Is This Tomorrow

by Caroline Leavitt

  Betty put one hand on Ava’s shoulder. “Forget that jerk,” she said.

  All that day, the women were kind to her. Betty loaned Ava her smock so Ava wouldn’t get carbon marks on her dress. At eleven, when the other women went to break, Cathy stopped at Ava’s desk. “You want to come?” she said.

  Cathy’s face was open, but Ava didn’t think she could move. “Thank you for asking,” she said. “But I think I’ll work through this.”

  Cathy put one hand on Ava’s shoulder, a touch so gentle, Ava wanted to grab her hand and hold on to it. “If you change your mind, you know where to find us.”

  When the women returned, Betty put a small paper plate with a lemon square on it on Ava’s desk. “I know you aren’t hungry, but eat. Sugar gives you energy.”

  Ava took a bite of the square because the women were watching her. It was crumbly and overly sweet and the middle didn’t taste as if it were quite done, but she ate all of it. “Delicious,” she said. “Just what I needed.”

  “My mom made it,” Charmaine said. “Everyone loves her world-famous squares.”

  Ava couldn’t concentrate on sinks and tubs and toilets today. The new claw-footed tubs made her think of Jake soaking after a session. The plaid sink that no one wanted reminded her of the plaid shorts she had worn to picnic with Jake when he had told her he couldn’t wait to get her out of them. She thought of Jake, driving somewhere new, a U-Haul loaded with all the things he owned pulled behind him. She didn’t even know his new address.

  At ten to five, before the closing bell rang, Betty leaned over. “If you want to sneak out, I’ll cover for you,” Betty said. “I’ll tell Richard you’re on the rag. That always shuts him up.”

  Ava quickly got up, keeping her typewriter uncovered, her little lamp switched on. If she ran into Richard now, she’d pretend she was going to the ladies’ room. She nodded at the other women and headed for the elevator, not relaxing until she was back out on the street.

  As soon as she got home, the phone was ringing and she picked it up. Jake. It was Jake.

  “Mrs. Lark,” said a voice. “Did you know one of your boyfriends has a record?”

  Ava swallowed. “Who is this? What are you talking about?”

  “Hank Maroni. One of your boyfriends, Jake Riverton. Actually Jake Richardson. He did time for assault in juvie. Did you know that? Did you know that he had another name?”

  She flinched. Assault. It was an ugly word and she couldn’t believe it, but suddenly, sickeningly, it explained why Jake wanted to get out of town so fast. What was she supposed to say? “It’s got to be a mistake,” she said. “Jake would never harm anyone.”

  “Where is he now, Mrs. Lark?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know anything anymore.” She began to hear something humming in her ear, like the whine of an insect.

  “If you hear from him, if he calls you, you let us know,” Hank said. “We’re going to be checking further into this.” The humming in Ava’s ear grew louder. She had never seen Jake even get angry. Could he really be violent and she hadn’t seen it? No, it couldn’t be true. She wouldn’t believe it because then it would mean that she hadn’t known him at all. It would show how stupid she really had been to love him. She hung up the phone and then she planted her hands flat on the table, as if that could stop their shaking.

  Jake was gone from her life. The next few days, she forced herself not to think about him, not to remember. If she felt like crying, she did it quickly and then drew herself up. No matter how she yearned for him, she knew he wasn’t worth it. She wouldn’t waste time trying to find him. She’d only try to find Jimmy.

  Now, when the phone rang, she didn’t immediately wonder if it was Jake. Instead, she thought it could be the boy, and why not? If Jimmy was going to call anyone, he would call her. She was an adult he trusted, but not a parent who might punish him. And she had already kept one secret for him.

  About a year ago, she had been home from work with the tag end of a cold, when the bell rang. She had thought it must be the mailman with a package, but there was Jimmy, in a pressed white shirt and dark pants and good leather shoes. “Lewis isn’t home,” she told him, a blossom of tissue at her nose.

  “That’s okay. Can I come in?” he asked.

  She didn’t know why she let him in. Maybe because he looked so pained. She showed him in and he sat carefully on the edge of the couch. “Are you okay?” she asked.

  His dark eyes looked everywhere but at her face. “Jimmy,” she said his name, and then he looked at her and his face was so full of longing, she felt struck.

