“I do Venmo,” she said, and pointed to a printed card by the door with a QR code. Alice snapped a picture and hurried out, the dog, little Toto, nipping playfully at her feathers.
43
Tommy would either call off the party and jump in a cab or he’d call the police, Alice didn’t know which. Maybe both. She turned off the Find My iPhone button and then turned off her phone altogether. He would probably guess that she’d go to Pomander, and so once she got up to 94th Street, Alice thought about going somewhere else, but there was nowhere else to go. It wasn’t a crime to leave your birthday party. It was a dick move, for sure, but it wasn’t a crime. She wasn’t a missing person. She was just a fool.
It was early yet—only ten o’clock. Alice opened the gate, relieved to hear the familiar creak of heavy iron. There were lights on at the Romans’， and at the house directly across from Leonard’s, which now belonged to an actor whose face Alice knew but whose name she could never remember. The cat sitter, Callie, lived next door, and Alice could see her parents watching television in their living room. Callie herself was probably in bed. It was such a good street to grow up on, but Alice also remembered how tight it sometimes felt, how short the view was out the window. Maybe that’s why Leonard had had trouble writing—he couldn’t see anything outside, just a house that looked exactly like his, and a city of fire escapes and windows in the back. But maybe he hadn’t had trouble, not this time.
Leonard’s lights—the house lights—were off. Alice wondered if Debbie would be there—she hadn’t been there that morning. Maybe she and Leonard had the dreamy sort of marriage that Alice herself wanted, or used to think she wanted, where they lived a few blocks apart and could always retreat to their own spaces. Pomander wasn’t tiny by New York City standards, but for someone who lived and worked at home, and had bookshelves lining every wall, and who had never learned how to buy or cook real food, it was tight. Debbie. The thought of her made Alice happy. She was so clearly kind, the sort of woman who would help you with your homework. Alice could picture Debbie as a loving, supportive teacher so clearly, with her bra line and the waistline of her full pleated skirt one and the same, the word bosom personified.
Alice unlocked the door, and Ursula was against her legs. Ursula had ruined Alice for other cats—the aloof layabouts who pretended not to know the humans were there until it was feeding time. “Oh, Ursula,” Alice said, and picked her up. The cat scrambled delicately onto Alice’s shoulders like a living stole. Some mail was splashed inside the door, where it had fallen through the slot. She moved over to the kitchen table and sat down in the dark. Ursula leaped down onto Alice’s lap and batted around some feathers before curling into a tight black ball and closing her eyes. Alice turned on the light.
There was a shelf on top of the fridge that held Leonard’s various prizes—an award shaped like a spaceship, another shaped like a comet. Alice had never understood why speculative fiction and outer space were so closely identified—surely the number of science fiction novels that took place on Earth vastly outnumbered the ones that took place on Planet Blork, or in some distant galaxy. Maybe it was because it was easier to imagine a totally different life outside the walls you were used to. Comforting, even, just to spend however many hours in some totally different place. Alice stood on her tiptoes and grabbed one of the silver spaceships. There were two of them, which Alice didn’t remember. It was dusty but heavy—a real piece of hardware, not like some flimsy trophy from a souvenir shop. There was a small plaque at the bottom, and Alice rubbed it clean as she read.
Best Novel, 1998
Dawn of Time
Leonard Stern
Alice put the spaceship on the counter next to the book. Ursula leaped up next to her, purring loudly and offering her chin to scratch. Alice turned on the faucet and Ursula began to flick her sandpaper tongue in and out of the water, an inefficient fountain. Alice splashed some water into her mouth, too, and then rested her hand on Ursula’s sleek back.
* * *
? ? ?
There were bookshelves everywhere, but Leonard had never put his own books on them, and even if he had, the shelves weren’t alphabetized or organized in a way that anyone but him could understand. When Alice was a kid, there were certain areas she knew how to find—the Agatha Christies, the P. G. Wodehouses, the Ursula K. Le Guins. Her eyes scanned the shelves, looking for her father’s name, knowing that she wouldn’t find it.
Leonard did have a stash, though—Alice could remember him signing copies of Time Brothers for various Belvedere fundraisers and things like that, auctions for some cause or another. She flipped on the light in the single, narrow hallway closet, in which Leonard had shoddily built wooden shelves, unfinished and full of splinters. There were several dinged-up cardboard Bankers Boxes. The one Alice could most easily reach was labeled tb foreign editions. Alice pushed it aside to see the box next to it, labeled dawn. Alice unfolded the small ladder that was tucked in for changing lightbulbs and heaved the box down with a thud. Dust rained on her pink feathers like fresh snow.