* * *
? ? ?
A workday. Alice went back to Belvedere and found herself alone in Melinda’s office, which didn’t have Melinda’s things in it. She spun in the chair and looked out the window. Tommy Joffey and his wife were on the list again. Alice felt sorry for him, stuck in the San Remo forever, as absurdly fortunate as he’d been every day of his life, but then she remembered the Ferrari poster.
* * *
? ? ?
London at the desk. Debbie at the bedside. Leonard, pale, unconscious.
* * *
? ? ?
She could do better, she could do more.
48
There were patterns: if Alice slept with Tommy and told him something firm, something concrete—marry me, or even just now you are my boyfriend—she could expect to find herself in the San Remo. Alice didn’t like being there any more than she liked being in her studio apartment. The children were always cute, but they never belonged to her. Tommy was always handsome, but he didn’t belong to her, either, not like that. It was hard to change a pattern once she’d started it, like her body wanted to do what it had done before, and Alice had to knock herself loose from a clear track. The world didn’t care what Alice did, she had no grand illusions about that, but there was clearly some cosmic inertia to overcome. She thought about what Melinda had told her—that everything mattered, but nothing was fixed. Melinda hadn’t been talking about time travel, Melinda had never talked about time travel, Alice thought, because Melinda was a sensible, grounded person, but it was good advice. All the tiny pieces added together to make a life, but the pieces could always be rearranged.
* * *
? ? ?
Sometimes things changed a lot, and sometimes things changed a little. Sometimes Alice had rented a different apartment, one that she could almost remember seeing—one that she’d ruled out for having too low a ceiling or a strange step-up toilet, or being up four flights of stairs.
* * *
? ? ?
Alice thought about bringing Sam with her but decided against it just in case there was also a Freaky Friday setting, and they ended up in each other’s bodies, or exploded.
* * *
? ? ?
Sometimes she just wanted a fresh bagel from H&H, steam rising off the dough, too hot to hold with her bare hands. Sometimes she just needed to walk by and smell it. Childhood was a combination of people and places and smells and bus stop advertisements and local jingles. It wasn’t just her father that Alice was visiting; it was herself, the two of them together. It was the way the Pomander gate clanked, the sound of the Romans sweeping leaves off the bricks.
* * *
? ? ?
Sometimes she didn’t tell anyone—not Sam, not Tommy, not her dad. Those were the trips Alice liked best. Just slipping into her own skin and watching everyone around her. It was like going to a zoo, only you could climb behind every fence and get right up close to every lion, every elephant, every giraffe. Nothing could hurt her, because everything was temporary. All she had to do was last the day.
49
Alice shaved her head with Leonard’s beard trimmer. She’d thought about doing it at various points, but the commitment had always seemed too great. Then she and Sam jumped on the 1 train and took it down to Christopher Street and walked for a few blocks until they hit a cheesy tattoo parlor by the West 4th Street stop and Alice asked for a whale, like the one from the Museum of Natural History, and Sam had gaped happily, her elbows digging into the black vinyl of the tattooist’s table as the needle went in and out of Alice’s shoulder. She skipped everything except lunch and dinner with her dad and went to sleep happy, blood seeping onto the giant see-through bandage.
50
New Zealand. Warm room, with the ocean out the window. Not her house—just temporary. Alice’s hair was still short, and bleached almost white. Her skin was tan, her arms strong. She carried a camera.
* * *
? ? ?
Debbie on her voicemail—Come home. There isn’t much time. Alice almost wanted to laugh. There is always more time, just look at all the time I have, she thought, but still, she got on a plane and flew through an entire day—backward through a day—arriving before she’d left.
51
Alice and Leonard ate her birthday dinner at every restaurant she loved: they had dumplings and dim sum at Jing Fong, all the way in Chinatown; they had high tea at the Plaza hotel; they went to Serendipity 3 for giant ice cream sundaes; they had doughy suburban pizza at Uno Pizzeria, which had always secretly been Alice’s favorite; they had Gray’s Papaya again and again; they had dripping, gooey pizza from V&T; they had lox at Barney Greengrass; they got every kind of cookie from the Hungarian Pastry Shop; they went to City Diner and Leonard made his favorite joke, that he would order the boiled scrod, and then they ate burgers and fries and milkshakes; Leonard let Alice have sips of his margarita at Lucy’s, an enormous plate of cheese enchiladas between them. Bowls of penne alla vodka at Isola. Sometimes it felt like cheating, for it to always be Alice’s birthday, and for there always to be a reason for cake and off-key singing, and it was cheating, of course, it was cheating the rest of the year, and tomorrow, but Alice didn’t care; she let her dad sing the whole song every time. After one or two birthdays, Alice realized that she was going back mostly for dinner, just to have those hours where she and her dad or she and her dad and Sam sat around a table, talking about nothing in particular but laughing, and happy. Just being together.