What Alice Forgot (18 page)

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.”

Chapter 12

A
lice groped for the right thing to say next. The obvious thing to ask was, “Did you try to get pregnant again?” but that would be like saying, “So! Moving right along!”

She glanced over at Elisabeth. She had put on sunglasses, so Alice couldn’t see her eyes, and was steering with one hand while she used the other hand to rub compulsively at something on the side of her face.

Alice looked away and saw that they were only a block away from the house. She and Nick had gone for so many walks around this area in the twilight, stopping to look at other people’s houses to steal renovation ideas for their own. Was that really ten years ago? It didn’t seem possible. The memory was so clear and ordinary it could have happened yesterday. Nick always said hello first to other neighborhood walkers. “Beautiful evening!” he would call out with a cheery lack of cool, and then he’d stop and chat, as if these people were old friends, while Alice stood there, smiling tightly, thinking, “Why are we bothering with these
strangers
?” But she was so proud of Nick’s uninhibited sociability, the way he could walk straight into a party full of people they didn’t know and stick his hand out to a stranger and say, “I’m Nick. This is my wife, Alice.” It was as though he had an amazing skill, like playing a complicated musical instrument, that Alice could never hope to master. The best part was that she could coast along safely beside him at any social event, so that parties became glittery and giggly instead of excruciating torture, so much so that she wondered if she’d ever really been that shy in the first place. Even when he wasn’t right by her side, she always knew that if the person talking to her drifted off, she wouldn’t be stranded in the crowd; she could go and find Nick with a purposeful expression on her face, and he’d put an arm around her shoulder and draw her smoothly into the conversation.

Did she have to go to parties on her own again now?

She remembered that raw sensation she’d felt after previous relationships had ended. For months afterward, it had felt like she’d lost a layer of skin. If she’d felt like that after those meaningless boys, what would she feel like after breaking with Nick? She’d been so cozy in the cocoon of their relationship. She assumed she got to stay there forever.

Alice looked up from her lap, where she’d been fiddling with her bracelet, and saw they were turning into Rawson Street. As she watched the long line of leafy liquid ambers and the car ahead putting on its right-hand indicator to turn into King Street, she felt a sudden sense of horror. Her heart palpitated as if she’d woken up in the middle of a nightmare; something grabbed her throat and squeezed; pure fear rammed her hard against her seat.

She went to reach out for Elisabeth, to touch her arm to let her know that she might be dying, but she couldn’t move. Elisabeth braked and looked left and right to turn onto King Street. Alice was having a heart attack right next to her and Elisabeth didn’t even realize.

They turned the corner and Alice’s heart began to slow. She could breathe again. She made a whooshing sound of relief as air filled her lungs once more.

Elisabeth glanced over at her. “You okay?”

Alice spoke, her voice high. “I felt really, really strange for a moment there.”

“Dizzy? Because I can take you straight back to the hospital right now if you like. It’s no problem.”

“No, no, it’s gone now. It was just—nothing, really.”

The fear had vanished, leaving her weak and shaky as though she’d just stepped off an amusement park ride. What did these huge tidal waves of feeling mean? First there had been that unimaginable grief. Now it was terror.

As they drove down Alice and Nick’s street, she saw a For Sale sign on the house directly opposite theirs. “Oh, are the Pritchetts selling?” she asked.

Elisabeth glanced at the sign and a strange, inscrutable expression crossed her face. “Um. I think they sold years ago. The family who bought it from them is selling it now. So, anyway—” She turned into Alice and Nick’s driveway and pulled on the handbrake. “Home sweet home.”

Alice looked out the window at her house and pressed her hand to her mouth. She threw open the car door and jumped out, the smooth white gravel driveway crunching beneath her shoes. White gravel! “Oh,” she said ecstatically. “Look what we
did
!”

They first saw the house on a gloomy July day.

“Oh dear,” they both said simultaneously when they pulled up in front of it, and then as they sat there in Nick’s sister’s car, gazing at it for a few seconds, they both made rising “ummm?” sounds, which meant, “But maybe it’s got something?”

It was a ramshackle two-story Federation house with a sagging roof, blankets hanging in the windows instead of curtains, and an overgrown junkyard lawn. It looked sad and battered, but if you squinted your eyes, you could see the stately home it had once been.

The For Sale sign out front said POTENTIAL PLUS, and everyone knew what that meant.

“Too much work,” said Nick.

“Far too much,” agreed Alice, and they gave each other sidelong suspicious looks.

They got out of the car and stood shivering on the street, waiting for the real estate agent to arrive. The front door of the house creaked open and a bent old lady wearing a man’s jumper over a checked skirt, long socks, and sneakers came shuffling up the footpath toward the letterbox.

