What Alice Forgot

If I couldn’t stand losing two hours of my memory, what would it be like to lose ten years?

As I looked for Alice’s ward number, I had a sudden memory of Mum and Frannie and me, giddy with excitement, just like that family in the lift, practically running through the corridors of another hospital looking for Alice’s room when Madison was born. We happened to see Nick in the distance, walking along ahead of us, and we all shrieked, “Nick!” and he turned around and while he waited for us to catch up, he ran around in circles on the spot, and did a two-fisted punch in the air like Rocky, and Frannie said fondly, “He’s such a card!” and I was dating that patronizing town planner at the time and I decided right then and there to break up with him, because Frannie would never call him a card.

If Alice had really lost every memory of the last ten years, I thought, then she would have no memory of that day, or of Madison as a baby. She wouldn’t remember how we all shared a tin of Quality Street chocolates while the pediatrician came in to check Madison. He flipped her this way and that, and held her in one palm with casual expertise, like a basketballer spinning a ball, and Alice and Nick blurted out in unison, “Careful!” and we all laughed and the pediatrician smiled and said, “Your daughter gets ten out of ten, an A-plus.” We all applauded and “whoo-hoo’d” Madison for her first-ever good mark, while he wrapped her back up in her white blanket, a neat packet of fish-and-chips, and ceremonially presented her to Alice.

I was just starting to consider the enormity of all the things that had happened to Alice over the last ten years when I found her ward number, and as I glanced through the door, I saw her in the first curtained-off cubicle, propped up against pillows, her hands resting on her lap and her eyes staring straight ahead. There was no color to her. She was wearing a white hospital gown, lying against a white pillow with a white gauze bandage wrapped around her head, and even her face was dead white. It was strange to see her so still; Alice is all about sharp, quick movement. She’s texting on her mobile, jangling her car keys, grabbing one of the kids by the elbow and saying something stern in their ear. She’s fingernail-tapping busy, busy, busy.

(Ten years ago she was nothing like that. She and Nick slept till noon every Sunday morning. “How will they ever find time to renovate that enormous house!” clucked Mum and Frannie and me, like elderly aunts.)

She didn’t see me at first and as I walked up to her, her eyes flickered, and they looked so big and blue in her pale face, but more importantly, she was looking at me in a different, but familiar, way. I don’t know how to describe it, except that the strange thought came into my head, “You’re back.”

You want to know the first thing she said to me, Dr. Hodges?

She said, “Oh Libby, what happened to you?”

I told you, it defines me.

Alice had finally been moved up to a ward and given a hospital gown and a remote for the television and a white chest of drawers. A lady wheeling a trolley brought her a cup of weak tea and four tiny triangular curried-egg sandwiches. The nurse was right; the tea and sandwiches had made her feel better, except they hadn’t done anything about the huge gaping crevasse in her memory.

When she’d heard Elisabeth’s voice on the mobile phone, it was just like each time she’d called home on that disastrous trip around Europe when she was nineteen and trying to pretend she had a different personality—an adventurous, extroverted sort of personality; the sort of person who loves exploring cathedrals and ruins all day on her own and talking to drunk boys from Brisbane in youth hostels at night—when really she was homesick and lonely and often bored, and couldn’t make head or tail of the train timetables. The sound of Elisabeth’s voice, loud and clear in a strange phone box on the other side of the world, always made Alice’s knees buckle with relief, and she’d press her forehead against the glass and think, That’s right; I am a real person.

“My sister is coming right now,” she told the nurse when she hung up, as if giving her credentials as a proper person with a family; a family she recognized.

Although, when Elisabeth first walked toward her bed, she actually didn’t recognize her. She vaguely assumed that this woman in the cream suit with the glasses and the swinging shoulder-length hair must be a hospital administrator coming to do something administrative, but then something about the woman’s straight-backed “I’ll take you on” posture, something essentially Elisabeth, gave her away.

It was a shock, because it seemed that overnight Elisabeth had put on a lot of weight. She’d always had a strong, lithe, athletic-looking body, because of her rowing and her jogging and whatever else it was she was always so busy doing. Now she wasn’t fat but definitely larger, softer, and bustier; a puffed-out version of herself, as if someone had blown her up like a plastic pool toy. She won’t like that, thought Alice. Elisabeth had always been so amusingly moralistic about fattening food, refusing an offer of pavlova as if it were crack cocaine. Once, when Nick, Alice, and Elisabeth went away for a weekend together, Elisabeth spent ages at the breakfast table studying the “nutritional information” panel on the side of a container of yogurt, warning them darkly, “You have to be really careful with yogurt.” Whenever Nick and Alice ate yogurt after that, one of them would always shout, “Careful!”

As she got closer and the bright light over Alice’s bed lit up her face, Alice saw fine spidery lines etched around Elisabeth’s mouth and on either side of her eyes behind the elegant spectacles. Elisabeth had large, pale blue eyes with dark lashes, like Alice, inherited from their father; eyes that attracted compliments, but now they seemed smaller and paler, as if the color had begun to wash out.

There was something bruised and wary and worn out about those washed-out eyes, as if she’d just been badly defeated in a fight she’d expected to win.

Alice felt a surge of worry; something terrible must have happened.

But when she asked, Elisabeth said, “What do you mean what happened to me?” so briskly and spiritedly that Alice doubted herself.

Elisabeth pulled over a plastic chair and sat down. Alice caught a glimpse of her skirt pulling unflatteringly across her stomach and quickly looked away; it made her want to cry.

Elisabeth said, “You’re the one in hospital. The question is what happened to you?”

Alice felt herself slip into the role of irrepressible, hopeless Alice. “It’s completely bizarre. It’s like a dream. Apparently, I fell over at the gym. Me, at the gym! I know! According to Jane Turner I was doing something called my ‘Friday spin class.’ ” She could be silly now, because Elisabeth was here to be sensible.