Chapter Twenty-Seven
Twenty-Seven
Alice should go home and sleep, but instead she burns over two hours of take-home pay to get a rideshare directly to Isabella’s house.
It’s a little after eight in the morning on a weekday, but it’s luckily one of the days Isabella stays home with the kids instead of going to work.
Something terrible must be clear on Alice’s face, because within a second of opening the door, Isabella wordlessly takes Alice’s arm, pushes her onto the couch, and buries her in a pile of blankets and small children still in their pajamas.
Isabella puts on Moana and Alice and Sebastian quietly watch it together, Sebastian curled up under her arm like she’s not the worst, loneliest person in the world.
“You should get some rest,” Isabella says when the movie ends. “I’m going to take Hazel up for her first nap, do you want to lay down with her?”
Alice absently wonders if she should be insulted at being told she should nap like a literal toddler, but she’s so emotionally exhausted that she can’t muster up even the tiniest spark of a feeling about anything. “No,” she says, numb and empty. “I’m okay.”
Great, now she’s even lying to Isabella.
While Isabella brings Hazel upstairs, Sebastian, who somehow knows how to use the remote despite not being able to poop in the potty, restarts Moana again from the beginning.
He drapes himself across her lap, a couple blocks in his hands, mindlessly humming along to the music, and Alice lets her mind go blissfully blank.
She might have slept for a while, she’s not sure, but she knows that at some point Hazel is dropped in her lap, still warm and snuggly from her nap.
Moana starts for the third time, and Hazel babbles to herself as she turns the pages of one of her board books.
The first song is ending when there’s a knock on the front door, and it isn’t until Isabella says, “Oh,” that Alice looks up from where she’s been idly playing with Hazel’s toes, making them dance along.
Alice freezes, Hazel’s pudgy feet in her hands, her brain experiencing the blue screen of death.
404 Error: program Alice.exe could not be found.
“Minivan!” Sebastian says, jumping up to stand on the couch and looking at the crowd of people at the door. “Hi, Minivan!” Sebastian waves, adorable in his onesie pajamas, and Van smiles at him.
“Hey, buddy,” she says, for all the world like this is a normal visit. Like it’s regular for her to be dropping by Alice’s cousin’s house in the middle of the day, with two of her family members and a dog clustered up behind her.
“We’re watching Moana!” he tells her as Aunt Sheila seems to give Van a hard shove from behind, forcing Van to trip across the threshold.
“Oh, I love that movie,” Marie says, coming into the house and perching on the arm of the couch next to Sebastian like she belongs there. Aunt Sheila lets go of Frank’s leash and he beelines for the dining room, zealously vacuuming up the crumbs under Hazel’s high chair.
All Alice can manage to say is, “I…what?”
What are they doing here?
What the fuck is happening? Has starting the same movie for the third time in a row created some sort of weird time loop, or opened a portal to a multiverse or something?
She watches with a detachment she worries may be bordering on hysteria as her two social circles fully collapse into each other.
Marie plucks Hazel out of Alice’s lap and immediately starts tickling her tummy while dropping onto the living room carpet to chat with Sebastian like they’re old friends, and Aunt Sheila is hanging everyone’s coats up on hooks like they live here.
“Um, hi,” Isabella’s saying to Aunt Sheila, clearly surrendering to whatever is happening in her house. “Great to meet you.”
“Look at this house!” Aunt Sheila says, louder than everyone else. “This is lovely! And it smells delicious! What are you making? What kind of stove is that? This sweater is so soft, where did you get it? Do you think it comes in orange?”
Aunt Sheila speed walks herself into the kitchen and Isabella follows her, shooting Alice a very confused and slightly afraid look over her shoulder as she goes, detouring around Frank, who is now licking her floor with great determination.
Alice finds herself standing up, somehow alone in a pocket of space with Van. Alice is wearing Isabella’s soft joggers and one of Henry’s All Mushrooms Are Magic sweatshirts, and Van looks as gorgeous as ever in her favorite thick hunter-green flannel shirt and her dark jeans.
“Hi,” Van says, and Alice wonders where her lungs have gone, her heart, her guts, because they’re surely not in her body anymore.
“Hi.”
Van looks nervous. She shoves her hands into the front pockets of her jeans, and the corners of her eyes are pinched in. She looks like she’s trying to make herself less tall, take up less space, and it would make Alice’s heart throb if she thought she still had one.
