Leaving Haven (8 page)

But last month he had muttered something one day about how ironic it was that the
restaurant
would be the only thing he'd created that would carry on his name, if it lasted that long. She'd found a bottle of Doo Gro Stimulating Hair Growth Oil stuffed at the back of the cabinet under the bathroom sink, which was funny because John had the teeniest bald spot at the very back of his head and had never really cared about his appearance. Georgia assumed it was some kind of midlife ennui; John was forty-seven this year, the creases at the corner of his eyes deeper, his dark hair shot through with silver.

She found him in bed, the computer on his lap, watching reruns of some cooking show with a loud chef who kept repeating, “
And now
for the pièce de résistance,” which was such a clichéd thing for a chef to say that Georgia couldn't believe it wasn't a joke.

“Hey,” she said, coming to stand at the foot of the bed.

“Hey.” He didn't look up.

Georgia reached up behind her neck to unhook the tiny clasp of her necklace. She took a deep breath. “So Polly and I were talking and she said something about donor eggs, about using a donor egg to get pregnant.”

“Uh-huh,” John said.

“So you'd consider it?” Georgia said.

“Hmmm.”

“Buffalo!” the computer chef said. “The pièce de résistance!”

“Can you turn that down?” Georgia asked. “Really, it's incredibly annoying to listen to that when I'm trying to talk to you.”

John closed the laptop and set it down on his bedside table. “Okay,” he said. “Although now I'll probably never make Chef Jamie's buffalo meatballs.”

“I'll live,” Georgia said.

“So what were you saying?” he said. He took off his glasses and massaged the bridge of his nose with his thumb and forefinger. “God, does my head hurt.”

Georgia's heart fell. Maybe now wasn't the best time to bring up Chessy's eggs.

John swung his legs over the side of the bed, stood up, and disappeared into the bathroom. She could hear him rummaging through the medicine cabinet, picking up pill bottles and shaking them.

“We have four, yes
four
, bottles of Advil here and they're all empty,” he said. “That's great. Shit.” Georgia heard more rattling, the sound of running water.

He came back out, palms pressed against his temples. “I took aspirin,” he said. “I haven't taken aspirin since 1986. Which is probably how old that bottle of aspirin is.”

He climbed into bed, lay on his back, pulled the covers up to his chin, and closed his eyes. It was the oddest position to sleep in, Georgia thought. Yet he'd slept like that, laid out like a pine board, since she'd known him.

“What did you want to talk about?” he said.

“Oh, never mind,” Georgia said. “We can talk about it some other time.”

“Good,” he said. “I need to get some sleep.” He let out a long, deep sigh.

Georgia dropped her necklace into the jewelry box on her dresser and reached up to pull an earring from one ear.

“At least I
can
sleep,” John murmured. “Remember all those years when Liza didn't sleep through the night? That killed me. Thank God we're done with
that
.”

Georgia paused, her hand on her earlobe. “With what?”

“Babies,” John said. “Screaming, crying, pooping, sleepless babies.” He yawned. “Good night.”

5

Alice

Two Months Earlier, April 2012

A
lice sat on a metal bench outside the Bender Library on a Monday afternoon, her briefcase on the concrete walkway beside her, a cup of coffee in her hand. The quad was filled with students giddy over the sunshine, the warm breeze, the impending freedom of summer. A boy in skinny jeans and a white T-shirt took off his black Converse sneakers, tied the laces together, and hurled them into a tree. Three girls in sundresses sat on the grass nearby, texting away on their phones. They looked up when they heard the
whoosh!
of the sneakers through the air, and one of the girls snapped a photo. Across the quad, a dog barked at a student who stood on a chair in front of the Mary Graydon building, wearing rainbow-striped parachute pants and no shirt.

Alice closed her eyes and turned her face toward the sun, feeling it warm her skin, the metal of the bench beside her, the concrete beneath her feet. Here she was at her beloved American University, in the middle of a spring semester in which she was teaching three of her favorite classes to some of the best students she'd ever had, with a letter from the dean in her briefcase commending a recent paper she'd published. The sun was shining after a month of rain; this week marked her fourteenth wedding anniversary; her daughter was thriving after all the upheaval in the fall—and yet Alice was so unhappy she envied the very buds on the trees for their unknowing complacency.

She kept retracing her marriage in her mind, as though if she could follow its course over the days and months and years she could discover the
one
moment that had led to this, the place where the river had encountered an obstacle and changed course. But it wasn't one moment—a shock of betrayal, a slap on the cheek, a bitter argument. None of those things had ever marred her marriage. Instead it was the accumulation of small moments—Duncan's eyes glued to the computer screen as she tried to talk to him about Wren; the empty space at the dinner table night after night because he had to work late again; his hand reaching out to turn off the light before they made love, every single time. They were little, little things, pebbles and grains of sand, carried along in the course of their marriage until they came to a still place and all those pebbles and grains grew into a pile and changed the course of things forever.

Her phone buzzed in her bag and she ignored it. The damn phone was part of the problem. It had made everything so easy, and had made it seem so innocent, at least at first. And as things progressed the phone became an addiction, as seductive to Alice as it was to the teenagers who sat across from her now, their thumbs tap-tap-tapping against the tiny screen.
I miss you,
he would write, as she was folding socks and underwear in front of the television in the evening.
You are the most adorable woman I've ever met
. Alice had never thought of herself as adorable before. Competent, yes; smart, yes; interesting, yes; strong, of course; attractive, okay. But adorable?
I can't stop thinking about you,
he would write, as she snapped the string beans for dinner.
When can I see you again?

