“Hey, what’s that crying?” His father’s voice was jovial, teasing. He was slurring his words in a funny way. “That couldn’t be my Lewis crying, could it? My Lewis doesn’t cry.”
Lewis snuffled. “I’m not crying,” he insisted, swiping at his eyes. “Where do you live? How can I find you?”
His father cleared his throat. “Well, right now, you can’t really visit me. I’m living out of a suitcase, but maybe later. In the meantime, I can visit you.”
“When?”
“Well, I don’t know, sport. Maybe next weekend, how about that?” He could hear his father’s breathing, deep and even on the phone.
“I’ll be better,” Lewis said. “I’ll be quiet in school. I’ll get good grades.”
The silence hummed through the wires.
“I miss you,” Lewis said. “I’ll wait out front for you,” and then his mother was taking the phone out of his hands and hanging it up. “He’s coming to see me next week,” Lewis said, but his mother walked over to the sink and began clattering dishes under the water.
That weekend, Lewis waited out front on the porch, though Ava tried to get him to come inside. Every time a car passed, Lewis jumped up, but then the car sped by. When Ava came out to say she was going grocery shopping and would he like to come, he shook his head no.
Later, when Ava pulled up and saw Lewis sitting there, she didn’t move for a moment. Then she got out of the car and handed him a package of cookies from the grocery bag, Fudge Stripes, his favorite, and sat beside him. “I’m sorry,” she said. She ripped open the cellophane bag and even though it was before dinner, they both sat there, eating cookies and not talking, ruining their appetites and not even caring.
Another car passed and then another, but of course none of them was his father. Lewis rested his chin on his knees. Why didn’t his father come see him? If he split himself into two columns, it felt like he had more pluses than minuses. He saw it, so why didn’t his father? Why didn’t he know what he had done wrong?
“I love you,” his mom told him, but how could he be sure? “You’re my best friend,” Jimmy assured him, but Lewis wasn’t always convinced Jimmy really meant it. He had to keep replaying how Rose and Jimmy always sought him out, how they didn’t want to hang out with anyone but him. “Hey, worrywart,” Rose teased. “Keep looking like that and your face will freeze.” She was smiling when she said it.
Houdini used to say that people saw what they wanted to see, they imagined it to be true, and maybe that was what Lewis was doing. But then again, Jimmy and Rose really did seem like real friends, the realest Lewis had ever had. They were plotting their future together, he and Jimmy. As soon as they were old enough, they were going to buy a car and drive cross-country into new lives. He and Jimmy had pooled their money and bought a big huge map and taped it to Jimmy’s wall. For every place they wanted to go—and it had to be a place that had meaning to them—they stuck in a pushpin. Lewis thrilled every time he saw the map, but it was something that Rose was miffed about because she wasn’t a part of their plan.
“It’s a boy thing,” Lewis told her.
“You can come visit,” Jimmy assured her. “We’ll keep an extra room for you.”
“Sure, we will,” Lewis said. He liked Rose. When he practiced magic tricks, she was always willing to hold the top hat or be his guinea pig. She always acted surprised and pleased when Lewis told her about something he was reading—about space travel or carnivorous plants—and she always wanted to know more.
“I can get my own room,” Rose said. “And I can leave before the two of you because I’m older. I’m going to plenty of important places myself.”
He and Jimmy were going to Kentucky or Wyoming or California, where they would be chefs or doctors. Jimmy wanted to stop in Santa Fe because his favorite aunt lived there. He liked Los Angeles because there were movie stars and maybe he could see Natalie Wood, whom he sort of had a crush on. Lewis wanted to visit Springfield, Missouri, because he thought that was where Father Knows Best took place. He made sure to put a tack on the Mojave Desert, where Death Valley was, because he loved the show Death Valley Days and watched it all the time. They were going to be happy and famous, and he wouldn’t have to think about his mother’s boyfriends or the light not going on because the electricity bill hadn’t been paid or getting secondhand bags of clothes from Morgan Memorial that he’d have to wear. He’d be so well-known that he’d get in the news or maybe be a star on TV and his father would read about him, and feel terrible, and call him instantly to make amends.
