Free Still Alice by Lisa Genova Page A

Lydia.
    Compass! Tambourine, serpent, compass.
    Relieved, Alice took out the ingredients for the white-chocolate bread pudding and placed them on the counter—vanilla extract, a pint of heavy cream, milk, sugar, white chocolate, a loaf of challah bread, and two half-dozen cartons of eggs. A dozen eggs? If the piece of notebook paper with her mother’s recipe on it still existed, Alice didn’t know where it was. She hadn’t needed to refer to it in years. It was a simple recipe, arguably better than Marty’s cheesecake, and she’d made it every Christmas Eve since she was a young girl. How many eggs? It had to be more than six, or she would’ve taken out only one carton. Was it seven, eight, nine?
    She tried skipping over the eggs for a moment, but the other ingredients looked just as foreign. Was she supposed to use all of the cream or measure out only some of it? How much sugar? Was she supposed to combine everything all at once or in a particular sequence? What pan did she use? At what temperature did she bake it and for how long? No possibility rang true. The information just wasn’t there.
    What the hell is wrong with me?
    She revisited the eggs. Still nothing. She hated those fucking eggs. She held one in her hand and threw it as hard asshe could into the sink. One by one, she destroyed them all. It was marginally satisfying, but not enough. She needed to break something else, something that required more muscle, something that would exhaust her. She scanned the kitchen. Her eyes were furious and wild when they met Lydia’s in the doorway.
    “Mom, what are you doing?”
    The massacre had not been confined to the sink. Empty shards of shell and yolk were splattered all over the wall and counter, and the faces of the cabinets were streaked with tears of albumen.
    “The eggs were past the expiration date. There’s no pudding this year.”
    “Aw, we have to have the pudding, it’s Christmas Eve.”
    “Well, there aren’t any more eggs, and I’m tired of being in this hot kitchen.”
    “I’ll go to the store. Go into the living room and relax, I’ll make the pudding.”
    Alice walked into the living room, shaking but no longer riding that powerful wave of anger, not sure whether she was feeling deprived or thankful. John, Tom, Anna, and Charlie were all seated and in conversation, holding glasses of red wine. Apparently, someone had found the opener. With her coat and hat on, Lydia poked her head into the room.
    “Mom, how many eggs do I need?”

JANUARY 2004
     
    S he had good reasons to cancel her appointments on the morning of January nineteenth with the neuropsychologist and Dr. Davis. Harvard’s exam week for the fall semester fell in January, after the students returned from Winter Break, and the final exam for Alice’s cognition class was scheduled for that morning. Her attendance wasn’t crucial, but she liked the sense of closure that being there provided, of seeing her students through the course from start to finish. With some reluctance, she arranged for a teaching fellow to proctor the exam. The bigger good reason was that her mother and sister had died on January nineteenth, thirty-two years ago. She didn’t consider herself superstitious like John, but she’d never received goodnews on that day. She’d asked the receptionist for another date, but it was either then or four weeks from then. So she took it, and she didn’t cancel. The idea of waiting another month was that unappealing.
    She imagined her students back at Harvard, nervous about what questions they would be asked, hurrying a semester’s worth of knowledge onto the pages of their blue exam books, hoping their heavily crammed short-term memories wouldn’t fail them. She understood exactly how they felt. Most of the neuropsychological tests administered to her that morning—Stroop, Raven’s Colored Progressive Matrices, Luria Mental Rotation, Boston Naming, WAIS-R Picture Arrangement, Benton Visual Retention, NYU Story