Chapter Nine #2
“Uh…” Alice picks at her bagel. “I mean, there’s not much to tell. He collapsed, I did CPR and called 911, then the EMTs came.”
“Wow, way to make something so badgrass sound boring.”
Alice snickers at badgrass, but shrugs at the rest of it.
“So wait. You guys were dating?”
Alice takes a questionably large bite of bagel to buy herself some time. This is a direct question. Either yes, they were dating, or no, they were not dating. There’s really no way to slide past this one like she’s slid past all the others.
And also…wait.
She has to lie—or, well, whatever she’s doing. Omit, maybe. She has to omit to Nolan’s family because she decided not to hurt them while he’s dying, and she has to omit to her boss so she’ll stay on the day shift. But Isabella isn’t an Altman, and she isn’t Mr. Brown. She doesn’t know any of them.
Isabella is the one person in the world Alice could tell the truth to.
Before she can chicken out too much, before she can seize onto the fear that what she’s doing is so terrible that Isabella will kick her out of the house, this sweet family reunion over before it truly began, Alice painfully swallows a lump of dough and shakes her head.
“Funny story about that, actually.”
Ten minutes later, Isabella’s eyes are wide, her jaw slack with surprise. She’s been frozen like that for Alice’s entire story, her breakfast forgotten and her coffee growing cold. “Jiminy cremini, this is the craziest ship I’ve ever heard in my life.”
Alice grimaces. “It’s…um. Well. Definitely the most confusing situation I’ve ever been in, that’s for sure.”
“So, okay,” Isabella says, rubbing at her forehead. “Let me make sure I got this right. You’ve literally never spoken to this man, and his whole enormous family thinks you’re his, like, serious girlfriend, and you’re just…faking it and hoping you don’t get found out?”
“I mean, when you say it like that it sounds insane.”
Isabella laughs, something high and almost hysterical. “How else could you put it?”
Alice shrugs. “I guess I figured…they were so happy to think that he was settling down, that he was with someone who cared about him. I didn’t…I didn’t want to make any of this harder on them. If it makes them feel good to believe that, I guess I hoped it wasn’t hurting anyone.”
Isabella’s eyes get softer, some of the wild energy draining out of her. “I get that,” she says, her voice caring now, something maternal in it. She drops her hand on top of Alice’s and squeezes. “I do. But what about if he wakes up?”
Alice breaks her bacon into tiny pieces.
“Originally, I figured they’d be so happy he was alive that they wouldn’t really care about me.
But now…” Her lips twist up. “Now I don’t know.
We’ve gotten closer than I thought we would.
Especially me and Van. I don’t know, I think she’d be…
it kind of feels like she, sort of…” She trails off, grimacing.
She’s not sure how to say this. “I think she, like…cares.”
Isabella’s voice is gentle. “About you?”
Alice nods. “Yeah. Like, separate from my relationship to Nolan, or whatever. You know? Like, his mom cares about me because of what she thinks I meant to him, but for Van, maybe…it’s not about him. Or not all of it. I think some of it’s about me.”
Isabella almost laughs, shaking her head. “Holy everything, Al. I mean, I know my life is basically a boring suburban mom cosplay right now, but, wow. This is all…holy ships, you know?”
Alice chuckles, taking a bite of bacon. “Tell me about it. A whole mucking flotilla of ships.”
After a couple more plates of bacon and one toddler meltdown, Alice finds herself led into the living room to sit on the floor with Hazel and Isabella.
Hazel is playing with magnetic tiles while Sebastian is enjoying screen time, so mesmerized by some show on his iPad that Alice is pretty sure he hasn’t blinked in literal minutes.
Isabella has spent the last five minutes incessantly demanding that Alice show her a picture of Nolan, which has resulted in Alice trying to figure out Marie’s Instagram handle.
“I wonder why he doesn’t have an account,” Isabella says, leaning over Alice’s shoulder to look while half-heartedly stacking some tiles.
“Probably to keep all of the women in his life from finding out about each other,” Alice mumbles.
“Woof. Nice boyfriend you’ve got there, Rue Rue.”
“Tell me about it. You should have seen the receptionist at his—Oh! That’s her.
Okay.” She clicks on Marie’s profile, and bless her oversharing generation, it’s public.
Alice only has to scroll for a minute or two before she sees familiar faces.
She clicks on the picture, and yup. There they all are.
