What Alice Forgot (25 page)

But that was all ten years ago.

So were those tiny items now faded and dusty in a cupboard somewhere?

Alice lifted her hand in affectionate greeting. Mrs. Bergen lowered her head and turned pointedly in the direction of her azaleas.

Oh.

There was no mistaking it. Mrs. Bergen had snubbed her.

Would sweet, chubby
Mrs. Bergen
yell and swear at her, as Nick had, if Alice went over to say hello? That would be like when the little girl’s head spun around in
The Exorcist
.

Alice went back inside quickly and closed the door behind her, feeling an absurd desire to cry.

Maybe Mrs. Bergen was going senile and didn’t recognize Alice anymore. That was a perfectly reasonable explanation. Yes, that would do. For now. Once she got back her memory, everything would fall neatly into place. “Oh,” she’d say. “Of course!”

Well. What next?

She wondered exactly what she did on these weekends when “Nick had the children.” Did she like the break? Was she lonely? Did she long for the children to come back?

The sensible thing to do would be to explore the house for clues about her life. That way she’d be ready for when Nick came back tomorrow night. She should have a persuasive presentation prepared: Ten reasons why we should not be getting this divorce.

Maybe she would find something about Gina. Love letters to Nick? But presumably he would have taken those with him when he moved out.

Or perhaps she should be doing something for this party tonight? But what? The party seemed strangely irrelevant.

Actually, she didn’t want to be in the house at all. Her stomach felt uncomfortably full from all that custard tart she’d eaten. “You want a
second
piece?” her mother had said with pleased surprise and Alice guessed that this was unusual for her.

She would go for a walk. That would clear her mind. It was a beautiful day. Why spend it indoors?

She went upstairs and then stopped in the hallway, looking at the other three bedroom doors. That must be where the children slept now. She and Nick had left them empty, except for the one they were going to use for the baby’s nursery. They’d spent a lot of time in there, sitting cross-legged on the floor, planning and imagining. They’d picked the paint color:
Ocean Azure
. It would work even if the baby surprised them by being a girl (which she had—a girl!).

Alice tentatively pushed open the nursery door.

Well. What did she expect? Of course there was no white crib or change table, no rocking chair. It wasn’t a nursery anymore.

Instead there was a single unmade bed, strewn with clothes and a bookshelf crammed with books, old empty bottles of perfume, and glass jars. The walls were almost entirely plastered with moody black-and-white pictures of European cities. Alice saw a tiny square of blue in between two posters. She went over and put her finger to it.
Ocean Azure.

There was a desk against one wall. She saw a ring binder labeled
Madison Love
. The handwriting was familiar. It looked like Alice’s own writing when she was in primary school. She noticed an open recipe book face down on the desk and picked it up. A recipe for lasagne. Wasn’t Madison too little to be
cooking
? And for posters of European cities? Alice was still playing with dolls at that age. Her own daughter was making her nine-year-old self feel inferior.

She carefully placed the recipe book back down and tiptoed out of the room.

The next bedroom door was closed and there was a note pinned to it.

KEEP OUT. DO NOT ENTER WITHOUT PERMISSION. NO GIRLS ALLOWED. THE CONSEQUENCES WILL BE DEATH.

Goodness. Alice let go of the door handle and backed away. She was a girl, after all. This must be Tom’s room. Maybe he had it booby-trapped. Little boys. How terrifying.

The next room was more welcoming. She had to push through beads hanging from the doorway. The bed was a little girl’s dream: four-poster, with a purple gauze canopy. Fairy wings hung from a hook on the wall. There were tiny glass ornaments shaped like cupcakes, dozens of stuffed animals, a makeup mirror with lights around it, hair clips and ribbons, a music box, glittery bangles and long beads, a pink portable stereo, a dress-up box filled with clothes. Alice sat down and rifled through the dress-up box. She pulled out a familiar green summer dress and held it up in front of her. She’d bought it especially for her honeymoon. It was one of the most expensive dresses she’d ever owned. Dry-clean only. Now it had a brown stain on the neckline and a jagged hemline where someone had taken to it with a pair of scissors. Alice dropped the dress, her head swimming. There was a sickly-sweet scent in the room like strawberry lip gloss. Fresh air. She definitely needed air.

