What Alice Forgot - Liane Moriarty [169]
On this particular night, Nick was leaving early the following morning for an important business trip. She’d just got back into bed after convincing Madison to go back to sleep (Why can’t I play outside now? Why is it the middle of the night?) when Tom began wailing. Her head swam as she bent over the crib to pick him up. She felt a wave of pure rage at this person who refused to let her sleep. Just what do you expect of me? Her arms tightened around the baby. You . . . need . . . to . . . be . . . quiet.
She laid him back down with elaborate care. Tom was enraged, and screamed as though she’d just put him down on a bed of knives. Alice went back to the bedroom, switched on the light, and said to Nick, “You need to lock me up. I wanted to hurt the baby.”
Nick sat up in bed, his eyes bleary and confused. “You hurt the baby?”
Alice was trembling all over. “No. I wanted to. I wanted to squeeze him until he stopped crying.”
“Right, then,” said Nick calmly, as if she’d just reported something perfectly normal. He got up and led her by the hand back to bed. “You need sleep.”
“But I need to feed him.”
“I’ll give him the expressed milk you’ve got in the freezer. Just go to sleep. I’m canceling tomorrow. Sleep.”
“But—”
“Sleep. Just sleep.”
It was the most erotic thing he’d ever said to her. He pulled the covers up under her chin, unplugged the monitor, and left, switching off the light and closing the door behind him. The room became divinely silent and dark.
She slept.
When she woke, her breasts rock hard and leaking, the room was filled with sunlight, and the house was quiet. She looked at the clock and saw that it was nine o’clock. He’d done it. He actually canceled his trip. She’d slept for six straight glorious hours. Her vision was brighter, her brain sharper. She went downstairs and found Nick giving Madison her breakfast, while Tom cooed and kicked in his bouncer.
“Thank you,” said Alice, almost delirious with gratitude and relief.
“No problem.” Nick smiled.
She could still see the pride on his face, because he’d saved her. He’d fixed things. He’d always loved to fix things for her.
So it wasn’t strictly true that he was never there, or that he always put work first.
Maybe if she’d just asked him for help more? If she’d fallen apart more often so he could be the knight in shining armor (but how sexist and wrong was that?); if she hadn’t made herself the expert on everything to do with the children; if she hadn’t been so condescending when he dressed the children in weirdly inappropriate combinations. He couldn’t stand being made to feel stupid, so then he just stopped offering to dress them. His stupid pride.
Her stupid pride about being the best, most professional mother. I might not have made it in your world, Nick, like Elisabeth, and all those career women in suits, but I’ve made it in my world.
She’d come to the steepest part of the route, the part that always made Gina use terrible language. Her calf muscles tightened.
It was good to remember that for every horrible memory from her marriage, there was also a happy one. She wanted to see it clearly, to understand that it wasn’t all black, or all white. It was a million colors. And yes, ultimately it hadn’t worked out, but that was okay. Just because a marriage ended didn’t mean that it hadn’t been happy at times.
She thought about that strange period of time straight after she’d got her memory back. At first, images, words, emotions crashed over her in violent waves. She could hardly breathe for the chaos. Then, after a few days, her mind had calmed, the memories had fallen into their correct places, and she felt a kind of beautiful relief. Without her memory, she’d been swimming through cloudy water, half blind: now she had clarity of vision again. And what she saw was this: her marriage was over and she