Chapter Twelve
Twelve
Alice is so busy trying to use her powers of mind control to keep Aunt Sheila from crashing the car that it takes her way longer than it should to realize they aren’t driving back to the hospital.
It isn’t until they’re on the Broadway Bridge, fully halfway across the river, that Alice looks over at Van. “Wait, where are we going?”
“Oh right,” Van says, smiling. “I forgot you haven’t been to the house.”
“The…house?”
“Our house,” Babs says from the front seat.
Oh. Shiitake.
Okay. This is probably fine. Right? Going to Babs’s house, seeing where Van and Nolan grew up, being surrounded by their knickknacks and evidence of the really nice life they had until a week ago, spending more time with Van outside of the sterile, extremely unsexy vibes of the hospital?
It’s harder than it should be not to flirt with her over her brother’s graying body, but in a dim, cozy living room? Or, god forbid, in a bedroom?
Yeah, no. Possibly the tiniest bit not fine.
“Jeez, Mom,” Marie says, leaning forward to look at Babs. “Did you even ask, or are we, like, kidnapping Alice right now and forcing her to participate in a religious ceremony against her will?”
Alice blinks a couple times. “Wh-what?”
Van laughs, and Babs clucks her tongue at her youngest. “It’s just Chanukah, Marina. Stop being so dramatic.”
“But did you ask?”
“Alice is family,” Babs says, her voice firm. Alice forgets how to breathe. “Of course she’s coming for Chanukah.”
Marie, clearly unaffected by this life-changing proclamation, rolls her eyes as she settles back into her seat. “Alice,” she says, her voice performatively loud. “Would you like to join us for a belated Chanukah celebration tonight?”
Alice can see Babs rolling her own eyes, and it would be hard to miss the bleating sound of Aunt Sheila laughing. “Um, I’ve never celebrated Chanukah before,” she admits. “But as long as that won’t mess anything up, then, yeah. Sure. I’d love to.”
“It’s not, like, a religious thing,” Van tells her, her voice soft. “It’s mostly food and candles.”
Alice finds that confusing—Is Chanukah not, in fact, a Jewish holiday? And does that not, by definition, mean it’s religious?—but she nods anyway. She doesn’t need to roll up looking ignorant, even if it could be understandable that Nolan hadn’t given her the full-on Judaism primer yet.
It’s not a long drive, although Alice vows to never, ever be driven over a bridge by Aunt Sheila again, not as long as she lives.
Aunt Sheila finally navigates into a neighborhood Alice doesn’t know too well, one of the lovely old middle-class neighborhoods on the east side, full of well-loved Craftsman houses with small porches, slightly muddy lawns, basketball hoops, and surprising pops of color on their columns and front doors.
She pulls into the driveway of a two-story house with light blue siding.
The roof is steeply pitched, so the rooms on the top story must have sloped ceilings, their windows poking out cheerfully to look over the street.
The front porch is framed with two squat columns, and there are two tall, slightly gnarled trees in the front, their bare branches dripping in the winter rain.
It’s a perfectly Portland house, the kind Alice used to dream about owning one day.
She and her dad would drive around when she was in middle school, back when they both thought he’d get better one day, and they’d pick out their favorite house, sometimes after a fearsome debate.
They’d park in front of the winner and spin elaborate stories of how they’d decorate it, where their bedrooms would be, what kind of pets they’d have, who would have to mow the lawn in the springtime.
Alice hasn’t let herself dream like that in a long time.
She and the Altmans pile out of the car and walk briskly up to the porch, their only concession to the rain the little turtle hunch of their heads into the collars of their jackets that, for everyone in Portland, is as natural as breathing.
Alice already likes this house much better than Nolan’s apartment, but she has to admit that accessing your place without getting rained on does sound pretty appealing.
Babs unlocks the front door and they all head inside.
Everyone takes their shoes off in the foyer, and Alice does the same, enjoying not having to pretend that she’s been here before.
For once, she can look around the way she wants to, take things in without straining to see from her peripheral vision.
It’s clearly an older house, not open concept or anything, but from the living room she can see into the dining room, and the kitchen is around the corner from there.
Like Van’s, it’s clearly lived in, cluttered with furniture but clean, and it’s cozy but with more of a Pinterest or white-mommy-blogger twist. There are signs on the wall with cursive mantras that say things like Home Is Where the Heart Is and Family, surrounded by posed photos of all three kids.
