Is This Tomorrow: A Novel (16 page)

The men talked about their wives, too. Tom rolled up his sleeve to show Lewis a big gauze pad. “That’s from making fried chicken,” he said. “And I was just an innocent bystander, watching my gal doing the frying.” They all laughed and Mick told about how his wife put all their extra change in wish jars, one for a trip to Niagara Falls, another for a new washer, as if a few extra quarters could make their dreams come true. “You have someone?” John asked Lewis.

“Not yet,” Lewis said. “But I’m open to suggestions.”

Mick laughed. “You wouldn’t like anyone my wife would fix you up with.”

“I might,” Lewis said hopefully, but Mick waved his hand. “Trust me on this one,” Mick said.

“It’ll happen when it happens,” John said.

The other guys were decent bowlers, but Lewis barely broke ninety, and he had more than a few gutter balls. None of the men seemed to care. “Straighten your arm,” Tom told him. “Keep your feet farther apart.” They cheered when Lewis did better, clapping when he got a spare. They bought him a beer and slapped him on the back. By the end of the night, Lewis’s arm was sore, he was drunk, and he couldn’t wait for the next outing.

One Friday night, Tom didn’t show up. “Where’s Tom?” Lewis said, and Mick and John exchanged glances. “What?” Lewis said. John took him aside. “His wife left him,” he said, his voice low. “He moved to Detroit.”

“What?” Lewis remembered the way Tom talked about how beautiful his wife was, how lucky he was. Tom had never shown up at bowling looking morose; his game had never changed. “When? Why?”

“It’s been going on a long time,” John said.

“I don’t get it,” Lewis said. “How did I not know this?”

John picked up a bowling bowl and put it in Lewis’s hands. “C’mon, we’re here to bowl, not jaw like dames,” he said.

All that weekend, Lewis thought about Tom. Lewis had thought he had known him, or at least was getting to know him, but look how wrong you could be. It made him wonder how well he really knew John or Mick, or when you thought about it, how well they knew him. When he talked, he shot the breeze about the hospital or Madison. It was all casual, loose as pocket change that never added up to anything.

He didn’t want to stay in his apartment so he grabbed his map of Madison and struck out on a walk, looking for new pockets of the city.

I
T WAS
S
ATURDAY
night, at work, and Lewis rounded the corner, nearly bumping into an old woman. She had on a pink floral bathrobe and she was hanging on to an IV, but when she saw him, she stopped short, staring at him. Her white hair flew about her face like dust motes. “Do you need help?” Lewis always asked, because sometimes people didn’t want to feel like they did, and if you asked, at least they felt that they had some control over the situation. Her hands began to tremble and she walked toward him, dragging her IV. She touched the pads of her fingertips to his chest. Her fingers were so cold, Lewis immediately began piecing together a diagnosis from what he had read in the nursing manuals. Circulation disorder. Thyroid. “Are you okay?” Lewis asked.

“You’re real,” she said, in amazement. Her finger sped across his forehead. They felt like mice feet to him. Then her fingers flew through his hair. “It’s you,” she whispered.

“Who?”

“You’re Jesus,” the woman said. “I’ve waited all my life to see you and here you are. Have you come for me? Is it finally my time?” Lewis let her take his hands. He folded his fingers around hers, while her eyes searched his face. “I’m not Jesus,” he said. “I’m a nurse’s aide. And I’m Jewish,” he added with a smile.

“Jesus started as a Jew.” Her mouth wavered, and for a moment, he wondered if he should have let her think what she wanted. She coughed and then she suddenly laughed. “Don’t you think I know that the Lord works in mysterious ways?” she said.

“Let’s get you back to bed.” He took her arm, like an escort to the prom, guiding her back toward her room. The whole time they were walking, she kept looking around at all the other people, holding her head up like a show pony. “I’m walking with Jesus!” she crowed.

“What’s your name?” he asked.

“Don’t you know it? Don’t you know everything?” She winked at him.

He smoothed her around the corner and into her room. Her bed had the covers thrown back as if she had been in a hurry. There was a glossy magazine on the bed, the pages spread open.

“Doris,” Lewis guessed. “Mary.” He glanced at the cover of the magazine.
Top Ten Tips to Keep Your Man
. He pressed his lips together so he wouldn’t laugh. “Adele.”

