Is This Tomorrow: A Novel (9 page)

He picked up a canister of salt, closing the cupboard, and then he set it down. “I’m not hungry,” he said, and he went out of the apartment.

He didn’t sleep nights. Ava heard him walking around the apartment and when she got up, she found him standing in the middle of the living room, gesturing, practicing a sales pitch about sedans. He blinked at her, and his hands fell to his sides. “Oh honey,” she said, resting her head along his shoulder, but he didn’t lift his hand to stroke her hair. He just stood there. “Go back to sleep,” he said. “I’m not going to come to bed for a while.”

He stopped doing anything with Lewis. One night, she urged him to at least help Lewis with his homework. “He needs you,” she insisted. Lewis was at the dining room table, his science book spread around him, fiddling with a pen. Brian sat down beside Lewis. “So, what have we got here?” Brian said, and Lewis began explaining about the phases of the moon. “New moon, waxing crescent, first quarter,” Lewis said. Ava saw the way Brian’s smile began to fade. Lewis set out a sheet of paper with all the moon phases. “I have to label all of them,” he said.

Lewis pointed to a slice of moon that looked like a fingernail. “What do you think that is?” Lewis said, his voice firming up as if he were a teacher, and Brian frowned, looking back at the book. “This is a little confusing,” Brian said. “These diagrams sort of all look alike, don’t they?”

“No, it isn’t hard at all,” Lewis said, his face brightening. “I can show you, Daddy. Look, this one is easy. It’s a waning gibbous.” Lewis pointed to another one, full except for a slice taken away. “Now, what’s that?” Lewis asked in an authoritative voice. “Come on, you can do it, Daddy,” Lewis said, and then Brian abruptly got up from the table, pushing the book away. “Why did you ask for my help if you didn’t need it?” Brian snapped. “You know how to do this, so go do it.”

Ava, startled by the force in Brian’s voice, saw Lewis’s eyes flood with tears, his pen gripped in his hand.

“Brian,” she said, but he glared at her, as if it were her fault. “I’m taking a drive,” he muttered. When he left, the door slammed and the sound traveled up her bones.

Ava noticed the house money Brian gave her every week was a little less. She was afraid to ask him why, because he was so edgy lately. He had snapped at her at breakfast because she had forgotten to buy the kind of orange juice he liked. At night, when she reached for him, he pulled away, so she lay on the bed staring into the darkness. He didn’t even look the same. The sprinkle of gray in his temples was suddenly gone, and it wasn’t until she discovered that her brand-new black mascara was dried up and there was a stain on his pillowcase, that she realized he must have been using it to color his hair to look younger.

She didn’t have access to their bank statements or a checkbook of her own, because Brian handled all that, but she began to worry. Where was the money going? Panicked, she began doing her grocery shopping at the Thrift-T-Mart, which was cheaper than the Star Market. She bought dresses on sale rather than in the boutiques, and still, every month, the money he left her dwindled.

Then, there began to be phone calls with hang-ups, a trail of breath on the line. She couldn’t stand it, and one night, when they were lying in bed, she asked him, “Are you seeing someone else?”

He sat up, the sheets bunching around him, and she wished suddenly that she hadn’t asked at all. “Am I the kind of guy who would do that to you?” he said.

“Is it the job? You don’t have to sell cars,” she said. “You could do something else. Or, I could get a job.”

“You’re my wife. You don’t work.”

“We could get a smaller apartment.”

“Things will work out,” he said. “I promise you.” He rolled over, pulling the blankets around him, tugging them so hard, she was left with only the sheet.

The next week, Ava was on her way to the grocery store when she passed a diner and happened to look in and there was Brian, waving his hands in conversation. She couldn’t see the other person, so she moved closer, imagining it was a colleague from the car lot. Instead, though, it was an older woman with a sharp nose and dry-looking curls, in a dowdy gray suit and hat. Ava knew Brian tried to be innovative in the way he sold cars, so she thought maybe he had taken a customer to lunch to close the deal, but then Brian lifted one hand and placed it along the woman’s cheek and Ava froze.

