What Alice Forgot

Chapter 11

Frannie’s Letter to Phil

I’m back again, Phil.

It’s six a.m. Still dark outside, and chilly. Brrrrr! I’m writing this in bed.

Barb called again last night to say that Alice is fine. They’ve done a CT scan apparently, whatever that is, and everything looks normal, although evidently Alice is suffering some memory loss. When she woke up, she thought she was still together with Nick!

Now Barb is celebrating because she thinks they’ll get back together. She has become so irritatingly optimistic ever since she took up salsa dancing.

I think reconciliation is unlikely. Alice was here on Monday (which was lovely, although I do sometimes feel as though I’m a chore being crossed off her list, but perhaps that’s unfair). I asked her about Nick and the most repellent expression crossed her face. She became quite ugly with hatred.

After she left, I was thinking about the first time Alice brought Nick around to meet me. They’d come straight from the beach, their feet sandy, their hair still wet, smelling of the sea. They were sitting on the couch chatting politely with me, not touching, or so it seemed, except that I happened to glance down and I saw that their hands were lying next to each other on the couch, and that Nick was caressing Alice’s little finger with his own. I remember being shocked by a feeling of pure envy. I wanted to be Alice, young and lovely, feeling the secret caress of a handsome boy’s fingertip.

Isn’t it strange and sad what time can do? What became of those passionate young people?

But what do I know about marriage? It’s a mystery to me. I assume it’s a matter of compromise. Negotiation. Give and take.

Actually, I remember seeing Alice and Nick, after another trip to the beach, except by this time they had three children and there was certainly no fingertip caressing. Something had obviously happened (to do with Olivia, I think) and you could have cut the air with a knife. They were talking to each other in those terrible, icily polite voices I’ve noticed couples use in public when they’re arguing.

Do you ever wonder, Phil, what sort of a marriage we would have had?

Would we have fought? For example, you always said you didn’t mind that I had the more senior position, but perhaps that wasn’t really true and it would eventually have become a problem for us. They say that men are defined by their work.

Do you know I’ve been writing to you now for over three decades? That’s longer than a lot of marriages. Longer than Alice’s marriage.

May I share another quibble with you about that fellow? That Mr. Mustache? Last night, I was in the dining room for dinner and he was sitting at the same table. He asked if any of my own family were performing at the Talent Night. I said that my “honorary granddaughter” would be dancing.

Mr. Mustache wanted to know what I meant by “honorary.”

I briskly gave him the facts. I said that I had lived next door to a young family, and that when the father died suddenly of a heart attack the mother wasn’t coping especially well and I stepped in to help out, as she had no other family. Eventually I became a sort of “pseudo” grandmother.

I didn’t tell him how the shattered, white faces of those poor little girls are imprinted on my memory forever. I didn’t tell him about the many days I had to drag their mother out of bed. (Once I got so frustrated, I actually pinched poor Barb, quite hard, on the arm. Isn’t that dreadful! I was tough back then.)

Of course, I didn’t tell him about you.

Mr. Mustache listened (I’ll give him that. He really did listen.) and then he said, “I think you can drop the ‘honorary.’ Sounds like they really are your family.”

Phil, I’m not sure why this bothered me so much. It was something about his tone. So definite. So presumptuous. I’ve only known the man five minutes and he’s making remarks about my life. And he seemed to be implying that I was being overly pedantic.

Am I making too much of this? Am I pedantic?

I guess I’ve always taken secret pride in my pedantry.

Oh I can just imagine you snorting!

Must rush. I’m catching the minibus into the shops to buy a gift for Alice. I’ll never get this letter finished at this rate!

Right! Time to get moving. A nice hot shower. Clothes. Hair. Makeup.

The last nurse had left and now a brisk, bossy voice in Alice’s head was telling her what to do.

Too tired, replied Alice truculently. Her eyes were dry and stinging. I’ve just had the worst night of my life. Also I should probably wait and ask a nurse.

Rubbish! You’ll feel more awake after your shower. You always do!

Do I?

Yes! And it’s time to look in the mirror, for heaven’s sake. You’re only thirty-nine, not eighty-nine. How bad can it be?

What about a towel? I don’t know which towel to use. There might be procedures.

You smell of sweat, Alice. From that gym class. You need a shower.

