually have an income to live on once I'm single.”

A long silence met her words, a silence broken only by the sound of Lily slurping at her bottle, the soft rustle of the breeze through the leaves of the trees at the shoreline, the lapping of the small waves against the sand.

“God,” Chessy said. “When you recite it all at once like that it makes it sound like you should have your own reality show. Okay, I understand your life sucks right now and you have some things to figure out. But that doesn't mean you can't relax for a day and enjoy my wedding. You don't even have to make the cake; we'll get a Carvel ice cream cake.”

“What about Ez's family?” Polly said. “He has parents, right? And his little E-L-F siblings.”

“His parents are in the Foreign Service; they left for Kenya two weeks after Lily was born,” Chessy said. “His little sister, Lizzie—Elizabeth—went with them. His brother, Eben, is a fishing guide in Alaska, and they're not that close, anyway.”

Polly closed her eyes and turned her face up toward the sun. “I'm in. I'd love to leave my kids with my sister-in-law for a few more days and stay here. A wedding is a great excuse.”

Georgia stared at Polly, the sensible one. “Are you crazy? What about the baby?”

Polly opened her eyes. “What about him? He's happy enough here.”

“That is not what I meant, and you know it.”

Polly slid her bottom forward until she was flat on her back on the towel, knees bent, her feet buried in the warm sand. “I, for one, am thrilled to be having a vacation. And you, Georgie, need more time to figure out what you want. I know you said last night after dinner that Haven's face reminded you of Alice and you didn't want to keep him, but I think you need to take more time. What's a few extra days?”

“Ez will be here after lunch tomorrow,” Chessy said. “When his friend Harris gets here, he can have Dad's old room, and you and Polly can share her room upstairs, and Ez and Lily and I can have the other room.”

“It's bad luck for Ez to see you before the wedding,” said Georgia, who was well versed in every possible bridal superstition in almost every culture.

Chessy shot her an exasperated look. “Right. And the fairies will come tonight and sprinkle fairy dust on our eyelids while we sleep. I'll take my chances.”

Haven began to cry, a low wail that soon rose to a series of shrieks. Polly sat up and looked at Georgia expectantly.

“Don't look at me,” Georgia said. But his cry went straight through her.

Polly stood up and went over to the baby, squatted down next to him, and pulled back the mosquito netting. “Hey there, peanut,” she said. “Don't worry. Somebody loves you.” She shot a pointed look over her shoulder at Georgia. “I'm not sure
who,
but somebody loves you.” She scooped him up and held him against her shoulder, patted his tiny back.

Georgia felt a familiar tingle in her breasts and looked down. Two large wet spots stained the front of her T-shirt.

“I don't want him, Polly,” Georgia said. “You can't keep trying to make me love him.” She scrambled to her feet, picked up her towel and shook it out, and wrapped it around her torso to hide the milk stains on her shirt. “Chessy has formula with her; it's in the diaper bag.” She slipped her feet into her sandals and headed toward the steps at the back of the beach that led up to the road.

“I'm walking home,” she called over her shoulder. “I'll see you there.”

And she left her sisters on the beach, babies in their arms.

P
OLLY'S
PHONE
RANG
after dinner that night as they were cleaning up the kitchen, or rather as Georgia was cleaning up and Polly and Chessy were soothing the babies. Polly sat with Haven in a rocker on the porch just outside the tiny kitchen, giving him a bottle and talking through the doorway to Georgia. Chessy, who had finished feeding Lily, was now waltzing her daughter around the porch on her shoulder.

“Will you get that?” Polly said as her cell phone rang.

“I'll get it,” Chessy said. She waltzed over to the table at the other end of the porch and scooped up the phone with one hand, holding Lily all the while.

“Hello?”

Chessy's face changed. “Right,” she said. “He's with us.”

Georgia came out from the kitchen, holding a dishtowel in her hand. “Who's on the phone?” she said.

Whoever it was continued to talk and Chessy rolled her eyes, the phone pressed against her ear. “What do you mean, ‘Where are we?' Where do you think we are?”

Polly sat the baby up and held him against her shoulder. “It's John,” she said to Georgia, as though Georgia couldn't tell by the expression on Chessy's face, the way one side of her mouth had lifted in a sneer.

“Georgia's fine,” Chessy said. “No thanks to you, of course.” A long pause. “That's stalking.” Chessy said. “You're stalking us. I think that's illegal.” She held the phone away from her ear and smiled as John's voice rose. Georgia couldn't make out what he was saying.

“You
asked
us to take him,” Chessy said into the phone. “Don't get so hysterical. There's no ‘kidnapping' involved. You
asked
us.” She paused. “Uh-huh. What difference does it make? You said, ‘Can you take him
for now
?' It all depends on your definition of ‘for now,' doesn't it? Really.”