Chapter Seventeen
Seventeen
Three days later, on Monday after work, Alice stands tall in Babs’s living room and clears her throat loudly to get everyone’s attention so she can make the speech she and Isabella incessantly rehearsed over the weekend.
Even poor little Sebastian could probably recite the entire speech from memory at this point, and he still hasn’t even nailed the alphabet song.
She practiced it twice in front of Delilah at work today, and now she’s here.
Standing in front of all of the Altmans, except for Nolan who is still at Portland Grace, saying it exactly like she practiced.
“Listen, there’s a lot going on right now.
With the amnesia and everything. So I’m going to, um…
” She takes a deep breath in and out, summoning courage from the memory of Hazel’s (likely unrelated) applause yesterday.
“I’m going to step back for a while. I know Nolan doesn’t remember me right now, and I don’t want to add that pressure onto him.
He needs to focus on his recovery, so I’m going to back off for a while, and whenever he’s ready, we can start dating again, if he wants to.
But if not, that’s okay too. In the meantime, though, I really hope he gets better quickly, and that you know how much I’ve loved getting to know you all. ”
No one says anything, and Alice immediately starts to sweat. She’s never seen the Altmans silent before. Especially not Aunt Sheila. Even Hazel had said something when she’d finished, although she’s guessing “Where Daddy” was less a compliment and more a plea to be rescued from Alice’s company.
It’s Marie finally who squeaks, “What?”
“You’re…” Van clears her throat. “You’re, what? Just…leaving? Us?”
Alice tries not to look at her. She can’t look at her. She can’t be in love with her and she can’t look at her and she can’t think about her slowly decaying in that hospital without crying and she’s trying to pretend to be fine.
“He has enough to deal with right now,” Alice says, digging deep for a line that was cut from a prior draft. “Really, it’s okay.”
“But you’re his girlfriend,” Babs says, and Alice shakes her head.
“I don’t need to be right now,” she says. God, but she’s gotten good at evading the truth, hasn’t she? “He doesn’t need to feel guilty or awkward about not remembering me when so much else is going on.”
And the thing is, she knows she’s right.
He doesn’t remember moving from L.A. to Portland, doesn’t remember his coworkers or his clients.
Doesn’t remember Cherry/Kerry or any of the other girls he’s actually been with.
He thinks Marie is still in high school, that Uncle Joe’s cholesterol is fine.
That he’s thirty-one, instead of his true thirty-six.
If she really had been a casual girlfriend, that’s too much to deal with.
She’d probably be bailing even if it were real.
Honestly, if it were real, she might have bailed way before now.
If she weren’t desperate for a family, if Babs’s hugs didn’t fuck her up beyond belief, if she weren’t in love with Van—which she’s not, for the record—she’d probably have bounced after the first day or so.
Faded into the background and ghosted everyone, retreating to the safety of her shitty apartment and her new day-shift life.
She stayed for all the wrong reasons, but she’s fixing it now.
“Alice,” Van says, stepping forward. What she wants and what they did is practically written all over her face, and Alice has to wrench her gaze away.
“Thank you for everything,” she manages to say to the room at large, proud that her voice isn’t shaking the way her hands are. “I mean it.”
Alice turns to go, but somehow Aunt Sheila has slipped around behind her, and is leaning against the closed front door, blocking her only exit. “Well,” she says as Alice stops dumbly in her tracks. “When you’re quite finished with that.”
Alice blinks at her. Not only is she confused, but that was a sentence fragment.
When she’s quite finished with what? She can’t help but look over her shoulder for reinforcement from the rest of the family, but they all seem quite used to this sort of thing, because none of them are batting an eye.
Marie’s flopping down on the couch with Frank, like the show is over.
“Alice,” Aunt Sheila finally says, pushing herself off the door and crossing her arms over her chest. “Honey, you’ve got to stop thinking of yourself as a burden on this family. So Nolan doesn’t remember you yet. Okay, who cares? Start over. Here, now.”
Alice knows she should say something, but her brain is stuck.
She is a burden on this family. She’s lying to them.
