What Alice Forgot - Liane Moriarty [42]
Maybe if I’d been more vigilant? Perhaps it was my responsibility as the older sister to keep us on track.
But the only way I’ve been able to get through the last seven years is by wrapping myself up like a package with a tighter and tighter string. It’s so tight that if I’m talking about anything (other than how to write the perfect direct-mail package), I feel as though there is something constricting my throat, as if my mouth doesn’t open wide enough for proper, unthinking conversation.
The problem is the rage. It’s permanently simmering, even when I’m not aware of it. If I hurt myself unexpectedly, or drop a punnet of blueberries all over the kitchen floor, it bubbles over like boiling milk. You should have heard the primeval scream of rage when I banged my forehead against an open cupboard door the other day when I was unpacking the dishwasher. I sat on the kitchen floor with my back against the fridge and sobbed for twenty minutes. It’s pretty embarrassing.
Before Alice and Nick split up, I sometimes felt there were unforgivable words hovering on the tip of my tongue whenever I spoke to Alice, words like: “You think the world begins and ends with you and your perfect little family and your perfect little life and you think stress is finding the perfectly color-coordinated cushions for your new $10,000 sofa.”
And I feel like scribbling those things out because they’re nasty and not even true. I don’t think those things at all, but I could have said them, I could still say them, and if I did, those words would have been there in both our memories forever. So it was safer to say nothing and pretend, and she knew I was pretending and she pretended too, and then we forgot how to be real with each other.
That’s why when she called me to say that Nick had moved out, it was as shocking as a death. I had no idea, no inkling they were having troubles. There was the indisputable evidence that we didn’t share secrets anymore. I should have known what was going on in her life. She should have been asking me for wise, sisterly advice. But she didn’t. So I’ve let her down as much as she let me down.
And that’s why, when I got the news about Gina, I couldn’t think what the right thing was to do. Should I phone Alice? Should I drive straight over? Should I call and ask first? I couldn’t think what Alice would want. I was worrying about the right etiquette, as if this was someone I didn’t know very well. And OF COURSE I should have driven straight to her, for God’s sake. What was wrong with me that I even had to think about it?
As we were walking out of the hospital, Mum said to me in a diffident, un-Mumlike voice, “I guess she doesn’t remember anything about Gina, either, does she?” And I said, “I guess not.” Neither of us knew what to say about that.
How do you find the thread that started it all and follow it all the way back through the tangles of phone calls and Christmases and kids’ parties, right back to the beginning when we were just Alice and Libby Jones? Do you know, Dr. Hodges?
Anyway . . . maybe I should try and sleep.
No. Can’t even fake a yawn.
Tomorrow I’m going to the hospital to pick up Alice and take her home. They’re expecting to discharge her by 10. She just seemed to take it for granted that I would be the one to come and get her. If she were her normal self, she would be making a point of not relying on me. She only takes favors from other school mums, because they can be repaid with complicated playdate arrangements involving their children.
I wonder if she’ll have her memory back by tomorrow. I wonder if she will feel embarrassed by the things she said this afternoon, especially about Nick. I wonder if that was her real self, or her old self, or just a confused, banged-on-the-head self. Deep down, is she devastated about the divorce? Was that a glimpse of what she’s really feeling? I don’t know. I just don’t know.
The doctor I spoke to seems confident that she’ll have her memory back by the morning.