“Wrong, wrong, wrong.” She shook her head.

“Lisa,” he said. “Mary Ellen. Betsy.”

“Sheila,” she said triumphantly.

Lewis held her as if she might break. “Careful now,” he said, as he lowered her onto her bed. She sunk against the pillows, and she took his hand. “Talk to me,” she said. “Nobody ever talks to me.”

He sat down next to her bed. “I grew up right here in Madison,” she said, yawning. “What about you?”

He told her about growing up in Waltham, about Rose and Jimmy and his mother, but he left out what had really happened. Sheila was supposed to be talking, too, but every time he slowed down or grew silent, she would wave her hands. “Tell me more,” she urged, and she was so interested, so focused on him, that he spilled out more of his story. The more he talked, the more he felt as if he were unbottling himself. His hands relaxed on his knees. He breathed more deeply.

Her eyelids fluttered shut. She sighed and burrowed into the sheets. “It’s so nice to hear conversation,” she said, and then she yawned again. He put one hand gently on her head, like a blessing, and she sighed and shut her eyes. “Sleep,” he gently ordered.

“Will you come back? To talk to me?”

“Of course I will.”

“Promise me.”

He promised and Sheila’s breath slowed and evened, and then he walked outside, back into the corridor, and leaned against the wall to steady himself.

There it was. The missing feeling.

For so many years, he had wished he could see or talk to Rose. All he wanted was an explanation for why she had vanished from his life. He wanted to know if she was still looking for Jimmy, though he had given up, knowing that if there was any news, his mother would tell him. He tried to imagine Rose now. Most women got married, had kids, but he could no more imagine her staying at home and being a housewife than he could his mother.

What did it matter anyway? How many people did he know who were still friends with their childhood buddies? He had heard a story recently from one of the nurses who said she had been contacted by her boyfriend from sixth grade, shortly after Kennedy was elected. “I’ve been thinking about you,” he had said and she had gone to meet him. She had gotten all dressed up in a sparkly marigold-colored dress, her hair bouffant like Jackie Kennedy’s. She had walked into the restaurant and the only person sitting at a table alone was an overweight man with pasty skin who was wearing a terrible brown toupee. “So much for memory lane,” she said.

Lewis walked by the windows, where he could hear the wind howling outside. A blizzard was expected, with temperatures so cold that the aged and those with respiratory problems were urged to stay inside. That was Madison for you. The summers so hot and muggy you didn’t feel like moving, the winters icing your bones until they seemed as if they might shatter. The first time he had walked outside in the winter, damp from a shower, his hair had frozen. A lock of hair actually broke off in his fingers. He hadn’t known what to do with his broken hair and had ended up leaving the pieces in the snow for the birds, thinking maybe they would want it for their nests when it thawed.

L
EWIS HADN’T EXPECTED
that he’d wind up in Madison, but he had wanted to move out of Waltham since the day that Rose had. He had begged Ava to leave, but she kept refusing, especially after she was finally put on staff full-time. “We’re lucky to have a house to rent here. And where would I work? I’m lucky to have the position I have now. It isn’t so easy for a divorced woman with a kid to start over,” she said.

“There are tons of jobs.”

“Oh, there are?” She grabbed the newspaper and flipped to the Help Wanted, scanning the ads. “Ah, here we go. The Women’s Section. A quarter of the size of the men’s, which is a problem right there. Let’s look at this,” she said. “Perky young woman with good personality.” She tapped another ad. “Pretty young woman with pleasing speaking voice.” She put the paper down. “Perky. Pleasing. Pretty. Young.” She punctuated each word with a snap. “You see me anywhere in there?”

“You’re young,” he said, though he had no idea if she really was anymore, and then, he instantly felt guilty that he hadn’t also called her perky and pleasing. She brushed him away. “What we need to do is get on with our lives here,” she told him.

It wasn’t even their house, yet she was spending all this time fixing it up, painting the rooms herself. She watched pennies and kept a ledger and every month she said, “We’re almost there for a down payment.” All Lewis could think was, why would anyone ever want to buy this house, least of all her, after all that had happened? How could she have so much pride in the run-down kitchen, the scratched-up wood floors?

“It’s important to have something that’s yours,” she said. She was grouting new adobe tiles around the sink, her hair pulled back in a kerchief. She made a sweeping gesture. “I’ll buy this house and then I can borrow against it so you can go to college.”

