“I think what Alice is asking, Leonard,” Sam said, “is whether there is aTime Sistersin the works. You know, same general idea, just with girls instead of boys, because girls are smarter in every way.”
Leonard nodded. “I hear you, I do. And thank you, Sam, for what is truthfully a million-dollar idea that I should have had years ago. Butwhat’s the fun in doing something again? If I wrote the same book again, just with different people in it, don’t you think that would be boring?”
Alice and Sam shrugged.
“It’s a bit likeSpider-Man, if I may be so bold. When you have a successful book, you have the power to publish another, but the reason the book was successful in the first place creates a sense of responsibility to one’s readers—they liked this, which is why I have that, and so on. There are some writers who write the same book over and over again, once a year, for decades, because their readers enjoy it and they can do it, and they do it well, and that’s that. And then there are some writers, like me”—here Leonard smiled—“who find the whole idea so utterly paralyzing that they’d rather watchJeopardy!with their teenage daughter and just write what they want to write and not worry about anyone else ever seeing it.”
“Jeopardy!is a really good show,” Sam said. “I get it.”
Alice didn’t think Sam got it. Sam had more academic and intellectual ambition in her toenails than most people had in their entire bodies, just like her mom. Sam had gone straight from undergrad to law school, bing bang boom, without so much as coming up for air. Alice got it, though. She saw it all the time at Belvedere—the parents who carried tennis rackets had children who carried tennis rackets. The parents with drinking problems and well-stocked home bars often were the ones called into the school counselor’s office about the Olde English forty-ounce found in Junior’s locker. The scientists had little scientists; the misogynists had little misogynists. Alice had always thought of her professional life in perfect contrast with her father’s—he’d had wild success, and she, none, just hanging on to something stable like a seahorse with its tail looped around some seagrass—but now she thought that she’d been wrong. He was afraid, too, and happier to stay close to what had worked, rather than risk it all on something new.
“I’m sorry, Dad,” Alice said. “I know how you feel.”
Leonard put his hand on her cheek and gave her a gentle pat. “You always did, you know that? It was very strange. Even when you were a very small child, and I asked you a question, somehow you always knew the answers. It was like someone was hiding in the bushes, and going to jump out and say,Ha! You thought this child knew the difference between a marsupial and a mammal, and she’s only three!But no one ever jumped out. You just knew.”
“You really should, though, Dad. What Sam said. It would be so good—you know it would, don’t you? People would love it. Just becauseTime Brotherswas, like, this world smash doesn’t mean that another book would be a total flop or something. It’s not a reason not to try.”
Leonard dug his spoon into the bottom of his paper cup. “When did you two get so smart, huh?” The girls had already finished their massive quantities of ice cream, and Leonard stood up and collected the detritus and threw it in the garbage can, then swept all the errant, escaped sprinkles off the tabletop and into his palm and threw those away, too. Sam looked at Alice and cocked her head to one side. “I have an idea,” she said. “I have to go home to look at something, but I’ll meet you back at Pomander, okay? Page me if you need me. Thanks for the ice cream, Lenny.”
Leonard bowed. “Anytime.”
Sam scurried out the door, waving. She blew a kiss to Alice, who caught it, suddenly nervous to again be alone with the truth.
“Are you too old for the whale?” Leonard asked.
28
The museum was always crowded on saturdays, but no matter how busy it was, people crammed into the dinosaur exhibits on the upper floors, which Alice hadn’t particularly cared about since she was five. That wasn’t where they wanted to go. Leonard flashed his membership card at the entrance and they quickly turned to the left, passing by a bronze Teddy Roosevelt and a few dioramas that no doubt greatly underestimated the tension between the Indigenous people of the region and the colonizing pilgrims. Leonard and Alice crossed through a doorway into a room that felt like a jungle, complete with life-sized tiger and a clamshell that was big enough to swallow even the tiger. That was always how Alice knew they were close.
It had a real name, of course, the Milstein Hall, but no one called it that. How could you, with a whale the size of a city bus swimming overhead and the dark sounds of the ocean all around you? Being in that room felt like sitting at the bottom of the sea, untouchable by whatever was happening on the surface. The upper balcony had spider crabs and jellyfish, all sorts of creatures lining the walls, but the realaction was down the stairs, under the whale, surrounded by enormous hand-painted dioramas. The manatee, sleepily floating as if witnessed forever mid-dream. The dolphins, jumping show-offs. The seal, recently clobbered to death by a gigantic walrus. In the corner, almost hidden by coral and fish, a pearl diver. Leonard and Alice walked carefully down the stairs without talking. The room wanted silence in the same way that a movie theater wanted silence, or a church pew.
