What Alice Forgot - Liane Moriarty [7]
She must remember every moment of this freaky day to tell Nick. He’d think it was hilarious. Yes, this whole day was quite a hoot.
Now she was being carried through another, much larger, blue-carpeted room, with rows of complicated-looking machinery being operated by men and women who all seemed to be straining to lift, pull, or push things that were far too heavy for them. The place had the studious, muted feel of a library. Nobody stopped what they were doing as the stretcher went by. Only their eyes followed with blank, impersonal interest, as if she were a news event on TV.
“Alice!”
A man stepped off a treadmill, pushing his headphones down from his ears and onto his shoulders. “What happened to you?”
His face—bright red and beaded with sweat—meant nothing to her. Alice stared up at him, groping for something polite to say. It was surreal, making conversation with a stranger while lying flat on her back on a stretcher. She was in one of those dreams where she turned up at a cocktail party in her pajamas.
“Fell off her bike and got a bit of a bump on the noggin,” George Clooney answered for her, sounding not at all medical.
“Oh no!” The man smeared a towel across his forehead. “Just what you need, with the big day coming up!”
Alice attempted to pull a rueful face about the big day coming up. Perhaps he was one of Nick’s colleagues and it was some work function she was meant to know about?
“Well, that’ll teach you to be such a gym addict, eh, Alice?”
“Ho,” said Alice. She wasn’t sure what she’d been trying to say, but that’s what it came out as: “Ho.”
As the paramedics kept walking, the man climbed back onto his treadmill and started running, calling out after her, “Take care, Alice! I’ll get Maggie to call!” He held up his thumb and little finger to his ear.
Alice closed her eyes. Her stomach churned.
“You doing okay there, Alice?” asked George Clooney.
Alice opened her eyes. “I feel a bit sick,” she said.
“That’s to be expected.”
They stopped in front of a lift.
“I really don’t know where I am,” she reminded George. She felt like it was worth mentioning again.
“Don’t worry about it for now,” said George.
The lift doors hissed open and a woman with sleek bobbed hair stepped out. “Alice! Are you okay? What happened?” She had one of those “How now, brown cow” accents. “What a coincidence! I was just thinking about you! I was going to call you about the—ahh, the little incident—at school, Chloe told me about it, you poor thing! Oh dear, this is all you need! What with tomorrow night, and the big day coming up!”
As she kept talking, the paramedics maneuvered the stretcher into the lift and pressed the “G” button. The doors slid shut on the woman lifting a pretend phone to her ear just like the treadmill guy, while at the same time a voice cried out, “Is that Alice Love I just saw on that stretcher?”
George said, “You know a lot of people.”
“No,” said Alice. “No, I really don’t.”
She thought about Jane saying, “I just got an invitation to her fortieth birthday.”
She turned her head and was sick all over George Clooney’s nice, shiny black shoes.
Elisabeth’s Homework for Dr. Hodges
It was just toward the end of the lunch break when I got the call. I only had five minutes before I was back on and I should have been in the bathroom checking I didn’t have food between my teeth. She said, “Elisabeth, oh, hi, it’s Jane, I’ve got a problem here,” as if there was only one Jane in the whole world (you would think somebody named Jane would be in the habit of giving their last name) and I was thinking Jane, Jane, a Jane with a problem, and then I realized it was Jane Turner. Alice’s Jane.
She said that Alice had fallen over at the gym during her spin class.
So there I was with 143 people all sitting back behind their tables, pouring their ice water, eating their mints, looking expectantly at the podium with pens poised, who had each paid $2,950