Lewis was walking from Main Street, winding in and out of the side roads of the neighborhoods because he was bored. He was on Chesterbrook Road when he saw the three kids hanging around the muddy empty lot. He knew them vaguely from the junior high crowd, their hair slicked back, two of them smoking cigarettes. They were all swigging bottles of soda. Joey Salvatore, the one with the curly dark hair, had once been at the same school bus stop as Lewis. Joey had taken a piece of chalk from his pocket and written PENIS and then VAGINA on the telephone pole, snickering and hooting when one of the girls glanced over and blushed. He once had grabbed another kid’s gym suit and stuffed it into the mailbox, and when the kid had protested, Joey had kicked him hard enough to topple him to the ground.
Lewis had learned to steer clear from Joey and his crew, but now there was no escape. He felt the boys all looking at him.
“Hey, creep.” Joey waved at him, casually. “Hey, I recognize that shirt.”
Lewis glanced down at his shirt. Blue and red check, pulled from one of the Morgan Memorial bags. He hadn’t given a thought whose shirt this might have been when he put it on. He only knew it wasn’t his.
Joey snickered. “I threw up on it and that’s why my mom gave it away.”
Lewis kept walking, hoping to be ignored. He thought as soon as he got home, he’d throw this shirt out. He’d rather not have anything to wear than have to wear something that had been Joey Salvatore’s. Suddenly, the boys were around him, grins stretched across their faces, eyes hard and gleaming. “Jewish Lewish,” Joey said.
“So.” Barney, one of the other boys, shoved him. “You hungry? Because we’ve got cookies.” He held up a pack of Oreos, half of them gone. “You want one?”
“No,” Lewis said.
“Oh, for crying out loud, don’t be like that,” Joey said, taking a drag on his cigarette, then chasing it with a big gulp of soda. “Thirsty, Lewis?” he asked. “I didn’t spit in it. You can have a drink.”
Lewis kept silent.
“Pull your pants down and you can have it,” Joey said. He tossed his cigarette and teased a cookie out of the bag and waved it under Lewis’s nose. “Mmmm, fresh, delicious cookie.” The other boys laughed and Joey took a few steps closer until his nose could have touched Lewis’s.
Joey grabbed the edge of Lewis’s shirt. His smile widened. “No, I mean it,” he said pleasantly. “Pull your pants down. I hear Jews’ wieners are different and I want to see.” Lewis could smell Joey’s breath, sugary from the Oreos, sour from tobacco. He could see the other boys behind Joey, impatient, shifting their weight from one foot to another, waiting to see what was going to happen. Joey shook the soda bottle, making it fizz.
“Here, wet your whistle,” Joey said, and then he heaved the soda towards Lewis, soaking his clothes. Barney bent and scooped up handfuls of mud, flinging them at Lewis, spattering his shirt and pants. “Aw, what a shame, but you’re used to dirty clothes, aren’t you?” he said.
Joey snickered and something snapped in Lewis. He sprang one fist back and grazed Joey’s jaw, and Lewis didn’t know who was more surprised, he or Joey. His knuckles throbbed. Numb with terror, he tried to swallow, but the lump in his throat refused to dislodge.
The other boys were frozen, but Joey’s eyes gleamed. “You’re dead,” Joey said, rubbing his chin, and Lewis turned and broke into a run.
Lewis was faster than they were. He was horrible in gym, the last one ever pic
ked on a team, but he could run when he wanted to, and now he sprinted, his breath in his ears. Huh huh huh, and when he ran onto Lexington Street, there was Rose, like a miracle, in a yellow dress, almost as if she had been waiting for him. She looked beyond him at the other boys and then she reached out and grabbed his hand as he ran past. “Run,” she said.
They both ran, hearing the boys shouting after them. “Always remember, the toughest people are cowards,” his father had once told him, but these kids were still running. They weren’t giving up. The clap of their sneakers quickened. “This way,” Rose said, tugging him. “We have to hide.” They ran up to the pathway for Green Acres Day Camp, sprinting into the woods. He followed her deep into the forest, brushing aside the bushes, until all they could hear was their own breaths. They stopped, and Lewis looked around.
