Chapter Ten
Ten
It takes half an hour to extract Van from Sebastian’s clutches, but they finally succeed through a winning combination of bribery (Legos) and distraction (more Legos!).
The promised fifteen-minute drive to Portland Grace later, and Alice and Van are stepping inside the ICU, raincoats dripping.
Babs and Marie are sitting in Nolan’s hospital room, which looks different today.
The mug from his fraternity is prominently displayed on the little table next to his bed now, plus what looks like every single other personal item from his office.
The bobbleheads, even a stress ball that Alice is absolutely sure he got from some mandatory HR training.
Aunt Sheila had pulled it out of the back of one of his desk drawers with a crow of triumph most suitable for a win on the battlefield, and is now clearly showing it off like some kind of trophy.
Finally, the décor shouts to Alice. Some tiny indication that he’s a person and not just a finance bro robot!
It’s like Babs and Aunt Sheila have created a shrine to the person they think he is, but since it’s populated only with these few meaningless bits and bobs from his office, it has the opposite effect on Alice.
Without his suits and his job and his diplomas and his women…
Alice still has no idea who Nolan actually is, and she’s becoming worried that maybe it’s not about when she learns more about him, but if she does.
If there’s actually anything more to learn, or if she’s seen what there is to see, and this meager shrine is the best anyone could do for him.
Alice wonders what would be in her hospital room if the roles were reversed.
What would Isabella pull out of her studio to cozy up the sterilized space around her bed?
The dusty paperbacks from her side table, the old Christmas ornaments from her mom, her favorite big blue mug, the photos of her and her parents smiling, back before the fire?
Is there anyone whose life wouldn’t look pathetic, distilled down into depressing hospital decorations?
There’s one other big change in the room: Nolan’s comatose form is now covered with what looks like a hand-knit blanket, which Babs keeps stroking as she sits by his head.
The blanket is bursting with color—all deep reds and bright yellows and liquid blues—and it should make the room feel brighter but all Alice can focus on is how it makes Nolan look paler.
Ideally he’d be getting pinker and pinker each day, but his face still has that grayish, ashen sheen she remembers all too well from her dad’s last few months. It’s not a super alive color, and honestly the blanket is making it worse.
“I love this blanket,” Alice gushes to Babs. She’s very purposely technically not lying about being his girlfriend, but she’s definitely cool with lying about other shit. A girl has to get by somehow, right?
“Thank you, honey,” Babs says, looking up with those big eyes that Alice is pretty sure haven’t been fully clear of tears since Nolan collapsed five days ago. “I knitted it when I was pregnant with him.”
Alice tries not to picture it. Young Babs, curled up on a couch, knitting around her enormous belly, hoping her child will turn out to be worthy of these bright, vivid colors, to be as bold and warming as this blanket.
Nolan doesn’t strike Alice as a bright-colors person—he’s always worn very traditional suits to work, and his office was basically monochrome. He feels more like an expensive slate-gray cashmere blanket than this riot of handmade color.
This blanket feels a lot more like Van than like Nolan.
But, then again, what the fuck does Alice know? Never having actually talked to him or anything.
“It’s beautiful,” Alice says. “What a wonderful gift.”
“I have mine in my dorm,” Marie says. “It’s water themed.”
Babs gives her youngest a sad smile. “My little Marina.”
Alice blinks. Okay, so Marie’s name is maybe Marina? Seems like a weird time to be learning Marie’s actual name, but okay. Sure. Marie’s a cute nickname for Marina.
Nolan, Vanessa, and Marina.
Alice almost laughs at how ridiculous it is to think of Van as a Vanessa.
She’s not a Vanessa. She’s not anything but a Van.
Blunt and to the point, unique, surprisingly soft, butch as the day is long.
She turns her head, about to ask Van how old she was when she started going exclusively by Van—and by the way, why does her business card say Vanessa instead—but she stops short at the expression on Van’s face.
It’s pinched, something painful in the clench of her jaw, years of buried hurt in the way her shoulders are inching up toward her ears.
Alice rewinds the conversation in her mind, trying to pinpoint what could have happened.
They were talking about the blankets. Nolan has one, and Marie does too.
She’s about to ask about Van’s, but then she glances between Van and Babs, who are very studiously not looking at each other, and clocks the way Marie looks at Van and then guiltily drops her eyes.
Oh.
Van doesn’t have one?
She must not be very subtle—in fact, she’s pretty sure her jaw is hanging open as she stares between them all like she’s watching a horrifying tennis match of unresolved family trauma—because Babs says, “Nolan and Van didn’t care as much for theirs.
I’ve held on to Nolan’s for him, and Van gave hers away years ago. ”
A muscle jumps in Van’s jaw, but she doesn’t say anything.
It’s so painfully awkward that Alice considers leaping out the window.
“Why don’t you guys go get some food and fresh air,” Van finally says, looking at her mom and Marie. “Alice and I can hold down the fort for a while.”
It’s, of course, forty degrees and raining, but like all born and bred Portlanders, both Babs and Marie look excited by the idea of going outside. They troop out, and the instant the door closes behind them, Van sags down into the chair next to Nolan.
She looks so fucking exhausted that Alice has an absurd urge to drop into her lap, to cradle Van’s head to her chest, to stroke her hair until Van falls asleep against her.
But of course that would be weird, wildly inappropriate, and quite possibly unwelcome, so Alice forces herself to sit down in the other chair, the one across the bed from Van, and hold on to her own hands to keep them to herself.
