What Alice Forgot - Liane Moriarty [63]
This was the bedroom she would have created for herself if she were living on her own. She’d always wanted to collect beautiful glass bottles and thought it was something she would never do.
Except for the roses. She remembered how the image of exactly those roses had popped into her mind while she was in the ambulance yesterday. She went over to the dressing table and studied them. Who gave her those? And why was she keeping them in her bedroom when she hated that sort of arrangement?
There was a small square card sitting next to the vase. Nick? Nick wanting her back and forgetting she didn’t like roses? Nick making a point by sending her roses he knew she would hate?
Alice picked it up and read: “Dear Alice, I hope we can do that again one day—next time in the sunshine? Dominick.”
Oh God. She was dating.
She plunked herself down on the end of the bed, holding the card between disbelieving fingers.
Dating was meant to be something from her past, not something from her future. She’d never enjoyed it that much anyway. The self-conscious, trapped feeling when you were sitting in the car together for the first time; the constant horrifying possibility of food caught in between your teeth; the sudden feeling of exhausted boredom when you realized it was your turn to come up with the next stilted topic of conversation. So what do you like to do on the weekends?
Oh, sure, yes, there was nothing better than when a date actually worked. She could remember the euphoria of those early dates with Nick. There was a night where they’d watched Australia Day fireworks from a bar in the Rocks. She was drinking a huge creamy cocktail, and Nick was telling a story about one of his sisters and he was so funny and so sexy and Alice’s hair looked nice and her shoes weren’t hurting and there were curls of shaved chocolate floating on top of her cocktail and Nick’s hand massaging her lower back and she felt such an intense sensation of happiness it frightened her, because surely there was a price to pay for this sort of bliss. (And was this the price? All these years later? Nick swearing at her on the phone from the other side of the world. Had she finally been sent an exorbitant bill?)
A date with any man other than Nick would be boring and awkward and stupid. Dominick. What sort of a name was Dominick?
In a sudden rage, she took the card and tore it into tiny pieces. How could she betray Nick like that by keeping these flowers in her bedroom?
And then there was that other man—that physiotherapist from Melbourne—who had sent her the card with the mention of “happier times.” Who was he? Was she already on to her second relationship after breaking up with Nick? Had she turned into a hussy? A point-making hussy who went to the gym and upset her beloved sister and hosted “Kindergarten Cocktail Parties”? She hated the person she’d become. The only good part was the clothes.
This all had to stop. She had to get Nick’s coins and his socks and his sneakers back in her bedroom, and these roses gone.
She lay back on the bed. Elisabeth was downstairs phoning up that Kate Harper woman trying to get tonight’s party canceled.
Alice crawled across the bed, pulled back the duvet, and got into crisp, clean sheets, still wearing her red dress.
She looked at the ceiling (plastered and painted, the water stains and cracks gone as if they’d never existed) and thought of that moment in the bathroom at the hospital when she had been going through that odd makeup routine and she had that rush of feeling after she smelled her perfume. It had seemed like