What Alice Forgot (9 page)

You told me the other week that this doesn’t define me, but it
does
, Dr. Hodges, it just does.

As I walked along the echoey corridors (clop, clop, clop, went my heels, and the
smell
, well, you probably know that horrible boiled-potato smell, Dr. Hodges, the way it floods your sinuses with memories of every other hospital visit), I ignored the badly dressed ghosts of hospital visits past and concentrated on Alice and wondered if she was still thinking it was 1998, and if so, what that would be like. The only thing I could compare it to was the one time when I was a teenager and got horribly drunk at a twenty-first party and stood up and gave a long, loving toast to the birthday boy, whom I had never met before that night. The next day, I didn’t remember a thing about it, nothing, not even shadowy snippets. Apparently I used the word “paucity” in my speech, and that disturbed me, because I didn’t think my sober self had ever said that word out loud before and I wasn’t even entirely sure what it meant. I never got drunk like that again. I’m too much of a control freak to have other people falling about laughing while they describe my own actions to me.

If I couldn’t stand losing two hours of my memory, what would it be like to lose ten years?

As I looked for Alice’s ward number, I had a sudden memory of Mum and Frannie and me, giddy with excitement, just like that family in the lift, practically running through the corridors of another hospital looking for Alice’s room when Madison was born. We happened to see Nick in the distance, walking along ahead of us, and we all shrieked, “Nick!” and he turned around and while he waited for us to catch up, he ran around in circles on the spot, and did a two-fisted punch in the air like Rocky, and Frannie said fondly, “He’s such a card!” and I was dating that patronizing town planner at the time and I decided right then and there to break up with him, because Frannie would never call him a card.

If Alice had really lost every memory of the last ten years, I thought, then she would have no memory of that day, or of Madison as a baby. She wouldn’t remember how we all shared a tin of Quality Street chocolates while the pediatrician came in to check Madison. He flipped her this way and that, and held her in one palm with casual expertise, like a basketballer spinning a ball, and Alice and Nick blurted out in unison, “Careful!” and we all laughed and the pediatrician smiled and said, “Your daughter gets ten out of ten, an A-plus.” We all applauded and “whoo-hoo’d” Madison for her first-ever good mark, while he wrapped her back up in her white blanket, a neat packet of fish-and-chips, and ceremonially presented her to Alice.

I was just starting to consider the enormity of all the things that had happened to Alice over the last ten years when I found her ward number, and as I glanced through the door, I saw her in the first curtained-off cubicle, propped up against pillows, her hands resting on her lap and her eyes staring straight ahead. There was no color to her. She was wearing a white hospital gown, lying against a white pillow with a white gauze bandage wrapped around her head, and even her face was dead white. It was strange to see her so still; Alice is all about sharp, quick movement. She’s texting on her mobile, jangling her car keys, grabbing one of the kids by the elbow and saying something stern in their ear. She’s fingernail-tapping busy, busy, busy.

(Ten years ago she was nothing like that. She and Nick slept till noon every Sunday morning. “How will they
ever
find time to renovate that enormous house!” clucked Mum and Frannie and me, like elderly aunts.)

She didn’t see me at first and as I walked up to her, her eyes flickered, and they looked so big and blue in her pale face, but more importantly, she was looking at me in a different, but familiar, way. I don’t know how to describe it, except that the strange thought came into my head, “You’re back.”

You want to know the first thing she said to me, Dr. Hodges?

She said, “Oh Libby, what
happened
to you?”

I told you, it defines me.

Alice had finally been moved up to a ward and given a hospital gown and a remote for the television and a white chest of drawers. A lady wheeling a trolley brought her a cup of weak tea and four tiny triangular curried-egg sandwiches. The nurse was right; the tea and sandwiches had made her feel better, except they hadn’t done anything about the huge gaping crevasse in her memory.

When she’d heard Elisabeth’s voice on the mobile phone, it was just like each time she’d called home on that disastrous trip around Europe when she was nineteen and trying to pretend she had a different personality—an adventurous, extroverted sort of personality; the sort of person who
loves
exploring cathedrals and ruins all day on her own and talking to drunk boys from Brisbane in youth hostels at night—when really she was homesick and lonely and often bored, and couldn’t make head or tail of the train timetables. The sound of Elisabeth’s voice, loud and clear in a strange phone box on the other side of the world, always made Alice’s knees buckle with relief, and she’d press her forehead against the glass and think,
That’s right; I am a real person.

“My sister is coming right now,” she told the nurse when she hung up, as if giving her credentials as a proper person with a family; a family she recognized.

Although, when Elisabeth first walked toward her bed, she actually didn’t recognize her. She vaguely assumed that this woman in the cream suit with the glasses and the swinging shoulder-length hair must be a hospital administrator coming to do something administrative, but then something about the woman’s straight-backed “I’ll take you on” posture, something essentially Elisabeth, gave her away.

It was a shock, because it seemed that overnight Elisabeth had put on a lot of weight. She’d always had a strong, lithe, athletic-looking body, because of her rowing and her jogging and whatever else it was she was always so busy doing. Now she wasn’t fat but definitely larger, softer, and bustier; a puffed-out version of herself, as if someone had blown her up like a plastic pool toy. She won’t like that, thought Alice. Elisabeth had always been so amusingly moralistic about fattening food, refusing an offer of pavlova as if it were crack cocaine. Once, when Nick, Alice, and Elisabeth went away for a weekend together, Elisabeth spent ages at the breakfast table studying the “nutritional information” panel on the side of a container of yogurt, warning them darkly, “You have to be
really
careful with yogurt.” Whenever Nick and Alice ate yogurt after that, one of them would always shout, “Careful!”

