But then again, other times, I walk onto the stage and I feel like there is some weight pressing on the back of my neck, making my head droop and my back hunch, like an old crone. I want to put my mouth close to the microphone and say, “What is the point of all this, ladies and gentlemen? You all seem like nice enough people, so help me out and tell me, what is the point?”

Actually, I do know the point.

The point is they’re helping pay the mortgage. They’re each making a contribution to our groceries and our electricity and our water and our Visa. They’re all generously chipping in for the syringes and the shapeless hospital gowns and that last anaesthetist with the kind, doggy eyes who held my hand and said, “Go to sleep now, darling.” Anyway, I digress. You want me to digress. You want me to just write and write whatever comes to my mind. I wonder if you find me boring. You always look gently interested, but maybe you have days where I walk in the office looking all needy, bursting to tell you all the pathetic details of my life, and you just long to put your elbows on your desk and your chin in your hands and say, “What is the point of all this, Elisabeth?” and then you remember that the point is that I am paying for your Visa, mortgage, grocery bills . . . and so the world goes around.

You mentioned the other day that a feeling of pointlessness is a sign of depression, but you see there, I don’t have depression, because I do see the point. Money is the point.

After I hung up on Jane, the phone rang again immediately (presumably her—thinking we’d been cut off) and I turned it off mid-ring. A man walking by said, “Sometimes you wonder if we’d all be better off without these damned things!” and I said, “Damned right!” (I have never said “Damned right!” in my life before; it just popped bizarrely into my head. I like it. I might say it our next session and see if you blink) and he said, “Congratulations, by the way. I’ve been to a lot of these sorts of workshops before and I’ve never heard anyone speak such good sense!”

He was flirting with me. It happens sometimes. It must be the microphone and the bright lights. It’s funny because I always think it must be obvious to any man that all my sexuality has been sucked out of me. I feel like a piece of dried fruit. Yes, that’s it. I AM A DRIED APRICOT, Dr. Hodges. Not one of those nice, soft, juicy ones, but a hard, shriveled, tasteless dried apricot that hurts your jaw.

I took a few deep breaths of bracing air-conditioned air and clipped the microphone back onto my jacket. I was in such a frenzy to get back onstage, I was actually trembling. I feel like I may have become temporarily deranged for a while this afternoon, Dr. Hodges. We can discuss this at our next session.

Or maybe temporary insanity is just an excuse for inexcusable behavior. Maybe I’ll be too ashamed to tell you that somebody called to say my only sister had been in an accident and I hung up on her. I package myself for you. I want to sound damaged, so you feel there is something useful for you to do, but at the same time I want you to think I’m a nice person, Dr. Hodges. A nice damaged person.

I strode onto that stage like a rock star—and I started talking about “visualizing your prospect” and I was on fire. I had them laughing. I had them competing with each other to yell out answers to me, and the whole time we were visualizing the prospect I was visualizing my little sister.

I was thinking, head injuries can be pretty serious.

I was thinking, Nick is away and this is not really Jane’s responsibility.

And finally I thought: Alice was pregnant with Madison in 1998.

Chapter 3

Nick wasn’t waiting at the hospital with flowers for Alice. Nobody was waiting for her, which made her feel slightly heroic.

Her two paramedics disappeared as if they’d never existed. She couldn’t recall them actually saying goodbye, so she didn’t get to say thank you.

The hospital was all flurries of activity, followed by periods of waiting alone on a stretcher in a small white box of a room, staring at the ceiling.

A doctor appeared and shone a tiny pencil-thin torch in her eyes and asked her to follow his fingers back and forth. A nurse with stunning green eyes that matched her hospital uniform stood at the end of her stretcher with a clipboard asking about health insurance and allergies and next of kin. Alice complimented her on her green eyes and the nurse said they were colored contacts and Alice said, “Oh,” and felt duped.

An icepack was applied to what the green-eyed nurse described as an “ostrich egg” on the back of her head, and she was given two white tablets in a tiny plastic cup for the pain, but Alice explained the pain wasn’t that bad and she didn’t want to take anything because she was pregnant.

People kept asking her questions, in voices that were too loud, as if she were asleep, even though she was looking right at them. Did she remember falling over? Did she remember the trip in the ambulance? Did she know what day of the week it was? Did she know what date it was?

“Nineteen ninety-eight?” A harried-looking doctor peered down at her through glasses with red plastic rims. “Are you quite sure about that?”

“Yes,” said Alice. “I know it’s 1998 because my baby is due on August eight, 1999. Eighth of the eighth, ninety-nine. Easy to remember.”

“Because, you see, it’s actually 2008,” said the doctor.

“Well, that’s not possible,” explained Alice as nicely as she could. Maybe this doctor was one of those brilliant people who were hopeless with normal stuff like dates.