Is This Tomorrow: A Novel (15 page)

She got up and made her way to her closet, looking at the walls. If Jimmy came back, he might look for a message from her. A sign.
Find me in Pittsburgh
,
she wrote, and then she scribbled her name.

A
T THE END
of July, the house was sold. When Lewis saw the sign, he wanted to kick it out from the grass. He waited for Rose, who tumbled out of the house, her face stormy. She made her way to Lewis.

“A dentist,” she said. “That’s who bought our house. Ron and Rhonda Brown. Isn’t that so cute you want to throw up?” Rose said. “My mother’s given them free range. As far as she’s concerned, it’s their house now.”

“It’s not their house. It will never be their house.”

“She thinks this is going to fix things, but it won’t,” Rose said. “How can we leave?” Rose scratched at the dirt along the curb with her toe. “You have to keep watch for him,” she told Lewis. “Hair might be dyed and cut. People can get fatter, too.” She put up one hand like a visor, scanning the neighborhood. “He could walk right back up here tomorrow.”

“I’ll never stop looking,” Lewis told her.

“Neither will I.” She pressed her forehead against his, her lids lowering.

T
HEY WERE MOVING
August
15
. Lewis had the day marked on his calendar with a small red
x.
Rose told him they were leaving early in the morning, that they were renting a U-Haul and driving. The neighbors had all chipped in, including Ava, to buy Dot a red suitcase, a white bow tied around it. When they had brought it over, Dot had looked at it like she didn’t know what to do with it. “Thank you,” she said, but she didn’t open it.

Every day when Lewis woke up, he was sure something would happen to prevent their departure. The Browns might decide they didn’t want to live in such a nosy neighborhood. Dot might realize she couldn’t leave while her son was still missing. Maybe a Communist missile would blow up Pittsburgh. Sometimes he imagined that Rose would get sick—not sick to her death, but sick enough so that they had to stay. And there was the other, amazing miracle: they would be all out on the street, watching the U-Haul being loaded, when Jimmy would appear, his jeans ragged, his hair longer, looking at them in astonishment. “Where’ve you been?” he’d say, as if it were everyone in the neighborhood that had been missing and not him.

The night before Rose’s departure, Lewis and Rose hung out at the schoolyard, sitting on the swings, scraping their sneakers in the dirt. Neither one of them said anything about this being the last time they might see each other. “I have to get going,” she said finally.

“I’ll see you tomorrow,” he said. Rose turned from him and he grabbed her hand. “I’ll see you tomorrow,” he repeated.

She was still for a moment. “Yeah. Tomorrow,” she said, but she didn’t look at him when she said it.

I
N THE MORNING,
the clock blinked at Lewis and he grabbed it in his fist like a baseball, panicked. Seven. How could it be seven? He fiddled with the dials. His alarm hadn’t gone off. He swung his legs over the bed and shoved his feet into his sneakers. Rose had told him that they were leaving at six, before anyone was up, but maybe they had gotten a late start. Maybe he could still make it. He ran to the living room, grabbing a coat to throw over his pajamas, then dashed out the front door. The frosty morning air made him shiver. He could hear the thwack of his shoes on the pavement. He ran and even before he got to the house, he could feel it for the first time, the connection Rose was always trying to get him to feel with her, only now it was raw and empty, and he knew they were gone.

He stopped, bracing his hands on his knees, panting. The U-Haul wasn’t there. The house looked empty. He thought of Rose, waking up, waiting for him. He wondered if she was mad or sad or if she’d ever forgive him. He knew he’d never forgive himself.

You could look right through the front windows and see how bare the house was. He tried the front door, but it was locked, so he went around to the back and pried open one of the back windows. He and Jimmy used to climb up from here to sit on the roof and survey the street. He got inside and saw that everything was ready for the Browns. The wood floors were glossy, the carpets clean. He walked into Jimmy’s room and was struck by the emptiness. There was a faint block on the wall where their travel map had been. The bed, the curtains, every trace of Jimmy was gone. It was just any old room now.

He explored the rest of the house, his skin hot. The kitchen was empty. So was the living room. He went into Rose’s room. The walls were still pale pink. He went to her closet, sliding down into a crouch and then sitting. “Rose,” he said out loud, and his voice echoed. He saw something in the corner and peered at it.
Find me in Pittsburgh
was etched on the wall, and under it her name.

