“I’m not saying that I think it’s garbage, Dad. I’m just saying that it’s sort of no duh. Someone would buy it, and publish it, and give you tons of money. So why not?” Alice blushed.
“I think what Alice is asking, Leonard,” Sam said, “is whether there is a Time Sisters in the works. You know, same general idea, just with girls instead of boys, because girls are smarter in every way.”
Leonard nodded. “I hear you, I do. And thank you, Sam, for what is truthfully a million-dollar idea that I should have had years ago. But what’s the fun in doing something again? If I wrote the same book again, just with different people in it, don’t you think that would be boring?”
Alice and Sam shrugged.
“It’s a bit like Spider-Man, if I may be so bold. When you have a successful book, you have the power to publish another, but the reason the book was successful in the first place creates a sense of responsibility to one’s readers—they liked this, which is why I have that, and so on. There are some writers who write the same book over and over again, once a year, for decades, because their readers enjoy it and they can do it, and they do it well, and that’s that. And then there are some writers, like me”—here Leonard smiled—“who find the whole idea so utterly paralyzing that they’d rather watch Jeopardy! with their teenage daughter and just write what they want to write and not worry about anyone else ever seeing it.”
“Jeopardy! is a really good show,” Sam said. “I get it.”
Alice didn’t think Sam got it. Sam had more academic and intellectual ambition in her toenails than most people had in their entire bodies, just like her mom. Sam had gone straight from undergrad to law school, bing bang boom, without so much as coming up for air. Alice got it, though. She saw it all the time at Belvedere—the parents who carried tennis rackets had children who carried tennis rackets. The parents with drinking problems and well-stocked home bars often were the ones called into the school counselor’s office about the Olde English forty-ounce found in Junior’s locker. The scientists had little scientists; the misogynists had little misogynists. Alice had always thought of her professional life in perfect contrast with her father’s—he’d had wild success, and she, none, just hanging on to something stable like a seahorse with its tail looped around some seagrass—but now she thought that she’d been wrong. He was afraid, too, and happier to stay close to what had worked, rather than risk it all on something new.
“I’m sorry, Dad,” Alice said. “I know how you feel.”
Leonard put his hand on her cheek and gave her a gentle pat. “You always did, you know that? It was very strange. Even when you were a very small child, and I asked you a question, somehow you always knew the answers. It was like someone was hiding in the bushes, and going to jump out and say, Ha! You thought this child knew the difference between a marsupial and a mammal, and she’s only three! But no one ever jumped out. You just knew.”
“You really should, though, Dad. What Sam said. It would be so good—you know it would, don’t you? People would love it. Just because Time Brothers was, like, this world smash doesn’t mean that another book would be a total flop or something. It’s not a reason not to try.”
Leonard dug his spoon into the bottom of his paper cup. “When did you two get so smart, huh?” The girls had already finished their massive quantities of ice cream, and Leonard stood up and collected the detritus and threw it in the garbage can, then swept all the errant, escaped sprinkles off the tabletop and into his palm and threw those away, too. Sam looked at Alice and cocked her head to one side. “I have an idea,” she said. “I have to go home to look at something, but I’ll meet you back at Pomander, okay? Page me if you need me. Thanks for the ice cream, Lenny.”
Leonard bowed. “Anytime.”
Sam scurried out the door, waving. She blew a kiss to Alice, who caught it, suddenly nervous to again be alone with the truth.
“Are you too old for the whale?” Leonard asked.
28
The museum was always crowded on saturdays, but no matter how busy it was, people crammed into the dinosaur exhibits on the upper floors, which Alice hadn’t particularly cared about since she was five. That wasn’t where they wanted to go. Leonard flashed his membership card at the entrance and they quickly turned to the left, passing by a bronze Teddy Roosevelt and a few dioramas that no doubt greatly underestimated the tension between the Indigenous people of the region and the colonizing pilgrims. Leonard and Alice crossed through a doorway into a room that felt like a jungle, complete with life-sized tiger and a clamshell that was big enough to swallow even the tiger. That was always how Alice knew they were close.
It had a real name, of course, the Milstein Hall, but no one called it that. How could you, with a whale the size of a city bus swimming overhead and the dark sounds of the ocean all around you? Being in that room felt like sitting at the bottom of the sea, untouchable by whatever was happening on the surface. The upper balcony had spider crabs and jellyfish, all sorts of creatures lining the walls, but the real action was down the stairs, under the whale, surrounded by enormous hand-painted dioramas. The manatee, sleepily floating as if witnessed forever mid-dream. The dolphins, jumping show-offs. The seal, recently clobbered to death by a gigantic walrus. In the corner, almost hidden by coral and fish, a pearl diver. Leonard and Alice walked carefully down the stairs without talking. The room wanted silence in the same way that a movie theater wanted silence, or a church pew.
The problem with adulthood was feeling like everything came with a timer—a dinner date with Sam was at most two hours, with other friends, probably not even as long. There was maybe waiting for a table, there was a night at a bar, there was a party that went late, but even that was just a few hours of actual time spent. Most of Alice’s friendships now felt like they were virtual, like the pen pals of her youth. It was so easy to go years without seeing someone in person, to keep up to date just through the pictures they posted of their dog or their baby or their lunch. There was never this—a day spent floating from one thing to another. This was how Alice imagined marriage, and family—always having someone to float through the day with, someone with whom it didn’t take three emails and six texts and a last-minute reservation change to see one another. Everyone had it when they were kids, but only the truly gifted held on to it in adulthood. People with siblings usually had a leg up, but not always. There were two boys from Belvedere, best friends since kindergarten, who had grown up and married a pair of sisters, and now all four of their children went to Belvedere, driven by one mom or the other in a little cousin carpool. That was next-level friendship—locking someone in through marriage. It seemed positively medieval, like when you realized that all the royal families in the world were more or less cousins. Even just the concept of cousins felt like bragging—Look at all these people who belong to me. Alice had never felt like she belonged to anyone—or like anyone belonged to her—except for Leonard.
He had walked to the center of the room and lowered himself onto the floor. Alice watched as he stretched out on his back, his scuffed sneakers flopping out to the sides. He wasn’t the only one—a family with a small baby was also lying down, staring up at the vast belly of the whale. Alice knelt down next to her dad.