What Alice Forgot (58 page)

Ever since Esther was three years old, she'd been developing these interests, or more accurately, obsessions. First it was dinosaurs. Sure, lots of kids are interested in dinosaurs, but Esther's interest was, well, exhausting, to be frank, and a little peculiar. Nothing else interested the child. She drew dinosaurs, she played with dinosaurs, she dressed up as a dinosaur. “I'm not Esther,” she'd say. “I'm T. rex.” Every bedtime story had to be about dinosaurs. Every conversation had to be related somehow to dinosaurs. It was lucky that John-Paul was interested, because Cecilia was bored after about five minutes. (They were extinct! They had nothing to say!) John-Paul took Esther on special trips to the museum. He brought home books for her. He sat with her for hours while they talked about herbivores and carnivores.

Since then Ether's “interests” had ranged from roller coasters to cane toads. Most recently it had been the
Titanic
. Now that she was ten, she was old enough to do her own research at the library and online, and Cecilia was amazed at the information she gathered. What ten-year-old lay in bed reading historical books that were so big and chunky, she could barely hold them up?

“Encourage it!” her school teachers said, but sometimes Cecilia worried. It seemed to her that Esther was possibly a touch autistic, or at least sitting somewhere on the autism spectrum. Although Cecilia's mother had laughed when she mentioned her concern. “But Esther is exactly like you were!” she said. This was not true.

“I actually have a piece of the Berlin Wall,” Cecilia had said that morning to Esther, suddenly remembering this fact, and it had been gratifying to see Esther's eyes light up with interest. “I was there in Germany, after the Wall came down.”

“Can I see it?” asked Esther.

“You can have it, darling.”

Jewelry and clothes for Isabel and Polly. A piece of the Berlin Wall for Esther.

Cecilia, twenty years old at the time, had been on a six-week holiday traveling through Europe with her friend Sarah Sacks in 1990, just a few months after the announcement that the Wall was coming down. (Sarah's famous indecisiveness paired with Cecilia's famous decisiveness made them the perfect traveling companions. No conflict whatsoever.)

When they got to Berlin, they found tourists lined along the wall, trying to chip off pieces as souvenirs using keys, rocks, anything they could find. The Wall was like a giant carcass of a dragon that had once terrorized the city, and the tourists were crows pecking away at its remains.

Without proper tools it was almost impossible to chip off a proper piece, so Cecilia and Sarah (well, Cecilia) decided to buy their pieces from the enterprising locals who had set out rugs and were selling off a variety of offerings. Capitalism really had triumphed. You could buy anything from gray-colored chips the size of marbles to giant boulder-size chunks complete with spray-painted graffiti.

Cecilia couldn't remember how much she had paid for the tiny gray stone that looked like it could have come from anyone's front garden. “It probably did,” said Sarah as they caught the train out of Berlin that night, and they'd laughed at their own gullibility, but at least they'd felt like they were a part of a history. Cecilia had put her chip in a paper bag and written “MY PIECE OF THE BERLIN WALL” on the front, and when she came back to Australia she'd thrown it in a box with all the other souvenirs she'd collected: drink coasters, train tickets, menus, foreign coins, hotel keys.

Cecilia wished now she'd concentrated more on the Wall, taken more photos, collected more anecdotes she could have shared with Esther. Actually, what she remembered most about that trip to Berlin was kissing a handsome, brown-haired German boy in a nightclub. He kept taking ice cubes from his drink and running them across her collarbone, which at the time had seemed incredibly sexy, but now seemed unhygienic and sticky.

If only she'd been the sort of curious, politically aware girl who had struck up conversations with the locals about what it had been like living in the shadow of the Wall. Instead, all she had to share with her daughter were stories about kissing and ice cubes. Of course, Isabel and Polly would
love
to hear about the kissing and ice cubes. Or Polly would; maybe Isabel had reached the age where the thought of her mother kissing anybody would be appalling.

Cecilia had put “Find piece of Berlin Wall for E” on her list of things to do that day (there were twenty-five items—she used an iPhone app to list them), and at about two p.m., she had gone into the attic to find it.

