Alice Hunter

Alice Hunter is David Hunter’s six-year-old daughter, killed with her mother, Kara, in a crash caused by a drunk driver. Though she appears only through David’s memories and dreams, she is central to the novel’s portrayal of bereavement: sleep briefly restores her as a living child and makes waking, rather than dreaming, the cruel return to loss.

Identity and Background

Alice is identified as David’s young daughter and Kara’s child. The available account gives no independent biography or perspective from Alice; readers encounter her through the consciousness of her bereaved father. The few details that define her are therefore also details of what David has lost: she was six, she was alive beside Kara before the crash, and her death transformed his family life in an instant.

David remembers the crash as the work of a drunk driver who walked away unscathed. He describes Kara and Alice as having been changed, in a moment, from living, vital people into dead organic matter. His professional knowledge lets him understand the body’s physical transformation with almost unbearable precision, but it cannot answer what became of the life that had been in them. Alice’s death thus lies at the crossing of two kinds of knowledge: David can comprehend the material aftermath, yet cannot make sense of the disappearance of the person he loved.

Alice in David’s Dreams

In David’s recurring dreams, Alice and Kara are not distant or indistinct. They are vibrant and real, and he can see, speak to, and touch them. The dreams take place in a house he has never encountered while awake, knows does not exist, and nevertheless experiences as home. There he talks with his family about his day and ordinary things, as they did when they were alive. The emphasis falls not on extraordinary revelations but on the recovered texture of shared domestic life.

That ordinariness makes the dreams both consoling and devastating. Within them David can believe that he and his family still have a future rather than only a past; the closeness feels sufficiently real that waking can seem like the illusion. The dream does not undo Alice’s death, but for a time suspends David’s knowledge of it. Its emotional force comes from the contrast between the intimate continuity of the imagined conversations and the finality awaiting him when he opens his eyes.

The recurring pattern also has a physical edge. After one bad dream, David jerks awake sweat-drenched and gasping, naked beside an open bedroom window, with its lower edge pressing against his thighs as he leans out. He backs away and sits on the bed, while the white sheets shine in the moonlight and tears dry on his face. The episode shows how the grief associated with the dreams can exceed their sleeping setting: waking leaves him disoriented and exposed, not simply relieved to have escaped a nightmare.

Death, Grief, and the Limits of Knowledge

David’s expertise in death once offered him a way to impose order on bodily endings. He could chart decomposition according to weather, soil, and season, and take satisfaction in identifying when and how a person had died. But when Kara and Alice were taken from him, that professional command became inadequate. Knowing what happens to a body could not tell him where its life had gone, or how animation and spirit could cease to exist. The question remains beyond the reach of his forensic skill.

The loss also helps explain David’s retreat from his former life. He could not immerse himself in work without encountering reminders of the dead and of the questions that consumed him. He left what he had known, relearned his medical training, and made a new career caring for the living, where he could at least try to delay death. Alice is part of the private history behind that change: her death belongs to the bereavement from which David flees, even as his attempt to build a different life cannot resolve it.

Longing and Narrative Significance

When David considers what Linda Yates has said about dreams having a reason, he cannot settle on a neat rational explanation for his own. A part of him resists the idea that the dreams are only dreams, because accepting something beyond that would lead toward the possibility of being with his family again. He recognizes that there would be only one way to do so, and that choosing it would express despair, not love. More frighteningly, he admits that sometimes he does not care.

Alice’s narrative presence therefore carries a grave ambiguity. The dreams preserve a felt bond with her, but their power also draws David toward a dangerous confusion between reunion and self-destruction. The text does not give Alice a voice or make her responsible for that temptation; the conflict belongs to David, who longs for the family that sleep returns and must face what that longing could make him do. Through Alice’s vivid yet inaccessible presence, the novel gives grief both its tenderness—the remembered talk of an ordinary day—and its perilous pull toward an impossible future.