Page 42 of Alice Rue Evades the Truth
“Yes, it is,” Babs says, smoothing down the sheet and studiously not looking at her daughter. “He wanted to be here to support you.”
Van doesn’t look at her mom either, staring at Nolan with hollow eyes. Her voice is shaking, and Alice wants nothing more than to reach out to her, to run her hands down Van’s arms, to curl up against her back and let Van lean into her. “You moved here because you wanted to be a bigger fish in a smaller pond at work,” she says flatly. “And because it made Mom happy. It had nothing to do with me.”
“You wanted to be here to help Van with the MS!” Babs’s voice is shrill now, and then there’s a ringing silence.
Or maybe it’s just Alice’s ears that are ringing.
To help Van with the MS? As in multiple sclerosis, MS? As in the degenerative disease that killed Michelle Obama’s dad, as in the one that Selma Blair fromLegally Blondehas? As in the one that lands people in wheelchairs and hospitals? That MS?
To help Van with the…
Van…Van has MS?
Alice blinks, rewinding and replaying every interaction she’s had with Van. She remembers the first time Van seemed tired, the day they went up to Nolan’s office and she walked slowly and leaned against things with big circles under her eyes. She kept opening and closing her hands that day, like she was trying to increase circulation to them. She remembers Babs’s concern about Van’s health, about if she should be opening her own PT clinic. She thinks about how Van has been translating what the neurologists have been saying this whole time, how she knew all about the MRI; Alice thought it was because of her professional training, but maybe it was because of this.
Because there’s something wrong with her brain too.
“Well, if that’s why you moved here, then you might as well go right back to L.A.,” Van snarls, and even Alice can tell she’s furious with her mom, not her brother, but she’s saying it to Nolan anyway. “Since you’ve done fuck all for me and the fucking MS.”
“Vanessa!” Babs is standing now, her cheeks pink, her hands balled up into fists at her sides, but Van is pushing through everyone and stomping out of the room, like maybe if her boots are loud enough on the floor, no one will see the tears in her eyes.
There’s a long, horribly loud silence, eventually broken by Marie’s sarcastic, “Nice one, Mom.” She hops off the counter and grabs Alice’s arm. “Come on,” she says, pulling Alice out of the room with her. “Let’s go find her.”
But, no. Alice can’t go find her. She needs—she needs a minute. Or ten.
She begs off, telling Marie she has to make a phone call andshe’ll find them in a few, then takes the elevator up to a random floor and curls up in a chair in the farthest waiting room she can find, pulling out her phone and typingmultiple sclerosisinto her search bar with shaking fingers.
Words jump out at her, each one worse than the last.Autoimmune disease. Nervous system, brain, spine. Chronic, disabling. Unpredictable relapses. Permanent damage. Progressive.
Incurable.
She claps a hand over her mouth, trying to stifle her sob. God, poor Van. Strong, beautiful, stoic Van, whose own body is eating itself up from the inside. Van, who works with her hands, who stands all day, who fixes other people’s bodies and their problems, who holds her entire family together.
No. It doesn’t matter what Alice feels, what she wants, how looking at Van takes her breath away, what it felt like in the bed with her and in the bathroom, to be pressed against her, to be wanted by her. No.
She can’t be with her. She can’t.
Van is sick. Van has a progressive, permanent, horrible disease and Alice cannot—she absolutely cannot—watch someone else she loves waste away and die in front of her.
She can’t.
She won’t.
Seventeen
Three days later, on Monday after work, Alice stands tall in Babs’s living room and clears her throat loudly to get everyone’s attention so she can make the speech she and Isabella incessantly rehearsed over the weekend. Even poor little Sebastian could probably recite the entire speech from memory at this point, and he still hasn’t even nailed the alphabet song.
She practiced it twice in front of Delilah at work today, and now she’s here. Standing in front of all of the Altmans, except for Nolan who is still at Portland Grace, saying it exactly like she practiced. “Listen, there’s a lot going on right now. With the amnesia and everything. So I’m going to, um…” She takes a deep breath in and out, summoning courage from the memory of Hazel’s (likely unrelated) applause yesterday. “I’m going to step back for a while. I know Nolan doesn’t remember me right now, and I don’t want to add that pressure onto him. He needs to focus on his recovery, so I’m going to back off for a while, and whenever he’s ready, we can start dating again, if he wants to. But if not, that’s okay too. In the meantime,though, I really hope he gets better quickly, and that you know how much I’ve loved getting to know you all.”
No one says anything, and Alice immediately starts to sweat. She’s never seen the Altmans silent before. Especially not Aunt Sheila. Even Hazel had said something when she’d finished, although she’s guessing “Where Daddy” was less a compliment and more a plea to be rescued from Alice’s company.
It’s Marie finally who squeaks, “What?”
“You’re…” Van clears her throat. “You’re, what? Just…leaving? Us?”
Alice tries not to look at her. She can’t look at her. She can’t be in love with her and she can’t look at her and she can’t think about her slowly decaying in that hospital without crying and she’s trying to pretend to be fine.
“He has enough to deal with right now,” Alice says, digging deep for a line that was cut from a prior draft. “Really, it’s okay.”