“Attic” was probably too generous a word for the storage area in their roof space. You reached it by pulling down a ladder from a trapdoor in the ceiling.

Once she was up there, she had to keep her knees bent so as not to bang her head. John-Paul point-blank refused to go up there. He suffered from terrible claustrophobia and walked six flights of stairs every day to his office so he could avoid taking the elevator. The poor man had regular nightmares about being trapped in a room where the walls were contracting. “The walls!” he'd shout, just before he woke up, sweaty and wild-eyed. “Do you think you were locked in a cupboard as a child?” Cecilia had asked him once (she wouldn't have put it past his mother), but he said he was pretty sure he wasn't. “Actually, John-Paul never had nightmares when he was a little boy,” his mother had told Cecilia when she asked. “He was a
beautiful
sleeper. Perhaps you give him too much rich food late at night?” Cecilia was used to the nightmares now.

The attic was small and crammed, but tidy and well organized, of course. Over recent years, “organized” seemed to have become her most defining characteristic. It was like she was a minor celebrity with this one claim to fame. It was funny how once it became a thing that her family and friends commented on and teased her about, it seemed to perpetuate itself, so that her life was now
extraordinarily
well organized, as if motherhood were a sport and she were a top athlete. It was like she was thinking,
How far can I go with this? How much more can I fit in my life without losing control?

And that was why other people, like her sister, had rooms full of dusty junk, whereas Cecilia's attic was stacked with clearly labeled white plastic storage containers. The only part that didn't look quite Cecilia-ish was the tower of shoe boxes in the corner. They were John-Paul's. He liked to keep each financial year's receipts in a different shoe box. It was something he'd been doing for years, before he met Cecilia. He was proud of his shoe boxes, so she managed to restrain herself from telling him that a filing cabinet would be a far more effective use of space.

Thanks to her labeled storage containers, she found her piece of the Berlin Wall almost straightaway. She peeled off the lid of the container marked “Cecilia: Travel/Souvenirs. 1985–1990,” and there it was in its faded brown paper bag. Her little piece of history. She took out the piece of rock (cement?) and held it in her palm. It was even smaller than she remembered. It didn't look especially impressive, but hopefully it would be enough for the reward of one of Esther's rare, lopsided little smiles. You had to work hard for a smile from Esther.

Then Cecilia let herself get distracted (yes, she achieved a lot every day, but she wasn't a
machine
, she did sometimes fritter away a little time) looking through the box and laughing at the photo of herself with the German boy who did the ice cube thing. He, like her piece of the Berlin Wall, wasn't quite as impressive as she remembered. Then the house phone rang, startling her out of the past, and she stood up too fast and banged the side of her head painfully against the ceiling. The walls, the walls! She swore, reeled back, and her elbow knocked against John-Paul's tower of shoe boxes.

At least three lost their lids and their contents, causing a mini landslide of paperwork. This was precisely why the shoe boxes were not such a good idea.

Cecilia swore again and rubbed her head, which really did hurt. She looked at the shoe boxes and saw that they were all for financial years dating back to the eighties. She began stuffing the pile of receipts into one of the boxes when her eye was caught by her own name on a white business envelope.

She picked it up and saw that it was John-Paul's handwriting.

It said:

For my wife, Cecilia Fitzpatrick

To be opened only in the event of my death

She laughed out loud, and then abruptly stopped, as if she were at a party and she'd laughed at something somebody said and then realized that it wasn't a joke, it was actually quite serious.

She read it again—“For my wife, Cecilia Fitzpatrick”—and oddly, for just a moment, she'd felt her cheeks go warm, like she was embarrassed. For him or for her? She wasn't sure. It felt like she'd stumbled upon something shameful, as if she'd caught him masturbating in the shower. (Miriam Openheimer had once caught Doug masturbating in the shower. It was just so
dreadful
that they all knew that, but once Miriam was on to her second glass of champagne, the secrets just bubbled out of her, and once they knew it was impossible to un-know it.)

