Is This Tomorrow: A Novel (13 page)

She pulled into the parking lot. “Come on,” she said. “Let’s go get something sweet.”

S
EVEN MONTHS AFTER
Jimmy had vanished, no one went on the neighborhood patrol anymore, though people did keep their eyes and ears open. Even the kids were walking to the elementary school again without an adult. The detectives finally stopped asking anyone anything. They stopped coming to the neighborhood. The case was cold, they said. They had done their best. No clear suspects had emerged. Jake must be off the hook, Ava thought, but it didn’t change anything.

It was October and Ava sat watching the rain from her window, the world growing gray, and listened to the news. Red Army troops had invaded Hungary. Gas prices were going up. But there were no longer reports about the Jimmy Rearson case.

She still missed him. Dot had grown thinner and almost never changed out of her bathrobe. Rose and Lewis were at the same school now, both secretive and sullen, always scribbling away in a notebook or whispering together. Ava was so lonely she thought sometimes she might go mad.

Some nights, Ava stared out the picture window and looked across the street at Dot’s house. She almost always saw Dot, standing on her porch staring out at the night sky. Ava would wave, but Dot never responded. If ever Ava walked over there, Dot didn’t want to talk. “We don’t have to talk,” Ava said. Instead, she sat there with Dot. Occasionally, Ava looked across at her own house. The inexpensive paint she had bought for the shutters was peeling already. The porch steps were lopsided. No matter what she did, her home still looked shabby, as if it had been stuck into the neighborhood like a mistake. She felt heavy with fatigue, but stifled her yawns until Dot inevitably pushed herself up from her chair. “Well, “Dot said, “Time to go.” And then she let herself into her house, leaving Ava alone to walk back to her own.

Chapter Eleven

Lewis woke up to the first December snowfall sifting against his window. He and Jimmy would have immediately run outside. Jimmy always threw snowballs, but Lewis liked to collect snow to look at under the microscope. He had tried to get Jimmy to look through the eyepiece at all the different shapes, but Jimmy tended to dawdle. By the time he took a gander, the flakes had usually melted.

He grabbed his notebook and wrote:
Jimmy liked snow. He may have gone someplace cold.
Alaska had been one of the places they had pricked on the map. If Jimmy didn’t go himself, maybe someone took him there. He wondered how he could get ahold of the Alaska papers to see if there might be a photo of Jimmy. He could call the cops and be a hero.

He picked up a book,
The Time Machine,
and went into the kitchen to read. His mother was sitting at the table, staring at the phone.

Lewis knew whose call she was waiting for. The one good thing to come out of everything was that the jerk Jake was gone. He didn’t know if his mother had broken it off, or if Jake had just decided it all on his own, but things felt different around the house. Lewis didn’t want to ask his mother what had happened with Jake. Who knows, maybe she’d say, “Oh, yes, that reminds me,” and call Jake up and then everything would just start up all over again.

“Want something to eat, honey?” Ava said. She got up and sliced him a piece of supermarket yellow cake she had on the counter. She poured milk in a jelly glass and set it in front of him.

“We should call Dad,” he said.

Ava started. She wiped her hands along the skirt of her apron. “Why on earth would we want to do that?”

“We’re alone. Everyone else here has a father.”

“Not everyone,” she said, and he knew she meant Rose. “Now drink your milk,” she said shortly and went to the sink to wash the dishes, noisily splashing water. He toyed with the cake, cutting it with the edge of his fork. He didn’t like it very much because it had no frosting and it was one of those day-old cakes she got on sale that always tasted like all the ingredients had gone bad. She left the room and he heard her rattling around in the living room as he chewed the dry cake. Maybe she was thinking about calling his father, he thought. You never knew. Rose had told him that her mother said that there was nothing worse for a woman than to be alone, that it was unnatural and unhealthy. She told Rose it had been the luck of the draw that her husband had died and she would get married again in a heartbeat, but the problem was nobody wanted a woman who had already been married, and especially one with children. It was even worse if you were divorced because that meant you had done something wrong, you hadn’t been able to keep your man. “No one wants leftovers,” Dot had said.

“That leaves both our moms out,” Rose said to Lewis.

Lewis began mashing up the remaining cake on his plate so it would look like he had eaten most of it and his mother wouldn’t start in about wasting food. He thought about his dad. His mother didn’t have to be a leftover. His father wasn’t dead like Rose’s. Maybe Lewis hadn’t seen him for years, but his father was still alive and all his mom had to do was get to him, show him what he was missing, and surely he’d come around. The last time Lewis had spoken to him was a year ago, on Lewis’s birthday, when his father promised him a present that must have gotten lost in the mail. But he heard his mother on the phone some nights talking to him, and even though she sounded angry, he never heard her hang up on him. If his father knew how dangerous things were, wouldn’t he at least call, if not come for a visit?

