Her father didn’t move, but his eyelids flickered. She got up and put her hand on his. It was thin and bruised—he was on blood thinners, to keep him from having a stroke, and it meant that every time the nurses and doctors poked him with another needle, a small purple blossom appeared. His eyes stayed closed. Every so often a lid would open, and Alice would watch him search around the room, not focusing on anything, not seeing her. At least she didn’t think so. When she could get her mother on the phone, Serena would tell her that hearing was the last sense to go, and so Alice always talked to him, but she wasn’t sure where her words were going, if anywhere. At least she could hear them. Serena also said that Leonard needed to release himself from his ego, and that until he did so, he would be forever chained to his earthly body, and that crystals would help. Alice couldn’t listen to everything her mother told her.
“I’ll be back on Tuesday. I love you.” She touched his arm. Alice was used to it now, the affection. She had never told her father she loved him before he went into the hospital. Maybe once, in high school, when she was miserable and they were fighting about her staying out past her curfew, but then it had been shouted back and forth, an epithet hurled through her bedroom door. But now she said it every time she visited, and looked at him when she said it. One of the machines behind him beeped in response. The nurse on duty nodded at Alice on her way out, her dreadlocks tucked into a white cap with pictures of Snoopy on it. “Okay,” Alice said. It felt like hanging up on him, or changing the channel.
2
Alice always texted her mother after leaving the hospital. Dad ok. No different, which seems positive? Serena sent back a red heart emoji and then a rainbow emoji, indicating that she had read the words and had nothing to add, no follow-up questions. It didn’t seem fair, abdicating all responsibility just because you were no longer married, though of course that was exactly what divorce meant. And they’d been divorced for far longer than they were married—more than three times as long, Alice thought, doing the math. Alice had been six when her mother had woken up, told them that she’d had a self-actualized visit from her future consciousness, or from Gaia herself, Serena couldn’t be sure, but she was sure that she needed to move to the desert to join a healing community run by a man named Demetrious. The judge had told them how rare it was for fathers to have sole custody, but even he couldn’t argue. Serena was fond, when she was in touch, but Alice never wished that her parents had stayed together. If Leonard had remarried, there would be some other person there holding his hand and asking the nurses questions, but he hadn’t, and so it was just Alice. Polygamy would be excellent in cases like this, or a passel of siblings, but Leonard had only ever had the one wife and the one daughter, and so Alice was it. She went down the stairs into the train station, and when the 1 train arrived, Alice didn’t even pretend to take out a book and read before she fell asleep with her forehead resting against the scratched, dirty window.
3
Alice and Matt hadn’t moved in together, because having two apartments always seemed like a great trick, a truly revolutionary way to be in a committed relationship, if you could afford it. She’d lived alone since she was in college, and truly sharing space with another adult every single day—kitchen, toilet, and all—was a level of commitment Alice did not aspire to. She’d read a Modern Love column once about a couple who kept two apartments in the same building, and that seemed like the dream. Alice had lived in the same studio since she was twenty-five and finally out of college, having limped through art school as slowly as she could. It was the garden-level apartment in a brownstone on Cheever Place, a tiny street in Cobble Hill where one could always hear the roar of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, which lulled Alice to sleep at night like the ocean. Because she’d been there so long, Alice paid less for rent than the twenty-five-year-olds she knew who lived in Bushwick.
Matt, improbably, lived in Manhattan, on the Upper West Side, which was the neighborhood Alice had grown up in, and where she worked. The first time she and Matt went out to dinner and he told her where he lived, Alice had thought he was joking. The idea that someone her age—five years younger, actually—could afford to live in Manhattan was absurd, even though Alice had long understood that where someone could afford to live often had little to do with their own paycheck, especially if it was in Manhattan. He lived in one of the gleaming new apartment buildings near Columbus Circle that had a doorman and a package room with a special cold section for people’s FreshDirect deliveries. He was on the eighteenth floor and could see all the way to New Jersey. When Alice looked out her window, she could see a fire hydrant and the lower half of people’s bodies as they walked by.
Even though Alice had a key to Matt’s apartment, she always stopped at the desk before going to the elevator, the way visitors were supposed to. It wasn’t unlike going to the hospital and giving her name. Today, one of the doormen, an older man with a shaved head who always winked at her, just pointed toward the elevator as she approached, and Alice nodded. A free pass.
Around the glossy marble corner, a woman and two small children were waiting for the elevator. Alice recognized the woman immediately but zipped her mouth shut and tried to be invisible. The children—both towheaded boys, maybe four and eight, ran in circles around their mother’s legs, trying to whack each other with tennis rackets. When the elevator finally arrived, the kids darted in, and their mother trudged behind them, her thin ankles sockless in her loafers. She looked up when she turned to face the doors, and that’s when she saw Alice, who sidled in right next to the buttons, tucking herself into the corner of the small cube.
“Oh, hi!” the mother said. The woman was pretty and blond, with an earnest tan, the kind that accumulated gradually on tennis courts and golf courses. Alice had met this woman—Katherine, maybe?—when she’d brought the older child to the admissions office at the Belvedere School.
“Hi,” Alice said. “How are you? Hi, guys.” The children had abandoned their racket swords and were now kicking each other in the shins. A game.
The woman—Katherine Miller, Alice now remembered, and the boys were Henrik and Zane—pushed her hair back. “Oh, we’re great. You know, so happy to be back in school. We were in Connecticut all summer, and they really missed their friends.”
“School sucks,” Henrik, the older boy, said. Katherine grabbed him by the shoulders and pulled him tight against her legs.
“He doesn’t mean that,” she said.
“Yes, I do! School sucks!”
“School sucks!” parroted Zane, in a voice three times as loud as the elevator required. Katherine’s cheeks turned purple with embarrassment. The elevator dinged, and she shoved both boys out. The younger one would be applying for kindergarten this fall, which meant that Katherine would be visiting Alice’s office again soon. There were several emotions visible in Katherine’s face, and Alice diligently ignored them all.
“Have a great day!” Katherine called out in a singsong voice. The elevator doors closed again, and Alice could hear her whisper-shout at her children as they walked down the hall.