Chapter Twenty-Five
Twenty-Five
It’s almost dinnertime on Saturday—the only time Alice’s schedule overlaps with the kids’—and the kids are in what Isabella calls their “witching hour.” Hazel has already had two meltdowns and Sebastian is on the cusp of one himself, one small Lego-related indignity away from losing it completely.
Henry is out of town for a conference, so Isabella is more frazzled than usual, and she and Alice haven’t gotten to talk much yet.
“Isn’t this so fun,” Isabella says as she mops up the milk Hazel has spilled all over the table for the fourth time. “Don’t you want kids so badly?”
“So badly,” Alice says, matching her sarcastic tone.
She absolutely doesn’t want kids—she feels like she still hasn’t started her own life yet and has zero desire to put herself on the back burner to wipe someone else’s butt, even if they are very cute and snuggly—but she’s missed these two.
Being an auntie is exactly the amount of kid time she wants, thank you very much.
“So what’s going on with you?” Bella asks as Hazel shoves a literal fistful of cheese into her mouth, like the icon she is. “You seem sad…der than usual.”
Alice bites her lip. It’s weird to talk about this in front of the kids, but they live here, so beggars can’t be choosers, etc. “I did a very, uh, adult activity on Wednesday.” She lifts her eyebrows, and Isabella makes a truly delighted sound.
“Oh really!” Isabella says, and Hazel uses her moment of distraction to grab way more shredded mozzarella out of the bag than Isabella would have given her. “With whom?”
Alice grimaces, bracing for the backlash she knows she well and truly deserves. “With, um…Van?”
“WHAT?” Isabella’s squawk is so loud that Hazel starts crying and Sebastian throws his hot dog onto the floor.
There’s some bustling around as Bella hauls Hazel out of her high chair, plops her on Alice’s lap, and rescues the hot dog, telling Sebastian she’s getting him a new one from the kitchen but really just holding the old one out of sight for ten seconds and then making it magically reappear.
He enthusiastically tucks into the “new” hot dog, Hazel goes back to eating cheese by the fistful, and Alice fiercely wishes all of her problems could be solved so easily.
“With Van?” Isabella says, almost whispering now, clearly trying to overcompensate. “How? Why? When? How was it?”
“It was…” Alice pauses, trying not to think about it, but instead remembering it in vibrant Technicolor.
The way Van’s mouth felt on her, the gentle way she’d brushed Alice’s hair out of her face, the tender encouragement she’d whispered into Alice’s skin, how strong and sturdy she was, how gorgeous.
“It was better than I could’ve imagined,” she finally says, proud that her voice only shakes a little.
“Alice, honey…” Isabella pauses for a second, like she’s not sure if she should say what she’s thinking. Hazel swipes at her milk, and Alice catches it before it topples over.
“Say it,” Alice tells the milk.
“Why aren’t you with her? You clearly love her.”
Alice flinches away from the word love, but she knows she’s not fooling anyone.
Even Sebastian would call bullshit on her, if he were paying attention and knew those words, and that kid is remarkably easy to fool.
The new hot dog had the same number of bites missing as his old one and the dude was not at all suspicious. This is possibly a new low for Alice.
She swallows and remembers that she and Isabella have pledged to be honest with each other and love each other no matter what, so she might as well go ahead and admit that she’s a terrible person. “She’s sick, Bella. She has MS.”
“Oh,” Bella says, her face falling, and Alice feels it deep in her guts. “Shiitake.”
“Yeah.”
But Bella’s expression turns suddenly businesslike. “This has officially become an after-bedtime conversation,” she says, putting some cut-up blueberries in front of Hazel that the toddler immediately smacks across the table.
“Mo chiss!” Hazel demands, her hands balled into pudgy little fists, and Alice can’t help but agree with her. She could use a lot more cheese herself.
Alice would have preferred to talk about this with the distraction of Sebastian loudly telling a story to his hot dog.
That would make it seem like less of a big deal—any conversation interrupted by trips to the potty and fake curse words can’t be that serious, right?
Alice can’t have totally fucked up her life if it’s more pressing to pry cheese out of Hazel’s fat, clenched fingers.
But stupid Isabella is out here ruining all of Alice’s plans to be avoidant.
