“It’s Alice.”
“Hi, Alice. Why are you calling me at the ass crack of dawn? Are you okay? Oh, fuck, it’s your birthday!” Sam cleared her throat. “Ha-appy birthday to you . . .”
“Okay, okay, yes, thank you. You don’t have to sing.” Alice watched her reflection as she talked. “I was just checking to make sure of something. Can you come over? When you’re up? Or can I come there? Just call me when you’re up, okay?” Her chin was as sharp as a knife. Why had Alice never written poems about her chin, taken photos of her chin, painted portraits of her chin?
“Okay, birthday bitch. Whatever you say. Love you.” Sam hung up, and then Alice did, too. Her closet shared a wall with the bathroom, and she heard her father go in and flick on the light and the whirring fan. The tap turned on—he was brushing his teeth. She hadn’t heard the door close, which, with a shoddy lock, was the only way for the two of them to communicate to each other that they needed privacy. Alice listened to her father brush and rinse and spit and knock his toothbrush against the lip of the sink before settling it back into its glass cup with a jangle as it knocked against hers. It had been so long since she’d thought about those sounds—the coffee grinder, the slippered shuffle down the hall. Alice rooted around on the floor and in her closet until she found clothes that smelled clean.
18
Leonard was sitting in his spot again, reading a book. Alice walked gingerly, like she might fall into a manhole at any second. Her father turned a page and stuck out his chin to let Ursula rub her face against it. Alice watched Leonard out of one eye while she opened the fridge and took out the milk. The cereal lived in the cabinet next to the plates and glasses, a collection of boxes beside the jars of peanut butter and the cans of soup and tomato sauce. Alice took out the box of Grape-Nuts, her father’s favorite.
“Are you okay, Dad? You feeling okay?” She watched Leonard’s face for any sign that he knew what was happening, that he recognized that something was amiss. But it was his face that was amiss—tiny crinkles around his eyes, but a full beard, a full smile. He was young, he was young, he was young. Alice did the math in her head—if she was sixteen, it meant that Leonard was forty-nine years old. Less than a decade older than she was. Alice was used to thinking of life as a series of improvements—high school to college, college to adulthood, twenties to thirties. Those had all felt like laps in a race she was doing well in—but Alice could see in her father all the ruin that was to come. The trips to the hospital, the endless doctor’s visits, once he agreed to go. The hearing aids, after years of yelling What, what, what? across the table in restaurants.
“Sure, why?” Leonard narrowed his eyes at her.
“No reason.” Alice looked at the cereal box. “I don’t know anyone else who buys this,” she said. “In my whole life, not one other person.”
Leonard shrugged. “I think you need to meet some more people.”
Alice laughed but also doubled over her bowl so that Leonard couldn’t see that tears had appeared in her eyes. She blinked them away, finished making her cereal, and finally went to sit next to her father.
He had the New York Times, The New Yorker, New York magazine, and an issue of People with JFK Jr. and Carolyn Bessette’s wedding on the cover. “Oh, man,” Alice said. “So sad.”
Leonard picked up the magazine and inspected it. “I see, yes. I, too, thought that there might be a chance for you, an old-fashioned child bride. Could have been great.” He let the magazine fall back to the table and gave her upper arm a squeeze. Alice’s breath caught in her throat. It felt real. The kitchen felt real, her body felt real. Her dad felt real. And John-John was newly married, and alive.
“No, I mean. Oh,” Alice paused. “Right.” She spooned some Grape-Nuts into her mouth. “These are so weird,” she said. “It’s like the parts that got left over when they were making good cereal, the crumbs, and they decided not to be wasteful and just repackaged them.” When she was sitting next to her father in the hospital, so badly wanting him to open his eyes and talk to her, she had not imagined them starting with Grape-Nuts.
Leonard snapped his fingers. “Resourceful and delicious. So, what’s the big plan for the day? You have your prep class at ten, hang out, do whatever, and we’ll have dinner with Sam, right? And then I’m heading down to the convention hotel, and I’ll be back tomorrow night, after my panel. You sure you don’t mind?”
Alice put her elbows on the table. Being a kid was wild—it was someone else’s job to buy the milk and the cereal, to make sure that there was toothpaste and toilet bowl cleaner and cat food, but everything you did—an SAT prep course on Saturdays, going to high school—was in service of some ambiguous, soft-focus future. Ursula walked across the open newspaper and sniffed at Alice. Like many black cats’, Ursula’s eyes sometimes looked green and sometimes looked yellow. She nosed up at Alice, who lowered her face to the cat in response.
“How old is Ursula?” Alice asked. The cat sniffed Alice’s cereal and then jumped back down to the floor.
“One cannot simply assign a number to a creature like that,” Leonard said. “I was not present at Ursula’s birth, and so I can only make a sorry human guess. She was already full grown when we found her. She was in front of number eight, remember? After we brought her home, I thought someone must be missing her—a cat this good you don’t just let go missing.”
Alice nodded. “I remember.” Maybe Ursula had traveled, too, from some point in the future when cats lived forever. Or maybe there was a new Ursula every year. “So, where is the test prep class?”
“At school. Same place as it was last week.”
“At Belvedere?”
Leonard snapped the paper in half, folding it neatly down the middle. Why did they make newspapers so enormous, so that you needed to hold them like that? “Yes.” He tilted his head to the side. “Are you okay? Is this birthday brain fever?” The back page had the TV listings, and Leonard had circled things that he wanted to watch so that he wouldn’t forget. There was a Hitchcock marathon, and the new episode of Early Edition.
“I guess so,” Alice said. The idea of going into school—into her building, the original building—actually sounded good, like she might walk through the door and just bump into Emily and Melinda and ask them to take her straight to the hospital for a psychological evaluation.