  “I like you,” he said, his voice a rasp. He looked at his feet, at his carefully shined shoes.

  “I like you, too. I like all the neighborhood kids.”

  He sat there, fumbling his hands in his lap.

  “Is something wrong?” Ava asked. “Do you want some juice or chocolate milk?”

  “I’ve never kissed a girl,” he whispered.

  She didn’t laugh. “You’re twelve. You have lots of time for that,” she said. “That’s nothing to be ashamed of.”

  “Would you give me kissing lessons?’

  Ava stood up then. Her nose was red and she hadn’t combed her hair. She wasn’t wearing any makeup and she knew she must have looked a thousand years old. Yet here was this boy.

  “Why would you ask me that?” she said quietly.

  “I told you. I like you. I think you’re beautiful.”

  “Jimmy—” She sat back down. “I want to tell you something,” she said. “I am flattered more than I can tell you, but I’m far too old for you, plus I’m your best friend’s mother, plus I want you to save your kisses for someone your age who deserves them.”

  His mouth wobbled. “James,” she said. She had never heard anyone call him that, but she knew it sounded more adult.

  He lowered his head. “Everyone acts like I have cooties. I have no one to do things with except Lewis and Rose. No girl will sit next to me. Not the way they do with Lewis, even though he doesn’t notice.”

  She knew that. She had seen the way Lewis missed all the signals Rose was throwing toward him. She sighed. “You wait,” she said. “Girls are dumb about these things when they’re young, but when they get older they smarten up. They see that your best feature isn’t your eyes or your thick hair, but your good heart.”

  “So you won’t give me kissing lessons?”

  “No. But I want you to promise me something. That your first kiss will be from someone near your age who loves you, who really sees you for who you are.”

  He stood up. “You won’t tell anyone I asked, will you?” he said and she lifted up her hand and made a motion as if she were locking her lips shut.

  “You probably shouldn’t come around here anymore when Lewis isn’t home, either,” she said quietly.

  “Why not? I can’t even talk to you?”

  “Of course you can. But when Lewis is here.”

  He still came by. He brought over a Wooly Willy toy, a big, bald cartoon face under a bubble of plastic, with tiny metal particles settled on the bottom, and he showed her how all you had to do was touch the screen with the special magnetic wand and you could guide the particles to make whiskers or eyebrows or a big mop of hair. She made him grilled-cheese sandwiches and TV dinners with apple brown betty for dessert, and when he didn’t touch the peas, she didn’t say a word. Still, she became more careful when he was around. She didn’t hug him the way she used to. When Jimmy came over to see Lewis, the two of them would head to Lewis’s room and shut the door. Ava wondered if Jimmy had told Lewis that he sometimes came over here by himself. She wondered what her son might think, but as far as she could tell, Lewis never treated her differently or even looked at her with suspicion.

  One evening, when she was in her room reading and the kids were playing cards in the dining room, she heard Jimmy ask Lewis, “Do you have a father who’s still alive?”

  “Of course I do,” Le
wis said hotly.

  “Where is he, then? Why doesn’t he come to see you?”

  “My father is crazy about me.” Ava heard the stutter in Lewis’s voice. “He writes me letters all the time. He’s tall and strong and he used to win prizes for being the best salesman and stuff.”

  “Really? Can I see the letters?”

  There was a silence. “They’re private,” Lewis said.

  “Do you have pictures of him? What did he look like?”

  Ava walked into the room. “Who wants to go to Brigham’s for ice cream?” she said, and the boys jumped up.

  The whole drive to Brigham’s, she worried. She saw how wistful her son was when he talked about his dad. Lewis didn’t hear the anger in Brian’s voice when he called to talk to Ava. He didn’t know that his father could have easily come and visited him but simply chose not to. To him, his father was a hero and Ava was somehow the reason why Brian left.

  She pulled into the parking lot. “Come on,” she said. “Let’s go get something sweet.”

  SEVEN MONTHS AFTER Jimmy had vanished, no one went on the neighborhood patrol anymore, though people did keep their eyes and ears open. Even the kids were walking to the elementary school again without an adult. The detectives finally stopped asking anyone anything. They stopped coming to the neighborhood. The case was cold, they said. They had done their best. No clear suspects had emerged. Jake must be off the hook, Ava thought, but it didn’t change anything.