Alice considers bailing for a half second, but she came over to unload all of this on Bella, and she resigns herself to doing it on Bella’s terms. She wants to talk it through like a big girl, but she can’t help feeling, as Hazel wriggles off her lap and knocks the milk over again, like she’s in trouble.
After an eventful playtime, bath time, and bedtime, Isabella collapses onto the living room couch with two glasses of wine.
Alice is wearing one of Bella’s shirts now because Sebastian splashed so much in the bath that she got soaking wet, and Hazel fell asleep on top of Alice halfway through her first book, her chubby thumb in her cute little mouth, so even this shirt has a big drool spot.
“So,” Isabella says. “Van has MS.”
Alice takes one of the glasses from her. “Yeah.”
Isabella looks like she’s trying to see through Alice, to x-ray her feelings. “I see how that could trigger some stuff for you,” she says, and Alice gets the impression she’s choosing her words carefully.
“That’s a nice way of putting it,” Alice mumbles, and Bella almost smiles.
“But are you, um…” Isabella bites her lip and takes a sip of her wine, and Alice’s chest is so tight that she can’t breathe easily. “Are you sure that’s enough of a reason to not be with her?”
Alice blinks a couple times. “I—yes? I mean, I can’t…
I know it makes me the worst person in the world but I…
” She’s talking too fast. The words are flying out of her mouth and her heart is racing and her tongue feels dry.
She takes a gulp of wine, which helps with literally none of those problems. “I can’t watch someone else I love wither away and die, Bella. I just can’t.”
It’s the most true thing in her life. Watching her mom die was agony, sharp and blindingly painful.
And then her dad died for her entire childhood and adolescence.
The most formative eleven years of her life were buried under blood oxygen levels and white blood cell counts and a deep, hacking, wet cough she still hears in her nightmares.
Losing her mom over that long, terrifying month would have scarred her for the rest of her life, but the way her dad died, slowly losing piece after piece of himself until there was nothing left but a skeleton covered with ashen gray skin wearing a gruesome approximation of her dad’s face—no. There’s no coming back from that.
It’s a miracle she survived the first time, the second. She absolutely cannot do that again.
“I don’t think there’s a lot of…withering…with MS,” Bella says, almost like she’s apologizing for having to push back against this most tender of spots. “One of Henry’s uncles has it, and he’s, like, mostly okay.”
Alice shrugs. “For now.”
“Yeah,” Bella says quickly, almost like she’s trying to pacify Alice. “For now. But…for a long time now. He’s in his sixties, and he uses a cane and one of his eyes doesn’t work great, but he’s not…you know.” She shrugs. “He’s not dying, Rue Rue.”
That should feel heartening, but Alice shakes her head, swallowing hard. “But there’s no guarantee Van would be like that,” she says. “Something bad could happen to her literally any day.” The furtive, middle-of-the-night googling has been clear on that.
Isabella doesn’t say anything right away, and Alice realizes this feels kind of like being in therapy with her third therapist, who would pause after Alice offhandedly said something super fucked up and quietly wait for Alice to hear it herself.
Finally, Isabella speaks. “Something bad could happen to me tomorrow,” she says, soft and gentle like Alice is a skittish animal. “I could be hit by a truck, instantly paraplegic. Would you…” She hesitates for a second, and then she says, “Would you still love me?”
“Of course I would,” Alice says, almost snapping. “But that’s different.”
“Why?”
“Because it is!” Alice realizes she’s raised her voice, and she takes a few deep breaths to calm herself down. Just because she’s triggered right now doesn’t mean she needs to be, like, so loud about it. “Because you’re my cousin. My family.”
“What if it were Nolan?” Isabella asks quietly. “What if you got with him for real, and then in a couple years he ended up having another brain injury. Would you leave him?”
“I—” The idea of being with Nolan feels so foreign to her now, like trying to put on a jacket she’d loved in high school and now realizes is hideous and several sizes too small. “I don’t know.”
“Or if Van were healthy—no MS—and then fifteen years down the line she gets breast cancer and needs chemo? What then?”
“I don’t know,” Alice says again, loud enough that Isabella winces, probably worried that Alice is going to wake up the kids. Alice drops her voice, apologetic but still frustrated. “I just don’t know, okay?”
