What Alice Forgot (48 page)

“Pardon?” she said.

“Sex!”
Madison choked out. “She said that you and Mr. Gordon probably did sex in his office. Like, a hundred times.”

Mr. Gordon. Oh.
Dominick.

“Darling,” began Alice, wondering where to start. For one thing she wasn’t sure if it was true. Surely they wouldn’t have had sex in his office? Would they?

“I nearly threw up. I had to take sort of deep breaths and put my hand over my mouth. You
didn’t
, did you? You never took off your clothes in front of Mr. Gordon, did you?”

Well, if she had, surely Chloe wasn’t privy to the information. Presumably Dominick hadn’t made an announcement about it at school assembly.

“Chloe Harper is a horrible liar,” said Alice decisively.

“I
know
,” said Madison with relief. “That’s what I said!” She looked out at the water and pushed her hair back behind her ears. “Then she said that I was the ugliest girl in the whole school, but that part wasn’t a lie, that part was true.”

Alice’s heart broke for her. “It certainly was not true.”

“I got this feeling,” said Madison. “A feeling like my head was going to explode. She was standing in front of me and I got out my scissors for art and I cut off her plait. I just went, snip! And it fell straight to the ground. And then when she turned around, I threw my cake at her. It wrecked the cake. Nobody even got to taste it. It was the best cake I ever made.”

“Did you threaten to stab her with the scissors?”

“No! She just made that bit up so I would get into more trouble.”

“Is that the truth?”

“Yes,” said Madison.

“Okay,” said Alice. Well, that was something.

Alice said, “You know, Madison, people are going to say mean things to you all through your life, and if you keep reacting like that, you’re going to end up in jail.”

Madison seemed to consider that. Alice wondered whether her wise, tough-love words were sinking in.

“Actually, I’m too young for jail,” said Madison.

“Well,
now
you are, but when you’re grown up—”

“When I’m a grown-up it won’t matter.”

“You mean, you won’t care if you go to jail? I think you will.”

Madison rolled her eyes. “No. I won’t care if people say mean things to me, because I’ll be grown up. I can just say, ‘Who cares? I’m going to France.’ ”

Ah. Of course. Alice could remember thinking something similar when she was a child. Once you were a grown-up nobody could hurt your feelings because how could your feelings possibly be hurt when you could
drive a car wherever you wanted
.

Before she could think of a way to answer without disillusioning her (what was there to look forward to otherwise?), a shadow fell over them.

“Ice cream delivery.” Nick was standing above them, holding three ice cream cones.

“I assume you still like rum and raisin,” he said to Alice.

“Of course.” Fancy having to ask her that.

They sat and ate their ice creams, looking out at the water.

“Madison has just told me what Chloe said to her,” said Alice. “And it was something nasty and untrue.”

“Okay,” said Nick carefully. He licked his ice cream and looked at them both.

“So, I guess we need to help Madison find some better ways to react when she feels angry.”

“I always take ten deep breaths before I say anything when I’m angry,” said Nick.

“No you don’t,” said Madison. “You just yell straightaway. So does Mum. And what about that time Mum threw that pizza box at you?”

Oh my, they’d been setting fine examples for their children.

Alice cleared her throat. “Well, the thing is—”

“Are you going to come home, please, Dad?” said Madison. “I think you should come home now and be Mum’s husband again. I’m pretty sure then I would stop being angry. Then I would never do another bad thing in my whole entire life. I could write that in a
contract
for you. So that means you could, like,
sue
me if I was ever bad, which I would not ever be.”

She looked at her father with desperate entreaty.

“Sweetheart,” began Nick, his face screwed tight as if he had a toothache. Then he stopped, distracted by some sort of disturbance on the beach. There were shouts and people running. Alice could see a small crowd of people forming up on the cliff above the aquarium, pointing at something in the water.

“Humpback whales in the harbor!” a man cried at them, running along with a camera bouncing on his chest.

Nick immediately leapt to his feet, still holding his ice cream. Madison and Alice looked up at him.