The sun dappled through the trees. The ground was soft with moss, and Rose was standing so close to him that he could smell her hair, like wet wood and cherries. He didn’t hear footsteps or voices. Rose touched him and he jolted. “You’re shivering,” she said. “You’re completely soaked and covered in mud.” She stepped closer and then, before he could stop himself, he was crying. It wasn’t just about being chased or shamed, there was Jake, his father, everything was wrong.
“I bet your clothes will dry in the sun.” She pointed to a patch of bright light, a clearing. “We can brush the mud off then.”
He squinted at her.
“I’ll shut my eyes. Your clothes are wet. It’s only me.”
His clothes—Joey’s clothes—were damp and sticky and caked with dirt. If he could have burned them, he would have.
“I have a younger brother, remember? It’s nothing I haven’t seen before.” Her eyes were clear and gray and serious. “I won’t tell anyone,” she said. “Not even Jimmy.” Lewis thought of the boys jeering, I want to see. I hear Jews’ wieners are different. The whole time he had known her she had never teased him, even when he and Jimmy had ganged up on her and tickled her or hid her diary or threatened to read it. She had never snapped at him when he and Jimmy shut her out of Jimmy’s room, when they wanted it to be just boys. Sometimes Rose ignored them, too, when she wanted to be alone to read.
Jimmy wasn’t much of a reader, but Rose read so intently, you could shout in her ear and she wouldn’t lift herself up out of the story. You had to shake her, and then she’d look at you, dazed, as if she couldn’t believe she was no longer in the story. And best of all, she talked to Lewis about what she was reading. She was the one who put A High Wind in Jamaica into his hands and insisted he read it. She gave him A Tree Grows in Brooklyn and The Catcher in the Rye. He held her dog-eared copies in his hands, reading at night in his bed. He read the notes she wrote in the margins. I feel like that. I love the pirates! And once, What are we all to do? It was as if she were reading the books with him, talking with him on every page.
“Come on,” Rose said now.
He felt clammy, but it wasn’t as if he’d be naked. He still had his gym shorts under his pants because his mother hadn’t done laundry and there wasn’t anything else.
He stepped out of his clothes, glancing at his watch. He was late to meet Jimmy. Then he had to meet Jake, but how could he do either when he felt as if he were breaking apart?
“It’ll be really warm in the sun over there. Your clothes will dry. We can just brush the mud off,” she repeated. When he didn’t move, she gave him a look of great pity. “It’s all right,” she said. “Everything is all right.” She put her hands over her eyes and carefully lay down on the ground in the patch of sunlight. Then he took off his pants and his shirt, stretching them out in the sun. He lay down beside her, the two of them not moving. Lewis didn’t dare look at her, and Rose’s eyes were still covered. “We’ll just lay here,” she said.
He listened to her breathing, and then his own, almost as if it were a conversation, her quick, short breaths, and his longer ones. “Jimmy’s going to be so mad,” he said.
“He could never be mad at us,” Rose said.
Lewis couldn’t deny it. He had never had a friend like Jimmy or like Rose, people who made him feel anchored to the world. When he and his mother had lived in an apartment in Watertown, before they moved here, he had hung out with a boy in his third grade named Don, but although Don was funny and liked to ride bikes and play Go to the Head of the Class as much as Lewis did, the person he really loved was Don’s father, a big, burly man who always lighted up when he saw Lewis. “There’s my other boy!” he said. He was always taking the two boys places, the movies, the museum, the theater, and when Don took his dad’s hand, and Lewis shied, Don’s father laughed and grabbed Lewis’s fingers. Don’s father spoiled Don, buying him games and books and toys. All Don had to do was look at something and his dad would buy it for him, and if Lewis was tagging along, Don’s dad would buy one for Lewis, too. Lewis loved it when they all would go out for ice cream and the lady who served the cones said, “What two fine boys you have!” and Don’s father didn’t correct her. Instead, Don’s father just smiled and the whole world seemed to fit into place.
A few months later, Don’s father got a job in Texas and the whole family moved away. Lewis, frantic, ran to the house, watching the moving truck. “I’ll write you every day!” Don promised, but how could Lewis tell him that it wasn’t Don that he was going to miss? He hugged Don’s father, shutting his eyes so the tears wouldn’t come, and Don’s father stroked his hair. Lewis was just figuring out how he could stow away, when his mother came over and put her arm around him. “Come on, honey,” she said quietly. “It’s time to go home.”
