“Listen, spirit animals are a whole different thing. The dog is loyal—” The woman whistled once, sharply, and a tiny ball of brown fluff skittered across the floor toward her. She leaned over and picked it up. “This is a dog, but it’s also not just a dog. This dog is my protector, my rock.” The dog, a dead ringer for Toto, leaned back on its hind legs and stretched its mouth up for a kiss. The psychic let it lick her on the cheek and then gently put it back down on the floor. “That’s what the dog is. You have your own dog. A friend, a family member. You might have a few. Someone who wants to protect you, who is always loyal. You gotta listen to your dog.”
“Okay,” Alice said.
“The Fool is a major card, too. It’s not about a promotion, or whether you said the wrong thing one time, that kinda thing. It’s the big stuff.”
“Couldn’t get any bigger,” Alice said.
“Basically, this card is saying you never know what’s coming, so you gotta be happy when it’s there. Whatever it is. I’ve been listening to this podcast,The Universe is Your Boss!, you know that one?”
Alice shook her head. The dog padded over, its nails ticking on the linoleum floor, and sniffed her hand.
“It’s good, you should listen. Anyway, the host ends every episode by saying, ‘Joy is coming.’ I think it’s a quote from a book or something, I don’t know. But she says it every week. Joy is coming. That’s the Fool. You just gotta keep your eyes open and look for it. Make sure not to fall.”
“You say that like it’s easy,” Alice said. Her phone was dinging, and she took it out of her pocket. The Find My iPhone alarm was going off. Tommy was tracking her. Which she understood. She’d married him young, high school sweethearts. They’d never been apart. Alice thought about having sex with only one person for your entire life—it sounded like a holdover from the days when life expectancy was thirty-five. “I have to go,” Alice said. She stood up and hugged the woman, who didn’t seem surprised.
“I do Venmo,” she said, and pointed to a printed card by the door with a QR code. Alice snapped a picture and hurried out, the dog, little Toto, nipping playfully at her feathers.
43
Tommy would either call off the party and jump in a cab or he’d call the police, Alice didn’t know which. Maybe both. She turned off the Find My iPhone button and then turned off her phone altogether. He would probably guess that she’d go to Pomander, and so once she got up to 94th Street, Alice thought about going somewhere else, but there was nowhere else to go. It wasn’t a crime to leave your birthday party. It was a dick move, for sure, but it wasn’t a crime. She wasn’t a missing person. She was just a fool.
It was early yet—only ten o’clock. Alice opened the gate, relieved to hear the familiar creak of heavy iron. There were lights on at the Romans’, and at the house directly across from Leonard’s, which now belonged to an actor whose face Alice knew but whose name she could never remember. The cat sitter, Callie, lived next door, and Alice could see her parents watching television in their living room. Callie herself was probably in bed. It was such a good street to grow up on, but Alice also remembered how tight it sometimes felt, how short the view was out the window. Maybe that’s why Leonard had had troublewriting—he couldn’t see anything outside, just a house that looked exactly like his, and a city of fire escapes and windows in the back. But maybe he hadn’t had trouble, not this time.
Leonard’s lights—the house lights—were off. Alice wondered if Debbie would be there—she hadn’t been there that morning. Maybe she and Leonard had the dreamy sort of marriage that Alice herself wanted, or used to think she wanted, where they lived a few blocks apart and could always retreat to their own spaces. Pomander wasn’t tiny by New York City standards, but for someone who lived and worked at home, and had bookshelves lining every wall, and who had never learned how to buy or cook real food, it was tight.Debbie. The thought of her made Alice happy. She was so clearly kind, the sort of woman who would help you with your homework. Alice could picture Debbie as a loving, supportive teacher so clearly, with her bra line and the waistline of her full pleated skirt one and the same, the wordbosompersonified.
Alice unlocked the door, and Ursula was against her legs. Ursula had ruined Alice for other cats—the aloof layabouts who pretended not to know the humans were there until it was feeding time. “Oh, Ursula,” Alice said, and picked her up. The cat scrambled delicately onto Alice’s shoulders like a living stole. Some mail was splashed inside the door, where it had fallen through the slot. She moved over to the kitchen table and sat down in the dark. Ursula leaped down onto Alice’s lap and batted around some feathers before curling into a tight black ball and closing her eyes. Alice turned on the light.
There was a shelf on top of the fridge that held Leonard’s various prizes—an award shaped like a spaceship, another shaped like a comet. Alice had never understood why speculative fiction and outer space were so closely identified—surely the number of science fiction novels that took place on Earth vastly outnumbered the ones that took place on Planet Blork, or in some distant galaxy. Maybe it was because itwas easier to imagine a totally different life outside the walls you were used to. Comforting, even, just to spend however many hours in some totally different place. Alice stood on her tiptoes and grabbed one of the silver spaceships. There were two of them, which Alice didn’t remember. It was dusty but heavy—a real piece of hardware, not like some flimsy trophy from a souvenir shop. There was a small plaque at the bottom, and Alice rubbed it clean as she read.
