Alice flopped over on her bed. The tiny dog who lived next door, with the elderly woman who liked to sit on her front stoop and talk to everyone who walked by, was barking, which meant that the mailman was nearby. The dog was an ancient dachshund and couldn’t go up or down the steps by himself, and so plaintively barked every time he wanted to be in a place he wasn’t. Alice’s bed was a mattress she’d ordered from an internet company that advertised on the subway, on a creaky IKEA bedframe. She wasn’t unhappy in her life—she hadn’t beenunhappyin her life. Everything was fine. She was healthy, she had a job, she had friends, she had a decent sex life. She got Sephora points and didn’t shop at Amazon. She carried her own bags to the grocery store. Alice didn’t know how to drive, but if she did, she would drive an electric car. She voted, all the time, even for city council and state senator. She had a 401(k) and paid down her credit cards every few months. But Alice couldn’t look around her apartment and see anything that actually made her happy. There was supposed to be an upside to adulthood, wasn’t there? The period of your life that was your own, and not chosen for you by other people?
Alice felt around her bed for her phone, finding it buried under the pillow, her battery nearly dead. It was only 8 a.m., but Sam would be awake.
“Hey,” Alice said.
“Hey, sweet cheeks! Happy belated birthday! I’m sorry I’ve been so hard to pin down, it’s been crazy,” Sam said. It was always crazy. There were yelps and hollers in the background. Alice thought of Sam’s house like a battlefield, where one might be ambushed at any moment.
“Can I come over? I’m sure you’re busy, but can I come over? And just hang out?” Alice missed the twisty cord of the telephone in her room on Pomander, watching the pink flesh of her finger bulge through.
“Youwantto comeheretoNew Jerseyto hang out with myfamily?” Sam asked, incredulous. “I cannot stop you, and would be delighted. I personally would vote for alcohol, with grown-ups only, but you do you, baby.”
“I’ll be there as soon as I can remember how to get there,” Alice said, and hung up the phone to map it.
It wasn’t complicated: Alice took the F to Jay Street, then the A to 34th, then New Jersey Transit, which felt like the subway but wasn’t. Alice liked long train rides. She was feeling too out of sorts to read a book—she’d stared at her bookshelf for almost twenty minutes, unable to decipher if she wanted a happy ending or science fiction or something with death on the first page—and so had turned on the latest episode of her favorite podcast,Shippers.The tag line for the podcast wasThe Reason the Whole Internet Was Invented, which was maybe a stretch, but Alice loved it—every week, the two hosts would talk about fictional characters who had not had a canonical romantic relationship, and then gab for upward of forty minutes about why they should have, how they would have, and so forth. Archie and Jughead, Buffy and Cordelia, Stevie Nicks and Christine McVie, Chris Chambers and Gordie Lachance, Tami Taylor and Tim Riggins. The couples weren’t always ones that Alice believed in or would have chosen, but the hosts were entertaining and so she always listened.
“Okay, okay,” said Jamie, one of the hosts, after the theme musicplayed. “I’m excited about this. It’s kind of old-school, but not the most old-school we’ve ever done.”
“Today we are going to talk about the two books by cult author Leonard Stern,Time BrothersandDawn of Time.Now, Jamie, what makes someone a cult author, and does that mean they’re in a cult?” Rebecca, the cohost, said.
Leonard had always been like that: liable to appear out of nowhere. A question onJeopardy!, an answer in the crossword puzzle. He was even on an episode ofThe Simpsons, where he got into a fight with the guy who owned the comic book store about someTime Brothersmemorabilia. Most people knew his name, and if they didn’t, they always knewTime Brothers, which had been an easy cheat for Alice at school when it came to making friends. She didn’t even have to say anything—news of a famous parent traveled quickly. Alice would be out of college before she discovered this was a bad thing and never led to an honest connection.
“Okay, so, before our imaginary call-in line starts to light up with a thousand of you complaining that we are about to suggest incest, first of all, no, and second of all, no,” Rebecca said. “In today’s episode, we are going to ship the hell out of the noncreepy Time Brother, Scott, who was played by Tony Jakes, and Dawn, who probably had a last name—Dawn Gale!—fromDawn of Time.”
