“I’m sorry, you’re right, I meant to tell you, but then I got busy and forgot, you know how it gets. But I disagree with you on this, you know I do. We supported the other two.”

“That’s different.”

“It’s not. You just don’t like what she picked.”

“It’s not the acting. It’s the not going to college. The window of time she’s likely to ever go is rapidly closing, John, and you’re making it easier for her to stay out.”

“She doesn’t want to go to college.”

“I think she’s just rebelling against who we are.”

“I don’t think it has anything to do with what we want or don’t want or who we are.”

“I want more for her.”

“She’s working hard, she’s excited and serious about what she’s doing, she’s happy. That’s what we want for her.”

“It’s our job to pass on our wisdom about life to our kids. I’m really afraid she’s missing out on something essential. The exposure to different subjects, different ways of thinking, the challenges, opportunities, the people you meet. We met in college.”

“She’s getting all that.”

“It’s not the same.”

“So it’s different. I think paying for her classes is more than fair. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you, but you’re hard to talk to about this. You don’t ever budge.”

“Neither do you.”

He glanced at the clock on the fireplace mantel, reached for his glasses, and placed them on top of his head.

“I’ve got to go to lab for about an hour, then I’ll pick her up at the airport. You need anything while I’m out?” he asked as he stood to leave.

“No.”

They locked eyes.

“She’s going to be fine, Ali, don’t worry.”

She raised her eyebrows but didn’t say anything. What else could she say? They’d played this scene out together before, and this was how it ended. John argued the logical path of least resistance, always maintaining his status as the favorite parent, never convincing Alice to switch over to the popular side. And nothing she said swayed him.

John left the house. Relaxed in his absence, she returned to the pictures in her lap. Her adorable children as babies, toddlers, teenagers. Where did the time go? She held the baby picture of Lydia that John had guessed was Tom. She felt a renewed and reassuring confidence in the strength of her memory. But of course, these pictures only opened the doors to histories housed in long-term memories.

John Black’s address would have lived in recent memory. Attention, rehearsal, elaboration, or emotional significance was needed if perceived information was to be pushed beyond the recent memory space into longer-term storage, else it would be quickly and naturally discarded with the passage of time. Focusing on Dr. Davis’s questions and instructions had divided her attention and prevented her from rehearsing or elaborating on the address. And although his name elicited a bit of fear and anger now, the fictitious John Black had meant nothing to her in Dr. Davis’s examining room. Under these circumstances, the average brain would be quite susceptible to forgetting. Then again, she didn’t have an average brain.

She heard the mail drop through the slot in the front door and had an idea. She looked at each item once—a baby wearing a Santa hat pictured on a holiday greeting card from a former graduate student, an advertisement for a fitness club, the phone bill, the gas bill, yet another L.L.Bean catalog. She returned to the couch, drank her tea, stacked the photo albums back on the shelf, and then sat very still. The ticking clock and brief eruptions of steam from various radiators made the only sounds in the house. She stared at the clock. Five minutes passed. Long enough.

Without looking at the mail, she said aloud, “Baby in Santa hat card, gym membership offering, phone bill, gas bill, another L.L.Bean catalog.”

Piece of cake. But to be fair, the time between being presented with John Black’s address and being asked to recall it had been much longer than five minutes. She needed an extended delay interval.

She grabbed the dictionary off the shelf and devised two rules for picking a word. It had to be low frequency, one she didn’t use every day, and it had to be a word that she already knew. She was testing her recent memory, not learning acquisition. She opened the dictionary to an arbitrary page and put her finger down on the word “berserk.” She wrote it on a piece of paper, folded it, put it in her pants pocket, and set the timer on the microwave for fifteen minutes.

One of Lydia’s favorite books when she was a toddler was Hippos Go Berserk! Alice went about the business of readying for Christmas Eve dinner. The timer beeped.

“Berserk,” without hesitation or needing to consult the piece of paper.

She continued playing this game throughout the day, increasing the number of words to remember to three and the delay period to forty-five minutes. Despite this added degree of difficulty and the added likelihood of interference from the distraction of dinner preparation, she remained error-free. Stethoscope, millennium, hedgehog. She made the ricotta raviolis and the red sauce. Cathode, pomegranate, trellis. She tossed the salad and marinated the vegetables. Snapdragon, documentary, vanish. She put the roast in the oven and set the dining room table.

Anna, Charlie, Tom, and John sat in the living room. Alice could hear Anna and John arguing. She couldn’t make out the topic from the kitchen, but she could tell it was an argument by the emphasis and volume of the back-and-forth. Probably politics. Charlie and Tom were staying out of it.

Lydia stirred the hot mulled cider on the stove and talked about her acting classes. Between concentrating on making dinner, the words she needed to remember, and Lydia, Alice didn’t have the mental reserve to protest or disapprove. Uninterrupted, Lydia spoke in a free and passionate monologue about her craft, and despite Alice’s strong bias against it, she found she couldn’t resist being interested.

“After the imagery, you layer on the Elijah question, ‘Why this night rather than any other?’” said Lydia.

The timer beeped. Lydia stepped aside without being asked, and Alice peeked in the oven. She waited for an explanation from the undercooked roast long enough for her face to become uncomfortably hot. Oh. It was time to recall the three words in her pocket. Tambourine, serpent…

“You’re never playing everyday life as usual, the stakes are always life and death,” said Lydia.

“Mom, where’s the wine opener?” Anna hollered from the living room.

Alice struggled to ignore her daughters’ voices, the ones her mind had been trained to hear above all other sounds on the planet, and to concentrate on her own inner voice, the one repeating the same two words like a mantra.

Tambourine, serpent, tambourine, serpent, tambourine, serpent.

“Mom?” asked Anna.

“I don’t know where it is, Anna! I’m busy, look for it yourself.”

Tambourine, serpent, tambourine, serpent, tambourine, serpent.

“It’s always about survival when you boil it down. What does my character need to survive and what will happen to me if I don’t get it?” said Lydia.

“Lydia, please, I don’t want to hear about this right now,” Alice snapped, holding her sweaty temples.

“Fine,” said Lydia. She turned herself squarely toward the stove and stirred vigorously, obviously hurt.

Tambourine, serpent.

“I still can’t find it!” yelled Anna.

“I’ll go help her,” said 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?