16
The room was dark and Alice felt creaky. She opened her eyes and blinked. It took several seconds for her to realize where she was. Somehow, in the night, she had made it all the way inside the house, into her narrow childhood bed. Leonard wasn’t one of those parents who turned his child’s bedroom into a warehouse for exercise equipment, but neither was he precious about Alice’s things. Most of them were still there, but once, on an annual clean-out that he did not ask her about first, Leonard had thrown all of her issues ofSassymagazine into the recycling, a transgression about which she was still mad. She stretched her arms over her head until her fingers tickled the wall behind her.
Alice’s body didn’t feel terrible, but her mouth was dry and a headache was on its merry way. She kept her eyes mostly closed as she reached onto the floor and felt around for her bag and phone. Instead, Alice’s fingers touched only the thick, shaggy rug, which she didn’t think had ever been vacuumed, and the crowded surface of the bedside table.
“Shit,” Alice said, and sat up. Her bag had to be nearby. Without her phone, she had no idea what time it was. It was certainly morning, even though her room was still dark. The backs of the houses on Pomander were always dark, especially in the morning, and the window in her bedroom overlooked the back windows in all the big buildings that lined the rest of the block, a whole inverted cityscape—fire escapes and mostly unseen windows, as far as the eye could see. Alice started making a mental list of all the credit cards she would have to cancel if she couldn’t find her wallet, and everything else she’d have to replace. How did one make an appointment at the Apple Store to replace a phone if one didn’t have a phone? Her laptop was at home. Alice exhaled.
She swung her legs onto the floor and stood up. She’d feed Ursula and figure out how to get on the train with no MetroCard. There had to be a few dollars somewhere in the house, enough to get home, and her landlady had a key to her apartment. The room was a mess—the floor absolutely piled with lumps of clothing, as if Leonard had been going through and getting rid of things before he went into the hospital. It was weird, but so was Leonard. Alice just nudged things out of the way with her bare toes, clearing a path to the door.
She shuffled into the bathroom and didn’t bother closing the door. She sat to pee and closed her eyes. There was a thump in the living room, and then the sound of Ursula walking the hall. Her tiny black face appeared in the doorway, and immediately her body was against Alice’s shins.
“Good kitten,” Alice said. It was only then that she looked down at her own body. She was wearing boxer shorts and an enormous yellow Crazy Eddie T-shirt that pooled in her lap. Her thighs, even flattened against the toilet seat, looked narrow, as if she’d somehow lost weight in the night. Alice didn’t remember changing clothes, and even if she had, she hadn’t seen this shirt in decades, a relic from her childhood.She stood up and pulled the shirt taut to admire it, a real piece of New York City history. The television commercial began to play in her brain. There was no way that Alice was not going to wear it home. Ursula wound her body around Alice’s feet and then ran off, no doubt to wait by her food bowl. Alice heard a noise from the other room—probably the tween cat sitter. Alice quickly pushed the door closed, not wanting to frighten the child.
Leonard’s bathroom was like a time capsule. Maybe it was that he still went to the same old-fashioned pharmacy he’d always gone to, or maybe it was that contemporary branding hadn’t arrived on the Upper West Side, but everything in the bathroom—Leonard’s toothpaste, his shaving cream, the towels that had once been beige and now just looked dirty, always—looked exactly the way it always had. Alice squeezed an inch of Colgate onto her finger and brushed her teeth. After she spat, she splashed some water on her face and dried off on the towel.
“I’ll be right out,” she called. “It’s Alice!” Children probably didn’t have heart attacks very often, but when she thought about her own childhood on Pomander Walk, there had been a lot of talk about stranger danger, and she had always been ready to kick and bite, like every good city girl. There was a quiet response, and so Alice straightened her T-shirt and walked out into the hall. She was a grown-up who worked with kids and could talk to anyone, even if she was wearing the kind of pajamas she’d worn as a teenager.
Ursula was perched in her favorite spot, the part of the windowsill directly above the heater vent, her black fur baking in the sun. She was the world’s most ancient cat—no one knew exactly how old she was, but if Alice had to guess, she would have said she was twenty-five, or immortal. She still looked just as vital as she ever had.
“Hey, good morning,” Alice said, turning the corner from the hallway into the kitchen. “Hope I didn’t scare you.”