His mother came back in from the other room and he felt her watching him. He kept his fork in midair, not moving, waiting to see what she would do.

“This is cake,” she said. “You can’t even finish cake.”

She pulled out a chair and sat down beside him. “You have your whole life ahead of you,” she said quietly. “You have so many people around you who care about you.” She tried to smooth his hair, but he pulled back. He picked up
The Time Machine,
which he didn’t even like that much. He had thought it would tell him something practical about time travel, how you might go back in time and change what had happened, like with Jimmy or his dad, but it was clearly all made up. If Lewis had the chance to go back in time, he knew what he would do, and it wouldn’t be going to that stupid library after the dentist. He would go straight to Jimmy’s house. He would find his dad and beg him not to leave and his father would listen.

He felt his mother’s gaze. He dipped back into the book, the only way he could think of to get her to leave him alone, and as soon as she did, he shut the book and put it aside and started thinking about Jimmy all over again.

She wouldn’t be so friendly if she had known what he had done, that he could have saved Jimmy if he had met him on time. His mom might think he had a lot of people around him who cared about him, but who were those people, and why didn’t he see them?

His teachers told him they cared about him, but only if he would stop interrupting their lessons with questions and try to be more like everyone else. His teachers liked him best when he didn’t bother them at all, when he sat at his desk and had no more presence than a ghost.

Who did he really have to talk to, except for Rose? He was so glad they were in the same school now, that they took the bus together, and sometimes just seeing her walk by him in the halls made him feel better. His world was narrowing, closing in like two walls pressed together. Everything was split up between before and after. Before, he used to spend every day with Jimmy and Rose, roaming the neighborhood, sitting in the woods behind Northeast Elementary with a bag of jelly sandwiches, but those woods were off-limits now, and Jimmy was gone. The only future Rose and he discussed now was about finding Jimmy. Even then, he felt as if he was falling behind, as if he needed her more than she needed him. She was always scribbling in her notebook, filling the pages, whipping them ahead so furiously they sometimes tore, but his notebook had only three pages filled. Every place Lewis had listed as a place to visit for clues was now crossed out. Jimmy wasn’t at the library. There were no clues at the Wal-Lex roller rink. No one he had talked to had seen him. He often stared at the blank pages, trying to think what he could write down. He sank into gloom and worry every time he saw Rose, because he was afraid she’d ask to see his notebook and her face would flood with disappointment when she saw how little he had written. He wanted to take a peek at what she was writing, but she always had her notebook clutched to her chest, and besides, if he asked, he would have to share his. “We can find him,” she insisted, “you have to think positive,” but Lewis wasn’t so sure. How long before she would tire of his doubt and leave him, too?

That night, he couldn’t sleep. Lewis felt as if his skin were moving separately from him, crawling like a live thing. He touched his arms, his legs, as if that would keep the skin in place.

He opened the door and could see there was no light under his mother’s door across the hall. The radio she listened to at night, the endless loop of talk shows, the voices tangling into one another like strings of yarn, was quiet, which meant she was sleeping. He went back in his room, grabbed up a flashlight, and shone it into all the corners of his room. There were his books, most of them loaners from Rose, the pages turned back, the covers torn from rereading, plus a few books from the library that he needed to return. He saw his magic tricks, all the old kits he had cobbled together, pushed next to his books on Houdini. He thought of Houdini’s wife, all those years waiting and waiting for him to give her a sign that he was still alive, holding séances for ten years, and finally giving up. Everyone thought that was proof that the dead stayed dead, that there was no such thing as ghosts or an afterlife or, if there was, the living couldn’t reach them. But maybe she gave up too soon, Lewis thought. Maybe Houdini had appeared in a way she hadn’t noticed, like a cool breeze blowing on her on a hot summer day, or her favorite flower suddenly strewn in her path. Who knew how people who were dead could communicate with you?

From where he was standing, he could just make out Rose’s window across the street. He moved closer and pointed the flashlight at her window and clicked it on and off, like Morse code. S-O-S. Over and over. Rose, he thought, as if he were calling her on the phone. Pick up, pick up, pick up. He clicked the flashlight off. He was just about to put it down, to turn and go back to bed, when he saw something blinking, cutting through the darkness.

S-O-S. S-O-S. Rose was sending him a message.

H
E DIDN’T SEE
Rose the next morning or on the bus, but later that day, after school, he headed outside the building and there she was, waiting for him on the sidewalk. “What are you doing here?” he asked.

“I felt you wanted to see me and here I am,” she said. She crunched her boots in the snow. “I don’t want to take the school bus home. Come on, we’ll walk home together,” she said.

“How’d you know that?” he asked. They walked all the way to the Northeast schoolyard, dusted off the snow from the swings, and sat down. She leaned back on her swing, twisting it so it would wind her in circles.