Alice sat up. She couldn’t stand the thought of having any sort of body odor. It was the ultimate humiliation. She was horrified even when Nick casually mentioned she had garlicky breath the day after they’d eaten an especially garlicky dinner. She would clap a hand to her mouth and run to clean her teeth and spend the whole day chewing gum. Nick was bemused by the fuss. He couldn’t care less if he smelled. After working all day on the house, he’d sniff cheerfully at his armpits like an ape and announce, “I stink!” as if it were a fine achievement.

Maybe Nick was divorcing her because she’d developed extremely bad breath.

She put a tentative hand to the tender lump on her head. The pain was still there, but it was definitely better, more like a memory of yesterday’s pain.

But she didn’t remember those children, and she didn’t remember Nick moving out.

She slid her bare feet onto the cool floor and looked around her. The tulips her mother had given her were fat, gold bulbs against the white of the hospital room wall. She tried to imagine her mother dancing the salsa with Roger, their hips swiveling in unison. She could imagine Roger’s hips swiveling all right, but Mum’s? She was fascinated and repelled by the thought. She couldn’t wait to talk to Nick about it.

Well.

She remembered his voice on the phone yesterday, thick with hatred. It had to be over something more than bad breath. If that had been the reason, he would have sounded compassionate and embarrassed.

Even with the memory of that phone call (the way he swore at her!), it still seemed impossible that Nick wasn’t about to turn up any minute, breathless and rumpled, apologizing for the misunderstanding, hugging her to his chest. She couldn’t feel properly upset about this talk of divorce because it was too stupid. This was Nick ! Her Nick. As soon as she saw him again it would all be okay.

The rucksack with the dinosaur stickers was sitting in the cupboard next to her bed. She thought about that beautiful red dress; maybe she could squeeze into it.

She held the rucksack under one arm and prudishly clutched the hospital robe together behind her in one hand so as not to reveal her underpants, but there was no need. The curtains around the other girl’s bed were pulled and she was still snoring her mosquito-whine snore.

Maybe as Alice had got older her snoring had got even worse and that’s why Nick had left. She could get one of those horrible mouthguard things. That was easy to solve. Come on home, Nick.

She was so tired it felt like she was walking through wet concrete.

I think I should get back into bed.

Don’t you dare get back into bed. You’ll make them late for school again and you’ll never hear the end of it.

Alice’s chin jerked up with surprise. Where did that come from? She thought of the photo of the three children in their school uniforms. It must be Alice’s responsibility to get them to school on time each day.

Maybe, just maybe, there was the tiniest, fleeting, corner-of-the-eye memory of pounding footsteps down a hallway, doors slamming, a horn tooting, a child wailing, a drilling feeling right in the center of her forehead. But as soon as she tried to grab hold of it, it vanished, as if she’d made it up.

It felt like she was facing straight ahead but just to the left and right of her were ten years’ worth of memories, if only she could find a way to just turn her head to face them.

She went into the small bathroom that she and the snoring girl shared, switched on the fluorescent light, and locked the door behind her. She blinked in the all-enveloping brightness. Last night she’d managed to use the toilet and wash her hands without looking at her reflection in the mirror above the sink. There would be no more of that. Today was the day for clean, crisp action.

She undid the ties around her neck and back, let the robe fall to the floor, and stepped in front of the mirror.

She could see herself from the waist up.

Skinny, she thought, pressing her fingertips to the curve of her waist and then running them up and down her ribs. She could actually see her ribs. You’re a skinny girl. Her stomach was hard and flat like that girl’s at the gym. How did that happen?

Of course she’d always said that she should get fit and lose weight, without ever actually doing anything about it. It was something you were meant to say to your girlfriends at regular intervals to show you were a proper woman: “Oh God, I’m so fat!” When she was going out with Richard, the boyfriend before Nick, who would say “Heave ’em up!” when he watched her pull up her jeans over her thighs, that slight dissatisfaction with her body occasionally turned to self-hatred and she’d starve herself for a day before eating a packet of chocolate biscuits for dinner. But then she met Nick, who told her she was beautiful, and whenever he touched her, it was as if his touch were actually making her as beautiful as he seemed to believe she was. So why would she deny herself a second piece of mud cake or glass of champagne if Nick was there with the knife or the bottle poised, grinning evilly and saying “You only live once,” as if every day were a celebration. Nick had a little boy’s sweet tooth, and an appreciation of good food, fine wine, and beautiful weather; eating and drinking with Nick in hot sunshine was like sex. He made her feel like a well-fed, happy cat: plump, sleek, purring with sensual satisfaction.