She went to her own bedroom and quickly found shorts and a T-shirt in the chest of drawers, and her sneakers and sunglasses still in the rucksack she’d brought back from the hospital. She hurried back downstairs and pulled off one of the baseball caps from the hat stand. It said PHILADELPHIA on the brim.

She left the house, locking the door behind her and noting with relief that Mrs. Bergen had gone back inside.

Which way? She turned to the left and took off at a brisk pace. A woman was approaching from the other direction, wheeling a stroller with a sternfaced baby who was sitting very straight-backed and solemn. As Alice got closer, the baby frowned up at her, while the woman smiled and said, “Not running today?”

“Not today.” Alice smiled back and kept walking.

Running?
Good heavens. She
hated
running. She remembered the way she and her friend Sophie used to shuffle around the oval in the high school, moaning and clutching their sides, while Mr. Gillespie called out, “Oh for God’s sakes, you girls!”

Sophie! She would give Sophie a call when she got home. If she hadn’t been confiding in Elisabeth, maybe Sophie knew more about what was going on with her and Nick.

She kept walking, seeing houses that had doubled in size, like cakes in the oven. Red-brick cottages had been transformed into smooth mushroomcolored mansions with pillars and turrets.

Actually, it was interesting, because she was walking quicker and quicker, sort of bouncing along the pavement, and the idea of running didn’t seem that stupid at all. It seemed sort of . . . pleasant.

Was it a bad idea with a head injury? Probably a very bad idea. But maybe it would jar all those memories back into place.

She began to run.

Her arms and legs fell into a smooth rhythm; she began to breathe deep, slow breaths, in through the nostrils and out through the mouth. Oh, this felt good. It felt right. It felt like something she did.

At Rawson Street she turned left and picked up her pace. The fat red leaves of the liquid ambers trembled in the sunlight. A white car packed with teenagers screeched by, thudding with music. She passed a driveway where a group of kids were shrieking and brandishing water guns. Someone started up a lawn mower.

Up ahead, the white car with the teenagers pulled up at the corner.

A momentous feeling of panic exploded in her chest. It was happening again, just like in the car with Elisabeth. Her legs quivered so ridiculously she actually had to crouch down on the footpath, waiting for whatever it was to pass. A scream of horror was lodged in her throat. If she let it out, it would be very embarrassing.

She looked around, her hands on the ground to balance herself, her chest heaving, and saw that the children with the water pistols were still running back and forth, as if the world hadn’t turned black and evil. She looked back at the end of the street where the white car was waiting for a break in the traffic.

It was something to do with a car pulling up at that corner.

She closed her eyes and saw the brake lights of a green four-wheel-drive. The number plate said: GINA 333.

Nothing else. She felt simultaneously hot and cold, as if she had the flu. For
God’s sake
. Was she about to be sick again? All that custard tart. The children could clean it up with their water pistols.

A horn tooted. “Alice?”

Alice opened her eyes.

A car had pulled up on the other side of the road and a man was leaning out the window. He opened the car door and quickly crossed the street toward her.

“What happened?”

He stood in front of her and blocked out the sun. Alice squinted mutely up at him. She couldn’t make out the features of his face. He seemed extremely tall.

He bent down beside her and touched her arm.

“Did you faint?”

She could see his face now. It was an ordinary, kind, thin, middle-aged sort of face, the unassuming face of a friendly newsagent who chatted to you about the weather.

“Come on. Up you get,” he said, and lifted her by both elbows so she rose straight to her feet. “We’ll get you home.”

He led her across the street to the car and deposited her in the passenger seat. Alice couldn’t decide what to say, so she didn’t say anything. A voice from the back of the car said, “Did you fall over and hurt yourself?”

Alice turned and saw a little boy with liquid brown eyes staring at her anxiously.

She said, “I just felt a bit funny.”

The man got back in the car and started the engine. “We were on our way over to your place and then Jasper spotted you. Were you going for a run?”

“Yes,” said Alice. They stopped at the corner of Rawson and King. She thought of the car with the GINA number plate and felt nothing.

