Chapter Twenty-Two
Twenty-Two
Almost a week later, on a frigid Wednesday, Alice puts herself to bed at the ripe hour of seven.
The high from happy hour had buoyed Alice for a few days, but today sucked.
There’s no other way for Alice to describe it.
The streets had been slick and icy this morning, and Alice fell on her ass, hard, on her way to the bus stop.
Then the bus was late and impossibly slow, so when she got to work at seven-twenty instead of seven a.m., her butt still smarting painfully, she wasn’t really in the mood to get reamed out by the ubiquitous Mr. Brown.
But of course, that didn’t matter, and she had to stand there, shivering, her pants still wet from the ice, while he yelled at her for a good five minutes.
Babs called and Marie texted again, which made her feel so guilty and anxious that she cried in the bathroom for six of her ten allotted minutes of break.
She forgot her lunch at home and it was too icy to walk down to the coffee shop, so she just starved and tried not to think about bao and mint tea and stolen kisses, and then her bus home slid down a hill and Alice found herself honestly saying the rosary while the lady behind her screamed and the person across the aisle threw up all over himself.
And of course she fell again, twice, on her walk back to her apartment, and the chicken breast she’d splurged on last time she went grocery shopping had gone bad even though it was supposed to be fine until tomorrow.
It was the kind of night where she wanted to give up, to order a pizza and climb into bed with her laptop and fuzzy socks and watch Parks and Rec again from the beginning until she fell asleep to the soothing sounds of Leslie Knope, but she couldn’t.
She couldn’t ask some poor kid working for a pizza place to risk their life to drive food to her, not now that it was dark—god, it gets dark so fucking early in the winter—so she found a depressing old can of chicken soup to heat up.
Too messy to eat in bed, somehow both flavorless and too salty, and Parks and Rec is behind a new paywall, and her fuzzy socks are in the laundry.
So now Alice is in bed at seven, sans pizza or socks or Leslie Knope, and she’s doing what she’s not supposed to.
She’s put on her Altman Christmas pajamas and is scrolling through Marie’s social media. She knows she has absolutely no right to be doing this with all of Marie’s unanswered texts piling up, but hey. What’s a little self-inflicted torture when you’re already feeling like complete and utter shit?
She misses Marie with a deep throbbing ache, and it only gets worse with each picture and video she sees.
Alice isn’t sure when the semester starts down in Corvallis, but Marie’s still posting a lot of the family.
A picture of her and Frank makes Alice’s heart seize up, and she lets out a wet laugh that’s almost a sob at the video of Marie trying to teach Aunt Sheila some choreography.
There’s a time lapse of them making a pie, and when Alice catches sight of someone wearing the pink “I Like Big Buns” apron, the tears start rolling down her face.
Great. Crying over a novelty apron. This isn’t a new low or anything.
Videos of Marie with Nolan hurt in a different way, and then there’s a whole series of Marie with other kids her age, probably her high school friends. They’re singing and dancing and joking around, and Alice watches them over and over and lets herself be miserable.
Alice has always thought of herself as a good person beset by bad circumstances.
She would have been a good student if she hadn’t been so busy taking care of her dad.
She would donate to charity if she had enough money, she’d return a wallet if she found one on the bus.
She would be a generous partner if she met the right someone.
But this whole thing with Nolan and Van—lying to the family, but especially lying to Nolan about himself—it’s making her wonder if she’s actually a bad person, a person who, at her core, is terribly selfish.
A person her parents would be ashamed of.
She tried to steal a man’s life, to take his mom and aunt and little sister for her own.
She fell for his other sister and kissed her before curling up under his Snuggie.
She took advantage of the family’s care and hospitality, ate their food and wore their pajamas and soaked up their affection, gave nothing back but lies, and for what?
A couple hugs and some Christmas cookies?
A hot boyfriend and the love of a parent?
And that’s not even the worst of it. Alice might excel at evading the truth with the Altmans, but even she can’t lie to herself.
The pure and unvarnished truth—no omissions, no technicalities, just blinding honesty—is that Alice ruined everything she could have had with Van.