Lewis touched it. Her handwriting. When had she written this? Did she mean it for Jimmy or for him, or for both? How did she even know he’d go into her closet? He pressed his hand over her words. The new people would hire someone to paint over this and then it would be gone, too.

Lewis got up. Already the morning light was sifting into the house. Soon, the fathers would be coming out of their houses, their lunches under their arms, and getting into their cars. Lewis went outside, crossed the street, and sat on his porch, his head in his hands. Rose had never gotten her aunt’s address in Pittsburgh from Dot. The world was wide and terrifying and there was no place for him in it alone.

A
LL THAT WEEK,
Lewis stayed in his room, staring at the ceiling. School was starting in a few weeks, eighth grade. Rose was gone. He kicked the book he had been reading about Houdini to the ground. Houdini, with all his tricks, now irritated him. He was tired of tricks and feelings and things you couldn’t touch. At one point, his mother came by and opened the door to his room. “Hey,” she said. “Aren’t there any kids around today?”

Didn’t she know he had no friends? He waited, but Ava didn’t leave.

“I have an idea,” Ava said. “What about the Penny Pool?”

The Penny Pool was a big community pool that cost a penny. It was always jam-packed and all the little kids peed in the pool. “No?” Ava said. “Well, how about you and I go to the movies?
Johnny Tremain
’s at the Embassy.”

“I don’t want to see a movie.” He willed her to leave, but she sat down on his bed, studying him. “Don’t you think I feel bad, too? Dot was a friend of mine, but this street is only a tiny part of the world. People leave all the time. That’s what life is,” she said quietly.

“Do you know where they went in Pittsburgh?” he said. “Did Dot give you an address or the aunt’s last name?”

“I asked, but she didn’t tell me. I think Dot just wanted to leave everything behind,” Ava said.

Lewis turned his back to her, facing the wall.

“If you change your mind, we could make the four o’clock show,” she said, as she got up and walked out of the room.

T
HE DAY THE
Browns moved in, it seemed that all of the neighborhood was outside, watching the big van unload, commenting on the furniture, which was white and ornate. “Oh, do I love French Colonial,” Debbie Hill said. She commented on the brass lamps and the wooden rocker. “What taste!” Tina Gallagher said. When Mrs. Brown spotted Lewis, she waved, but he pretended not to see her, and soon she was talking to someone else. He watched them going in and out and he suddenly wished he had scratched away Rose’s message. He didn’t want them finding it. It belonged to him. But when he tried to sneak into the house, Mrs. Brown stopped him. “Whoah now,” she said. “We’re not open for business just yet.”

Every night he wrote Rose letters. He told her how sorry he was that he had missed her leaving, that he would do anything to make it up to her if she would only let him. He told her how strange and lonely the neighborhood was now without her. He sealed the letters in envelopes, but because he didn’t have an address, he put the letters in a drawer, hiding them under his underwear.

Then it was fall and suddenly all the teachers were telling them what a big deal it was, how before they knew it, they would be in high school. “You aren’t children, anymore,” Lewis’s teacher said.

Lewis read books about different places: San Francisco, Chicago, Rome. He went to a gas station and asked for a free United States map and he taped it up in his bedroom, trying to remember all the routes he had planned out with Jimmy. He stuck a red thumbtack in San Francisco. He could go on the road. When he turned eighteen, he could leave home and live anywhere he wanted. He could do anything. When he lay back on his bed, the tack seemed to twinkle at him, like a star he could wish upon. Yeah, soon he’d be gone.

Part Two

1963

Chapter Thirteen

Halfway through his night shift, Lewis walked the hospital floors at St. Merciful’s in Madison, quietly opening doors and checking in on the patients. He looked at the top of each door to see if the yellow call light was blinking. His step was clean and precise as a cat’s, his white sneakers gliding along the red line the hospital put down for visitors to find their way. Visitors got lost anyway, standing in the center of the busy hall, their arms full of flowers or stuffed bears, turning around searching for a sign, and finding Lewis instead. He would take people wherever they needed to go, never minding that he wasn’t usually thanked or even remembered. Well. People had things on their minds in a place like this. Lewis knew he was the least of their problems.

