Chapter Sixteen
Sixteen
Alice gives it a day, returning to the hospital the next evening after work.
She’s hoping the doctors will have figured out what’s going on with Nolan by now, that they’ll have a guess about if this is going to be a permanent or temporary loss of five years of memories so that she’ll have a better sense of which kind of screwed she is.
If it’s permanent, she’s ready to do what Isabella suggested, to gently remove herself from the equation for a while, to extricate herself from this enormous lie through the simple expedient of giving them time to get him back on track.
Not breaking up with him, exactly, but fading away until she and Nolan can decide together if they want to date or shake hands and say “good game” and mutually back away from each other.
Bowing out of his life without any of the fanfare with which she arrived.
She’s not sure how she’ll say goodbye to Van, if Van will even let her bow out at all, but she’s ready to try.
And if she gets out of this fake thing, and then Van wants to start a real thing, if Van is willing to take the risk of pissing off her mom and confusing the rest of her family… yeah. Alice would do it.
She would.
If Van wants her after all of that, Alice won’t stop it.
She’s honestly not sure she could if she wanted to.
This thing between them feels almost inevitable, like all they could possibly do is delay it a little.
Like they might as well give in and start making out in earnest now, because it’s going to happen sooner or later.
Which of course they can’t do for a million reasons, but Alice is only a weak, weak person and she can’t control fate.
She gets to the hospital and finds Nolan sitting up in bed, looking better than he has since he collapsed on her lobby floor.
There’s more color in his cheeks than she’d expected to see; he almost looks like his old self, but it doesn’t feel like it used to when she looked at him.
Before all of this, it was like her feelings were screaming at her when she saw his beautiful face, his thick hair, his sharp jawline, but today she doesn’t feel any of that.
The memories of those feelings come to her, but the little throb in her chest is more from nostalgia than from actively wanting him.
He’s still beautiful, but…yeah, no. It’s not the same.
She doesn’t need to, but she lets her eyes slide from him to Van anyway, and she feels exactly what she knows she will.
Something hot and wanting erupts inside her, ferocious and insatiable and impossibly melancholy. God, she wants Van so badly, and the fact that she can’t have her right now doesn’t dull the wanting at all, it just tints it, like a wash of a blue watercolor over a dried painting.
Alice knows, with a painful jolt, that no matter how Nolan acts, what he’s like, that she won’t want to date him.
Not with Van right there, a shining, beautiful, wonderful person that Alice is so desperate for.
That even if Nolan did want to try again to be with her—again being a slightly inaccurate term, of course—Alice’s real answer would be, as Bella so eloquently put it, Boy, bye.
But, okay. One thing at a time. Figure out this amnesia thing, then figure out how to transfer herself from fake-girlfriend-of-Nolan to real-girlfriend-of-Van.
Babs is sitting on the edge of the bed, talking with her son.
Alice sidles up to Marie, who is sitting on top of one of the counters in what must be a breach of hygiene standards. “Any news on his amnesia?” Alice asks softly.
“Kind of,” Marie says. “He remembers more today than yesterday.” Alice’s heart slithers down into her lower intestine.
Is this it? Is she found out already? But Marie keeps going, not looking as happy as Alice would expect if it were all better.
“But only, like, a few months more. He’s still missing the last four years, and the doctors don’t know if more will come back or not.
” She scoffs. “Dad says they’re so scared of being sued for guessing wrong that they won’t tell us anything. ”
Yeah, that sounds about right.
“Shit,” Alice says, her heart absolutely sinking, and Marie pats her on the shoulder.
“Yup.”
Okay.
Well. If the memories are creeping back, month by painstaking month, Alice needs to bail now.
She needs to do what she brainstormed with Isabella: get out of this before it gets worse, and create some distance between herself and his family, which will serve her especially well if his recent memories come back and they all realize she’s a fraud.
Honestly, not being in the room when they figure that out sounds pretty damn good.
So, even though there aren’t updates, it’s game time.
