Chapter Nineteen
Nineteen
The existential dread comes more quickly than Alice would have hoped.
It’s after the delicious roast ham dinner, after Alice shamefully confesses that she doesn’t have presents for anyone and is resolutely shushed by Babs for worrying about it, and midway through a double-feature viewing of Elf and Home Alone.
They’ve all changed into brand-new matching pajamas, Alice included—they’re red and flannel and warm and they make Alice want to cry.
Babs and Van had to help Nolan into his, and Uncle Joe and Steve are both covering theirs up with giant bathrobes, but it’s still fucking delightful and so picture perfect that Alice sort of can’t believe this is her life.
Well, of course, it’s not, really. It’s a life she’s borrowing until Nolan dumps her or his recent memories come back or Alice kisses Van again and everything falls apart.
But even so, she can’t stop feeling like she’s on the verge of tears, like the rub of the soft fabric against her skin is unraveling every piece of armor she’s made for herself since she was eight years old. They’re not her parents, her aunt, her siblings, but god. She wants them so badly anyway.
At the intermission between films, Babs brings out the box of Snuggies, and, like a Chanukah-themed déjà vu, starts handing them out to everyone.
Somehow, despite no one being at the hospital anymore, there’s still one too few Snuggies.
Alice has read a lot of romance novels where there’s only one bed, and she is rapidly becoming suspicious that Babs has hid a blanket or two in order to manufacture the manic joy in her eyes when she announces that Alice and Nolan can share one.
Alice would rather share a Snuggie with Uncle Joe, who she’s spoken to less than Nolan despite him never having been in a coma, but she’s not sure how to say no.
We didn’t actually date and have no history of intimacy wouldn’t cut it even if she were willing to hop right up and say it, because she hadn’t made a single peep of complaint before she cuddled right into Van during the other winter festival of lights.
She considers turning the blanket down altogether, but the old heater in the house can’t keep up with the freeze outside.
Plus, Alice has a sneaking suspicion rejecting the Snuggie might make Babs cry, which is theoretically the whole reason she’s here anyway, isn’t it? To keep Babs from being sad?
So Alice simply gives a meek smile and accepts the half Snuggie Babs lovingly drapes over her lap.
She doesn’t put her arm through the hole, and she tries not to look over at Van, who is sitting in a straight-backed chair she dragged in from the living room.
Alice can see from the corner of her eye that Van is sitting with impeccable posture, her gaze boring holes in the TV, which hasn’t started playing the second movie yet.
She looks like a statue, a monument to rejection, and it hurts so fucking much.
She wants to be on Van’s lap, under her Snuggie.
She wants to be as far away from this house and these people as she can. She wants everything to be different.
She forces herself to stop staring so obviously at Van—there would be no heterosexual explanation for the mournful expression on her face, she’s sure of it—so Van’s sharp intake of breath is Alice’s only indication she, sitting all the way across the room, hears Babs’s loud whisper to Aunt Sheila.
“Maybe next Christmas we’ll have a grandchild cooking under there!”
That’s so preposterous that Alice almost laughs, almost stands up, sloughing off the Snuggie and dropping a few truth bombs before calling the world’s most expensive Uber.
Alice pregnant? Alice and Nolan, baking a grandbaby?
Alice and Nolan making a genetic stew that’s congealing inside of her body?
Alice thinks the fuck not. But as the slightly hysterical urge to laugh begins to fade, the thought of having Nolan’s baby starts to make her want to claw her uterus out with her bare hands.
She settles for clenching her teeth and unobtrusively scooching her hip away from his.
Marie snickers at her mom, the boomer men honestly probably didn’t hear Babs, and Van aggressively presses play on Home Alone. Nolan seems to be pretending he didn’t hear what his mom said, so Alice does too, her discomfort sitting hot and heavy right in what Babs hopes is her baby oven.
After Home Alone ends, robbers suitably foiled and child somewhat supervised, the party breaks up.
Everyone starts cleaning up before bed, Babs and Aunt Sheila already making plans for breakfast. Alice has mainlined more cookies and icing than ever before in her life, and the thought of another morsel of food makes her a little nauseous, but she’s learned that’s basically a constant condition in this house, and she can’t say she minds.
Steve, Aunt Sheila, and Uncle Joe head upstairs, leaving Babs downstairs to wedge the four “kids” into the two remaining beds.