Lewis had just turned nineteen, and he was on the surgical ward this month. He had been on the job almost a year, and it suited him just fine. He was one of two nurse’s aides for ten or so patients, the youngest one and the only male, too, which was either a conversation starter or stopper, depending on whom you talked to. Elaine, his supervising nurse on surgical, certainly wasn’t happy to take him on at first. Nothing about him seemed to please her, not his too-long hair or the fact that he was a man, which seemed like the greatest affront of all.

He had gotten this job as a fluke, going through the paper the week he had arrived in town, eighteen years old with only a little money in his pocket. He told himself he would be lucky. He had responded to all the job ads that didn’t require college, and when he saw one for a nurse’s aide, it seemed like a destination. They offered training. He wouldn’t be ashamed to tell people that was what he did. He didn’t need much sleep and he liked the idea of taking care of people, of making them feel better, even if all he was doing was filling a glass with water. He loved the idea of being needed. And though it was nursing, nowhere did he see the word
female.

He went in for an interview and talked his way into the job. He nodded when Elaine told him what he’d have to do, all the unglamorous business of cleaning bedpans, putting ointment on bedsores, trailing the nurses around and hopping to do whatever anyone told him. He needed a uniform, but he could hardly wear a blue dress like the other aides. “Get yourself some blue dress shirts,” Elaine told him. “Wear black pants. With a name tag, you’ll be fine.”

For the first few days, all he did was follow Elaine around. He made mental notes about where things were so he could find them again quickly. The supply closet was by the elevator, the nurse’s station was at the end of the hall. He tried to pick up the lingo. “Feeders” were the people he had to feed, the ones who couldn’t hold a spoon or fork. “Slow feeders,” he soon learned, were the worst. “Code brown” was when someone defecated in the bed and guess who had to clean it up? He mopped up pee and vomit. He changed lightbulbs and helped people walk the corridors to get back their muscle strength.

The protocol was the hardest to learn and Lewis began to carry a small notebook and pencil with him to take notes. There were nurses who wore black shoes and no cap because they didn’t have their license yet, but he still had to listen to them and do what they said. Lewis made a point of looking at everyone’s name badge because Ava had always told him that people liked it when you called them by name. But the nurses didn’t like it. “Morning, Laura,” he said and Laura frowned at him. “Miss Miller,” she said pointedly, and then she told him to go collect the bedpan from room
209
. He had questions, but every time he asked one—why did they thump the chest of someone with bronchitis? why did you need to flush an IV line?—a nurse would look at him as if he had interrupted her thinking. “Why do you want to know?” she would respond, as if he couldn’t possibly understand.

The doctors, of course, totally ignored him. They were all men, who swept through the rooms in their white lab coats, and when Lewis was in their path, they glanced at him as if he were something unpleasant in their way, and then refused to make eye contact or to return his hello, which made Lewis want to thunk his own chest, just to make sure he was still there. “Don’t speak to the doctors, they’re busy,” Elaine said.

“Like we’re not?” Lewis said, and Elaine laughed. “You’re learning,” she said.

His first week at work, he watched Elaine change the dressings of an older patient named Mr. Walker, whose wife had shot him in the stomach. Elaine sat on one of the yellow plastic chairs and bent over Mr. Walker and motioned for Lewis to sit and watch. “There you go,” she said, finishing up, looking at Lewis. Mr. Walker grunted and turned his face to the wall. “Where’s my wife?” he said.

Lewis was about to say something when a doctor strode into the room. He was young, with a Band-Aid on his neck, and he cleared his throat, looking meaningfully at both of them. Elaine leaped to her feet. She nudged Lewis. “Stand,” she hissed, and Lewis did.

“Good morning, Dr. Ryan,” she said. She glared at Lewis.

“Morning, Dr. Ryan,” he said.

The doctor didn’t respond. Instead, he glanced at the chart and then at the patient. “He was coughing earlier,” Elaine said, and the doctor nodded, not taking his eyes off the chart, not writing anything down. He leaned over and looked at the dressing.

