What Alice Forgot (35 page)

“
R
ight. Seat belts on?” said Alice. Her hand shook slightly as she turned the key in the ignition. Did she really drive this gigantic car every day of her life? It felt like a semi-trailer. Apparently, it was called an SUV.

“Are you sure you're safe to take them to school tomorrow? Because if you think there is any risk at all to the children, I'd rather drive them myself,” Nick had said the night before when he was leaving, and Alice had wanted to say, “Of course I'm not right, you idiot! I don't even know where the school is!” But there had been something about Nick's tone that made the hairs on the back of her neck stand up with a powerful, strangely familiar feeling that was close to . . . fury? He had such a sneery way of talking to her now. That snippy voice spoke up again in her head:
Sanctimonious bastard! Trying to make me look like a bad mother.
“I'll be fine,” she'd said. And he'd sighed his huffy new sigh, and as she watched him walk out to his shiny car, she felt something almost like relief at the same time as she thought, “But why don't you just come up to bed with me?”

Now her three children sat in the seat behind her. They were in horrible moods. If they'd been drunk last night, now they were all suffering from terrible hangovers. They were pale and snarly, with purple shadows under their eyes. Had they slept badly because of her? She suspected she'd let them stay up way past their normal bedtimes. There had been a lot of vagueness when she asked them what time they normally went to bed.

Alice adjusted the rear-vision mirror.

“Do you remember how to drive?” asked Tom.

“Yes, of course.” Alice's hand hovered nervously over the handbrake.

“We're late,” said Tom. “You might have to go quite a bit over the speed limit.”

It had been a strange and stressful morning. Tom had appeared at Alice's bedroom door at seven a.m. and said, “Have you got your memory back?” “Not quite,” Alice had said, trying to shake her head free of a night of dreams all involving Nick yelling at her. “She hasn't got it back!” she heard Tom cry, and then the sound of the television being switched on. When she got out of bed, she found Madison and Tom lounging around in their pajamas, eating cereal in front of the television. “Do you normally watch television before school?” Alice had asked. “Sometimes,” Tom had answered carefully, without removing his eyes from the TV. Twenty minutes later, he was in a frenzy, yelling that they needed to leave in five minutes' time. That's when it emerged that Olivia was still sound asleep in bed. Apparently it was Alice's job to wake her.

“I think Olivia might be sick,” Alice had said, as Olivia kept collapsing back against the pillow, her head lolling to one side, saying sleepily, “No thank you, I'll just stay here, thank you, goodbye.”

“Mum, she's like this every morning,” Tom had said disgustedly.

Finally, after Alice had dragged a half-comatose Olivia into a school uniform and spooned cereal into her mouth, while Madison had spent half an hour with a roaring hair dryer in the bathroom, they had left the house, incredibly late, according to Tom.

Alice put her hand around the handbrake.

“Did you even brush your hair this morning, Mum?” asked Madison. “You look sort of . . . disgusting. No offense.”

Alice put a hand to her hair and tried to smooth it down. She had assumed that she didn't need to dress up for dropping the kids off at school. She hadn't bothered with hair or makeup and had pulled on a pair of jeans, a T-shirt, and an old watermelon-colored jumper she'd found at the back of the drawer. The jumper was faded and frayed, and it had given Alice a start when she realized she remembered buying it brand new with Elisabeth just the other week.

Just the other week ten years ago.

“Don't be mean to darling Mummy,” Olivia said to Madison.

“Don't be mean to darling Mummy!” mimicked Madison in a sugarysweet voice.

“Stop copying me!” Alice felt the thud of Olivia's feet against her lower back as she kicked the seat.

“We're so late,” moaned Tom.

“Would you three just be quiet for once in your lives!” snapped Alice, in a voice entirely unlike her own, and at the same time, she released the handbrake and reversed out of the driveway and turned left, her hands smooth and capable on the leather-clad steering wheel, as if she'd said exactly those words and done exactly that maneuver a million times before.

She drove toward the lights, her hand already on the indicator to turn right.

There was a sullen silence in the back of the car.