She forgot her errands and went right to the car, driving herself back home. Brian used to love to show Ava off. He encouraged her to buy new dresses, to get her hair done, because he said she was a reflection of him. So who was this older woman and why would he be with someone like her?

She hadn’t bought the meat they needed, the vegetables, so she made spaghetti for dinner, but Brian didn’t come home. When she called his office, no one answered. “Where’s Daddy?” Lewis demanded and Ava forced a smile. “He’s working late, honey,” she lied.

When Lewis went to bed, Ava promised that she’d send Brian in to kiss him good-night, even if he was sleeping. She sat in the dim light of the living room, waiting for him. Brian had told her he always practiced his sales pitches so he’d feel more confident. She began to rehearse what she’d say to him. What’s going on? What did I do? How can we make this better? She went into their bedroom and brushed her hair until it snapped with shine. She glossed on lipstick and put on one of his favorite dresses, and then she went back into the living room.

Around midnight, she heard his key in the lock and she stood up, flicking on the light. He looked at her, startled. She could smell alcohol on his breath. “I thought you’d be asleep,” he said. “Long night at the office.”

She forgot everything she had planned to say. “Please don’t lie,” she whispered. “I saw you with her today.”

He sat down on the couch, breathing into his hands.

“She’s older,” Ava said in wonder. “Isn’t she?”

Brian lowered his hands. “She’s thirty-eight,” he said finally.

“I don’t understand—”

“She’s a businesswoman. She works for her father’s paper business in Cleveland.”

“She works?” Ava thought of all the times she had begged Brian to let her go to work and he had taken offense. “Women don’t work,” he had insisted.

“Ava, please.”

“Who is she?”

“Does it matter?” He got up and started to pace, the way he always did when he was nervous.

“How did you meet?”

“Ava—”

“No, tell me.”

“She came to look at a car with her brother. Things just happened.”

“What things?”

“Her father offered me a job as sales manager.”

“What? Paper? You don’t know anything about paper.”

His eyes narrowed. “You think I can’t do it? You don’t have faith in me anymore? Well, she sure does. And so does her father. He’s been looking for someone first-rate to eventually take the whole place over. That could be me, Ava.”

“Do you love her?”

He wouldn’t look at her, but threaded his hands together.

“How can you do this to us?” Ava’s voice was a whisper. “This is so crazy.”

“You can keep the furniture, the apartment, what’s in the bank account. But you’ll need a lawyer. I think this is going to be better for everyone,” he said.

“Why? Why do you think that?” Of all the ways she thought they could fix their marriage, she had never considered that he would leave them. How could she manage? What would she do? Ava felt something breaking up inside of her, pop-pop-pop, as fragile as bubbles. “What about Lewis?” she asked.

“He has you,” Brian said. “I’m gone all day anyway. He hardly sees me.”

“Are you crazy? You’re his father!” She heard the begging in her voice and tried to swallow it down. “Aren’t you going to say good-bye to him?” she asked.

“Of course I will,” he said. “As soon as I’m settled. I’ll still see him.”

“What about me?” she said. “How are we supposed to live without you here?”

“Ava,” he said slowly. “You’ve been doing that for quite a while now.” And then, just like that, he was gone and she still didn’t really understand why.

Chapter Eight

Two weeks after Jimmy had vanished, when Rose finally went back to school, she was a celebrity. A picture of her and her mother had been in both the
Waltham Tribune
and the
Boston Globe,
a bad, blurry shot of her in a tired plaid dress and scuffed saddle shoes, her hair pulled back in a messy braid. Anyone glancing at that picture would think her mother was looking to her for support, the way her mother was clutching her arm, depending on her, the one child left, when in fact Rose was the one hanging on. She could feel her mother’s rage like a force field, pushing her away. No one would know how angry Rose’s mother had been at that moment. “Why weren’t you watching out for your brother?” Dot had accused Rose, her voice a whisper.

