This Time Tomorrow

by Emma Straub

Her father was heavily pregnant with death, and there was little to do but wait—his

not rushing to get married, like so many people she knew had, just because they were trying to be adults. It was embarrassing, if you slowed down long enough to think about it, how many major life decisions happened because they looked like the model you’d been given.

Disagree

When she was young, she’d thought he was old, and now that he was old, Alice realized how young he’d been. Perspective was unfair.

What a very long time one had to be an adult, after rushing through childhood and adolescence.

There should be several more distinctions: the idiocy of the young twenties, when one was suddenly expected to know how to do adult things; the panicked coupling of the mid- and late twenties, when marriages happened as quickly as a game of tag; the sitcom mom period, when you finally had enough food in your freezer to survive for a month if necessary; the school principal period, when you were no longer seen as a woman at all but just a vague nagging authority figure. If you were lucky, there was the late-in-life sexy Mrs. Robinson period, or an accomplished and powerful Meryl Streep period, followed, of course, by approximately two decades of old-crone-hood, like the woman at the end of Titanic.

“So college does matter.” “Everything matters,” Melinda said. “But you can change your mind. Almost always.”

It felt shameful to admit it so plainly. Kids at Belvedere were now open wounds of self-conscious vulnerability. They changed sexual orientations and genders, they experimented with pronouns. They were so evolved that they knew they were still evolving. When Alice was a teenager, the entire point of life had been to pretend that absolutely nothing had an effect on her.

Alice had truly believed that magazines were preparing her for the future, that Beverly Hills, 90210 was a mirror, only with shorter dresses and more hats worn at school. Everything that she consumed told her that she was grown. She wanted to shake Sam by the shoulders and tell her that they were both still children and no one around them knew, like they were standing on each other’s shoulders in a trench coat and everyone believed it. But Sam already knew, because Sam got in trouble when she stayed out late.

One of the worst parts about being a teenager was realizing that life wasn’t the same for everyone—Alice knew that at the time. What had taken decades was realizing that so many things that she had thought were advantages to her own life were the opposite.

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.

The problem with adulthood was feeling like everything came with a timer—a dinner date with Sam was at most two hours, with other friends, probably not even as long. There was maybe waiting for a table, there was a night at a bar, there was a party that went late, but even that was just a few hours of actual time spent. Most of Alice’s friendships now felt like they were virtual,

There was never this—a day spent floating from one thing to another. This was how Alice imagined marriage, and family—always having someone to float through the day with, someone with whom it didn’t take three emails and six texts and a last-minute reservation change to see one another. Everyone had it when they were kids, but only the truly gifted held on to it in adulthood. People with siblings usually had a leg up, but not always.

The first twenty years of her life had gone by in slow motion—the endless summers, the space from birthday to birthday almost immeasurable—but the second twenty years had gone by in a flash. Days could still be slow, of course, but weeks and months and sometimes even years zipped along, like a rope slipping through your hands.

Her father had had good friends. But they were also men, and men weren’t trained to be in charge of their own friendships.

She felt like she always had on certain summer nights, like she was already missing the moment that she was still living inside.

Alice and her father had always been such good friends. It was luck, she knew, plain luck, that gave some families complementary personalities.

So many people spent their lives wishing to be understood. All Alice wanted was more time.

“I do,” Sam said. “Do you?” Samantha Rothman-Wood, she wasn’t going to give anything up, Alice thought, her gratitude boundless. There was no friend like a teenage girl, even if that teenage girl grew up.

Her voice was gentle—Sam was a good mom. She cooked, she played, she let the kids watch television, she loved their dad, she went to therapy. If Alice could have chosen a mother, she would have chosen Sam.

So many places from her childhood were gone, like the Raccoon Lodge, where her coolest babysitter had hung out with her biker boyfriend, and the tiny horseback riding stable in a converted garage on 89th Street where she’d begged Leonard to let her take lessons as a kid,

but that was New York, watching every place you’d kissed or cried, every place you loved, turn into something else.

but Alice had never seen what happened to Tommy in the face of actual anger, if he turned sad or sour, if his anger went inward or outward.

what took years to learn, which habits would calcify into immovable traits.

Part of Alice was thrilled to be in this part of a relationship—the boring part, the plateau ...

She had nothing but questions. Do I want to be married to Tommy? Do I want children? How do I keep my dad alive? What the fuck am I supposed to do with my life? Which life, even? Do I have a job? In some other life, do I have a better one? How do I know which life to choose? Each question was more embarrassing than the last—she couldn’t say any of those out loud, not even to a complete stranger. Her chest expanded and contracted in time with the psychic’s. Alice took an extra breath and decided. She opened her eyes. “How do I know if I’m living the right life?”

If Time Brothers was Leonard looking for adventure and for family—he

then Dawn of Time was Leonard looking at her—looking at himself looking at her.

It was better than a diary, because there was nothing that could make her cringe, nothing that felt inappropriate for her to see. People were allowed to have privacy, even parents. 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.

But Alice could read it for what it was, which was a love story. Not a romance—there was no sex in the entire book, a few kisses, that was it—the book was about the love between a single parent and their only child. It wasn’t funny. It was earnest. It was the kind of thing that Leonard would never have said aloud to Alice, not in a million years. But it was true all the same.

After one or two birthdays, Alice realized that she was going back mostly for dinner, just to have those hours where she and her dad or she and her dad and Sam sat around a table, talking about nothing in particular but laughing, and happy. Just being together.

Alice had imagined, over the course of her life, telling Leonard lots of things that made him cackle with joy—true joy, big joy—but there was no going forward, only back. And so she told him this one thing, over and over again, knowing how he would react, a present to them both.

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.

Alice thought that it was probably exactly the inverse, the mirror image, of how it felt to be pregnant, and to know that your life would never be the s...

So many of the customs were identical—people would send flowers, or cards, or food. Someone would have her name on their to-do list—Write a note to Alice Stern. And then it would be done, j...

“No one talks about that—at least not to dads. Maybe moms talk about it more—I bet they do. But no one ever talked to me about it, that’s for sure—what it feels like to love someone so much, and then have them change into someone else. You love that new person, but it’s different, and it all happens so fast, even the parts that feel like they just last for fucking ever while they’re happening.”

to tell him how much he had changed, too, though of course he knew it. She loved him now, but not in the same way that she had loved him as a kid, because he wasn’t the same and neither was she.