Is This Tomorrow: A Novel (3 page)

Now, she glanced at the clock. Five more minutes and she could go home and get ready.

I
N PREPARATION FOR
her date, she showered in lilac soap. She stood in a cloud of Tabu perfume, a sample they had handed out at Grover Cronin’s, and pulled on a new dress, red, with a low neckline. This was the start of a whole new phase of their relationship. She knew it. As soon as you got your child involved, you couldn’t be casual. And he had suggested it, not her, and maybe that was why her heart was hurtling. She kept going over and over in her mind how the evening might go. She didn’t do more than sip wine, but Jake liked a glass, and she had bought a bottle of red that the man in the wine store assured her was delicious, even at such a low price. She picked daisies and put them in a vase on the table, and even set out some Charlie Parker records.

Ava paced the house, waiting for Lewis. She wasn’t sure how he’d act tonight, if he’d be nice and give this guy a chance. When Lewis wasn’t home yet and it was seven, she began to get annoyed. She wanted him to put on good pants and a nice shirt, to wet a comb and rake it through his hair, straighten up his room.

She walked from room to room, obsessing, trying to see if her house looked presentable. Her mind churned. She moved back into the living room and sat on the couch. It felt like two different days, the worry about Brian and the joy about Jake. But it was important to remember that she deserved happiness and had worked hard for it. They were two very different people, Brian and Jake. History didn’t have to do any repeating.

She got up and brushed some dust off the edge of the couch, then she glanced at her watch. Seven thirty. How did it get to be so late? Where was Lewis? She looked outside, at the waning light splashing across the neighborhood.

Jimmy had said his mom was at the Our Lady’s carnival, but when she spotted a light across the street, she called Dot, who sounded exasperated. “Jimmy’s not home, either,” Dot said.

“Those boys,” Ava said, relieved. Lewis wasn’t alone then.

“And girl. Count Rose in, too.” Dot sighed. “At least they’re together, having fun,” she said.

“The Three Mouseketeers,” Ava said, and Dot laughed.

“They’re good kids,” Dot said. “We’re lucky they have each other.”

Ava didn’t want to spoil her good mood by yelling at Lewis when he got home, nor did she want to risk making him surly and silent when Jake got there. No, she’d rise above it, the way she did at work when Richard decided he needed to throw his weight around as the boss and stood in front of the whole typing pool and blamed her for botching a sale of the new turquoise sinks they were pushing, when she and everyone else knew all Ava did was type invoices and letters, and the real reason they hadn’t sold was because the sinks were so ugly no one wanted them. The other women had looked at her as if she were to blame, too, or maybe they were just glad she was the one being chewed out, instead of them.

No, she’d bide her time. She’d talk to Lewis later about responsibility and considering other people. He’d bow his head as if he were praying, but she knew him: he acted like he didn’t care sometimes, but he was a sensitive kid. He’d take it to heart.

She glanced out the big picture window. Some of the neighbors were walking home with their kids, holding on to balloons and stuffed animals from the carnival, carrying covered aluminum dishes of food. She saw wives greeting their men, already home from work, flinging their arms around them, talking and laughing. By eight o’clock, she was furious, wondering if Lewis was doing this deliberately. Jake would be here soon. Her good mood, her joy, wilted. The daisies in the glass now looked faded, her dress felt wrinkled, and the jazz albums she had put out casually on the table seemed suddenly forced and stupid, so she got up and put them back in the album rack. What was she supposed to tell Jake when he showed up and there was this silent spot where her son was supposed to be? How would the evening go now?

She walked to the kitchen, knocking her hip against the edge of the table, placing one hand over the jab of pain, and then she reached toward the phone, about to call Dot again, when it rang. Lewis, she bet. At the Wal-Lex bowling alley or the skating rink, his voice hushed with apology. At the library. All the places he usually went to and she wouldn’t have been so angry if it hadn’t been this one special night for her. If it hadn’t meant so much.

“I don’t know where Jimmy and Rose are,” Dot said, “And frankly I’m beginning to worry.” Ava leaned against the kitchen wall, shutting her eyes. She wasn’t afraid. Not then.

“Those kids are so irresponsible,” Ava said. “They all have watches—why can’t they learn to use them?” She thought of Lewis’s Superman watch, red and bright yellow. She had scoured all of Boston for it for Lewis’s birthday, wrapping the timepiece up, buying a card, and forging Brian’s name, so he’d think his father had remembered him. Lewis never took it off. He even slept with it on. When people asked him who gave it to him, he always said, “My dad.”