  It was October and Ava sat watching the rain from her window, the world growing gray, and listened to the news. Red Army troops had invaded Hungary. Gas prices were going up. But there were no longer reports about the Jimmy Rearson case.

  She still missed him. Dot had grown thinner and almost never changed out of her bathrobe. Rose and Lewis were at the same school now, both secretive and sullen, always scribbling away in a notebook or whispering together. Ava was so lonely she thought sometimes she might go mad.

  Some nights, Ava stared out the picture window and looked across the street at Dot’s house. She almost always saw Dot, standing on her porch staring out at the night sky. Ava would wave, but Dot never responded. If ever Ava walked over there, Dot didn’t want to talk. “We don’t have to talk,” Ava said. Instead, she sat there with Dot. Occasionally, Ava looked across at her own house. The inexpensive paint she had bought for the shutters was peeling already. The porch steps were lopsided. No matter what she did, her home still looked shabby, as if it had been stuck into the neighborhood like a mistake. She felt heavy with fatigue, but stifled her yawns until Dot inevitably pushed herself up from her chair. “Well, “Dot said, “Time to go.” And then she let herself into her house, leaving Ava alone to walk back to her own.

  Chapter Eleven

  Lewis woke up to the first December snowfall sifting against his window. He and Jimmy would have immediately run outside. Jimmy always threw snowballs, but Lewis liked to collect snow to look at under the microscope. He had tried to get Jimmy to look through the eyepiece at all the different shapes, but Jimmy tended to dawdle. By the time he took a gander, the flakes had usually melted.

  He grabbed his notebook and wrote: Jimmy liked snow. He may have gone someplace cold. Alaska had been one of the places they had pricked on the map. If Jimmy didn’t go himself, maybe someone took him there. He wondered how he could get ahold of the Alaska papers to see if there might be a photo of Jimmy. He could call the cops and be a hero.

  He picked up a book, The Time Machine, and went into the kitchen to read. His mother was sitting at the table, staring at the phone.

  Lewis knew whose call she was waiting for. The one good thing to come out of everything was that the jerk Jake was gone. He didn’t know if his mother had broken it off, or if Jake had just decided it all on his own, but things felt different around the house. Lewis didn’t want to ask his mother what had happened with Jake. Who knows, maybe she’d say, “Oh, yes, that reminds me,” and call Jake up and then everything would just start up all over again.

  “Want something to eat, honey?” Ava said. She got up and sliced him a piece of supermarket yellow cake she had on the counter. She poured milk in a jelly glass and set it in front of him.

  “We should call Dad,” he said.

  Ava started. She wiped her hands along the skirt of her apron. “Why on earth would we want to do that?”

  “We’re alone. Everyone else here has a father.”

  “Not everyone,” she said, and he knew she meant Rose. “Now drink your milk,” she said shortly and went to the sink to wash the dishes, noisily splashing water. He toyed with the cake, cutting it with the edge of his fork. He didn’t like it very much because it had no frosting and it was one of those day-old cakes she got on sale that always tasted like all the ingredients had gone bad. She left the room and he heard her rattling around in the living room as he chewed the dry cake. Maybe she was thinking about calling his father, he thought. You never knew. Rose had told him that her mother said that there was nothing worse for a woman than to be alone, that it was unnatural and unhealthy. She told Rose it had been the luck of the draw that her husband had died and she would get married again in a heartbeat, but the problem was nobody wanted a woman who had already been married, and especially one with children. It was even worse if you were divorced because that meant you had done something wrong, you hadn’t been able to keep your man. “No one wants leftovers,” Dot had said.

  “That leaves both our moms out,” Rose said to Lewis.

  Lewis began mashing up the remaining cake on his plate so it would look like he had eaten most of it and his mother wouldn’t start in about wasting food. He thought about his dad. His mother didn’t have to be a leftover. His father wasn’t dead like Rose’s. Maybe Lewis hadn’t seen him for years, but his father was still alive and all his mom had to do was get to him, show him what he was missing, and surely he’d come around. The last time Lewis had spoken to him was a year ago, on Lewis’s birthday, when his father promised him a present that must have gotten lost in the mail. But he heard his mother on the phone some nights talking to him, and even though she sounded angry, he never heard her hang up on him. If his father knew how dangerous things were, wouldn’t he at least call, if not come for a visit?

