Leaving Haven (3 page)

He was on his back, arms thrown overhead, little hands curled into fists. Alice leaned forward to study him. He had John's full lips, no doubt, and the ears that stuck out just slightly, like John. His hair was brown, as Georgia's had been once, before she began to color it that rich auburn. His skin was ruddy. Alice tried to remember if Liza had been a ruddy baby.

The baby whimpered, and pursed his lips. Without thinking Alice put her hands to her breasts but then realized that of course she had no milk, because this was not her child.

“Does he have a name?” Alice said. John stood beside her.

“Kind of,” John said. “Georgia was talking about Nicholas, or Benjamin, but we hadn't decided anything.”

“She didn't name him before she left the hospital?”

“No.” A guilty look stole over John's face. “But I had to fill out all this paperwork before I brought him home, and I didn't want him to come home as ‘Baby boy Bing.' ”

Oh, God. If John had chosen a legal name for the baby without consulting Georgia it would make everything even worse, if that were possible. “So you gave him a name,” Alice said. It was a statement. She knew John.

“Haven,” John said. “Haven Jonathan Bing.”

“
Haven?
John, Georgia likes plain names, ordinary—”

“Georgia wasn't
there,
” John said, his voice angry for the first time. “Haven Schmidt played minor league baseball with my dad; he was my dad's best friend for decades. He batted .303 one year for the Albuquerque Dukes.”

Alice started to say something, but stopped. What was the point? John and Georgia would have to figure this out on their own.

The baby began to cry. Alice looked at John. He rolled his eyes. “Here we go again,” he said. “He's been asleep all of twenty minutes.” The crying turned into shrieks. Alice reached forward and patted the baby's head. He shrieked again and Alice pulled her hand away. She felt the same uncertainty she had felt with Wren.
What do I do now?

She reached forward and slid a careful hand under the baby's head, for support, and another hand under his bottom, picked him up, and held him against her chest. She could feel his downy hair against her chin. He stopped screaming and nestled in against her, whimpering. She rocked back and forth for a minute or two, feeling somewhat awkward—how did other women figure out that unconscious, easy rhythm when they held babies?—until he was quiet.

“You see?” John said. “You are good with babies.”

“Oh, please.” Alice rolled her eyes. “Here, you take him,” she said, putting a hand behind the baby's vulnerable neck again, trying to disentangle herself.

“No way,” John said. “He's happy.”

“John, I have to go.”

Alice looked at him with pleading eyes. She pulled the baby away from her neck and cradled him in her arms for a moment, gazing down into his face. The baby looked at her for the first time, his gray eyes on hers, serious and intent. Alice was completely unprepared for the sudden rush of feeling she felt—the shock of recognition, the fierce protectiveness, the wild love.

“All right,” John said. “I'll take him. Go.” He held out his arms.

Alice didn't even hear him. She heard instead the whisper of the baby's yawn, the soft rustle of his clothing as he stretched one small arm above his head. She kept her eyes fixed on his tiny face.

Oh, my God,
she thought, looking into the baby's eyes.
I am never going to let you go.

2

Georgia

A Year Earlier, April 2011

T
he first time Georgia ever even imagined that her husband could be capable of having an affair came one May evening at the restaurant, when Amelia leaned across the table, said, “Mmmm, that looks good,” speared a bite of John's chicken kebab with her fork, and popped it into her mouth. John had grinned at Nicole, his dark eyes meeting hers, and Georgia thought,
He hates it when anyone touches his food. Why is he smiling at her?
Then she thought,
Hmmm
.

For a few weeks after that she watched John more closely, trying to note whether or not he was working more hours, spending more time on the computer, paying more attention to his appearance, or exhibiting any of the other “Seven Telltale Signs Your Husband Is Cheating” that she had found online. But John seemed to work the same hours as always, read the same chef blogs, and look as sloppily handsome as usual.

“I think John may be having an affair,” she said one day to Alice as they sat in Georgia's kitchen drinking tea. Or rather, Georgia was sitting and Alice was fixing the broken drawer front that Georgia had stuck together with silver duct tape. Georgia's house, an 1890 Victorian with a 1980s kitchen, always had something in it in need of repair. And while Georgia could draw, paint, sew, hook rugs, knit, weave, bake, and even carve wood, she had little interest in or skill with home repairs.

Alice, who was at the counter bent over the faulty drawer, looked up. She had bright blue eyes and eyebrows that didn't quite match, because the left eyebrow curved up in a perfect arch while the right one was almost straight. A wrinkle furrowed the space between her brows as she focused on what Georgia was saying.

“Now why would you think that?” she said.

“I don't know,” Georgia said. “There's something about that girl Amelia, his new sous chef.”

“What about her?” Alice said. She put the screwdriver down on the Formica counter. “And what do you mean ‘girl'? How old is she?”

Georgia scratched her nose. “I don't know. Twenty-seven? Twenty-eight? Liza and I stopped by the restaurant the other night and John took a break and had dinner with us. Then she came over to our table and tasted his chicken kebab.”

Alice looked at Georgia and contemplated this. Georgia loved this about Alice, the fact that she took Georgia's concerns seriously, no matter how unrealistic or ridiculous. Alice was all the things Georgia wasn't—confident, organized, practical. From the time they'd first met all those years ago, kneeling side by side on bright blue gymnastic mats while their babies mimicked the motions of the spry young Wiggle with Me teacher, Georgia had felt reassured by Alice's steadiness, her unflappable common-sense approach to everything.

Even though Wren was Alice's first baby, she never worried about whether fluoride toothpaste was poison or plastic baby bottles caused cancer. “She'll survive,” she said. She worked part-time as an economics professor, had her daughter neatly scheduled into a sport for every season, and did her grocery shopping for the entire week every Sunday. Alice's organizational skills and confidence in her own way of doing things impressed Georgia, whose house was always cluttered in spite of her best efforts and who rarely had confidence that someone, somewhere wasn't doing a better job than she was.

