What Alice Forgot - Liane Moriarty [170]
It wasn’t just that her memories of the last ten years were back. It was that her true self, as formed by those ten years, was back. As seductive as it might have been to erase the grief and pain of the last ten years, it was also a lie. Young Alice was a fool. A sweet, innocent fool. Young Alice hadn’t experienced ten years of living.
But even as she tried to reason with her, scolded her, and grieved for her, young Alice stubbornly refused to go away.
Over the months that followed she kept popping up. She’d be paying for petrol at the service station and find her hand reaching out for a bar of heavenly Lindt chocolate. She’d be talking seriously to Nick about complicated logistical arrangements with the children and she’d find herself asking him something flippant and entirely unrelated to the conversation, like what he’d had for breakfast that morning. She’d be rushing to the beautician and find herself calling Elisabeth to suggest they meet for a coffee instead. She’d be hurrying between appointments and a voice would whisper in her head: Relax.
Finally she stopped resisting and called a truce. Young Alice was allowed to stay as long as she didn’t eat too much chocolate.
Now it seemed like she could twist the lens on her life and see it from two entirely different perspectives. The perspective of her younger self. Her younger, sillier, innocent self. And her older, wiser, more cynical and sensible self.
And maybe sometimes Young Alice had a point.
Like with Madison, for example. Before she’d lost her memory, Alice had been going through a bad stage with Madison. She’d been so tough on her, so frustrated by her behavior, and in the deepest, most shamefully childish part of her mind, she had blamed Madison for Gina’s accident. If she hadn’t had to take her to the dentist that morning, Gina wouldn’t have been pulling up at the corner at that time. They would have stopped to have coffee instead.
And of course Madison would have been smart enough to pick up on Alice’s resentment. She was already a child who felt everything far too deeply. She’d seen her mother’s friend killed in an accident and then her parents separated.
No wonder she’d been playing up. Elisabeth recommended a psychiatrist she’d heard about. A Dr. Jeremy Hodges. Madison had been going to see him twice a week, and it seemed to be helping. At least she hadn’t assaulted anyone lately at school; and Kate Harper’s husband had been transferred to somewhere in Europe, so the Harper family was now thankfully out of their lives.
There was a friendly toot of a horn and Alice looked up to see Mrs. Bergen driving by in her little blue Honda. It was strange, but after she got her memory back Alice found she’d lost interest in the development issue. The idea of selling up for a nice profit and moving to a fresh, new house without memories no longer seemed that important. She knew the bad memories would come with her anyway, and she didn’t want to leave the good ones behind.
On the other hand, if the developers won—well, that was life. Things changed. Oh, things sure did change.
She came to the corner where Gina had died and remembered yet again the terror and disbelief of that moment. Her grief had changed since she lost and regained her memory. It was simpler, calmer, sadder. Before, she had somehow channeled her grief into a whole lot of different directions: fury toward Nick (He should have taken Gina’s side when she was splitting up with Mike), coldness toward Elisabeth (She never really