“And my mom, she’s so happy to meet you. For real. She’s always believed, deep down, that Nolan is, like, a good guy who will settle down with a nice girl like you, get married, give her grandchildren, all that shit.”
She grimaces at Alice, and Alice hears everything she isn’t saying. The way Babs must have put all of her eggs in Nolan’s basket, never expecting her gay daughter to have those things, to give her those grandchildren. Marie’s too young and Van’s too queer, so it all fell on Nolan. Who is now an inch from death.
“And now you’re here, and she’s like, he did it! We’re so close!” Van twists up her lips a little bit. “Everyone is so pleased he finally ended his eternal fuck-boy phase. Honestly, if heweren’t in a coma, I think they’d be throwing him a Welcome to Monogamy party.”
Alice tries to laugh, but she’s pretty sure she sounds more like a dying farm animal. Eternal fuck-boy phase? Great. Simply, absolutely the best. Of course Alice’s fake-boyfriend ends up being quite possibly the biggest player in the world. Alice isn’t exactly anyone’s dream girl, she knows that—poor, uneducated, sarcastic as shit, unwilling to laugh at jokes that aren’t funny, not hot or skinny—and Nolan is sounding less and less like someone who’d pick her for her winning personality.
It doesn’t matter, not in the grand scheme of Nolan’s life, or even in the delicate balance of maintaining this fiction for the family, but if Nolan wakes up, the odds that he falls madly in love with her are getting slimmer and slimmer.
And making the truly wonderful situation worse, now not only are his parents and his aunt thrilled that Nolan settled down with her, but Van is too? Even Van wants to believe this absurd fantasy, that her fourteenth-floor brother found himself in a relationship with a dowdy, impoverished receptionist? Even Van feels closer to her brother and more settled knowing that he had Alice these past few months?
Fuck Alice’s entire fucking life.
After only a few more minutes, Van leaves to get some rest, and Alice spends the rest of her shift with her head in her hands, trying to figure out how she—a person who prides herself on being realistic, responsible, and pessimistic—landed in this absolutely ridiculous scenario. It’s certainly the most out-of-character thing she’s ever done, going along with this ruse that can only end in loss and disappointment.
Besides the shame of inventing a romance out of a single scrap of eye contact, Alice is now full of information aboutNolan she never wanted, and she’s starting to feel something beyond embarrassed—ashamed, maybe, or even disturbed—about the enormous crush she’s been harboring for so long despite knowing nothing about him except that he never stopped to chat with her. Would Nolan ever have seen Alice as anything other than a frumpy ornament in his otherwise pristine lobby? If she’d gotten another job, would he even have noticed she was gone?
She wonders why he regularly comes into the office in the wee hours of the morning; she’d daydreamed that he was deeply dedicated to some clients in Japan or something, but maybe he was running away from one-night stands, preferring to leave after sex rather than have an actual conversation with a human woman. She wonders what his days are like, his nights. His friends. The women he actually dates.
She should have walked away from this mess immediately, hopped out of the moving SUV if she’d had to. It’s always mattered to her that she stick to her guns, be fiercely independent, so she tries not to think about how easily swayed she’s been by Aunt Sheila’s snark, Marie’s hope, and Babs’s soft hugs. How little it took to make her stay and lie.
Stuck behind her desk, lonely and exhausted, she definitely tries not to think about Van at all. She doesn’t want to think about Van’s kind smile, her understanding eyes, her broad shoulders and long legs, her gentle touch, her dykey outfits and cologne, her enormous dog, or her beat-up station wagon.
She’s trying not to get too deep with Van in particular, but apparently that message hasn’t traveled from her brain to her body, because her fingers type out and send a text before her shift ends.I’m going home to sleep, but could you come get me on your way back to the hospital this afternoon?
Five
Babs isn’t at Nolan’s bedside, which eases some of the clenching pressure in Alice’s chest. Marie seems to be on duty this afternoon, along with the man who is either her dad or her uncle. Alice really needs to figure out which one is which, but even face-to-face with this one, she’s pretty sure she wouldn’t be able to pick him out of a lineup of other sixty-year-old white guys. Dad/Uncle is reading the newspaper—areal, physical newspaper—and Marie is buried in a terrifyingly large textbook with headphones on. Alice belatedly realizes that it’s almost Christmas, so Marie’s probably in finals.
Van was right; talk about bad timing.
It’s pretty awkward. Dad/Uncle isn’t a talker like Babs is, and Van seems significantly quieter around her family than she is with Alice alone. Marie is the only one who seems like she could bridge the uncomfortable silence with light chatter, but she’s so deep in what looks like biology that Alice honestly isn’t sure she knows that Alice and Van showed up half an hour ago. Alice leans against the wall, listening to the nurses in thehallway gossiping about the uppity medical residents, and wishes she’d brought a book.
Finally a nurse comes in to check on Nolan, but she doesn’t have any updates to share. Van asks a question that Alice doesn’t understand, and the nurse gives an equally incomprehensible answer. Alice hadn’t realized physical therapist training involved so much neurology—Van clearly knows a lot—but it kind of makes sense.
“His vitals are steady,” the nurse translates for Dad/Uncle when he looks up from his newspaper. “No changes today.”
He frowns at her. “At what point is it a concern that he hasn’t woken up?”
The nurse looks uncomfortable. Alice is pretty sure the answer is “already,” but clearly the nurse doesn’t want to be so blunt about it. “It’s hard to say,” she hedges, and Alice tries not to smile. She’s had some bad experiences, of course, but overall, nurses are the bright spot in the hospital. “Each patient is different.”
Van huffs out a breath, clearly not finding this vagueness as predictable as Alice is. As a PT, Van must not be a stranger to this type of cover-your-ass hedging that is so common in the ICU, but maybe this is her first experience as a family member instead of a provider, hearing it rather than saying it.
Maybe this is her first experience with someone she loves being stuck in the liminal twilight between life and death. That thought, for the first time, makes Alice want to take care of Van right back. Of Nolan’s entire family. Her thoughts are somewhere between bitter envy andoh, sweet summer child,but mostly she wants to smooth the worry lines burrowing into Van’s forehead, the slight shake of Dad/Uncle’s newspaper, the pinch of Marie’s hunched shoulders.
“I’m going to take him for another MRI now,” the nurse says, starting to unhook Nolan from all of the equipment.
“How long will that take?” Dad/Uncle asks Van in an undertone, almost like he doesn’t want the nurse to know that he doesn’t know without asking.
Van looks over at the nurse. “Brain only?”
The nurse nods.
“With and without contrast?”
She nods again.
Van turns to her older male family member. “Probably around forty minutes,” she says. She scoots her chair neatly out of the way as the nurse starts pushing the bed out of the room and says to her, “No pacemaker, metal jewelry, or implants.”