“We’ll do a CBC,” the doctor said. “What?” Mr. Walker said. “What are you going to do? A CB-what?” The doctor ignored him, gliding out and as soon as he did, Elaine sat back down again. “What’s happening?” Mr. Walker said. “What did the doctor just say?”

“He’s going to do a complete blood count,” Lewis said. “Here, I’ll write it down so you can remember. Don’t worry, it’s routine.” Lewis scribbled into the notebook, tore off the page, and handed it to Mr. Walker.

He took the piece of paper and looked at it. “Now I know,” he said.

Lewis followed Elaine out of the room. “That was good, what you did,” Elaine said quietly. “Best medicine in the world is acting like a human being to someone else.”

At the end of his shift, he was always so tired, he felt as if he were sleepwalking. When he got back to his small rented room, he would smell the hospital—antiseptic, feces, urine—and it took him a minute to realize the smell was on him. He washed out his blue shirt, one of four he had bought at the Thrift-T-Mart, so it would be ready when he needed it, smoothed his pants across his tiny table because he didn’t own an iron, and got in the shower, turning the water as hot as he could stand it. He carefully set his alarm, flopped on the bed, and fell asleep. When he awoke the next morning, he was always startled it was a new day.

He had a whole hour before he had to be at work. Lewis spent the time tearing apart the sheets from his bed and practicing making hospital corners. He threw his laundry in the center of the mattress, bunching it up like a patient, and pretended to make the bed with a body in it. He went through all the procedures, wanting to perfect them all.

It didn’t take him long to show Elaine how responsible he was, what a quick learner, and soon he was on his own. “You’re ready,” she said.

She gave him a pager for when she needed him and told him to walk the floors, to pay attention to the call lights over the rooms. He had a list of patients he was supposed to check up on, to feed them meals, to make their beds, to get whatever it was that they wanted, and his job included cleaning. “I’ll check up on you when I can, okay?” she asked and he couldn’t help but feel a skip of joy.

All day, Lewis was in and out of patients’ rooms. Sometimes it was terrible, pain radiating from the beds, patients curled up. Once he came upon a woman sleeping, a smile on her face, and though he was trying to be quiet, he woke her. She jolted up, bursting into tears. “I was dreaming!” she cried. “And now I’m in the goddamned hospital!” She rubbed at her eyes. “Get out!” she shouted at him. “Get out!”

Patients wanted to know why he had become a nursing assistant, where was he from because his accent was so funny, and how old was he anyway? The women mothered him and fussed. They wanted to know if he had a girlfriend, but Lewis noticed they didn’t ask him if he wanted to meet their daughters or nieces. The men, though, stiffened at his touch and said little. Well, they didn’t have to love him. Most of them stayed only a week at the most, and then they were replaced by someone else. All he had to do was care for them while they were there, and that was easy enough.

Lewis had been alone for so long that he found he liked talking to the patients. Every illness seemed to have a narrative to it. A patient wasn’t just a heart attack, but a man who had been overeating because his wife had left him and now food was the only thing that gave him solace, other than his Beach Boys records. A young girl with diabetes was madly in love with her boyfriend, who came every visiting hour and held her hand, and she confided in Lewis that she was terrified about his going to war. “He wants to fight Communists,” she said bitterly, and Lewis thought of Mr. Corcoran from the old neighborhood, how he threw around words like Red Scare and Yellow Menace in even the most casual conversations.

All these lives and he got to glimpse them. He was disappointed when he came into a room and someone was sleeping, faced turned into the pillow, or worse, when someone was hooked up to tubes and machines, their eyes shut. Still, he sat by them. He spoke to patients by name, took their hands, some of them mottled and bruised from the IVs. “You’re going to be fine,” he reassured, even if he didn’t know if it was true. He loved how patients perked up when they recognized him, how they needed him. A patient wanted something—a cup of water, an explanation of a procedure—and Lewis could take care of it. It made Lewis feel as if he had a place in the world.

Every floor had its own feeling—and its own nurses. The only floor he hadn’t been on was the maternity ward, where he wasn’t allowed because he was male. “It’s inappropriate,” Elaine told him.

“There’s men on that floor,” Lewis said. “I see them get off there all the time.”

