Is This Tomorrow: A Novel (30 page)

He wanted to come to the office with her to meet the people she worked with. “Come on, show me off,” he joked.

“Not yet,” she said.

T
HEY BEGAN SEEING
each other again. Ava found herself watching the calendar, marking the days with the red ink of her pen. Jake stayed for two days and then three, but instead of feeling a thrill or growing calmer, content, she couldn’t shake her unease.

One night, Jake was playing his sax for her in the living room. His eyes were shut, his body swaying, and occasionally he’d turn and look at her before he was lost in the music again. She used to be able to sit for hours, just listening, or she’d get up and lean against the length of his back, so the vibrations of the music would flow through her. But tonight, watching him made her want to get her hands in flour. Hearing the way he slid the notes made her think about adding coconut to a pear pie, or dusting the rim of fluted crust with brown sugar. As soon as he was finished, she got up and went into the kitchen to bake. “Hey, where you going?” he called, and she laughed. She let him sit on a stool and watch her, but she wouldn’t let him help, and she got so lost in concentration that she actually forgot he was there. Later that night, when they were eating the pie, she talked to him about how she made it, the same way he spoke to her about music. He scraped the last bit of filling from his plate and then pointed his fork at her. “I don’t know which one is more delicious.”

Later, in bed with Jake, his head was on her breast, his arm wrapped about her waist. The two of them were so slick with sweat, he got up and came back with a bowl full of ice. He tilted a piece out and traced it down her body until she shivered and then he lay back against her. She heard the ice fall back into the bowl. The chill of the ice, the heat of his body. She shut her eyes.

She took a chip of ice from the bowl and put it in her mouth, letting it melt, cool against her tongue. It was going to be summer soon. Before she knew it, the neighborhood would be awash with kids home from school, fathers watering their lawns, the wives bringing out frosty pitchers of lemonade. The neighbors knew Jake was back, but to her surprise, they waved when they saw him. Bell seemed to like him, too, and every time they came to the café, Bell would tease him and give him extra-big portions.

“You and me, we’re like music,” Jake told her. “It’s just all in the timing. There’s no neighbors breathing down our throats. Your son is grown and on his own. There are no exes. It’s just us.” He kissed her mouth. “What do you say, you want to get married?”

She stared at him. “Is this a real question?”

“Will you give me a real answer?”

“I don’t know. I have to think about it.”

He cupped her face. “Whenever you’re ready,” he told her.

A
T WORK THE
next day, Ava felt as if she were in a cloud. She barely heard Richard when he yelled at her about a typing mistake she made. “The client’s name is Bohart, not Bohert,” he sniped. “If you need to take time off to go to the eye doctor, go and do it.” He watched her put a carbon between two sheets of paper and slide it in the machine. Charmaine looked at Ava with concern. “Are you all right?” Charmaine asked.

“I’m not sure,” Ava said. She started to type again. Her eyes hurt, as if she had seeds in them. She wished she could go out now and find Jake and talk to him. By four that day, Ava realized she had only typed up six invoices and she had at least twenty shuffled into her in-box. She walked to the candy machine, but instead of putting the money in the slot, she turned to the pay phone and dialed Jake. There was that strange swimmy feeling again. When he answered, his voice sleepy, she cleared her throat.

“You love me,” she said.

“I always have.”

“Then yes,” she told him.

“Yes what?” he said.

“What do you think?” Ava said, and then Jake laughed and she heard this rattling sound. It took her a moment to realize it was her hand shaking, banging the receiver against the wall. A week later, she flashed the small ring Jake had bought for her, a tiny chip of light on her finger, and Betty and Charmaine swooned. “Imagine that. First Cathy gets hitched and now you,” Charmaine said wistfully. Ava knew how lucky she was. Most women didn’t get remarried, let alone when they were in their forties. Jake was going to move into her house—their house—soon. With his extra income, she could probably buy it by next year.

She called Lewis on a night when Jake was out playing a gig at the Blue Owl. He had never liked Jake. What if he wouldn’t come to the wedding? She couldn’t get married without her son being there. His phone kept ringing. He was probably still on his road trip with Rose. Maybe the two of them had given up finding Brian and had had gone on an adventure instead. She couldn’t help but hope that the pull of love was stronger than his wanting to find his father.

