What Alice Forgot

Epilogue

S he was floating, arms outspread, water lapping her body, breathing in a summery fragrance of salt and coconut. There was a pleasantly satisfied breakfast taste in her mouth of bacon and coffee and possibly croissants. She lifted her chin and the morning sun shone so brightly on the water, she had to squint through spangles of light to see her feet in front of her. Her toenails were each painted a different color. Red. Gold. Purple. Funny. The nail polish hadn’t been applied very well. Blobby and messy. Someone else was floating in the water right next to her. Someone she liked a lot, who made her laugh, with toenails painted the same way. The other person waggled multicolored toes at her companionably, and she was filled with sleepy contentment. Somewhere in the distance, a man’s voice shouted, “Marco?” and a chorus of children’s voices cried back, “Polo!” The man called out again, “Marco, Marco, Marco?” and the voices answered, “Polo, Polo, Polo!” A child laughed; a long, gurgling giggle, like a stream of soap bubbles.

We’re on the Hawkesbury River. This is our magical houseboat holiday.

Alice lifted her head from the water and looked at Gina. She had her eyes shut; her long curly hair was floating out from her head like seaweed.

“Gina! You’re not dead, are you?”

Gina opened one eye and said, “Do I look dead?”

Alice was filled with exquisite relief. “Let’s have champagne to celebrate!”

“Oh, definitely,” said Gina sleepily. “Definitely.”

There was someone swimming toward them. Bobbing up and down in a clumsy breaststroke. Brown shoulders rising in and out of the water. It was Dominick. His hair plastered close to his head. Drops of water sparkling on his eyelashes.

“Hi, girls,” he said, treading water next to them.

Gina kept quiet.

Alice felt embarrassed in front of Gina. For some reason it was wrong. It wasn’t right that Dominick was here.

Gina rolled over onto her stomach and swam away.

“No, no, come back!” shouted Alice.

“She’s gone,” said Dominick sadly.

“You shouldn’t be here,” said Alice to Dominick. She splashed him and he looked hurt. “This isn’t your holiday.”

The radio alarm went off. An eighties song, loud and jarring in the morning silence.

There was a flurry of movement and the quilt slid off her shoulders. “Sorry.” The radio was switched off again.

She turned over and pulled the quilt back up again.

A Gina dream. She hadn’t dreamed of her for so long. She loved those dreams that felt so real, it was almost like she was seeing her again, spending another day with her. Except Dominick shouldn’t have popped up like that. It felt like a betrayal of Nick to let Dominick into her houseboat holiday memory. Nick had loved that holiday. She could see him standing on the top deck of the boat, loping about, pretending to be a pirate. “Arg! Arg!” He would grab Tom around the waist and say, “Time to walk the plank, my boy!” and throw him high, so high in the air. She could see Tom’s exhilarated face so clearly, his little brown boy’s body suspended forever against a bright blue sky.

Tom.

She opened her eyes.

Had Tom come home last night?

He’d promised to be home by midnight and they’d gone to bed early. She’d meant to get up and check on him, but for some reason she’d fallen asleep so soundly.

Was that a memory of his key in the door? The car scraping in the driveway, music hastily switched off, the explosive sounds of teenage boys trying to be quiet. Huge feet thumping up the stairs.

Or was that another night?

Maybe she’d better go and check, but it was so early, and she was sleepy, and it was Sunday. Her one sleep-in day. She would get up, push open his bedroom door, and he’d be there, sprawled out fully dressed on top of his bed. The room dank and musty with the smell of aftershave and unwashed socks. Then she’d be wide awake with no chance of getting back to sleep. She’d have to spend the next two hours sitting in the kitchen, waiting for someone to wake up.

And it was Mother’s Day! They were meant to bring her breakfast and presents in bed. If they remembered. Last year they forgot entirely. They were teenagers, full of the tragedies and the ecstasies of their own lives.

But what if Tom hadn’t come home? And she didn’t report him missing until ten a.m.? “I was asleep,” she’d have to explain to the police officers when they asked why it had taken her so long to report that her eighteenyear-old son was missing. The police officers would exchange glances. Bad, lazy mother. Bad, lazy mother who deserves to have her son killed on Mother’s Day.

She pushed back the covers.