All of the furniture is nice but well used, like they bought it new fifteen years ago.
It looks like the kind of house that’s seen three children born and raised, and Alice loves it, even though Babs is clearly not happy with the state of it, striding through the living room and barking orders at Marie and Van like a drill sergeant about what to clean up first.
There’s a door off the living room that Alice assumes is a closet, but Van opens it, and Alice catches a glimpse of a small bedroom before an enormous, gangly, white spotted animal flings itself out of the room at Van, all wriggling elbows and wet tongue.
“Hey, Franko,” Van says, letting him jump up on her and scratching his face. “Hey, buddy.”
“Frank!” Alice didn’t consciously move, but she’s suddenly right behind Van, and Frank is snuffling at her ears. “My favorite gentleman! I didn’t know you’d be here.”
“Oh yeah.” Van pushes him down, where he makes enthusiastic circles around them, his tail smacking into Alice’s thighs like a happy propeller. “He wouldn’t want to miss Chanukah. Would you, boy?”
Alice grins down at him. “Now I’m picturing him in one of those little hats—what are they called?”
Van laughs. “A yarmulke? Good lord, that would be so freaking cute. Can you imagine?” She cups her hand over the top of his head, approximating what it would look like, and yes.
It’s quite possibly the cutest thing Alice has ever thought about.
Frank gives them both a huge doggy grin, his tongue drooping out the side of his mouth, and Alice can’t help it.
She drops down to her knees and opens her arms, and Frank wiggles his way into them. It’s less a hug than her holding on to him while he tries to stick his nose all the way down into her eardrum, which is much louder and wetter than Alice would have imagined, but it’s still perfect.
After only a minute of dog cuddles, Sergeant Babs orders Van and Alice to gather “the Chanukah supplies” from the garage, and Alice isn’t sure what “Chanukah supplies” are—hopefully some little hats for Frank—but she nods and follows Van until something in the hallway stops her in her tracks.
“Oh. My. Fucking. God.” Alice’s eyes are bugging out. “Vanessa Altman. You have some ’splaining to do.”
Van rolls her eyes and puts both hands on Alice’s back, pushing her forward. “I said no detours.”
“This isn’t a detour,” Alice protests, digging her heels in and refusing to be moved.
Of course they both know Van could easily move Alice, could probably throw Alice over her shoulder if she really needed to, but Van’s polite enough not to mention it and it’s important for Alice not to think about such sexy things.
“It’s literally on the way. And we both know there’s not a snowball’s chance in hell that I was going to walk past this without getting an explanation.
” She gestures at the picture on the wall, and Van grimaces.
The whole hallway is filled with family pictures. They’re crammed together like jigsaw puzzle pieces, frames large and small, everything from school portraits to embarrassing candids to those posed shots from Sears of all five of them dressed in identical outfits.
The one from the late nineties of the four of them (pre-Marie, probably) in overalls and denim bucket hats absolutely deserves a long and thorough period of admiration, but the one that has Alice almost delirious is much, much better.
Alice’s voice squeaks. “You were a cheerleader?”
Van rolls her eyes, pushing at Alice’s shoulders again. “I was not.”
“Umm,” Alice says, grinning and pivoting to face Van, gesturing up at the picture and trying to stifle her laugh so she can demand answers.
“Deny it all you want, but the photographic evidence doesn’t lie.
Admit it. You—the handsome, stone-cold butch standing before me—were once forced into this outfit, and it’s been immortalized on this wall ever since. ”
Van must be only five or six in the picture.
Her black hair is curly and wild up in two high pigtails, each secured with an enormous blue sparkly bow.
She’s wearing an honest-to-goodness cheerleading outfit, blue and silver and glittery as hell, and she’s holding matching pom-poms. Her face is still obscured in the baby softness of childhood, but Alice would recognize that scowl anywhere.
Little Van is clearly furious, a second away from ripping the bows out of her hair and yelling every bad word she knows, and it’s absolutely the best thing Alice has ever seen.
“The whole thing lasted about five minutes,” Van admits, yielding to the fact that Alice will absolutely never let this go. “I screamed the entire way there for the first day, and then lay down on the mats and refused to stand up for the whole hour. The teachers asked my mom not to bring me back.”