Chapter Twenty-Three
Twenty-Three
It’s been three weeks since Christmas and four days since Alice’s no good, very bad day, and she’s alone in Isabella’s house.
It was too expensive to fly four people to Texas over Christmas, so Isabella’s family is making the trek out to see the grandparents this week instead.
Alice wonders why her aunt and uncle didn’t simply come to Portland themselves—two adults flying would be both cheaper and easier than flying with a preschooler and a toddler—but, whatever.
Since when has Alice agreed with any decision her aunt has made in the past twenty or so years?
Isabella had asked Alice if she would be willing to house-sit for them.
She’d claimed that Henry was always anxious about leaving their house empty for more than a night or two.
Alice was pretty sure it was simply kindness—would Alice like to stay in a big house with an actual TV and full-sized kitchen instead of her cramped, loud, probably moldy apartment?
Yes, in fact, Alice would.
Or, well, she’d thought she would. But now that she’s here, it’s painfully quiet.
Alice hadn’t realized how much the sounds of her neighbors keep her company.
How the loud Russian soap operas in 301 drown out the silence of her own life, how the baby crying in 203 reminds her of how happy she is to not have her own children.
It never feels like she’s entirely alone in her apartment, because she never is.
There’s always someone pulling up to buy weed from the dealer in 302, someone moving in or out, the endless parade of one-night stands from the girls who live in 304.
Up here in North Portland, on this quiet street of large, single-family homes, Alice can’t hide from her loneliness.
She has so many rooms she can be alone in.
A kitchen to cook in by herself, a dining room to silently eat in like a sad widow in Victorian England, a living room for solitary sitting, a den for solo TV watching.
Even a finished basement, in case she wants to watch sports alone in a man cave or build something truly enormous out of Legos.
Then upstairs, she can be alone in the bed that Isabella and Henry share because they’re fucking married and pledged to never be alone again, or in Sebastian’s or Hazel’s room, where they’re only one loud wail away from having company at any time of day or night.
Alice feels like the walls are closing in around her.
She texts with Delilah a little on Saturday, setting up a time to go shopping with her and Raisin in a couple weeks, but Delilah stops responding after a while and Alice isn’t desperate enough to endure the shame of double texting.
Isabella’s busy with her parents—who Alice is quite sure she’ll never forgive for abandoning her and her dad—so Alice is well and truly alone.
On Sunday afternoon, Alice briefly considers chopping off her own finger to have a reason to scream, to fill the house with noise and the bustle of paramedics.
But an ambulance ride would literally bankrupt her, so she decides to put on her coat and boots and go for a walk instead.
She doesn’t want to go back to the same park in case Van is there again, so she heads for a different one that her phone tells her is about half an hour’s walk away, which seems far enough to make her feel accomplished, while close enough that she probably won’t die of frostbite.
It’s cold outside, windy and bracing, but she ducks her head down into her collar, one of Henry’s beanies on her head and Isabella’s warmest gloves on her hands.
The beanie says Ask Me about Shrooms! on it, so she’s wearing it inside out.
She does not, in fact, want to be asked about mushrooms of the magical or culinary variety.
She’s sure she wouldn’t be able to do Henry proud.
It’s a straight shot down Isabella’s street to the park and the neighborhood is so cute that she almost hates it.
It’s nothing like where she lives, no businesses or dumpsters or billboards or trash.
It’s just cute house after cute house, big wet lawns and bare trees.
There’s a Prius or Subaru in every driveway, and she can hear kids playing in several of the backyards.
Some have smoke curling out of their chimneys, which makes Alice want to have a childhood-style panic attack but she knows is probably nice for people without fire-related trauma.
She finally makes it to the park and begins to walk across it, grimacing in the sharp cold.
The park isn’t too big, only a couple square blocks, and something about the misery is kind of working for her.
It’s nice to feel like shit for a good reason—she’s exhausted, her toes have turned to ice in her cheap boots, the skin of her cheeks feels like it’s filleting off her face in the wind—instead of because she has irrevocably fucked up her life. It’s a good change of pace.