“Tom came home,” said a sleepy voice beside her. “I checked earlier.”

She pulled the covers back up.

Tom would always come home. He was reliable. Did what he said he would. He didn’t like being asked too many questions about his life (no more than three in a row was his rule), but he was a good kid. Studying hard for his exams, playing his soccer, and going out with his friends, bringing home pretty, eager-faced girls, who all seemed to think that if they just sold themselves to Alice they’d be in with a chance. (How wrong they were! If Alice showed too much interest in a girl, she was never seen again.)

It would be Olivia who wouldn’t come home one night.

Alice couldn’t stop being surprised at the transformation of Olivia from sweet, angelic little girl to surly, furious, secretive teenager. She’d dyed her beautiful blond curls black and pulled her hair dead straight, so she looked like Morticia from The Addams Family . “Who?” Olivia had sneered. You couldn’t talk to her. Anything you said was likely to give offense. The slamming of her bedroom door reverberated throughout the house on a regular basis. “I hate my life!” she would scream, and Alice would be researching teenage suicide on the Net, when next thing she’d hear her shrieking with laughter with her friends on the phone. Drugs. Teenage pregnancy. Tattoos. It all seemed possible with Olivia. Alice was pretty sure she was going to need intense therapy when Olivia was studying for her HSC in two years’ time. For herself.

It’s just a stage, Madison told her. Just ride it out, Mum.

Madison had got all her teenage angst over and done with by the time she was fourteen. Now she was a joy. So beautiful to look at that it sometimes made Alice catch her breath in the morning when she saw her come down to breakfast, her hair tousled, her skin translucent. She was studying economics at uni and had a besotted boyfriend called Pete, whom Alice had begun to think of as a bonus son (which was unfortunate, because she had an awful feeling that Madison would be breaking his heart in the not too distant future). It had all gone so fast. One minute they were driving her home from the hospital, a tiny, wrinkled, squalling baby. The next she was all legs and cheekbones and opinions. Whoosh. It made Alice’s head spin.

“It goes so fast,” she told Elisabeth, but Elisabeth didn’t really believe her. Anyway, she was the expert on all things mothering now. Even if she didn’t have teenagers yet, she still knew best. Alice wanted to say, Just you wait until your beautiful little Francesca is sleeping until noon and then slumps about the house, flying into a rage when you suggest she might want to get dressed before it’s bedtime again.

But Elisabeth was too busy to hear it. Busy, busy, busy.

She and Ben had ended up adopting three little boys from Vietnam after Francesca was born.

Two were brothers. The youngest was a severe asthmatic and was constantly in and out of hospital. One was in speech therapy for a stammer. Francesca was into swimming, which required early-morning training sessions. Elisabeth was involved with the Vietnamese expatriate community, a support group for adoptive parents, and of course she was treasurer of her school’s Parents and Friends Committee. She’d also got back into rowing and was as thin as a rake.

She and Ben also had two dogs, a cat, three guinea pigs, and a fish tank. That quiet, neat little house Alice had visited all those years ago when Elisabeth was refusing to get out of the bed was now an absolute madhouse. Alice got a headache after five minutes.

Luckily they were all coming here today for a Mother’s Day lunch, rather than Elisabeth’s crazy house, and Madison, the precious girl, was going to cook.

Sleep, Alice. In a few hours the house will be filled with people.

Mum and Roger would be early. They’d be desperate to show them their photos from their recent holiday to the Latin Dance Convention in Las Vegas. Salsa dancing was still their passion.

As Frannie once said, “They’ve created a whole life around salsa dancing.” Xavier had added, “Not like us. We’ve created a whole life around sex.” Frannie hadn’t spoken to him for a week, she had been so humiliated to hear him speak like that in front of the grandchildren.

Frannie and Xavier would be there today, together with Jess, one of Xavier’s granddaughters, who had moved to Sydney a few years ago and made contact with her grandfather, to his everlasting joy. She was an extremely hip young Web designer who was also the lead singer in a band. Frannie and Xavier enjoyed going along to Jess’s “gigs” and making knowledgeable comments afterward about the “crowd” and the “acoustics.”

Alice worried sometimes that Frannie was overtiring herself, keeping up with all of Xavier’s activities, but there was no denying her happiness.

She shifted in her bed. Sleep. As Frannie would certainly point out, she was quite old enough to take care of herself!

