Matryoshka didn’t open until 5 p.m., but the guy on the phone said that if she was just looking for something she lost, she could come by whenever. Alice was sure that it had happened at the bar—dark, subterranean, and always a little bit sticky underfoot. If there was any secret pathway to the past and the future, it made sense that it would be underground, running alongside the 2/3 train tunnels, places where no one ever went if they didn’t want, in one way or another, to disappear.
Alice had read about homeless people who lived in the tunnels, and there were abandoned train stations, she knew, there was one right on 91st Street, you could see it if you were on the 1/9 train, if you were paying attention. That had to be it—someone who had dug too far, crossed through some boundary, messed some shit up. Alice wished that she had paid attention when Leonard and his friends talked about science fiction novels, instead of just making fun of them for being grown men who spent all their time talking about parallel universes.
“So, what’s it like, being a grown-up?” Sam asked.
“It’s okay, I guess. I can do whatever I want. I can go wherever I please.”
Sam started singing, “And nothing compares to you . . .”
Alice laughed. “Yeah. I guess right now I just feel like if I had made different choices, then everything would be different. And everything is okay, you know; I’m not dead, I’m not in jail. But I can’t help wondering if things could be better.” She thought about Leonard, and all the tubes and machines, and the frowning doctors.
According to Sam, they had only been to the bar once or twice—all the times that Alice remembered spending there must have happened later than Alice remembered. The summer after they graduated, maybe, or even during college, when they were both home for Thanksgiving and seeing friends. Alice thought they looked too young to just walk in, especially during the daylight hours—they would have to make something up.
“What are we looking for?” Sam whispered.
“Something,” Alice said. “We are looking for something. A doorway, a tunnel. A light switch? I don’t know. I think we’ll know it when we see it, if we see it. Just think about any time travel book or movie you’ve ever seen, okay?”
“Got it,” Sam said. “I mean, I will try.” Their dynamic was already different, Alice could feel it. It wasn’t that Sam didn’t trust her—clearly, she did. But Sam understood that the Alice she was talking to wasn’t just her Alice; she was like a chaperone Alice, a babysitter Alice. She hadn’t even told her that she worked at Belvedere yet. Then she’d be Professional Administrator Alice, and what fun would that be?
The door of Matryoshka was propped open, and the girls walked in slowly, waiting for their eyes to adjust to the dark. It was empty, with rows of bottles lined up on the bar and a half-seen person bent over on the other side, counting. Sam gripped Alice’s elbow, clearly freaked. Alice understood—her friend’s greatest powers were in situations she could control and organize, like studying for the LSATs or marrying a boy who worshipped her.
“Hello?” Alice said. She clutched Sam’s arm back, holding tight.
The bartender stood up straight—the one who had overserved her in such a friendly manner only the night before. “Oh, hi!” Alice said, relaxing. “Hi. Nice to see you again!”
“Girls,” the bartender said, both a greeting and a wary identification. He gave no indication that he recognized her.
“I lost something here, I think,” Alice said, and cleared her throat. “I called earlier. Can we just look around for a minute? We’re not going to drink anything.”
He started moving bottles back into the racks behind the bar. The whole place smelled terrible, like the cumulative regret of a thousand strangers with a soup?on of vomit and Lysol. “Okay,” he said as he worked.
Alice pulled Sam into the corner by the jukebox. “Okay, so I was here, and he was here, and I told him it was my birthday, and he gave me many free shots, and then I got drunk and I spilled something on my sweater and I think I handed out some tapas to some sorority girls.”
“When was this?” Sam asked. Their noses were almost touching, skin orange from the light of the tiny bulbs behind the songs.
“Last night. My last night.”
“Got it, got it. So we’re just looking for something weird? Like . . . a door? A creepy hallway?” Sam looked at the room around them—an ancient pinball machine, a sagging couch that probably held DNA to solve half a dozen crimes, the jukebox.
“The photo booth!” Alice said. She pulled Sam by the hand past the bar and into the next room.
The photo booth curtain was open and the seat empty. Alice scooted in, and Sam slid in beside her.
“It looks normal to me,” Sam said.
“Me too,” Alice said. “I just wish I could Google this.”
“Are you talking future to me?” Sam pursed her lips. “If you’re going to do that, then I’m going to need to know more about who I married, and whether it’s Brad Pitt or Denzel Washington.”
“They are both too old for you. Even grown-up you. But fine! Fine. Okay, I know I said I wasn’t going to, but in the future, there’s this thing called Google, and you just type something in and it spits back thousands of answers. And there’s this website called Wikipedia that does the same thing, basically. And I really wish that I could just type in ‘time travel help please’ and get some answers.”
“So you just type in anything? And it tells you everything you need to know? Does anyone do their homework?” Sam asked.
“I don’t think so,” Alice said. She ran her finger around the instructions for how to operate the booth and the dollar slot. She stood up, pried her wallet out of her back pocket, and yanked out a crinkly dollar bill. She slid it into the slot, and the light started to flash. Alice and Sam posed once, twice, three times, four times, and then the whirring of the internal mechanisms began, and they slid out.
While they waited for the pictures to develop, Alice walked the perimeter of both rooms, feeling along the tacky walls, looking behind pictures that hadn’t been moved in decades. There was nothing weird, or at the very least, nothing weirder than seeing a nighttime place during the day, the bizarro version of being in a school after hours. The machine finally spit out the photos and Sam and Alice hurried back over, holding the still-wet strip by its edges.
“Classic,” Sam said approvingly. Kissy faces, tongues out, eyes open, eyes closed.
“I love it,” Alice said. She could see herself in them—her sixteen-year-old face, of course, but the rest of her, too. It was something in her irises, in the tension in her mouth. It wasn’t the exact same photo Sam had given her for her fortieth birthday, but it was close, like the difference between fraternal twins.
“You keep it,” Sam said. “A birthday present, from me to you.”
Alice felt slightly defeated. “Let’s just go back to Pomander. I want to spend as much time as possible with my dad.”
“Okay,” Sam said. They waved goodbye to the confused bartender and went back through the turnstiles, flashing their school passes. They slid to the end of a row of empty seats.
“Tell me something else,” Sam said. “Something good.”
“You move to New Jersey,” Alice said, and smiled.
Sam threw a fake punch. “You’re just playing with me.”
Alice nodded. Sometimes the truth was hard to hear.
26
Leonard wasn’t home when they got to Pomander, but Ursula crisscrossed through their legs as Sam and Alice walked through the house and back to Alice’s room. There was a Post-it note stuck to her door that said Back soon —Dad.
“So what’s the plan?” Sam asked, curling up on Alice’s bed. She leaned over and picked up a copy of Seventeen magazine. “I can’t believe you subscribe to this garbage.”
“For tonight? Or for my life?” Alice sat next to her.