Leaving Haven (5 page)

Alice knew he was awake, just as she was. This had become their new routine, their new normal. She and Duncan would sit in the living room after the last of the dinner dishes had been rinsed and put away, with Duncan in the big cream-colored chenille armchair with his feet up on the ottoman, tapping away on his laptop. Alice would sit across from him on the brown leather sofa and fold the laundry. Sometimes she graded papers, leaning over the glass-topped coffee table, or filled out forms for Wren's dance camp. Neither one of them spoke. Once in a while Wren would flit in, chatting away on her cell phone, and walk into the kitchen to grab a glass of vanilla hemp milk, her favorite snack. At some point, Alice would look at her watch, or Wren would pop in again, and good nights would be said, and Wren would disappear upstairs. Alice would stretch and say, “You coming to bed?” and Duncan would say, “No, not quite yet,” and Alice would brush her teeth and change into her nightgown and lie there, on her half of the bed, until she heard Duncan come in and undress in the dark.

So on this night, a month after the Day Everything Fell Apart, Alice made up her mind to say something.

“Thank you,” she said. She had decided, on that black day, that from now on every word that passed her lips would be honest. And of all the many things she could say, or had said already, the thing she most wanted Duncan to understand was her gratitude.

Such a long silence met her words that she thought perhaps he was asleep. At last she turned her head to look at his profile in the dim light—the high forehead, that strong Scottish nose, the firm jaw. He swallowed.

“For what?” he said.

“For still being here,” she said.

“Honestly, I am in shock, Alice.”

“I know.” Alice rolled onto her side, facing him. “I found a counselor,” she said. “I'm going to go, myself. And I would be happy to go with you, too, if you thought—”

“I'm not
thinking
right now,” he said. He lay on his back, his eyes on the ceiling. “But I'm sure as hell
feeling
.”

Alice flinched. She had never heard Duncan swear before. Not a
shit
or a
damn
or even a
hell
had once passed his lips in the fifteen years she'd known him. Duncan was one of the most courtly, well-mannered people she'd ever met, thanks to his Atlanta upbringing, an upbringing that had included dance lessons and charity balls and “yes, ma'am” and knowing that dishes are passed from left to right and that you should always hold a stemmed glass only by the stem. His gentle, genteel ways were one of the things that had drawn Alice to him from the first day they'd met, at Kramerbooks in Dupont Circle, the spring of her sophomore year. She was looking for something to read over spring break, something that had nothing to do with economics or statistics. But everything she picked up seemed either too grim (
Cold Mountain
) or too silly (Danielle Steel). She was studying the back cover of
Angela's Ashes
(more grimness!) when a voice in her ear said, “Excuse me. Have you read this?” She looked up, surprised, to see a tall, lean man next to her, with blue eyes the same color as that piece of sea glass her father had sent her once from Hawaii. His light brown hair was cropped close to his head, which made the strong angles of his cheekbones, nose, and jaw even more prominent. He held out a copy of
Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil
. Alice, ever the introvert, shook her head.

“I'm trying to find a book for my sister's birthday,” he said.

Alice thought of herself as the person someone would be least likely to approach anywhere. She didn't mean to be reserved, but something about the way she held herself seemed to keep people at bay. She knew it, and had been trying to figure it out since arriving at college, studying herself in the mirror and practicing how to relax her shoulders, ease the tiny furrow between her brows.

“I'm afraid you're asking the wrong person,” she said. “I haven't read anything except economics textbooks for a year or two now.”

“So you've decided to break out and read something fun like
Angela's Ashes
?”

Alice smiled. He invited her to have a cup of coffee, in the café at the back of the bookstore. The conversation flowed—Georgetown, Virginia Tech (his alma mater), economics, law (he worked for Covington & Burling), Michigan (her home state), Georgia (his), siblings (she had none; he had three younger sisters), fitness.

