“It is. Serena’s labor was tough, it was tough. But I know how it ends, and that makes it much easier.”
“Did you ever tell her?” Alice asked.
“Who, your mom? No.” Leonard shook his head. “I tried a few times, to make it work, you know? Each time I went back I tried to be a better husband, whatever that means, or to be more the way she wanted me to be. I paid attention to every word she said, I rubbed her back, I fed her ice chips. I did most of those things the first time, I think. I hope. I really tried, in that one crazy day, to show Serena that we could be great. Once, when I got back, we were still married, but she was even more miserable than she was before. Angrier. Because I’d been trying to be someone I wasn’t, which is a shitty thing to do in a marriage.”
“Whoa,” Alice said.
“You’ll see,” Leonard said. He smiled. “The good news is that life is pretty sticky. It’s hard to change things too much. What my friends were saying is true, but it’s all theoretical.” He lowered his voice, as if anyone else could hear. “They’re professional amateurs.”
“What’s happening there now?” Alice had wondered—was herforty-year-old body slumped, motionless, inside the shed, scaring all the Pomander residents going about their day? “Your friends scared me with all their Baby Hitler talk.”
“Nothing,” Leonard said. “A pause. You go right back. Thirty seconds, maybe? A minute? It can’t be more than a minute that goes by. The planets are moving, we’re moving, so I’m sure it’s not exact, but give or take. You’ll find yourself where you are. It’s not the exact same forty you’re going back to—but it’s you, at forty. Doing whatever it isthis dayhas gotten you. You see what I mean about it being sticky? It’s a day—you wake up in the morning, and between three and four a.m., bingo bango, you’re back to when you left. That’s all the time you get. Most of the decisions we make as people are pretty stable, and timelikesstability. I think about it like a car on a track. The car wants to stay on, and so it does, most of the time. I can imagine what Howard and Simon would say—Baby Hitler. What’s different? What did you do, what did you set in motion? Sure, that stuff’s important. But it’s gotta be something big in order to knock you far off the track. Don’t worry about it too much.” Leonard walked a hand one direction on the table, and then walked it the other.
Alice looked at the clock. It was three. All the lights on Pomander were out except for theirs. “Just give me a minute,” she said. She stubbed out the cigarette inside a bottle cap and hurried into her room. Alice looked around, searching for something solid to hold on to. She felt like she was on line for an upside-down roller coaster, a roller coaster she was going to fall out of, and there was nothing she could do to stop it. No change of clothes would help.
Leonard leaned against her doorframe. “Sweetie,” he said.
Alice looked at him and knew that she hadn’t done it—whatever he was talking about, pushing the car off the track, she hadn’t done it. “Dad,” she started, but he lifted a palm to stop her.
“It’s going to feel a little strange at first,” he said. Leonard walkedher through it—the fuzziness that would follow. She would remember her life, the life before, but not vividly. Memories were memories, after all, and faded over time, especially without prompts like photographs. Over years, things smoothed out. At least he thought so. Of course, Leonard explained, he couldn’t say for sure. He was calm, but Alice was starting to panic.
“But I just got here,” Alice said. “It’s not fair.” She wanted to tell him that it wasn’t fair because she hadn’t figured out how to make sure that when she got back, or forward, or ahead, whatever the right word was, he would be waiting for her, eyes open.
Leonard nodded. “It’s never enough time. I know. But remember—you know how to get here. Do you know how many times I’ve watched you be born? You can come back.”
“And you’ll just be here? And we can just do this? So, what do I do?” Alice shook out her hands and feet, a one-girl hokey pokey. “What am I supposed to do?”
“It’s late,” Leonard said. “I would just go to bed. Or we can sit on the couch.”
Alice walked past her dad and down the dark hallway. Ursula rubbed her body against her, and Alice swooped down to pick her up. She lay down on the sofa and Ursula did, too, curling perfectly into her armpit.
Leonard covered her with a blanket and clicked on the television, though Alice knew he was watching her instead. She closed her eyes and tried to breathe normally, but she could only picture shriveled smoker lungs, black like the commercials that were supposed to scare her away but hadn’t.