Since Marie has her own room, Alice assumes she’s spending the night in bed with either Van or Nolan, and she can’t decide which is worse.
She’s pretty sure she’d end up having sex with Van or enduring the literal most awkward night of her life with Nolan, and both of those seem like significantly bad options.
She opens her phone, and as she expects, an Uber would be approximately five bajillion dollars, seeing that it’s after midnight on what is now Christmas morning, and she remembers that Van doesn’t like to drive at night, which seems very octogenarian of her, but whatever.
Who is Alice to judge? She basically lives like an old lonely widow who isn’t on Social Security herself.
“I’ll take the couch,” she offers.
“Nonsense,” Babs says, flapping her hands at Alice as if to dispel the very idea. “You can share with Nolan, sweetie. Steve and I don’t mind; we’re not old-fashioned like that. It’s not like you haven’t done it before, and lord knows we didn’t wait until marriage!”
Oh yes, it’s just Alice’s luck that her fake-boyfriend’s parents are so modern that they don’t mind the idea of her having sex with him under their roof!
They’ve done it so many times before! What twenty-first-century parenting!
And how fun for Alice to know about Babs’s sex life!
This is delightful on each and every level!
Alice waits until Babs finally troops upstairs before she turns to Nolan. “I don’t want you to be uncomfortable,” she says quickly. “I’ll sleep on the couch. Honestly, I’d prefer it.”
“No,” Van says, and Alice almost has a heart attack before she realizes Van is saying no to Alice taking the couch, not to Alice refusing to curl up with her brother. “You and Marie take the guest room. Nolan, take Marie’s room. I’ll sleep on the couch.”
“No,” Alice starts to object, but Van glares at her, that chiseled face drawn with disappointment and confusion, and Alice swallows back what she was going to say, some thoughtless drivel about Van being sick and needing the rest.
Alice expects that Nolan might object to spending the night in his baby sister’s twin bed, but apparently the thought of bunking with her is enough to send him running toward the small room with the pastel pink walls and the enormous Red, White & Royal Blue poster.
“Thanks,” he says as Marie helps him to his room, not even looking back over his shoulder as he says, “Good night.”
Two hours later, Alice is exhausted and awake.
She’s tried everything—counting, practicing her apology for when this all goes to shit, running the list of inventory she remembers from when she worked at the pediatric dentist’s office, a full-body-scan meditation, doing her multiplication tables, remembering every embarrassing thing she’s ever done in excruciating detail, but nothing works.
Eventually she slips out of bed, deciding that doomscrolling in the freezing dining room sounds much better than holding herself stiffly so she doesn’t wake Marie, who is a surprisingly loud snorer.
Hell, maybe she should have just taken a Snuggie into the costume closet and died tonight like a man.
She’s grateful for the warmth of her new pajamas as she tiptoes across the room, opening and closing the bedroom door as quietly as she can.
It’s dark in the living room, but she picks her way through it, avoiding the coffee table like a pro until her foot catches on the dining room chair Van had been sitting in earlier.
Alice hadn’t factored that into her mental map of the dark space, and she tumbles forward, luckily landing face-first on a couch instead of smashing her head open on the floor.
One small problem, though.
There’s something hard on the couch, and it grabs her.
She almost screams, swallowing it down at the very last instant as her brain catches up to her racing heart.
“Oh my god,” she says at the same time a voice from under the blanket says, “What the hell?”
“Van?”
“…Alice?”
Shit. Alice tries to scramble off her, but it’s confusing in the dark. She’s somehow tangled all of her limbs in the various Snuggies Van has layered on top of herself—it’s like the arms of each blanket have grown sentient and are lashing her down.
“Okay, hold on,” Van mutters, and Alice feels Van’s hands come up to her waist. “Let me—okay.” She shifts and Alice sinks down, now tucked neatly between the solid warmth of Van’s body and the back of the couch.
She’s on her side, one arm tossed over Van’s stomach, and both of Van’s arms around her.
“Better?” Van asks, and Alice doesn’t know what to say.
Like, yes, she’s infinitely more comfortable, and god, if this isn’t almost everything she’s ever wanted, but also, no! This is now much worse!
Why does Van smell so fucking good in the middle of the night, after eating her weight in sugar cookies and cuddling with her dog?
“Couldn’t sleep?” Van asks, her voice rough, and Alice wants to kiss her so badly that it hurts.
