“I don’t know why I never come here anymore,” she said. “I feel like my blood pressure just dropped.”
“Since when do you worry about blood pressure? Man, sixteen ain’t what it used to be.” Leonard shifted his hands to his stomach, and Alice watched them rise and fall with his breath.
Alice thought about saying something right then. There were families pushing sleeping children in strollers and tourists lugging around shopping bags, but the room was quiet, and whatever Alice said, no one but her father would hear her.
Leonard had, of course, thought about time travel more than most people. Even though he routinely mocked terrible sci-fi novels and movies and television shows, even ones made by his friends, Alice knew that he loved it. The impossible being possible. The limits of reality being pushed beyond what science can fully explain. Sure, it was a metaphor, it was a trope, it was a genre, but it was also fun. No one—certainly no one Leonard liked—wrote science fiction because it was a tool. That was for assholes. Of all the writers in the world, Leonard’s least favorite were the fancy ones, the ones from highly ranked MFA programs and award ceremonies where one had to dress in black tie, who had descended briefly to earth and stolen something from the genres—the undead, perhaps, or a light apocalypse—before returning to heaven with it in their talons. Leonard liked the nerds, the ones with science fiction in their blood. Some of those fancy writers were deep, true nerds under the surface, and Leonard was okay with them. But Alice didn’t think that she could just start a conversation about nerds, or science fiction, or time travel, not without giving herself away, and she wasn’t ready to do that just yet. It wouldn’t be like telling Sam, Alice knew, who still had one eyebrow raised, like an agnostic who believed in something but not necessarily in God. Leonard had always trusted Alice—about which girl had pushed her off the slide in kindergarten, about which boy had teased her, about which teacher was grading unfairly. She wasn’t worried that he would doubt her. Alice was afraid of what would happen next because Leonard would believe her right away, without hesitation.
The whale was the length of the whole room, its nose pointing down, poised to dive into the inky depths. The wide tail looked like it was about to push upward, maybe even through the ceiling, to help propel the giant animal down. Alice closed her eyes and concentrated on how solid the floor was beneath her back.
“Did I ever tell you about when Simon and I went to see the Grateful Dead at the Beacon Theatre?”
He had.
“Go ahead,” Alice said, and smiled. She knew every word that was going to come out of his mouth.
“1976,” Leonard began. “Jerry had this white guitar. I know a lot of people who saw the Dead a thousand times, but I only saw them that one time. The Beacon can feel so small, depending where you’re sitting, and Simon had gotten tickets from his agent, who was this super hotshot, and somehow we were in the third row—the third row!—and every woman there was drop-dead gorgeous, and it was like being on another planet for four hours.”
This was what Alice had been missing. Not just the answers to questions that she’d never been brave enough to ask, and not just family history that no one else knew, and not just visions of her own childhood through her father’s eyes, but also this: the embarrassing stories she’d heard a thousand times and would never hear again. She could see the whole concert, Leonard’s sweaty, smiling face—before he was married, before he was a dad, before he’d published a book. She could see it as clearly as she could see the whale, even with her eyes closed.
29
When they got back to Pomander, the phone was ringing. Leonard swung his body aside and gestured for Alice to answer it.
“It’s for you,” he said.
“How do you know?” Alice said, and picked up the receiver.
“Jesus, I have been calling, like, every ten minutes for hours,” Sam said.
“Sorry, this is Alice, not Jesus.” Alice wound the cord around her pointer finger. Why did people think that having cell phones was less tethered than this? She’d been floating in space all day, unreachable, and now, connection.
“Oh, shut up, grandma. Where do you want to have dinner? I’ll meet you there.”
“Where should we have dinner, Dad?” Alice asked Leonard. He was standing over the kitchen table, looking through a stack of mail and magazines and who knows what.
“Let’s go to V&T. Then Sam can just walk and meet us. Sound good?”