Exclusive extract from The Australian Women’s Weekly Great Read, March issue Still Alice (Simon and Schuster) by Lisa Genova.
“John?”
Alice waited, suspended in the front hallway, holding the handle of her suitcase. Harvard Magazine lay on the top of a pile of unclaimed mail strewn on the floor in front of her. The clock in the living room ticked and the refrigerator hummered. A warm, sunny late afternoon at her back, the air inside felt chilly, dim, and stale.
Uninhabited.
She picked up the mail and walked into the kitchen, her suitcase of wheels accompanying her like a loyal pet. Her flight had been delayed, and she was late getting in, even according to the microwave. He’d had a whole day, a whole Saturday, to work.
The red voicemail light on the answering machine stared her down, unblinking. She checked the refrigerator. No note on the door. Nothing.
Still clutching the handle of her suitcase, she stood in the dark kitchen and watched several minutes advance on the microwave. The disappointed but forgiving voice in her head faded to a whisper as the volume of a more primal one began to build and spread out. She thought about calling him, bu the expanding voice rejected the suggestion outright and refused all excuses. She thought about deciding not to care, but the voice, now seeping down her body, echoing in her belly, vibrating in each of her fingertips, was too powerful and pervasive to ignore.
Why did it bother her so much? He was in the middle of an experiment and couldn’t leave it to come home. She’d certainly been in his shoes innumerable times. This was who they were. The voice called her a stupid fool. She spotted her running shoes on the floor next to the back door. A run would make her feel better. That was what she needed.
Ideally she ran every day. For many years now, she treated running like eating and sleeping, as a vital daily necessity, and she’d been known to squeeze in a jog at midnight or in the middle of a blinding snowstorm. But she’d neglected this basic need over the last several months. She’d been so busy. As she laced her shoes, she told herself she hadn’t bothered bringing them with her to California because she’d knows she wouldn’t have the time. In truth, she’d simply forgotten to pack them.
When starting from her house on Poplar Street, she invariably followed the same route – down Massachusetts avenue, through Harvard Square to Memorial Drive, along the Charles River to the Harvard Bridge over by MIT, and back, a little over five miles, a forty-five minute round trip. She had long been attracted to the idea of running in the Boston marathon but each year decided that she realistically didn’t have the time to train for that kind of distance. Maybe some day she would. In excellent physical condition for a woman her age, she imagined running well into her sixties.
Clustered pedestrian traffic on the sidewalks and intermittent negotiations with car traffic in intersections littered the first part of her run down Massachusetts Avenue and through Harvard Square. It was crowded and ripe with anticipation at that time of day on a Saturday, with crowds forming and milling around on street corners waiting for walk signals, outside restaurants waiting for tables, in movie theatres lines waiting for tickets, and in double-parked cars, waiting for an unlikely opening in a metered space. The first ten minutes of her run required a good deal of conscious external concentration to navigate through it all, but once she crossed Memorial Drive to the Charles Rover, she was free to run in full stride and completely in the zone.
A comfortable and cloudless evening invited a lot of activity along the Charles, yet it felt less congested than the streets of Cambridge. Despite a steady stream of joggers, dogs and their owners, walkers, rollerbladers, cyclists, and women pushing babies in jogger strollers, like an experienced driver on a regularly traveled stretch of road, Alice only retained a vague sense for what went on around her now. As she ran along the river, she became mindful of nothing but the sounds of her Nikes hitting the pavement in syncopated rhythm with the pace of her breath, She didn’t replay her argument with Lydia. She didn’t acknowledge her growling stomach, She didn’t think about John. She just ran.
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