“Oh, please,” Sam said. Both her hands were spread flat against herbelly, which was not flat—it was huge, a perfect half circle. “New Yorkers think they’re the center of the world. It takes less time to get here than it does to get to wherever the twenty-five-year-olds live now. Queens?”
“Bushwick, I think.”
“Right. It’s just New Jersey. Oof.” Sam let her sneakers flatten against the wood porch, and the swing slowed to a stop. Sam pushed herself up to standing, her belly in full, triumphant view.
“Wow,” Alice said. She hadn’t seen Sam very much when she was pregnant before. They had been at dinner at some dark restaurant when Sam whipped out a sonogram photo, the tiny little astronaut profile that would eventually be her eldest, and after that, it was their regular hectic schedule, trying to squeeze in a March dinner that became an April dinner, and so on—Alice had seen photos of Sam and Josh on vacation in Puerto Rico, Sam’s belly poking out in between the polka dot slices of her bikini, but even before Sam and Josh had moved to Jersey, even before the kids were born, it wasn’t ever like it had been in high school, where they just talked on the phone from the minute they walked in the door until the minute they fell asleep, and where they slept in each other’s bed every weekend. It was like watching a plant grow in stop motion. “You look amazing.”
Sam rolled her eyes. “I assure you that I do not feel amazing, but thank you. Let’s get a drink and then we can sit?”
Alice nodded and followed Sam through the front door. “Where are the kids?”
“The kids? Well, Mavis is in the backyard, and this one’s in here.” Sam pointed to her belly.
“Right,” Alice said. “That’s what I meant.” She remembered Sam’s lists of girl names: Evie, Mavis, Ella. Pregnancies were fragile things—it wasn’t shifting the world’s balance. Sam had had miscarriages before, and maybe she had again. That was Alice’s biggest question, theone Leonard hadn’t answered because she hadn’t known to ask it—were all those other kids, those other lives, still happening, somewhere? She thought so, but it was impossible to know for sure.
Sam pulled open the fridge and took out two cans of fizzy water. “Pamplemousse okay?”
Alice nodded. The house was so big, like something on a TV show, one of the sitcoms that she and Sam used to watch after school, like Debbie’s show. Rooms big enough for siblings and parents and guys hoisting boom mics over all of their heads. Sam led them out the back door. Mavis was on the little wooden play structure they had, dangling upside down by her knees, with Josh standing next to her, his waiting arms ready to catch if she needed to be rescued. Alice waved, and Josh waved back, unable to leave his post. That was fine—they both knew she was there just for Sam.
“Forty’s not so bad,” Sam said. “You struggling with it? The idea of it?” She popped open her can and took a long sip. “God, being pregnant is like always being hungover. I am always thirsty, and I always have to pee, and I never want to get up to go to the bathroom.”
“No, it’s fine,” Alice said. “That part’s fine.”
Sam looked at her. “So what’s not fine? What’s going on? You know I love when you come here, but you never come here.”
“I just miss you,” Alice said. “And I miss my dad.” She let out a noise that was somewhere between a hiccup and a sob. “I’m sorry.”
“No, honey, come on! It’s okay! You know how much I love Lenny. Did he give me royalties for telling him to write a book that would make him a gazillion dollars? No. But did he thank me in the acknowledgments? Yes. Did he offer to put my kids through college? Also yes. I don’t need him to, but you never know. What if Josh gets run over by a bus, and I have to stop working? Your dad is like my personal Oprah.” She squeezed Alice’s arm. “I’m kidding. Not about him offering to put my kids through college, though—he really did.”
“I didn’t know that.” Alice could imagine it, though. She could see her dad saying it to Sam, pregnant with her first baby. He had probably wanted more kids—Alice had never considered it, they were always just a team of two, but coming from a tiny family, maybe he had wanted more. Or maybe he’d assumed that Alice would give him a grandkid or two eventually! He would never have pressured her, not in a million years, but Alice wondered if when he had gone back, Leonard had ever tried to find someone else—or if he’d ever gone back after meeting Deborah, to see if he could find her sooner. Have children of their own. Maybe he had. What else had he done that he didn’t want to tell Alice about? Probably a thousand things.
“Are you going to go see him today?” Sam asked.
Josh helped Mavis unhook her knees, and the girl disappeared into the top of the structure, which was built to look like a pirate ship.
“I’ll go this afternoon.” Alice put the cool can to her forehead. “It just sucks, you know?”
“I know.” Sam put her arm around Alice’s shoulders. “Oof, this kid just will not stop kicking me.”
“Can I feel?” Alice had reluctantly touched several pregnant bellies—teachers at school, friends from college, Sam. It always felt invasive on her part, borderline creepy. Alice had never been one of those people obsessed with babies, who would flirt across tables in restaurants and over the backs of airplane seats with any nearby child. Having a baby—carrying a baby—seemed so unfairly public, and compelled strangers to weigh in on your life choices with nary an invitation. But Alice felt like she needed proof that this world was real, that today, whenever today was, was a real day in her real life, and in Sam’s, too.
“Of course,” Sam said. She reached for Alice’s hand and put it low on her belly. “Oh, you know who just moved to Montclair? That kid—man, I guess, he’s a man now—but that kid who was a year behind us at Belvedere. Kenji?”
“Kenji Morris,” Alice said. She’d seen him a lot recently—he was the very tail of the boy train coming into her sixteenth birthday party on Pomander. A year behind them, but tall for his age, and skinny, Kenji had swayed like a willow tree. His mother was Japanese, and his father was dead. Alice didn’t think she knew anything else about him. He’d smoked Parliaments, maybe? No, he hadn’t smoked at all. They’d had Spanish together—he was good at languages, and was the only sophomore in the class.
“Right, Kenji Morris,” Sam said. “He and his kid live around the corner. He just got divorced. His daughter is Mavis’s age, and we met them in the park the other day. He’s nice! I never really knew him.”
“Let me guess—he’s a lawyer.”
“No, you fucking snob. Not every single person we went to school with is a lawyer, okay? He’s an architect.” Sam snorted.
“That’s a made-up job for men in romantic comedies.”
“That is also not true.” Sam put her head on Alice’s shoulder. “What do you want for lunch? The menu is grilled cheese or peanut butter and jelly. Or scrambled eggs.”
This time—yesterday—Alice hadn’t told Sam or her father. It seemed beside the point to tell Sam now, now that Alice knew it wouldn’t last and would probably only add to Sam’s therapy bills. Even when she hadn’t told her, the concept of it was still there, deep in their brains—no one who loved Keanu Reeves could avoid time travel for long.
“Is he bald?” Alice could picture Kenji so clearly, his black hair swooping low over one eye. Haircuts were terrible in the nineties—Caesars, baby bangs, even a few white boys with dreads—but Kenji’s hair had always had the freshly brushed quality of a kid on picture day.