The fact that she, Alice Elaine Kinnaird, was in this situation was as foreign to her as it would have been to open her eyes and see a green sun in the sky, purple grass on the quad. She had spent the past few weeks in a kind of fevered blur she had never experienced before. The routine of her days was the same; but she was not the same. She woke in the mornings and went down to the basement to work out, came upstairs and made a smoothie, zipped a Luna Bar into Wren's backpack so she would eat
something,
made coffee for herself and Duncan. Then the phone would beep and he would text her:
Are you alone? Can I call?
She edited essays and graded quizzes and prepared lesson plans and recorded grades faithfully in Blackboard, drove across the Chain Bridge three times a week to teach.
Meet me after your class. Just for half an hour.
She picked Wren up after school and drove her to ballet class, raced to the grocery store to pick up milk or toothpaste, went home and cooked healthful dinners from recipes she found in
Cooking Light
. She lay next to Duncan at night, kissed him good-bye every morning and hello every evening, as always. And yet she was a completely different woman now; she was a cheater. She felt like someone in one of those cartoons Wren used to watch, someone who looks and acts perfectly normal until he reaches up and peels off a rubbery layer of skin to reveal the monster inside.

The thing was, on some level Alice didn't feel guilty at all. She had married Duncan because she wanted someone responsible, protective, reliable—all the things she had never had in her life before. But she had been so focused on finding a safe haven that she hadn't thought about how desolate or lonely that haven might feel, hadn't thought about passion, nurturing, communication. Duncan was a good, good man, but he was also a private and reserved man. Which had suited Alice just fine, until He, her lover, had slid himself inside her body, stared into her eyes, and held the back of her neck with his hand so she could not turn her face away. He had forced her to stare into the heart of their intimacy, and it had changed her. She had spent a lifetime making do on her own, without any nurturing from her mother, with her husband's polite reserve. And she wanted, she realized now at the ripe old age of thirty-four, to love and be loved all-out, to be wanted with a greedy, reckless passion, to be held so tightly her body hurt, to be desired and babied and adored.

Her phone buzzed again. She opened her eyes and leaned forward, fished the phone out of her bag. She read the message there and felt a little thrill; followed at once by a sense of shame so thick she felt it rise in her throat. She hated the feeling of living in pieces. She looked at the phone again. Then, before she could regret it, she typed a message back and hit “send”:
I can't do this anymore
. She saw his eyes as he lay on top of her, remembered the taste of his mouth, the strange roughness of his skin.
It's over.

Alice dropped the phone into her bag, brushed a dusting of pollen from the shoulder of her blue coat, stood up, and walked across the quad, out onto the green, green grass, into the bright yellow sun.

A
LICE
WAS
SIX
the first time she spent an entire night totally alone. Rita, her mother, left at 7:30
P
.
M
. after giving Alice her favorite dinner—macaroni and cheese with hot dogs. She showed Alice how to work the record player, and told her she could play any of the records while she was out, even Carole King and Karla Bonoff, her mother's favorites. Alice liked Carole best because she looked more solid and responsible than Karla, who was pretty and had long hair and probably went out on a lot of dates, like Rita.

“You tuck yourself in at nine,” her mother said. “I'll be back at nine thirty.”

Alice didn't like being home alone, but Rita always locked the door and made sure Alice knew how to dial 911. Alice spent one or two evenings a week by herself while Rita went out to dinner, usually with her boyfriend Joe, sometimes with someone else. Most of those evenings Alice watched TV and organized things: her rock collection, her markers, her shoes. She loved the feeling of satisfaction she got when everything was in its right place. She had forty-two rocks now, including a Petoskey stone from northern Michigan that her father had given her last year on her birthday. He hadn't actually given it to her, as in
handed
it to her, because he was in Canada, but he'd mailed it to her and it was her favorite rock.

On this particular evening Alice didn't mind being alone so much because it was Thursday and she could watch
The Cosby Show.
But after the show was over and after she'd arranged Rita's makeup in neat categories on her vanity—all the mascaras lined up in military precision, the lipsticks standing at attention, the blushes and powders in neat piles—she ran out of things to do. It was after nine, though, so she brushed her teeth and put on her pink flowered nightgown and climbed into bed.

She couldn't sleep. The numbers on her digital clock said 9:15 and then 9:38. She closed her eyes and listened for the sound of her mother's key in the lock, but she heard only silence. When she opened her eyes, the numbers said 10:03. At 10:30 she got up and went into her mother's room and played the whole
Tapestry
album. When it ended she went into her bedroom to look at the clock again: 11:12. She felt the first stirrings of fear deep in her belly.
What if she doesn't come home?

She went back to her mother's room, but listening to Karla Bonoff sing “Someone to Lay Down Beside Me” made Alice sad so she put Carole King back on and lay on the floor. If a bad guy came in she figured she could scoot under the bed before he saw her. She wished (not for the first time) that she had a big brother to watch out for her, or a sister who liked to play imaginary games and organize makeup. They could hide under the bed together. When the record ended she'd sit up, flip it over, and play the other side. She dozed off, but when the music stopped the silence would wake her, and she'd flip the record again. She wondered what would happen if Rita never came home. Would her father take her to Canada? Or would she have to live in an orphanage like Annie?