Still Alice Page 0,9

sat in the darkening study awhile longer, listening to her quiet house and the sounds of neighborhood barbecues. She inhaled the smell of hamburger grilling. For some reason, she wasn’t hungry anymore. She took a multivitamin with water, unpacked, read several articles from The Journal of Cognition, and went to bed.

Sometime after midnight, John finally came home. His weight in their bed woke her, but only slightly. She remained still and pretended to stay asleep. He had to be exhausted from being up all night and working all day. They could talk about Lydia in the morning. And she’d apologize for being so sensitive and moody lately. His warm hand on her hip brought her into the curve of his body. With his breath on her neck, she fell into a deep sleep, convinced that she was safe.

OCTOBER 2003

That was a lot to digest,” said Alice, opening the door to her office.

“Yah, those enchiladas were huge,” said Dan, grinning behind her.

Alice smacked him lightly on the arm with her notepad. They’d just sat through an hour-long lunch seminar. A fourth-year graduate student, Dan had an overall J. Crew appearance—muscular and lean with clean-cut, short blond hair, and a toothy, cocky smile. Physically, he looked nothing like John, but he possessed a confidence and sense of humor that often reminded Alice of John when he was that age.

After several false starts, Dan’s thesis research had finally taken off, and he was experiencing an intoxication that Alice fondly recognized and hoped would develop into a sustainable passion. Anyone could be seduced by research when the results poured in. The trick was to love it when the results weren’t forthcoming, and the reasons why were elusive.

“When do you leave for Atlanta?” she asked as she rifled through the papers on her desk, looking for the draft of his research paper that she’d edited.

“Next week.”

“You can probably have it submitted by then; it’s in good shape.”

“I can’t believe I’m getting married. God, I’m old.”

She found it and handed it to him. “Please, you’re hardly old. You’re at the beginning of it all.”

He sat down and flipped through the pages, furrowing his brows at the red scrawls in the margins. The introduction and discussion sections were the areas where Alice, with her deep and ready knowledge, contributed the most to rounding out Dan’s work, filling in the holes in his narrative, creating a more contiguous picture of where and how this new piece fit into the historical and current linguistics puzzle as a whole.

“What does this say?” asked Dan, showing her a specific set of red scribbles with his finger.

“Differential effects of narrow versus distributed attention.”

“What’s the reference for that?” he asked.

“Oh, oh, what is it?” she asked herself, squeezing her eyes shut, waiting for the name of the first author and the year of the work to bubble to the surface. “See, this is what happens when you’re old.”

“Please, you’re hardly old either. Don’t worry, I can look it up.”

One of the big memory burdens for anyone with a serious career in the sciences was knowing the years of the published studies, the details of the experiments, and who did them. Alice frequently awed her students and postdocs by offhandedly rattling off the seven studies relevant to a certain phenomenon, along with their respective authors and years of publication. Most of the senior faculty in her department had this skill at their fingertips. In fact, there existed an unspoken competition among them to see who possessed the most complete, readily accessible mental catalog of their discipline’s library. Alice wore the imaginary blue ribbon more than anyone.

“Nye, MBB, 2000!” she exclaimed.

“It always amazes me that you can do that. Seriously, how do you hold all that information in your head?”

She smiled, accepting his admiration. “You’ll see, like I said, you’re just at the beginning.”

He browsed through the rest of the pages, his eyebrows relaxed. “Okay, I’m psyched, this looks good. Thanks so much. I’ll get it back to you tomorrow!”

And he bounded out of her office. That task completed, Alice referred to her to-do list, written on a yellow Post-it note stuck to the hanging cabinet just above her desktop screen.

Cognition class

Lunch seminar

Dan’s paper

Eric

Birthday dinner

She placed a satisfying check mark next to “Dan’s paper.”

Eric? What does that mean?

Eric Wellman was the head of the psychology department at Harvard. Did she intend to tell him something, show him something, ask him something? Did she have a meeting with him? She consulted her calendar. October eleventh, her