What Alice Forgot - Liane Moriarty [119]
Ring Sophie. She’s your best friend! You must have told her something about what’s going on.
Your diary says you’ve got a Mega Meringue meeting at 1 p.m. Presumably you’ve got to run it. Great! That should be a hoot. Find out where it is! How? Ring someone. Ring that Kate Harper if you must. Or your “boyfriend.”
Would fix it if he could. Would fix it if he could.
Laundry.
Yes, you already said that.
Laundry!
Yes, calm down.
She shouldn’t have had the two cups of coffee. Her heart was beating much too fast. She took a few deep, shaky breaths to steady herself. She couldn’t keep up with her own body. She felt as if she needed to run crazily across a huge expanse of grass, flinging her body about like a puppy let off its leash.
When she got home she ran through the house as if she were in some sort of weird competition, gathering piles of clothes from laundry hampers and the floors of the children’s bedrooms and bathrooms. There was a lot. She pounded down the stairs to the laundry. No surprise to see a huge, shiny-white washing machine taking up half the room. She lifted the lid ready to toss in the clothes when she felt a rush of feelings. Embarrassed. Betrayed. Shocked.
What did it mean? The memory flipped to the front of her brain like a neat index card. Of course. Something had happened right here. Right here in this extraordinarily clean laundry. Something horrible.
That’s right. It was a party.
In the summer. Still warm late in the evening. There were tubs of ice on the laundry floor. Bottles of beer and wine and champagne poking out of the melting ice cubes. She went to get a new bottle of champagne and she was laughing as she pushed open the door and when she saw them, she automatically said, “Hi!” like an idiot, before her brain caught up with what they were doing, what she was seeing. A tiny graceful woman with closely cropped red hair sitting up on the washing machine, her legs apart, and Nick standing in front of her, his hands flat on the machine on either side of her legs, his head bent. Her husband was kissing another woman in the laundry.
Alice stared down at the pile of clothes in the machine. She could see the woman’s face so clearly. The delicate bones of her face. She could even hear her voice. Sugar-sweet and childlike to match her tiny body. It made her teeth ache.
She poured in a scoop of washing powder and slammed down the machine lid. How dare Nick guffaw when she asked if he’d had an affair? That kiss was worse than catching them in bed together. It was worse because it was so obviously a kiss at the beginning. Early kisses were so much more erotic than early sex. Sex at the beginning of a relationship was fumbly and silly and vaguely gynecological, like a doctor’s appointment. But fully clothed kisses, before you’d slept together, were delicious and mysterious.
Nick had kissed her for the first time up against the car after they’d just seen Lethal Weapon 3 at the movies. He tasted of popcorn, with a hint of chocolate. He was wearing a black jumper over a white T-shirt and jeans, and he was a bit stubbly under his lower lip and even as he was kissing her, she was already carefully saving it up as a memory, knowing that she’d be sitting at her computer screen the next day, reliving it. She’d pulled it out and replayed it like an old movie so many times. She had described it in minute detail to her friend Sophie, who had been in a relationship for five years and had therefore moaned with jealousy, even though Jack was the love of her life.
Sophie. Her oldest friend. Bridesmaid at her wedding.
She would ring Sophie right now. There was no way she hadn’t called Sophie and told her about the horror of that kiss in the laundry. First she would have called Elisabeth. Then Sophie. She would have skewed the story for each of them. For Elisabeth she would have concentrated on her own feelings. “How could he do that to me?” she would have asked and her voice would have quivered.