Alice couldn’t decide if she liked her flat new stomach or not. On the one hand, there was a distinct feeling of pride, like discovering a new skill. Look what I did! I’ve got a stomach like a supermodel! On the other hand, the feeling of hard bone under her skin gave her a slight feeling of revulsion, as if her flesh had been shaved away.

What did Nick think of this new skinny body? Perhaps he didn’t care. “So why the fuck did you ring me?”

Her breasts were a lot smaller, she noted, and not quite as perky. Actually, they were awful, elongated and sagging like socks down toward her stomach. She held them up in her hands and let them drop again. Oh, yuck. She didn’t like that at all. She missed her nice, round, cheerful, bobbing-about breasts.

Was it breast-feeding three children that had done this? And that would be perfectly fine if she had nostalgic memories of late nights sitting in a rocking chair with a downy-headed baby in her arms, except she didn’t . She was looking forward to breast-feeding. It was meant to happen in her future, not in her past.

Okay, forget the breasts. The face. It was time for the face.

She took a step closer to the mirror and held her breath.

At first it was a relief, because it was still her own Alice face looking dopily back at her. She wasn’t hideously deformed. She hadn’t grown horns. In fact, she quite liked her thinner face. It seemed to have more definition and made her eyes look bigger. Her eyebrows were perfectly shaped and her eyelashes were dark. She didn’t seem to have as many freckles. Her skin looked smooth and clear, although actually, there were quite a few funny, faint scratches on her face around her mouth and eyes. Maybe from when she fell over? She leaned in closer to examine them.

Oh.

They weren’t scratches. They were wrinkles, just like Elisabeth’s, maybe worse than Elisabeth’s. There were two deep grooves in between her eyes. When she stopped frowning they didn’t go away. There were little pouches of pink skin under her eyes, and Alice remembered how when she’d seen Jane yesterday she thought at first there was something wrong with her eyes. There had been nothing wrong with Jane; she was just ten years older.

She rubbed her fingertip over the fine scratchlike lines around her mouth and eyes as if she could just smear them away. They seemed wrong, as if they shouldn’t be there; thank you anyway, but I don’t think so, not for me, these don’t belong on my face.

She gave up and stood back from the mirror so she couldn’t see the wrinkles.

Her hair was still pulled back in the elastic band from the night before. She pulled it out and looked at it in the palm of her hand, amazed afresh that she didn’t even recognize the black hair band and had no memory of putting it in her hair.

Her hair fell just above her shoulders. She must have had it cut, as she suspected. What brought on that decision, she wondered. The color was different, too. It was bordering on blond rather than brown; a dark ashy sort of blond. It was messy from her night of tossing and turning, but then she ran her fingers through it and saw that it was cut in an elegant shape that curved around the neck, making it seem longer. It wasn’t her taste, but she had to admit it did suit her face better than any other haircut she’d had.

She’d grown up. That was it. A grown-up looked back at her. She just didn’t feel that way.

Okay, then. This is you, Alice. This is who you are. A grown-up skinny mother of three in the middle of a nasty custard-throwing divorce.

She squinted her eyes and imagined her old self, her real self, staring back at her from the mirror. Long brown hair in no particular style, a rounder, softer face, perkier, bigger breasts, fatter (pretty fat) stomach, more freckles, no wrinkles to speak of—in love with Nick and pregnant with her first baby.

But that girl was gone. There was no point thinking about her.

Alice turned away from the mirror and, looking around the unfamiliar bathroom, she was overwhelmed with loneliness. She thought again of that silly solitary trip through Europe, brushing her teeth in strange bathrooms, staring at herself in speckled mirrors with a dizzy feeling of dissociation as she tried to work out who she really was without people who loved her to reflect back her personality. Now she wasn’t in a strange country where people spoke a different language, but she was in a strange new world where everybody knew what was going on except for her. She was the foolish one making a goose of herself, saying the wrong thing, not knowing the rules.

She took a shaky breath.

This was only temporary. Soon she would have her memory back and life would go on as normal.

But did she want her memory back? Did she want to remember? What she really wanted was to hop in her time machine and go directly back to 1998.

Well. Bad luck. Deal with it, honey. Have a shower. Time for coffee and an egg-white omelette before the kids wake up.