“I don’t need college.”

“What are you talking about? Of course you do.” She sat up, the putty knife in one hand, making parabolas with it in the air. “And eventually, I can give the house to you.”

“I won’t want to live in it,” he said.

“You might change your mind when you get out in the world and see how expensive things are,” Ava had told him. “A house is equity. It’s peace of mind, owning it. And if you really don’t want it, then you can sell it, with my blessing. Then you can get enough money to live wherever it is you want to live.”

“Why do you want us to stay here?”

She had spread grout along a green tile. “Why do you want us to leave?”

He had always wanted to leave. Every minute he had been in the neighborhood and in his house, without Jimmy, without Rose, he had felt as if his real life were somewhere else and he just needed to find his way to it.

The worst time of every year was the anniversary of Jimmy’s disappearance. There was always something in the local papers, though there was less coverage as time passed:
Local Boy Still Missing. No New Clues in Disappearance Case.
There was a grainy photograph of Jimmy, his sixth-grade school picture. How would anyone ever recognize Jimmy in that? Patsy Baker, the newscaster known for her freckles, always did a segment on the show, talking about the lack of clues, giving sad updates, as if she were taking it personally. There was usually one neighbor or another willing to go on camera, but it was inevitably the person who knew the least about Jimmy, or who had the weirdest theories, like Mr. Corcoran blaming it on a Communist infiltration on Warwick Avenue, or even hinting it might have something to do with a Negro family who had moved in six blocks away, a statement that made Patsy Baker quickly wind up the story.

Lewis had waited and waited for Rose to write, but no letters ever arrived. He had even gone out and bought special stationery to write to her, and a new felt-tip pen in deep blue. “What have you heard from your friend?” the neighbors would ask him at first, which always made him feel worse, as if it were his fault somehow that yet another person in the neighborhood had vanished. He had called Pittsburgh information but there were no Rearsons listed and he had no idea what Rose’s aunt’s last name would be. He even tried writing to Rose’s address in Waltham, in case the mail would be forwarded, but it came back, and when it did, he tore it up in his hands. One night, he shut his eyes and tried to send her a message telepathically, the way she had shown him.
Write me. Find me, Rose.
All that happened was he began to hear the dog barking outside, louder than ever before.

But it wasn’t just Jimmy and Rose who haunted Lewis. There hadn’t been news of his father for years, but still, every time the phone rang, or the mail came, Lewis couldn’t help but hope. No matter what his mother had said, he knew there was some explanation. There had to be.

Lewis, though, kept changing. His voice bumped to a lower register. When he caught his face in the bathroom mirror, it seemed to have new hollows, and downy hairs sprouted along his upper lip and on his body. He tapped the length of his nose with a finger. It looked longer to him, more pointed. Even his eyes looked different, as if he had grown more lashes. He pulled on his dungarees only to find they didn’t reach past his calves. His shirts exposed his wrists and forearms. How strange it was that he was now taller than the Jimmy he remembered. How would Jimmy recognize him if he looked this different, and how would he recognize Jimmy? He swiveled, studying himself. From this angle, he almost looked like the old photographs of his father.

Shortly after Lewis turned fifteen, he was eating dinner with his mother when she turned to him and said, “Why don’t you ever talk to me anymore? You used to.”

“I talk,” Lewis insisted, though the last conversation he could remember having with his mother was over whether or not he wanted baloney for lunch, and he chose American cheese instead.

“Where are your friends?” Ava asked. “It’s not good to be a loner. You need kids your own age to do things with, to talk to. I worry about you.”

“Excuse me? You’re asking
me
about friends?” He shook his head and she waved her hand.

“We’re not talking about me,” Ava said. “And I’m with people all day at work.”

It wasn’t true anyway. Lewis wasn’t such a loner. He had friends he palled around with. He played chess with a guy Greg from his science class sometimes. He often biked with Scott from gym. He was fine while he was with them, but something always felt as if it were missing. Sometimes he noticed girls looking at him, their mouths opening as if to speak, but he never knew what to say back to them. He had heard the girls, too, talking. “My parents would never let me date a Jew,” someone said, and Lewis withdrew. There was no one he could really talk to, and even if he could, how could he be sure they would stay?