Sam shoved Alice all the way over in the back seat and then laydown in her lap. “When you go back, I still get to keep you, right? Like, you’ll still be here? Will you remember all this?”
“I don’t know,” Alice said, and put her arm across Sam’s body like a seat belt. They were quiet for the rest of the ride up to 121st Street, where Alice helped Sam get into her building and apartment while Leonard kept the driver company down below. Sam’s apartment was quiet and dark—Lorraine would have been asleep for hours. The clock in Sam’s room said it was 1:30 a.m. Alice pulled back Sam’s covers and tucked her in.
“I love being your friend,” Alice said. “It’s okay that you move to New Jersey.”
“Oh my god, stop it, get out of here,” Sam said. “I love you.”
Alice slipped out the door like a burglar and ran down the wide stone steps to the waiting cab. Her father was still in the front seat, now deep in conversation about something. It took Alice a minute, then she got it—the driver was talking aboutTime Brothers.Leonard smiled at her through the partition and rolled down his window, letting the cool air in as they drove back down to Pomander Walk.
•••
Leonard unlocked the gate and pushed it open for Alice. The Romans’ lights were still on, but the rest of the street was mostly dark, with just one lit window on the second floor here and there—front bedrooms. Alice imagined all their neighbors in their beds, books open or televisions on. She felt like she always had on certain summer nights, like she was already missing the moment that she was still living inside.
“Okay,” he said. “Now we can really talk.” Leonard jogged quickly toward the door, keys jangling in his hands. “We don’t have much time.”
“Time for what?” Alice said. She remembered the mess her father was about to see. “Oh, shit. I forgot to tell you. I had a party. It wasn’tthat big, not as big as it was last time, but—” Leonard opened the door before she could even finish her sentence. The kitchen was a disaster—someone had spilled a beer, and Alice’s and Leonard’s shoes made sticky thwacking sounds as they crossed the floor—but Leonard didn’t even seem to notice. He went straight to his regular seat, pushed aside all the empty bottles in front of him to clear a space, lit two cigarettes in his mouth, and then held one out for Alice.
“Sit,” he said.
Alice sat. She took a drag of the cigarette and flicked it nervously between her fingers.
“I believe you.”
“Really? At the hotel, before I found you, I was talking to your friends about time travel stuff and, it all made it sound ridiculous. Like, a magic bone? What does that even mean? There is no science that supports this.” Alice looked at the yellow spots on her finger, slick little nicotine patches. What if she had exercised, ever? What if she didn’t drink forty ounces of beer all in one sitting? What if she had paid attention in math class? What if she had actually enjoyed her father as much as she could, every day? What if Leonard had exercised, or learned to cook, or quit smoking? What if she could fix everything that ever went wrong and he would live until he was ninety-six and then die in his sleep? All she wanted was for everything to change, all the bad stuff.
Leonard raised his eyebrows and took a long drag. He puffed out three perfect smoke rings in a row, and then stuck his finger through them. “Simon’s magic bone is ridiculous, of course. Even he knows that. But what you’re saying is not ridiculous, and I know it. Because I’ve done it, too.”
“What?” Ursula leaped onto the table, nimbly avoiding all the detritus, and then hopped onto Leonard’s shoulders.
“People say things,” he went on. “There was gossip on time travel message boards, which are about as unhinged as you’d expect, but Ispent a lot of time talking to people and reading crazy theories before I wrote the book. There were a few threads about Pomander, totally unsubstantiated, you know, like people who claim to have a friend who had a friend who had a cousin who had seen Bigfoot, but still. I’d heard of it, and I mean, obviously it was appealing regardless. But people talk about it—time travel—about the real possibilities. The realities, even. And there was a place for sale at the right time, and we moved in, and even after that, it took a while to figure it out.” He paused and laughed. “ ‘Figure it out.’ There’s no figuring it out. I see it sort of like surfing—you just have to go where you go. Not at all like Scott and Jeff,with their clunky station wagon and all the buttons and knobs and thin places. If I’d actually done it before writing the book, gone back,Time Brotherswould have been different. You can’t drive it. You can’t choose where you go. Everyone has one destination, one route, that’s it. And when you come back, it’s always right back to where you started, like a ride at Disney World. But the exit looks different, depending on what you did. It’s like, every time, you make the ride. You decide if it goes fast or slow, if there are big drops or it’s just a lazy river, floating along. So you can take it real easy, and come out, and everything looks just like it did when you went in.”
“The ride,” Alice said.
“Yes,” Leonard said. “It’s a metaphor.”
“Thank you,” Alice said. She took a drag. She wanted a piece of paper in front of her—a diagram, a map, something. “Okay. So it’s just being here that made it happen? In our house? Like, the whole street? How can that be?”
Leonard shook his head. “Tell me what you did.”
“I had dinner with Sam. Then I went to Matryoshka and got too drunk. Then I took a cab back here and I barfed on the street and then I fell asleep outside like a true degenerate, I think, and when I woke up, you were here, like this.”
“You fell asleep outside?” Leonard asked.
“In the guardhouse. Your potting shed, or whatever. It was mostly empty, and so I just shoved a few things aside and passed out.”
Leonard nodded. “Do you know what time it was?”
“What time I fell asleep? I don’t know—maybe three a.m.? Four?” If Alice had her phone, she could check what time the Uber had dropped her off, but her memory was foggy, soaked in too many shots.
“It was between three and four a.m., because that’s the only time it works,” Leonard said. He leaned back and ran a hand over his face. “It took me so long to figure it out. Years. I looked and looked. I didn’t know for sure that anything was there, but I justfeltit. And one day, ten years ago, right around the time you started at Belvedere, I was talking to Chip aboutDoctor Who, and it reminded me of our little shed, and I thought, ‘That has to be it.’ I was out there all night, in and around it, just sure that the Headricks or someone wouldn’t be looking out their window at me, but they didn’t, at least I didn’t think, and I went in and emptied it out—took out everything, all the brooms and the dirt and the shovels and the crap, even the spiderwebs, and I just sat there for what felt like a really long time, and the next thing I knew, I was somewhere else. Not just not in the guardhouse anymore. I was in bed—our bed, me and your mom’s—in our old apartment. And it wasn’t 1986 anymore—I just knew it.
“At first, I thought it was just, you know, I’ve gotTime Brothersbrain, or some kind of hallucination, like maybe I was hungover or having some weird DTs, but I walked outside, and to the newsstand, and I picked up the paper, and it was 1980. I had a quarter in my pocket, and so I bought the paper, and then I looked at it again and I realized—it was your birthday.”
“My birthday,” Alice said. “Today. October twelfth. In 1980.”
“Yes,” Leonard said. He laughed, and Ursula jumped down from his shoulders onto his lap. “It was the day you were born. Your momwasn’t due for another three weeks. We were still living on Eighty-Sixth then, in that long, skinny apartment, and she was so miserable, she would just pace up and down, up and down, and when I got up and saw her body, like a snake that had swallowed a watermelon, I couldn’t believe it. Serena looked so beautiful, even though she was uncomfortable, and huge, and angry—and I knew what she didn’t, that you were going to worm your way out that afternoon. Three seventeen p.m.” Leonard blinked and blinked, but the tears came anyway. “Do you know how many times I’ve been in that room? Watched it happen? Watched you come into this world, your perfect little face? I don’t know why, but that’s my time. That’s what I get to see.”
Alice could picture the long hallway, and her mother, large and angry. “That sounds bloody and stressful.”
