Chapter Twelve #3
“She’s obsessed with Halloween,” Marie says unnecessarily.
That’s quite clear, yes. “And she’s kept every costume any of us have ever worn.
Plus everyone in the neighborhood knows to give them to her or come get one.
All of October is, like, a costume swap meet in here.
” Marie squeezes past Alice to get to the very back of the closet. “Let me try to find my favorite.”
Alice runs her fingers over a hippie outfit (long wig, tie-dye shirt, round purple sunglasses), a child’s bear costume, and a glow-in-the-dark skeleton onesie.
“I used to sneak up here and try on the suits from the Men in Black era,” Van says softly, only for Alice. “When I was in high school, before I knew any queer people. They were all enormous and old and, like, awful, but I still loved it.”
Alice turns to look at her and tries very hard not to kiss her. “I wish I’d known you then,” she settles for saying. “I bet you were a total stud.”
Van scoffs, but she’s still standing so close, looking at Alice so intensely. “In a cheap suit that some old guy probably died in before Mom found it at Goodwill, yeah. Absolute chick magnet.”
Alice shrugs one shoulder, feeling her lips curl up. “Would’ve worked on me, I bet.”
“Guys! Check it out!” Alice turns, and almost screams at the enormous shark head that has taken Marie’s place. “My great white costume!”
Alice jumps backward, her heart rate so high that it takes her almost a full minute to realize that she bounced back into Van, and now Van’s hands are on her hips, warm and steady and solid.
Marie runs out of the closet to scare her mother—Alice hopes no one else ends up in the hospital—leaving Alice and Van alone in the dark, claustrophobic costume emporium, Alice’s heart still galloping in her chest.
Van touches the sleeve of a poofy white shirt, cinched at the wrists, like a rich old-timey man might wear.
“This was my costume last year,” Van says.
“My ex, Sarah, wanted to be Ariel so I was Prince Eric. And Frank was Sebastian; he has a little crab costume.” Alice thinks that’s adorable—except for the whole Van ever having kissed or slept with or shared canine custody with anyone else part—but Van is frowning.
“That sounds cute?” Alice offers, making it a question even though it’s not. “I bet Frank looked amazing. And you do have that swoopy Prince Eric hair thing happening.”
Van self-consciously runs a hand through the thick black hair that, now that Alice thinks about it, is totally Disney prince worthy. “I guess, yeah,” she says, but her mouth is twisted up, and Alice can’t help but reach out and lay her hand on Van’s arm.
“What?” she asks softly.
Van’s frown turns wry, like she knows she’s being weird. “It’s stupid,” she says, trying to brush it off, starting to turn to leave the closet, but Alice stands her ground, her grip on Van’s strong forearm unwavering.
“It’s not,” Alice says, and something that looks suspiciously like affection wells up in Van’s eyes.
“Sarah’s all, like, femme usually, so I thought it would be funny to switch it,” Van says, half her mouth quirked up, but not like she’s having fun.
“For me to be Ariel, and her to be Eric. But she totally flipped out.” Her mouth slides back down.
“She was always, like…I don’t know. Wanting me to be the guy? Like, that really mattered to her.”
Alice nods, a lot of things clicking into place. Babs wanting Van to be a pink blanket, frilly dress, femme girl and Sarah wanting her to be a mannish prince are two sides of the same coin. Gender essentialist bullshit by any other name would smell as foul.
Van isn’t femme, and she’s not a man. She should get to put on a long wig and a seashell bra, she should get to bind her chest and draw on facial hair. She should get to be everything, because she is. She’s everything.
Right now, though, she’s uncomfortable. Alice wonders if she’s ever told anyone she feels like that before.
Van is a woman of few words—someone who seems to value actions more than declarations—so Alice decides against giving a stern, affirming lecture, and turns away only long enough to find a long, red cape.
“Here,” she says, draping it over Van’s shoulders, a move that brings her much closer to Van’s gorgeous, troubled face than she meant it to. “Next year, you’ll be Little Red Riding Hood, and I’ll be the woodsman, and Frank can be the wolf dressed up as Granny.”
Alice is holding the edges of the cape together under Van’s chin, and Van reaches up, trapping Alice’s hands under hers.
She looks like she’s trembling on the knife’s edge between smiling and crying, and Alice isn’t sure if it’s because of the gender-expression swap or Alice’s assumption that she’ll be around next year, or maybe that Alice wants to be in a group costume with Van and her dog—like a girlfriend would.
“Deal,” is all Van says, her body hot and steady against Alice, the scent of her cologne sharp and delicious. “Deal.”
—
An hour of trying on costumes and arranging blankets downstairs later, and the front door opens.
One of the men comes in the house, and Babs meets him in the living room.
He gives Babs a peck on the lips, so either there is something very weird about this family or that’s Van’s dad (whose name Alice has learned by stealthily flipping through the mail is Steve).
He further cements his identity by announcing that he’s left Uncle Joe to keep Nolan company at the hospital.
“He can’t eat any of this anyway, not with his cholesterol,” Aunt Sheila says from the doorway to the kitchen, two hot pink oven mitts on her hands, brushing off Alice’s protestation that she could have sat with Nolan and let the whole family be together.
“He’s happy with his ESPN app and his deli sandwich. ”
That sounds like an extremely raw deal to Alice, but hey. She was kidnapped and brought here against her will, so it’s not like anyone’s dying for her input on their holiday plans.