“Before the kids wake up.” The way this rather bossy, acerbic voice kept popping into her head was really freaking her out. And an “egg-white omelette”? What was that all about? Wouldn’t it be entirely without flavor? She didn’t fancy that at all for breakfast.

Or did she? She licked her lips experimentally. Egg-white omelette or peanut butter on toast? Both choices seemed simultaneously delicious and disgusting.

Well, it’s hardly a matter of life and death, is it, Alice?

Oh shut up. No offense, but you sound like a bit of a bitch, Alice.

She went to the rucksack and pulled out the swish toiletries bag. Presumably she could rely on new Alice to have packed shampoo and conditioner. She rifled through chunky, expensive-looking jars and bottles (good Lord, wasn’t this just a trip to the gym?) and found two slim, tall, dark bottles. They were brands she didn’t recognize promising “salon-quality results.”

As she stood under the shower and massaged the shampoo into her hair, the fragrant smell of peach filled her nostrils and it was so entirely familiar her knees buckled. Of course, of course. She made a sound like a strangled sob and remembered herself standing under a pounding shower, steam billowing, resting her forehead against a wall of blue tiles and howling silently while the bubbly lather from the peach-smelling shampoo slipped into her eyes. I can’t bear it. I can’t . . . I can’t . . .

For a moment the memory was so real, it could have been happening right then, and then the next second it slithered away like the froth from her shampoo.

The smell of the shampoo remained intensely, ridiculously familiar, but she couldn’t grab hold of another memory.

Oh, that feeling of hopeless grief and just wanting the pain to stop.

Am I remembering crying over Nick?

If these were the memories that were locked away in her head—memories of a perfectly wonderful marriage disintegrating, memories of clinging to a shower wall while she cried—did she really want them back?

She turned off the shower and dried herself with the towel from the rucksack. With the towel wrapped around her, she pulled the bottles and jars out of the toiletries bag and lined them up in front of her. What did she actually do with all that stuff?

Move it, move it.

Her hand moved instinctively toward a jar with a gold lid. She opened it to reveal a thick, creamy moisturizer. With rapid, efficient movements she briskly rubbed the moisturizer all over her face. Dab, dab, dab. Without stopping to think, she picked up a glass bottle of foundation, poured some onto a sponge, and began rubbing it all over her face. A part of her mind registered all this with astonishment. Foundation? She never wore foundation. She hardly ever bothered with makeup. But her hands were moving so fast, her head tilting this way and that as if she’d done this a million times before. Next came a shiny gold-colored stick that she rubbed into her cheeks. She snapped open jars, bottles, and containers. Mascara. Eyeliner. Lipstick.

Suddenly—it must have taken less than five minutes—she was finished and stowing all the bottles away in the toiletries bag. Without stopping, she unzipped a pocket on the side of the bag and wondered what she was looking for until she pulled out a portable hair dryer and a round brush. Oh, right, fair enough. Time to blow-dry your hair. She plugged it in and once again her hands moved without waiting for her to tell them what to do. The brush moved back and forth. The hair dryer roared hot air.

Okay, so once you leave here, you’ve got to—

Her mind went blank.

. . . you’ve got to . . .

Her hair was done.

She snapped off the hair dryer, pulled the plug out of the socket, twirled the cord round and round, and shoved it back into the bag and began to rustle again for something else. Good Lord. Why was she moving so fast ? Where was the fire?

She pulled out the flat plastic bag with the clothes, shook it open, and pulled out the matching cream underwear and dress. The underwear felt smooth and luxurious against her skin and the bra lifted her breasts back to their former perky position. Surely this beautiful dress would not fit, but she was sliding it over her head, doing up the zipper at the side without having to look for it, and there were no bulges of unsightly fat because she didn’t have them anymore.

Jewelry. She found the topaz necklace and Nick’s bracelet and put them on. Shoes. She slid her feet into them.

She stopped and looked at the woman in the mirror and watched her bottom lip drop in awe.

She looked, well, she had to say that she looked pretty good. She turned side to side and observed herself over one shoulder.

An attractive, elegant, slim woman. The sort of woman she never thought it was possible for her to be. She had become one of those women, those other women, who had seemed too perfectly put together to be real.

Why did Nick want to leave her if she looked this damned good?

There was still something missing.

Perfume.