She’s directly responsible for them believing things about Nolan’s life that aren’t true.
She doesn’t belong here; they don’t owe her anything and she owes them so much, beginning with the truth and ending with a lot of gas money.
Aunt Sheila seems to take her silence for confusion, because she spells it out.
“You’re his girlfriend. You supported him.
He cared about you. So be here. That’ll help him with his recovery much more than if you leave now, and even if he doesn’t remember falling for you, he’ll do it all over again. ”
That’s absurd. Life isn’t some kind of romance novel, where he’ll fall in love with her in any universe, in any permutation, some kind of soulmate bullshit.
He didn’t give a rat’s ass about her in real life when he had all of his marbles.
He liked girls like Cherry, tall and polished and skinny.
So there’s absolutely not a prayer of a chance of him wanting her—dowdy and overweight, undereducated and horribly in debt, no professional skills to speak of—especially now that his brains have been addled and he’s missing the memories from the years of living near his family that might have actually made him more open and compassionate.
Yeah, no. Not going to happen, Aunt Sheila. Sorry. He’s never going to pick Alice, and the one person who might pick her, who could feasibly pick her, well.
Alice can’t pick her back.
“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” she starts, but Aunt Sheila shakes her head, walking right into Alice’s space and wrapping an arm around her shoulders, steering her toward the dining room table with an unrelenting grip.
“Sit,” Aunt Sheila says, and it’s not a request. “Eat something. You look hungry.”
Alice casts a desperate look over to Marie, but the traitor shrugs, a little smile on her lips.
Fuck.
—
Alice comes back to the hospital two days later, on Wednesday, after work.
She stops in the doorway of Nolan’s room but doesn’t step all the way inside because it’s the worst possible scenario: It’s only Nolan and Van inside.
He’s sitting up with his legs hanging over the side of his bed, and she’s sitting on one of those low wheeling stools doctors use. Neither of them seem to notice her.
She has one hand on his arm, like she’s bracing him in case he falls, and the other on top of his knee. “Press up into my hand,” she says. “Press, press, press.”
Alice can’t see much movement, but Van nods.
“Good,” she says. Alice lingers in the doorway as Van gives him what looks like a full workup, testing his knees, his ankles, his wrists and arms, his ability to open and close his fingers, touch his nose, track her finger.
Alice has never seen her work before, and it’s kind of mesmerizing.
Her voice is low and even, encouraging without giving anything away.
She reacts the same when something happens as when something doesn’t, and she gives off a steady energy that Alice envies.
She can’t help but remember how chaotic and frantic she’d been trying to give Nolan CPR. Van would have been so much better at it, so much calmer and more effective. There’s a reason Van’s a doctor and Alice is a receptionist, apparently, and it’s not only that Van got to go to college.
Alice is maybe not super great in a crisis.
“When do I get to go home?” Nolan asks as Van brushes her fingers across his cheeks and asks if it feels the same on both sides.
“Probably soon,” Van says, most of her concentration shifting to hitting his knees with a little hammer to test his reflexes.
“There’s not much more they can do for you here.
” She looks up at him then, and her eyes narrow.
“But it’s not recommended for anyone with a traumatic brain injury to live alone.
They’ll probably send you to stay with Mom and Dad for a while, see if more of your memories come back there. ”
Nolan shakes his head, but that was clearly a bad thing to do because he abruptly sways and Van has to catch him with both hands.
She eases him back onto his pillows, moving his legs for him, and Nolan grimaces.
Alice isn’t sure if he’s reacting to the idea of staying with his parents or at how his body isn’t working right, and either way, watching it hurts.
How many times did she watch a nurse swing her dad’s legs around for him, hear a doctor use that same tone Van did for his lung capacity tests, even after Alice knew enough to know he was failing them, one after another?
How many times did her dad ask to be sent home, did the nurses look over at her like they were trying to evaluate if she was old enough for the responsibility of taking care of him?
How many times did she bring him home, spending money they didn’t have on cabs until she was old enough to drive, with him promising her this was the last time? He was going to get better, and they’d never need to go back to that hospital again.