Part Three
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Alice hadn’t fallen asleep, or at least she didn’t think she had, but there was the slightly underwater feeling of awakening from a dream. She stretched her arms over her head, clonking them on something hard. Alice let her hands feel around a little bit—hard, shiny, with bumps, definitely not her father’s ancient sofa—before she opened her eyes.
Once her eyes adjusted to the dark room, Alice could see that she was in bed—a huge bed, whatever size came after king. Alice wiggled her toes to make sure that she could, and sure enough, there they were, poking up against the heavy duvet. It looked like an expensive room at a hotel she couldn’t afford. A silver lamp with a geometric shade was next to her face, and Alice clicked on the light. The other half of the bed was empty, with the cover thrown back carelessly, as if someone had just climbed out. The walls were cream, the sheets were cream, and the floors were wood, with details laid in a hundred years earlier. Alice knew two things for certain: she’d never been in this room before, and also, at the same time, it was without a doubt her bedroom. It was like Leonard had told her: You’re going to wake up in your bed, wherever your bed is. You’re going to be inside your life, just like you’re inside your life right now. And there will be a lot of things that you missed. But you’ll feel those things, too, eventually.
* * *
? ? ?
She shimmied herself up so that she was propped against the headboard and then leaned over to inspect her drawer. There was her phone, all plugged in, and some earplugs, and a pen, and an eye mask. There was a small stack of books on the floor underneath the table, which calmed Alice down—she was still her, no matter how nice the apartment looked. She remembered what Leonard had said about the tracks, and that calmed her down, too, the idea that even if things looked different, she wasn’t, not really. Alice unplugged her phone and held it in front of her face. 5:45 a.m.—she’d slept through the shift. The password was the same—all her passwords were the same, her birthday and Keanu Reeves’s birthday; she’d set it when she was fourteen and had never seen a reason to change it. No wonder it was so easy to steal identities. Only now, instead of the resplendent photograph of Ursula that Alice was used to seeing, there were two smiling, dark-haired children.
They appeared to be a boy and a girl, but Alice couldn’t say for sure. Both kids had dark brown eyebrows slashed across their pale foreheads. The smaller one was sitting on the bigger one’s lap, like a pair of nesting dolls. The big one had their mouth open wide, and the little one looked nicely chunky. They were, Alice knew, her children. And judging from their coloring and mouths and eyes and how much they both looked like little Raphael Joffey, who had walked into her office that week or never, depending, Alice knew who slept on the other side of the bed.
Alice pulled back the covers and lowered her feet to the floor. The rug under the bed was enormous and probably cost more than three months’ rent on Cheever Place. She was in striped pajama bottoms and a Belvedere Fun Run T-shirt that she recognized as being a few years old. Alice pressed it against her body, a soft cotton security blanket. Okay, she thought. Okay. Alice gripped her phone and tiptoed toward the door. She had her hand on the knob when the toilet flushed and a door on the adjoining wall swung open. Alice instinctively curled her body up, as if she were a pangolin or a roly-poly bug, but she remained both human and visible.
“What are you doing?” Tommy was wearing a slim-fitting exercise outfit, with the sweat stains and damp hair to match. He looked much the same as he had in her office, but with a tighter haircut, and an even slimmer face. It had worked—something had worked. Alice thought about Tommy’s head on her shoulder in the taxicab, and whispering in his ear. Maybe that was the key—telling people exactly what you wanted, the actual truth, and then getting out of the way.
“Nothing,” Alice said. She straightened up. “We live here. You and me.”
“That’s right. See also: sky is blue, grass is green. Any other shocking revelations?”
“We live here all the time,” Alice said.
“Well, not all the time,” Tommy said, rolling his eyes. “Can you imagine? How embarrassing!” He was making a joke, but the joke made Alice feel ill. “Is this a weird way of telling me that you want to buy another fucking house? Zillow is not your friend, Alice. Just put the phone down in the middle of the night. One country house is plenty.” As Tommy talked, Alice could picture it—a white house behind a hedge, a gravel driveway. Someone else cutting the grass. “Plus my parents’。 And they’re having the pool redone this year; the kids will love it.”