“You can do it, too, you know,” she said. “Know where and when I might appear.” She told him when he was at school and feeling lost, to look for signs that she was around. “It can be as simple as a light suddenly going on,” Rose told him. “It can be someone humming a song that you know I like.” She tilted her chin to the air. “Sometimes when I think Jimmy’s near, it’s like everything has a charge. Like something is about to happen.”

“I don’t know,” Lewis said doubtfully. He turned his swing around, scraping his boots along the snow. “Shut your eyes,” she ordered.

He did. The world went white. He felt the frosty air on his face. “Stay still,” she said. “Concentrate. I’m going to walk away and you tell me which direction I went. Keep your eyes closed. When you know, you tell me.”

He heard the thump of her feet hitting the ground when she jumped off the swing, but then he couldn’t hear anything. He sniffed experimentally at the air. His knee itched and he yearned to scratch it. He felt hopeless. He pointed in back of him. “You’re there,” he guessed and Rose laughed, and he turned around and opened his eyes and there she was, smiling triumphantly at him while he blinked at her in amazement. “It was no guess,” she told him. “You knew.”

He felt dizzy. He wanted Rose to stop moving around so quickly, to stay in one place so he could really see her, but she was a blur. She walked over to him and pressed her forehead against his. “Read my thoughts,” she said. She closed her eyes. He shut his and he felt a pulse of heat. “What color am I thinking of?” she said. “Don’t think. Just let it happen.”

“Blue,” he guessed, and he opened his eyes to see her smiling at him.

“What did I tell you?” she said. “You knew. You just knew.”

“Come on, let’s get out of here,” he said.

They tore around the block to Greer Street and there was Mr. Corcoran, his head covered by a blue watch cap. He was shoveling snow along his walk, but when he saw them, he paused. “Why are you kids on your own?” he said.

“We’re with each other,” Rose said. “We aren’t alone.”

Mr. Corcoran dusted his hands off against his pants. “Your mothers know where you are?” he asked. “You’re sure about that?”

“My mother’s at work,” Lewis said.

“Well, maybe she ought to be home with you.”

Lewis scowled. He already hated that his mother worked, but it bothered him even more when people commented on it.

Mr. Corcoran studied Rose and Lewis, his gaze falling on the notebook Rose clutched to her chest, which had a photograph of Jimmy Stewart on the cover. “Jimmy Stewart, huh,” he said. “He’s more than a little
pink
,
if you know what I mean.”

“He is?” Lewis asked.

“Look at that movie,
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
,
” he said. “You think a real American would interrupt a Senate proceeding the way he did? And smile while he was doing it?” He tapped his forehead. “Use your noggin.”

“I liked that movie,” Lewis said. He had watched it with his mother, a bowl of popcorn between them, and when his mother had cried, he had pretended not to notice.

“That’s just the point. You’re meant to like it. You’re meant to be sucked in and think one thing, while another is going on. You can’t trust these Communists,” he said. “And do you want to know why?”

“No, why?” Rose said, so politely that Lewis shot her a look.

“Because they lie. They couldn’t tell the truth if they wanted to. My Stanley knows that. You kids should know it, too.”

Lewis bit down on his lip so he wouldn’t laugh. Mr. Corcoran pointed at the sky. “You kids think it’s funny, but any second a missile could come down at us,” he insisted. “And we wouldn’t even see it or be prepared. One minute we’re here talking in this nice neighborhood, and two seconds later,
boom,
we’re ash. You think it can’t happen?” He lifted his two hands in the air and then kamikazied them down. “The Russians hide explosives, did you know that? And there are lots of Reds right here in America. They could be in this neighborhood and we wouldn’t even know it.”

“Who?” Rose asked. “Who in this neighborhood?”

He tapped Lewis’s notebook, the photo of Tony Curtis.

“Him for one.”

“He’s an actor. He played Houdini,” Lewis said. “And he doesn’t live here.”

“A Jew. Both of them. Houdini was a Commie, though I don’t know about Curtis.”

“I’m Jewish.” A flare of pain rose in his belly. He didn’t like the way Mr. Corcoran folded his arms and rocked on his heels. If his Jesus was so great, why hadn’t He helped them find Jimmy? He wanted to say it out loud to Mr. Corcoran to see what happened, but he chickened out.

“You kids better get home now,” Mr. Corcoran said, dismissing them.

As soon as they were out of sight, Rose made “he’s crazy” circles, spinning her hands about her temple, but her mood seemed to have darkened. Lewis didn’t feel like roaming the neighborhood anymore. A plane zoomed across the sky. Lewis looked up. He imagined Mr. Corcoran’s missile flying down from the sky, aimed right at them, lean and silver as a needle. Would he see it before it struck or would it happen so fast that everything would be obliterated? Would he know a Communist if he saw one? “Rose, do you know any Communists?” he asked, worried.