“Look,” Isabella says after another long pause.
“What you decide is up to you, and you know I love and support you no matter what. But I think you need to consider, like…okay, you know Van comes with this…complication. You know she’s never going to be completely healthy.
And that’s real. But everyone else—me, you, the kids—we’re all one diagnosis or accident away from being the same or possibly much worse.
So with Van it’s a guarantee, right, and with everyone else it’s a risk.
I know you’re super risk averse, and with everything you’ve been through, that makes so much sense.
But, honey…” She reaches out and takes Alice’s empty hand in hers.
“I don’t want you to throw away this beautiful, precious love you’ve finally found because you’re scared. ”
Alice feels like she’s going to throw up.
“I don’t think your parents would want you to miss out on Van just because they were in an accident,” Bella says. “I think they’d want you to be loved the way Van loves you. Even if it means you have some stuff to work through.”
That might be the understatement of the century, Alice thinks, but she can’t say it because she’s too distracted by the way she’s started to cry.
She knows that Bella’s right. Her parents were strong and healthy until one day they weren’t, and Van seems okay.
She gets tired sometimes, and she opens and closes her hands a lot, and she doesn’t like to drive at night, but she seems okay.
Alice realizes with a little jolt that she doesn’t even know what Van was like before the MS. Maybe she was exactly the same except a little less tired, a true nighttime-driving machine.
Maybe she was wildly high energy, always buzzing, always darting from place to place, but Alice kind of doubts it.
She thinks about some of the things she loves most about Van—her steadiness, her careful, deliberate movements, her quiet energy, the intense way she cares—maybe those have always been part of Van, or maybe they’re new.
But either way, Alice realizes, the only Van she’s ever known is Van with MS, and that’s the one she fell in love with.
That’s the person who is so damned compelling and desirable that Alice is repeatedly blowing up her entire life for the possibility of one more hug, ten more minutes with her.
Van has already been hit by the truck. Alice has never known her any other way, and Alice is obsessed with her.
Alice lets her eyes flutter closed, Isabella’s hand still warm in hers.
She thinks about the things she wants most with Van—those nights on the couch, the feeling of Van’s hands on her skin, burying her face in Van’s neck, Van’s soft caring voice in her ear, Van making her laugh even when she’s at her lowest. Making cookies together and having sex and spending all of the holidays tucked under the same Snuggie.
She could do all of those things even if Van’s MS progresses, even if she’s using a wheelchair or her eyesight gets worse or her balance gets wonky or she’s more tired.
The thought of Van getting worse, being sicker, is honestly terrifying, but for the first time ever, Alice realizes that she’d much prefer learning to live alongside the MS than to never see Van again, not be with her at all.
Maybe she doesn’t need Van to be physically perfect to be exactly the person she wants, the person she needs. The person she loves so desperately that it actually hurts.
Alice thinks about being the one to drive at night, and an unexpected wave of tenderness washes over her as she imagines steering Van’s station wagon through the wet, dark Portland streets, Van sturdy and almost falling asleep in the passenger seat.
Maybe they’d keep a blanket in the car and Alice would drape it over Van at a red light, Frank curled up in the backseat on top of his gangly legs.
There would be soft music playing, and Van might mumble that she loves Alice as Alice drives them home from Babs’s house, and Alice would say it back, clear and gentle and true.
They’d get home—their home—and Alice would help Van into the house, easing her into the bed and curling up on her chest, Van’s arms around her, Van’s heartbeat under her ear.
She wants that, she realizes. She wants that with Van. She wants the good days and the bad nights and even holding her hand at the scary doctor’s appointments. She wants to be Marie’s sister and Babs’s kid and Aunt Sheila’s niece, and most of all she wants to be Van’s.
MS or no fucking MS, she wants to be Van’s.
She opens her eyes, looking over at Isabella and taking in the worry in her face, the pinch of her eyebrows, the firm grip of her hand. She would love the shit out of her cousin if she got sick, and it’s no different for Van.
Hell, she’d loved the shit out of her dad, even when she was thirteen and crying on the phone to the doctor.
“Bella,” Alice whispers. “I’m so fucking stupid.”