Not out of some misplaced sense of nobility, the self-sacrifice of saying, I can’t get between you and your mother.
No. It was pure selfishness. Alice’s desire to protect herself, and only herself, rearing up and smashing all the other options to dust.
And yes, maybe Babs would have freaked out about Alice flitting from her son to her daughter. Maybe they’d have needed to spend time with Marie separately while things with Babs were bad—and that would be horrible.
But Babs and Nolan aren’t the reason Alice is alone and miserable in her cold, Knope-less studio tonight.
What it comes down to is that if she weren’t such an ableist asshole that she refuses to watch Van wither away and die, then she could be tucked up in bed next to her right now, warming her freezing toes on Van’s shins, scrolling through Marie’s social media together, a strong arm under her head, her chest pressed against Van’s.
Alice misses all of them horribly, but she can’t think about them—Van, Babs, Nolan, Aunt Sheila—without hating herself.
Without being disgusted by what a terrible person she is.
But with Marie, it’s different. She can miss Marie without feeling like a manipulative asshole, because whether she was with Nolan or Van, or neither, she loved Marie like a little sister.
The cookies, the costume closet, laughing at Aunt Sheila together…
it’s exactly what Alice would have wanted from a sister if she’d ever had one.
Marie was never filling in for anyone, not standing in for Alice’s dead parents or absent aunt or missing cousin or comatose fake-boyfriend.
She was the only little sister Alice has ever had, and Alice misses her so fucking badly.
She wants a future where she can drive down to Corvallis to see Marie in some weird experimental play.
She wants to help her move out of her dorm and into an apartment with her friends over the summer.
She wants to text her memes, to hear about Marie’s crushes and classes and roommate drama.
She wants to be the cool big sister who buys her hair dye or takes her to pierce her eyebrow or get her first tattoo even though Babs will flip.
But Alice can’t have any of that. She can’t be Marie’s big sister anymore, and she lets herself cry about it.
By ten, Alice is all cried out. She doesn’t feel lighter, though. She feels heavy, like she’s a soggy piece of bread. She should get out of bed, brush her teeth, turn off the lights. She should put down her phone.
But she doesn’t.
And then, while she’s robotically refreshing Marie’s page, a new post appears.
And, fuck.
She should have stopped. She should have gone to sleep.
She should have blocked Marie. She should never have come to this page, to have tortured herself like this, because she’s pretty sure there would never have been a good time to see this post, but right now is definitely not it.
Not after a terrible day, after hours of misery and hating herself.
Now isn’t the time to process this, but it’s too late.
She’s already seen it.
It’s a video of Van working with Nolan, helping him use those enormous stretchy bands to improve his balance.
“My sister is the best physical therapist in Portland,” Marie’s voice says over the footage, the captions big and bold across the bottom.
“She’s opening her own practice and she needs an office manager.
Link to the job posting in the comments.
You could not possibly have a better boss! Click it!!!”
Alice almost throws up her tasteless, salty soup.
It’s not like Alice thought she could still have the job, not after everything. Not after Christmas Eve, not after Van couldn’t even look at her at the park. She hadn’t thought about the job much, that loss minuscule compared to the rest. But…shit.
She still wants it. She still wants Van, still wants out of her boring job, to get away from Nolan and all of the finance bros and lawyers who don’t think she exists.
She doesn’t want to spend every day staring at the spot on the floor where all this started, where Nolan’s legs gave out and his head hit the black marble floor with a sickening thud.
She still wants the life she almost had, the life that was never actually a possibility.
A life where she goes to work at Van’s practice, where she’s busy and helpful and happy, and then goes home to Van, who is strong and healthy and okay, and they have mind-blowing sex before getting the best sleep of their lives, on repeat, ad infinitum.
That was never real, but the job was. The job was real, and it was Alice’s, and now it’s gone.
It’s not the worst thing she’s seen tonight, not the worst thing that’s happened today, but it’s the last straw.
She wants the job less than she wants Van, but she’s still not sure she’ll ever fully get over it.
She throws her phone across the bed, and sobs into her pillow until she falls asleep a long, long time later.