The roar of a motorcycle split the air. “What’s that?” Dot said alarmed.

“I have to go,” Ava said.

There were neighbors outside, in a group, studying Jake as he parked. Ava felt their eyes on her as she walked toward him in her heels, sinking a bit in the soft grass. She heard someone say, “That’s what she’s wearing?” The comment felt aimed at her like a barbed arrow, and she self-consciously smoothed down the front of her dress. Jake was in a suit, and he held a small wrapped package. He smiled when he saw her, and when she told him about Lewis, he shrugged

“Kids,” he said. “I’d be pissed off, too, if I thought someone was courting my mama.”

Courting. He said courting.

He bent and kissed her. “We have time.” He held up the package. “You told me he liked magic, so I bought him a kit.” He unpeeled some of the tape on the wrapping, opening one side carefully to show her, and she felt a pulse of warmth. It was such a sweet gesture. Then she studied the glossy cover of the kit and her heart sank a little when she saw the silly-looking rabbit popping out of a hat, the cartoony magician holding the animal by the ears. She could tell that it was a kit for a younger kid, and even worse, right there in shiny red letters on the bottom it said “for ages
4
–
6
.” Lewis would be insulted. He read adult-level books. He’d no more want this kit than he would want a pacifier, but she could only hope that Lewis would be polite.

Ava and Jake sat in her living room and had a glass of the burgundy, but she couldn’t relax, not without Lewis being there. She kept checking her watch, and every time she saw the time, she felt a little sicker. After half a glass of wine, she felt faintly buzzed, as if there were a scrim over the room. They played a game of gin, but in the back of her mind, she thought of what she was going to do and say when Lewis sauntered in. She’d wait to see if he apologized, and if he did, the evening still might be salvaged, but if he didn’t, she might explode. She was going to ground Lewis. She was going to set down new and clear rules around the house that he had to obey. She was furious with him for being so inconsiderate. Kids. They ran away, they did stupid things, they came home tired and dirty and full of excuses and you didn’t know whether to yell at them or hold them close.

By ten, she was frantic. He had never stayed out this late before, even when he was with Jimmy and Rose. She looked out the window and saw how dark it was.

“We need to go look for him,” she told Jake, and he nodded and stood up, just as the phone rang, startling her.

“I called the police,” Dot’s voice was strained. “They’re coming over.”

The cops arrived within ten minutes, pulling up to Dot, who was standing in the street, her face pale of her usual makeup, her I Love Lucy curls limply held back by her kerchief. Ava and Jake came out to join her, but Dot looked at them as if they were strangers, instead grabbing for the first cop who got out of the car, an older beefy guy who absently patted her hand. The second cop sauntered out, young and thin, and then the other neighbors came out of their houses to find out what was going on. Ava, tight with fear, didn’t care that the neighbors were watching her, that they were drinking Jake in. Lewis. Where was Lewis?

“Where could they be?” Dot cried.

Ava thought of the map that had been in her son’s room for a week before it went back to Jimmy’s, all those pushpins tacked to the places that he and Jimmy were going to visit when they were older, a cross-country trip they thought would be an adventure. She dropped Jake’s hand. “They were planning this trip—” she said. “There’s a map.”

“The map’s for fun, it doesn’t mean anything!” Dot said. “And they’re happy kids, why would they run away?”

“You don’t know that they were running away,” Ava said, her voice sharpening. She tried to imagine Lewis on the road and felt sickened. Lewis had no sense of direction. He had once left their table at a restaurant to go to the men’s room, and on the way back, he had gotten lost. He wouldn’t ask any of the waiters for help, and she had finally gotten up to look for him and found him wandering in another room by a tropical fish tank. She had tried to teach him how to find his way, from home to the school, from the Star Market to home. “Pick out signposts,” she had told him. “Look for trees, a white house, a mark on the wall.” She thought of Lewis out somewhere in the dark and she braced one hand against Jake’s arm.

“Who saw the kids last?” one of the cops asked.

“Jimmy came to my house this afternoon,” Ava said, and as soon as she said it, the cop looked at her with interest. “Lewis was at the dentist.”

“Again at your house?” Dot said. “Again?” Her voice slid up an octave.