Now every time Rose’s mother noticed Rose, her eyes narrowed, as if she couldn’t believe Rose was there in front of her and Jimmy was not. As if she were thinking:
They’ve taken the wrong child.
“First Benjamin and now this,” she said.

Benjamin was Rose’s father. Rose couldn’t really remember him. She’d been only been three when he had died, and though she believed he was up in Heaven with the angels, her mother kept him alive in their home. She talked about him daily, as if he were still somehow there. “Oh Benjamin, how you’d love this program!” she said, when Jackie Gleason came on the television, making faces and pumping his arms. “Let’s get a roast, your father’s favorite,” she’d say to Rose in the supermarket. His clothes stayed in the closet, his desk wasn’t touched, and there were photos of him hanging in every room. There they were on their wedding day, her mother in a soft satin dress with bridal point sleeves, her father, tall and beaming, his thick, dark hair in a brush cut, his mustache trim and dapper. There were a few photos of them on vacation, slick as seals at the beach, or the two of them in a canoe, Dot’s tight red curls blowing back from her face, their eyes locked on each other as if they couldn’t believe their luck. Her mother told her he had read her stories every night, that he made up silly songs and the two of them sang them together. “Oh hobbledee-hoy, it’s time to buy you kids a new toy,” Rose’s mother sang. “You were Daddy’s girl,” her mother said, and Rose wanted to scream,
how?
How could she have been Daddy’s girl if she couldn’t remember any of it? What did a wonderful family life feel like? How could she miss it if she didn’t know what it was?

When Rose plunked in front of the television, instead of just enjoying her favorite family shows, she studied them. She ached to be Kitten in
Father Knows Best
. She watched Katrin running into Papa’s arms in
Mama,
and she started to cry out of yearning. What would it feel like to have that? Jimmy, a year younger, recalled nothing of their father, but she had one memory: her father handing her a teddy bear in a shoebox and showing her how to move it around the floor like the bear was in a boat. That was it. She had nothing else of her dad.

Jimmy had inherited his father’s thick mass of hair, his cat-shaped eyes. His resemblance to their father was always the first thing anyone said when they met them, even after her father had died, and it always made Rose’s mother beam. “It’s such a blessing,” she said. “It’s like God made sure there was a piece of Benjamin left on earth.” Her mother was always going on about Jimmy, how handsome he was, how all the teachers loved him. She put Jimmy’s blue ribbon for baseball up on the kitchen wall, but when Rose brought home As on all her papers, her mother just leafed through them and said, “Keep it up.”

Rose didn’t really know her father’s relatives. Dot had told her that the Rearsons, who lived in California, had never thought Dot was smart or cultured enough for their son. They put up with her once a year, inviting her to Thanksgiving dinner where everyone talked over her head about books she hadn’t read or theater productions she hadn’t seen, but they never bothered to ask her a single question. “That’s just the way they are,” Benjamin had tried to soothe her when she cried. “They take time to warm up.” He insisted they would eventually love Dot, but even when Jimmy and Rose were born, they stayed distant, sending cards and sometimes gifts for the children, but rarely visiting. And when Benjamin died of a heart attack, they saw her at the funeral and then abandoned her altogether. “You marry a man, you marry his family,” Dot told Rose. “Good or bad. You remember that. It’s never just the two of you.”

After Jimmy disappeared, everyone seemed to think Rose would want to stay at home, but Rose couldn’t wait to get out of the house. She was glad to be back at school. She didn’t want to be home, where her mother was either laying on her bed, staring at the ceiling, or putting the dishes away so hard she ended up smashing some of them. Rose hated going to church on Sunday, where her mother kept her head bent down in prayer, and when the priest mentioned Jimmy, Dot cried as if she would never stop. Rose hated having the detectives around the house. They kept asking her the same questions. They wanted her to stay inside, as if she were a hothouse flower. One detective, that Mr. Maroni guy, asked her if Ava ever walked around in front of them naked. “Are you crazy?” Rose asked. Just the thought of that made her so embarrassed she wanted to die. But most of all, she didn’t like how being at home made her miss Jimmy even more.