She found it in the zippered section at the front of the toiletries bag. She sprayed it on both wrists and suddenly she was leaning forward, grasping both sides of the basin to stop herself from falling. The scent was vanilla, mandarin, and roses. Her whole life was right there in that scent. She was being sucked into a massive swirling vortex of grief and fury and the ring, ring, ring of the phone and the rising whiny shriek of a child and the babble of the television and Nick sitting on the end of the bed, bent right over with his hands laced tightly around the back of his head.

“Excuse me?”

There was a knock on the bathroom door.

“Excuse me? Will you be much longer? It’s just that I’m dying to go!” Alice stood slowly back up. The color had drained from her face. Was she going to be sick again, like yesterday? No.

“Sorry!” she called out. “Won’t be a second.”

She put her hands in the sink and used the pink soap from the soap dispenser to scrub away hard at the perfume. As the straightforward, bracing smell of strawberry bubble gum mixed with disinfectant filled her nostrils, the vortex receded.

I don’t remember.

I don’t remember.

I won’t remember.

Elisabeth’s Homework for Dr. Hodges

She was dressed and waiting for me when I went to pick her up from the hospital. She had dark circles under very red eyes, but her hair was done and her makeup perfect as always.

She looked so much like her normal self that I was sure she must have her memory back and this strange interlude in our lives was all over.

I said, “Has it all come back to you now?” and she said, “Just about,” and avoided my eyes and I thought she must have felt embarrassed about what she’d said about Nick. She said she’d been checked over by the doctor, and signed all the forms, and couldn’t wait to get home to her own bed.

She didn’t say much as we were leaving the hospital, and I didn’t either. When she finally went to speak, I thought for sure she would be talking about all the million things she had to do that weekend and the precious time she’d lost being in hospital. Instead she said, “How many children do you have?”

I said, “Alice!” and nearly swerved the car as I turned my head to look at her.

She said, “I’m sorry I didn’t ask earlier, I think I was just in shock. I would have rung Mum to ask her but I wasn’t sure whether she still had the same phone, and then I thought, What if Roger answers the phone?”

I said I thought she had her memory back, and she said, “Well, not exactly.”

I started insisting that we go straight back to the hospital and asking did she lie to the doctor to get herself discharged, and she stuck her chin out (she looked just like Madison). She said if I took her back to the hospital, she would just say that she didn’t know what I was talking about because her memory was perfect and then the hospital would have to decide which one was crazy and she bet they’d choose me and next thing they’d have me in a straitjacket.

I said I didn’t think they used straitjackets anymore. (Do they, Dr. Hodges? Have you got an emergency one in your drawer, ready to whip out at a moment’s notice?)

Alice folded her arms across her chest and writhed about as if she was in a straitjacket, saying, “Let me out! My sister is the nutter! I’m the sensible one!”

I was flabbergasted. She was being so . . . silly. So old Alice.

Next thing we were giggling like schoolkids. We laughed and laughed and I kept driving her toward her house because I didn’t know what else to do. It was so strange, laughing like that with Alice. It was like tasting something delicious I hadn’t eaten for years. I’d forgotten that drunken, euphoric feeling of being rocked with laughter. We both cry proper tears when we laugh hard enough. It’s a family trait we inherited from our dad. How funny. I’d forgotten that too.

Eventually they stopped laughing and became quiet.

Alice wondered if Elisabeth would return to the subject of going back to the hospital, but she didn’t say anything. Instead she wiped under each eye with a fingertip, sniffed, and reached over to turn on the car stereo. Alice steeled herself; Elisabeth enjoyed the sort of loud, angry, heavy metal music that normally appealed to teenage boys in hotted-up cars and made Alice’s head ache. Instead, slow chords and a mellow female voice filled the car, as if they were in a smoky jazz bar. Elisabeth’s taste in music had changed. Alice relaxed and looked out the window. The streets of Sydney looked pretty much as she remembered them. Had that coffee shop always been there? That block of units looked new, although it was entirely possible they’d been there for twenty years and she’d just never noticed them before.

There was an incredible lot of traffic, but all the cars looked the same. When she was little, she had assumed that by the year 2000 they’d be living in a space-age future complete with flying cars.

She glanced at Elisabeth’s profile. She still had a leftover smile from their laughing fit.

Alice said, “Last night I dreamed again about that woman with the American accent, and this time I remembered you being there. Are you sure it doesn’t mean anything to you?”

The leftover smile vanished from Elisabeth’s face, and her cheeks, which had been puffed out and pink from laughing, seemed to collapse inward; Alice regretted saying anything.

