This Time Tomorrow(50)

They appeared to be a boy and a girl, but Alice couldn’t say for sure. Both kids had dark brown eyebrows slashed across their pale foreheads. The smaller one was sitting on the bigger one’s lap, like a pair of nesting dolls. The big one had their mouth open wide, and the little one looked nicely chunky. They were, Alice knew, her children. And judging from their coloring and mouths and eyes and how much they both looked like little Raphael Joffey, who had walked into her office that week or never, depending, Alice knew who slept on the other side of the bed.

Alice pulled back the covers and lowered her feet to the floor. The rug under the bed was enormous and probably cost more than three months’ rent on Cheever Place. She was in striped pajama bottoms and a Belvedere Fun Run T-shirt that she recognized as being a few years old. Alice pressed it against her body, a soft cotton security blanket. Okay, she thought. Okay. Alice gripped her phone and tiptoed toward the door. She had her hand on the knob when the toilet flushed and a door on the adjoining wall swung open. Alice instinctively curled her body up, as if she were a pangolin or a roly-poly bug, but she remained both human and visible.

“What are you doing?” Tommy was wearing a slim-fitting exercise outfit, with the sweat stains and damp hair to match. He looked much the same as he had in her office, but with a tighter haircut, and an even slimmer face. It had worked—something had worked. Alice thought about Tommy’s head on her shoulder in the taxicab, and whispering in his ear. Maybe that was the key—telling people exactly what you wanted, the actual truth, and then getting out of the way.

“Nothing,” Alice said. She straightened up. “We live here. You and me.”

“That’s right. See also: sky is blue, grass is green. Any other shocking revelations?”

“We live here all the time,” Alice said.

“Well, not all the time,” Tommy said, rolling his eyes. “Can you imagine? How embarrassing!” He was making a joke, but the joke made Alice feel ill. “Is this a weird way of telling me that you want to buy another fucking house? Zillow is not your friend, Alice. Just put the phone down in the middle of the night. One country house is plenty.” As Tommy talked, Alice could picture it—a white house behind a hedge, a gravel driveway. Someone else cutting the grass. “Plus my parents’. And they’re having the pool redone this year; the kids will love it.”

Alice had overheard sentences like these a thousand times. The way she had survived life at Belvedere was by channeling her envy into superiority. Two-thirds of the student body would have described themselves as middle class, a category that Alice did not think usually included access to privately chartered airplanes and houses on Caribbean islands, cottages on Long Island, or full-time help in the home. Leonard had told her, flat out, that he made more money than most of his friends but they had less money than most of her friends, because his money was their only pot, so to speak, and most of the kids at Belvedere were sitting on several generations’ worth of booty. New Yorkers were experts at flipping their everyday struggles (carrying heavy bags of groceries, taking the subway instead of driving a car) into value points, and Alice had years of experience making herself feel better because she didn’t have a family compound in Greenwich or a horse or a Range Rover. Now that she seemed to have all these things, in addition to a sweaty Tommy Joffey in their shared bedroom, Alice didn’t know quite what to do. This was how all the time travel movies she’d ever seen ended—in 13 Going On 30, Jenna Rink came out of the house in a wedding dress. Bill and Ted passed their history class. Marty McFly got a Jeep. Then the camera slid backward, revealing the whole, perfect scene, and faded to black. In Time Brothers, in between rescues, Scott and Jeff went to their favorite pizzeria. No one was ever standing in their pajamas, trying to remember their life.

The bedroom door swung open, whacking Alice’s right side.

“Mommmmmmy!!!” A small body was attached to her shins. It felt like being attacked by a friendly octopus—there couldn’t be only two arms. Alice thought she might fall over, but she didn’t, bracing herself against the wall. The child was clamped on tight. Alice set one hand lightly on the top of its head. Was this the boy or the girl in the photo? Alice knelt down to get a better look.

“Hello there,” Alice said. It was a boy—not the boy she had interviewed at Belvedere, but close. His eyes were the same—Tommy’s, on a smaller face—and the thick, beautiful hair. Alice looked for herself in the child’s face but could not find herself anywhere. It felt like complimenting someone on their resemblance to their child only to have them say, Well, you know, they’re adopted. “What’s your name, again? Firetruck, is it? Xylophone? Remind me, will you?”

The boy giggled. “Mommy, it’s me, it’s Leo.” He burrowed himself into the tiny shelf of Alice’s lap, knocking her gently to the ground. Despite having apparently given birth to two humans, Alice’s body felt tight and strong, stronger than it ever had before. She wondered how much money she’d spent on personal trainers, but decided it was better not to know.

“Oh, yes, that’s right,” Alice said. “Leo. And what about your sister? Umbrella? Zimbabwe?” She could feel the name rolling around in her head—Alice could almost see the letters swimming into place, like alphabet soup. These children were hers, no doubt about it. Hers, and Tommy’s. Alice was a mom. Mommy? Mama? Her own mother had eventually decided that she preferred being called by her first name, because there was only one real mother—Gaia, Mother Earth. Alice felt the skin around her neck go blotchy with panic.