Free Leaving Haven by Kathleen McCleary

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.
    â€œYou 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