Finally, Elisabeth said, “It was six years ago.”

Elisabeth’s Homework for Dr. Hodges

So I told her all about it, as if it was a story. Actually, all of a sudden I was desperate to tell her before she remembered for herself. Before she could write it off as a tiny, sad incident that had happened a long time ago.

This is what happened, Dr. Hodges. FYI.

Alice and I were both pregnant at the same time. Her baby was due exactly one week after mine.

Alice’s third pregnancy was another accident of course, something complicated and typically Alice (typically old Alice; not the new and improved pedicured, manicured, peeled, waxed, and tinted Alice) to do with swapping brands of the pill.

My pregnancy was not an accident. The very idea of an “accidental pregnancy” seems so flippant and free. It makes me think of summer holidays, kissing for hours, smooth young skin, and . . . I don’t know, pina bloody coladas. It feels like something that would always have been impossible for me, not just because of my stupid body, but because I don’t have the right personality. I’m not whimsical enough. I don’t get caught up in the moment. I want to say to people, “Why didn’t you just use CONTRACEPTION?” Alice told me once that if she’d just stretched her fingertips a bit further she would have found the condom in her bedside drawer and Madison would never have been conceived. I found that immensely irritating because how hard is it to stretch your fingertips, ALICE?

Ben and I tried to get pregnant naturally for two years. We tried all the stuff people try. The temperature-taking, the charts, the acupuncture, the Chinese herbs, the holidays where we pretended not to think about it, the kits where you check your saliva under a microscope for the pretty fern pattern that meant you were ovulating.

The sex was still nice. It was before I became a dried apricot, you see, Dr. Hodges, and I was thin and fit. Although sometimes I would notice that Ben had the same grimly determined expression on his face as when he was trying to fix something tricky on his car with a wrench.

I was upset that we couldn’t get pregnant, but I was still pretty upbeat, because I was an upbeat sort of person. I read a lot of self-help books back then. I even went along to weekend seminars and found the power within and hollered and hugged strangers. Oh yes, I was a believer. If someone gave me lemons, I made lemonade. I had inspirational quotes stuck on the noticeboards in front of my desk. This was my mountain and I was going to climb it. (I was a nerd.)

So we started IVF.

And we got pregnant on our very first cycle. That hardly ever happened! Well, we were ecstatic. We were giddy with happiness. Every time we looked at each other we laughed we were so happy. It was the proof of positive thinking! It was the miracle of modern science! We loved science. Good old science. We loved our doctor. We even loved those daily injections—they’d been no problem at all, didn’t even hurt, weren’t that scary! The medication hadn’t really made me that moody and bloated. Actually, the whole process had just been interesting and fun!

I despise our old selves and at the same time I feel indulgently fond of them, because we didn’t know any better (and, what, do I think everyone should lead their lives pessimistically, expecting the worst so they don’t end up looking silly?). I can hardly bear to think of ourselves hugging and crying and making giggly phone calls, like we were in some inane sitcom. We actually discussed names. Names! I want to shout back through the years at myself, “Just because you’re pregnant doesn’t mean you get a baby, you idiots!”

There is a photo somewhere of Alice and me standing back-to-back with our hands pressed meaningfully to our stomachs. We look pretty. I’m not doing my stupid teeth-gritting fake smile and Alice hasn’t got her eyes closed. We were thrilled when we found out our due dates were only days apart. “They could be born on the same day!” we said, pop-eyed by the coincidence. “They’ll be like twins!” we cried. We were going to take photos of ourselves every month in the same position to record the progress of our bellies. It was so fucking sweet. (I’m sorry to swear, Dr. Hodges. I just wanted to sound cool and angry for a moment. A spoonful of paprika for me. That’s what Mum used to give us when we swore as children, instead of washing our mouths out with soap and water, which she felt was unhygienic. I can never say “fuck” without tasting paprika. Ben laughs whenever I swear. I don’t do it right. Neither does Alice. It’s something to do with the paprika. I think we screw our faces up in preparation for the horrible taste.)

Alice came with me for my twelve-week ultrasound because Ben was away in Canberra at a car show. Madison was at preschool, but Tom was with us, sucking on a rusk in his stroller, sitting up very straight and alert and monitoring the world. I was completely besotted with Tom’s laugh when he was a baby. I used to do this thing where I would keep my face completely straight and then, without warning, puff out my cheeks and shake my head from side to side like a dog. Tom thought it was hysterical. He’d watch me closely, his eyes dancing, and when I did my headshaking thing, he’d fall straight back in his stroller and laugh with his whole body, slapping his knee in imitation of Nick’s dad, because he thought that was a rule when you laughed. He had two tiny front teeth and the sound of his laugh was as delicious as chocolate.

