“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 witheverything 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 holdingher 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.”
Twenty-Six
Unfortunately it turns out that it’s easier to realize you’re fucking stupid than to figure out what to do about it. Obviously some kind of admission to Van is required, some kind of prostrating at the altar of “I’m Sorry I’ve Been Such an Ableist Asshole and in My Defense I Have Some Trauma but Also I Love You, Might You Please Ever Be Able to Forgive Me?” but Alice isn’t quite sure how to pull that off.
It’s been a week since they had sex and Van hasn’t responded to the text Alice sent after cravenly sneaking out of her own apartment. Marie and Babs haven’t reached out since then either, and Alice wonders what Van told them, why they erased themselves from her life in a way they’d refused to do for the previous eight weeks.
God, has it only been eight weeks? Everything before Nolan collapsed in her lobby feels like a lifetime ago. Alice can barely remember who she was before the Altmans and Van and Isabella. It’s like all of that was a long, dreary, mundane dream, and now that she’s awake she can’t believe she’d thought thatrepetitive nightmare was her real life.
The only problem is that she’s not sure how to fix any of it, how to beg Van to fall into her arms again. She’s not sure how to confess her feelings for Van without revealing the entire lie, because she’d need to say something like,Oh yeah, LOL, don’t worry, I’m not actually into Nolan at all,which kind of leads right intoI promise sleeping with Van isn’t weird because I never actually slept with Nolan.But that pretty much requires a dip intoOh yeah, we were never dating, ha ha,and then, although she’d like to linger on thetechnically I never actually said we were,she’s pretty sure she’d have to jump right toYup, I straight-up lied to you during your darkest days, please accept me into your close-knit and loving family,which seems…rough.
It’s been a few days since her epiphany, and she’s still working with a very early draft of her speech, which would be okay except for the fact that the three Altman siblings are walking into the lobby of the office building right now.
Alice can’t help but flash back to the first time a group of Altmans descended on the lobby, mere hours after Nolan collapsed. Alice had still been in shock from what had happened—his fall to the ground, her desperate attempt at CPR, the paramedics sweeping him away without a backward glance—and a troop of agitated, excitable people had come rushing in, dressed like aliens who were approximating human clothing for the first time. They’d been loud and chaotic and wrong about everything and Alice had loved them immediately.
Today the three of them are dressed normally even though it’s not even seven in the morning, and, more important, Nolan is there, standing and walking on his own, looking so much more like the man Alice had pined after for so long. His black hair is combed, his sharp jaw clean-shaven, the sweater covering his chest clearly expensive. Nolan Altman, FourteenthFloor, is back.
Van and Fourteenth-Floor Nolan must have switched lives; she looks like the one who has been recovering. There are bags under her eyes, her cheeks are pale, and she won’t make eye contact with Alice. She’s standing behind her siblings, her usually long, rapid strides diminished into a shuffle, like she hopes Alice won’t notice she’s there.
It’s Alice’s first sight of Van since she left her—naked, asleep, sated—curled up in Alice’s sheets. Her first sight since her revelation at Isabella’s house, since she started drafting the speech.
Alice wants to run to her, to kiss her, to have some brilliant and thoughtful apology spill out of her mouth on cue, but instead she slides off her stool and squares her shoulders. She’s not sure what’s coming right now, but she’s going to try to be ready for it.
“Hi, Alice,” Nolan says as they reach her enormous black desk.
“Hi,” she says, wary. None of them look happy, and Marie looks particularly upset. Alice wonders why she isn’t back at school in Corvallis—surely her semester has started by now?
“Guess what?” Nolan says, and Alice realizes she still hasn’t talked to him enough to have a baseline for his tone, his speech patterns. She can’t tell if he’s pissed right now, or pleased, or simply going to ask her for a key to his office.
“What?”