It’s everyone she’s grown to know in the last five days, and honestly it’s weird to see Nolan standing up among them instead of lying silently between them.
Van had mentioned Chanukah, but it seems like they must celebrate both, since in the picture they’re all wearing thick Christmas sweaters, posed in front of a decorated tree.
“That’s him,” she says, handing the phone to Isabella.
“Daaaaaamn, girl,” Isabella says, grinning. “Your fake-boyfriend is hot!”
“Thank you. I picked him out myself.”
Isabella zooms in on Van and Marie, standing side by side. “That’s the sister?” she asks, pointing at Marie.
“Yeah. Both sisters.”
“Where is—Oh. I see. Sorry, I thought that one was a dude.”
Alice tries not to ruin things by getting frustrated. Straight people can be so freaking narrow sometimes. “That’s Van.”
“Huh,” Isabella says. Then, after a beat, “She’s hot too.”
Alice swallows, something in her throat suddenly thick. “Yeah.”
Isabella hands the phone back, but there’s something pointed and knowing in her face that Alice is absolutely sure is going to become very, very dangerous in the future.
Only a couple minutes later, when Alice is focused on making the magnetic tiles into a star, Isabella seems to get uncomfortable, some of the nervous energy from before popping back up.
She’s shifting more than is warranted by the soft living room rug underneath them.
“Hey, I, um…” Isabella looks down at the tiles in her hands, putting them together with way more focus than is required.
She lets out a loud, long breath, and then she finally looks up at Alice. “I have to apologize.”
Alice blinks a couple times. “For…what?”
Isabella seems like she’s almost going to laugh, but not because something is actually funny.
“For everything,” she says, her voice quiet and serious.
“I didn’t…I think back when I was a kid and we moved away, I didn’t really get it.
I didn’t fully understand what you were going through, and I had all these other cousins in Texas, and I…
” She bites her lip, and Alice wonders if she’s going to say forgot about you.
“I had this whole new life,” Bella finally says.
“And I didn’t understand that you didn’t too. ”
That punches Alice in the gut a little bit, but she gets it. Kids are self-centered. It was Isabella’s parents’ job, her mom’s job, to remind her about Alice. To not have yanked her away from Alice in the first place.
“You were a kid,” Alice says, leaning forward. “You couldn’t have been expected to—”
But Isabella cuts her off, a wry smile on her face. “I haven’t been a kid in a long time, Alice.”
Well, she’s not wrong.
Alice waits, wondering what’s coming next. She’s honestly furious that Bella didn’t reach out when they moved back, and she’s curious to hear what Bella’s going to say about it.
“It wasn’t until college that I really started to look back and be like, okay, what the actual muck, you know?
Like I put all of the pieces together, and only realized then that what happened was so messed up, that my mom totally dropped you and your dad, and that I had been, like, a horrible cousin. ”
Alice shakes her head, more out of polite habit than honest disagreement, but Isabella keeps going.
“But instead of reaching out then and being like ‘Wow, that was messed up, let’s be friends again,’ I think I got…
ashamed.” She’s twisting her fingers. “I felt so shitty about how I’d ghosted you that I was too embarrassed to reach out. So I didn’t.”
Alice can tell from the fact that she cursed, actually said shitty instead of shippy or whatever, even with Hazel right there on the rug with them, that she means it.
“I’ve regretted it, always,” Isabella says, looking right at Alice.
“And I know this doesn’t make up for it, but I really…
” She takes another long breath, like she’s bracing herself.
“If you could ever forgive me, I’d really like to be close the way we used to.
You’re my family, and I don’t want it to be weird anymore. ”
She looks like she might cry, and Alice has been through a lot of surprises this week, but this is the one that makes tears come to her eyes.
She could have a cousin again. Family, again.
A person who loves her, who’s there for her, who might even have Alice over for Thanksgiving and Christmas, invite Alice to her kids’ birthday parties and bring over food when Alice is sick.
Someone who could know Alice well enough that she wouldn’t always have to explain herself, someone who would know to never leave a candle burning in an unattended room, or smoke a cigarette in front of her.
Someone who could be her best friend again.
It isn’t hard to find forgiveness. She needed Isabella back then, but she wants her now too.
She reaches out, pulling her cousin into a side hug that should be awkward, but isn’t.
