Is This Tomorrow: A Novel (29 page)

“Lean on me,” he said, and he helped her to her place, up the five flights, leaving a trail of blood she kept looking back at. “I’ll get it later,” he told her. He sat her on the couch. “I can do this,” she said, but he went into her bathroom. As soon as he opened her medicine cabinet, he sighed. She had a bottle of Arpège perfume, a Tangee lipstick, and some lotions. He couldn’t find even the simplest first-aid items like Bactine or bandages. He pushed aside the Pond’s face cream, grabbed a washcloth and big towel, and found some tweezers that he wiped with rubbing alcohol to sterilize.

When he came out, Rose had peeled off her stocking and there was a long pale leg, a flash of creamy skin, and he saw that she had painted every nail a different, bright color, and he wanted to touch every one. “You’re going to get bloody,” she warned.

“Occupational hazard,” he said. He gave her the big towel to drape around her wet body. He lifted up her foot in his hands, the warmth of it, and gently turned it on its side. He could feel her pulse along her ankle. He took the tweezers and gently pulled the first piece of glass out. When he looked up at her, she didn’t wince. Instead, her face was grave and lovely, watching him. He took his time, carefully setting each piece of glass on the washcloth. “It looks worse than it is,” he told her. “It’s all for show, this blood.” When he was done, he ran his fingers along the bottom of her skin, checking for rough, tiny pieces of glass, and when he finished, he did it again. “Your patients must love you,” she said. He glanced up at her. She was still watching him. “Does it hurt?” he said.

Her eyes were deep as pools and he couldn’t stop looking at them. “Everything hurts,” she said.

His mouth went dry. “Your eyes? Do your eyes need medical attention?” he said, and when she nodded, he couldn’t help it. He leaned up and kissed them. She didn’t move away.“What about your nose?” he said.

“It kills.” He kissed the tilt of it. He was so close he could see the shadows her lashes made on her cheeks.

“And my lips. Awful,” she said quietly, and then he cupped her chin, his eyes on hers. He placed his forehead against hers and she moved closer against him. He kissed her mouth, and then she was kissing him back, unbuttoning his shirt, and he was pulling her to the floor.

I
N THE MORNING,
Lewis got up first and dressed and went into the kitchen, opening the refrigerator. It was as bad as his. A half a loaf of bread, some cheese, a few pieces of fruit, and a stalk of limp broccoli freckled with mold. “Hey.” He turned to see Rose, sleepy and beautiful, her hair a storm about her shoulders. She rubbed her eyes. “Sleepy?” he said and she shook her head and sat down. He couldn’t stop sneaking peeks at her. He had known her since they were kids, but everything about her seemed new, the way her neck curved into her shoulders, the graceful way she walked. She drank her juice as if she were considering each sip.

“Are you okay about this?” she finally said. He didn’t know what to say. He was used to women changing suddenly after sleeping together, wanting to make him breakfast and then lunch and then dinner, wanting things he wasn’t sure he had in him. But with Rose it was different. He didn’t want to be anywhere else in the world, but this kitchen. “I’m good,” he said.

She drew a circle in a damp spot on the table. “What do we do now?”

They went out to eat breakfast at a little café Rose knew and then walked around the campus until they found a sunny spot to sit on the grass. “I spend so much time thinking about my past and here you are, a real part of it,” she said. She tugged up a dandelion and blew on it, scattering the gray seeds. She brushed her hand against the soft grass. “Maybe you should try to find your father,” she said.

He looked at her, surprised. “What? Why would I want to do that? Why would you even think about that?”

“It keeps hitting me how I don’t have any family left,” she said. “What that means, how it feels. But you do, and maybe you shouldn’t throw that away like it doesn’t mean anything. Don’t you want to know what happened to him? I know he wasn’t there for you as a kid, but maybe he’s changed. Maybe he deserves a second chance. Don’t you ever wonder about him?”