Hurry up and sleep.

She slept, and dreamed of Gina again.

She, Mike, Nick, and Alice were sitting around the dinner table after a long night of eating and drinking.

“I wonder what we’ll all be doing in ten years’ time,” said Gina.

“We’ll be grayer and fatter and wrinklier,” said Nick, who was a bit drunk. “But hopefully the four of us will still be friends sitting around a table like this, talking about our memories.”

“Awwww,” said Gina, raising her glass. “You’re so sweet, Nick.”

“Preferably on a yacht,” said Mike.

Was it a dream or a memory?

“Alice,” said a voice in her ear.

Alice opened her eyes.

Nick’s face was creased with sleep. “Were you dreaming about Gina?” “Did I say her name?”

“Yes. And Mike’s name.”

Thankfully she hadn’t said Dominick’s name. He was still a bit strange about Dominick. Did Nick sometimes dream of that Megan? She looked at him suspiciously.

“What?” he said.

“Nothing.”

“Happy Mother’s Day.”

“Thank you.”

He said, “I’ll go bring us up some coffee in a minute.”

“Okay.”

Nick closed his eyes and fell immediately back asleep.

Alice put her hands behind her head and considered her dream. Dominick had made an appearance because she’d seen him at the IGA yesterday. He was studying a packet of floss as if his life depended upon it. She had a feeling he’d seen her first and wasn’t in the mood for one of their overly hearty, let’s-pretend-this-isn’t-awkward chats and so she’d obligingly darted into the next aisle.

It was so strange to think that she’d seriously considered spending her life with him. (He was married now to one of the other mothers from school; he probably thought the same thing about her.)

Madison had been asking Alice a lot of questions lately about the year they separated.

“If you hadn’t lost your memory that time, do you think you and Dad would have still got back together?” she’d asked just yesterday.

It made Alice sick with guilt when she thought about what they had put the children through that year. She and Nick had been so young , so full of the earth-shattering importance of their own feelings.

“Do you think we damaged you?” she asked Madison anxiously.

“No need to get hysterical, Mum,” Madison had sighed, worldly-wise.

Would they have got back together if she hadn’t lost her memory?

Yes. No. Probably not.

She remembered that hot summer’s afternoon a few months after Francesca was born. Nick had stopped by the house to return a schoolbag Tom had left in his car. The children were out back, in the pool, and Alice, Dominick, and Nick were on the front lawn, reminiscing about their own childhood summers playing with water sprinklers on front lawns, before the days of water restrictions. Alice and Dominick were standing together, and Nick was standing a little way apart.

The conversation had led to Alice and Nick telling Dominick about how they’d painted the front veranda on a sweltering hot day. It had been a disaster. The paint had dried too quickly; it had all cracked and peeled.

“You were in such a bad mood that day,” Nick said to Alice. “Stomping around. Blaming me.” He imitated her stomping.

Alice gave him a shove. “You were in a bad mood, too.”

“I poured a bucket of water over you to calm you down.”

“And then I threw the tin of paint at you and you went crazy . You were running after me. You looked like Frankenstein.”

They laughed at the memory. They couldn’t stop laughing. Each time their eyes met they laughed harder.

Dominick smiled uneasily. “Guess you had to be there.”

That just made them laugh harder.

When they finally stopped and wiped the tears from their eyes, the shadows on the lawn had lengthened and Alice saw that she was standing next to Nick and Dominick was standing apart, as if she and Nick were the couple and Dominick was the visitor. She looked at Dominick and his eyes were flat and sad. They all knew. Maybe they’d all known for the last few months.

Three weeks later, Nick moved back in.

The funny thing was that Nick didn’t even remember that moment on the lawn. He thought she imagined it. For him, the significant moment had been at Madison’s oratory competition.

“You turned around and looked at me and I thought, Yep, she wants me back.”

Alice didn’t remember that at all.

“What are you thinking about?”

Alice blinked. Nick stood at the foot of the bed, looking down at her. “Your face has gone all serious.”

“Pancakes,” said Alice. “I’m hoping they’re seriously good pancakes.”

“Ah. Well, they will be. Madison is cooking.”