“Will you do one thing for me?” Alice asked.
“Sure, what?” Leonard said.
“Will you quit smoking? Like, for real this time?” Leonard had tried before—he’d tried once a decade since he’d been a teenager himself.
Leonard snorted. “Fine. I’ll try, okay? You’re catching me in a weak moment here, and so I’ll promise to try.” He paused. “Al—” Leonard said, half to himself. “Why was it empty in the guardhouse? I’m so careful. How was it just, cleared out? Where was I?”
Alice didn’t want to lie to him, but she also couldn’t tell him the truth. She hadn’t thought much about the hospital, not as much as she usually did. It felt as far away as it was—decades, eons. If they were a hugging family, she would have hugged him, just to make sure she got one in. Why weren’t they a hugging family? Was it her? Was it him? Alice couldn’t remember. Leonard was close, and talking. That was all that mattered. “I took it out. It was piled up, like normal. Took me forever,” she murmured into the arm of the sofa, and then she wasgone.
PartThree
36
Alice hadn’t fallen asleep, or at least she didn’t think she had, but there was the slightly underwater feeling of awakening from a dream. She stretched her arms over her head, clonking them on something hard. Alice let her hands feel around a little bit—hard, shiny, with bumps, definitely not her father’s ancient sofa—before she opened her eyes.
Once her eyes adjusted to the dark room, Alice could see that she was in bed—a huge bed, whatever size came after king. Alice wiggled her toes to make sure that she could, and sure enough, there they were, poking up against the heavy duvet. It looked like an expensive room at a hotel she couldn’t afford. A silver lamp with a geometric shade was next to her face, and Alice clicked on the light. The other half of the bed was empty, with the cover thrown back carelessly, as if someone had just climbed out. The walls were cream, the sheets were cream, and the floors were wood, with details laid in a hundred years earlier. Alice knew two things for certain: she’d never been in this room before, and also, at the same time, it was without a doubt her bedroom. It was likeLeonard had told her:You’re going to wake up in your bed, wherever your bed is. You’re going to be inside your life, just like you’re inside your life right now. And there will be a lot of things that you missed. But you’ll feel those things, too, eventually.
•••
She shimmied herself up so that she was propped against the headboard and then leaned over to inspect her drawer. There was her phone, all plugged in, and some earplugs, and a pen, and an eye mask. There was a small stack of books on the floor underneath the table, which calmed Alice down—she was still her, no matter how nice the apartment looked. She remembered what Leonard had said about the tracks, and that calmed her down, too, the idea that even if things looked different, she wasn’t, not really. Alice unplugged her phone and held it in front of her face. 5:45 a.m.—she’d slept through the shift. The password was the same—all her passwords were the same, her birthday and Keanu Reeves’s birthday; she’d set it when she was fourteen and had never seen a reason to change it. No wonder it was so easy to steal identities. Only now, instead of the resplendent photograph of Ursula that Alice was used to seeing, there were two smiling, dark-haired children.
They appeared to be a boy and a girl, but Alice couldn’t say for sure. Both kids had dark brown eyebrows slashed across their pale foreheads. The smaller one was sitting on the bigger one’s lap, like a pair of nesting dolls. The big one had their mouth open wide, and the little one looked nicely chunky. They were, Alice knew, her children. And judging from their coloring and mouths and eyes and how much they both looked like little Raphael Joffey, who had walked into her office that week or never, depending, Alice knew who slept on the other side of the bed.
Alice pulled back the covers and lowered her feet to the floor. Therug under the bed was enormous and probably cost more than three months’ rent on Cheever Place. She was in striped pajama bottoms and a Belvedere Fun Run T-shirt that she recognized as being a few years old. Alice pressed it against her body, a soft cotton security blanket. Okay, she thought. Okay. Alice gripped her phone and tiptoed toward the door. She had her hand on the knob when the toilet flushed and a door on the adjoining wall swung open. Alice instinctively curled her body up, as if she were a pangolin or a roly-poly bug, but she remained both human and visible.