He couldn’t lie. He had thought about his father. Sometimes when his relationships soured, he wondered if it was because he’d never really had a man in the house to model himself after. When he was dealing with children at the hospital, he went by instinct, by what he thought he’d want if he were a kid in a bed. Sometimes, too, he wondered if his father ever thought about him, if he ever regretted leaving them.

“I think you need to find him,” Rose said.

“And then what?” Lewis said.

“Whatever happens happens. But at least you’ll know him.”

“I’m just not sure it’s a good idea.”

“He’s your father,” she said. “A father is a father. You can’t just throw that away like it’s nothing.” She took his hand. “Besides, I want to know everything about you, and that includes him. I want to know if you got your eyes from him or if you have the same sense of humor.”

“I can tell you we don’t.”

“You don’t know that,” Rose said. “You were so little when he left. You’re a man now. It’s all different. You should find him, Lewis.”

“He could have found me if he wanted.”

“You can’t leave things up to other people. Sometimes you have to just go and make things happen. Come on. It’s something we can do something about.” She tugged on his sleeve. “I’ll go with you,” she said. She tugged his sleeve harder.

“You would?”

He saw that her eyes were full of light. He still didn’t know how he felt about finding his father. It was all dark and confused inside of him, but he knew how he felt about going on a road trip with Rose, maybe taking the whole rest of his vacation to do it. She moved closer to him.

“How are we going to find him, though?” Lewis asked.

“You could ask Ava.”

“My mom? She doesn’t know where he is. And if she did, she
wouldn’t tell me.”

“She might know.” Rose touched Lewis’s arm. “Call her. Ask.”

H
E CALLED FROM
Rose’s apartment and his mother answered on the second ring, and as soon as she heard his voice, her own voice changed, growing warmer. “Honey,” she said. “How are you?”

“I’m with Rose,” he said. “I took vacation days to come see her.”

“Rose.” She sighed her name. “But that’s wonderful. I’m so glad. How is she?”

He told her a little about Rose and then his mother insisted on speaking to her. As soon as Rose took the receiver, she brightened. “Me, too,” Rose said, and then she gave the phone back to Lewis. “She said she missed me,” Rose whispered. “She said she’s glad we’re together.”

“So, Mom,” Lewis said, hesitating. “I think I want to find Dad.”

There was silence, but he didn’t know whether she was buying time or whether she was trying to think of a new reason why he shouldn’t do this. “Do you know where he is?” Lewis pressed.

He heard his mother sigh. “I don’t know,” she said.

“Mom, please.”

“I’d have to track down the lawyer, see if he had an old address. I don’t even know if he’d give it to me, or if he even has it after all this time.”

“But you’ll try?”

“Why do you want to do this, Lewis? How are you going to feel if you don’t find him, or if you do and he’s just the same?”

He wanted to tell her that he wasn’t twelve anymore. She didn’t have to protect him like this or lie about his father. “Rose is coming with me,” he said. “We’re going to find him together.”

“You and Rose?” He heard the change in her voice. She was his mother, after all, and he could sense her weighing how much she wanted him to have a nice girlfriend, one that she approved of, against the fact that she didn’t want him to find his dad.

“Mom. I’m an adult now. I’m not going to fall apart over this. I just want to meet him.”

“Okay,” she said finally. “Give me the number there and I’ll call you back, but I’m not promising anything.”

Lewis hung up the phone. He didn’t know how he felt about finding his father, not really, but when he looked at Rose, he felt as if something were lighting up inside of him. She was leaning against the counter. “What?” she asked, and he swallowed.

“She’s going to help us.”

T
WO DAYS LATER,
they had an address in Cleveland, courtesy of Ava’s old lawyer who remembered Ava and called in a few favors from friends. Lewis was surprised that Ava didn’t give him advice about how to act with his father. He thought she would have told him not to talk about her, what to be wary of and what to say, but all she did was recite the address and tell him to call if he needed her. “Mom, thanks,” he said, and he meant it.

They took Lewis’s car and the old map because it was symbolic, but they stopped at a gas station and got a new map for Ohio, spreading it out in the car. “Okay, so what’s the best way to go?” Rose asked.

