What Alice Forgot (55 page)

A
lice was running with her mobile in her hand, so she wouldn’t miss the call when it came.

She was running the route that Luke used to take her and Gina on. She’d let Luke go. She couldn’t justify spending one hundred and fifty dollars on a personal-training session. Not when she and Nick were still trying to work out the money settlement. She’d also dropped the gym membership. These days she just liked to run and remember.

Since she’d lost her memory and got it back again, she was obsessed with remembering her life. She kept a daily journal, and whenever she went running she let memories drift through her head. When she got home she would write them down. It was hard to know whether she’d fully recovered her memory of the ten years she’d lost, or if there were still gaps. She understood that even before the accident she wouldn’t have had perfect recall of the previous decade, but she kept scouring her mind, searching for any missing pieces.

Today she was remembering a night when Tom was a baby. Everyone had told her that her second child would be a wonderful sleeper after her problems with Madison. Everyone was wrong. Tom was a “cluster feeder.” He didn’t like having a proper feed every three to four hours, thanks anyway. He much preferred a snack every hour. Every
single hour
. That meant Alice slept for only forty minutes at a time before she was wrenched awake again by the sound of his cry through the baby monitor. And Madison was a toddler but she
still
had never slept through a single night in her life.

It was a time in her life when Alice was obsessed with sleep. She lusted for it. She saw television ads for sleeping pills or beds with people sleeping and they made her want to spit with envy. After feeding Tom, she would half stumble, half run back to the bedroom and dive into the bed. Her sleep would be full of dreams about the baby: she’d fallen asleep on the baby and suffocated him; she’d left him on the change table halfway through changing his nappy and he’d rolled onto the floor. And then, just at the moment she was sleeping the deepest, most exquisite sleep, the sound of the monitor would wake her again. It was like being desperately thirsty and having somebody hand you a tall glass of ice water and then tear it away from your mouth just as you took a sip. Better not to have any water at all.

On this particular night, Nick was leaving early the following morning for an important business trip. She’d just got back into bed after convincing Madison to go back to sleep (
Why
can’t I play outside now?
Why
is it the middle of the night?) when Tom began wailing. Her head swam as she bent over the crib to pick him up. She felt a wave of pure rage at this person who refused to let her sleep.
Just what do you expect of me?
Her arms tightened around the baby.
You . . . need . . . to . . . be . . . quiet.

She laid him back down with elaborate care. Tom was enraged, and screamed as though she’d just put him down on a bed of knives. Alice went back to the bedroom, switched on the light, and said to Nick, “You need to lock me up. I wanted to hurt the baby.”

Nick sat up in bed, his eyes bleary and confused. “You hurt the baby?”

Alice was trembling all over. “No. I
wanted
to. I wanted to squeeze him until he stopped crying.”

“Right, then,” said Nick calmly, as if she’d just reported something perfectly normal. He got up and led her by the hand back to bed. “You need sleep.”

“But I need to feed him.”

“I’ll give him the expressed milk you’ve got in the freezer. Just go to sleep. I’m canceling tomorrow. Sleep.”

“But—”

“Sleep. Just sleep.”

It was the most erotic thing he’d ever said to her. He pulled the covers up under her chin, unplugged the monitor, and left, switching off the light and closing the door behind him. The room became divinely silent and dark.

She slept.

When she woke, her breasts rock hard and leaking, the room was filled with sunlight, and the house was quiet. She looked at the clock and saw that it was nine o’clock. He’d done it. He actually canceled his trip. She’d slept for six straight glorious hours. Her vision was brighter, her brain sharper. She went downstairs and found Nick giving Madison her breakfast, while Tom cooed and kicked in his bouncer.

“Thank you,” said Alice, almost delirious with gratitude and relief.

“No problem.” Nick smiled.

She could still see the pride on his face, because he’d saved her. He’d fixed things. He’d always loved to fix things for her.

So it wasn’t strictly true that he was never there, or that he always put work first.

