•••
She could do better, she could do more.
48
There were patterns: if Alice slept with Tommy and told him something firm, something concrete—marry me, or even justnow you are my boyfriend—she could expect to find herself in the San Remo. Alice didn’t like being there any more than she liked being in her studio apartment. The children were always cute, but they never belonged to her. Tommy was always handsome, but he didn’t belong to her, either, not like that. It was hard to change a pattern once she’d started it, like her body wanted to do what it had done before, and Alice had to knock herself loose from a clear track. The world didn’t care what Alice did, she had no grand illusions about that, but there was clearly some cosmic inertia to overcome. She thought about what Melinda had told her—that everything mattered, but nothing was fixed. Melinda hadn’t been talking about time travel, Melinda hadnevertalked about time travel, Alice thought, because Melinda was a sensible, grounded person, but it was good advice. All the tiny pieces added together to make a life, but the pieces could always be rearranged.
•••
Sometimes things changed a lot, and sometimes things changed a little. Sometimes Alice had rented a different apartment, one that she could almost remember seeing—one that she’d ruled out for having too low a ceiling or a strange step-up toilet, or being up four flights of stairs.
•••
Alice thought about bringing Sam with her but decided against it just in case there was also aFreaky Fridaysetting, and they ended up in each other’s bodies, or exploded.
•••
Sometimes she just wanted a fresh bagel from H&H, steam rising off the dough, too hot to hold with her bare hands. Sometimes she just needed to walk by and smell it. Childhood was a combination of people and places and smells and bus stop advertisements and local jingles. It wasn’t just her father that Alice was visiting; it was herself, the two of them together. It was the way the Pomander gate clanked, the sound of the Romans sweeping leaves off the bricks.
•••
Sometimes she didn’t tell anyone—not Sam, not Tommy, not her dad. Those were the trips Alice liked best. Just slipping into her own skin and watching everyone around her. It was like going to a zoo, only you could climb behind every fence and get right up close to every lion, every elephant, every giraffe. Nothing could hurt her, because everything was temporary. All she had to do was last the day.
49
Alice shaved her head with Leonard’s beard trimmer. She’d thought about doing it at various points, but the commitment had always seemed too great. Then she and Sam jumped on the 1 train and took it down to Christopher Street and walked for a few blocks until they hit a cheesy tattoo parlor by the West 4th Street stop and Alice asked for a whale, like the one from the Museum of Natural History, and Sam had gaped happily, her elbows digging into the black vinyl of the tattooist’s table as the needle went in and out of Alice’s shoulder. She skipped everything except lunch and dinner with her dad and went to sleep happy, blood seeping onto the giant see-through bandage.
50
New Zealand. Warm room, with the ocean out the window. Not her house—just temporary. Alice’s hair was still short, and bleached almost white. Her skin was tan, her arms strong. She carried a camera.
•••
Debbie on her voicemail—Come home. There isn’t much time.Alice almost wanted to laugh.There is always more time, just look at all the time I have, she thought, but still, she got on a plane and flew through an entire day—backward through a day—arriving before she’d left.
51
Alice and Leonard ate her birthday dinner at every restaurant she loved: they had dumplings and dim sum at Jing Fong, all the way in Chinatown; they had high tea at the Plaza hotel; they went to Serendipity 3 for giant ice cream sundaes; they had doughy suburban pizza at Uno Pizzeria, which had always secretly been Alice’s favorite; they had Gray’s Papaya again and again; they had dripping, gooey pizza from V&T; they had lox at Barney Greengrass; they got every kind of cookie from the Hungarian Pastry Shop; they went to City Diner and Leonard made his favorite joke, that he would order the boiled scrod, and then they ate burgers and fries and milkshakes; Leonard let Alice have sips of his margarita at Lucy’s, an enormous plate of cheese enchiladas between them. Bowls of penne alla vodka at Isola. Sometimes it felt like cheating, for it to always be Alice’s birthday, and for there always to be a reason for cake and off-key singing, and it was cheating, of course, it was cheating the rest of the year, and tomorrow, but Alice didn’t care; she let her dad sing the whole song every time. After one or two birthdays, Alice realized that she was going backmostly for dinner, just to have those hours where she and her dad or she and her dad and Sam sat around a table, talking about nothing in particular but laughing, and happy. Just being together.
•••
Leonard was always so happy when she told him. Aside from dinner, it became Alice’s favorite part. He was surprised every time, and sometimes clapped his hands with delight, pitching his upper body forward. Alice had imagined, over the course of her life, telling Leonard lots of things that made him cackle with joy—true joy, big joy—but there was no going forward, only back. And so she told him this one thing, over and over again, knowing how he would react, a present to them both.
52
It felt good, for a little while, to treat going back and forth like she was just going forward, as if each day were a new day, no matter the year, and it followed the one before it, and like she didn’t have to think too far ahead. Alice had never had a problem going from one day to the next. She knew it wasn’t true, but sometimes, when she was sitting in the guardhouse, waiting for the past or the future, she felt like she could do it forever, and like no one would ever die, and whatever choices she made, they didn’t matter, because she was just going to undo them in the morning.
53
Leonard’s pale skin, Leonard’s closed eyes, Leonard’s shallow breaths. She could make him better, and so she did, over and over again, a magic trick. Leonard young, Leonard funny, Leonard drinking Coca-Cola and smoking. Leonard immortal, if only for the day.
PartFive
54
It was two weeks after Alice’s birthday now, each visit pushing forward one day. Now she was used to being forty—truly, what did it matter—but her body did feel creakier than she remembered it, and when she stood up, there were some crinkling noises in her knees, like a freshly milked bowl of Rice Krispies. If Alice had just gone home that night, that first night, her fortieth birthday, if she’d called the fancy car and just given the driver her own address instead of her father’s, she would have vomited and passed out and woken up forty plus one day, plus one hangover. She still hadn’t fixed one thing in her life. She was no Dawn—she wasn’t even a Time Brother. If her life had a tag line, it would beGo back in time, fix nothing!Those books had happy endings, or, at the very least, satisfying ones, where there was some definitive resolution. A period at the end of the sentence. Alice’s problem was that there was always another sentence.
The Cheever Place apartment was smaller than she remembered, which was always how it felt after a day away. Most garden apartments were floor-throughs, with a door that led to an outdoor space, whetherit was grassy or just, like in her building, a large concrete square, but the way Alice’s landlady had divided her house, the rental apartment was just one large singular room with a built-in kitchen along one wall and exactly two internal doors: one that opened into a closet, and one that opened into the bathroom. Her desk, which was really just one side of her small kitchen table, was covered with a mountain of paper that was threatening to avalanche at any second. Her shoes, which were supposed to live on their little shoe rack by the door, dribbled out into the middle of the floor as if elves had taken them for joyrides.
