Visiting hours were until 5:00, but when Alice passed London her ID at 4:45, he didn’t say a word, just slipped her a pass. Alice felt terrible. Not sick, not exactly, but slow and heavy, like she was wading through molasses. With a headache. It was disorienting—at least when she was in the guardhouse, Alice knew what to expect. She thought about it like making a mixtape the way she’d done in high school, rewinding until just the right spot and then adding something new. It had always felt so crucial to put things in the right order, to have this song after that one. But you couldn’t control how someone else would listen, whether they would care, whether they would play it over and over or whether the tape would get caught and spin out like a ball of Christmas tinsel. She could go back more easily than she could go forward. Going forward was scary, because anything could have happened. Anything could happen. Anything had been proven to be within a fairly narrow range, but still—Alice couldn’t control it.
The hospital was quieter than usual—the afternoon had turned cloudy and dark, and maybe most of the visitors had gone home early to beat the coming rain. Alice nodded polite greetings to the people she passed in the endless hallways, one leading to the next and the next, until she reached her father’s room. She expected the same scene she’d walked into so many times: her father, mostly asleep, eyes closed, and Debbie fussing about in the chair, the noise of television news blasting away in several neighboring rooms. But when Alice pulled aside the curtain, Leonard was alone and awake, his eyes open, with his head propped up on pillows. He looked at her and smiled.
“Finally.” Leonard opened his hands, like a magician revealing that something—a coin, a rabbit—had disappeared.
Alice stopped, still clutching the cheap nylon curtain. “Dad.”
Leonard smiled. “Were you expecting someone else?” His face was thin, and his stubble was gray. Leonard waved a hand in the direction of the chair. “Come into my tiny kingdom.”
“I just didn’t know you’d be up.” Alice swiftly ducked into the chair and held her arms tight across her lap like they were the safety bar on a roller coaster.
“Debbie just left. She was hoping to catch you, but you can call her later, right?” There were a few bags of fluid hanging behind him, one dripping slowly into his arm. The doctors’ and nurses’ names were on the whiteboard, and a list of all of Leonard’s medications. It was the same as it always was, only he was awake and talking and looking at her. “Good to see you, Al-pal.”
“Good to see you, too,” Alice said, which was an understatement.
“How was your day?” Leonard said. “You look a little tired.”
“I am tired,” Alice said, though it was more than that. She felt embarrassed, and anxious, and excited. Alice had already spent so much time grieving in the present that she didn’t know quite what to make of having her father in front of her, awake. The idea of Leonard dying, and what it would mean for the rest of her life, was heavy, but it was a familiar weight. Not that Alice thought she had worked her way through it—if anything, she understood that it wasn’t actually something one could ever work all the way through, like a jigsaw puzzle or a Rubik’s cube; grief was something that moved in and stayed. Maybe it moved from one side of the room to the other, farther away from the window, but it was always there. A part of you that you couldn’t wish or pray or drink or exercise away. She was used to him being so close to gone that gone was almost desirable—no one wanted to watch someone they loved suffer. But she was also tired—tired of how tense her body was when the phone rang, tired of how nervous she felt whenever she walked out of his hospital room, tired of how it felt to know that her life was going to change and that she was going to have this enormous hole forever. Soon. Alice thought that it was probably exactly the inverse, the mirror image, of how it felt to be pregnant, and to know that your life would never be the same. A subtraction instead of an addition. So many of the customs were identical—people would send flowers, or cards, or food. Someone would have her name on their to-do list—Write a note to Alice Stern. And then it would be done, just her problem again, day in and day out, forever. It had taken a long time for Alice to get wherever she was, and she didn’t know if she could do it again.
She couldn’t remember exactly what had happened on her last trip—all the days had run together. She hadn’t told him, she thought, at the end of the night, as she sometimes did.
“Fine, fine. Yeah, you seem fine,” Leonard said, teasing.
“You’re better,” Alice said. “Better than I’ve seen you.”
Leonard nodded. “You know, they don’t know what’s wrong with me. They know I’m dying, of course”—here he smiled at the plain truth of it—“but they don’t know why. I think when they look at my blood tests, it’s like looking at a ninety-six-year-old man.” He wiggled his eyebrows. He knew. Of course he knew.
“Dad,” Alice said, “I haven’t been able to talk to you.” She tried to do the math—it had been twenty-four years since her sixteenth birthday, but it had also been a day, a week, two weeks. “Can you just tell me what you know? I mean, I keep going back and trying to help—trying to solve this, like”—she gestured around the room—“this whole thing, but this is the first time you’ve even been awake! I just don’t know what to do. And so I’ve been going back and forth, because, like, why not?” She tried to laugh but it came out more like a groan. Alice wished that they were at home, and that Ursula was on her lap. Did hospitals have cats? She’d seen segments with dogs on the news, docile and fluffy golden Labradors who would tuck their sweet snouts into the hands of the sick. Leonard wouldn’t have wanted some random dog to lick him; he would have wanted the ageless, limitless dignity of Ursula.
“Well, it only works between the hours of three and four a.m., and it has to be empty. Which it usually isn’t. I make sure of that. That’s that, really. I learned a long time ago, the rules are the rules. It doesn’t matter if they don’t make sense. It’s just how it works. Is that what you mean?” Leonard smiled. “Science fiction only has to make sense within its own walls, even if the walls are your world.”
“You explained that part. Once. Who else knows?” Alice asked. “Is it just us?”
Leonard nodded, his face tight. “The Romans know. Cindy used to go back to the seventies and dance all night. That was before we moved in. It gets harder, going back and forth. Harder to come back, really. You feel it in your body. For a long time, I didn’t think it actually hurt you, but, well . . .” He gestured around the room. “Cindy used to go to Studio 54 and boogie, the whole bit, and when she came back, she started running into some trouble.”
“What kind of trouble?” Alice thought of her own body and how it seemed to be getting slower, the way her head hurt in the mornings, no matter where or when she was.
“It feels like double vision, a little bit wobbly, and the wobbling gets more pronounced the older you get. It’s sort of the reverse of what you’d really want, you know—you’d want things to be more and more clear the farther you get away from a certain time, the less you can rely on your own memory, but that’s not how it works.” Leonard knit his fingers together. His skin looked thin and pale.
“And how do you make sure you get back to where you want to be?” This was what she hadn’t figured out. “I mean, how do you know when to stop?”
“Do you know where you want to be?” Leonard raised an eyebrow.