This Time Tomorrow(15)

Leonard had been in pain for months, and once he’d finally agreed to go to the hospital, the nurses on duty would help lessen the anguish by attaching his IV to a bag of diluted fluid, the strong stuff, and in the minutes before he got too stoned and fell asleep, Alice and her father started to really talk.

“You remember Simon Rush?” Leonard had asked. This was when he was in a room with a view, the mighty Hudson River and the George Washington Bridge right out the window. Alice watched boats go up and down the water, even Jet Skis. Where did people get Jet Skis in New York City?

“Literally your most famous friend? Of course I do.” Alice could picture him standing in the doorway on Pomander, and remembered sometimes coming across him and her father smoking cigarettes on the corner of 96th Street and West End Avenue when she and some of her friends were climbing back up from Riverside Park.

“He always had stuff like this. Was too trippy for me, usually, but sometimes, yeah. Sometimes we’d get so zonked and just sit in his apartment on Seventy-Ninth Street and listen to Love’s Forever Changes on vinyl. He had everything on vinyl, plus the best speakers money could buy.” Leonard pointed at her. “You have that, on your phone? Can you play it?”

Leonard had never gotten a smartphone—didn’t see the point. But he liked that Alice could immediately conjure anything he wanted to listen to, like it was magic. She pushed a few buttons and then music came pouring out of the tiny speakers. Guitars like dancers. Leonard raised a thin hand and softly snapped his fingers.

“It’s amazing, Alice, the way you were always just perfect. I was doing my thing, like always, and you were so solid, always. Like a bulldog. Terrestrial, you know.”

Alice laughed. “Thanks.”

“What? Am I not supposed to say that? I was great when you were little, man, and we could play, and just use our imaginations, and make up stories, but by the time you hit puberty, I should have called in someone who knew what they were doing. Sent you to some boarding school. Moved you in with Sam and her parents. But you were just such a good kid, you didn’t seem to notice.”

“You let me smoke in my room.” Alice’s bedroom had shared a wall and a fire escape with her father’s.

“You didn’t smoke, not really, did you? Cigarettes?”

“Dad, I smoked a pack a day. When I was fourteen.” Alice rolled her eyes. They had smoked together, at the kitchen table, sharing an ashtray.

He laughed. “No, seriously? But you never even got in trouble. You and Sam and Tommy and all your friends, you were such funny, good kids.”

“When I was in high school, you treated me like a grown-up. And so I thought I was a grown-up. But not, like, a square grown-up. I thought I was Kate Moss or Leonardo DiCaprio or something, one of the movie stars that was always stumbling out of nightclubs. That was my goal, I think.”

Leonard nodded, his eyes starting to close. “Next time, we’ll have more rules. For both of us.”

It was true—she had always been just fine. So fine that no one ever checked to see what was happening underneath. There were kids with problems—Heather, who got sent to rehab for shooting up between her toes like she was in The Basketball Diaries, and Jasmine, who ate only one hundred calories a day and had to be held back because she spent four months in inpatient treatment, being fed through a tube. That wasn’t Alice. Alice was fun, she was normal. She and her dad were like a comedy team, and she always laughed the loudest. If she’d had rules, or a curfew, or a parent who grounded her when he found drugs instead of just taking them away, maybe she could have gone to Yale, maybe she could have had test scores high enough that she could even have said that out loud without the college counselor laughing. Maybe she’d be wearing white in the fall, her hair long, and she would have left town and moved to France and done something, anything. Maybe she’d be talking to the hospital’s nurses’ station from her house in Montclair, watching through a window as her husband and kids splashed in the pool on the last seasonable days. When Sam had gotten too drunk as a teenager, she came to Pomander, and Leonard let her sleep it off in Alice’s bed. Maybe parents were supposed to be narcs. Alice had always assumed that he knew everything and trusted her enough not to get in trouble, but maybe he just had never been paying attention, like everyone else. Now it was harder for him to pay attention, and he had to ask her the same question over and over again. Leonard remembered Sam and Tommy but couldn’t have named anyone Alice worked with. Alice understood—this was how it worked. When she was young, she’d thought he was old, and now that he was old, Alice realized how young he’d been. Perspective was unfair. When Leonard was fully asleep, Alice left.





14



Alice had one large shopping bag in each hand—her fancy sweater in one and her doggie bag in the other. She had never, in her life as a New Yorker, been alone, at night, in the far west Thirties. She walked east until Eighth Avenue, when she found herself in a crowd of people with wheelie suitcases heading into Penn Station. Alice didn’t feel drunk, not exactly, but the world had taken on a slightly goofier tinge, and she giggled as she walked against the current of bodies in the crosswalk. The subway was right there, but she didn’t want to take it yet—the beauty of New York City was walking, was serendipity and strangers, and it was still her birthday, and so she was just going to keep going. Alice turned and walked up Eighth, past the crummy tourist shops selling magnets and keychains and i ? ny T-shirts and foam fingers shaped like the Statue of Liberty. Alice had walked for almost ten blocks when she realized she had a destination.