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 in Outlander just had to walk into some ancient rocks. Jenna Rink had some fairy dust in her parents’ basement closet. In Kindred and The Time Traveler’s Wife, it just happened, out of nowhere. Alice ran through every scenario she could remember. What was it in The 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.
Sam picked up after a few rings and groaned. “What?”
“It’s Alice.”
“Hi, Alice. Why are you calling me at the ass crack of dawn? Are you okay? Oh, fuck, it’s your birthday!” Sam cleared her throat. “Ha-appy birthday to you . . .”
“Okay, okay, yes, thank you. You don’t have to sing.” Alice watched her reflection as she talked. “I was just checking to make sure of something. Can you come over? When you’re up? Or can I come there? Just call me when you’re up, okay?” Her chin was as sharp as a knife. Why had Alice never written poems about her chin, taken photos of her chin, painted portraits of her chin?
“Okay, birthday bitch. Whatever you say. Love you.” Sam hung up, and then Alice did, too. Her closet shared a wall with the bathroom, and she heard her father go in and flick on the light and the whirring fan. The tap turned on—he was brushing his teeth. She hadn’t heard the door close, which, with a shoddy lock, was the only way for the two of them to communicate to each other that they needed privacy. Alice listened to her father brush and rinse and spit and knock his toothbrush against the lip of the sink before settling it back into its glass cup with a jangle as it knocked against hers. It had been so long since she’d thought about those sounds—the coffee grinder, the slippered shuffle down the hall. Alice rooted around on the floor and in her closet until she found clothes that smelled clean.
18
Leonard was sitting in his spot again, reading a book. Alice walked gingerly, like she might fall into a manhole at any second. Her father turned a page and stuck out his chin to let Ursula rub her face against it. Alice watched Leonard out of one eye while she opened the fridge and took out the milk. The cereal lived in the cabinet next to the plates and glasses, a collection of boxes beside the jars of peanut butter and the cans of soup and tomato sauce. Alice took out the box of Grape-Nuts, her father’s favorite.
“Are you okay, Dad? You feeling okay?” She watched Leonard’s face for any sign that he knew what was happening, that he recognized that something was amiss. But it was his face that was amiss—tiny crinkles around his eyes, but a full beard, a full smile. He was young, he was young, he was young. Alice did the math in her head—if she was sixteen, it meant that Leonard was forty-nine years old. Less than a decade older than she was. Alice was used to thinking of life as a series of improvements—high school to college, college to adulthood, twenties to thirties. Those had all felt like laps in a race she was doing well in—but Alice could see in her father all the ruin that was to come. The trips to the hospital, the endless doctor’s visits, once he agreed to go. The hearing aids, after years of yelling What, what, what? across the table in restaurants.
“Sure, why?” Leonard narrowed his eyes at her.
“No reason.” Alice looked at the cereal box. “I don’t know anyone else who buys this,” she said. “In my whole life, not one other person.”
Leonard shrugged. “I think you need to meet some more people.”
Alice laughed but also doubled over her bowl so that Leonard couldn’t see that tears had appeared in her eyes. She blinked them away, finished making her cereal, and finally went to sit next to her father.
He had the New York Times, The New Yorker, New York magazine, and an issue of People with JFK Jr. and Carolyn Bessette’s wedding on the cover. “Oh, man,” Alice said. “So sad.”