“How many children do you have?” Alice asked. “Your husband is Josh, right? Who you met in college? At Harvard?”
“Jesus, Alice.” Sam let her heavy foot fall back to the floor. “Are you having a stroke?”
“No, I’m fine—” Alice stopped. “I’m not fine. I mean, I might be fine, eventually, but right now I seem to be in a slightly . . . weird place?” She paced back and forth at the foot of her bed, the feathers waving. Alice stopped in front of the window and looked out at the park. Some of the trees were already yellow and orange. It had been almost a whole day. Time was going to keep going, churning away. Alice had to make a decision. “Do you remember my sixteenth birthday?”
Alice watched in the window’s reflection as Sam swiveled her body toward her. Sam’s belly was the shape of a perfectly taut basketball. Like a three-dimensional clock. This time, Alice knew what it felt like, to have someone swimming around inside your body. She felt a little ghost flicker near her belly button, a reminder.
“I do,” Sam said. “Do you?” Samantha Rothman-Wood, she wasn’t going to give anything up, Alice thought, her gratitude boundless. There was no friend like a teenage girl, even if that teenage girl grew up. She turned around and walked back to the bed, where she and her feathers perched next to Sam. “I have two children, and this is my third. I am married to Josh, and we met at Harvard. What about you, Alice? Where’d you come from? Where’d you go?” Her voice was gentle—Sam was a good mom. She cooked, she played, she let the kids watch television, she loved their dad, she went to therapy. If Alice could have chosen a mother, she would have chosen Sam.
“When you didn’t pick up today,” Alice said, “I got worried that something had happened, you know? Between us?”
Sam laughed. “Yeah, something happened. Between us, we have four and a half kids. Do you know how hard it is to find a time when no one is saying your name, or touching your body, or needs help going to the bathroom?”
“Have we talked about it ever? I’m sorry. I feel like a really bad friend right now, because not only did I tell you this very big, very weird, crazy thing, but now I have no idea if it’s something that we just pretended never happened. Does that even make sense?” Alice put her face in her hands.
Sam put a hand on her belly, and Alice could see it move—whoever was inside was adding something to the conversation. “So, you’re like 13 Going On 30, but it’s 40 Going On 16 Going On 40? Something like that?”
“Exactly,” Alice said. She sank down next to Sam and put her head on her shoulder.
“That’s trippy,” Sam said. “But okay.” She paused. “Either I believe you again or I believe that you have ongoing psychosis, which is sort of the same thing, if you think about it. You believe this is happening to you, and I believe that you believe it. And obviously Leonard believed it, too.”
“Why do you say that?” Alice asked.
Someone knocked on the door, and then Tommy poked his head in. Both Alice and Sam whipped their heads around to look at him.
“The natives are restless,” he said. He made what would pass for a sheepish face, if he’d ever felt sheepish about asking for anything except a blow job. Alice was remembering more. It was like watching someone paint a giant canvas at high speed, all the white getting filled in with details.
“You can’t say that anymore,” Alice said. “Be right there.”
Tommy nodded and withdrew his head from the room.
“Why did I think that marrying Tommy was the answer to anything?” Alice asked. “I mean, it is exactly what I pictured being a grown-up would be like, this whole thing—” She gestured around the room. “And my clothes are fucking amazing. Do you know how many pairs of shoes I have? The kids are beautiful, and funny, and—” Alice thought about her dad. Whatever she’d done, or said, it hadn’t been enough. She hadn’t told him everything she needed to.
“I get it. I think,” Sam said. “You can do it again, can’t you? Isn’t that how the book goes?”
“How the story goes?” Alice asked. “I don’t know.”
Sam shook her head. “Dawn of Time. You know, the best idea I ever had that I didn’t get paid for?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Alice said.
“Hang on,” Sam said. She scooted off the bed and slipped out the door as elegantly as a very pregnant person possibly could, still barefoot. Alice got up and chewed on her beautiful fingernails. A minute later, Sam opened the door again, noise from the party spilling into the room. In one hand, she had a pile of shrimp on a paper napkin, and in the other she had a book. “Here,” Sam said, thrusting it at Alice. “Just go—I’ll cover for you.”
Alice looked at the book in her hand. It was orange, with enormous type, type that took up nearly the whole jacket—Dawn of Time, by Leonard Stern. She opened it and read the flap.
An all-new time travel adventure by Leonard Stern, author of the worldwide sensation Time Brothers.
It was exactly what they’d talked about over ice cream—High school senior Dawn Gale didn’t expect her graduation to be momentous, but when she wakes up the next morning as a thirty-year-old, she knows she’s got a mystery to solve. Will this smart girl get back to her own life, or will she be stuck forever, going back and forth between these two different points in her life? The copyright date was 1998, the year that Alice herself had graduated from high school.
“This is real?” Alice said. He’d done it—she knew he could, and he had. She turned the book over and stared at the photograph of Leonard that took up the entire back of the book. His face, in black and white and gray. It was a Marion Ettlinger photograph, Alice could tell—she’d shot every important writer of the decade, and her style, silver and steely, was unmistakable. The picture was in focus, every hair on his head. Leonard’s eyebrows were raised, as if he weren’t expecting someone to take his photograph, as if Marion had just happened upon him in the wild, chin resting on his hand just so. He was wearing a black T-shirt and a black leather jacket and his eyes were fixed straight at the camera, staring it down.
“Okay,” Alice said. She clutched the book in her hand. “I love you.”
Sam kissed Alice on the cheek. “Until the future.” She smiled and opened the door.
42