  His mother came back in from the other room and he felt her watching him. He kept his fork in midair, not moving, waiting to see what she would do.

  “This is cake,” she said. “You can’t even finish cake.”

  She pulled out a chair and sat down beside him. “You have your whole life ahead of you,” she said quietly. “You have so many people around you who care about you.” She tried to smooth his hair, but he pulled back. He picked up The Time Machine, which he didn’t even like that much. He had thought it would tell him something practical about time travel, how you might go back in time and change what had happened, like with Jimmy or his dad, but it was clearly all made up. If Lewis had the chance to go back in time, he knew what he would do, and it wouldn’t be going to that stupid library after the dentist. He would go straight to Jimmy’s house. He would find his dad and beg him not to leave and his father would listen.

  He felt his mother’s gaze. He dipped back into the book, the only way he could think of to get her to leave him alone, and as soon as she did, he shut the book and put it aside and started thinking about Jimmy all over again.

  She wouldn’t be so friendly if she had known what he had done, that he could have saved Jimmy if he had met him on time. His mom might think he had a lot of people around him who cared about him, but who were those people, and why didn’t he see them?

  His teachers told him they cared about him, but only if he would stop interrupting their lessons with questions and try to be more like everyone else. His teachers liked him best when he didn’t bother them at all, when he sat at his desk and had no more presence than a ghost.

  Who did he really have to talk to, except for Rose? He was so glad they were in the same school now, that they took the bus t
ogether, and sometimes just seeing her walk by him in the halls made him feel better. His world was narrowing, closing in like two walls pressed together. Everything was split up between before and after. Before, he used to spend every day with Jimmy and Rose, roaming the neighborhood, sitting in the woods behind Northeast Elementary with a bag of jelly sandwiches, but those woods were off-limits now, and Jimmy was gone. The only future Rose and he discussed now was about finding Jimmy. Even then, he felt as if he was falling behind, as if he needed her more than she needed him. She was always scribbling in her notebook, filling the pages, whipping them ahead so furiously they sometimes tore, but his notebook had only three pages filled. Every place Lewis had listed as a place to visit for clues was now crossed out. Jimmy wasn’t at the library. There were no clues at the Wal-Lex roller rink. No one he had talked to had seen him. He often stared at the blank pages, trying to think what he could write down. He sank into gloom and worry every time he saw Rose, because he was afraid she’d ask to see his notebook and her face would flood with disappointment when she saw how little he had written. He wanted to take a peek at what she was writing, but she always had her notebook clutched to her chest, and besides, if he asked, he would have to share his. “We can find him,” she insisted, “you have to think positive,” but Lewis wasn’t so sure. How long before she would tire of his doubt and leave him, too?

  That night, he couldn’t sleep. Lewis felt as if his skin were moving separately from him, crawling like a live thing. He touched his arms, his legs, as if that would keep the skin in place.

  He opened the door and could see there was no light under his mother’s door across the hall. The radio she listened to at night, the endless loop of talk shows, the voices tangling into one another like strings of yarn, was quiet, which meant she was sleeping. He went back in his room, grabbed up a flashlight, and shone it into all the corners of his room. There were his books, most of them loaners from Rose, the pages turned back, the covers torn from rereading, plus a few books from the library that he needed to return. He saw his magic tricks, all the old kits he had cobbled together, pushed next to his books on Houdini. He thought of Houdini’s wife, all those years waiting and waiting for him to give her a sign that he was still alive, holding séances for ten years, and finally giving up. Everyone thought that was proof that the dead stayed dead, that there was no such thing as ghosts or an afterlife or, if there was, the living couldn’t reach them. But maybe she gave up too soon, Lewis thought. Maybe Houdini had appeared in a way she hadn’t noticed, like a cool breeze blowing on her on a hot summer day, or her favorite flower suddenly strewn in her path. Who knew how people who were dead could communicate with you?