Is This Tomorrow: A Novel (27 page)

He rested his head against the receiver. “I never forgot him, either.”

Her voice came at him like a rush. “People keep telling me now you can move on, now it’s over. But Lewis, it’s still not over, you know? If anything, there’s even more to figure out. I keep going through all the newspapers, even the old ones I kept. I keep calling the cops, but they don’t want to take my calls anymore.”

There was a funny silence. “He wouldn’t go in that shelter willingly,” Lewis said finally.

“That’s what I thought,” she said, her voice rising. “That’s exactly what I thought.”

“It wasn’t an accident.”

“No, no, I don’t think so, either. He’d never go even near there if he could help it,” she said. “There’s got to be more to this, more reason why he was there. People think I’m wallowing in this, that I’m crazy, that I need help, but something isn’t right. I just feel it. And I need to know what happened.”

He heard the papers in the background stop rustling. When they were kids, she was always telling him to look at her face, that her expression or her eyes would tell him what he needed to know, but all he could see now was his shabby apartment, the phone in his hands. He wished that she were right there in front of him. “Can I come to see you?” he asked.

She was quiet, and for a moment he was afraid she was going to say no.

“You want to come here?” she asked.

“Please, Rose.”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I’m not good company these days. I don’t sleep. I don’t eat. I burst into tears at the cookie aisle at the supermarket yesterday because I saw a whole rack of Sno Balls.”

“Who else but me would know Jimmy only liked the white ones? And fuck being good company. I just want to see you. Rose, I’m a mess, too. But maybe we can talk about this. We can figure it out together.”

She was quiet again.

“Rose, please. Isn’t it worth a try?” He tried to think about what he would do if she said no, how he’d get through the endless long days ahead. “I’ll come just for a few days.”

“I’m a teacher,” she said finally. “Spring break is coming up in a week.” I’ll have nearly ten days off. He heard the hum of the wires. “I have two weeks vacation coming to me,” he said. “You could come here, if you want, I suppose,” she said slowly. “You could even come a little early and see my class. You could camp on my couch if you wanted to.”

T
HE WHOLE TIME
Lewis was in Madison, he had only taken a few brief vacations, and those were to visit his mother. He stayed only three days in Waltham each time because it was too strange being back in the neighborhood. The truth was that he liked working, being busy, being on his own. He liked the buzz of the hospital, the feeling of community. Now, though, he called in his vacation days. “You deserve it,” Elaine said, “Go somewhere fun and don’t think of us slaving here.”

Before he knew it, there he was, on a Friday evening in Ann Arbor, three days earlier than he said he’d come because he couldn’t wait, and maybe, too, because he was afraid to give her too much time to change her mind. He was sitting in a small café. He had never thought he’d see her again, and he wasn’t even sure what he would say to her.

“Lewis?”

There was that shock of time, the way he felt when he once saw a photo of himself as a kid that he never remembered had even been taken. She was and wasn’t familiar. She still had that long hair, shiny as glass. Those bangs that hid her eyes. She was wearing cowboy boots and some sort of minidress. As soon as he saw her he realized he didn’t know anything about her. Did she have a husband? A child? He hadn’t even thought to ask her about her life when he called, but she hadn’t asked him about his, either. He glanced at her hands. There were no rings.

She sat down. A waitress ambled over and set down two red plastic menus. “I can’t believe I’m seeing you,” Rose said.

“Me, too,” he said. He didn’t know what he expected, that like in the movies, it might seem that no time at all had passed. That he’d feel instantly close to her and connected, but instead, he felt as if he were floating

She studied him and then reached across and brushed her fingers against his hair. “I just wanted to see if you were real,” she said.

“Sometimes I have my doubts,” Lewis said. She had dark circles under her eyes, like stains and he wanted to touch them.

Neither one of them talked about Jimmy at first. Instead, she told him about her third-grade class, about her apartment. “I never guessed you would have been a teacher,” he said. “You were such an adventurer. I thought you’d backpack around the world or live in Costa Rica.”

She laughed and he saw suddenly how beautiful she was, which made him feel uneasy and strange, as if something were off. “What about, you?” she asked. “Let me guess. A scientist. Or a shrink.” She looked at him expectantly. “Am I right?”