“What do you mean, again? Of course at my house. The kids are always at my house. He was waiting for Lewis. I don’t like kids being in my house without me so I shooed him out so I could get to work. He went right home. I saw him.”

“Who were these kids’ other friends?” the cop asked. “Did they have any enemies? What do they do to blow off steam?”

Ava told them everything she remembered. How Jimmy had looked standing on his front porch, the day shiny with heat. How Lewis had promised to be home by six. A metallic taste filled her throat and her heart was beating so hard she felt it pushing against her skin.

She watched one of the cops writing something down. And then, like a mirage, in the distance, she saw Lewis and Rose stumbling toward them, in a gold halo of streetlight.

Chapter Three

A
t four o’clock, earlier that day, after the dentist cleaned his teeth (“You need to brush better,” the dentist had scolded Lewis, smacking a new red toothbrush onto Lewis’s palm), Lewis walked to the library to pick up a book he needed for school. He was supposed to meet Jimmy at his house, something they’d planned earlier at school, and though Lewis had sort of wanted to check out the carnival, Jimmy wouldn’t even consider it. “Bunch of junk and parents,” Jimmy said.

Sometimes Lewis wondered if Jimmy only hung around him because of Ava, which was an absolutely creepy thought. “Is your mom going to be home?” Jimmy had asked this morning, which irritated Lewis. “What if she isn’t?” he had asked and Jimmy just shrugged. “I have to go to the dentist, but I’ll meet you at your house around four,” Lewis told him. Then later, at lunch in the cafeteria, when two of the rougher boys, Billy D’Adario and Tommy Scanell, had pried Lewis’s sandwich from his hands to show there was no filling in the middle, to laugh (“Haw! A bread sandwich!” Tommy had said), Jimmy had just sat there. Billy flung a handful of rusty pennies on the table. “You’re a Jew, pick them up,” he said, and for one horrible moment Lewis had wanted to, because he could have used those pennies. There were enough there so he could have put the coins in his pocket, along with the cab money Ava had given him, adding it all to the stash he was saving for his trip across the country with Jimmy when they were older. Instead, he did what his mother had told him to do. He turned away. He pretended it didn’t hurt, looked bored, and the boys scattered.

“Why didn’t you stand up for me?” Lewis asked Jimmy.

“You can’t win with those guys,” Jimmy said. He sipped grape juice from a plaid thermos.

“You’re just scared,” Lewis muttered, and Jimmy flushed, which meant that Lewis was right. But Lewis was scared, too. He stared down at his bread sandwich, manhandled by the boys, and shoved it aside. He saw the pennies were still there, but he wouldn’t touch them, either.

That had been earlier, but he was still upset about it at the dentist, and even here in the library. He wandered into the main room, which was cool and dark, and as soon as he saw the stacks of books, he felt a little better. He traced his fingers along the spines of the novels (his favorite section), and pulled out
The Great Gatsby
. Maybe it would be good. He turned right and then left until he was in biographies. The titles winked out at him. He was supposed to find a biography of a famous person to do a report for sixth-grade finals, but none of these names spoke to him. Benjamin Franklin was boring and fat and greasy looking, Clara Barton had a mean face, and no way was he going to do Davy Crockett like every other kid in school because they all thought it might be a good excuse to buy those stupid furry hats.

He wished he didn’t have to go to school. Every grade was more boring than the last. He could read already in kindergarten because Ava had taught him, making a big deal of getting him a library card as soon as he could scribble his name. “If you want to be someone, you have to be educated,” she told him. Every Friday, she took him to the library, letting him sprawl in the kids’ room for hours, choosing as many books as he could carry to take home. Before his father had left, he had bought him the absolute best birthday present in the world, a set of
Collier’s Encyclopedia.
“Everything you want to know is in there,” his dad told him. Whenever Lewis could tell his dad a new fact, Brian would ruffle his hair and hug him. The week his father left, Lewis began systematically reading them, starting at
A.
He kept imagining how proud his father would be when he came back and Lewis could tell him all about the atomic bomb or how fire was produced. Every time he was given any toy, from plastic dinosaurs to a deck of cards, he looked it up in his
Collier’s
to find out everything he could about it.

