Close up, the guardhouse was nearly empty—there was a broom standing upright in one corner and a few sealed bags of gardening dirt propped up against the opposite wall, but otherwise the tiny little shack was spotless. Alice closed the door behind her and sat on the floor. After a few minutes, she wadded up the shopping bag with her dirty sweater in it and used it as a pillow behind her head, with the dirt as back support. She fell asleep quickly, imagining herself as the tiny bunny in the Richard Scarry book, cozy in his tree all winter.
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 of Sassy magazine 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.