A small electronic trumpet noise sounded in the background. “Scott and Dawn! Tony Jakes and Sarah Michelle! I love this pairing.” Jamie laughed at her own joke. “Okay, first of all, I want to acknowledge that it’s weird, but I can’t help it that in my brain, Dawn is Sarah Michelle Gellar, who is a real person in the world, like post–All My Childrenbut pre-Buffy, and Tony Jakes does not exist, like, I couldn’t tell you one thing about him.”
“He has a horse farm, according to Wikipedia,” Rebecca added, clearly researching in real time.
“Right, a horse farm. Okay, so Tony Jakes has a horse farm, and has not been on-screen in, like, two decades, and according to this super-old profile I read inPeoplemagazine, he’s gay and also renovates houses. So he sounds awesome, and I love him.”
“Anyway, here’s what I like about Leonard Stern,” Rebecca said. “Do you know how old he was when he published his first novel?”
“Twenty-five?” Jaime guessed.
“Incorrect! Leonard Stern was thirty-eight years old! And he didn’t publishDawn of Timeuntil he was fifty-two!” Rebecca sounded triumphant.
“I love that,” Jamie said. “Snaps for late bloomers.”
“Seriously,” Rebecca said. “We should start a whole other podcast about people who really tap into their potential after forty. That’s a good podcast idea! Tweet at us if you agree!”
Rebecca and Jamie were still talking, but Alice wasn’t really listening anymore. She’d never thought about Leonard as a late bloomer. He had bloomed within her lifetime; how could it feel late? But hearing the numbers out loud, from strangers, it did seem notable. These two women were talking about these characters that her father had invented as if they were real, because they were. Sometimes people didn’t understand that—Alice wasn’t a writer, but she’d spent enough time sitting at dinner tables with novelists to understand that fiction was a myth. Fictional stories, that is. Maybe there were bad ones out there, but the good ones, thegoodones—those were always true. Not the facts, not the rights and the lefts, not the plots, which could take place in outer space or in hell or anywhere in between, but the feelings. The feelings were the truth.
“Okay,” Rebecca went on, “but want to know my actual favorite fact about Leonard Stern, that I learned literally this morning on Wikipedia? He married the woman who played Dawn’s mother in the movie!” Rebecca cleared her throat, and Alice sat up, suddenly paying full attention.
“No waaaay,” Jamie said. “The woman from that show? About the kids?”
“Yes and yes,” Rebecca said. “Dawn’s mother was played by actress Deborah Fox, who was also on the classic eighties television showBefore and After School.”
It was the image Alice had of her—the bosomy teacher. Alice closed her eyes and could see the whole credit sequence of the TV show—a sitcom about a woman who adopted a houseful of kids and was also their school principal. It had aired on Saturday mornings in the 1980s, and the optics of it were terrible, a multiracial cast of kids and the plump, sweet white lady who saved them. Deborah Fink was Deborah Fox, an actress. And she had married Leonard after costarring in his movie.
“Wow,” Alice said out loud. There was always more to learn. How many more surprises did Leonard have that she would discover someday? Alice laughed to herself, thinking of Leonard and Debbie and Sarah Michelle Gellar at Gray’s Papaya, the fun house mirror version of her family.
55
The Rothman-Woods lived near the upper Montclair stop, in a big blue house with a porch swing. It was only three blocks from the train station, but Alice came so rarely that she kept having to check that she was walking the right direction. She flipped the phone around in her hand so that it was pointing the way she needed to walk. After only two wrong turns, Alice could see it, the blue floating into view. Montclair’s sidewalks were already crunchy with leaves, and the trees seemed to be more full of birds than in Brooklyn. Some houses had already started decorating for Halloween, and headstones dotted the front lawns of Sam’s street. Her next-door neighbor had a row of pumpkins leading up to their stoop, and when she got closer, she saw that Sam did, too.
“Hey,” Sam said. She was sitting on the porch swing, rocking herself back and forth with her toes.
“Hey!” Alice said. She shoved her phone in her pocket. “It only took me twenty-five years to get here.”