Her mother wouldn’t let her take the school bus and instead drove her to and from school every day. The first time she walked into her classroom, the kids stared at her as if they had never seen her before. Miss Pizzi, the homeroom teacher, plucked at a button on her blouse and then called Rose over. “If you need to go home, or you want to stay in the art room, you just let me know,” Miss Pizzi said meaningfully. Her frizzy brown hair was held back loosely with a rust-colored bobby pin Rose couldn’t help wanting to touch. “I’m okay,” Rose insisted. She wanted to poke Miss Pizzi’s bobby pin back into place but she kept her hands at her side.

She kept hearing her name. “Rose,” someone said, but when she looked around, she couldn’t tell who had said it. A few kids shied away.

Night after night, she had lain in bed going over what had happened. At three o’clock, she had come home from school and Jimmy wasn’t there. She decided not to do her math homework just yet, even though she could have polished it off in ten minutes. She just didn’t feel like it. Something unsettling was swimming its way up inside of her. She kept walking around her room, annoyed that Jimmy had plans with Lewis that didn’t include her. “No girls today,” Jimmy had said that morning, and she had rolled her eyes, pretending she couldn’t care less, that she had better things to do. Sometime around four, she was tired of watching the clock, of flopping on her bed trying to read or do anything but think about what she was missing. She felt that strange tingle in the air, as if something were about to happen, and she went outside. The neighborhood was hot and silent. Even her mother was at the stupid carnival, and Rose had had enough of church on Sundays without wanting to go today. The only other living thing on the street was Romeo, a white cat from down the block, that stared impassively at her while he licked his front paws.

She decided to walk into Waltham to kill some time, maybe try on dresses even though she couldn’t afford them.

All she had to do was to change two seconds of her life, and everything might have gone differently. She might have realized that feeling meant she had to go find Jimmy. She could have stayed home. Maybe she’d have walked faster and missed Lewis altogether. Instead, as soon as she saw him, running onto Lexington Street, she felt dizzy with love, as if a thousand magnets were pulling inside of her and she was powerless to resist.

Lewis didn’t know it, but if he had asked her to beat up all those boys who were after him, Rose would have done it, winding up her fists and kicking with everything she had. If he had asked her to sing in the middle of the road, her mouth would have opened and a tune would have flown free. She took his hand without thinking. “Run,” she told him, but she meant with her.

She had been so busy tuning in to Lewis that she had jammed the station she kept for her own brother. She thought of how it had been, laying so close to Lewis, wanting to kiss him but being terrified, because what if he didn’t love her back? What if he shoved her away? Or laughed at her? And all the while, Jimmy had been in trouble and she hadn’t even known it.

Now, both she and Lewis were being kept close at home and they weren’t even in the same school. The phone had to be left free because any moment Jimmy could call. There might be a voice, a clue, a sign. Sometimes she thought Lewis was just avoiding her. He could have come over to her house, couldn’t he?

By lunchtime, at school, everyone seemed to be watching her. She was eating her baloney and cheese sandwich alone when Annie came over, plunking down in the seat opposite her. “I saw your picture in the paper,” Annie said and Rose nodded.

“Now everyone knows who you are,” Annie said.

“Is that good?”

Annie shrugged.

“Who am I, then?” Rose blurted and Annie laughed.

“You’re a big dope,” she said.

All that day, Rose felt as if she were sleepwalking, but she was in no hurry to go back home. She couldn’t be there in her house without Jimmy. Rose had always felt that he had somehow belonged to her. They played together and slept in the same room until Rose turned ten, when her mother told her “a young lady needs privacy” and gave her the front bedroom all to herself. But Rose missed sharing a room, and even though she was only a year older, had always felt that taking care of him was her job.

