“Why do you say that?” Alice asked.
Someone knocked on the door, and then Tommy poked his head in. Both Alice and Sam whipped their heads around to look at him.
“The natives are restless,” he said. He made what would pass for a sheepish face, if he’d ever felt sheepish about asking for anything except a blow job. Alice was remembering more. It was like watching someone paint a giant canvas at high speed, all the white getting filled in with details.
“You can’t say that anymore,” Alice said. “Be right there.”
Tommy nodded and withdrew his head from the room.
“Why did I think that marrying Tommy was the answer to anything?” Alice asked. “I mean, it is exactly what I pictured being a grown-up would be like, this whole thing—” She gestured around the room. “And my clothes are fucking amazing. Do you know how many pairs of shoes I have? The kids are beautiful, and funny, and—” Alice thought about her dad. Whatever she’d done, or said, it hadn’t been enough. She hadn’t told him everything she needed to.
“I get it. I think,” Sam said. “You can do it again, can’t you? Isn’t that how the book goes?”
“How the story goes?” Alice asked. “I don’t know.”
Sam shook her head. “Dawn of Time. You know, the best idea I ever had that I didn’t get paid for?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Alice said.
“Hang on,” Sam said. She scooted off the bed and slipped out the door as elegantly as a very pregnant person possibly could, still barefoot. Alice got up and chewed on her beautiful fingernails. A minute later, Sam opened the door again, noise from the party spilling into the room. In one hand, she had a pile of shrimp on a paper napkin, and in the other she had a book. “Here,” Sam said, thrusting it at Alice. “Just go—I’ll cover for you.”
Alice looked at the book in her hand. It was orange, with enormous type, type that took up nearly the whole jacket—Dawn of Time, by Leonard Stern. She opened it and read the flap.
An all-new time travel adventure by Leonard Stern, author of the worldwide sensation Time Brothers.
It was exactly what they’d talked about over ice cream—High school senior Dawn Gale didn’t expect her graduation to be momentous, but when she wakes up the next morning as a thirty-year-old, she knows she’s got a mystery to solve. Will this smart girl get back to her own life, or will she be stuck forever, going back and forth between these two different points in her life? The copyright date was 1998, the year that Alice herself had graduated from high school.
“This is real?” Alice said. He’d done it—she knew he could, and he had. She turned the book over and stared at the photograph of Leonard that took up the entire back of the book. His face, in black and white and gray. It was a Marion Ettlinger photograph, Alice could tell—she’d shot every important writer of the decade, and her style, silver and steely, was unmistakable. The picture was in focus, every hair on his head. Leonard’s eyebrows were raised, as if he weren’t expecting someone to take his photograph, as if Marion had just happened upon him in the wild, chin resting on his hand just so. He was wearing a black T-shirt and a black leather jacket and his eyes were fixed straight at the camera, staring it down.
“Okay,” Alice said. She clutched the book in her hand. “I love you.”
Sam kissed Alice on the cheek. “Until the future.” She smiled and opened the door.
42
The upper west side was beautiful during the day, if you had the stomach for the yuppies and the preppies and the bankers and the glossy chains that had eaten up all the idiosyncratic storefronts of Alice’s youth, but it was more beautiful at night, when all the shops had closed and the quiet streets glittered under the glow of streetlights. Alice had always loved walking home from Tommy’s apartment—her father had given her a rape whistle when she was twelve, just in case, and she kept it in her pocket, next to her sharpest keys, always ready. Despite having to be aware of every man within a block radius and how close they were to her body, the inner radar that every woman naturally possessed, Alice loved to walk alone at night. The later the better. She stepped into the middle of the street, her phone in one hand and Dawn of Time in the other, pumping her arms like a mall walker on a mission. She walked up Central Park West until she passed the Museum of Natural History, which was closed, but the rounded towers at either end were still illuminated, little dinosaur-filled lighthouses. Alice turned on 81st Street and hurried past the row of uniformed doormen, hands at the ready. She crossed Columbus and walked over the hill to Amsterdam, where the bars were hopping and crowds of revelers were vaping outside, some of them even ignoring their phones for long enough to flirt. So many places from her childhood were gone, like the Raccoon Lodge, where her coolest babysitter had hung out with her biker boyfriend, and the tiny horseback riding stable in a converted garage on 89th Street where she’d begged Leonard to let her take lessons as a kid, but that was New York, watching every place you’d kissed or cried, every place you loved, turn into something else.