Alice wheeled Tom into the room with us, parked the stroller in the corner, and I took off my skirt and lay down on the chair. I wasn’t taking all that much notice of the wispy-haired woman with the American accent who was rubbing cold jelly on my tummy and typing things into her computer, because I was making eye contact with Tom, ready to make him laugh again. Tom was looking straight back at me, his solid little body quivering all over with anticipation, and Alice was chatting to the wispy-haired woman about how they’d both rather the weather was cold than muggy, although not too cold of course.

The woman tapped away at the keyboard as she rubbed the plastic probe back and forth. I glanced briefly at the screen and saw my typed name in the right-hand corner over the top of the lunar landscape that apparently had something to do with my body. I was waiting for the woman to start pointing out the baby, but she was silent, tapping at her keyboard and frowning. Alice stared up at the television screen and chewed her nail. I looked back at Tom, widened my eyes, lifted my chin, and shook my head about.

Tom fell back in his stroller in an ecstasy of mirth, and the woman said, over the top of his laughter, “I’m sorry, but there is no heartbeat.” She had a soft Southern accent, like Andie Mac-Dowell.

I didn’t understand what she meant, because Ben and I had already heard the heartbeat when we went for our first visit to the obstetrician; it was a strange, eerie sound like the beat of a horse’s hooves underwater and it didn’t seem quite real, but it seemed to please Ben and my doctor, who both grinned proudly at me as if they were responsible for it. I thought the wispy-haired woman must mean that there was a problem with her machinery; something had broken down. I was about to say politely, “That’s no problem,” but then I looked over at Alice, and she must have understood right away because she’d curled her hand into a fist and pressed it against her mouth and when she turned around to look at me her eyes were red and watery. The woman touched me on the arm with her fingertips and said, “I’m so sorry,” and it was slowly dawning on me that maybe something quite bad had happened. I looked back at Tom gnawing on his rusk and grinning, thinking, “She’s going to do that crazy thing again soon!” and I smiled involuntarily back at him, and said, “What do you mean?”

Afterward, I felt guilty because I hadn’t been concentrating on my own baby. I shouldn’t have been playing with Tom when my poor little baby was trying to have a heartbeat. I felt that it must somehow have known I wasn’t concentrating. I should have had my eyes fixed on that screen. I should have been helping it along, thinking: Beat. Beat. Beat.

I know this is irrational, Dr. Hodges. I’m never going to give you the professional satisfaction of hearing that story so you can point out it’s irrational and pat yourself on the back for a good day’s work at the office.

I know it’s irrational, and I know there is nothing I could have done.

But I also know that a good mother would have been concentrating on her baby’s heartbeat.

I never pulled that silly face for Tom again. I wonder if some part of his baby mind missed it. Poor little Tom. Poor little lost astronaut.

“Remember?” asked Elisabeth. “The woman with the wispy hair? Tom had rusk smeared all over his face. It was a really hot, humid day and you were wearing khaki pants and a white T-shirt. On the way home you had to stop and get petrol and when you came back to the car, both Tom and I were crying. You’d bought a Twix in the service station and you handed out pieces, and a man behind you waiting for the pump tooted his horn at us, and you put your head out the window and shouted at him. I was proud of you for shouting.”

Alice tried to remember. She wanted to remember this. It seemed a betrayal of Elisabeth to have forgotten. She strained her mind with all her might, like a weight lifter, heaving to lift something huge that had lodged itself in her memory.

Scenes came into her head of a baby laughing in a stroller, Elisabeth crying in the car, a man angrily tooting his horn; but she couldn’t tell if they were real memories or just her imagination painting pictures as Elisabeth talked. They didn’t feel like real memories; they were insubstantial and shadowy, without context.

“You remember now?” said Elisabeth.

“Maybe a bit.” She didn’t want to disappoint her; she looked so hopeful.

“Well. Good. I guess.”

Alice said, “I’m sorry.”

“What for? It’s not your fault. You didn’t throw yourself headfirst at the floor at the gym.”

“No, I mean, I’m sorry about your baby.”