This Time Tomorrow(21)

“Sure, why?” Leonard narrowed his eyes at her.

“No reason.” Alice looked at the cereal box. “I don’t know anyone else who buys this,” she said. “In my whole life, not one other person.”

Leonard shrugged. “I think you need to meet some more people.”

Alice laughed but also doubled over her bowl so that Leonard couldn’t see that tears had appeared in her eyes. She blinked them away, finished making her cereal, and finally went to sit next to her father.

He had the New York Times, The New Yorker, New York magazine, and an issue of People with JFK Jr. and Carolyn Bessette’s wedding on the cover. “Oh, man,” Alice said. “So sad.”

Leonard picked up the magazine and inspected it. “I see, yes. I, too, thought that there might be a chance for you, an old-fashioned child bride. Could have been great.” He let the magazine fall back to the table and gave her upper arm a squeeze. Alice’s breath caught in her throat. It felt real. The kitchen felt real, her body felt real. Her dad felt real. And John-John was newly married, and alive.

“No, I mean. Oh,” Alice paused. “Right.” She spooned some Grape-Nuts into her mouth. “These are so weird,” she said. “It’s like the parts that got left over when they were making good cereal, the crumbs, and they decided not to be wasteful and just repackaged them.” When she was sitting next to her father in the hospital, so badly wanting him to open his eyes and talk to her, she had not imagined them starting with Grape-Nuts.

Leonard snapped his fingers. “Resourceful and delicious. So, what’s the big plan for the day? You have your prep class at ten, hang out, do whatever, and we’ll have dinner with Sam, right? And then I’m heading down to the convention hotel, and I’ll be back tomorrow night, after my panel. You sure you don’t mind?”

Alice put her elbows on the table. Being a kid was wild—it was someone else’s job to buy the milk and the cereal, to make sure that there was toothpaste and toilet bowl cleaner and cat food, but everything you did—an SAT prep course on Saturdays, going to high school—was in service of some ambiguous, soft-focus future. Ursula walked across the open newspaper and sniffed at Alice. Like many black cats’, Ursula’s eyes sometimes looked green and sometimes looked yellow. She nosed up at Alice, who lowered her face to the cat in response.

“How old is Ursula?” Alice asked. The cat sniffed Alice’s cereal and then jumped back down to the floor.

“One cannot simply assign a number to a creature like that,” Leonard said. “I was not present at Ursula’s birth, and so I can only make a sorry human guess. She was already full grown when we found her. She was in front of number eight, remember? After we brought her home, I thought someone must be missing her—a cat this good you don’t just let go missing.”

Alice nodded. “I remember.” Maybe Ursula had traveled, too, from some point in the future when cats lived forever. Or maybe there was a new Ursula every year. “So, where is the test prep class?”

“At school. Same place as it was last week.”

“At Belvedere?”

Leonard snapped the paper in half, folding it neatly down the middle. Why did they make newspapers so enormous, so that you needed to hold them like that? “Yes.” He tilted his head to the side. “Are you okay? Is this birthday brain fever?” The back page had the TV listings, and Leonard had circled things that he wanted to watch so that he wouldn’t forget. There was a Hitchcock marathon, and the new episode of Early Edition.

“I guess so,” Alice said. The idea of going into school—into her building, the original building—actually sounded good, like she might walk through the door and just bump into Emily and Melinda and ask them to take her straight to the hospital for a psychological evaluation.

“You know it doesn’t really matter, right? Your SAT scores?” Leonard had gone to the University of Michigan, which was in his hometown and cost his parents almost nothing, which is why he hadn’t even been allowed to apply anywhere else. Alice did know this, now, but at Belvedere, there had always been pressure. Alice felt like she was part of that pressure now—the parents who brought their kids into her office had to say where they went to school, as if it had any bearing on their children’s lives, whether they went to Harvard or community college or no college at all. Being a parent seemed like a truly shitty job—by the time you were old and wise enough to understand what mistakes you’d made, there was literally no chance that your children would listen. Everyone had to make their own mistakes. Alice had been one of the youngest students in her grade—some kids were a full year older. By junior year, some of her friends already knew where they wanted to go—Sam wanted to go to Harvard, and Tommy had already applied to Princeton, where his entire family had gone, back at least three generations, but swore he would rather die than go. Alice wasn’t sure—she hadn’t been sure then, and even decades later, she thought she could have chosen a hundred different things and had a hundred different lives. Sometimes she felt like everyone she knew had already become whatever they were going to become, and she was still just waiting.

“I guess so,” Alice said. Her stomach rumbled—she was still starving. The test prep class had been a giant waste of time—she remembered it now. Or part of her did. Alice felt aware of simultaneous thoughts, sort of like when you were driving cross-country and the local radio stations kept flipping back and forth as you moved in and out of range. Her vision was clear, but it was coming from two different feeds. Alice was herself, only herself, but she was both herself then and herself now. She was forty and she was sixteen. She could suddenly see Tommy leaning back in his chair, chewing on a pencil, and her stomach began to bubble. It wasn’t the cocktail of emotions she’d had when Tommy had brought his kid into Belvedere, a mixture of anxiety and embarrassment. It was the old feeling—absolutely delusional lust. “What’s your panel about, at the convention tomorrow?”