What did it
say
? She considered tearing it open right that second, before she had time to think about it, like the way she sometimes (not very often) shoved the last piece of chocolate in her mouth, before her conscience had time to catch up with her greed.

The phone rang again. She wasn't wearing her watch, and suddenly she felt like she'd lost all sense of time.

She threw the rest of the paperwork back into one of the shoe boxes and took the piece of the Berlin Wall and the letter back downstairs.

As soon as she left the attic, she was picked up and swept along by the fast-running current of her life. There was a big Tupperware order to deliver, the girls to be picked up from school, the fish to be bought for tonight's dinner (they ate a lot of fish when John-Paul was away for work because he hated it), phone calls to return. The parish priest, Father Joe, had been calling to remind her that it was Sister Ursula's funeral tomorrow. There seemed to be some concern about numbers. She would go, of course. She left John-Paul's mysterious letter on top of the fridge, and gave Esther the piece of the Berlin Wall just before they sat down for dinner.

“Thank you.” Esther handled the little piece of rock with touching reverence. “Exactly which part of the Wall did it come from?”

“Well, I think it was quite near Checkpoint Charlie,” said Cecilia with jolly confidence. She had no idea.

But I can tell you that boy with the ice cube wore a red T-shirt and white jeans and he picked up my ponytail and held it between his fingertips and said, “Very pretty.”

“Is it worth any money?” asked Polly.

“I doubt it. How could you prove it really was from the Wall?” asked Isabel. “It just looks like a piece of rock.”

“DMA testing,” said Polly. The child watched far too much television.

“It's D
N
A, not DMA, and that comes from people,” said Esther.

“I
know
that!” Polly had arrived in the world outraged to discover that her sisters had gotten there before her.

“Well then why—”

“So who do you reckon is going to get voted off
The Biggest Loser
tonight?” asked Cecilia, while simultaneously thinking,
Why, yes, whoever that is observing my life, I am changing the subject from a fascinating period of modern history that might actually teach my children something to a trashy television show that will teach them nothing, but will keep the peace and not make my head hurt.
If John-Paul had been at home, she probably wouldn't have changed the subject. She was a far better mother when she had an audience.

The girls talked about
The Biggest Loser
for the rest of dinner, while Cecilia pretended to be interested and thought about the letter sitting on top of the fridge. Once the table was cleared and the girls were all watching TV, she took it down to stare at it.

Now she put down her cup of tea and held the envelope up to the light, half laughing at herself. It looked like a handwritten letter on lined notebook paper. She couldn't decipher a word.

Had John-Paul perhaps seen something on television about how the soldiers in Afghanistan wrote letters to their families to be sent in the events of their deaths, like messages from the grave, and had he thought that it might be nice to do something similar?

She just couldn't imagine him sitting down to do such a thing. It was so sentimental.

Lovely though. If he died, he wanted them to know how much he loved them.

“. . . in the event of my death.” Why was he thinking about death? Was he sick? But this letter appeared to have been written a long time ago, and he was still alive. Besides, he'd had a checkup a few weeks ago, and Dr. Kluger had said he was as “fit as a stallion.” He'd spent the next few days tossing his head back and whinnying and neighing around the house, while Polly rode on his back swinging a tea towel around her head like a whip.

Cecilia smiled at the memory, and her anxiety dissipated. So a few years ago, John-Paul had done something uncharacteristically sentimental and written this letter. It was nothing to get all worked up about, and of course she shouldn't open it just for the sake of curiosity.

She looked at the clock. Nearly eight p.m. He'd be calling soon. He generally called around this time each night when he was away.

She wasn't even going to mention the letter to him. It would embarrass him, and it wasn't really an appropriate topic of conversation for the phone.

One thing: How exactly was she meant to have found this letter if he
had
died? She might never have found it! Why hadn't he given it to their solicitor, Miriam's husband, Doug Openheimer? So difficult not to think of him in the shower every time he came to mind. Of course it had no bearing on his abilities as a lawyer; perhaps it said more about Miriam's abilities in the bedroom. (Cecilia had a mildly competitive relationship with Miriam.)