“What are you waiting for?” he said, and next thing the three of them were running breathlessly along the beach, up onto the foreshore, and running around the walkway, their ice creams held precariously in front of them.

They had to run a steep set of concrete steps and Alice drew ahead, one hand holding her ice cream, the other holding up her skirt as she effortlessly leapt up the steps, two at a time.

As she reached the top, she was in time to see a massive plume of water shoot up from the water below them.

“It’s a mother and her calf,” said a woman to Alice. “Watch. Just there. You’ll see them again.”

Nick and Madison pounded up the stairs behind her. Nick was breathing heavily. (How did he get so unfit?)

“Where? Where?” said Madison. Her face was pink and anxious.

“Just watch,” said Alice.

For a few seconds there was nothing but silence. The surface of the harbor rippled in the breeze and a seagull squawked plaintively.

“They’ve gone,” said Madison. “We’ve missed them. Typical.”

Nick looked at his watch.

Come on, whale,
thought Alice.
Give us a break.

The water erupted as a massive creature shot straight into the air. It was like something prehistoric had crashed through an invisible barrier into ordinary life. Alice caught a glimpse of a barnacle-encrusted white front. It seemed to hover in the air before slamming back into the water, with a flurry of icy, salty raindrops against their faces.

Madison grabbed hold of Alice’s arm. Her face was radiant with joy, speckled with droplets of water. “Look, Mum! Look!”

The whale rolled luxuriously about, revealing huge curves of velvety black skin, its tail slapping the water, as if enjoying a hot bath.

“Madison, Alice, over there—it’s the baby!” shouted Nick, and he sounded like a sixteen-year-old boy.

The calf was splashing about in miniature imitation of its mother. Alice could almost imagine it gurgling with laughter.

“Ha!” said Nick idiotically. “Ha!”

All around them were faces full of joy and wonder. The sea air was cool on their faces, the sun warm on their backs.

“Do it again!” said Madison. “Jump up again, mother whale!”

“Yeah!” agreed the man with the camera. “One more time.”

And right on cue, she did.

Elisabeth’s Homework for Jeremy

Ben is threatening to ring you up. He thinks I’m behaving like a crazy person.

Frannie’s Letter to Phil

Something quite extraordinary has happened, Phil.

As they walked back to the picnic rug, Madison danced around them. She was euphoric. Skipping. Jumping. Swinging on Nick’s hand, then Alice’s, then both. People walking by smiled at her.

“That was the best thing I’ve ever seen!” she kept saying. “I’m going to blow that photo up into a poster and put it over my bed!”

The man with the camera had taken Nick’s e-mail address and was going to send him the photo he’d taken.

“Let’s hope he didn’t miss it,” said Nick.

“No, he got it,” said Madison. “He definitely got it. Can I go paddle? Just to feel the water?”

She looked at Alice, and Alice looked at Nick. He shrugged.

“Sure,” said Alice. “Why not?”

They watched her run down toward the water.

“Do you think she needs counseling?” said Alice.

“She’s been through a lot,” said Nick. “Gina’s accident. You and me. And she always feels things so deeply.”

“What do you mean, Gina’s accident?” Alice thought about Madison’s nightmare.
Get it off her.

“Madison was with you,” said Nick. “She saw it happen. You don’t remember it, do you?”

“No,” said Alice. “Just the feeling of it.” Although that feeling of sick horror seemed impossible here today, with the sun and sea, ice creams and whales.

“There was a storm,” said Nick. “A tree fell on Gina’s car. You and Madison were driving behind.”

A tree. So that horrible image of a black leafless tree swaying against a stormy sky was real.

“It must have been horrendous for both of you,” said Nick quietly. He lifted a handful of sand and let the grains fall through his fingers. “And I didn’t—I wasn’t—”

“What?”

“I wasn’t as supportive as I should have been,” said Nick.

“Why weren’t you?” asked Alice curiously.

