This Time Tomorrow

by Emma Straub

There were some people who were just on your circuit, people who lived around the corner or across the borough, but for whatever reason, you and they were on the same track and would bump into each other again and again. Then there were the people who lived next door and were on a different schedule, and you never saw them at all. Different paths, different subway lines, different timetables.

Teenage girls’ skeletons were half bones and half secrets that only other teenage girls knew.

Maybe that was the trick to life: to notice all the tiny moments in the day when everything else fell away and, for a split second, or maybe even a few seconds, you had no worries, only pleasure, only appreciation of what was right in front of you. Transcendental meditation, maybe, but with hot dogs and the knowledge that everything would change, the good and the bad, and so you might as well appreciate the good.

But in Leonard’s book—his books!—Alice could find little messages. Sometimes it was as simple as a description of a meal that she knew Leonard himself liked to eat—fried eggs left alone in the pan long enough to turn brown and crispy at the edges—or the mention of the Kinks. They were all tiny little parts of him, preserved forever, molecules that had rearranged themselves into words on a page, but Alice could see them for what they were, which was her father.

The idea of Leonard dying, and what it would mean for the rest of her life, was heavy, but it was a familiar weight. Not that Alice thought she had worked her way through it—if anything, she understood that it wasn’t actually something one could ever work all the way through, like a jigsaw puzzle or a Rubik’s cube; grief was something that moved in and stayed. Maybe it moved from one side of the room to the other, farther away from the window, but it was always there. A part of you that you couldn’t wish or pray or drink or exercise away. She was used to him being so close to gone that gone was almost desirable—no one wanted to watch someone they loved suffer. But she was also tired—tired of how tense her body was when the phone rang, tired of how nervous she felt whenever she walked out of his hospital room, tired of how it felt to know that her life was going to change and that she was going to have this enormous hole forever. Soon.

She closed her eyes for a moment and thought about everything she’d had on her sixteenth birthday—a father she loved and wanted to spend time with, who also trusted her to be alone. A best friend. A crush. Alice wondered if the day changed over the course of your life. Maybe there was a day in her forties, fifties, sixties that would be so full of love, so full, period, that a ninety-year-old Alice would go there instead. But Leonard wouldn’t be there, because no matter what she did, by then, he would be gone. It might not be someone else’s best, but it was hers, for now.

He had been young, and she had been young—they had been young together. Why was it so hard to see that, how close generations were? That children and their parents were companions through life.

“But that love doesn’t vanish. It’s still there, inside everything you do. Only this part of me is going somewhere, Al. The rest? You couldn’t get rid of it if you tried. And you never know what’s going to happen next.