“Remember when we used to come here all the time?” she asked. They had visited weekly when she was a kid, if not more often—Alice even remembered being at the museum with her mother, who had preferred the hall of gems and minerals. Alice ran her hands up and down her thighs. Her sailor pants were dark and stiff. She’d bought them at Alice Underground, her favorite store, and not just because it shared her name. It was still so strange to see her body—her young body, a body she hardly remembered as it was, because she’d been so busy seeing it as something it wasn’t.
“Only place in New York City where you would stop crying,” Leonard said, a wide smile on his face. He slapped the floor next to him. “Come on down.”
Alice flopped onto her back. Some of the stoners at Belvedere went to the light show at the planetarium right around the corner—the Pink Floyd one, with the flying pigs—when they were high, but Alice didn’t know why anyone would want to be anywhere other than in this room.
“I don’t know why I never come here anymore,” she said. “I feel like my blood pressure just dropped.”
“Since when do you worry about blood pressure? Man, sixteen ain’t what it used to be.” Leonard shifted his hands to his stomach, and Alice watched them rise and fall with his breath.
Alice thought about saying something right then. There were families pushing sleeping children in strollers and tourists lugging around shopping bags, but the room was quiet, and whatever Alice said, no one but her father would hear her.
Leonard had, of course, thought about time travel more than most people. Even though he routinely mocked terrible sci-fi novels and movies and television shows, even ones made by his friends, Alice knew that he loved it. The impossible being possible. The limits of reality being pushed beyond what science can fully explain. Sure, it was a metaphor, it was a trope, it was a genre, but it was also fun. No one—certainly no one Leonard liked—wrote science fiction because it was a tool. That was for assholes. Of all the writers in the world, Leonard’s least favorite were the fancy ones, the ones from highly ranked MFA programs and award ceremonies where one had to dress in black tie, who had descended briefly to earth and stolen something from the genres—the undead, perhaps, or a light apocalypse—before returning to heaven with it in their talons. Leonard liked the nerds, the ones with science fiction in their blood. Some of those fancy writers were deep, true nerds under the surface, and Leonard was okay with them. But Alice didn’t think that she could just start a conversation about nerds, or science fiction, or time travel, not without giving herself away, and she wasn’t ready to do that just yet. It wouldn’t be like telling Sam, Alice knew, who still had one eyebrow raised, like an agnostic who believed in something but not necessarily in God. Leonard had always trusted Alice—about which girl had pushed her off the slide in kindergarten, about which boy had teased her, about which teacher was grading unfairly. She wasn’t worried that he would doubt her. Alice was afraid of what would happen next because Leonard would believe her right away, without hesitation.
The whale was the length of the whole room, its nose pointing down, poised to dive into the inky depths. The wide tail looked like it was about to push upward, maybe even through the ceiling, to help propel the giant animal down. Alice closed her eyes and concentrated on how solid the floor was beneath her back.
“Did I ever tell you about when Simon and I went to see the Grateful Dead at the Beacon Theatre?”
He had.
“Go ahead,” Alice said, and smiled. She knew every word that was going to come out of his mouth.
“1976,” Leonard began. “Jerry had this white guitar. I know a lot of people who saw the Dead a thousand times, but I only saw them that one time. The Beacon can feel so small, depending where you’re sitting, and Simon had gotten tickets from his agent, who was this super hotshot, and somehow we were in the third row—the third row!—and every woman there was drop-dead gorgeous, and it was like being on another planet for four hours.”
This was what Alice had been missing. Not just the answers to questions that she’d never been brave enough to ask, and not just family history that no one else knew, and not just visions of her own childhood through her father’s eyes, but also this: the embarrassing stories she’d heard a thousand times and would never hear again. She could see the whole concert, Leonard’s sweaty, smiling face—before he was married, before he was a dad, before he’d published a book. She could see it as clearly as she could see the whale, even with her eyes closed.
29
When they got back to Pomander, the phone was ringing. Leonard swung his body aside and gestured for Alice to answer it.
“It’s for you,” he said.
“How do you know?” Alice said, and picked up the receiver.
“Jesus, I have been calling, like, every ten minutes for hours,” Sam said.
“Sorry, this is Alice, not Jesus.” Alice wound the cord around her pointer finger. Why did people think that having cell phones was less tethered than this? She’d been floating in space all day, unreachable, and now, connection.
“Oh, shut up, grandma. Where do you want to have dinner? I’ll meet you there.”
“Where should we have dinner, Dad?” Alice asked Leonard. He was standing over the kitchen table, looking through a stack of mail and magazines and who knows what.
“Let’s go to V&T. Then Sam can just walk and meet us. Sound good?”
“Yes, Sam, did you hear that? Gooey pizza. V&T. Six o’clock.” Alice turned her body away from her dad. “Anything else?”
“Yes,” Sam said, slightly breathless, as though she’d been jogging in place for hours and not just redialing the telephone. “I think I figured it out. Maybe. Potentially. I’ll tell you when I see you.” Alice felt a flame in her belly, a flare of hope, or anxiety, that buried itself in her rib cage.
“Okay,” Alice said, and hung up.
Leonard tossed the stack of mail back onto the table. “Why is it always just junk?” he asked.
The television was in an awkward place—perched on the end of the kitchen counter, where it could be swiveled one way to face the table and another to face the couch. The table was in the way of the couch, but there wasn’t much space, and anyway, Leonard and Alice were both used to it. The VCR was tucked underneath, all the wires dangling off the counter. If they’d had a different kind of cat, a normal cat and not Ursula, the wires would have been an irresistible trouble, but Ursula was above such things. They had hours before dinner. Alice opened and closed all the cabinet doors until she found the microwave popcorn. She waved it at her dad.
“Want to watch a movie?”
Leonard opened the closet, which was where the VHS tapes lived, and started calling out titles. “Wizard of Oz? Rebecca? Chitty Chitty Bang Bang? Bedknobs and Broomsticks? Mary Poppins? Stand by Me? Dirty Dancing? Back to the Future? Eraserhead? Prick Up Your Ears? Peggy Sue Got Married?”
“Peggy Sue,” Alice said. She stepped around the closet door so that she could see him. Leonard pulled the tape out of the box and handed it to her.
“Voilà,” he said. “Now, are we the two most smartest people or what? Other people are jogging, for fun, and we’re watching a movie in daylight hours.”