“What about the dog?” Alice felt dizzy. “Is that, like, some sort of spirit animal?”
“Listen, spirit animals are a whole different thing. The dog is loyal—” The woman whistled once, sharply, and a tiny ball of brown fluff skittered across the floor toward her. She leaned over and picked it up. “This is a dog, but it’s also not just a dog. This dog is my protector, my rock.” The dog, a dead ringer for Toto, leaned back on its hind legs and stretched its mouth up for a kiss. The psychic let it lick her on the cheek and then gently put it back down on the floor. “That’s what the dog is. You have your own dog. A friend, a family member. You might have a few. Someone who wants to protect you, who is always loyal. You gotta listen to your dog.”
“Okay,” Alice said.
“The Fool is a major card, too. It’s not about a promotion, or whether you said the wrong thing one time, that kinda thing. It’s the big stuff.”
“Couldn’t get any bigger,” Alice said.
“Basically, this card is saying you never know what’s coming, so you gotta be happy when it’s there. Whatever it is. I’ve been listening to this podcast, The Universe is Your Boss!, you know that one?”
Alice shook her head. The dog padded over, its nails ticking on the linoleum floor, and sniffed her hand.
“It’s good, you should listen. Anyway, the host ends every episode by saying, ‘Joy is coming.’ I think it’s a quote from a book or something, I don’t know. But she says it every week. Joy is coming. That’s the Fool. You just gotta keep your eyes open and look for it. Make sure not to fall.”
“You say that like it’s easy,” Alice said. Her phone was dinging, and she took it out of her pocket. The Find My iPhone alarm was going off. Tommy was tracking her. Which she understood. She’d married him young, high school sweethearts. They’d never been apart. Alice thought about having sex with only one person for your entire life—it sounded like a holdover from the days when life expectancy was thirty-five. “I have to go,” Alice said. She stood up and hugged the woman, who didn’t seem surprised.
“I do Venmo,” she said, and pointed to a printed card by the door with a QR code. Alice snapped a picture and hurried out, the dog, little Toto, nipping playfully at her feathers.
43
Tommy would either call off the party and jump in a cab or he’d call the police, Alice didn’t know which. Maybe both. She turned off the Find My iPhone button and then turned off her phone altogether. He would probably guess that she’d go to Pomander, and so once she got up to 94th Street, Alice thought about going somewhere else, but there was nowhere else to go. It wasn’t a crime to leave your birthday party. It was a dick move, for sure, but it wasn’t a crime. She wasn’t a missing person. She was just a fool.
It was early yet—only ten o’clock. Alice opened the gate, relieved to hear the familiar creak of heavy iron. There were lights on at the Romans’, and at the house directly across from Leonard’s, which now belonged to an actor whose face Alice knew but whose name she could never remember. The cat sitter, Callie, lived next door, and Alice could see her parents watching television in their living room. Callie herself was probably in bed. It was such a good street to grow up on, but Alice also remembered how tight it sometimes felt, how short the view was out the window. Maybe that’s why Leonard had had trouble writing—he couldn’t see anything outside, just a house that looked exactly like his, and a city of fire escapes and windows in the back. But maybe he hadn’t had trouble, not this time.
Leonard’s lights—the house lights—were off. Alice wondered if Debbie would be there—she hadn’t been there that morning. Maybe she and Leonard had the dreamy sort of marriage that Alice herself wanted, or used to think she wanted, where they lived a few blocks apart and could always retreat to their own spaces. Pomander wasn’t tiny by New York City standards, but for someone who lived and worked at home, and had bookshelves lining every wall, and who had never learned how to buy or cook real food, it was tight. Debbie. The thought of her made Alice happy. She was so clearly kind, the sort of woman who would help you with your homework. Alice could picture Debbie as a loving, supportive teacher so clearly, with her bra line and the waistline of her full pleated skirt one and the same, the word bosom personified.
Alice unlocked the door, and Ursula was against her legs. Ursula had ruined Alice for other cats—the aloof layabouts who pretended not to know the humans were there until it was feeding time. “Oh, Ursula,” Alice said, and picked her up. The cat scrambled delicately onto Alice’s shoulders like a living stole. Some mail was splashed inside the door, where it had fallen through the slot. She moved over to the kitchen table and sat down in the dark. Ursula leaped down onto Alice’s lap and batted around some feathers before curling into a tight black ball and closing her eyes. Alice turned on the light.
There was a shelf on top of the fridge that held Leonard’s various prizes—an award shaped like a spaceship, another shaped like a comet. Alice had never understood why speculative fiction and outer space were so closely identified—surely the number of science fiction novels that took place on Earth vastly outnumbered the ones that took place on Planet Blork, or in some distant galaxy. Maybe it was because it was easier to imagine a totally different life outside the walls you were used to. Comforting, even, just to spend however many hours in some totally different place. Alice stood on her tiptoes and grabbed one of the silver spaceships. There were two of them, which Alice didn’t remember. It was dusty but heavy—a real piece of hardware, not like some flimsy trophy from a souvenir shop. There was a small plaque at the bottom, and Alice rubbed it clean as she read.
Best Novel, 1998
Dawn of Time
Leonard Stern
Alice put the spaceship on the counter next to the book. Ursula leaped up next to her, purring loudly and offering her chin to scratch. Alice turned on the faucet and Ursula began to flick her sandpaper tongue in and out of the water, an inefficient fountain. Alice splashed some water into her mouth, too, and then rested her hand on Ursula’s sleek back.
* * *
? ? ?
There were bookshelves everywhere, but Leonard had never put his own books on them, and even if he had, the shelves weren’t alphabetized or organized in a way that anyone but him could understand. When Alice was a kid, there were certain areas she knew how to find—the Agatha Christies, the P. G. Wodehouses, the Ursula K. Le Guins. Her eyes scanned the shelves, looking for her father’s name, knowing that she wouldn’t find it.