But school was different. Knowing more than the other kids meant he had to sit around listening to everyone struggling to figure out colors, and later, to sound out “Run, Sally, run,” in their
Dick and Jane
books. But it wasn’t just reading that was easy for him. Math was pretty simple. He often completed his work early, and then there was nothing else to do but sit around waiting for the rest of the class to finish. Even if he asked, his teacher never gave him anything extra to do.

It didn’t take him long to realize that he knew more than some of the teachers did and that, to his shock, they didn’t like him for it. Every new grade, he started out thinking it might be different, but as soon as he began to ask questions, his teachers would say, “Let’s have somebody else speak up for a change.” When they were studying civil rights, Lewis remembered the Milks, a Negro family that was supposed to move onto their block, but all the neighbors had started up a petition to stop them. Only his mother had refused to sign. In the end, the house sold to another white family. “How come there are no Negro kids in our school?” he asked and the teacher said, “They go to other schools,” and when Lewis asked what those schools were, his teacher told him not to be so smart. When they were studying American Indians in fifth grade, his teacher brought in pictures of teepees. Lewis raised his hand and she sighed. “Yes, Lewis?” she said, and he told her that the Indians didn’t just live in teepees, that they actually had many kinds of houses depending on where they were. “Where it was warm, they had grass houses,” he said. “They had wood and adobe, too.”

“Yes, but the teepee was the most prominent,” she said.

“Just for the Plains Indians,” Lewis added.

“Let’s move on,” his teacher said, dismissing him with a frown.

Sixth grade with Miss Calisi was no better. She talked a lot to the class about how she square-danced and why rock and roll was responsible for juvenile delinquency, and she smelled like old socks. Lewis had felt a spark of hope when he started her grade and she had announced, “I’m a really tough teacher. You’re all going to work really hard,” but instead, it was the same easy work, the same admonitions not to ask so many questions, and after that, Lewis just stopped trying in school and busied himself thinking about what he wanted to learn. He kept quiet and filled his notebook with things they weren’t doing in class, plans on how to build a ham radio, facts about ten different kinds of whales. One day, he was working on a drawing, comparing a beluga whale with a blue whale, when a shadow fell across his paper. He looked up and Miss Calisi’s brow was buckled in anger. “I asked you a question and you didn’t even hear me,” she said. “What are you doing?” She lifted up his notebook and peered at the page in astonishment. Lewis hunkered down in his seat. “This has nothing to do with long division,” she said curtly. She flipped some of the pages and then tucked the notebook under her arm, making him worry he wasn’t going to get it back. He watched her at her desk, scribbling something, while the other kids twisted in their seats to stare at him. Then she came down the row and handed him a note. “I want your mother to sign this,” she said. “Now open your arithmetic book.” She stood over him, waiting until he did. He sat there, listening to her drone on about long division, and in his mind, he heard humpback whales singing mournfully.

There was no way he would give this note to his mother. His mother was always telling him how important it was that he do well in school, that he had to get good grades because that was how he’d get a scholarship to college. But he couldn’t see what was so important about college. He made a list of everyone famous who had never gone to college: Henry Ford. Andrew Jackson—and he became president. George Washington. Gandhi. Hitler. He crossed out Hitler because that seemed like an argument for why you should go, so you wouldn’t be like him. He ticked off all the different politicians, leaders, inventors. You could do anything. He had a whole notebook of things he himself wanted to do. Be a doctor. Study animals. Maybe be a scientist. And he could figure out how to do it without this dopey school. Anything he needed to learn was right here in the library. His dad had been like that. “I’m a self-made man,” Brian had always told Lewis, and he had won all these trophies and prizes for being the best salesman to prove it.

He’d sign his mother’s name on the paper.

Now, Lewis wandered the library stacks. The biography he really wanted was Houdini. Harry Houdini was Jewish like he was, and he was cool and the one thing Lewis wanted to do tonight, rather than meet his mother’s boyfriend Jake, was to disappear. Jake. What a name. Like jerk. Like stupid. Like stay out of my life.

His mother had told him that Jake was going to take them both out for ice cream, a special treat on a school night. “He’s a friend. We’ll have a great time,” she had insisted. Lewis had asked her, well, what about his father? How about what Mr. Gallagher across the street had told him—that people were married forever in the sight of God, like he and his wife Tina were? A child, like their little Eddy, who was always swatting a baseball bat at the bushes, was the covenant. That was why divorce wasn’t a real thing. Ava had narrowed her eyes at him. “Divorce is very real,” she told him.