As she got closer and the bright light over Alice’s bed lit up her face, Alice saw fine spidery lines etched around Elisabeth’s mouth and on either side of her eyes behind the elegant spectacles. Elisabeth had large, pale blue eyes with dark lashes, like Alice, inherited from their father; eyes that attracted compliments, but now they seemed smaller and paler, as if the color had begun to wash out.

There was something bruised and wary and worn out about those washed-out eyes, as if she’d just been badly defeated in a fight she’d expected to win.

Alice felt a surge of worry; something terrible must have happened.

But when she asked, Elisabeth said, “What do you mean what happened to
me
?” so briskly and spiritedly that Alice doubted herself.

Elisabeth pulled over a plastic chair and sat down. Alice caught a glimpse of her skirt pulling unflatteringly across her stomach and quickly looked away; it made her want to cry.

Elisabeth said, “You’re the one in hospital. The question is what happened to
you
?”

Alice felt herself slip into the role of irrepressible, hopeless Alice. “It’s completely bizarre. It’s like a dream. Apparently, I fell over at the gym. Me, at the gym! I know! According to Jane Turner I was doing something called my ‘Friday spin class.’ ” She could be silly now, because Elisabeth was here to be sensible.

Elisabeth stared at her with such grim, frightened concentration that Alice felt her silly grin drift away.

She reached out for the photo she’d left sitting on the chest of drawers next to her bed and handed it to Elisabeth, saying in a small, polite voice, “Are these my . . .” She felt more foolish than she’d ever felt in her life. “Are these my children?”

Elisabeth took the photo, glanced at it, and something complicated crossed her face, a barely perceptible tremor, and vanished. She smiled carefully and said, “Yes, Alice.”

Alice took a deep, shaky breath and closed her eyes. “I’ve never seen them before.”

She heard Elisabeth take a deep breath herself. “It’s just temporary, I’m sure. You probably just need to rest, to relax and—”

“What are they like?” Alice opened her eyes. “Those children. Are they . . . nice?”

Elisabeth said in a stronger voice, “They’re wonderful, Alice.”

Alice said, “Am I a good mother? Do I look after them all right? What do I feed them? They’re so big!”

“Your children are your life, Alice,” said Elisabeth. “You’ll remember for yourself soon. It will all come back. Just—”

“I could cook them sausages, I guess,” said Alice, cheering up at the thought. “Kids love sausages.”

Elisabeth stared. “You would never feed them sausages.”

“I thought I was pregnant,” said Alice. “But they did a blood test and told me I’m definitely not. I don’t feel like I am, but I can’t believe I’m not. I can’t believe it.”

“No. Well, I don’t think you would be pregnant—”

“
Three
kids!” said Alice. “We’re only going to have two.”

“Olivia was an accident,” said Elisabeth stiffly, as if she disapproved.

“None of this seems real,” said Alice. “I’m like Alice in Wonderland. Remember how much I hated that book? Because nothing made sense. You didn’t like it either. We liked things to make sense.”

“I can imagine it must feel
really
strange, but it’s not going to last, it’s all going to come back to you any minute. You must have hit your head quite . . . severely.”

“Yes. Very severely.” Alice picked up the photo again. “So this little girl. This little girl is the oldest, so she must be my first baby, right? So we had a girl?”

“Yes, you did.”

“We thought it was a boy.”

“I remember that.”

“And labor! I went through labor three times? What was my labor like? I’m so nervous about it. I mean, I
was . . .”

“I think you had a pretty easy time with Madison, but there were complications with Olivia—” Elisabeth fidgeted in her plastic seat. “Look, Alice, I think I should go and try to talk to one of your doctors. I’m finding this really hard. It’s weird. It’s really . . . scary.”

Alice reached out for Elisabeth’s arm in a panic. She couldn’t stand to be alone again. “No, no, don’t go. Someone will be around soon. They keep coming and checking on me. Hey, Libby, I called Nick at work and they told me he was in Portugal! Portugal! What’s he doing there? I left a message with some horrible secretary. I stood up to her. You’d be proud of me! I showed backbone. My backbone was like
steel
.”

“Good for you,” said Elisabeth. She looked as if she’d just eaten something that disagreed with her.

“But he still hasn’t called me back,” sighed Alice.

Elisabeth’s Homework for Dr. Hodges

It was only when she started talking about Nick being in Portugal that the obvious hit me, and it seemed even more shocking than when she asked me whether her children were “nice.”

She really has forgotten everything.

Even Gina.

Chapter 7

“
S
o, you
seriously
don’t remember anything, not a single thing, since 1998?” Elisabeth shifted the plastic chair in closer toward Alice’s bed and leaned toward her, as if it was time to get to the bottom of this. “Nothing at all?”

“Well, I’ve been having some funny snippets of things come into my mind,” said Alice. “But none of them make sense.”

“Okay, so tell me about them,” urged Elisabeth. Her face was closer now to Alice and the lines on either side of her mouth were even deeper than Alice had first thought. Goodness. Involuntarily, Alice pressed her fingertips to her own skin; she still hadn’t looked at herself in a mirror.

She said, “Well, when I first woke up, I was having this dream, and I couldn’t tell if it was just a dream or something that really happened. I was swimming, and it was a beautiful summer’s morning, and my toenails were all painted different colors. There was somebody else with me and their toenails were painted the same way. Hey, maybe the other person was you? I bet it was you!”