“Come on,” Sam said. She stood up and patted Mavis on the top of the head. Alice winked at Mavis, who blinked back with her whole face. “Time to eat.”
56
Visiting hours were until 5:00, but when Alice passed London her ID at 4:45, he didn’t say a word, just slipped her a pass. Alice felt terrible. Not sick, not exactly, but slow and heavy, like she was wading through molasses. With a headache. It was disorienting—at least when she was in the guardhouse, Alice knew what to expect. She thought about it like making a mixtape the way she’d done in high school, rewinding until just the right spot and then adding something new. It had always felt so crucial to put things in the right order, to have this song after that one. But you couldn’t control how someone else would listen, whether they would care, whether they would play it over and over or whether the tape would get caught and spin out like a ball of Christmas tinsel. She could go back more easily than she could go forward. Going forward was scary, because anything could have happened. Anything could happen. Anything had been proven to be within a fairly narrow range, but still—Alice couldn’t control it.
The hospital was quieter than usual—the afternoon had turned cloudy and dark, and maybe most of the visitors had gone home early to beat the coming rain. Alice nodded polite greetings to the people she passed in the endless hallways, one leading to the next and the next, until she reached her father’s room. She expected the same scene she’d walked into so many times: her father, mostly asleep, eyes closed, and Debbie fussing about in the chair, the noise of television news blasting away in several neighboring rooms. But when Alice pulled aside the curtain, Leonard was alone and awake, his eyes open, with his head propped up on pillows. He looked at her and smiled.
“Finally.” Leonard opened his hands, like a magician revealing that something—a coin, a rabbit—had disappeared.
Alice stopped, still clutching the cheap nylon curtain. “Dad.”
Leonard smiled. “Were you expecting someone else?” His face was thin, and his stubble was gray. Leonard waved a hand in the direction of the chair. “Come into my tiny kingdom.”
“I just didn’t know you’d be up.” Alice swiftly ducked into the chair and held her arms tight across her lap like they were the safety bar on a roller coaster.
“Debbie just left. She was hoping to catch you, but you can call her later, right?” There were a few bags of fluid hanging behind him, one dripping slowly into his arm. The doctors’ and nurses’ names were on the whiteboard, and a list of all of Leonard’s medications. It was the same as it always was, only he was awake and talking and looking at her. “Good to see you, Al-pal.”
“Good to see you, too,” Alice said, which was an understatement.
“How was your day?” Leonard said. “You look a little tired.”
“I am tired,” Alice said, though it was more than that. She felt embarrassed, and anxious, and excited. Alice had already spent so much time grieving in the present that she didn’t know quite what to make of having her father in front of her, awake. The idea of Leonard dying, and what it would mean for the rest of her life, was heavy, but it was a familiar weight. Not that Alice thought she had worked her way through it—if anything, she understood that it wasn’t actually something one could ever work all the way through, like a jigsaw puzzle or a Rubik’s cube; grief was something that moved in and stayed. Maybe it moved from one side of the room to the other, farther away from the window, but it was always there. A part of you that you couldn’t wish or pray or drink or exercise away. She was used to him being so close to gone that gone was almost desirable—no one wanted to watch someone they loved suffer. But she was also tired—tired of how tense her body was when the phone rang, tired of how nervous she felt whenever she walked out of his hospital room, tired of how it felt to know that her life was going to change and that she was going to have this enormous hole forever. Soon. Alice thought that it was probably exactly the inverse, the mirror image, of how it felt to be pregnant, and to know that your life would never be the same. A subtraction instead of an addition. So many of the customs were identical—people would send flowers, or cards, or food. Someone would have her name on their to-do list—Write a note to Alice Stern. And then it would be done, just her problem again, day in and day out, forever. It had taken a long time for Alice to get wherever she was, and she didn’t know if she could do it again.