Alice relaxed. She liked him. They had a lot in common. They were both early risers, religious about their exercise routines, prompt, disciplined. Then he mentioned pole vaulting, which he had done in college. Alice knew sports and strength training, which she had done since she was fifteen. But pole vaulting?

“Why?” she said. She was truly curious.

He leaned forward across the little café table, his blue eyes on hers. “Because it's a thinking sport,” he said. “Every time, you have to figure out which pole to use, which height to jump, which strategy to use.” He sat back. “And then you fly.”

He was all the things Alice had never had before in her life—competent, reliable, trustworthy—and yet he had this one exotic thing about him, this passion for a strange sport that made you feel as if you were flying.

“I'd like to see that sometime,” she had said.

He had smiled at her. “You will.”

Later he had told her that he had approached her because she was so pretty but also because she was so careful, picking up each book, studying the cover, reading everything on the back jacket and the inside flaps. “You seemed like a serious person, a thoughtful person,” he said. “But then when we had coffee, you were charming—shy but confident, smart, and you thought pole vaulting was intriguing and not geeky. I was captivated.”

Captivated. No one in the world—her faraway father, her indifferent mother—had ever found her captivating.

She looked at him now, inches from her in their too-small bed, his eyes still fixed on a point on the ceiling.

“I'm sorry,” she said.

“You've said that.”

“Do you want to talk about it?”

“No.”

She didn't cry. She had never been a crier, and this was beyond that.

“Okay,” she said. “When you want to talk—if you want to talk—I'm here.” She paused. “Always.
Forever.
” She waited, held her breath.

“Okay,” he said, and rolled over on his side, his back to her.

And she had to be satisfied that, for now, that was enough.

T
HE
NEXT
WEEK
was the spring dance team performance at school. The dance team performed—an odd choice, in Alice's mind—to Eminem's “Love the Way You Lie,” and even though they had edited the sound track and cleaned up the lyrics, Alice was uncomfortable. She worried that Duncan would be shocked that Wren was doing a dance—albeit a passion-filled, very good dance—to a song about a man who hit his wife. She wondered if Duncan was thinking about her and
her
big lie. Finally, she felt unsettled because she found herself wishing that she and Duncan could express that kind of raw, honest emotion with each other instead of the agonizing politeness that had characterized their marriage for a while, and especially this past month.

She remembered the first year they were married, when he would come home late at night from work and come upstairs to find her, taking the steps two at a time with those long legs of his, so eager to see her that he couldn't wait to take off his coat. When had he stopped doing that?

She had read an article once about a woman who lost her sense of smell. The woman was a hair colorist, and over time the chemicals she worked with had irritated the tiny nerves at the roof of her nose. First, the woman noticed that her son had a different smell when she hugged him; not bad, just different. Then she noticed that her house didn't smell the same when she made her pungent garlic tomato sauce for the spaghetti. Losing her sense of smell was gradual, the woman said—a missing scent here, a diminished fragrance there—and then it was gone. It took her a while to figure it out.

And that was exactly what had happened to Alice's marriage, a dimming, so subtle you didn't even notice it at first. Duncan had been so busy at work he didn't have time to respond to her e-mails or texts, not even with a
Got it. Thanks. Home at 8:30
. Texts and e-mails were small things, but they were moments of connection, however mundane. She and Duncan were both tired in the evening, so they didn't read to each other in bed anymore before turning out the light. He never looked at her when she changed clothes, never noticed the lacy new bra she'd bought, or the three inches she had cut off her hair. They had become roommates.

And then there had been the day last year when Duncan had come home and announced that he had quit his job at Covington & Burling (“Covetous & Boring,” as he had long referred to it) and taken a job at the Mid-Atlantic Innocence Project, a nonprofit that worked to free prisoners who had been wrongly convicted. Alice had known that he found his work at Covington dull, but had no idea he had been researching jobs with nonprofits, or that he had even a remote interest in the plight of potentially innocent prisoners. It surprised her as much as if he'd told her he'd decided to quit the law for a career as a trapeze artist or a plumber, something completely out of left field. Their income dropped by more than half—a significant life change that she thought Duncan should at least have
discussed
with her first.