The problem with adulthood was feeling like everything came with a timer—a dinner date with Sam was at most two hours, with other friends, probably not even as long. There was maybe waiting for a table, there was a night at a bar, there was a party that went late, but even that was just a few hours of actual time spent. Most of Alice’s friendships now felt like they were virtual, like the pen pals of her youth. It was so easy to go years without seeing someone in person, to keep up to date just through the pictures they posted of their dog or their baby or their lunch. There was never this—a day spent floating from one thing to another. This was how Alice imagined marriage, and family—always having someone to float through the day with, someone with whom it didn’t take three emails and six texts and a last-minute reservation change to see one another. Everyone had it when they were kids, but only the truly gifted held on to it in adulthood. People with siblings usually had a leg up, but not always. There were two boys from Belvedere, best friends since kindergarten, who had grown up and married a pair of sisters, and now all four of their children went to Belvedere, driven by one mom or the other in a little cousin carpool. That was next-level friendship—locking someone in through marriage. It seemed positively medieval, like when you realized that all the royal families in the world were more or less cousins. Even just the concept of cousins felt like bragging—Look at all these people who belong to me. Alice had never felt like she belonged to anyone—or like anyone belonged to her—except for Leonard.
He had walked to the center of the room and lowered himself onto the floor. Alice watched as he stretched out on his back, his scuffed sneakers flopping out to the sides. He wasn’t the only one—a family with a small baby was also lying down, staring up at the vast belly of the whale. Alice knelt down next to her dad.
“Remember when we used to come here all the time?” she asked. They had visited weekly when she was a kid, if not more often—Alice even remembered being at the museum with her mother, who had preferred the hall of gems and minerals. Alice ran her hands up and down her thighs. Her sailor pants were dark and stiff. She’d bought them at Alice Underground, her favorite store, and not just because it shared her name. It was still so strange to see her body—her young body, a body she hardly remembered as it was, because she’d been so busy seeing it as something it wasn’t.
“Only place in New York City where you would stop crying,” Leonard said, a wide smile on his face. He slapped the floor next to him. “Come on down.”
Alice flopped onto her back. Some of the stoners at Belvedere went to the light show at the planetarium right around the corner—the Pink Floyd one, with the flying pigs—when they were high, but Alice didn’t know why anyone would want to be anywhere other than in this room.
“I don’t know why I never come here anymore,” she said. “I feel like my blood pressure just dropped.”
“Since when do you worry about blood pressure? Man, sixteen ain’t what it used to be.” Leonard shifted his hands to his stomach, and Alice watched them rise and fall with his breath.
Alice thought about saying something right then. There were families pushing sleeping children in strollers and tourists lugging around shopping bags, but the room was quiet, and whatever Alice said, no one but her father would hear her.
Leonard had, of course, thought about time travel more than mostpeople. Even though he routinely mocked terrible sci-fi novels and movies and television shows, even ones made by his friends, Alice knew that he loved it. The impossible being possible. The limits of reality being pushed beyond what science can fully explain. Sure, it was a metaphor, it was a trope, it was a genre, but it was alsofun. No one—certainly no one Leonard liked—wrote science fiction because it was a tool. That was for assholes. Of all the writers in the world, Leonard’s least favorite were the fancy ones, the ones from highly ranked MFA programs and award ceremonies where one had to dress in black tie, who had descended briefly to earth and stolen something from the genres—the undead, perhaps, or a light apocalypse—before returning to heaven with it in their talons. Leonard liked the nerds, the ones with science fiction in their blood. Some of those fancy writers were deep, true nerds under the surface, and Leonard was okay with them. But Alice didn’t think that she could just start a conversation about nerds, or science fiction, or time travel, not without giving herself away, and she wasn’t ready to do that just yet. It wouldn’t be like telling Sam, Alice knew, who still had one eyebrow raised, like an agnostic who believed insomethingbut not necessarily in God. Leonard had always trusted Alice—about which girl had pushed her off the slide in kindergarten, about which boy had teased her, about which teacher was grading unfairly. She wasn’t worried that he would doubt her. Alice was afraid of what would happen next because Leonard would believe her right away, without hesitation.
The whale was the length of the whole room, its nose pointing down, poised to dive into the inky depths. The wide tail looked like it was about to push upward, maybe even through the ceiling, to help propel the giant animal down. Alice closed her eyes and concentrated on how solid the floor was beneath her back.
“Did I ever tell you about when Simon and I went to see the Grateful Dead at the Beacon Theatre?”
He had.
“Go ahead,” Alice said, and smiled. She knew every word that was going to come out of his mouth.
“1976,” Leonard began. “Jerry had this white guitar. I know a lot of people who saw the Dead a thousand times, but I only saw them that one time. The Beacon can feel so small, depending where you’re sitting, and Simon had gotten tickets from his agent, who was this super hotshot, and somehow we were in the third row—the third row!—and every woman there was drop-dead gorgeous, and it was like being on another planet for four hours.”