Van risks her mom’s wrath by daring to sit down, and Alice joins her, hoping that Steve’s immediate grab for the remote will give them some non-cleaning cover.
It seems to work, because Babs, Aunt Sheila, and the oven mitts retreat back into the kitchen for another ten minutes or so until the explosion sounds finally stop.
Babs calls them all to come gather at the dining room table to light the candles.
Alice hangs back, not sure what to do, but Aunt Sheila pulls her forward, hooking her elbow around Alice’s and keeping her close.
“Tonight is the last night of Chanukah,” she says in what she probably thinks is a whisper as Marie gets everything set up. “But we missed the first, obviously, so we’re going all out tonight instead.”
Alice nods, like she knows what that means.
Marie sets the candle holder on a sheet of tinfoil, and carefully places nine candles in it.
Alice wonders why it’s nine instead of eight.
Isn’t that the thing, aren’t there eight nights?
That’s what her aborted research session told her, but what the hell does she know.
Maybe it’s like birthday candles, one to grow on?
“Traditionally, only women light the candles,” Aunt Sheila whispers at a volume that is louder than Alice’s normal speaking voice. “But everyone says the prayers.”
Babs turns off all the lights in the house, and Alice’s eyes slowly adjust to the darkness, only the orange glow from a streetlamp down the block filtering in through the window.
It’s startling and oddly bright when Marie strikes a match and lights the candle in the middle, which is up higher than the others.
It glows fiercely in the darkness, just the one little flame.
Then Marie picks up that candle, and as she uses it to light the others, everyone sings something in what Alice assumes must be Hebrew.
It’s pretty, lilting and a little staccato.
One part of it repeats a few times, both the words and the melody.
Alice has no idea what it all means, but there’s something beautifully reverent about it, about standing in a dark room and watching light bloom, about being with parents and children and siblings, singing the light back into their home.
The house smells delicious—fried potatoes, onions, and what might be dough—and Aunt Sheila’s arm is steady around Alice’s.
It doesn’t feel like going to church did, when Alice was little and they used to go.
That was intimidating—cavernous and cold and echoing, and you got in trouble if you talked too loudly about how the priest’s hat was funny.
They never did any religious stuff at home.
Alice didn’t even really know that was an option, other than having a Christmas tree, which never felt very connected to the Jesus she heard about at church.
Lupe was a chaplain, but Alice thought of her more like a friend, more aunt than pastor.
Lupe never talked much about religion, opting instead to let Alice demolish her in Go Fish and, later, Texas Hold ’Em.
The idea that your house, your dining room table, could be a site of ritual, of prayer over candles, of something holy—Alice likes that. Being able to invoke God or spirits or whatever, right where you are, without having to go to a place? That feels…oddly powerful.
But Alice also understands what Van meant when she said it wasn’t going to be very religious, because as soon as the prayers are done—probably less than a minute, all told—Babs flicks the lights back on, Steve carefully moves the candle holder from the table to the windowsill, and everyone sits down at the table like it’s any other day.
Alice finds herself next to Aunt Sheila, across from Van and Marie, with Babs and Steve sitting at the head and foot.
They pass the food around while Aunt Sheila tells Alice the story of Chanukah.
“That’s why most of what we eat tonight is fried,” she says after a long meandering story full of interruptions from Babs (aggressively distributing food) and Steve (historical commentary), heaping what Alice would have thought were hash browns before her furtive google session onto Alice’s plate without asking.
“To honor the miracle of the oil,” she says. “Latkes, and, for dessert, donuts.”
“Dang,” Alice says without thinking. “Being Jewish is delicious.”
“Damn right,” Aunt Sheila says, grinning. “Damn right.”
Once everything has been passed around, Steve stands up.
“Chanukah is about a miracle. About God giving the Maccabees what they needed to survive. I hope that a similar miracle is coming to our family, and that soon we’ll have another chair at this table for our Nolan, returned to us happy and healthy. ”
It’s the most Alice has ever heard him say.
She wordlessly raises her glass of red wine a beat after Aunt Sheila does.
It’s kind of easy to forget what this is really about, here in the house.
Away from the hospital, Alice can sort of pretend she’s on holiday, getting to playact like she’s part of this happy family for a little while.
She’s been so consumed by not getting caught in her lie that she’s sort of lost sight of the central piece of all of this.
Nolan is in a coma.
Their son, brother, and nephew—her supposed boyfriend—is lying in a hospital bed, unresponsive, and possibly brain dead.
He should be here. He should be in this chair; he should be the one laughing at the costumes upstairs, sneaking beers with Marie, and eating the truly impossible amount of latkes heaped on this plate.
It’s not just that Alice doesn’t belong here. It’s that Nolan does. It’s not Alice’s fault that he’s not here—she did literally everything she could to save his life—but it suddenly all feels so wrong.
She’s enjoyed herself, these last eight days.
Sure, they’ve been stressful and hard and confusing, but she’s laughed more in the last week than in the last year combined.
She’s been hugged more, cared about more, touched more.
Marie and Babs and Aunt Sheila (except when she’s driving) have brought love into Alice’s life, and Van has made her feel more than she has since her dad died.
Even Frank has brought her so much happiness.
Alice’s life is better than it was last week. And that’s because their son, their baby, their big brother, is probably going to die. All of her joy turns sour in her mouth.
She stares hard at the candles burning merrily on the windowsill. Please, she prays, not sure if she’s asking God or the light itself, wishing she had a song to sing. Please let him wake up.