Sam picked up after a few rings and groaned. “What?”
“It’s Alice.”
“Hi, Alice. Why are you calling me at the ass crack of dawn? Are you okay? Oh, fuck, it’s your birthday!” Sam cleared her throat. “Ha-appy birth-day to you...”
“Okay, okay, yes, thank you. You don’t have to sing.” Alice watched her reflection as she talked. “I was just checking to make sure of something. Can you come over? When you’re up? Or can I come there? Just call me when you’re up, okay?” Her chin was as sharp as a knife. Why had Alice never written poems about her chin, taken photos of her chin, painted portraits of her chin?
“Okay, birthday bitch. Whatever you say. Love you.” Sam hung up, and then Alice did, too. Her closet shared a wall with the bathroom, and she heard her father go in and flick on the light and the whirring fan. The tap turned on—he was brushing his teeth. She hadn’t heard the door close, which, with a shoddy lock, was the only way for the two of them to communicate to each other that they needed privacy. Alice listened to her father brush and rinse and spit and knock histoothbrush against the lip of the sink before settling it back into its glass cup with a jangle as it knocked against hers. It had been so long since she’d thought about those sounds—the coffee grinder, the slippered shuffle down the hall. Alice rooted around on the floor and in her closet until she found clothes that smelled clean.
18
Leonard was sitting in his spot again, reading a book. Alice walked gingerly, like she might fall into a manhole at any second. Her father turned a page and stuck out his chin to let Ursula rub her face against it. Alice watched Leonard out of one eye while she opened the fridge and took out the milk. The cereal lived in the cabinet next to the plates and glasses, a collection of boxes beside the jars of peanut butter and the cans of soup and tomato sauce. Alice took out the box of Grape-Nuts, her father’s favorite.
“Are you okay, Dad? You feeling okay?” She watched Leonard’s face for any sign that he knew what was happening, that he recognized that something was amiss. But it was his face that was amiss—tiny crinkles around his eyes, but a full beard, a full smile. He was young, he was young, he was young. Alice did the math in her head—if she was sixteen, it meant that Leonard was forty-nine years old. Less than a decade older than she was. Alice was used to thinking of life as a series of improvements—high school to college, college to adulthood, twenties to thirties. Those had all felt like laps in a race she was doing wellin—but Alice could see in her father all the ruin that was to come. The trips to the hospital, the endless doctor’s visits, once he agreed to go. The hearing aids, after years of yellingWhat, what, what?across the table in restaurants.
“Sure, why?” Leonard narrowed his eyes at her.
“No reason.” Alice looked at the cereal box. “I don’t know anyone else who buys this,” she said. “In my whole life, not one other person.”
Leonard shrugged. “I think you need to meet some more people.”
Alice laughed but also doubled over her bowl so that Leonard couldn’t see that tears had appeared in her eyes. She blinked them away, finished making her cereal, and finally went to sit next to her father.
He had theNew York Times,The New Yorker,New Yorkmagazine, and an issue ofPeoplewith JFK Jr. and Carolyn Bessette’s wedding on the cover. “Oh, man,” Alice said. “So sad.”
Leonard picked up the magazine and inspected it. “I see, yes. I, too, thought that there might be a chance for you, an old-fashioned child bride. Could have been great.” He let the magazine fall back to the table and gave her upper arm a squeeze. Alice’s breath caught in her throat. It felt real. The kitchen felt real, her body felt real. Her dad felt real. And John-John was newly married, and alive.
“No, I mean. Oh,” Alice paused. “Right.” She spooned some Grape-Nuts into her mouth. “These are so weird,” she said. “It’s like the parts that got left over when they were making good cereal, the crumbs, and they decided not to be wasteful and just repackaged them.” When she was sitting next to her father in the hospital, so badly wanting him to open his eyes and talk to her, she had not imagined them starting with Grape-Nuts.
Leonard snapped his fingers. “Resourcefulanddelicious. So, what’s the big plan for the day? You have your prep class at ten, hang out, do whatever, and we’ll have dinner with Sam, right? And then I’m headingdown to the convention hotel, and I’ll be back tomorrow night, after my panel. You sure you don’t mind?”
Alice put her elbows on the table. Being a kid was wild—it was someone else’s job to buy the milk and the cereal, to make sure that there was toothpaste and toilet bowl cleaner and cat food, but everything you did—an SAT prep course on Saturdays, going to high school—was in service of some ambiguous, soft-focus future. Ursula walked across the open newspaper and sniffed at Alice. Like many black cats’, Ursula’s eyes sometimes looked green and sometimes looked yellow. She nosed up at Alice, who lowered her face to the cat in response.