“Dads and doctors,” Elaine said. “And the fathers stay in the waiting room with the TV, right where they belong. No one wants men messing around in the delivery room. I sure as hell didn’t.”

Sometimes, depending on the nurse on duty, he wasn’t allowed to do certain things for female patients, no matter what floor they were on. He couldn’t give a sponge bath to an elderly woman, even though she was so heavily sedated, she’d have never known he was there. He wasn’t supposed to help the teenager in room
404
to change out of her clothes into a johnny, though she had been waiting for a nurse to help her for over an hour.

He asked how it was different for male doctors, but the head nurse gave Lewis a glassy stare. “Since when did you go to medical school?” she said. “Don’t compare yourself.”

The nurses all knew about him, the only male nurse’s aide, and sometimes Lewis would see a group walking by, as if they had come deliberately to gawk. Elaine told him they had had a man three years ago working as a nurse. “But he was different,” Elaine said. “He came from the marines. Really strong, really gentle. Anytime we needed help carting a patient somewhere, he was our guy. He didn’t stay long, though. After he saw a few patients die, that was it for him. He ended up going back to school to be an engineer.” She looked pointedly at Lewis’s hands, at his bitten nails. “He was married, too,” she said.

“I’m only nineteen,” Lewis said and she shrugged.

“I was married at eighteen,” Elaine said. She held up her hand so he could see the ring, large and sparkling on her finger.

A
LL THAT HAD
been almost a year ago, and now being at the hospital had a sort of routine to it. Lewis loved his days, but when the workday was over, he didn’t looked forward to going home alone to his tiny room. Once he was there, there was really nowhere to go. His loneliness pounded like a headache. All around him were young couples from the university, holding hands, kissing, flirting. He was surrounded by opportunity, so why couldn’t he make something happen for himself? He tried. He went to double features at the Bijoux, his feet up on the chair above him. During the second, older movie,
Hud,
a young woman slid into his row and sat beside him. She had long, dark hair and a small, serious face, and he couldn’t concentrate on Paul Newman anymore because he wanted to talk to her. He imagined what he might say to her after the film, how they might go grab a coffee. When the lights came on, he leaned toward her, smiling. “Wasn’t that movie amazing?” he said, and she blinked at him, as if she hadn’t realized he was sitting beside her. She turned and moved out of the row, not saying a word to him, and when he left, he tripped over her popcorn box. He sat in on evening classes, but when he tried to talk to a woman, she held her finger up across her mouth for silence, her gaze turning to the lecture. He kept hoping he’d see the same people around town, so he could say hello without anyone thinking he was nuts, but he never did.

At work, the nurses and aides might not have wanted to have much to do with him, but there were other people on the hospital staff. Every morning, he and Mick, an orderly, would toss a “Hey, how you doing?” at each other when they passed on the floor. “Can’t complain,” Mick would say, swabbing the floor, and then Mick would concentrate on the spots he had missed and go silent. Lewis figured this would go on forever if he didn’t press for more. He was leaving work when he saw Mick with John, who worked in the cafeteria dishing out the food, and both of them were carrying bowling bags. “Where do you bowl?” he asked and Mick turned to him. “Pins Palace. You know it?”

Lewis had no idea where it was, but he nodded his head enthusiastically. “Great place to bowl,” he said.

Mick considered him. “A few of us get together every Friday. Bowl a few games, have a few beers, some laughs,” he said. “You want to come?”

The last time Lewis had bowled was with Jimmy and Rose, back when they were kids, candlepins at the Wal-Lex, all of them so bad that no one bothered keeping score.

“I’d love it,” Lewis said.

N
ONE OF THE
guys were older than thirty-five, but to Lewis, they looked weathered by life. Mick already had a slight paunch he covered with a yellow bowling shirt, and John was balding, and Tom, who was new to him, had faded tattoos on both forearms. All of them were married with families, and as soon as they all got settled on their lane, John pulled out his wallet to show off his kid. “Get a load of this little one,” John said, showing Lewis a photograph of a little girl with a gap-toothed grin. “That’s my Gracie.” Mick had an eight-year-old girl who loved horses, and Tom had twin freckle-faced boys who were in kindergarten. “Bedlam at my house,” Tom said, but he was smiling when he said it.