“Couldn’t sleep?” Van asks, her voice rough, and Alice wants to kiss her so badly that it hurts.
“No,” she says, but right now she can’t figure out why. She’s exhausted, suddenly. She can feel her head dropping, sinking down onto Van’s shoulder, can feel the little designs Van is aimlessly drawing on her back lulling her to sleep.
“What, um…what does this mean?” Van asks, and Alice blinks a couple times, as confused now as she is tired.
“What?” she asks, eloquent as always.
“You coming out here to me,” Van says. “After today, with him and the Snuggie and, you know. Your pregnancy.”
Alice scoffs—the pregnancy is ridiculous—but Van isn’t laughing.
“Are you really getting back with him?” Van asks, a bite in her voice now. “After everything?”
Alice figures she doesn’t mean the coma and the hospital and the amnesia. Not that kind of everything. Van means this everything, the gayer, more confusing everything that has Alice’s hand clenching the Snuggie over Van’s chest, her nose buried in the warmth of Van’s neck.
“It’s all more complicated now,” Alice says, too emotionally and physically exhausted to do a good job at walking the tightrope between evading the truth and outright lying. “I didn’t think he’d wake up.”
Van tenses under her. Alice wants to sleep but she can’t—she’s just said something wrong and she doesn’t know what itis.
“So, you’re saying, what? You hoped he would die?”
“No! Never.” That’s the truth. She never wanted him to die, but she had simply thought he would. Not a desired outcome, but a fact.
“But you’re saying if he’d died, we’d be together? The only way I’d get to be happy is if my brother was dead? And now that he’s alive—that I don’t have to mourn him—I have to lose you?”
Fuck.
Alice squeezes her eyes closed, presses herself tightly to Van. She wishes the layers of Snuggies weren’t there, that shecould dig herself into Van so tightly that they’d never be pulled apart. “No,” she breathes. “No, that’s not—I didn’t mean…” She trails off. She doesn’t know what she means. In a way, Van’s right.
If Nolan died, Alice could be with her.
If it weren’t for the MS.
Or, no.
If it weren’t for Alice’s absolute, abject, shameful cowardice related to the MS.
“So that’s it,” Van spits when Alice can’t find the words to defend herself, her voice almost loud enough to carry to the bedrooms. She shifts, pushing them both into more of a sitting position, still tangled up in each other and the Snuggies. “He’s not dead, so now you’re going to, like, shack up with him and make his babies?”
“No!” Alice is the one who is too loud now, and she tries to pull it back to a hoarse whisper. “God, of course not, Van. That’sinsane.”
“That’s not the song you were singing earlier.” Alice has never heard Van’s voice sound like this before, the harsh scrape of sandpaper under her words, the tremble of pain she’s trying so hard to conceal.
“Your mom said it,” Alice snaps. “Not me.”
“Well, why didn’t you say no?”
“Because it didn’t matter!” Alice hisses, her throat clenching like she’s yelling. “None of this fucking matters!”
It isn’t until Van’s eyes fill with tears that Alice realizes what she’s actually said, what Van thinks she meant. Not that things with Nolan don’t matter because they’ll never become anything, but that none ofthismatters. That Van doesn’t matter.
“No,” Alice says as quickly as she can, reaching out bothhands for Van. “Van, no. That’s not what I meant. I don’t think that. You matter.”
But Van is shaking her head.
“Look,” Van says, her body moving in earnest now, like she’s trying to get out from under Alice. “I can’t do this, okay? You know what I want, and I thought you wanted it too, but I’m not going to do this. I’m not going to stand here and let you—whatever. Have his babies and then crawl into my bed. That doesn’t work for me.”
She gets free, sliding off the couch and out from under the Snuggies. She stands, and it’s so dark but Alice can still see the pain in her eyes, the exhausted lines on her face.