“You’re not that scary,” said her dad. Leonard Stern was sitting in his spot at the kitchen table. There was a cup of coffee next to him, and an open can of Coca-Cola. Next to his drinks, Leonard had a plate with some toast and a few hard-boiled eggs. Alice thought she could see an Oreo, too. The clock on the wall behind the table said that it was seven in the morning. Leonard looked good—he looked healthy. Healthier, actually, than Alice could ever remember him looking. He looked like he could run around the block if he wanted to, just for fun, like the kind of dad who could play catch and teach his kid how to ice skate, even though he absolutely wasn’t. Leonard looked like a movie star, like a movie star version of himself—handsome, young, and quick. Even his hair looked bouncy, its waves full and the deep, rich brown they had been in her childhood. When had his hair started to gray? Alice didn’t know. Leonard looked up and made eye contact with her. He turned to look at the clock, turned back to Alice, and shook his head. “You are up early, though. A new leaf! I like it.”What was happening?Alice closed her eyes—maybe she was hallucinating! That was possible! Maybe she had gotten beyond drunk, so drunk that she was still, many hours later, more drunk than she had ever been in her entire life, and she was seeing things. Maybe her father had died, and this was his ghost. Alice started to cry, and rested her cheek against the cool wall.
Her father pushed his chair back from the table and slowly walked toward her. Alice didn’t take her eyes off him—she was afraid that if she looked away, he would disappear.
“What is happening, birthday girl?” Leonard smiled. His teeth looked so white and so straight. She could smell the coffee on his breath.
“It’s my birthday,” Alice said.
“I know it’s your birthday,” Leonard said. “You’ve made me watchSixteen Candlesenough times to ensure that I wouldn’t let this one slide. I did not buy you a boy with a sports car, though.”
“What?” she said. Where was her wallet? Where was her phone? Alice patted her body again, looking for anything that belonged to her, that made this make sense. She pushed her enormous T-shirt against her body and felt her flat stomach, her hip bones, her body.
“It’s your sixteenth birthday, Al-pal.” Leonard nudged her leg with his toe. Had he always been able to stretch like that? He hadn’t moved his body that easily in years. It felt exactly like when she saw her friends’ children for the first time in a few years and all of a sudden they were full-on humans who could skateboard and came up to her shoulders, but in reverse. She’d seen her father every day, then every week or so, for her entire life. There was never a gap, a time when she could see him with fresh eyes. She’d been there for every gray hair’s arrival, so of course she hadn’t noticed when the balance had shifted, when it was more salt than pepper. “Want an Oreo forbreakfast?”
PartTwo
17
Alice stood in her bedroom doorway. Her heart was doing things that hearts weren’t supposed to do, like beating in time to a Gloria Estefan song. She wanted to go and sit with her dad, but she also needed to understand if she was alive, if he was alive, if she was asleep, or if she was, in fact, sixteen years old instead of forty and standing in her bedroom in her father’s house. Alice wasn’t sure which option seemed the least appealing. If she was dead, then at least it hadn’t hurt. If she was asleep, she would wake up. If her father was dead, and this was her body’s response to the trauma, fair enough. The most likely option, other than this being the most lucid fucking dream of her life, was that Alice had had a mental health break, and that all of this was happening inside her own brain. If she had traveled back in time and her forty-year-old consciousness was once again inside her teenage body, and outside, it was 1996 and she was a junior in high school, that presented some major problems. It was unlikely that her bedroom would contain the answers to any of these questions, but teenage girls’ bedrooms were full of secrets, so anything was possible. Alice had grownup with two imaginary time-traveling brothers as her only siblings, after all.
She turned on the light. The piles of clothing that she had nudged aside weren’t things her father was dealing with; they were mountain ranges of her own making. The room was exactly as she remembered it, but worse. It smelled like cigarette smoke and Calyx, the sweet and bright perfume that she’d worn all through high school and into college. She closed the door behind her and then stepped gingerly over the piles of clothes until she had crossed the floor and reached her bed, the bed that she had woken up in.
