A few things that were different about Alice’s body: Her nipples were larger and darker, one more so than the other. Her stomach was soft and domed slightly toward her pelvis, her skin pockmarked with silvery dots and short lines, like a message in Morse code that readI’ve had two babies.It felt like a game, or a puzzle in the back of amagazine—Spot the Difference!Her hair was shorter, and Alice could tell it was a more expensive cut than she’d ever had before—the color was what her natural color had been in the summertime when she was a kid, sun-kissed and blond, but it was October, and she hadn’t been this blond in two decades. The shampoo choices were expensive, with artistic packaging, and Alice knew for a fact that the giant container of body soap cost fifty dollars. She still didn’t know what Tommy did for a living. Part of her knew, of course, but not the part that was currently driving the boat. Alice had so many questions for her father. Had he quit smoking, just because she’d asked? What had happened to her other life, the one she had before? Was that one still happening, without her, or had she pushed the reset button on the whole world? That seemed like too big of a responsibility. He’d been smiling, hadn’t he, when he told her how things worked?
When Alice was clean and dry and dressed, she wandered back out into the living room, where she found the children and a strange woman—Sondra?—at the kitchen table, working on something. But of course only Alice was a stranger here, not this woman.
“Look, Mommy! Sondra helped!” Leo said. He whipped something off the table and ran it over to her. It was a folded sheet of construction paper with a pointy crayoned heart on the front andLEOin big letters on the inside.
“Thank you,” Alice said. “It’s perfect.” She kissed the boy on the head. There were arranged marriages in so many parts of the world, situations where you walked into a room as strangers and left it as family. People learned how to love each other every day. Alice felt like she’d walked onto the set of a television show, notTime BrothersbutMalcolm in the MiddleorRoseanne, something that was filmed on a set with a couch at the center and the camera where the television would be in real life. It didn’t feel real, but Alice was willing to give it a go. She picked up a crayon and a piece of paper and started to draw.
39
The hospital was just as Alice remembered it—a series of large white and glass buildings clinging to the upper tip of Manhattan, with the Hudson River down below. A giant banner proclaiming it the number 11 hospital in the nation was strung across Fort Washington Avenue, which seemed a sorry brag indeed. Doctors and nurses in scrubs stood on line at food trucks outside, professionally impervious to the ambulances and the loading and unloading of sick and dying people. Its familiarity was comforting—again Alice thought about what her dad had said, about life being sticky. Her father wasn’t dead. Her father was alive, and here, exactly where she’d left him.
Alice waited inside the hospital to check in. She recognized two of the men at the desk, London and Chris, who were, as usual, smiling and chatting with visitors as they passed over their IDs. When it was her turn, Alice stepped in front of London’s chair and smiled.
“Well, hello, birthday girl!” London flipped some invisible hair over his shoulder. “Look at you!”
The lobby of the hospital was airy and high-ceilinged, with aStarbucks at one end and a gift shop selling cheap stuffed bears and candy bars at the other. It was loud enough that no one else could hear you unless they were straining to listen on purpose.
“How did you know?” Alice asked.
London waved her license at her. “Also, I’m a psychic.”
“Right,” Alice said, embarrassed. “It was yesterday.”
“Go on up,” London said. “You remember where? Room is printed on the badge,” he said, and handed her license and her pass across the transom.
•••
The hospital wasn’t unlike the San Remo, in certain ways. There were multiple elevator banks, and there were unmarked doors that led to places civilians weren’t supposed to go. People made eye contact as little as possible. Alice took an empty elevator to the fifth floor and walked through two sets of double doors, past the sitting area with the good view of the water and the steep gray palisades on the other side, approaching the George Washington Bridge. The hallways felt sterile, with hand sanitizer pumps every fifteen feet, but also not quite as clean as one would expect, with dust bunnies along the baseboards and people coughing into the shared air. Alice was cold, and pulled her jacket closed. She was close.
It didn’t seem fair. It was supposed to be that things were always the same going backward, in the other direction. Alice had assumed—she realized this as she walked down the final hall—that this part would be different, just as her basement apartment had been replaced with a sunny co-op complete with adorable children and a nanny. She had assumed that if things were fixed, things were fixed. Everyone died, of course. Everyone diedin the end, at some unknown point in the future. People were supposed to die when their loved ones could nod and grieve and say,It was their time. What had Alice done, if not undone time?Whatever she had managed to accomplish in between her sixteenth birthday and this moment, it had changed everything else in her life, so why hadn’t it changed this? Alice arrived at the curtained-off room that belonged to her father. There was a dry-erase board on the wall just outside with his name and the names of the doctors and nurses on duty and all his meds. The television was on, and Alice could see the closed captions on the screen. It was the weather report.Warmer than average, highs of 65 today, 70 degrees tomorrow. We’ll see if it lasts until Halloween.Alice put a hand on the curtain and pulled.
Leonard was in bed. There were no tubes in his nose, no lines in his arm, nothing attached except a port in his forearm that dangled like a limp carrot top. His hospital gown was covered by a flannel bathrobe, flung over his narrow body like a blanket. The room was freezing, like always. Leonard’s eyes were closed but his mouth was open, and Alice could hear him breathing out of his chapped lips.
There were often people in and out of hospital rooms—that was one of the things that made the whole experience bearable. An endless parade of doctors and nurses and therapists of various kinds, and staff members who brought clean sheets. One was always dragged back to polite civility and small talk. A new name to learn, a greeting to offer. There was a woman there now, standing by the window. Alice thought that it was nice that she was taking a moment to look out at the Hudson before continuing to deliver fluids or lunch or check vital signs or remove the trash, whatever her job was. Alice took a step closer to her dad. The woman turned and smiled.
“Alice,” she said, and held out both her hands, grasping like little pale lobster claws. Alice dutifully reached back and let the woman hold her hands, but the woman wasn’t finished, and kept pulling Alice closer until their bodies were pressed flat against each other in a tight embrace. She was small and nicely dense, like a snowman, with a corona of graying curls.
“Hi,” Alice said. “I don’t think you’re a doctor.” The woman looked like every Upper West Side therapist she’d ever met, or a middle school principal, a profession that required both warmth and a firm hand. There was something familiar about her face, but Alice couldn’t place her. The cheese counter at Zabar’s. On line for popcorn at the subterranean Lincoln Plaza Cinemas. She looked like someone’s mother. Alice had a momentary panic that this woman washermother, but no, that wasn’t possible.
The woman laughed. “Please, can you imagine? You know how well I do with blood.” She let go and sat down in the only chair in the room.
“How is he today?” Alice asked.
“He’s okay,” she said. There was a large tote bag at her feet, and she reached in and pulled out a pile of knitting. “Pretty much the same as yesterday.”
Alice turned back toward her dad. He looked yellow and pale under the fluorescent lights, with stubbled cheeks that were now more like a real beard than not. She touched his hand. “Hi, Dad,” Alice said quietly.
“How was the rest of your birthday? Kids make you something?” the woman asked.
“Good, yeah,” Alice said. She felt a poke in her back and whipped around, saw the woman holding an envelope.
“Your dad wrote you something. A birthday card, I guess.” It was a plain white envelope with Alice’s name written in Leonard’s jumpy, terrible handwriting. Alice took it gently and held it with both hands.
“When did he write this?”
“I’m not sure. But he gave it to me maybe a month ago. To give to you. Today.” Her eyes scrunched. “Oh, Alice.” The woman’s arms were around her waist.“He really wanted to be here for your birthday.”
“He is,” Alice said. She pulled away, though the woman resisted.
