“What’s happening there now?” Alice had wondered—was her forty-year-old body slumped, motionless, inside the shed, scaring all the Pomander residents going about their day? “Your friends scared me with all their Baby Hitler talk.”
“Nothing,” Leonard said. “A pause. You go right back. Thirty seconds, maybe? A minute? It can’t be more than a minute that goes by. The planets are moving, we’re moving, so I’m sure it’s not exact, but give or take. You’ll find yourself where you are. It’s not the exact same forty you’re going back to—but it’s you, at forty. Doing whatever it is this day has gotten you. You see what I mean about it being sticky? It’s a day—you wake up in the morning, and between three and four a.m., bingo bango, you’re back to when you left. That’s all the time you get. Most of the decisions we make as people are pretty stable, and time likes stability. I think about it like a car on a track. The car wants to stay on, and so it does, most of the time. I can imagine what Howard and Simon would say—Baby Hitler. What’s different? What did you do, what did you set in motion? Sure, that stuff’s important. But it’s gotta be something big in order to knock you far off the track. Don’t worry about it too much.” Leonard walked a hand one direction on the table, and then walked it the other.
Alice looked at the clock. It was three. All the lights on Pomander were out except for theirs. “Just give me a minute,” she said. She stubbed out the cigarette inside a bottle cap and hurried into her room. Alice looked around, searching for something solid to hold on to. She felt like she was on line for an upside-down roller coaster, a roller coaster she was going to fall out of, and there was nothing she could do to stop it. No change of clothes would help.
Leonard leaned against her doorframe. “Sweetie,” he said.
Alice looked at him and knew that she hadn’t done it—whatever he was talking about, pushing the car off the track, she hadn’t done it. “Dad,” she started, but he lifted a palm to stop her.
“It’s going to feel a little strange at first,” he said. Leonard walked her through it—the fuzziness that would follow. She would remember her life, the life before, but not vividly. Memories were memories, after all, and faded over time, especially without prompts like photographs. Over years, things smoothed out. At least he thought so. Of course, Leonard explained, he couldn’t say for sure. He was calm, but Alice was starting to panic.
“But I just got here,” Alice said. “It’s not fair.” She wanted to tell him that it wasn’t fair because she hadn’t figured out how to make sure that when she got back, or forward, or ahead, whatever the right word was, he would be waiting for her, eyes open.
Leonard nodded. “It’s never enough time. I know. But remember—you know how to get here. Do you know how many times I’ve watched you be born? You can come back.”
“And you’ll just be here? And we can just do this? So, what do I do?” Alice shook out her hands and feet, a one-girl hokey pokey. “What am I supposed to do?”
“It’s late,” Leonard said. “I would just go to bed. Or we can sit on the couch.”
Alice walked past her dad and down the dark hallway. Ursula rubbed her body against her, and Alice swooped down to pick her up. She lay down on the sofa and Ursula did, too, curling perfectly into her armpit.
Leonard covered her with a blanket and clicked on the television, though Alice knew he was watching her instead. She closed her eyes and tried to breathe normally, but she could only picture shriveled smoker lungs, black like the commercials that were supposed to scare her away but hadn’t.
“Will you do one thing for me?” Alice asked.
“Sure, what?” Leonard said.
“Will you quit smoking? Like, for real this time?” Leonard had tried before—he’d tried once a decade since he’d been a teenager himself.
Leonard snorted. “Fine. I’ll try, okay? You’re catching me in a weak moment here, and so I’ll promise to try.” He paused. “Al—” Leonard said, half to himself. “Why was it empty in the guardhouse? I’m so careful. How was it just, cleared out? Where was I?”
Alice didn’t want to lie to him, but she also couldn’t tell him the truth. She hadn’t thought much about the hospital, not as much as she usually did. It felt as far away as it was—decades, eons. If they were a hugging family, she would have hugged him, just to make sure she got one in. Why weren’t they a hugging family? Was it her? Was it him? Alice couldn’t remember. Leonard was close, and talking. That was all that mattered. “I took it out. It was piled up, like normal. Took me forever,” she murmured into the arm of the sofa, and then she was gone.