What Alice Forgot

Alice ran her fingers over the three shiny dinosaur stickers on the flap of the backpack. They each had speech bubbles saying either “DINOSAURS RULE!” or “DINOSAURS ROCK!” She looked down at the sticker on her shirt and peeled it off. It was a definite match. She stuck it back on her shirt (she felt that she should for some reason) and waited for a feeling or a memory.

Did these belong to the Sultana? Her mind skittered away from the idea, like a frightened animal. She didn’t want to know. She didn’t want a readygrown baby. She wanted her own little future baby back.

This could not be happening to her. But it is, so get a grip, Alice. She began to open the bag and her fingernails caught her attention. She held up her hands in front of her. Her nails were beautifully shaped and long and painted a very pale, beige color. Normally they were ragged and broken and rimmed with dirt from gardening or painting or whatever other renovation job they were doing at the time. The only other time they’d looked like that was for her wedding when she’d got her manicure. She’d spent the whole honeymoon flapping her hands at Nick, saying, “Look, I’m a lady.”

Apart from that, her hands still looked like her hands. Actually, they looked quite nice.

They were bare, she noticed. No jewelry. It was a little unusual that she wasn’t at least wearing her wedding ring, but perhaps she’d been in a rush when she was getting ready for her “spin class.”

She held up her left hand and saw that there was a thin white indentation from her wedding ring that hadn’t been there before. It gave her a disconnected feeling, like when she’d seen the feathery marks on her stomach. Her mind thought everything was still the same, but her body was telling her that time had marched on without her.

Time. She put her hands to her face. If she was supposedly sending out “invitations to her fortieth-birthday party,” if she was . . . thirty-nine—she mentally choked and gasped for air at the thought—then her face must be different. Older. There was a mirror over a basin in the front corner of the room. She could see the reflection of her feet, in their short white socks; one of the flurry of nurses had taken off the strange sneakers (chunky, rubbery things) and put them on the floor next to the bed. Alice could just hop out of the bed and walk over and look at herself.

Presumably it was against strict hospital regulations to get out of bed. She had a head injury. She might faint and hit her head again. Nobody had told her not to get out of bed, but they probably thought it was obvious.

She should look in the mirror. But she didn’t want to see. She didn’t want to know. She didn’t want this to be real. Besides, she was busy at the moment. She had to look through the bag. Quickly, she undid the buckles of the backpack and shoved her hand in. She pulled out . . . a towel.

A plain, innocuous, clean blue bath towel. Alice looked at it and felt nothing but embarrassment. She was fossicking through somebody else’s private stuff. Jane Turner had obviously picked up someone else’s bag and insisted it was hers without really looking at it. It was just like Jane. So bossy and impatient.

Well.

Alice examined her beautifully manicured fingernails again. She put her hand in the bag again and pulled out a plastic bag, folded flat. She opened it and emptied it onto her lap.

A woman’s clothes. Underwear. A red dress. A cream-colored cardigan with a single large wooden button. Knee-high beige boots. Small jewelry case.

The underwear was creamy lace-edged satin. Alice’s underwear tended to be flippant and faded; jolly seahorses on her pants and purple cotton bras that clipped at the front.

She held the dress up in front of her and saw that it was beautiful. A simple design of silky fabric with tiny cream flowers. The cream of the cardigan matched the cream of the flowers on the dress exactly.

She checked the label on the dress. An S for small. It wouldn’t fit her. She was a medium at best. It couldn’t be hers. She folded the clothes back up and opened the jewelry case, lifting out a fine gold necklace with a big topaz stone. The stone was too big for her taste, but she dangled it over the dress and agreed that it was an excellent match. Well done, whoever you are.

The other piece of jewelry was Alice’s gold Tiffany charm bracelet.

Alice said, “Fancy meeting you here.” She picked up the bracelet and laid it across her wrist and felt comforted, as if Nick had finally arrived.

Nick had bought this bracelet for her the day after they found out she was pregnant with the Sultana. He shouldn’t have spent that much because they were experiencing what Nick called “severe fiscal stress,” due to the fact that every single thing they did to the house ended up costing more than planned, but Nick said it could go on the balance sheet under “extraordinary items” (whatever that meant) because it was extraordinary that they were having a baby.

The Sultana had been conceived on a Wednesday night, which just didn’t seem exciting enough a night for such a momentous event, and the sex hadn’t even been that passionate or romantic. It was just that there had been nothing much on TV and Nick had yawned and said, “We should paint the hallway,” and Alice had said, “Oh, let’s just have sex,” and Nick had yawned again and said, “Mmmm. Okay.” And then they’d discovered there weren’t any condoms in the chest of drawers next to the bed, but by then the action was under way and neither of them could be bothered to get up and find one in the bathroom, and besides which it was a Wednesday and it was only once and, well, they were married. They were allowed to get pregnant, so therefore it wasn’t really likely. The next day Alice discovered there actually had been a condom in the back of the drawer if she’d bothered to stretch her fingers just a bit further but by then it was too late. The Sultana had already started doing what it needed to do to become a person.

The day after they did the eight positive pregnancy tests (just in case the first seven were wrong) Nick had come home from work and handed her a small gift-wrapped box with a card that said “For the mother of my child,” and inside was the bracelet.

To be honest, she loved that bracelet even more than she loved her engagement ring.

Of course, to be really honest, she didn’t actually love her engagement ring at all. She sort of hated it.

Not a single person in the world knew this. It was her only real secret, so it was a pity it wasn’t juicier. The ring was an Edwardian antique that had belonged to Nick’s grandmother. Alice had never met Granny Love, but she had apparently been formidable but adorable (she sounded dreadful). Nick’s four sisters, whom Nick called “the Flakes” because of their undeniably flaky tendencies, were crazy about that ring and there had been a lot of bitter remarks when Granny Love left the ring to Nick in her will. One or another of the Flakes was always grabbing Alice’s left hand and sniffing, “You just can’t get jewelry like that anymore!”