“It’s already done,” she says, and Isabella squeezes her back until Hazel drops herself into Alice’s lap like a wrestler, all pointy elbows and sharp knees and suspiciously wet diaper.
—
An hour or so later Alice is due to leave for the hospital, but instead of letting her look up the bus schedule, Isabella insists that Alice text Van to see if she’s home.
“It’s a fifteen-minute drive to Portland Grace from here, and you said she lives nearby,” Isabella insists.
“Why not try to save yourself an hour on the bus if you can?”
Which is how Alice finds herself waiting in the kitchen, shoes and jacket on, for Van to pick her up from her cousin’s house.
She hopes that Van will simply text from outside when she’s there, but she has a sinking suspicion that Van “I’ll walk you up a bunch of flights of stairs” Altman doesn’t quite have that move in her repertoire.
And, lo and behold, there’s a sharp, crisp knock on the door.
Alice opens it, but Isabella is immediately elbowing her out of the way. Van is there, tall and solid in the freezing rain.
“You must be Nolan’s sister Van,” Isabella chirps, neatly shoving Alice a few steps backward into the house. “I’m Isabella. Please, come in.”
“No,” Alice starts, but Van is already stepping inside, careful not to drip too much water on the floor as she pushes her hood back.
“Nice to meet you,” Van says, holding out a hand that Alice has to imagine is ice-cold and wet.
Isabella takes it enthusiastically, and Alice is forcibly reminded of how easy it was to make friends as a kid with Isabella by her side.
Bella did all the work, Alice following like a quiet shadow and reaping the benefits by tagging along to everything Bella was invited to.
“You too,” Isabella says, something dangerous glinting in her eye. “Alice has been telling me all about you and your family.”
Van shifts, and it’s the first time Alice has ever seen her look anxious. Actually, come to think of it, Van looks a little pale, the circles under her eyes heavier than usual. Alice wonders if she didn’t sleep well.
Alice wonders what her bedroom looks like, if Frank sleeps in the bed next to her.
“I didn’t realize Alice had family in town,” Van says, looking between them. “And so close by.”
“Oh, that’s because I’m a total grasshole. We moved back from Texas a couple months ago but I was so frantic dealing with the kids and new jobs and everything that I didn’t reach out until now.”
Alice can see Van’s mouth moving over the syllables of grasshole, but before she can ask, said kids come up to them.
Hazel immediately pulls on Isabella’s hand, and Isabella sweeps her up onto her hip. Sebastian is staring hard at Van, his iPad dangling from his hand. “Are you a boy or a girl?”
“Sebastian!” Isabella’s eyes go wide as she shushes him. “That’s not polite—”
“It’s okay,” Van says, crouching down to look at Sebastian with a slight wince. “What’s your name?”
“Sebastian.”
“Sebastian. That’s a cool name. My name is Van. Like a minivan.”
Sebastian giggles, clearly as enraptured with Van as his auntie is.
“I’m a girl,” Van says, “but that doesn’t really matter, does it? Because no matter if you’re a girl or a boy or both or neither, you can still have friends and eat snacks and play games and have fun, right?”
Sebastian seems to be considering for a while. No one says anything, letting him chew on it. Finally he nods a little bit, clearly approving of this new information. “Wanna see my room?”
“Oh heck yes.” Van goes to stand up but she wobbles a little bit, sinking back down immediately.
Alice grabs onto her arm, her fingers slipping on the wet, slick surface of her raincoat as she helps tug Van back upright.
“Thanks,” Van says, studiously not making eye contact with Alice.
She quickly toes out of her boots and Sebastian offers her his hand.
She takes it, wordlessly following him as he leads her into the house, giving her a grand tour that he certainly didn’t offer Alice.
“Well,” Isabella says, watching them go. “I guess Sebastian’s a fan.” Hazel starts wiggling, and the instant Isabella puts her down, she toddles as quickly as she can after Van and Sebastian. Isabella laughs. “Got it, make that two fans.”
Alice laughs because she should, and also because some part of her is relieved to see someone else falling so quickly under Van’s spell. It makes her feel better; yes, she’s hopelessly bisexual but also Van is clearly as magnetic as Hazel’s tiles.
Alice listens to the sounds of Sebastian narrating his room to Van, and she’s never been jealous of a preschooler before but she is now.
She wishes she could be the one hand in hand with Van, showing off her bedroom and all her favorite things, the sole focus of Van’s steady gaze and warm, easy smile.