This Time Tomorrow(69)

Sam looked at her. “So what’s not fine? What’s going on? You know I love when you come here, but you never come here.”

“I just miss you,” Alice said. “And I miss my dad.” She let out a noise that was somewhere between a hiccup and a sob. “I’m sorry.”

“No, honey, come on! It’s okay! You know how much I love Lenny. Did he give me royalties for telling him to write a book that would make him a gazillion dollars? No. But did he thank me in the acknowledgments? Yes. Did he offer to put my kids through college? Also yes. I don’t need him to, but you never know. What if Josh gets run over by a bus, and I have to stop working? Your dad is like my personal Oprah.” She squeezed Alice’s arm. “I’m kidding. Not about him offering to put my kids through college, though—he really did.”

“I didn’t know that.” Alice could imagine it, though. She could see her dad saying it to Sam, pregnant with her first baby. He had probably wanted more kids—Alice had never considered it, they were always just a team of two, but coming from a tiny family, maybe he had wanted more. Or maybe he’d assumed that Alice would give him a grandkid or two eventually! He would never have pressured her, not in a million years, but Alice wondered if when he had gone back, Leonard had ever tried to find someone else—or if he’d ever gone back after meeting Deborah, to see if he could find her sooner. Have children of their own. Maybe he had. What else had he done that he didn’t want to tell Alice about? Probably a thousand things.

“Are you going to go see him today?” Sam asked.

Josh helped Mavis unhook her knees, and the girl disappeared into the top of the structure, which was built to look like a pirate ship.

“I’ll go this afternoon.” Alice put the cool can to her forehead. “It just sucks, you know?”

“I know.” Sam put her arm around Alice’s shoulders. “Oof, this kid just will not stop kicking me.”

“Can I feel?” Alice had reluctantly touched several pregnant bellies—teachers at school, friends from college, Sam. It always felt invasive on her part, borderline creepy. Alice had never been one of those people obsessed with babies, who would flirt across tables in restaurants and over the backs of airplane seats with any nearby child. Having a baby—carrying a baby—seemed so unfairly public, and compelled strangers to weigh in on your life choices with nary an invitation. But Alice felt like she needed proof that this world was real, that today, whenever today was, was a real day in her real life, and in Sam’s, too.

“Of course,” Sam said. She reached for Alice’s hand and put it low on her belly. “Oh, you know who just moved to Montclair? That kid—man, I guess, he’s a man now—but that kid who was a year behind us at Belvedere. Kenji?”

“Kenji Morris,” Alice said. She’d seen him a lot recently—he was the very tail of the boy train coming into her sixteenth birthday party on Pomander. A year behind them, but tall for his age, and skinny, Kenji had swayed like a willow tree. His mother was Japanese, and his father was dead. Alice didn’t think she knew anything else about him. He’d smoked Parliaments, maybe? No, he hadn’t smoked at all. They’d had Spanish together—he was good at languages, and was the only sophomore in the class.

“Right, Kenji Morris,” Sam said. “He and his kid live around the corner. He just got divorced. His daughter is Mavis’s age, and we met them in the park the other day. He’s nice! I never really knew him.”

“Let me guess—he’s a lawyer.”

“No, you fucking snob. Not every single person we went to school with is a lawyer, okay? He’s an architect.” Sam snorted.

“That’s a made-up job for men in romantic comedies.”

“That is also not true.” Sam put her head on Alice’s shoulder. “What do you want for lunch? The menu is grilled cheese or peanut butter and jelly. Or scrambled eggs.”

This time—yesterday—Alice hadn’t told Sam or her father. It seemed beside the point to tell Sam now, now that Alice knew it wouldn’t last and would probably only add to Sam’s therapy bills. Even when she hadn’t told her, the concept of it was still there, deep in their brains—no one who loved Keanu Reeves could avoid time travel for long.

“Is he bald?” Alice could picture Kenji so clearly, his black hair swooping low over one eye. Haircuts were terrible in the nineties—Caesars, baby bangs, even a few white boys with dreads—but Kenji’s hair had always had the freshly brushed quality of a kid on picture day.

“Are you kidding? His hair is as amazing as it ever was. Honestly, better, because there are some grays in there, and I don’t know if I’m just getting old, but he is fully hot. Isn’t it weird how when you’re in high school, a kid who is, like, six months younger than you but a grade behind feels like an actual baby? All the boys in our grade sucked, no offense, but there were some cuties in the grade below us. Why didn’t we go out with them?”

Mavis slid down the plastic slide, crunching a pile of leaves with her tiny sneakers. Josh had walked around to the back of the swing set.

“That’s a good question,” Alice said. She’d always had crushes on older boys. They were beautiful and adult-seeming and not remotely interested in her, except for sometimes at parties when one of them would stick his tongue halfway down her throat and then walk away when he got bored. “How did you know you wanted to marry Josh?”