DECEMBER 2003

On the night of Eric Wellman’s holiday party, the sky felt low and thick, like it was going to snow. Alice hoped it would. Like most New Englanders, she’d never outgrown a childlike anticipation of the season’s first snow. Of course, also like most New Englanders, what she wished for in December she’d come to loathe by February, cursing her shovel and boots, desperate to replace the frigid, monochromatic tedium of winter with the milder pinks and yellow-greens of spring. But for tonight, snow would be lovely.

Each year, Eric and his wife, Marjorie, hosted a holiday party at their home for the entire psychology department. Nothing extraordinary ever happened at this event, but there were always small moments that Alice wouldn’t dream of missing—Eric sitting comfortably on the floor in a living room full of students and junior faculty on couches and chairs, Kevin and Glen wrestling for ownership of a Yankee-swapped Grinch doll, the race to get a slice of Marty’s legendary cheesecake.

Her colleagues were all brilliant and odd, quick to help and argue, ambitious and humble. They were family. Maybe she felt this way because she didn’t have living siblings or parents. Maybe the time of year made her sentimental, searching for meaning and belonging. Maybe that was part of it, but it was also much more.

They were more than colleagues. Triumphs of discovery, promotion, and publication were celebrated, but so were weddings and births and the accomplishments of their children and grandchildren. They traveled together to conferences all over the world, and many meetings were piggybacked with family vacations. And like in any family, it wasn’t always good times and yummy cheesecake. They supported one another through slumps of negative data and grant rejection, through waves of crippling self-doubt, through illness and divorce.

But most of all, they shared a passionate quest to understand the mind, to know the mechanisms driving human behavior and language, emotion and appetite. While the holy grail of this quest carried individual power and prestige, at its core it was a collaborative effort to know something valuable and give it to the world. It was socialism powered by capitalism. It was a strange, competitive, cerebral, and privileged life. And they were in it together.

The cheesecake gone, Alice snatched the last hot-fudge-drenched cream puff and looked for John. She found him in the living room in conversation with Eric and Marjorie just as Dan arrived.

Dan introduced them to his new wife, Beth, and they offered hearty congratulations and exchanged handshakes. Marjorie took their coats. Dan had on a suit and tie, and Beth wore a floor-length red dress. Late and much too formal for this party, they’d probably gone to another one first. Eric offered to get them drinks.

“I’ll have another one, too,” said Alice, the glass of wine in her hand still half full.

John asked Beth how she liked married life so far. Although they’d never met, Alice knew a little about her from Dan. She and Dan had been living together in Atlanta when Dan was accepted at Harvard. She’d stayed in Atlanta, originally content with a long-distance relationship and the promise of marriage after he graduated. Three years later, Dan had carelessly mentioned that it could easily take five to six, maybe even seven years for him to finish. They had married last month.

Alice excused herself to use the ladies’ room. On the way, she lingered in the long hallway that connected the newer front of the house to the older back, finishing her wine and cream puff as she admired the happy faces of Eric’s grandchildren pictured on the walls. After she found and used the bathroom, she wandered into the kitchen, poured herself another glass of wine, and fell captive to a boisterous conversation among several of the faculty wives.

The wives touched elbows and shoulders as they moved about the kitchen, they knew the characters in each other’s stories, they praised and teased each other, they laughed easily. These women all shopped and lunched and attended book clubs together. These women were close. Alice was close with their husbands, and it set her apart. She mostly listened and drank her wine, nodding and smiling as she followed along, her interest not truly engaged, like running on a treadmill instead of on an actual road.

She filled her wineglass again, slipped unnoticed out of the kitchen, and found John in the living room in conversation with Eric, Dan, and a young woman in a red dress. Alice stood next to Eric’s grand piano and strummed the top of it with her fingers while she listened to them talk. Each year, Alice hoped that someone would offer to play it, but no one ever did. She and Anne had taken lessons for several years as children, but now she could remember only “Baby Elephant Walk” and “Turkey in the Straw” without sheet music, and only the right hand. Maybe this woman in the fancy red dress knew how to play.

At a pause in the conversation, Alice and the woman in red made eye contact.

“I’m sorry, I’m Alice Howland. I don’t believe we’ve met.”

The woman looked nervously at Dan before she answered. “I’m Beth.”

She seemed young enough to be a graduate student, but by December, Alice would have at least recognized even a first-year student. She remembered Marty mentioning that he’d hired a new postdoctoral fellow, a woman.

“Are you Marty’s new postdoc?” asked Alice.

The woman checked with Dan again. “I’m Dan’s wife.”

“Oh, so nice to finally meet you, congratulations!”

No one spoke. Eric’s gaze bounced from John’s eyes to Alice’s wineglass and back to John, carrying a silent secret. Alice wasn’t in on it.

“What?” asked Alice.

“You know what? It’s getting late, and I’ve got to get up early. You mind if we get going?” asked John.

Once they were outside, she meant to ask John what that awkward saccade was about, but she became distracted by the gentle beauty of the cotton-candy snow that had begun to fall while they were inside, and she forgot.

THREE DAYS BEFORE CHRISTMAS, ALICE sat in the waiting room of the Memory Disorders Unit at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston pretending to read Health magazine. Instead, she observed the others who waited. They were all in pairs. A woman who looked twenty years older than Alice sat next to a woman who looked at least twenty years older than her—most likely her mother. A woman with big, unnaturally black hair and big gold jewelry talked loudly and slowly in a thick Boston accent to her father, who sat in a wheelchair and never looked up from his perfectly white shoes. A bony, silver-haired woman flipped pages of a magazine too quickly to be reading anything next to an overweight man with matching hair and a resting tremor in his right hand. Probably husband and wife.

The wait to hear her name took forever and seemed longer. Dr. Davis had a young, hairless face. He wore black-rimmed glasses and a white lab coat, unbuttoned. He looked like he used to be thin, but his lower torso slumped a bit beyond the outline of his open coat, reminding Alice of Tom’s comments about the poor health habits of physicians. He sat in a chair behind his desk and invited her to have a seat across from him.

“So Alice, tell me what’s been going on.”