This Time Tomorrow(48)

Leonard shook his head. “Tell me what you did.”

“I had dinner with Sam. Then I went to Matryoshka and got too drunk. Then I took a cab back here and I barfed on the street and then I fell asleep outside like a true degenerate, I think, and when I woke up, you were here, like this.”

“You fell asleep outside?” Leonard asked.

“In the guardhouse. Your potting shed, or whatever. It was mostly empty, and so I just shoved a few things aside and passed out.”

Leonard nodded. “Do you know what time it was?”

“What time I fell asleep? I don’t know—maybe three a.m.? Four?” If Alice had her phone, she could check what time the Uber had dropped her off, but her memory was foggy, soaked in too many shots.

“It was between three and four a.m., because that’s the only time it works,” Leonard said. He leaned back and ran a hand over his face. “It took me so long to figure it out. Years. I looked and looked. I didn’t know for sure that anything was there, but I just felt it. And one day, ten years ago, right around the time you started at Belvedere, I was talking to Chip about Doctor Who, and it reminded me of our little shed, and I thought, ‘That has to be it.’ I was out there all night, in and around it, just sure that the Headricks or someone wouldn’t be looking out their window at me, but they didn’t, at least I didn’t think, and I went in and emptied it out—took out everything, all the brooms and the dirt and the shovels and the crap, even the spiderwebs, and I just sat there for what felt like a really long time, and the next thing I knew, I was somewhere else. Not just not in the guardhouse anymore. I was in bed—our bed, me and your mom’s—in our old apartment. And it wasn’t 1986 anymore—I just knew it.

“At first, I thought it was just, you know, I’ve got Time Brothers brain, or some kind of hallucination, like maybe I was hungover or having some weird DTs, but I walked outside, and to the newsstand, and I picked up the paper, and it was 1980. I had a quarter in my pocket, and so I bought the paper, and then I looked at it again and I realized—it was your birthday.”

“My birthday,” Alice said. “Today. October twelfth. In 1980.”

“Yes,” Leonard said. He laughed, and Ursula jumped down from his shoulders onto his lap. “It was the day you were born. Your mom wasn’t due for another three weeks. We were still living on Eighty-Sixth then, in that long, skinny apartment, and she was so miserable, she would just pace up and down, up and down, and when I got up and saw her body, like a snake that had swallowed a watermelon, I couldn’t believe it. Serena looked so beautiful, even though she was uncomfortable, and huge, and angry—and I knew what she didn’t, that you were going to worm your way out that afternoon. Three seventeen p.m.” Leonard blinked and blinked, but the tears came anyway. “Do you know how many times I’ve been in that room? Watched it happen? Watched you come into this world, your perfect little face? I don’t know why, but that’s my time. That’s what I get to see.”

Alice could picture the long hallway, and her mother, large and angry. “That sounds bloody and stressful.”

“It is. Serena’s labor was tough, it was tough. But I know how it ends, and that makes it much easier.”

“Did you ever tell her?” Alice asked.

“Who, your mom? No.” Leonard shook his head. “I tried a few times, to make it work, you know? Each time I went back I tried to be a better husband, whatever that means, or to be more the way she wanted me to be. I paid attention to every word she said, I rubbed her back, I fed her ice chips. I did most of those things the first time, I think. I hope. I really tried, in that one crazy day, to show Serena that we could be great. Once, when I got back, we were still married, but she was even more miserable than she was before. Angrier. Because I’d been trying to be someone I wasn’t, which is a shitty thing to do in a marriage.”

“Whoa,” Alice said.

“You’ll see,” Leonard said. He smiled. “The good news is that life is pretty sticky. It’s hard to change things too much. What my friends were saying is true, but it’s all theoretical.” He lowered his voice, as if anyone else could hear. “They’re professional amateurs.”

“What’s happening there now?” Alice had wondered—was her forty-year-old body slumped, motionless, inside the shed, scaring all the Pomander residents going about their day? “Your friends scared me with all their Baby Hitler talk.”

“Nothing,” Leonard said. “A pause. You go right back. Thirty seconds, maybe? A minute? It can’t be more than a minute that goes by. The planets are moving, we’re moving, so I’m sure it’s not exact, but give or take. You’ll find yourself where you are. It’s not the exact same forty you’re going back to—but it’s you, at forty. Doing whatever it is this day has gotten you. You see what I mean about it being sticky? It’s a day—you wake up in the morning, and between three and four a.m., bingo bango, you’re back to when you left. That’s all the time you get. Most of the decisions we make as people are pretty stable, and time likes stability. I think about it like a car on a track. The car wants to stay on, and so it does, most of the time. I can imagine what Howard and Simon would say—Baby Hitler. What’s different? What did you do, what did you set in motion? Sure, that stuff’s important. But it’s gotta be something big in order to knock you far off the track. Don’t worry about it too much.” Leonard walked a hand one direction on the table, and then walked it the other.