“No,” she says, but right now she can’t figure out why. She’s exhausted, suddenly. She can feel her head dropping, sinking down onto Van’s shoulder, can feel the little designs Van is aimlessly drawing on her back lulling her to sleep.
“What, um…what does this mean?” Van asks, and Alice blinks a couple times, as confused now as she is tired.
“What?” she asks, eloquent as always.
“You coming out here to me,” Van says. “After today, with him and the Snuggie and, you know. Your pregnancy.”
Alice scoffs—the pregnancy is ridiculous—but Van isn’t laughing.
“Are you really getting back with him?” Van asks, a bite in her voice now. “After everything?”
Alice figures she doesn’t mean the coma and the hospital and the amnesia. Not that kind of everything. Van means this everything, the gayer, more confusing everything that has Alice’s hand clenching the Snuggie over Van’s chest, her nose buried in the warmth of Van’s neck.
“It’s all more complicated now,” Alice says, too emotionally and physically exhausted to do a good job at walking the tightrope between evading the truth and outright lying. “I didn’t think he’d wake up.”
Van tenses under her. Alice wants to sleep but she can’t—she’s just said something wrong and she doesn’t know what it is.
“So, you’re saying, what? You hoped he would die?”
“No! Never.” That’s the truth. She never wanted him to die, but she had simply thought he would. Not a desired outcome, but a fact.
“But you’re saying if he’d died, we’d be together? The only way I’d get to be happy is if my brother was dead? And now that he’s alive—that I don’t have to mourn him—I have to lose you?”
Fuck.
Alice squeezes her eyes closed, presses herself tightly to Van.
She wishes the layers of Snuggies weren’t there, that she could dig herself into Van so tightly that they’d never be pulled apart.
“No,” she breathes. “No, that’s not—I didn’t mean…
” She trails off. She doesn’t know what she means. In a way, Van’s right.
If Nolan died, Alice could be with her.
If it weren’t for the MS.
Or, no.
If it weren’t for Alice’s absolute, abject, shameful cowardice related to the MS.
“So that’s it,” Van spits when Alice can’t find the words to defend herself, her voice almost loud enough to carry to the bedrooms. She shifts, pushing them both into more of a sitting position, still tangled up in each other and the Snuggies.
“He’s not dead, so now you’re going to, like, shack up with him and make his babies? ”
“No!” Alice is the one who is too loud now, and she tries to pull it back to a hoarse whisper. “God, of course not, Van. That’s insane.”
“That’s not the song you were singing earlier.” Alice has never heard Van’s voice sound like this before, the harsh scrape of sandpaper under her words, the tremble of pain she’s trying so hard to conceal.
“Your mom said it,” Alice snaps. “Not me.”
“Well, why didn’t you say no?”
“Because it didn’t matter!” Alice hisses, her throat clenching like she’s yelling. “None of this fucking matters!”
It isn’t until Van’s eyes fill with tears that Alice realizes what she’s actually said, what Van thinks she meant. Not that things with Nolan don’t matter because they’ll never become anything, but that none of this matters. That Van doesn’t matter.
“No,” Alice says as quickly as she can, reaching out both hands for Van. “Van, no. That’s not what I meant. I don’t think that. You matter.”
But Van is shaking her head.
“Look,” Van says, her body moving in earnest now, like she’s trying to get out from under Alice.
“I can’t do this, okay? You know what I want, and I thought you wanted it too, but I’m not going to do this.
I’m not going to stand here and let you—whatever.
Have his babies and then crawl into my bed. That doesn’t work for me.”
She gets free, sliding off the couch and out from under the Snuggies. She stands, and it’s so dark but Alice can still see the pain in her eyes, the exhausted lines on her face.
Alice struggles to sit up, feeling like all of her limbs are submerged in quicksand.
“Van, no,” she says, not quietly enough. “That’s not it.”
“That is it, though,” Van says, and she’s walking across the room to her shoes. She puts them on and whistles softly, and Frank hops off the other couch, stopping to stretch halfway across the living room.
“I’m going home,” Van says, not looking at Alice. “Tell everyone…I don’t know. Tell them whatever you want.” There’s a long beat, and then, “I’m sure you’ll be fine lying to them. You’re pretty good at it.”
The door closes behind her, firm but not loud, and it takes Alice what feels like ages to pull the Snuggies up around her, to curl into the spot that’s still warm from Van’s body, to cry.