She watched him pull back the curtains and examine the day outside. He lifted the window and breathed in luxuriously. Obviously the weather had met with his approval. Then he went into the en suite bathroom, pulling up his T-shirt to scratch his stomach and yawning.

Alice closed her eyes and remembered those first few months after Nick moved back in.

Sometimes it was exhilaratingly easy to be happy again. Other times they found that they did have to “try,” and the trying seemed stupid and pointless and Alice would wake up in the middle of the night thinking of all the times Nick had hurt her and wondering why she hadn’t stayed with Dominick. But then there were the other times, unexpected quiet moments, where they’d catch each other’s eyes, and all the years of hurt and joy, bad times and good times, seemed to fuse into a feeling that she knew was so much stronger, more complex and real, than any of those fledgling feelings for Dominick, or even the love she’d first felt for Nick in those early years.

She had always thought that exquisitely happy time at the beginning of her relationship with Nick was the ultimate, the feeling they’d always be trying to replicate, to get back, but now she realized that was wrong. That was like comparing sparkling mineral water to French champagne. Early love is exciting and exhilarating. It’s light and bubbly. Anyone can love like that. But love after three children, after a separation and a near-divorce, after you’ve hurt each other and forgiven each other, bored each other and surprised each other, after you’ve seen the worst and the best—well, that sort of a love is ineffable. It deserves its own word.

And quite possibly she could have achieved that feeling with Dominick one day. It was never so much that Dominick was wrong for her and that Nick was right. She may have had a perfectly happy life with Dominick.

But Nick was Nick. He knew what she meant when she said, “Oh my dosh.” They could look at an old photo together and travel back in time to the same place; they could begin a million conversations with “Do you remember when . . .”; they could hear the first chords of an old song on the radio and exchange glances that said everything without words. Each memory, good and bad, was another invisible thread that bound them together, even when they were foolishly thinking they could lead separate lives. It was as simple and complicated as that.

When Olivia started high school, Alice had begun work as a consultant for fund-raising events. Working seemed to give her relationship with Nick a new edge. Sometimes they would go out to dinner after they’d both been working, and she felt an entirely new attraction for him. Two professionals flirting across the table. It had the frisson of an affair. It was so good to find that their relationship could keep on changing, finding new edges.

Nick stopped suddenly beside the bed and looked down at her, his hand pressed to his chest.

“What?” Alice sat upright. “Chest pain? Are you feeling chest pain?”

She was obsessed with chest pain.

He removed his hand and smiled. “Sorry. No. I was just thinking.”

“God,” she said irritably, lying back down again. “You nearly gave me a heart attack.”

He knelt on the bed next to her. She swatted him away. “I haven’t cleaned my teeth.”

“Oh, for heaven’s sakes,” he said. “I’m trying to say something profound.”

“I prefer you to be profound when I’ve cleaned my teeth.”

“I was just thinking,” he said, “how grateful I am that you hit your head that day. Every day I say a little prayer thanking God for creating the spin class.”

She smiled. “That’s very profound. Very romantic.”

“Thank you. I do my best.”

He lowered his head, and she went to give him a friendly, perfunctory kiss (she hadn’t cleaned her teeth; she was impatient for her coffee) but the kiss turned unexpectedly lovely and she felt that ticklish, teary feeling behind her eyes as a lifetime of kisses filled her head: from the very first brand-new-boyfriend kiss, to “You may kiss the bride,” to the unshaven, shell-shocked, red-eyed kiss after Madison was born, to that aching, beautiful kiss after she broke up with Dominick and told Nick (standing in the car park of McDonald’s, the kids arguing in the backseat of the car), “Will you please come back home now?”

The bedroom door burst open and Nick jumped back to his side of the bed, grinning. Madison was balancing a tray set for breakfast, Tom was holding a huge bunch of sunflowers, and Olivia had a present.

“Happy Mother’s Day to you,” they sang, to the tune of “Happy Birthday.”

“We’re trying to redeem ourselves for last year,” explained Madison as she placed the tray on Alice’s lap.

“I should think so,” said Alice. She picked up the fork, took a mouthful of pancake, and closed her eyes.

“Mmmmm.”

They would think she was savoring the taste (blueberries, cinnamon, cream—excellent), but she was actually savoring the whole morning, trying to catch it, pin it down, keep it safe before all those precious moments became yet another memory.