She hung up the phone. She had had her share of uneasy nights, the times when just the sound of the phone would make her start because she never knew who it was and what they might want from her. The nights when she’d sit up, the bills fanning around her on the dining room table. Those nights, she’d walk into Lewis’s room and watch him sleep, all tangled boy, the heat of his skin rising up, his hair mashed against the pillow. I made this, she thought. He was her reason. She would stand there watching him until she felt better.

Ava went into Lewis’s old room. She knew he probably wouldn’t ever live there again, but she had kept his bed in there, his books, some of his things, and sometimes during the day she came in here and read. Boys. Way back when she had been pregnant, she knew Brian wanted a boy. He kept bringing home miniature-sized baseball bats and gloves and balls. Still, the whole time she was giving birth, she kept thinking,
Annabelle, Christine, Joella,
and then the doctor had boomed, “It’s a fine boy!” and for one second, Ava had thought there had to be a mistake.

But she had fallen hard for Lewis. He had been a cautious little boy who preferred to keep his feet on the ground. He could be happy right now. He could be in bed with Rose, the woman he loved, that Ava loved, too, and she wouldn’t know, and that was the way it was supposed to be.

She heard a key in the lock and glanced at the time. Just after midnight. Almost the hour of the wolf. She walked out into the hall and there was Jake, and even from there, she could smell the smoky club on him, she could feel the cold of the night air on his skin. “Hey babe,” she said, and he looked at her, surprised.

“You’re up,” he said. “I was going to surprise you in your sleep.” He gave her a grin. She walked to him, her bare feet padding on the cold floor and she rested her head against his shoulder. “I missed you,” she said. “I’ve missed you for so long.”

L
ATER, IN BED,
she curled around him, warming her feet between his. He looked down at her, laughing. He grabbed her hand and kissed her fingers.

“I wish I had known you before,” he said. “I wish I had been your first boyfriend, your first husband, that you hadn’t had to go through all that stuff. I wish you had never had to live here.”

“I like it here,” she said.

He took a strand of her hair and wrapped it around his finger, tugging her closer to him. “I know this is horrible to say, but I can’t help thinking that we’ve been made possible because of a horrible tragedy,” he said.

Ava drew the sheets around her. “What do you mean?” she said.

Jake turned so he was facing her. He took her hands in his, blowing on them, as if they were cold. “Well, we have this great thing, don’t we? I just remember how it was, with all the neighbors watching us, with Lewis not really liking me.”

“Lewis was a child then. And the neighbors are different now.”

“I know that, but Jesus, back then. And those cops. And then when Jimmy vanished, it all fell apart. But now, it’s like we met at a better time. Do you know what I mean?”

Ava stared at him. “No,” she said. “I don’t.” Jake leaned closer to her, as if he were about to tell her a secret. “Something happened the day Jimmy disappeared,” he said.

J
AKE TOLD
A
VA
that the first time he came into Ava’s neighborhood, he had been spooked before he even knocked on her door. He knew people said that the suburbs were the life, that they fled from their city apartments in droves just for a patchy plot of grass and a squashed little ranch house with a backyard. Kids were safe here, people could have real lives, family lives. He’d heard it a million times. But he was a city guy. He wanted to be in the center of things, and he was lucky he had found a house in Cambridgeport. It had been a dump when he had bought it dirt cheap, but he took his time fixing it up until it was worth twice what he had paid for it. He had loved the buzz of Cambridgeport, how you could ramble out of bed at three in the morning and find the streets hopping, where you could find coffee or eggs or spaghetti at all hours. He had loved the sea of people washing along the sidewalks, the way any moment he might catch someone’s eye. The city had a rhythm, its own melody, propelling him.

Ava’s street had made him want to turn right around and get out of there. All Jake could see was the line of houses, like an endless row of shoeboxes, neatly perched on lawns all carefully trimmed like an expensive haircut. There weren’t enough trees, at least not yet, just these spindly seedlings aching to grow. All of the houses, except for Ava’s bright blue one, were the same washed-out pastel shade with identical patio-stone walkways—you’d never be able to tell them apart. Suburbia. You could take it, as far as he was concerned, and throw it into the ocean. “It’s convenient,” she said, telling him about the Drake’s Cakes truck that came by every week, the Fuller Brush men and Avon ladies, the scissor and knife sharpener, the milkman. “I step outside my door and I can find those things anytime I want. We have these things called stores,” he told her, and she laughed.