Maybe if she’d just asked him for help more? If she’d fallen apart more often so he could be the knight in shining armor (but how sexist and wrong was that?); if she hadn’t made herself the expert on everything to do with the children; if she hadn’t been so condescending when he dressed the children in weirdly inappropriate combinations. He couldn’t stand being made to feel stupid, so then he just stopped offering to dress them. His stupid pride.

Her stupid pride about being the best, most professional mother.
I might not have made it in your world, Nick, like Elisabeth, and all those career women in suits, but I’ve made it in my world.

She’d come to the steepest part of the route, the part that always made Gina use terrible language. Her calf muscles tightened.

It was good to remember that for every horrible memory from her marriage, there was also a happy one. She wanted to see it clearly, to understand that it wasn’t all black, or all white. It was a million colors. And yes, ultimately it hadn’t worked out, but that was okay. Just because a marriage ended didn’t mean that it hadn’t been happy at times.

She thought about that strange period of time straight after she’d got her memory back. At first, images, words, emotions crashed over her in violent waves. She could hardly breathe for the chaos. Then, after a few days, her mind had calmed, the memories had fallen into their correct places, and she felt a kind of beautiful relief. Without her memory, she’d been swimming through cloudy water, half blind: now she had clarity of vision again. And what she saw was this: her marriage was over and she was in love with Dominick. That was that. With Dominick she felt the sweet, soothing comfort of being with a man who was besotted by her, fascinated by her, and wanted to find out who she was. With Nick, all she felt was bitterness, fury, and hurt. He was a man who had already decided who she was, who could list all her flaws, annoying tendencies, and mistakes. She could hardly stand to be in the same room with him. The idea that she’d planned to get back together with him was terrifying and shocking. As if someone had drugged her, hypnotized her, duped and deceived her.

It wasn’t just that her memories of the last ten years were back. It was that her true self,
as formed by those ten years,
was back. As seductive as it might have been to erase the grief and pain of the last ten years, it was also a lie. Young Alice was a fool. A sweet, innocent fool. Young Alice hadn’t experienced ten years of living.

But even as she tried to reason with her, scolded her, and grieved for her, young Alice stubbornly refused to go away.

Over the months that followed she kept popping up. She’d be paying for petrol at the service station and find her hand reaching out for a bar of heavenly Lindt chocolate. She’d be talking seriously to Nick about complicated logistical arrangements with the children and she’d find herself asking him something flippant and entirely unrelated to the conversation, like what he’d had for breakfast that morning. She’d be rushing to the beautician and find herself calling Elisabeth to suggest they meet for a coffee instead. She’d be hurrying between appointments and a voice would whisper in her head:
Relax.

Finally she stopped resisting and called a truce. Young Alice was allowed to stay as long as she didn’t eat too much chocolate.

Now it seemed like she could twist the lens on her life and see it from two entirely different perspectives. The perspective of her younger self. Her younger, sillier, innocent self. And her older, wiser, more cynical and sensible self.

And maybe sometimes Young Alice had a point.

Like with Madison, for example. Before she’d lost her memory, Alice had been going through a bad stage with Madison. She’d been so tough on her, so frustrated by her behavior, and in the deepest, most shamefully childish part of her mind, she had blamed Madison for Gina’s accident. If she hadn’t had to take her to the dentist that morning, Gina wouldn’t have been pulling up at the corner at that time. They would have stopped to have coffee instead.

And of course Madison would have been smart enough to pick up on Alice’s resentment. She was already a child who felt everything far too deeply. She’d seen her mother’s friend killed in an accident and then her parents separated.

No wonder she’d been playing up. Elisabeth recommended a psychiatrist she’d heard about. A Dr. Jeremy Hodges. Madison had been going to see him twice a week, and it seemed to be helping. At least she hadn’t assaulted anyone lately at school; and Kate Harper’s husband had been transferred to somewhere in Europe, so the Harper family was now thankfully out of their lives.