There’s only one other couple braving the windchill halfway across the park, and their presence makes her feel less alone than she has in Isabella’s house—until she sees that they’re holding hands, and her heart clenches.
What would that be like, to have someone next to you, their hand outstretched to you?
Someone you want to touch so badly that you’d reach for them even if it meant leaving your hand exposed to the brutal wind, only a thin glove protecting it from the elements?
Alice knows painfully well what it’s like to want that with someone; she just doesn’t know what it’s like to have it.
Maybe it’s because she’s thinking about Van, wishing she could let herself want and be wanted in that overwhelming, simple, entwined-fingers kind of way, that she can almost see Van’s broad shoulders in the taller person’s frame, in the way they’re bowing their head to escape the wind.
But a moment later, the couple comes into focus, and her heart stops. It is Van. And she’s with Sarah.
Sarah, the ex who wouldn’t let Van dress up as Ariel the mermaid for Halloween, the ex who made Marie say ugh and made Van feel like she had to only ever be one thing. Sarah, who is prettier than Alice, who dogsits Frank and has a whole house in a cute, well-off neighborhood.
Sarah, who was Van’s ex two weeks ago, but is now holding on to one of Van’s hands.
Those hands are sensitive, tender, the first parts of Van’s body to show her MS symptoms, and one of them is hanging out in the freezing cold air of the park, unprotected by her pocket, just to touch fucking Sarah. Ugh is right.
Alice wonders if she’s going to throw up, if it’s cold enough for her vomit to freeze solid before it hits the ground. She wonders if Van will say anything, or if the love of her life will walk right by her with a blank face, like she’s a stranger.
They finally pass each other, and Van pointedly looks down at the path, like maybe it’s icy (it’s not) and she has to carefully navigate it (she doesn’t). Sarah nods at Alice without recognition, and Alice nods back like it isn’t killing her.
Sarah isn’t the reason Alice isn’t with Van—Alice is the reason. Alice and her fucking lie and the fucking MS, or rather, her reaction to the fucking MS. She doesn’t deserve Van. She rejected Van. She can’t be with Van. None of that has changed.
Alice is just as single as she was yesterday, Van is just as much not her girlfriend as she was this morning, but still. Alice takes the long way back to Isabella’s, vowing to never set foot in a park in this cursed neighborhood again.
When she gets back to the house, she strips off her layers and finds the liquor cabinet. She descends down into the man cave, covers herself with a pile of blankets to hide from the judgmental Lego men hard at work on their forklifts, and drinks herself into a stupor.
—
“Rue!”
Alice stops talking midsentence, her head snapping over to where Mr. Brown is stalking across the lobby.
She isn’t doing anything wrong—she and Delilah are quietly chatting, and there’s no one in the lobby who needs anything.
It’s getting close to the end of her shift, and most of the people who bothered to come into work on such an icy mid-January day are streaming out without a backward glance before the sun goes down and all the streets turn fully into a slip-and-slide of doom.
“Yes, sir?”
Mr. Brown rucks up his truly hideous gray corduroys and says without preamble, “You’re back on the night shift.”
It feels like Alice’s body splits fully in two, like she can hear the wet splat of her intestines hitting the floor. She’s cold all over, and her voice doesn’t work until her third attempt. “I…what? No! Why?”
He gives her a look like she’s stupid, and she suddenly understands.
She is stupid. He put her on the day shift while Nolan was in the news, while he thought a heroic receptionist would benefit his building, bring him heaps of new, shiny lease applications.
But it’s been six weeks. The news moved on, the new tenants have either dried up or never arrived, and apparently her being on the day shift has done nothing but keep a prettier receptionist stuck, invisible, on the overnight shift.
“Chloe’s starting back,” he says. “She’ll be on days with Delilah.”
Of course. Of course it’s Chloe. She used to be on days back when Alice first started, and she left to be a full-time yoga teacher or essential oil saleslady or whatever it is hot twenty-four-year-old white girls with a safety net do in Portland.