Lewis was driving and Rose held the map, but every time he looked at it, he couldn’t quite get where the route was. After he turned off at a wrong exit, Rose proclaimed herself the navigator. She put her feet up on the dash and sang heartily to the radio. It was all he could do not to pull over and kiss her.

By the time they pulled into a diner to grab a bite to eat, they were famished. They ordered burgers and fries before the waitress could even set down the menu.

“She reminds me of your mom,” Rose said when the waitress sped away, and Lewis wasn’t sure if that was a compliment or not. He hoped his mother wasn’t wearing black toreador pants or blouses that shiny and tight to the café where she sold her pies.

At night, to save money, they parked and tried to sleep in the car. Rose took the back, her knees curled up. In the front seat, Lewis could hear her tossing and turning. Rose finally sat up, sighing, a strand of hair pasted along her cheek. “How much could a motel cost?” Rose said, rubbing her shoulder.

They drove to the nearest motel, but at the door, there was a small sign that read:
PLEASE LEAVE YOUR GUNS AT HOME!
“Are we sure we want to go here?” Rose asked, and Lewis looked around. The area was desolate. There were no cars around, no people, and he thought, well maybe that meant there would be no guns, too. He didn’t know where there were any other motels, how far away they might be.

“Come on, we’ll be fine,” he promised. They reached the counter and rang the little bell, and a bored-looking man came out. When it was time to sign the register, Lewis wrote Mr. and Mrs. Lark with a flourish, and Rose put her hands in her pockets so the clerk wouldn’t see she didn’t have a wedding band on. Fighting back yawns, they made their way into the elevator, which had a rug in the middle of the floor and as soon as Rose stepped on it, she stumbled. She jumped back surprised and lifted the edge of the rug. There was a hole in the linoleum as if someone had punched it in. Lewis pulled Rose over to the side of the elevator. “Maybe the room is better,” he said hopefully.

The first thing Lewis noticed about the room were the two tiny twin beds. There was a huge painting of migrating geese on the wall, and someone had drawn a handlebar mustache on one of the birds. The bathroom had a line of fungus along the shower and there was a spiderwebbing of cracks moving across one ceiling. Rose silently went and got a chair and wedged it under the door. She came back and flopped on the bed, motioning Lewis to lie beside her. “I guess we can call this an adventure,” she said weakly.

“Thank you for coming with me,” Lewis said.

“That’s what friends do.” She looked at him seriously. “You don’t know the half of how Jimmy used to stick up for you.”

“He didn’t that day. That’s why I was so mad at him.”

Rose shook her head. “I remember some kids were talking about how they could get you to do anything if they gave you money or offered ice cream, and he stood up for you.”

Lewis felt a flash of shame. As a kid, he had felt the lure of cookies, of presents, of privileges he didn’t have. He had been helpless against his own yearning. It pulled at him like a tide. Once he had taken off his pants when he was five for an Oreo cookie, standing helplessly on Danny Zaroni’s porch, his face hot with fear, but all he could think about was the cookie, the sugar melting on his tongue, the taste of the chocolate. Danny’s mother suddenly appeared and she took one look at Lewis standing there with his pants hanging at his ankles and accused him of peeing on her front porch. “You wait right there,” she warned him, and he had tugged up his pants, terrified, and Danny wouldn’t look at him. She came back with a bucket of soapy water and Lysol and she made him scrub the porch while she watched, not caring how the cement scraped his knees. “All those germs!” she scolded.

Lewis put one hand along Rose’s face, where the skin was cool.

“He loved you,” she said. “He would have done anything for you.” She got up and stretched. “Tomorrow, we’ll see your father,” she said.

Chapter Nineteen

Ava was at home on Saturday morning, lost in a novel about a widowed pioneer woman who was fighting off wolves and despair on a Kansas homestead, half wondering how Lewis and Rose’s road trip was going. She hadn’t wanted to help him find Brian, but maybe it was time to let that go. Brian wasn’t holding anything over her anymore. There was nothing he could do to Lewis now. Lewis was a grown man and able to make his own decisions about people. Plus, she couldn’t stop thinking of Lewis with Rose. She had always loved that girl, and who knew, maybe her son would, too. When the bell rang, the sound startled Ava.