Her flowered Laura Ashley sheets were in a tangle, as if a tornado had touched down just here, on top of her twin mattress. Alice sat down and pulled her squishiest pillow, the one with the Care Bears pillowcase, onto her lap. The room was small, and the bed took up nearly half the space. The walls were covered with pictures cut out of magazines, a collage that Alice had worked on continually from when she was about ten until the day she left for college. It looked like psychotic wallpaper—here was Courtney Love kissing Kurt Cobain’s cheek on the cover ofSassy, here was James Dean sitting on a tractor, here was shirtless Morrissey, here was shirtless Keanu Reeves, here was shirtless Drew Barrymore, her hands covering her breasts and daisies in her hair. There were lipstick kisses throughout, where Alice had blotted her lips on the wall instead of a tissue—Toast of New York, Rum Raisin, Cherries in the Snow. A giantReality Bitesposter, bought from a bin at the video store for ten dollars, was now the centerpiece, with other things taped to it and over it, leaving only Winona totally untouched. There were words written behind the movie stars—movie, trust, jobs—and Alice had added her own:high school, art, kissing. Someone had tagged over Ben Stiller’s face—Alice’s friend Andrew, her brain supplied a second later. Almost every single one of her malefriends in high school had had a tag and pretended to write graffiti, even if most of them only wrote it on pages in their notebooks, not on the walls of the subway. Alice turned toward the nightstand and pulled open the small, rickety drawer: her diary, a lighter, a pack of Newport Lights, a tin of Altoids, a few pens, some hair elastics, some loose change, and a package of photos. It was like she’d just woken up in a museum where she was the only exhibit. Everything in her room was exactly as it had been when she was sixteen.
Alice opened the flap and lifted out the stack of photos. They weren’t from any particular event, as far as she could tell—it was Sam sitting on her bed; Sam talking on the pay phone at school; pictures of herself that she’d taken in the mirror, a black hole where the flash had gone off; Tommy in the student lounge at Belvedere, covering his face. She thought it was Tommy. So many of the boys at Belvedere had dressed identically: enormous jeans, tops that would have looked preppy if they’d been three sizes smaller. Alice could hear her father turn on the radio in the kitchen and start to wash dishes.
“I’m just going to take a shower, Dad!” she called out. Alice had turned on her heels and escaped, which must have seemed enough like her teenage self that Leonard just shrugged and sat back down to finish his breakfast. What did her voice sound like? Did it sound the same? Alice caught her reflection in the cheap full-sized mirror that hung on the back of her closet door.
Every second of her teenage years, Alice had thought that she was average. Average looks, average brain, average body. She could draw better than most people. She couldn’t do math for shit. When they had to run during gym, Alice had to take breaks to walk and clutch her side. But what she saw in the mirror now made her burst into tears. Sure, Alice had complained about getting older—she’d made self-deprecating remarks to Emily on her birthdays, things like that, and she’d felt it inher back and her knees and seen it in the lines by her eyes, but on the whole, she’d felt exactly the same as she had when she was a teenager. She’d been wrong.
Alice stood in front of the mirror and put a finger up, E.T. style, to greet herself. Her hair was parted in the middle and hung past her shoulders. There was a small pimple growing on her chin, threatening to break through the surface, but otherwise, Alice’s face looked like a Renaissance painting. Her skin was creamy and smooth, her eyes were bright and big. The apples of her cheeks were comically pink.
“I look like a fucking cherub angel baby,” Alice whispered to herself. She looked down at her flat stomach. “What the fuck was wrong with me?” She started to hyperventilate. Her pink cassette player was at the foot of her bed, its antenna extended. Alice hugged it to her chest. The little marker was just past the 100—Z100, 100.3, a terrible radio station she had listened to probably every day of her childhood. She had made so many mixtapes for boys she had crushes on, boys who she hadn’t thought about in decades—and for Tommy Joffey, and for Sam, but also for a thousand other people, each song a secret message, and at least half of them Mariah Carey, who wasn’t even subtle. The radio had gone on to live in the bathroom for a little while, where Leonard would sometimes listen to music while he was in the bathtub, but Alice hadn’t seen it in more than a decade. She pulled it tighter, as if just holding it, she could hear every song she’d ever loved.
The Time Brothers had rocketed back and forth across the space-time continuum in a car. Marty McFly had the flux capacitor. Bill and Ted had their phone booth and George Carlin. The sexy lady inOutlanderjust had to walk into some ancient rocks. Jenna Rink had some fairy dust in her parents’ basement closet. InKindredandThe Time Traveler’s Wife, it just happened, out of nowhere. Alice ran through every scenario she could remember. What was it inThe Lake House?A magic mailbox? Alice had gotten drunk and passed out. She took deep breaths, watching her cheeks fill and empty.
At her feet, Alice saw another familiar object—her clear plastic telephone, its eight-foot coiled cord long enough to go anywhere in her room. She’d gotten it for her fifteenth birthday—her own line. Alice sank to the floor and pulled the phone into her lap. The dial tone was as familiar and comforting as a kitten’s purr. Her fingers traced a number—Sam’s. Sam’s pink phone, in her pink bedroom in her parents’ apartment. It was still so early, and and while grown-up Sam would be up and feeding her kids breakfast and bribing them with cartoons, teenage Sam would be sleeping on her face, dead to the world. Alice dialed anyway.
