Alice wheeled Tom into the room with us, parked the stroller in the corner, and I took off my skirt and lay down on the chair. I wasn’t taking all that much notice of the wispy-haired woman with the American accent who was rubbing cold jelly on my tummy and typing things into her computer, because I was making eye contact with Tom, ready to make him laugh again. Tom was looking straight back at me, his solid little body quivering all over with anticipation, and Alice was chatting to the wispy-haired woman about how they’d both rather the weather was cold than muggy, although not too cold of course.

The woman tapped away at the keyboard as she rubbed the plastic probe back and forth. I glanced briefly at the screen and saw my typed name in the right-hand corner over the top of the lunar landscape that apparently had something to do with my body. I was waiting for the woman to start pointing out the baby, but she was silent, tapping at her keyboard and frowning. Alice stared up at the television screen and chewed her nail. I looked back at Tom, widened my eyes, lifted my chin, and shook my head about.

Tom fell back in his stroller in an ecstasy of mirth, and the woman said, over the top of his laughter, “I’m sorry, but there is no heartbeat.” She had a soft Southern accent, like Andie Mac-Dowell.

I didn’t understand what she meant, because Ben and I had already heard the heartbeat when we went for our first visit to the obstetrician; it was a strange, eerie sound like the beat of a horse’s hooves underwater and it didn’t seem quite real, but it seemed to please Ben and my doctor, who both grinned proudly at me as if they were responsible for it. I thought the wispy-haired woman must mean that there was a problem with her machinery; something had broken down. I was about to say politely, “That’s no problem,” but then I looked over at Alice, and she must have understood right away because she’d curled her hand into a fist and pressed it against her mouth and when she turned around to look at me her eyes were red and watery. The woman touched me on the arm with her fingertips and said, “I’m so sorry,” and it was slowly dawning on me that maybe something quite bad had happened. I looked back at Tom gnawing on his rusk and grinning, thinking, “She’s going to do that crazy thing again soon!” and I smiled involuntarily back at him, and said, “What do you mean?”

Afterward, I felt guilty because I hadn’t been concentrating on my own baby. I shouldn’t have been playing with Tom when my poor little baby was trying to have a heartbeat. I felt that it must somehow have known I wasn’t concentrating. I should have had my eyes fixed on that screen. I should have been helping it along, thinking: Beat. Beat. Beat.

I know this is irrational, Dr. Hodges. I’m never going to give you the professional satisfaction of hearing that story so you can point out it’s irrational and pat yourself on the back for a good day’s work at the office.

I know it’s irrational, and I know there is nothing I could have done.

But I also know that a good mother would have been concentrating on her baby’s heartbeat.

I never pulled that silly face for Tom again. I wonder if some part of his baby mind missed it. Poor little Tom. Poor little lost astronaut.

“Remember?” asked Elisabeth. “The woman with the wispy hair? Tom had rusk smeared all over his face. It was a really hot, humid day and you were wearing khaki pants and a white T-shirt. On the way home you had to stop and get petrol and when you came back to the car, both Tom and I were crying. You’d bought a Twix in the service station and you handed out pieces, and a man behind you waiting for the pump tooted his horn at us, and you put your head out the window and shouted at him. I was proud of you for shouting.”

Alice tried to remember. She wanted to remember this. It seemed a betrayal of Elisabeth to have forgotten. She strained her mind with all her might, like a weight lifter, heaving to lift something huge that had lodged itself in her memory.

Scenes came into her head of a baby laughing in a stroller, Elisabeth crying in the car, a man angrily tooting his horn; but she couldn’t tell if they were real memories or just her imagination painting pictures as Elisabeth talked. They didn’t feel like real memories; they were insubstantial and shadowy, without context.

“You remember now?” said Elisabeth.

“Maybe a bit.” She didn’t want to disappoint her; she looked so hopeful.

“Well. Good. I guess.”

Alice said, “I’m sorry.”

“What for? It’s not your fault. You didn’t throw yourself headfirst at the floor at the gym.”

“No, I mean, I’m sorry about your baby.”

Chapter 12

Alice groped for the right thing to say next. The obvious thing to ask was, “Did you try to get pregnant again?” but that would be like saying, “So! Moving right along!”

She glanced over at Elisabeth. She had put on sunglasses, so Alice couldn’t see her eyes, and was steering with one hand while she used the other hand to rub compulsively at something on the side of her face.

Alice looked away and saw that they were only a block away from the house. She and Nick had gone for so many walks around this area in the twilight, stopping to look at other people’s houses to steal renovation ideas for their own. Was that really ten years ago? It didn’t seem possible. The memory was so clear and ordinary it could have happened yesterday. Nick always said hello first to other neighborhood walkers. “Beautiful evening!” he would call out with a cheery lack of cool, and then he’d stop and chat, as if these people were old friends, while Alice stood there, smiling tightly, thinking, “Why are we bothering with these strangers?” But she was so proud of Nick’s uninhibited sociability, the way he could walk straight into a party full of people they didn’t know and stick his hand out to a stranger and say, “I’m Nick. This is my wife, Alice.” It was as though he had an amazing skill, like playing a complicated musical instrument, that Alice could never hope to master. The best part was that she could coast along safely beside him at any social event, so that parties became glittery and giggly instead of excruciating torture, so much so that she wondered if she’d ever really been that shy in the first place. Even when he wasn’t right by her side, she always knew that if the person talking to her drifted off, she wouldn’t be stranded in the crowd; she could go and find Nick with a purposeful expression on her face, and he’d put an arm around her shoulder and draw her smoothly into the conversation.