She tossed off the blanket she was curled under, wondering who it could be. She wrapped her robe tighter about her, catching her reflection in the hall mirror as she went to the door. She hadn’t set her hair last night, but she found to her surprise that she liked the way it looked today, wild and curly and doing as it pleased.

She opened the door and there, like a shock, was Jake, in a suit and tie, his hair so long it touched his shoulders. “Ava,” he said, and for a moment, she was drowning just looking at him. “What are you doing here?” she asked, her voice tight.

“Please. Let me come in and talk to you.”

“No.” She tried to push the door shut. She didn’t want to have to look at his face. He had left her behind when everything around her was falling apart. It had been years and there had been no letters, not a single phone call. No matter what she did to forget, he bounced back inside of her, reminding her of all she was missing. Every time she kissed a man, she thought of Jake’s mouth. When a man took off her blouse and lowered her to a bed, she felt Jake’s arms about her. He was like an imprint on her skin, a stain she couldn’t wash out.

“Do you know what I went through?” she said. She thought of what Charmaine always said about bum boyfriends: You can’t chase someone who doesn’t want to be caught. He’s gum on the bottom of your shoe. Scrape him off and forget him. Move on.

“What do you want?”

“You.”

“You had your chance.”

“Ava, the neighbors. Please let me come in.”

“Screw the neighbors,” Ava said, but it pained her to see the hopeful way he was standing there. She opened the door wider and stood aside so he could come in, his shoulder brushing hers.

Jake hadn’t been in this house for years. Since then, she had rearranged the room and painted the walls, but he didn’t even register a flicker of surprise. He acted as if he had as much right to be here as the furniture. But just his being in the room changed things. The air felt warmer and smelled like he did, all pine and wood shavings and smoke. He stood, shifting his weight from foot to foot. She nodded at a chair and took the couch. “Sit,” she said and he did, leaning toward her as if he were swimming through air.

“You look good, Ava. Different.”

“You look the same.”

“No. I’m different.”

“Why are you here?” she said.

He was quiet for a moment. “I missed you.”

“Just like that? You missed me?” Ava snorted.

“You think I wanted to leave?”

“You did leave,” she said bitterly.

“Ava, I begged you to come with me. You refused.”

“You had a criminal record,” Ava blurted. “You changed your name.”

He was so quiet, she was frightened.

“Oh God, it’s true, isn’t it?” she said. “I didn’t know if they were making it up to get me to say something about you.”

“I was sixteen,” he said quietly. “You know how young that is?”

She thought of Lewis, how silent he had become by the time he was sixteen, how he had this whole secret world about him. “I do,” she said. She looked at Jake and his mouth was one tight line, his face darkened, but she couldn’t tell whether it was in shame or anger.

“You want the story like everybody else? Fine, I’ll give it to you,” he said shortly. “This kid at school kept stealing my money, roughing me up. Every fucking day and there was nothing I could do about it. When I told the principal, he didn’t believe me because the kid was from a rich family, and why’d he need to steal anything? But it kept going on, and finally, one day, when it was snowing, this kid surrounded me outside with his Neanderthal buddies and demanded my jacket. He was standing there laughing, like there was nothing I could do about it. Like I was nothing. The other kids were waiting, like it was a show and I was the main attraction and I popped. I boiled over and I started to beat him up.”

Ava stared at him.

“I could have stopped after I bloodied him, but I kept going until his eyes closed and he was like jelly under me. I broke his nose and his jaw. I couldn’t stop myself even when his buddies were pulling me off him. When they looked at me, Ava, they were afraid. But that was it for me. They sent me to juvenile detention, and if I thought high school was horrible, it was a cakewalk compared to juvie.” He couldn’t look at her. “I did it on purpose, Ava,” he said. “That’s who I was.”