“I didn’t go to college,” he said.

“You didn’t? But you were so smart. You used to borrow all my books, remember?”

He didn’t want to talk about why he hadn’t gone, so instead he shrugged. “I thought I could get myself an education on my own. I’m a nurse’s aide,” he told Rose. “I like what I do.”

She nodded. “Okay then. That’s good.”

“No kids, no husband?” he blurted and she smiled ruefully.

“I just broke up with someone,” she said.

“I’m on my own, too.”

He told her about his job, how he was the one the patients called for by name, how they dubbed him “that nice young man who doesn’t hurt,” and Rose laughed again. The waitress came by and they both ordered spaghetti. “Back in a jiff,” the waitress said. Rose leaned forward on her elbows. She told him how Dot had died, how she had stopped talking about Jimmy, how she kept all the photos boxed away where you had to get a step stool to reach them. “I think maybe it’s good that she died when she did, that she didn’t know how it ended,” Rose said.

The waitress set down their plates, drowning in sauce. Lewis took a bite and then put it down. It was like hospital food. It had the same smell, that texture, like socks boiled on a stove.

“You never wrote,” Lewis said.

She picked at her spaghetti, winding the noodles around her fork. “What are you talking about? I did write you. Every week. You never wrote back and I couldn’t understand why.”

“I never got any letters from you,” Lewis said. “I would have written you whole novels if I had.”

Rose put her fork down. “None?” she said. He shook his head.

“I wrote so many,” she said. “Every week. My mother kept telling me that if you had wanted to write me, you would have, that I was wasting my time.”

“I don’t understand,” Lewis said. “You remembered your return address? The stamp? You mailed them?”

“My mother did,” she said.

Lewis frowned. He thought of how Dot used to send back the casseroles people brought her, how his mother would go over to talk to her and Dot would sometimes refuse to even open the door.

“Did she want you to write me?” Lewis asked.

“God, no. She said girls don’t chase boys.” Rose put her fork down and frowned. “Oh no,” she said abruptly. “I never once thought that she’d—”

“Me, either,” Lewis said. He looked at her and thought how different his life might have been if he had gotten her letters, if he had had her friendship to get him through high school. She wouldn’t have been like a phantom limb all those years, there but not there. Maybe he would have even tried to go to college where she went or at least near her. But he couldn’t say any of that to Rose, not now.

“I’m so sorry,” she said. “For both of us.”

“Me, too.” He pushed his plate away, no longer hungry.

“What about your mom? How’s she doing?”

“I don’t see her all that often.”

“You’re kidding. Why not?”

“I’m in Madison. She’s in Boston. You know.”

“Want to know something? I always wanted her to be my mother. She used to talk to me like I was important and smart and special. She listened to whatever I had to say, even if it was just about clothes, and she’d look at me like it was crucial information she just had to know. I ate dinner at your house every night, remember? She gave me her lipsticks.” Rose paused. “She was amazing. You know, in the mornings I used to hear her collecting bottles out of the trash for the refund money. I knew she didn’t want anyone to know.”

“My mom did that?” He felt hot with shame.

“One time, I saw Mr. Hill come out and he watched her collecting the bottles, not helping or anything, which made it sort of creepy, and she looked up at him and he said, ‘You don’t have to do that.’ He walked over to her and he put his arm on her shoulder in a funny way. He leaned in closer to her, and she froze and then he said something to her that I couldn’t hear and I don’t know why, I ran out in my nightgown and bare feet, and as soon as he saw me, he took his arm away, and then suddenly the conversation was about me being barefoot.” Rose dipped her head. “I wanted to stay outside and help her, but she wouldn’t let me. I told her she had to walk me home even though I could have gotten there by myself. Mr. Hill gave me this look, and then he finally turned and went back inside his house.”

Something knocked in his head. “I never knew about that”

“You would have hated it if you had known, so I never told you. But me—I lay in bed and every night I knew she was outside and near me, collecting bottles, and I liked that. She seemed powerful to me. There were all these bad stories about your house, but it was the only place I ever felt safe.”