“Oh
God
,” said Alice in agony. It was bad enough when you caught a glimpse of a harried middle-aged couple rushing out to their car to drive away before you went stomping through their house, making disparaging remarks about their choice of carpet. It broke Alice’s heart when she saw the things they did to try to make their house sell—the fresh flowers, the kitchen counters with wet streaks from where they’d been vigorously wiped, the coffee plunger and cups placed just so on the living room table to make it look homey. Nick would snort cynically when people lit scented candles in the bathroom as if that’s the way they always lived, but Alice was always touched by their hopefulness. “Don’t go to all that effort to try and impress
me
,” she wanted to tell them. And now here was this ancient, trembly old lady. Where would she go on this freezing day while they looked at her house? Had she scrubbed the floors on arthritic knees for their appointment, when they probably wouldn’t even buy it?

“Hi!” called out Nick, while Alice shrank behind him, saying, “Shhh!” He pulled her out from behind him, and because she didn’t want to have a full-on wrestling match in public, she had no choice but to walk along beside him toward the old lady.

“We’re meeting the real estate agent here in a few moments,” explained Nick.

The old lady didn’t smile. “Your appointment isn’t until three.”

“Oh, no,” said Alice. There
was
something a bit familiar about the time three o’clock and she and Nick were always getting things like that wrong. (“God help you if you two ever have children,” Nick’s mother had said to them once.)

“Sorry about that,” said Nick. “We’ll go for a drive around the neighborhood. It looks beautiful.”

“You may as well come in now,” said the old lady. “I can do a better job of showing it to you than that smarmy weasel.”

Without waiting for an answer, she turned around and started shuffling up the path toward the house.

Nick whispered in Alice’s ear, “She’s going to put us in cages and fatten us up before she eats us.”

“Leave a trail of crumbs,” whispered back Alice.

Shaking with repressed laughter, they obediently followed her.

There were two stately sandstone lions at the top of the veranda stairs, guarding the house. Their eyes seemed to follow Nick and Alice as they walked by.

“Raaaah!” whispered Nick to Alice, lifting his hand like a claw, and Alice said, “Shhhh.”

Inside, the house was better and worse than they’d expected. There were soaring ceilings, ornate cornices and ceiling roses, original marble fireplaces; Nick quietly kicked back a corner of fraying old carpet to show Alice wide mahogany floorboards. At the same time there was a nose-tickling smell of damp and neglect, gaping holes in plaster, ancient moldy bathrooms, and a kitchen with 1950s linoleum and a stove that looked like it came from a museum.

The old lady sat them down in front of a single bar heater and brought them cups of tea and a plate of Scotch Finger biscuits, waving away Alice’s desperate offers to help. It was excruciating to watch her walk. She finally sat down with a dusty black old photo album.

“This is what the house looked like fifty years ago,” she said.

The photos were small and black-and-white, but you could still see that the house was once beautiful and proud, not the shrunken skeleton it had become.

The old lady pointed a yellowed fingernail at a photo of a young girl standing with her arms outspread in the front garden. “That was me on the day we moved in.”

“You were so pretty,” said Alice.

“Yes,” said the old lady. “I didn’t know it, of course. Just like you don’t know how pretty you are.”

“No she doesn’t,” agreed Nick solemnly, who was eating his third stale Scotch Finger as if he hadn’t eaten for a month.

“I should be leaving this house to my children and grandchildren,” said the old lady. “But my daughter died when she was thirty, and my son doesn’t talk to me anymore, and so I’m putting it on the market. I want two hundred thousand for it.”

Nick choked on his biscuit. The ad had listed it at over $300,000.

“The real estate agent will tell you I want a lot more, but I’m telling you if you offer that much, I’ll accept. I know I can probably get more than that from an investor who will do it up quick-sticks and sell it on, but I was hoping a young couple might buy it and take their time restoring it and bring back the happy memories. We had a lot of happy memories here. Even though you probably can’t feel them, they’re here.”

She spat out the words “happy memories” with slight disgust.

“It could be beautiful,” continued the old lady as if she were reprimanding them. “It
should
be beautiful. Just a bit of a spit and polish.”

Later in the car, they sat and looked at the house silently.

“Just a bit of a spit and polish,” said Alice.

Nick laughed. “Yeah, gallons of spit and truckloads of polish.”

“So what do you think?” asked Alice. “Should we forget it? We should just forget it, shouldn’t we?”

“You go first. What do you think?”

“No, I want you to go first.”

“Ladies first.”

“Okay, fine,” said Alice. She took a breath and looked at the house, imagining fresh paint, a mowed lawn, a toddler running around in circles. It was madness, of course. It would take them years to fix it all up. They didn’t have the money. They were both working full-time. They didn’t even own a car! They had agreed they would
not
buy a house that needed anything but superficial renovations.