“You were a kid,” she said, but the words jammed in her throat.

“I was old enough to know better than pounding on someone who was already knocked out. I was wrong and ashamed and scared and I paid for all of it.” She watched the anger drain from him, and he slumped onto her couch. “I haven’t been that person for a long time.”

“I’m sorry,” she said.

He shrugged. “Don’t be. When I got to juvie, I had to fight for everything, every day. When I got out, I was through with fighting for the rest of my life. All I did at home was hang back and play my sax like my life depended on it. When I played, it was like I was talking to it, and it talked back in the only language I wanted to know. The better I got, the better I felt about myself, the more the rage melted away. The day I got good enough, I changed my name and hitched to Boston.”

“Why didn’t you tell me this before?”

“I wanted to start over. All that was dead.”

“You could have explained this to the police. One thing didn’t have to do with the other.”

“Oh no? Ever hear of once guilty, always guilty? I thought the records might have been sealed, because I was so young, but they could have gotten a court order to look at them.”

“But the case went cold. They must have dropped you as a suspect the way they did everyone else.”

“If I had been there, they might not have. Think of the field day the papers could have had. They were so desperate for a lead. The police called me again, you know, after they found the bones, to see if I had any more information, but after a few questions, they left me alone.”

“And you left me to handle the whole mess by myself,” she said quietly.

“Ava, all that time, in that little room, with those cops hunched over me, I kept thinking how they put innocent people in jail all the time,” he said. “If you can’t afford a good lawyer, you’re screwed, and I certainly couldn’t. I’ve seen it, Ava. Half the musicians I work with have stories. Nabbed on everything from drugs to robbery and they’re suspect just because they don’t have regular jobs. And I had a record. I’d have been stuck in jail for months until the truth came out, if it came out at all. What good could I do you if they put me away? How could I have helped you and Lewis? Can you imagine how your neighbors would have treated you then?”

“Please don’t tell me you did this for me.” Ava folded her arms. “You gave me a choice to come with you or not, like it was cut-and-dried. Like there really was a choice. I never got the sense that you were leaving to protect me.”

“I wanted to be there for you. But I was the perfect scapegoat. Single, a musician, a guy who rides a motorcycle and has a record. And there’s such a thing as guilt by association.”

“There was no note. No calls. You never even helped look for him.”

“I couldn’t.”

“Don’t give me that. I just can’t believe you were thinking of me and not you.”

“All I do is think about you,” he said.

“You didn’t even write me after you left.”

“There hasn’t been a day or night that’s gone by that I haven’t thought of you and wondered what you were doing, how you were. I told myself it was over, that I needed to move on. And then, later, I began to beat myself up for being a coward. I knew that I was. There’s nothing you’re saying to me now that I haven’t said to myself. The more time went on, the worse I felt. I figured you’d never take me back so I didn’t even try. Then I saw the story about finding Jimmy, how everybody knew it was an accident, and everything changed.”

“Just stop,” Ava said, but when he got up and sat beside her, she didn’t move. Now he was so close, he made her nervous.“Where were you?” she said. “What were you doing?”

She thought he was going to tell her that he had been recording in California, playing the beach clubs, but he got that pained look again. “Teaching music in Des Moines.”

“Iowa?” She looked at him askance. She tried to imagine him in all that flat prairie, but it made her think of the games Lewis used to love when he was a kid, the “What’s wrong in this picture?” drawings. “You’ve spent all these years in Iowa?”

“A friend got me the job. It’s steady income, plus I had money from the sale of my house in Cambridgeport, so any gig I get is just extra gravy.” He shrugged. “It’s not the way it sounds. I like it there. I’m used to it.”

“Is ‘used to it’ the same as being happy? How could you end up in Iowa?”

“Ava, look at me. I’m here now.”

“What’s the matter, no single women where you are? You’re getting older and you just thought I’d be here waiting for you?”

“I love you, Ava,” he said.

She stood up from the couch, looking at the door. “I can’t do this right now,” she told him. She wondered if she was being a fool. “Please go,” she said.