Alice was the one in whom Georgia confided all her secret failings and longings, like the time she'd gotten so frustrated with Liza that she'd run outside and locked herself in the car. “But you didn't drive away!” Alice had said triumphantly. “See? You
are
a good mother.” Alice was the one who had rushed over when Liza had tumbled backward and hit her head on the coffee table, opening a wound that bled so much Georgia had almost fainted. Alice had pressed a dark blue dishtowel against the cut (“blood doesn't show on navy blue”) and then driven them to the ER in her bloodstained white blouse while Georgia held the screaming Liza in her arms. Why, Georgia had even told Alice her most intimate secrets, like how sometimes she wished John wouldn't yell quite so loudly in her ear when they made love.

“Did she
ask
for a bite of chicken kebab first?” Alice said.

Georgia shook her head.

“That is a little strange,” Alice said. “John is so weird about his food.”

“Exactly,” Georgia said.

“But,” Alice said, “think about the setting. You were in the restaurant. John and Amelia work together, and for all you know they've spent the entire week trying to perfect that chicken kebab recipe. It would be like you tasting the mousse filling from someone else's wedding cake. A work thing.”

“I guess,” Georgia said. She wasn't convinced.

“Has there been anything else?”

Georgia shook her head. “Not really. There just was something about the way he looked at her.”

“Did you ask him about it?”

“No. I didn't want to seem paranoid, you know?”

Alice shook her head. Of course Alice wouldn't know, Georgia thought. Duncan, Alice's husband, was as solid and reasonable and straightforward as Alice was. He worked as a lawyer for a nonprofit, mowed the lawn every Saturday, attended church every Sunday, and had never, to Georgia's knowledge, even looked at another woman since he'd married Alice. He didn't even buy the
Sports Illustrated
swimsuit issue.

In many ways, Duncan and Alice seemed like the perfect couple to Georgia. They were gentle and polite with each other, laughed a lot together, and almost never argued, even though they had a volatile twelve-year-old daughter just like Georgia did. Their life never seemed messy and chaotic the way Georgia's own life felt to her, like racing downhill on a pair of Rollerblades, always on the verge of losing control. Alice's cream-carpeted living room was perpetually fresh and clean; she had her family's schedule all written out on a big calendar, with different-colored markers for each person; she returned every phone call and e-mail
the same day
. And Duncan—he was handy and loved fixing things, so everything in their house always worked, from the alarm clocks to the garbage disposal. He never forgot a birthday or anniversary, whether it was Alice's or his aunt Jessie's. And as if that weren't enough, Duncan was also amazing in bed and did something with a feather held between his teeth that made the normally self-contained Alice lose all control, as she had told Georgia.

“You're not paranoid, Georgia,” Alice said now, bending back to the kitchen drawer. “I'd think twice about what was going on if Duncan spent all day working with a twenty-something-year-old—he's only human, after all. Have you noticed anything else? Is John working more hours than usual? Is he secretive about his phone or his e-mail?”

“No,” Georgia said. “I thought of all that. He's so absentminded—half the time he leaves his e-mail up on the screen staring me in the face.”

“Okay, then,” Alice said. “So there are no other signs anything's wrong. And every time I see you—which is pretty much all the time—you two seem to be getting along fine. You are fine, right?”

Georgia was silent.
Are we fine?
She and John had known each other for almost twenty years, and been married for seventeen. They'd met when Georgia was twenty-one, fresh out of college, working as an apprentice pastry chef at a high-end restaurant in Albany. John, seven years her senior, had been the sous chef at Truscello's, earthy, funny, with quirky devotions to things like martial arts movies and the perfect paella. Their attraction had been immediate and explosive. For the most part, her marriage was good. They shared a passion for fine food and they both loved their work. John had pushed her to turn her baking into her own business, suggested her as the dessert chef when he got catering gigs, had even encouraged her to bid on making the wedding cake for a well-known senator's nuptials—a bid she had won and that had boosted her business a thousand percent. They both adored Liza, their daughter, and even if John wasn't as involved with parenting as Georgia was, that wasn't so unusual. True, their marriage had settled into the kind of businesslike arrangement that seemed to characterize so many marriages of Georgia's generation, a constant negotiation about the division of home chores and work demands, endless rounds of if-you-take-Liza-to-soccer-I'll-do-the-grocery-shopping bargaining. But that was normal, right? If Georgia's marriage was less than fine for any reason, it was the baby thing.

“I guess so,” Georgia said. Her voice was soft. “I think he's a little burned out on the infertility stuff.”

Georgia and John had been trying to have another baby for more than seven years now, with nothing to show for it. Georgia's heart clenched just thinking about it. John had opened Bing's, his restaurant, the year Liza turned three, and things had been crazy after that, both of them working long hours and taking care of Liza and pouring every penny they made back into the business. It had paid off; Bing's was one of the busiest, most popular spots in northern Virginia now. Then Georgia's business had taken off, too. Once they'd decided they were ready for baby number two, Georgia had a miscarriage, and another, and another, and then didn't get pregnant again at all.

“Unexplained infertility” was the official diagnosis. They tried six rounds of Clomid, and three rounds of Femara and hCG injections, followed by eight months of acupuncture and then intrauterine insemination (twice). They tried in vitro fertilization (three times) without success, and two months ago, on her fortieth birthday, Georgia had decided—finally—to give up. It was enough to make anybody crazy. But the top drawer of her dresser still held the grainy black-and-white ultrasound images of the babies she'd miscarried, as well as a tiny blue baby sweater Chessy had given her when Georgia had announced her second pregnancy—too soon.