He hated thinking about his mother and this new guy. What if she really liked him? Every time he thought about it, he had to sit down and make lists. He thought of running away, but then where would he go? How would he live? If he could just find his father—but he hadn’t been able to yet. He knew his father had had to leave because of his mom, because of the way they were fighting, and the few times his dad had called, Lewis could tell how happy Brian was to talk to him just by the sound of his voice. He didn’t know why his dad didn’t visit or call him, except that it had to have something to do with his mom and that was why Lewis had to be careful around her. She could make things worse. Especially with this Jake guy.

“Lewis.” He turned around, startled. Mrs. Groth (the librarian, a spindly woman who didn’t like it that he took books out from the adult section and always shooed him, as if he were a dog, back to the kids’ room with all those dumb toys and miniature desks) glared at him. “Is this where you belong?” she asked pointedly. She stared at the book in his hand,
The Great Gatsby,
and took it from him. “This is too old for you,” she said, as if she knew the slightest thing about him. She leafed through it, stopping at a page with a small rip. “And where did this come from?” she demanded, fingering the page.

Lewis stared at the tear, a fingernail of paper. “It was there when I took the book.”

Her mouth pinched like his mother’s change purse. “I see,” she said. She walked to her desk and then took a slip and wrote something on it and handed it to him. “You have to pay for what you destroy,” she said.

“I didn’t destroy anything,” Lewis said. He stared down at the note. She had written “Two dollars: destruction of library property” in black ink and underlined it twice. The last time she had done this, he had told his mother when he got home and, to his surprise, Ava had driven all the way back to the library and marched right up to Mrs. Groth and told her that not only did she personally remember the rip (“I don’t know why the library doesn’t keep better care of their books,” she had said) but she was tired of hearing comments about what books her son could take out. “I’m his mother and if he wants to read
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
,
he can,” she had snapped. “What do you care, as long as he’s reading?” Mrs. Groth had flushed. He had loved his mother intensely at that moment.

“You see that you pay for this,” Mrs. Groth told him now.

Lewis stuffed the notice in his pocket. He waited for her to leave, and then he began roaming the adult stacks again. He knew if he asked, his mother would confront Mrs. Groth again. She’d never stand for any of this. Still, as grateful as he was, there were so many times he wished that his mom were different.

No one else’s mother made sandwiches out of bagels or brought home foods like lox and chicken livers, and even worse, tongue. Even though Lewis liked bagels, he was embarrassed to be seen with them because kids made fun of them. “What’s with the donut bread?” they mocked. Other children complained about having to go to church on Sundays, but Lewis’s mom didn’t even take him to temple. The only religious thing she did was light those stupid Sabbath candles on Friday nights when she remembered, which wasn’t all that often. Every once in a while, she would talk to him about God, but it didn’t sound anything like what the other kids talked about. “Everyone communes with God in his or her own way,” she said. She didn’t believe that one religion was better than another. “You find your own truth,” she told him. She didn’t look like anyone else’s mother, either, not the suits she wore to work when all the other mothers were in housedresses, the tiny two-piece swimsuit she wore to get a tan, when everyone else’s mother wore a skirted one-piece. The other mothers wore slacks, but Ava wore tight dungarees with the bottoms rolled into cuffs. “Why do you dress differently from everybody else?” he had asked. She had looked at him, surprised. “I do?” He noticed her watching the neighborhood women as if she were studying them. Two days later, she came home from shopping with a pair of slacks that zipped on the side and a housedress, but the pants were still tight and the dress was a shocking shade of orange.

And he remembered Jimmy’s amazed reaction the first time he’d ever laid eyes on Ava. The two boys were walking past Lewis’s house to Jimmy’s when they saw Ava through the picture window, feather duster in her hand, dancing in their living room as she cleaned. She swooped the feather duster into lazy circles. Her hips snaked. “That’s your mom?” Jimmy asked. The two boys stood on the sidewalk and Lewis watched his mother swaying, throwing her head back so her hair tossed in her eyes and you couldn’t see her face. Her mouth moved, as if she were singing. Lewis could hear Jimmy’s intake of breath and Lewis tried to will his mother to stop, to pull the curtains at least. Jimmy flapped his hands as if he were cooling the world down.

“Hubba-hubba,” Jimmy said. “Va-va-va-voom.” Lewis socked him in the arm. “Hey, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” Jimmy said, but his gaze stayed on Ava.