“How old is Ursula?” Alice asked. The cat sniffed Alice’s cereal and then jumped back down to the floor.
“One cannot simply assign a number to a creature like that,” Leonard said. “I was not present at Ursula’s birth, and so I can only make a sorry human guess. She was already full grown when we found her. She was in front of number eight, remember? After we brought her home, I thought someone must be missing her—a cat this good you don’t just let go missing.”
Alice nodded. “I remember.” Maybe Ursula had traveled, too, from some point in the future when cats lived forever. Or maybe there was a new Ursula every year. “So, where is the test prep class?”
“At school. Same place as it was last week.”
“At Belvedere?”
Leonard snapped the paper in half, folding it neatly down the middle. Why did they make newspapers so enormous, so that you needed to hold them like that? “Yes.” He tilted his head to the side. “Are you okay? Is this birthday brain fever?” The back page had the TV listings, and Leonard had circled things that he wanted to watch so that he wouldn’t forget. There was a Hitchcock marathon, and the new episode ofEarly Edition.
“I guess so,” Alice said. The idea of going into school—into her building, the original building—actually sounded good, like she might walk through the door and just bump into Emily and Melinda and ask them to take her straight to the hospital for a psychological evaluation.
“You know it doesn’t really matter, right? Your SAT scores?” Leonard had gone to the University of Michigan, which was in his hometown and cost his parents almost nothing, which is why he hadn’t even been allowed to apply anywhere else. Alice did know this, now, but at Belvedere, there had always been pressure. Alice felt like she was part of that pressure now—the parents who brought their kids into her office had to say where they went to school, as if it had any bearing on their children’s lives, whether they went to Harvard or community college or no college at all. Being a parent seemed like a truly shitty job—by the time you were old and wise enough to understand what mistakes you’d made, there was literally no chance that your children would listen. Everyone had to make their own mistakes. Alice had been one of the youngest students in her grade—some kids were a full year older. By junior year, some of her friends already knew where they wanted to go—Sam wanted to go to Harvard, and Tommy had already applied to Princeton, where his entire family had gone, back at least three generations, but swore he would rather die than go. Alice wasn’t sure—she hadn’t been sure then, and even decades later, she thought she could have chosen a hundred different things and had a hundred different lives. Sometimes she felt like everyone she knew had already become whatever they were going to become, and she was still just waiting.
“I guess so,” Alice said. Her stomach rumbled—she was still starving. The test prep class had been a giant waste of time—she remembered it now. Or part of her did. Alice felt aware of simultaneous thoughts, sort of like when you were driving cross-country and thelocal radio stations kept flipping back and forth as you moved in and out of range. Her vision was clear, but it was coming from two different feeds. Alice was herself, only herself, but she was both herself then and herself now. She was forty and she was sixteen. She could suddenly see Tommy leaning back in his chair, chewing on a pencil, and her stomach began to bubble. It wasn’t the cocktail of emotions she’d had when Tommy had brought his kid into Belvedere, a mixture of anxiety and embarrassment. It was the old feeling—absolutely delusional lust.“What’s your panel about, at the convention tomorrow?”
“Oh,” Leonard said. “It’s a celebration of theTime Brothersshow. Someone is going to ask me questions. Tony and Barry are coming, too. Everyone is very excited to see them.” His mouth was a flat line. He had never liked the actors, especially not Barry. “I’m sure Tony will have some fascinating anecdotes from his time on the movie set with Tom Hanks.” Tony had had a small role in the section ofForrest Gumpset in the 1970s, as if no casting director knew where in time to place him. Alice thought that was probably the reason he would abandon acting altogether and spend the rest of his days with horses, who only knew him in the present, holding an apple in the flat of his palm.
“Do you have to do it?” Ursula jumped back onto the table and began to lap up the remaining milk in Alice’s bowl.
“Everyone is very excited to see them. It sells tickets, sells books, buys the Grape-Nuts. It’s fine.” Leonard waved a hand in the air, shooing away Alice’s concern. “Where do you want to have dinner?”
“We’re still eating breakfast,” Alice said, petting Ursula. “Let me think about it.” Her father took a sip of his coffee. His arms looked strong. If she was hallucinating, she was doing a really terrific job. There was a loud noise, and Alice thought, Oh, that must be my alarm going off, I’m going to wake up any second, but no, it was her telephone blaring from her bedroom.