She tapped his hand. “You should go see her more often,” Rose said. “You can’t wait on these things because one moment people are here, and then they’re not.” She motioned to the waitress, making a check mark in the air.

They went to her place, a square little apartment in a squat building on East William Street. By the fifth flight up, Lewis could see how this would get old fast, but Rose didn’t seem to mind it. He trailed behind her, watching her legs flash on the stairs, and he suddenly wanted to take her hand. He dug his hands deeper into his pockets.

Her apartment was all wood and green plants, with a well-worn Oriental rug in the center of the floor, which had plant patterns in it, too, as if she were outdoors even while she was inside. He stopped as soon as he passed the photo of Jimmy she had hanging on her wall, staring at it because Jimmy seemed too real, so immediate. She touched his arm. “Sit,” she said, motioning to the red velvet couch and he did, running his hand along the nap, thinking of her mother’s orange and brown plaid couch back in Waltham. Rose sat on the couch, too, facing him.

“Do you think we would have stayed friends if we had kept in touch?” she asked.

“I wanted to,” he said.

She swept a curtain of hair to one side of her neck, leaving the other side exposed, and he suddenly couldn’t swallow. He looked away, embarrassed, and then back at her again. He had come to her apartment to talk more about Jimmy, but neither one of them had said a word.

“What’s wrong?” she asked. “You look worried.”

“I thought I was hiding it.”

“You still can’t hide anything from me,” she said, half smiling.

“I think I’m just tired,” he said, because he didn’t know what else to say, and as soon as he said it, he hated himself because she got up and started taking blankets from a side closet, ending the conversation.

A
FTER
R
OSE SET
Lewis up on the couch, she closed her door and though he heard her rustling in the other room, he couldn’t imagine what she was doing or how she was feeling, or if she’d be able to sleep. As soon as he shut his eyes, he saw Jimmy, crouched down in the bomb shelter, his arms around his knees, the way he had when he had peed his pants. Lewis turned over on the couch, so he was facing the window. There was no window in the bomb shelter. No air. He bolted upright, and then Rose’s door opened and she came out, a blue robe tied aro
und her. “You, too?” she said and she came and sat opposite him.

“I keep thinking about Jimmy,” Lewis said.

“I never stop.” She rubbed her eyes and then leaned toward him. “Why did he go in there?”

“We never would have thought to look there for him. Never,” Lewis said.

They talked about it, how the cops had searched everyone’s house, closet, basements. How it had been so chaotic and urgent. “Remember that one cop Maroni?” Rose asked. She shook her head. “Moron-i,” she said. “That’s what he was. A big Moron-i.”

Lewis remembered the cop, big and beefy with slicked-back hair. He was always clapping his hands at the kids, scattering them. He warned people not to mess things up. “Just let me do my job,” he snapped.

“It doesn’t make sense. Everyone was looking everywhere,” Lewis said.

“But we didn’t look there. We didn’t even think of it.”

“Neither did Mr. Gallagher.”

He thought of how the neighbors had made lists of all the areas that had been checked out so they wouldn’t waste time searching the same places. He remembered the checklist of places in one of the neighbor’s rec rooms. “It feels so awful. That we’ll never know.”

Rose adjusted and readjusted the pillow on her chair, settling one on top of another. There was a silence like taut wires. She went over to her bookcase. “I’m the family historian,” Rose said, crouching to the bottom shelf. “I keep looking at these things over and over.” She hesitated. “Do you want to see them? Some people don’t—”

“Of course I do.”

The creases on her forehead smoothed. She tugged out a big wicker box, dragging it over to the couch, opening its lid like a mouth.

She pulled out an old photograph album, the black paper pages filled with clumsily pasted pictures. There Jimmy was at ten, grinning, flashing silver toy pistols into the air. There was a photo of Jimmy with Rose, the two of them dressed up for church, Rose in a fussy plaid coat buttoned to her throat, Jimmy in a tie and a dark suit. She traced one finger over it. “God, but I hated that coat,” she said. She pointed to another picture. The three of them, Rose, Lewis and Jimmy, standing in Lewis’s backyard, their arms around each other, in shorts.