There was a friendly toot of a horn and Alice looked up to see Mrs. Bergen driving by in her little blue Honda. It was strange, but after she got her memory back Alice found she’d lost interest in the development issue. The idea of selling up for a nice profit and moving to a fresh, new house without memories no longer seemed that important. She knew the bad memories would come with her anyway, and she didn’t want to leave the good ones behind.

On the other hand, if the developers won—well, that was life. Things changed. Oh, things sure did change.

She came to the corner where Gina had died and remembered yet again the terror and disbelief of that moment. Her grief had changed since she lost and regained her memory. It was simpler, calmer, sadder. Before, she had somehow channeled her grief into a whole lot of different directions: fury toward Nick (
He should have taken Gina’s side when she was splitting up with Mike
), coldness toward Elisabeth (
She never really liked Gina all that much
), and irritation toward Madison (
Gina would still be alive if they’d driven in the same car
)
.
Hearing the facts of her life—“Your friend died”—without the memories, had untangled her feelings. Now she just missed her.

The phone rang in her hand. She stopped to answer it without looking at the name on the screen.

“Heard anything yet?” It was Dominick.

“No!” she said. “Stop taking up the phone line.”

“Sorry.” He laughed. “I’ll see you tonight. I’m bringing a chicken, right?”

“Yes, yes! Go away!”

He liked to check things. And double-check. And triple-check. Just to be sure. It could potentially become an annoying habit, but then, everyone had annoying habits. And she wouldn’t have even considered asking Nick to do something so menial as buy a barbecue chicken on a weeknight! Nick was too busy and important. When Dominick came over after a day’s work, he was totally present. Not like Nick, who would sometimes act as if Alice and the children weren’t quite real, as if his real life was at the office. It wasn’t as if Dominick didn’t have a stressful job, too. Nick might run a company but Dominick ran a school. And which one was contributing more to the community?

She just wished she would stop comparing Dominick to Nick, as if all the reasons she loved Dominick were simply because he was so different from Nick. It sometimes seemed as if the whole
point
of her relationship with Dominick was how it compared to her relationship with Nick.

The other day she and Dominick had been at Tom’s soccer game and Nick was there, too. She’d been so aware of his eyes on them from the other side of the field as she laughed extra hard at Dominick’s jokes. She’d made herself a bit sick, to be honest.

The awful thing was that even when Nick
wasn’t
there, she was always imagining him watching.
Look at us snuggled up on the couch together watching TV, Nick. He’s rubbing my feet. You never did that. Look at us walking hand in hand into this café. No fuss about finding the “perfect” table—we just sit down! Look, Nick, look!

So did that make her relationship with Dominick nothing more than a performance?

She slowed down to a brisk walk, panting hard, and remembered how she’d sat in the kitchen drinking wine with Nick and the blissful relief she’d felt kissing him.

Stupid. So mortifying. He’d kissed her back, though. He’d been willing to “try again.”

She had absolutely no desire to try again. None whatsoever. Been there, done that. Time to move on with her life. She had made the right decision. The children loved Dominick. He’d probably spent more time with them than they’d ever spent with their father.

And she and Nick were so civil and grown-up nowadays! They had finally worked out a “shared parenting arrangement” that suited them both. Nick wasn’t having them fifty percent of the time, but he was seeing them a lot more than just on weekends. He was actually taking Friday afternoons off from work so he could pick them up from school.

Recently, she had found she was actually looking forward to seeing him when he dropped off the children. It was going to be one of those “amicable” divorces.

Yes, a good marriage (if you averaged it all out) followed by a good divorce. According to the children, Nick had a girlfriend. Megan.

Alice wasn’t exactly sure how she felt about
Megan
.

The phone rang again.

At last. It was him. She sat down on somebody’s red-brick garden wall.

“Tell me,” she said. “Hurry up and tell me!”

At first she couldn’t understand him. He seemed to be in the middle of blowing his nose.

“What? What did you say?”

“A little girl,” said Ben, loud and clear. “A beautiful little baby girl.”

Chapter 34