“Can I call you later? Can I come back?”

“I don’t know.” She felt a flush of relief when he got up and walked out the door. Ava watched him from the window, his car driving off. She saw him wave wistfully at her, almost as if he were beckoning her to him, but she kept her hands at her sides.

F
OR THE REST
of the day, she couldn’t do anything right. She picked up her book again and then realized she was reading the same page over and over. She tried to color her hair, a new shade called Kicky Redhead, in the bathroom and got a streak of auburn in the grout she couldn’t scrub out. When the phone rang, she didn’t move until it stopped. When it rang again the next morning, she grabbed for it. “Can I see you today?” he said.

“I don’t know.”

“I rented a place,” he said. “A little efficiency on Moody Street. I even got a gig in Cambridge.”

“Why?”

“I’m just showing you how serious I can be.”

“What about your job in Iowa?”

“Leave of absence,” he said.

“You didn’t quit.”

“Ava, I’m a romantic, but I’m also a realist. Let’s have dinner. Please.”

“All right. Dinner. But that’s all.”

A
VA ASKED HIM
to take her to Bell’s, because Bell had once told her she was an excellent judge of men and because she wanted to show off for Jake.

“Every pie here is mine,” Ava told him, pointing to the displays. She sat opposite Jake and when Bell came over, Ava felt the way Bell was studying Jake. “You good to this girl?” Bell asked him pointedly.

“Absolutely,” said Jake.

“You better be, because I’m cooking tonight and you wouldn’t want to cross me.” She winked at him and he laughed, and then she laughed, too. “Good. I like a man with a sense of humor,” Bell said. She tapped Ava on the shoulder as she left.

Jake insisted they order the most expensive things on the menu. All through dinner, her concentration was hazy. She couldn’t taste the steak because of the stones in her throat. “I’ll take that if you don’t want it,” Jake said, spearing a slice of meat on his fork. When the waiter came by, Jake said, “Isn’t she beautiful?” nodding at Ava, who blushed. When it came time for the pie—coconut this evening—one of her better pies, she watched his face. He shut his eyes when he took a bite. He sighed. She felt her whole body warming.

After dinner, he drove her home. She felt buzzed on the wine Jake had ordered, and starving from all the food she hadn’t eaten. It felt as if her senses had all been shuffled. “You can come inside,” she said.

She stood wavering in the middle of the living room, grasping the edge of the couch, looking for steady ground. “What do you think, Ava?” he said. She was used to men teasing her, testing her by the way they might stroke her wrist, or sigh into her hair, but Jake was just standing there. He was leaving it up to her, the way he always had, but she wasn’t thinking about the future right now. She was thinking about the feel of his skin against hers, the deep thrumming of desire. You didn’t always want the right thing for you, but sometimes you just had to make the same mistake to find out for sure. So she crossed the room and pulled his shirt out of his pants and then slid her hand under his shirt, along his back, in the hollows. She heard his deep intake of breath. She stopped thinking then. She let herself fall against him, hearing his breath in her ears, kissing his mouth as if she wanted to swallow him whole.

A
VA AWOKE IN
her bed to the sound of a lawn mower. She had a headache, thumping like a rabbit paw in her head. Jake was sleeping, beautiful and still, the daylight splashed across him. He had one arm hooped about her possessively. They had never slept this way, and it made her feel strange, uneasy. His mouth moved as if he were saying something. “
Shfll,
” he said, as if it were a secret language. She traced a finger on his mouth, but he didn’t stir.

She touched his shoulder and his eyes flew open. He gave her a lazy smile. “Well, hi,” he said and rose up and kissed her mouth. She pulled away. “I’ll be late for work,” she said.

“Don’t go today.”

“I have to.”

“I’ll drive you,” he told her.

“No, I’ll drive myself.”

She ran the shower so hot, her skin blossomed red. She felt self-conscious and dressed in the bathroom. By the time she got out, Jake was already fully clothed and making coffee for both of them in the kitchen. “One for me, one for my baby,” he said.