What Alice Forgot (54 page)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“I wonder if we should call a doctor?”

“No,” said Alice out loud, her eyes shut. “I'm all right. Just give me a minute.”

Now she was remembering the past week. It was as if she'd been permanently drunk. She was mortified.

 

 

Alice opened her eyes.

She was sitting on the grass of the school oval.

Nick and Dominick were both squatting down uncomfortably in front of her.

“Are you all right?” said Nick.

Alice looked at him. He flinched, as if she'd hit him.

“You've got your memory back,” he said. It wasn't a question. He stood up. It was as if he were folding up his face, making it bland and cold. “I'll go let the kids know you're okay.” He started to turn away and then looked back at her and said, “You owe me twenty bucks.”

Alice turned to Dominick.

He smiled, hugged her to him, and said, “Everything is all right now, darling.”

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.