She’ll look much better sitting behind this desk than Alice does.
She has cute clothes to go with her pretty face, and when men say condescending shit to her, she smiles and laughs like she doesn’t want to murder them—a skill Alice never cared to master.
If someone had asked Alice ten minutes ago if her life was going in a good direction, she’d have laughed in their face.
The gaping losses of the Altmans as her family and Van as her love have sent her into what she would have thought were the darkest depths of despair.
But as she thinks about going back to the night shift, she realizes that she was wrong.
She has things in her life. Good things.
Things she wants. Things that, even without the Altmans and Van, could make her happy.
Seeing the sunshine and sleeping at night, like everyone else.
Becoming real friends with Delilah and Raisin and the others.
Raisin hasn’t transformed her from a fugly straight-passing caterpillar to a (still sort of) young, perceptibly bisexual butterfly yet—lord knows that’s something worth looking forward to.
And what about Isabella and the kids? If she’s back on nights, she’ll never be able to see them.
She’ll go back to how she was before, so alone that it hurts, but this will be worse because she’ll know what she’s missing.
She’ll know that her cousin slash best friend is right there, only a few miles away, wishing Alice could come over.
Her little niece and nephew will learn how to use the magnetic tiles and forage mushrooms and traverse the monkey bars without her, will get bigger and say more words and be adorable away from her.
It’ll be torture.
Alice straightens her spine. She’s not going to simply roll over and take this. She has things to fight for—a life—and she’ll be damned if Mr. Fucking Brown, with his nasty clothes and preferential treatment of hot girls, is going to take them away from her.
“Please,” she says quickly. “Please, let me stay on days. Please.”
He shakes his head, and Delilah grabs Alice’s hand under the desk.
“Sorry,” Mr. Brown says, and he does sound a little contrite somewhere underneath his usual gruff tone, and Alice is horrified to realize it’s probably because she’s crying.
There are actual tears coming down her cheeks, and she drops Delilah’s hand to wipe her face.
She’s never been much of a fighter, she guesses. Makes sense that her first time standing up for herself is a brutal failure. “Starting when?” she whispers, looking down at the awful big black desk she hates.
“Tomorrow night,” he says, and Alice had thought things couldn’t get worse, but she was wrong. That’s so soon. She won’t even have time to mourn.
He turns and walks away, and Alice can’t breathe. Everything she almost had—daylight, a family, friends, the Altmans, Van—it’s all gone.
Well. She’ll be damned.
—
After a week of night shifts, Alice knows she needs a different job.
She knows that. This isn’t the only office in the entire city—someone must need a receptionist during the day.
But the transition to vampirism has entirely jacked up her sleep cycle and she’s so exhausted—body, mind, soul, wallet—that searching for one feels impossible.
Since the sun sets around four-thirty in the afternoon, Alice’s commute home after her shift is literally the only time she sees daylight now.
She’s pretty sure that would be enough to throw anyone into a depression, but that’s honestly the least terrible part of being back on nights.
It’s only been a week, but Alice misses people so desperately.
Her people, yes, but also customers and the baristas at Fresh Grounds, visitors and tenants at work, her neighbors on the stairs or doing laundry, the regular commuters on the bus she exchanges friendly nods with.
Alice is alone all the time now, and the silence is almost physically painful.
All her limp, exhausted brain can do is taunt her with memories of Van: the scent of her cologne, the way rain looks on her black hair, the sound of her laugh, the comfort of being tucked in the car with her, the feel of her hands sliding under Alice’s sweater.
There’s nothing to distract Alice from her agonizing longing for everything she doesn’t have, and the texts from Isabella with videos of the kids or pictures of the drawings they’ve done for her only make it worse.
Alice could survive losing Van and the Altmans because she had Isabella and the kids and daylight and the promise of a better, non-nocturnal life. And now she has nothing, and every single loss is cutting deeply enough to maim her, and there’s no reprieve in sight.
Just an endless stream of nights.