One day at school, she had felt a cloud darkening over her, and she just knew something wasn’t right. She ran home, panting, and when she finally banged into the house, there was Jimmy sitting on a kitchen chair, his hand bandaged. “I burnt it on the stove,” he told her. Another day, she felt a bright flash of joy, and as soon as she got home, Jimmy was crowing that he had won a marble tournament, holding up the green cat’s-eye that was his prize. She wanted to be around him all the time, and they were, until he became friends with Lewis.

She went into Jimmy’s room at night and stared at that stupid map that he and Lewis were using to plot out their lives, and every thumbtack she saw pushed into a city hurt her. The blue tacks marked the places they were going: San Francisco and Chicago and Kansas. The red ones were the side trips like the Grand Canyon and Yellowstone Park, the places they didn’t want to live but definitely wanted to visit. She pulled out the blue tacks in Los Angeles and Nashville and put them in her pocket. She moved the red tacks around, confusing their routes. If she could have, she would have spelled out her name right there on the map.

They never even thought to blame her, which somehow made it worse. “Jeeze Louise, what happened here,” Lewis said, and the two of them spent an afternoon fixing the route, while Rose, flopped on Jimmy’s bed, said nothing.

One afternoon she came into the room and Jimmy said, “We’re busy here.” They were poring over the map. “No girls allowed.”

“That’s too bad because I know a pool we can crash,” she said.

“You do not,” Jimmy said, but he looked at her with interest. “Where?” he asked.

She led them over to Trapelo Road and then to Lexington Street and over to Green Acres Day Camp and showed them how to climb over a big fence. The pool was clear and glossy and cool and they jumped in in their clothes, though Lewis stayed in the shallow end, wading. “How did you know about this?” Lewis asked, splashing her.

“I just know things,” she said. The truth was she had heard a senior girl in school talking about how she and her boyfriend always came here, but she wanted the boys to think she had somehow known this magically. “Like Houdini,” she said, “I can make things appear,” and when he grinned, she felt something in her heart fluttering, like a bird’s wing. She didn’t tell him that she thought Houdini was a jerk, a man who could have lived if he had gotten medical attention, a man who promised his wife he would come back from death and then didn’t.

“She does know things,” Jimmy admitted to Lewis. “She showed me how to make phony phone calls. She knows how to get a burger at Brigham’s and sneak out without paying.”

Lewis looked at Rose as if she were a new page in a book. After that, they rarely excluded her, and if Lewis came over when Jimmy wasn’t around, Lewis didn’t turn and go home. He stayed and hung out with her. He didn’t act as if she were second best, either. Lewis tested out his magic tricks on her. She gave him books she thought he should read, and she began to protect him, the way she had Jimmy when he was younger, only it felt weird and different with Lewis. She told herself she was brushing her hair a hundred times because there were knots in it, that she was wearing Ava’s perfume not because of Lewis, who never noticed, but because didn’t every girl want to smell good? Lewis looked her straight in the eyes when he talked to her, and every time he did, she felt herself listing. It was crazy. He was her brother’s best friend. He was her friend. He was too young, just a kid. Girls her age were interested in eighth- or ninth-grade boys, not sixth graders, whom they viewed with disdain.

Now, there was nobody who wanted to be with Rose. She traced a line someone had dug into the desk.
Biff loves Tina Forever
. She wondered if he still did. She thought about what Lewis was doing now, where Jimmy might be. She knew she’d feel it in her body if Jimmy were gone. She’d somehow know it if he were being hurt in some way. Instead, she felt that same connection she had always had to her brother, as if nothing had changed. But things were hidden, like in one of Lewis’s magic tricks, and she swore if she shut her eyes, if she listened, she could hear him whispering to her, telling her where he was, and why. One thing she had to believe: Jimmy was alive.

O
NE AFTERNOON, SHE
came out of school to find her mother waiting for her, dressed, with a little veiled hat on. “Come on,” she said. “We’re going someplace special.” Rose got in the car. She didn’t say a word, not even when her mother parked in front of a brown house, not even when a woman in a turquoise turban opened the door. “Ah, an old soul,” she said, looking at Rose.