He had found Jimmy the first day of fourth grade, shortly after they moved to Waltham, zooming in on him in art class when they were doing family portraits, and Lewis quickly saw that Jimmy was the only other boy without a father. “I’m Jewish,” Lewis said defiantly, because he wanted to get it over with, the weird looks, the questions (“So do you hate Christ?” some kid had actually asked him at his old school), but Jimmy had actually looked impressed. “You lucky duck, you don’t have to go to church on Sunday,” Jimmy said. Lewis met Jimmy’s sister Rose, who offered to teach Lewis how to play Chinese checkers, and had one whole wall of her bedroom filled with books that she said he could borrow. Soon, they all began to hang out together, forming their own little family. They never talked about their missing fathers, but they didn’t have to. When the kids had to make presents for Father’s Day at school, Jimmy and he spent the time looking up information on all the places they were going to go to when they were older. Lewis carefully wrote all the facts into one of his notebooks. “Madison, Wisconsin, has great cheese,” Jimmy informed Lewis. “Write that down. Write down they have rodeos there.” When they saw fathers playing ball with their sons in the neighborhood, the three of them hightailed it to the schoolyard where it was empty and quiet and they could play ball on their own without the distraction of fathers.
Now, lying next to Rose, his lids heavy, he wanted to reach out and touch her shoulder, to make sure she was really there. Her eyes were open and she was watching the sky. The air felt hot, like a blanket thrown over the world, and the more he listened to Rose’s breathing, the more tired he felt. Slowly, so gently that he didn’t feel it at first, she curled against him, resting her head on his shoulder. “Rose,” he started to say, and then he thought about Jimmy, waiting for him, he thought about their plans, and how he needed to get home, and then he was drifting, falling deeper and deeper into sleep while Rose was whispering something in his ear, the beginning of a story that he couldn’t quite hear.
IT WAS DARK when Lewis jolted awake. The woods seemed to be moving around them. He turned to Rose, who was sleeping, one arm thrown over his chest. As soon as he moved, her eyes flew open. She jolted up and started brushing the twigs from her skirt. “Hurry,” he said. He was suddenly embarrassed and grabbed for his shirt, his pants. They were dry, though still sticky and caked with mud. He tried to brush the mud off, but all it did was
smear on the cloth. He threw on his shirt and stepped into his pants. Rose was hurriedly combing her hair with her fingers. She wouldn’t look at him. “My mother’s going to kill me,” she said.
“Mine, too.”
Jimmy. He glanced at his watch, shocked. Ten thirty at night now. Jimmy would never forgive him. And his mother—she’d be furious that he hadn’t come home to meet Jake. She might think he had done it on purpose.
The whole way home, picking their way through the twigs and the rocks and the dark, they tried to come up with a story. “We could tell the truth,” Rose said, and Lewis glowered at her.
“My mother would call their mothers,” he said and Rose’s face fell.
“We can’t do that, then.”
They tested out other stories. Rose’s mom had been at the Our Lady carnival, so they couldn’t say they had gone there, because she’d know they were lying. Brigham’s was open late, filled with high school kids. Maybe they could say they had gone there. “But what about Jimmy? I was supposed to meet him at your house. And what about the time?”
“Say you forgot,” Rose said. “That we both forgot the time.”
“That’d really bug Jimmy.” He thought of how Jimmy hadn’t stood up for him in the cafeteria. Too bad, he thought. Too bad if it bugged him.
Rose held her finger up. “I know. Say I was upset, then. That I was crying about school and you had to calm me down.” She looked at him hopefully. Rose was a girl who almost never cried. “You can blame me,” she insisted. He tried to think and then they were on pavement, walking down Lexington Street to Trapelo Road, over to Warwick Avenue.
The first thing he saw was the police car, white and black with a revolving gumball light on the roof, and he stopped walking, stunned. “We weren’t gone that long,” he said. The doors of the police car were open, like a mouth. There were two cops, one with his hands on his hips, and there, in a group, was his mother and Dot, and some of the neighbors.
Lewis saw his mother pointing to him, calling out to him. “Lewis!” she cried and there was something strange and stretched in her voice that made him uncomfortable. “Lewis!”
Is This Tomorrow Page 5