“Honestly, I don’t know,” said Nick. “I just felt detached. I felt like you wouldn’t want my sympathy. I felt like—I felt that if you’d had the choice, you would have preferred that I’d died rather than Gina. I remember I tried to hug you and you pushed me away as if I made you sick. I should have tried harder. I’m sorry.”

“But why would you think I’d prefer you to die?” asked Alice. It seemed such a silly, childish, wrong thing to think.

“We weren’t getting on that well at the time. And you two were such good friends,” said Nick. “I mean—that was great—that was fine—but . . .” His lips did something funny. “You told Gina that you were pregnant with Olivia before you told me.”

“Really?” Why would she have done that? “I’m sorry.”

“Oh, well, it was only a small thing.” He stopped. “Also, once I overheard you saying something about our sex life. Or lack thereof. I mean, I know women always talk about sex together. It was just the tone in your voice. It was such
contempt
for me. And then, when she and Mike broke up, and you were going out to bars with her, trying to help her pick up men, I got the feeling that you were jealous. You wanted to be a single woman with her. I was in the way. Cramping your style.”

“I’m so sorry,” said Alice. She felt like some other woman had been horrible to Nick. As if he were describing an awful ex-girlfriend who had broken his heart.

“And then Gina died. And that was it. You froze up. That’s how it felt. You were like ice.”

“I don’t understand why I did that,” said Alice. If
Sophie
had died, she would have cried for hours in the safe, comforting circle of Nick’s arms.

“Is that why you didn’t come to the funeral?” she asked.

Nick shrugged.

“I had to be in New York. It was a huge meeting. Something we’d been planning for months, but I told you a million bloody times I was happy to cancel. I kept asking if you wanted me at the funeral, and you said, ‘Do what you want.’ So, I thought, maybe you’d actually prefer it if I
wasn’t
there. I wanted to go. She was my friend, too, once upon a time. You always seem to forget that. She drove me crazy the way she bossed you around, but I still cared about her. It just got so confusing after she and Mike split up. I wanted to stay friends with him, too, and you saw that as a betrayal of Gina. So did she. She was so mad with me. Each time I saw Gina, she’d say, ‘Seen Mike lately?’ and you’d both be shooting me evil looks as if I was the villain. I didn’t see why I had to dump a good mate just because of one drunken—anyway, we’ve been over it a million times. I’m just trying to say that I felt so, I don’t know,
awkward
, when she died. I didn’t know how I was meant to act. I just wanted you to say, ‘Of course you should cancel the trip. Of course you should come to the funeral.’ I felt like I needed your permission.”

“So all our problems were because of Gina and Mike,” said Alice. These two
strangers
had destroyed their marriage.

“I don’t think we can blame them for everything,” said Nick. “We argued. We argued over the most trivial things.”

“Like what?”

“Like, I don’t know, cherries. One day we were going over to Mum’s place for dinner and I ate some cherries we were meant to be taking. It was the crime of the century. You would not let it go. You were talking about those cherries for months.”

“Cherries,” pondered Alice.

“I’d be at work, where people respected my opinions,” said Nick. “And then I’d come home and it was like I was the village idiot. I’d pack the dishwasher the wrong way. I’d pick the wrong clothes for the children. I stopped offering to help. It wasn’t worth the criticism.”

They didn’t say anything for a few moments. Next to them, a family with a toddler and a baby laid out a rug. The toddler picked up a handful of sand with a determined expression on his face and went to drop it all over his baby sister’s face. They heard the mother say, “Watch him!” and the father pulled him away just in time. The mother rolled her eyes, and the father muttered something they didn’t catch.

“I’m not saying I was perfect,” said Nick, his eyes on the father. “I was too caught up in work. You’d say I was obsessed with it. You always talk about the year I was working on the Goodman project. I was traveling a lot. You had to cope on your own with three children. You said once that I ‘deserted you.’ I always think that year made my career, but maybe . . .” He stopped and squinted out at the harbor. “Maybe that was the year that broke our marriage.”