While things were slow today at work, Alice made Isabella text her a script of what to say to Babs, so now Alice has all of her lines written down and memorized.
She’s about to ask Marie and Van to step outside with her—she figures doing it all at once would be making too big a deal out of it—when she tunes in to what Babs and Nolan are talking about.
“Why did I leave L.A.?”
“To be closer to the family,” Babs says, her face proud. “With everything going on with Van and all.”
Alice is confused—what was going on with Van?—but she’s not the only one who seems to be objecting.
“Mom, no,” Van says, stepping forward, her arms crossed over her chest. “That’s absolutely not why he moved back.”
“Yes, it is,” Babs says, smoothing down the sheet and studiously not looking at her daughter. “He wanted to be here to support you.”
Van doesn’t look at her mom either, staring at Nolan with hollow eyes.
Her voice is shaking, and Alice wants nothing more than to reach out to her, to run her hands down Van’s arms, to curl up against her back and let Van lean into her.
“You moved here because you wanted to be a bigger fish in a smaller pond at work,” she says flatly.
“And because it made Mom happy. It had nothing to do with me.”
“You wanted to be here to help Van with the MS!” Babs’s voice is shrill now, and then there’s a ringing silence.
Or maybe it’s just Alice’s ears that are ringing.
To help Van with the MS? As in multiple sclerosis, MS? As in the degenerative disease that killed Michelle Obama’s dad, as in the one that Selma Blair from Legally Blonde has? As in the one that lands people in wheelchairs and hospitals? That MS?
To help Van with the…
Van…Van has MS?
Alice blinks, rewinding and replaying every interaction she’s had with Van.
She remembers the first time Van seemed tired, the day they went up to Nolan’s office and she walked slowly and leaned against things with big circles under her eyes.
She kept opening and closing her hands that day, like she was trying to increase circulation to them.
She remembers Babs’s concern about Van’s health, about if she should be opening her own PT clinic.
She thinks about how Van has been translating what the neurologists have been saying this whole time, how she knew all about the MRI; Alice thought it was because of her professional training, but maybe it was because of this.
Because there’s something wrong with her brain too.
“Well, if that’s why you moved here, then you might as well go right back to L.A.,” Van snarls, and even Alice can tell she’s furious with her mom, not her brother, but she’s saying it to Nolan anyway. “Since you’ve done fuck all for me and the fucking MS.”
“Vanessa!” Babs is standing now, her cheeks pink, her hands balled up into fists at her sides, but Van is pushing through everyone and stomping out of the room, like maybe if her boots are loud enough on the floor, no one will see the tears in her eyes.
There’s a long, horribly loud silence, eventually broken by Marie’s sarcastic, “Nice one, Mom.” She hops off the counter and grabs Alice’s arm. “Come on,” she says, pulling Alice out of the room with her. “Let’s go find her.”
But, no. Alice can’t go find her. She needs—she needs a minute. Or ten.
She begs off, telling Marie she has to make a phone call and she’ll find them in a few, then takes the elevator up to a random floor and curls up in a chair in the farthest waiting room she can find, pulling out her phone and typing multiple sclerosis into her search bar with shaking fingers.
Words jump out at her, each one worse than the last. Autoimmune disease. Nervous system, brain, spine. Chronic, disabling. Unpredictable relapses. Permanent damage. Progressive.
Incurable.
She claps a hand over her mouth, trying to stifle her sob. God, poor Van. Strong, beautiful, stoic Van, whose own body is eating itself up from the inside. Van, who works with her hands, who stands all day, who fixes other people’s bodies and their problems, who holds her entire family together.
No. It doesn’t matter what Alice feels, what she wants, how looking at Van takes her breath away, what it felt like in the bed with her and in the bathroom, to be pressed against her, to be wanted by her. No.
She can’t be with her. She can’t.
Van is sick. Van has a progressive, permanent, horrible disease and Alice cannot—she absolutely cannot—watch someone else she loves waste away and die in front of her.
She can’t.
She won’t.