“So, what's happening at school today?” she said.

Madison sighed dramatically as if she'd never heard a more stupid comment.

“Volcanoes,” answered Tom. “We're talking about what makes a volcano erupt. I've written down some questions for Mrs. Buckley. Some pret-ty tricky questions.”

Poor Mrs. Buckley.

“We're making a Mother's Day surprise,” said Olivia.

“Now it's not a surprise, is it?” said Madison.

“It is so!” said Olivia. “Mum, it is, isn't it?”

“Yes, of course it's still a surprise, I don't know what you're making,” said Alice.

“We're making special candles,” said Olivia.

“Ha!” said Madison.

“Well, I still don't know what color they are,” said Alice.

“Pink!” said Olivia.

Alice laughed.

“Idiot,” said Madison.

“Don't call her that,” said Alice. Had she and Elisabeth spoken to each other in such a horrible way? Well, there was that time Elisabeth threw the nail scissors at her. For the first time, Alice felt sorry for their mother. She didn't remember her ever yelling at them when they fought, just sighing a lot, and saying plaintively, “Be nice, girls.”

They were pulled up at a red light. The lights changed and Alice had no idea where to go.

“Umm,” she said.

“Straight ahead. Second on the left,” said Tom laconically from the back, sounding so much like his father that Alice wanted to laugh.

Alice drove. The car was huge and unfamiliar again.

She saw she was driving behind a similarly huge car with a woman at the wheel and two small heads bobbing about in the back.

Alice was a mother driving her three children to school. She did this every day. It was unbelievable. Hilarious.

“So, compared to the other mums at school,” she said, “am I strict?”

“You're like a Nazi,” said Madison. “You're like the Gestapo.”

“You're about average,” said Tom. “Like, for example, Bruno's mum won't even let him go on school excursions, that's how mean she is. But then there's Alistair's mum—she lets him stay up till nine o'clock, and they have KFC whenever they want, and they watch television when they're eating their breakfast.”

“Hey!” said Alice.

“Oh, yeah.” Tom gave a dry chuckle. “Sorry, Mum.”

“When am I like the Gestapo?” asked Alice.

“Don't worry about it,” sighed Madison. “You can't help it.”

“I don't think you're strict,” said Olivia. “Just—sometimes, you get a bit angry.”

“What makes me angry?” asked Alice.

“Me,” said Madison. “Just looking at me makes you mad.”

“Running late for school normally makes you
really
mad,” said Tom. “Ummm, let's see, what else. Doors slamming. You can't stand it when a door slams. You have got really delicate ears.”

“Daddy makes you angry,” said Olivia.

“Oh, yeah,” agreed Tom. “Dad makes you the angriest.”

“Why?” Alice tried not to sound too interested. “What does he do that makes me so angry?”

“You hate him,” said Tom.

“I'm sure that's not true,” said Alice.

“You do,” said Madison wearily. “You've just forgotten that you do.”

Alice looked in the rear-vision mirror at her three extraordinary children. Tom was frowning at a chunky plastic wristwatch, Olivia was staring dreamily ahead, and Madison had her forehead pressed against the car window, her eyes closed. What had she and Nick done to them? This casual talk about hatred. She was filled with shame.

“I'm sorry,” she said.

“Sorry for what?” said Olivia, who seemed to be the only one listening.

“I'm sorry about your dad and me.”

“Oh, that's okay,” said Olivia. “Can we have hot chocolates after school?”

“That's a green arrow,” said Tom tersely.

Alice pulled into a street lined with trucklike cars similar to the one she was driving. It looked like a festival. A festival of women and children. The women stood in groups of two or three, sunglasses pushed up on their foreheads, scarves slung around necks. They wore jeans and boots, beautifully cut suede jackets. Were mothers always this attractive and thin? Alice tried to remember the mothers from her own school days. Weren't they sort of chunky and plain? Sort of irrelevant and fading into the background? A few women waved when they saw Alice. She recognized someone who had got quite drunk at the kindergarten cocktail party. Oh Lord, she should have done her hair.