What Alice Forgot

She opens her eyes to a world that doesn't make sense. There is a pounding in her head and a chorus of concerned voices, but in her mind, she is twenty-nine, deliriously in love with her husband, Nick, and giddy with the secret of their first baby growing inside her. It's 1998, and life is a project of joyful, chaotic potential - the ramshackle house they're renovating, the future they're building, the fierce, tender love that feels as essential as air. She remembers Nick's words, whispered after a trip to the grocery store, as the scent of lavender drifted from the garden: “Don't be ridiculous, you goose, you know I'm bloody besotted with you.”

But the faces leaning over her belong to a different world. It's not 1998, they tell her. It's 2008. She is not twenty-nine; she is thirty-nine, a decade of her life gone in the space of a fall at the gym. She is no longer pregnant. Instead, she is the mother of three children - Madison, Tom, and Olivia - whose faces in a photograph are those of beautiful, heartbreaking strangers. Her body is an unfamiliar landscape of lean muscle, stretch marks, and a pale scar low on her belly she cannot explain. This new Alice is a stranger to her: a super-fit, hyper-organized, impeccably dressed woman who runs school committees and hosts kindergarten cocktail parties.

The greatest shock comes when she finally reaches Nick on the phone, her heart soaring with the need to hear his voice, only to be met with a blast of cold fury. “Then why the fuck did I need to call you?” he snarls. The man she adores, her human hot water bottle, her partner in everything, speaks to her like an enemy. It is her sister, Elisabeth, who delivers the final, impossible truth. “It's just that you and Nick aren't together anymore,” she says gently. “You're getting divorced.” The word is ugly and alien, a thing that happens to other people, never to them.

Reeling from this new reality, Alice begins a desperate investigation into her own life. She is a time traveler in her own home, a beautiful, perfect house where every renovation from their “Impossible Dream” list has been completed, yet it feels sterile and unfamiliar without Nick's comforting clutter. Her own unassuming mother, now a salsa-dancing bombshell, is married to Nick's pompous father, Roger. Her sister Elisabeth, once her closest confidante, is distant and brittle, weighed down by a private sorrow Alice cannot remember. And Alice herself, the easygoing girl who loved baking and sleeping in, has become a taut, efficient woman who runs on caffeine, schedules, and a simmering, unfamiliar anger.

At the center of this missing decade is a ghost named Gina. She was Alice's best friend, a vibrant, champagne-loving woman who lived across the street. But Gina is gone, killed in a tragic accident a year ago - an accident Alice witnessed. The memory exists only as a phantom terror that grips her whenever she passes a certain street corner, a dark, swaying tree against a stormy sky. Everyone's grief and guilt seem to revolve around Gina, and Alice knows that understanding her friendship with this woman is the key to understanding how her own perfect life shattered.

As the 29-year-old Alice inhabits this foreign life, she tries to mend the pieces she cannot comprehend. She is appalled by the cold war she and Nick have been waging via email, fighting over custody and possessions. She sees her children not as the source of stress and schedules they seem to have become, but as miracles. She sits on the beach with Nick and their daughter Madison after a bullying incident at school, and for a moment, watching a whale breach in the harbor, they are a family again. “Maybe we should try again,” Nick says, and Alice's heart floods with hope. She even finds a new man in her life - Dominick, the kind, gentle school principal - but he is a stranger, a placeholder for the only man she believes she could ever love.

The past comes crashing back on Mother's Day, at a school fundraiser held in Gina's memory. They are baking the world's largest lemon meringue pie - Gina's signature dish. As the sweet, citrusy scent of the baking pie fills the air and Elvis music plays, the dam in Alice's mind breaks. Ten years of memories flood her in a dizzying, sickening rush: the bone-deep exhaustion of raising three small children, the loneliness of a husband consumed by his career, the slow, bitter erosion of a once-perfect love. She remembers the fights, the contempt, the crushing grief after Gina's death that froze her heart, and the final, quiet decision to leave. She remembers it all.

With her memory restored, the 39-year-old Alice is back, horrified by the naive actions of her younger self. She remembers exactly why she fell out of love with Nick and into the arms of Dominick. The easy path would be to continue with the divorce, to move forward with a new life. Yet, the experience has changed her. Having seen her marriage through the fresh, hopeful eyes of her younger self, she remembers not just the pain, but the joy. She remembers the boy who got tears in his eyes when she agreed to marry him, the young father who canceled an important trip to let her sleep, the man who knew her better than anyone else in the world.

Years later, she lies in bed on a Sunday morning. The house will soon fill with the happy chaos of family - her children, now teenagers; Elisabeth and her own bustling brood; Frannie and her new love. Nick is beside her, his breathing slow and even. Their life is not the simple, sun-drenched love story she remembered from 1998. It is something deeper, more complex and resilient, forged by pain and forgiveness, by memories both lost and found. He had once told her he was grateful she'd hit her head, and she understands now. It was not a memory she lost, but a perspective she gained - a second chance to choose the life, and the love, that had been there all along.