Chapter Twenty-Six #3
Alice goes on once Babs’s face seems to be ready to hear more.
“And I thought, if this little white lie could make you all feel better, grieve easier, why wouldn’t I do it?
It felt…easy. Selfless, you know. Kind, or something.
Plus I—I guess that’s not totally all of it.
I told myself it was selfless, but I was getting stuff too.
Babs, you especially just…you kept hugging me and I hadn’t…
it had been so long, and I…” She lets out a breath, trying to center herself enough to finish a single sentence.
“I didn’t want to walk away from you. Any of you.
” She gives Marie a small, sad smile before she says, “And then it…spiraled out of control.”
She wonders if she sounds like as much of an asshole as she did on Christmas, when she told Van that she hadn’t thought Nolan would wake up, and Van had pushed Alice off her body and walked away.
Marie is tucked under Babs’s arm now but is narrowing her eyes at Alice again, like she’s trying to poke holes in Alice’s story. “But why stick around? Why keep lying to us?”
Alice is horrified to feel something tight rising in her throat, something wet welling up behind her eyes. “Van told you all about my parents?”
Aunt Sheila blinks at the abrupt change of topic. “Yes,” she says, something kinder in her tone than Alice deserves. “She said they died.”
“Yeah,” Alice says. “I haven’t had a family for a really long time.
” She takes a beat, and when she speaks she says it to Aunt Sheila, to Babs, to Van and Marie, and even to Steve and Uncle Joe.
“I was never in love with Nolan. Not really. But I—I fell in love with you all, with this family, so quickly. I didn’t—it was so selfish, but I didn’t want to lose you. ”
She shakes her head, because when they descended on her for the first time she was lonely and na?ve and shortsighted and stupid and so, so fucking sad.
“I told myself that if he woke up, I’d come clean,” she says, blinking back her tears.
“Right then and there. But then…he did wake up, and it was so…” She tries to push down the memory of how her first thought when she heard the news, when Marie’s voice came through the tinny speaker of Van’s phone, was oh no.
“It was so good you were awake,” she says to him, “but everything wasn’t okay, and I didn’t want to, like, I don’t know.
Make it about me when the amnesia was such a shock, you know.
And the next few days, I tried to leave, I really did, but that didn’t, um… take, I guess.”
She looks over at Aunt Sheila, who seems a bit surprised, like she’s—for the first time—remembering how she had literally body-blocked Alice from leaving the house when Alice had tried to bow out.
“So you thought it was better to lie to me?” Nolan spits at her. “Better to make up shit about my own life?”
“It got out of hand,” Alice says quickly, holding her hands up in surrender, talking only to him now.
Please, Your Honor, she thinks. I’m pleading guilty here.
“I never meant for it to go so far, to hurt you like this. The fact that I lied to you about yourself, made you doubt your own memories and your own sense of who you are, I regret that so much. I always will. I’m so sorry, Nolan. Really.”
He shakes his head, but Marie’s narrowing her eyes. She can tell there’s something else that Alice isn’t saying, and Alice decides if she’s going to go out in a blaze of honesty, she might as well do the thing.
“I know I should have left earlier,” she admits, finally brave enough to look Van right in the eye. “But I—”
Van sucks in a breath, but she doesn’t break the eye contact.
“All of this started because I had this stupid crush on Nolan, even though I’d never talked to him,” Alice says to Van, pretending they’re the only people in the room.
“I thought maybe I even loved him, but, I…” She feels the tears falling now, but that’s okay.
She lets it happen as she says, “I had no fucking idea what love felt like until you.”
It’s quiet again. She’s never heard the Altmans quiet—not Babs or Aunt Sheila or Marie individually, and certainly not as a group—but it’s deeply, profoundly quiet as everyone slowly turns to stare at Van, eyes wide, mouths agape.
“I—what?” Babs finally says. “What?”
“Oh my god,” Marie whispers, suddenly sounding excited. “Oh my god!”
Alice tries to ignore everyone that isn’t Van, everyone that isn’t the woman she loves so much that it feels like claws are slicing through her skin to shred her organs, like every part of her is torn, tattered, mangled.
“I didn’t know how to tell you the truth,” Alice says.
“At first I tried not to feel it, and then I tried not to act on it, but…” She gives Van a wry smile, and Marie makes some kind of triumphant sound, but Alice isn’t looking anywhere but at Van, who is still perfectly impassive.
“I know it’s all too fucked and complicated for it to work, you and me.
The history, this lie.” She doesn’t know how to mention the MS in the middle of all the rest of this, so she gestures vaguely at it instead, saying, “And everything else,” while waving her hand around like a dead fish.
Her chest feels too small and her head too hot.
Her voice is cracking now, and she knows she only has one or two sentences left before she absolutely loses it.
“I need you to know,” Alice says, using up the last of her words, hoping that beneath Van’s blank, vaguely surprised face, she’s listening.
“Everything started from this lie, these fake feelings, but this…you and me, Van, this is the realest thing in the world to me. I love you so much, and I’m so sorry. ”
Her voice breaks, and Van doesn’t do anything but blink at her, her hands slowly opening and closing at her sides.
“Okay,” Alice says, forcing herself to take one last look at everyone in the room.
There’s a bit of a burden off her shoulders already—the lie is over, and that will feel good later—but the new weight of Van’s blank face might be even heavier to bear.
“I’m…I’m going to go. I’m so sorry. To all of you.
For lying and abusing your kindness and care and tragedy, and… for everything. I really am.”
Marie is crying too, and Alice tries to give her another little smile, but she’s not sure it works.
She turns to go, already mourning that she’ll never feel one of Babs’s hugs again, never laugh at another one of Aunt Sheila’s kooky jokes, come into this house and smell Babs’s baking, laugh in the corner with Marie, get her eardrum licked by Frank’s ridiculously long tongue.
Never have anything with Van but her memories.
Alice reaches the door, and no one does anything to stop her. No one even says goodbye.
It’s all over.