There were other things that had unsettled him. He knew Ava came with a child, that Lewis was part of the package, and though Jake wasn’t really a kid person, he did his best to position himself right, to know what to expect. He asked Ava about Lewis a lot. What kind of kid was he? Did he play baseball? Was he smart? Did he have friends? He got her to show him pictures and he exclaimed over the kid’s freckles and big eyes. Ava was always happy to talk to him about her son, her voice sounding like it had been dipped in honey. God, but she loved that boy. She told him how smart Lewis was even though he didn’t get good grades in school. She mentioned how Lewis ached for his father, a man who didn’t deserve such adoration, and she told him about Rose and Jimmy, how they were practically like her other set of kids. Especially Jimmy, Lewis’s best friend. Good, Jake thought. Lewis had a best friend, which meant he’d be kept busy and wouldn’t interfere too much with Jake’s alone time with Ava, but when Ava told him how often Jimmy came around and how she got the impression Jimmy was a little in love with her, Jake felt uneasy. “Don’t encourage him,” Jake said.

On the day Jimmy had disappeared, he had hoped to come over early, but she had told him she was leaving to go to work around four. He thought that while she was gone, maybe he’d surprise her by fixing her broken porch step. It only took him a few minutes to fix and he was about to leave for home to shower and get dressed for their date that night. Of course, he was a little nervous, since it would be his first time meeting Lewis. But then he felt someone watching, and he turned to see a kid skulking in the bushes, watching him through a bright turquoise toy periscope.

“What, you think I’m spying for the Reds?” Jake said. He made his own hands into binocular circles and put them to his eyes, as if he were lining up the boy in his sights. “Who are you?” Jake asked.

“Jimmy.”

Jimmy lowered the periscope and stood up and Jake’s hands fell back along his sides.

“Aren’t you supposed to be in school?” Jake asked him.

“School’s over for today,” Jimmy said, tucking the periscope into one of his pants pockets.

“Where are your friends?”

“At a dopey church carnival. And Lewis is my best friend and he had to go to the dentist.” He shrugged. “I can’t wait for my sister Rose forever. I don’t even know where she is.” Jimmy looked around the neighborhood. “Anyway, nothing’s happening.”

“Why don’t you wait for them at your house?”

“I can be here. It’s a free country.” Jimmy just stood there, his feet planted in Ava’s scrubby grass. “So are you and Ava getting married or something?” Jimmy said.

“I would say that’s none of your business,” Jake said. The kid stood his ground for a minute until Jake said, “You should go home,” making his voice an edge and then Jimmy moved to Jake’s motorcycle, casually stuck out a sneaker, and kicked the motorcycle. “Hey!” Jake called, and Jimmy jumped back, but the look he gave Jake was defiant.

“What’s the matter with you? Why would you do something like that?” Jake said. “This is not a toy.”

Jimmy’s mouth trembled and for a moment Jake thought he was going to cry, which was all he would need. He cleared his throat. “The problem with us is, we’re both in love with Ava,” he said quietly. “Am I right?” The kid didn’t deny it. He just continued to stare at Jake.

“Be a man and talk to me,” Jake said. He knew kids liked it when you treated them like equals, like adults, but Jimmy’s mouth was pressed shut. Time to try another tact.

“Then I’ll talk to you. You know what the big difference between us is? I’m an adult and you’re a kid, and you need to be with other kids your own age,” Jake said. He said it louder than he had expected. “Go,” Jake said. “You need to get lost.”

“I live here,” Jimmy said. “This is my neighborhood and Ava’s my friend. Maybe you’re the one who needs to get lost.” Jimmy turned and kicked the motorcycle again, harder this time, sending it crashing to the ground. Zigzag lines cracked in the rear view mirror, and Jimmy’s face paled. The mirror was expensive. The bike was Jake’s pride, and here was this kid pushing it over like it was nothing. Without thinking, he grabbed Jimmy’s shirt, gathering it in his fingers. He tugged him up hard, so the boy rocked off his heels and was lifted into the air. Jimmy gasped, and as soon as he did, Jake’s hands flew open, his fingers trembled. Jimmy tumbled to the sidewalk. Jake bent to offer his hand, but Jimmy refused it. What was the matter with him, grabbing a kid like that? What was he thinking?