She doesn’t know what to say—to Nolan, to Van, about what just happened, about all of the history that Alice doesn’t understand but is influencing everything happening in this room—so she doesn’t say anything.
It’s maybe three or four minutes, functionally an eternity, before Van says, “It was pink.”
Alice blinks a couple of times. She was going through her monthly budget in her head, trying to figure out if her small raise from the day shift will mean she can afford to buy a couple more fresh vegetables a week, so she’s a little lost. “What was?”
“My blanket,” Van says, finally looking up at Alice.
She’s holding the edge of Nolan’s blanket, rubbing the soft yarn between two of her fingers.
Alice can’t tell if she’s jealous or disgusted.
Or both. “It was all pink. She was super pumped about having a girl, I guess.” She gives a tiny shrug, so small Alice wouldn’t have noticed if she hadn’t been staring so hard.
“I wasn’t quite what she’d expected, I guess. ”
She grimaces up at Alice, almost like she’s trying to make it seem like a joke, but nothing has ever been less funny.
Alice swallows, hard.
“Anyway,” Van says, raising her shoulders again, this time like she’s trying to shrug it off, to let the heaviness roll off her like it doesn’t matter, even though Alice can still so clearly see the pain in her eyes, in the set of her mouth.
“We got in a huge fight the summer after my sophomore year of college. A cousin was getting married and Mom was trying to force me to wear a dress to the wedding. I was living in Corvallis in this amazing, nasty group house with all my gay friends, deeply involved with the queer community on campus, finally coming into my own, you know, all that cliché shit of figuring out who I was and how I wanted to look.” She gives Alice a wry smile, and Alice’s heart melts.
She’d love to go back in time to meet baby butch Van, see the light in her eyes when she first tried on a suit or men’s jeans, when she cut off her hair and saw herself in the mirror for the first time.
“And then I came home for the summer, to this bedroom designed for, like, I don’t know. Barbie’s grandma.”
Alice almost does a spit take.
Van actually smiles at her. “I mean, white lace and pink everywhere. Walls, décor, everything. And then this fucking hideous pink blanket on the bed, a tangible representation of everything my mom hoped I was going to be, you know? Like she put all of her girly, ballet, pigtails, shopping spree, low-fat-diet partner dreams into every fucking stitch, right?” She shakes her head, and Alice can’t help it.
She stands up and walks around the bed, sitting down on the edge right in front of Van.
Nolan is behind her now, no longer between them.
She’s close enough to touch Van, but she doesn’t.
Van doesn’t say anything about it, but something might loosen in her face at Alice’s proximity.
“And anyway, I…I lost it. I told her I wasn’t wearing the fucking dress and I hated the fucking blanket and no matter what I wore or what I slept under, I was never going to be straight and she needed to open her eyes and meet the kid she actually had instead of trying to force me to be the kid she wanted. ”
Alice’s hands are on Van before she’s finished talking. One on her shoulder, one gently brushing the side of her face before dropping down and squeezing her arm.
“Anyway. She donated the blanket to Goodwill or something, I don’t know. And now we just…don’t talk about it.”
“Van,” Alice breathes, but Van shakes her head.
“It’s okay. I mean, it’s fine. I’m still, like, you know. Part of the family. She didn’t disown me or whatever. We…she’ll be perfectly nice to whoever I’m dating but call them my friend. That kind of shit.”
Alice squeezes Van even tighter. She can’t imagine being disappointed in Van, wanting Van to be anything other than the brilliant, kind, gentle, beautifully queer butch that she is.
“I never came out to my dad,” Alice offers softly, knowing there’s nothing she can say to make this any better, to ease three decades of Van’s pain.
Van’s eyes flicker up in that way queer people’s always do when someone overtly comes out to them, even if they already suspected.
That way that says, Hey, I see you. You’re one of mine.
Alice nods back in that way queer people often do, the tiniest motion of her head that says, I know. We’re one of each other’s.
“My mom died when I was too little, obviously, but my dad…By the time I’d guessed that I might be bi, in high school, he was already so sick. I didn’t want to risk it, you know? Like, what if he wasn’t okay with it, didn’t want me around anymore, and then there was no one to take care of him?”
One of her hands is still on Van’s arm, and Van brings her own hand up to cover Alice’s, trapping it in her warm grip.
“So I didn’t,” Alice says, simple and true. “I’ve always wondered what he would’ve said. If he’d like who I am.”
“There’s no way he wouldn’t,” Van says, her voice a little thick.
Alice shakes her head—Van is literally perfect and she was just talking about how her own mother hasn’t gotten with the program—but Van clenches her fingers around Alice’s until it’s right on the line between pleasure and pain. “He’d be so proud of you, Alice.”
Proud of what? Alice wants to say. Working these jobs she hates, still in the same apartment she’s been in since he died, living every day like it’s Groundhog Day and she’s waiting to be woken up from the most boring, tedious dream on the planet?
Lying to Babs and Aunt Sheila and Marie to get a tiny bit of comfort and care in return?
Touching Van every chance she can while she’s pretending to be halfway in love with Van’s brother?
Alice is pretty sure there’s not much to be proud of.
But Van doesn’t need to hear any of that. “Everyone in your life should be proud of you,” Alice says instead. “You’re the best person I’ve ever met.”
Van’s lips press together, and Alice guesses that Van’s inner monologue might sound pretty similar to hers right now.
Minus the enormous, ridiculous lie, of course.
They don’t say anything else, but Alice doesn’t move away, doesn’t pull her hand back, until Babs and Marie come in.