CHARACTER
The Things We Cannot Sayby Kelly Rimmer

Alice Michaels

Alice Michaels

Quick Facts

  • Role: Modern-day protagonist; primary narrator of the contemporary timeline
  • First appearance: Prologue
  • Age/Appearance: Late 30s–early 40s; slight build; often described through exhaustion and strain rather than physical markers
  • Family: Wife to Wade Michaels; mother to Eddie and Callie; granddaughter to Alina “Babcia” Dziak; daughter of Julita Slaski-Davis
  • Core Conflict: Balancing caregiving, marriage, and identity while uncovering a buried family history

Who They Are

Alice Michaels is a meticulous, exhausted caregiver whose life has narrowed to the tight orbit of her son’s needs and her family’s routines. The novel gives few physical details, underscoring how seamlessly her identity has fused with caretaking; we see her body mainly as a measure of effort—Eddie weighs “more than half my body weight”—and her mind as a running checklist. Beneath the routines, however, sits a restless mind, a writer’s eye, and a daughter’s fierce devotion. When her grandmother can no longer speak, Alice becomes the family’s translator—of behavior, of silence, and ultimately of history.

Personality & Traits

Alice’s temperament is forged by love and pressure. Her self-discipline and hypervigilance protect Eddie, but they also harden into resentment and self-doubt. The journey to Poland chips away at that armor, revealing humor, bravery, and a stubborn insistence on truth.

  • Dedicated yet Overwhelmed: She tracks Eddie’s routines, scripts, and sensory triggers with clinical precision. The yogurt-packaging meltdown in the prologue lays bare the cost of that vigilance: public humiliation, isolation, and a mother’s terror at losing control.
  • Loyal and Empathetic: Her bond with Babcia drives her across the world on little more than a shakily written request. Even when clues are scant, Alice refuses to minimize her grandmother’s pain or dismiss her final wish.
  • Resentful and Insecure: She bristles at Wade’s distance and feels judged by her high-achieving mother, Julita. The loss of her career leaves her fearing she’s become a “1950s housewife,” a phrase that reveals both self-mockery and grief.
  • Determined and Resilient: Once she commits, she investigates with tenacity—cornering leads, pressing strangers for help, and showing up where she might not be welcome. Her toughness crystallizes in moments like refusing to leave the clinic without answers.

Character Journey

Alice begins trapped in a grind of caregiving, where the unspoken—Eddie’s silence, marital avoidance, Babcia’s guarded past—defines the household. Babcia’s stroke ruptures that stalemate. Armed with a name and a plea, Alice flies to Poland and slowly inhabits her own agency: she pushes past gatekeepers, reconstitutes timelines, and listens to a past that mirrors her present. In piecing together Alina’s wartime story of Love, Sacrifice, and Loyalty, she recognizes the lineage of endurance she’s inherited. Returning home, she doesn’t shed responsibility; she reframes it. She writes again, lets Wade learn to parent without her mediation, and reimagines her family not as broken but as a “mosaic”—an image that crystallizes the novel’s belief in Family Legacy and Intergenerational Connection.

Key Relationships

  • Eddie Michaels: Eddie’s needs have shaped every corner of Alice’s life; she is his advocate and interpreter in a world designed to misunderstand him. Their bond foregrounds the novel’s meditation on Communication and Silence: when words fail, Alice learns to read other languages—gesture, routine, history—and to insist that Eddie’s experience be taken seriously.

  • Alina Dziak (Babcia): Babcia is Alice’s safe harbor and moral compass. When Alina’s speech falters, Alice refuses to let her story die with her, transforming a granddaughter’s love into a historian’s quest and, in the process, finding the contours of her own courage.

  • Wade Michaels: Years of miscommunication leave Alice resentful of Wade’s disengagement from Eddie’s care. Her absence forces Wade to step forward, and the resulting recalibration gives Alice room to be more than a buffer—opening a path toward a more equal, if imperfect, partnership.

  • Julita Slaski-Davis: Alice’s formidable mother embodies scrutiny and high standards, creating a knot of defensiveness and yearning in Alice. The Poland journey helps Alice see Julita not just as a judge but as a link in the same chain of survival—complicated love tempered by history.

Defining Moments

Alice’s arc is punctuated by crises that push her from reaction to intention. Each event exposes a pressure point, then reorients her toward agency.

  • The Grocery Store Meltdown: Eddie spirals over a yogurt rebrand; Alice absorbs strangers’ stares and her own shame. Why it matters: It establishes the daily stakes of caregiving and the novel’s theme that systems—not families—fail.
  • Booking Flights to Poland: After a fight with Wade, she buys the tickets. Why it matters: Impulse becomes resolve; Alice chooses action over paralysis and places Babcia’s voice at the center.
  • The Standoff at the Clinic: Alice refuses to leave without speaking to Lia, Emilia’s granddaughter. Why it matters: She trades apologetic deference for assertiveness—“smash the damn door down” becomes practice, not platitude.
  • Emilia’s Revelation: A FaceTime call exposes the truth about Tomasz Slaski and Saul Weiss. Why it matters: The investigation lands; private grief turns into shared knowledge, allowing Alice to reframe Babcia’s life and her own.

Essential Quotes

I’m doing the best I can, it’s usually not good enough and that’s just the way it is. This line captures Alice’s exhausted realism and her internalized standard of perfection. The resignation is defensive—if “not good enough” is inevitable, she can keep moving—but the sentence also names the invisible labor no one else sees.

You asshole... She’s going to die, Wade. Babcia is going to die and I don’t know how to help her and you pick today to try to address the problems in our marriage? Alice’s fury exposes how triage living has displaced intimacy; there’s no bandwidth for marital repair when survival feels urgent. The outburst also signals a truth the novel confronts: love without communication corrodes into accusation.

This family of mine is messy and it’s different, but in this moment of grief and sadness, we feel closer to a whole unit than we have in as long as I can remember. Life has a way of shattering our expectations, of leaving our hopes in pieces without explanation. But when there’s love in a family, the fragments left behind from our shattered dreams can always be pulled together again, even if the end result is a mosaic. The “mosaic” reframes brokenness as art—difference as design rather than defect. Alice’s language shifts from defense to creation, asserting a vision of family that honors imperfection without denying pain.

Our family life is never going to be easy, but that can’t stop any one of us from reaching for our dreams. It cost our ancestors too damned much for us to have this life—the best thing we can do to honor them is to live it to its fullest. Here Alice links present choice to ancestral sacrifice, translating history into obligation and possibility. The line synthesizes her arc: not escape from hardship, but a conscious, grateful embrace of a hard-won life.