Best Novel, 1998
Dawn of Time
Leonard Stern
Alice put the spaceship on the counter next to the book. Ursula leaped up next to her, purring loudly and offering her chin to scratch. Alice turned on the faucet and Ursula began to flick her sandpaper tongue in and out of the water, an inefficient fountain. Alice splashed some water into her mouth, too, and then rested her hand on Ursula’s sleek back.
•••
There were bookshelves everywhere, but Leonard had never put his own books on them, and even if he had, the shelves weren’t alphabetized or organized in a way that anyone but him could understand. When Alice was a kid, there were certain areas she knew how to find—the Agatha Christies, the P. G. Wodehouses, the Ursula K. Le Guins. Her eyes scanned the shelves, looking for her father’s name, knowing that she wouldn’t find it.
Leonard did have a stash, though—Alice could remember him signing copies ofTime Brothersfor various Belvedere fundraisers and things like that, auctions for some cause or another. She flipped on the light in the single, narrow hallway closet, in which Leonard had shoddily built wooden shelves, unfinished and full of splinters. There were severaldinged-up cardboard Bankers Boxes. The one Alice could most easily reach was labeledtb foreign editions.Alice pushed it aside to see the box next to it, labeleddawn.Alice unfolded the small ladder that was tucked in for changing lightbulbs and heaved the box down with a thud. Dust rained on her pink feathers like fresh snow.
There were hardcovers and paperbacks—the orange paperback that Sam had thrust at her, and a hardcover edition with an understated black-and-white jacket, mostly type but with a small yellow door at the center, like a sunset as seen through a cartoon mousehole. In addition to several copies of those, there were foreign editions—Alba del Temps,Swit Czasu,Dämmerung der Zeit—all shoved into the box as if Leonard had been cleaning out his desk in a hurry. There were DVD boxes, which Alice hadn’t seen in years. ATime Brothersbox set had snuck in—six discs, plus bonus material, and right underneath it was a DVD box forDawn of Time, which appeared to have been made into a movie starring Sarah Michelle Gellar.
She put the movie back in the box and shoved it all toward the back of the closet, except for the hardcover copy ofDawn of Time, which she tucked under her arm and carried to the couch. Leonard had always been a dedicated napper, and so the couch had a threadbare but still cozy blanket thrown over the top, and a pillow that belonged to Ursula but which she was willing to share. Alice lay down and closed her eyes. It was late, and she was exhausted. Ursula jumped onto the couch and started making biscuits on Alice’s chest, poking tiny holes into the bodice of her dress. She opened the book, knowing that she wouldn’t stop until she was finished.
IfTime Brotherswas Leonard looking for adventure and for family—he had not had a brother; his parents had been well-meaning but disinterested in his internal life—thenDawn of Timewas Leonard looking at her—looking at himself looking at her. Alice knew that she wasn’t Dawn, that Dawn was a creation, a mix of people, of Leonardhimself and what he thought about Alice, and other people, too, and then that strange alchemy of writing, when the character began to do and say things the writer didn’t expect. Alice loved her father’s book. Books! She wished there were more of them to read, hidden in a box somewhere. It didn’t matter if they were published, or if no one else read them. It was better than a diary, because there was nothing that could make her cringe, nothing that felt inappropriate for her to see. People were allowed to have privacy, even parents. But in Leonard’s book—his books!—Alice could find little messages. Sometimes it was as simple as a description of a meal that she knew Leonard himself liked to eat—fried eggs left alone in the pan long enough to turn brown and crispy at the edges—or the mention of the Kinks. They were all tiny little parts of him, preserved forever, molecules that had rearranged themselves into words on a page, but Alice could see them for what they were, which was her father.
It wasn’t a guardhouse—Dawn, who lived on Patchin Place, in the West Village, with its gas lamp at the end of the lane like something Mr. Tumnus would be leaning against, had crawled through a tiny door in the back of the closet in her bedroom, the kind of door that usually hit fuse boxes or water shut-off knobs, a jerry-rigged space built out of necessity. She was just looking for a small place of her own, but when she made it to the very back of the closet, she emerged into the ramble in Central Park. The story was complicated—portals, a mystery to solve, different years, different realities. But Alice could read it for what it was, which was a love story. Not a romance—there was no sex in the entire book, a few kisses, that was it—the book was about the love between a single parent and their only child. It wasn’t funny. It was earnest. It was the kind of thing that Leonard would never have said aloud to Alice, not in a million years. But it was true all the same. Alice wiped at her eyes and looked up at the clock. It was just before three. She sat up and looked out the window at the guardhouse. Whathad it cost her, traveling back? It had cost her a day. A day when her father was still alive. She couldn’t put it off forever, but Leonard had said she could go back. He had, after all. Alice shut the front door quietly behind her and ducked into the guardhouse. This time, she could do it onpurpose.
PartFour
44
When she woke up in her bed on Pomander Walk, Alice knew exactly where she was, and when she was, and where her father was. She stayed in bed for a few moments, stretching. Ethan Hawke and Winona Ryder stared at her from the opposite wall and Alice involuntarily started singing “My Sharona.” Ursula was curled up on top of her stomach.
“You really are the best cat,” Alice said. Ursula tucked in her paws and rolled onto her back, her eyes still closed. Alice dutifully petted her furry tummy.