“Sorry for the entourage,” Van finally says, and Alice feels herself taking a step closer even though she didn’t mean to. “They got, um…a little excited when I said I was thinking about coming over here.”
Alice doesn’t know what to say to that. The fact that Aunt Sheila and Marie are here is confusing, of course, but Van being here—Van, who Alice just confessed her love to, Van, who Alice is fucking in love with—that’s the only thing Alice can think about right now.
“Did you mean it?” Van finally asks.
Alice bites her lip, trying to figure out what specifically Van is referring to. She meant it all, but lord knows there’s been enough miscommunication here for a couple of centuries at least. “Which part?”
Van licks her lips, and Alice almost passes out.
She’d thought that she’d wanted Van badly before, but none of those times have anything on this one.
She’d thought her final look at Van back at the house was the very last time Alice would ever lay eyes on her, but now, here she is.
Tall and real, long fingers and chiseled jawline, inconceivably standing in Isabella’s living room, and Alice is sure that the force of how badly she wants Van is going to kill her.
“You said you love me,” Van says, her voice soft.
Alice hears Marie shush Sebastian, stage-whispering, “Wait, buddy, I gotta hear this!”
“Yes,” Alice says, proud that her voice isn’t shaking yet. “I meant it.”
“Did you lie about anything else?” Van asks, and Alice tilts her head. It’s not what she expected Van to ask. “Anything but Nolan?”
“No,” Alice says quickly. “Nothing else.”
And of course she technically never…whatever.
Van takes a step closer, and Marie starts making a low rumble of excited sounds, like a teakettle getting ready to hit a full boil. “What do you want, Alice?” Van asks. “Five years from now, what does your life look like?”
Alice can’t help herself. She reaches out and touches Van’s sleeves, the thick, soft material of her shirt and the warm strength of her wrists below.
“You.” Her voice is hoarse now, cracking again, but she doesn’t let it stop her.
“This. Us. Here, with my family, and yours. And Frank. Just…with you.” She lets out a long, shuddering breath. “I just want you, Van.”
The Marie teakettle squeaks—only once, but very loudly.
She feels Van’s arms twitch under her fingertips.
“You know about the MS.” Van says it like it’s a factual query, but Alice knows what she’s really asking. “It’s a lot.”
Alice nods. “I do. And it—to tell the truth, it freaked me out for a while. But I’m…
” She takes a final step in, and she throws all caution to the wind.
She reaches up and cups Van’s perfect jaw in her hands, lets her thumbs brush against the soft skin of her cheeks, still cold from outside. “I’m all in.”
Alice faintly hears Isabella make a little sound from where she and Aunt Sheila are peeking out of the kitchen, sees out of the corner of her eye that Bella has a hand over her heart and Aunt Sheila may or may not be beaming and excitedly shaking Bella back and forth like a rag doll.
Marie actually shrieks and Sebastian does too, likely for a different reason but it still adds to the festive atmosphere as the worry in Van’s face slowly fades into the biggest, most purely joyful smile Alice has ever seen.
Van’s hands are on Alice now, one wrapping around her neck and one warm and steady on her hip, and Alice hears what sounds suspiciously like Isabella whooping as Van leans down, as beautiful and strong and soft as she’s ever been, and kisses Alice like nothing else exists.
“Fuck,” Van mumbles against Alice’s lips. “Me too, Al. I’m all in too.”
“Mommy!” Sebastian yells as Alice finally, finally lets herself sink into Van’s body, happily begins to be devoured by Van’s lips and her grasping hands. “What does ‘fuck’ mean?”
—
It’s less than a five-minute drive from Isabella’s house to Van’s.
Van drives with one hand on the steering wheel and the other entwined with Alice’s, both resting on Alice’s knee like they belong there.
Aunt Sheila and Marie have been relegated to taking an Uber home—although Alice has a sneaking suspicion they may end up watching all of Moana with Sebastian before they leave.
Ani DiFranco classics are softly coming through the old speakers of the station wagon, Ani DiFranco himself is curled up in the backseat napping off his Teddy Grahams windfall, and every breath smells like Van.
Alice can’t take her eyes off Van, who can clearly tell, a smile tugging at the corners of her mouth even as she keeps her focus on the road.
She pulls into her driveway and Alice gets out of the car, inordinately pleased that Van hadn’t done something idiotic like ask Alice if she wanted to go back to her own apartment.
If Alice had it her way, she’d never leave this tiny pocket of North Portland, would bounce between Van’s and Isabella’s and never get cold or lonely ever again.