What Alice Forgot - Liane Moriarty [35]
Alice could hear Elisabeth murmuring urgently to the nurse, asking if she could see the doctor, wanting to know what tests had been done. “How do you know she hasn’t got some sort of clot in her brain?” Elisabeth’s voice rose a bit hysterically, and Alice smiled to herself. Drama queen.
(Although, could there be a clot? A dark, ominous thing swooping about in her head like an evil bat? Yes, they really should look into that.)
Maybe Nick had got bored with her. Was that it? Once, when she was in high school, she overheard a girl saying, “Oh, Alice, she’s okay, but she’s a nothing sort of person.”
A nothing sort of person. The girl had said it so casually, without malice, as if it were a fact, and at fourteen Alice had felt cold with the official confirmation of what she’d always believed. Yes, of course she was boring, she bored herself silly! Other people’s personalities were so much more substantial. That same year, a boy at the bowling alley leaned in close with the sweet smell of Coke on his breath and said, “You’ve got a face like a pig.” And that just confirmed something else she’d always suspected; her mother was wrong when she said her nose was as cute as a button; it wasn’t a nose, it was a snout.
(The boy had a skinny, tiny-eyed face like a rat. She was twenty-five before it occurred to her that she could have insulted him back, but the rule of life was that the boys got to decide which girls were pretty; it didn’t really matter how ugly they were themselves.)
Maybe Nick had been bringing her a cup of tea one morning and all of a sudden a veil lifted from his eyes and he thought, Hey, wait a second, how did I end up married to this lazy girl with her boring nothing personality and piglike face?
Oh Lord, were all those terrible insecurities really so fresh and close to the surface? She was grown up; she was twenty-nine! It was only recently that she’d been walking home from the hairdresser’s, feeling gorgeous, and a gaggle of teenage girls walked by, and the sound of their strident giggles made her send a message back through time to her fourteen-year-old self: “Don’t worry, it all works out. You get a personality, you get a job, you work out what to do with your hair, and you get a boy who thinks you’re beautiful.” She’d felt so together, as if all the teenage angst and the failed relationships before Nick had all been part of a perfectly acceptable plan that was leading to this moment, when she would be twenty-nine years old and everything would finally be just as it should be.
Thirty-nine. Not twenty-nine. She was thirty-nine. And that day with the teenagers must have been ten years ago.
Elisabeth came back in and sat back down next to Alice. “She’s going to try and get the doctor to come around again. Apparently that’s a very big deal, because you’re just under observation now and the doctor is ‘extremely busy,’ but she’s going to ‘see what she can do.’ So I think our chances are probably zero.”
Alice said, “Please tell me it’s not true. About Nick.”
“Oh, Alice.”
“Because I love him. I properly love him. I love him so much.”
“You did love him.”
“No, I do. Right now. I know I still do.”
Elisabeth made a “tsk” sound that was full of sympathy, and lifted her hands in a hopeless sort of gesture. “When you get your memory back—”
“But we’re so happy!” interrupted Alice frantically, trying to make Elisabeth see. “It’s not even possible to be happier.” Tears slid helplessly down the sides of her face and trickled ticklishly into her ears. “What happened? Did he fall in love with someone else? Is that it?”
Surely not. It was impossible. Nick’s love for Alice was a fact. A fact. You were allowed to take facts for granted. Once, a friend was teasing Nick for agreeing to go with Alice to a musical (although he