“I saw Neil Morris at the IGA this morning,” said the man. “He said he saw you being carried out of the gym on a stretcher yesterday! I left a few messages for you, but I didn’t . . .”

His voice drifted away.

“I fell over and hit my head during my ‘spin class,’” said Alice. “I’m fine today, but I shouldn’t have been running. It was stupid of me.”

The little boy called Jasper giggled in the backseat. “You’re not stupid! Sometimes my dad is stupid. Like today, he forgot three things and we had to keep stopping the car and he’d say, ‘Boofhead!’ It was pretty funny. Okay, first thing was his wallet. Second thing was his mobile phone. Third thing—ummm, okay, third thing—Dad, what was the third thing you forgot?”

They were pulling into Alice’s driveway. They stopped the car and the little boy gave up on the third thing and threw open his car door and ran toward the veranda.

The man pulled on the handbrake and then turned to look at Alice with gentle concern. He put a hand on her shoulder. “Well, I think you’d better put your feet up while Jasper and I take care of those balloons.”

Balloons. For the party, presumably.

“This is a bit awkward,” began Alice.

The man smiled. He had a lovely smile. He said, “What is?”

Alice said, “I have absolutely no idea who you are.”

(Although, in truth, there was something about the way he smiled and the feeling of his hand on her shoulder that was giving her an idea.)

The man’s hand sprang back like an elastic band.

He said, “Alice! It’s me. Dominick.”

Frannie’s Letter to Phil

Me again, Phil.

Barb and Roger took me for lunch at Alice’s place today.

Physically she seems fine, but she is definitely not herself. She didn’t remember Gina! It was disconcerting. Gina played such a big part in Alice’s life. Almost too big a part.

Barb talked about it all the way home. “Sometimes I wish Alice had never met Gina,” she fretted. “You can’t change the past,” pronounced Roger, and we were all quite overcome by his wisdom. He’s a philosopher, that fellow.

It’s not relevant now but I always thought that Gina did dominate Alice. (Alice does have a slight tendency toward hero worship.) I remember her making some comment about Alice’s outfit at Olivia’s birthday party last year. It was something along the lines of “Your such-and-such blouse looks nicer with that skirt.” Alice went straight back upstairs and changed. I noticed Nick was watching the whole incident and didn’t look too happy about it.

After Barb and Roger dropped me off, we had yet another Social Committee meeting. This time we were discussing plans for this year’s Christmas party. Mr. Mustache suggested a “Casino Night.” People loved the idea! Can you think of anything
less
Christmassy, Phil?

He’s the most aggravating man.

I will admit, however, that he did make a point of asking me whether Alice liked the talcum powder.

Elisabeth’s Homework for Dr. Hodges

A funny thing happened when I got home from lunch with the Infertiles. Not exactly ha-ha funny. Just stupid ironic funny.

Driving home after lunch, I kept thinking about “Giving Up.” The idea grew stronger and stronger in my head. It suddenly seems quite obvious to me. I can’t go through another miscarriage. I can’t. The thought of it happening again gives me the feeling of a block of concrete dropping on my chest. I have had enough. I didn’t know I’d had enough, but it turns out I have.

We used to keep setting those deadlines. No more after my fortieth birthday. No more after Christmas. But then each time we’d think, well, but what else is there to do? We’d traveled, we’d been to lots of parties, lots of movies and concerts, we’d slept in. We’d done all those things that people with children seem to miss so passionately. We didn’t want those things anymore. We wanted a baby.

I remember thinking about how mothers were prepared to run into burning buildings to save their children’s lives. I thought I should be able to go through a bit more suffering, a bit more inconvenience to
give
my children life. It made me feel noble. But now I realize I’m a crazy woman running into a burning house for children who don’t exist. My children were never going to exist. They were always in my mind. That’s what’s so embarrassing about all this. Each time I sobbed for a lost baby, it was like sobbing over the end of a relationship when I’d never even gone out with the guy. My babies weren’t babies. They were just microscopic clusters of cells that weren’t ever going to be anything else. They were just my own desperate hopes. Dream babies.