? ? ?
Leonard was always so happy when she told him. Aside from dinner, it became Alice’s favorite part. He was surprised every time, and sometimes clapped his hands with delight, pitching his upper body forward. Alice had imagined, over the course of her life, telling Leonard lots of things that made him cackle with joy—true joy, big joy—but there was no going forward, only back. And so she told him this one thing, over and over again, knowing how he would react, a present to them both.
52
It felt good, for a little while, to treat going back and forth like she was just going forward, as if each day were a new day, no matter the year, and it followed the one before it, and like she didn’t have to think too far ahead. Alice had never had a problem going from one day to the next. She knew it wasn’t true, but sometimes, when she was sitting in the guardhouse, waiting for the past or the future, she felt like she could do it forever, and like no one would ever die, and whatever choices she made, they didn’t matter, because she was just going to undo them in the morning.
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Leonard’s pale skin, Leonard’s closed eyes, Leonard’s shallow breaths. She could make him better, and so she did, over and over again, a magic trick. Leonard young, Leonard funny, Leonard drinking Coca-Cola and smoking. Leonard immortal, if only for the day.
Part Five
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It was two weeks after Alice’s birthday now, each visit pushing forward one day. Now she was used to being forty—truly, what did it matter—but her body did feel creakier than she remembered it, and when she stood up, there were some crinkling noises in her knees, like a freshly milked bowl of Rice Krispies. If Alice had just gone home that night, that first night, her fortieth birthday, if she’d called the fancy car and just given the driver her own address instead of her father’s, she would have vomited and passed out and woken up forty plus one day, plus one hangover. She still hadn’t fixed one thing in her life. She was no Dawn—she wasn’t even a Time Brother. If her life had a tag line, it would be Go back in time, fix nothing! Those books had happy endings, or, at the very least, satisfying ones, where there was some definitive resolution. A period at the end of the sentence. Alice’s problem was that there was always another sentence.
The Cheever Place apartment was smaller than she remembered, which was always how it felt after a day away. Most garden apartments were floor-throughs, with a door that led to an outdoor space, whether it was grassy or just, like in her building, a large concrete square, but the way Alice’s landlady had divided her house, the rental apartment was just one large singular room with a built-in kitchen along one wall and exactly two internal doors: one that opened into a closet, and one that opened into the bathroom. Her desk, which was really just one side of her small kitchen table, was covered with a mountain of paper that was threatening to avalanche at any second. Her shoes, which were supposed to live on their little shoe rack by the door, dribbled out into the middle of the floor as if elves had taken them for joyrides.
Alice flopped over on her bed. The tiny dog who lived next door, with the elderly woman who liked to sit on her front stoop and talk to everyone who walked by, was barking, which meant that the mailman was nearby. The dog was an ancient dachshund and couldn’t go up or down the steps by himself, and so plaintively barked every time he wanted to be in a place he wasn’t. Alice’s bed was a mattress she’d ordered from an internet company that advertised on the subway, on a creaky IKEA bedframe. She wasn’t unhappy in her life—she hadn’t been unhappy in her life. Everything was fine. She was healthy, she had a job, she had friends, she had a decent sex life. She got Sephora points and didn’t shop at Amazon. She carried her own bags to the grocery store. Alice didn’t know how to drive, but if she did, she would drive an electric car. She voted, all the time, even for city council and state senator. She had a 401(k) and paid down her credit cards every few months. But Alice couldn’t look around her apartment and see anything that actually made her happy. There was supposed to be an upside to adulthood, wasn’t there? The period of your life that was your own, and not chosen for you by other people?
Alice felt around her bed for her phone, finding it buried under the pillow, her battery nearly dead. It was only 8 a.m., but Sam would be awake.
“Hey,” Alice said.
“Hey, sweet cheeks! Happy belated birthday! I’m sorry I’ve been so hard to pin down, it’s been crazy,” Sam said. It was always crazy. There were yelps and hollers in the background. Alice thought of Sam’s house like a battlefield, where one might be ambushed at any moment.
“Can I come over? I’m sure you’re busy, but can I come over? And just hang out?” Alice missed the twisty cord of the telephone in her room on Pomander, watching the pink flesh of her finger bulge through.
“You want to come here to New Jersey to hang out with my family?” Sam asked, incredulous. “I cannot stop you, and would be delighted. I personally would vote for alcohol, with grown-ups only, but you do you, baby.”
“I’ll be there as soon as I can remember how to get there,” Alice said, and hung up the phone to map it.
It wasn’t complicated: Alice took the F to Jay Street, then the A to 34th, then New Jersey Transit, which felt like the subway but wasn’t. Alice liked long train rides. She was feeling too out of sorts to read a book—she’d stared at her bookshelf for almost twenty minutes, unable to decipher if she wanted a happy ending or science fiction or something with death on the first page—and so had turned on the latest episode of her favorite podcast, Shippers. The tag line for the podcast was The Reason the Whole Internet Was Invented, which was maybe a stretch, but Alice loved it—every week, the two hosts would talk about fictional characters who had not had a canonical romantic relationship, and then gab for upward of forty minutes about why they should have, how they would have, and so forth. Archie and Jughead, Buffy and Cordelia, Stevie Nicks and Christine McVie, Chris Chambers and Gordie Lachance, Tami Taylor and Tim Riggins. The couples weren’t always ones that Alice believed in or would have chosen, but the hosts were entertaining and so she always listened.
“Okay, okay,” said Jamie, one of the hosts, after the theme music played. “I’m excited about this. It’s kind of old-school, but not the most old-school we’ve ever done.”
“Today we are going to talk about the two books by cult author Leonard Stern, Time Brothers and Dawn of Time. Now, Jamie, what makes someone a cult author, and does that mean they’re in a cult?” Rebecca, the cohost, said.
Leonard had always been like that: liable to appear out of nowhere. A question on Jeopardy!, an answer in the crossword puzzle. He was even on an episode of The Simpsons, where he got into a fight with the guy who owned the comic book store about some Time Brothers memorabilia. Most people knew his name, and if they didn’t, they always knew Time Brothers, which had been an easy cheat for Alice at school when it came to making friends. She didn’t even have to say anything—news of a famous parent traveled quickly. Alice would be out of college before she discovered this was a bad thing and never led to an honest connection.