All of this came to her as Wren danced onstage, her strong, wiry body moving with an intensity that startled Alice, that made her look at dancing in a way she had never imagined. All Wren's anger, her sense of injustice, emanated from her body onstage, the taut line of her neck, the fierce height of her leaps. Alice had never seen Wren like this. If only Duncan had reacted with this kind of passion to everything that had happened with Wren, or to the chain of events it had unleashed . . .

“I've never seen her dance like that,” she said to him, as they waited in the lobby for Wren after the performance.

“Like what?”

“With that kind of intensity. She's thirteen, and yet she understood that character. I think what happened last fall really changed her.”

“I am not a fan of that song,” Duncan said.

“I figured. But Wren—” Wren had danced like someone who understood what it felt like to want to be loved and to fear disapproval and to seethe over betrayal. But Alice couldn't say that to Duncan.

“She just seemed more involved with the dance this time,” Alice said.

“I guess.” Duncan's eyes brushed past her, over the crowd.

Alice felt small, compressed with guilt, as she had for weeks now. She turned her attention from Duncan to the familiar faces she saw in the lobby, the parents she knew whose children had gone through preschool and kindergarten and elementary and now middle school with Wren, who showed up at all the soccer games and concerts and field days, as involved as they could possibly be. Alice wondered how many of them really knew what their middle schoolers were like.

Wren rushed up to them, flushed, breathless. “There's a party to celebrate the end of the season at Annie's house,” she said. “Can I go? Her parents are home. Her mom will drive us there. I'll call you when I need a ride home.”

Duncan shrugged. “Sounds okay.”

“Whoa,” Alice said.

“What?” Duncan and Wren both turned to look at her.

Alice didn't really have an objection, at least not a rational one. She just had the same gut-clenching protective instinct she had to everything involving Wren now.

“Well,” Alice said. “Who else will be there?”

“The dance team girls, Mom. Annie, Lily, Rachel, Nicole, Ally—the usual.”

“Liza? Emilie?”

“No.”

Duncan raised one eyebrow at her, something she had once found endearing but now found annoying. Duncan, so essentially good-natured and decent, did not understand the Machiavellian machinations of adolescent girls. He had always viewed the world as a kind and welcoming and safe place—or at least he had until a month ago. He assumed the best of people; trusted things would work out; saw setbacks as temporary blips. For Alice, who had spent much of her life poised on a knife edge of wariness and uncertainty, Duncan's confidence in the general goodness of things had always been at once irresistible and irritating.

Alice shrugged, tried to display a casual acceptance she did not feel. “Okay.”

“Thanks! I'll call you.” Wren turned and darted away to find her friends, her dark ponytail bouncing behind her. And as much as Alice had chafed and despaired over those early years when Wren was an infant, for a moment she wished with all her heart that she had that little girl back again, safe under her own watch.

Duncan looked at his watch. “Eight thirty,” he said. “We should get home.”

“Why?” Alice said. All at once she was sick of being polite, sick of pretending that there wasn't a large elephant—or two, or three—sitting in the middle of her life, squeezing the breath out of her.

Duncan looked at her in surprise. “What do you mean, ‘Why?' ”

“I mean why do we have to rush home? It's Saturday night. It's eight thirty. Our only child is at a party. Why don't we go out for a drink? Or go to a movie?
Do
something?”

“You're serious?”

“Yes, I'm serious.”

The crowd had thinned now, and they stood alone at the side of the lobby, Duncan impeccable in his sport coat and khakis, Alice in the crisp, professional pants and silk top she'd worn that afternoon to teach. Duncan looked off into space, over Alice's head.

“Hmm,” he said. “I have to think about that.”