From where he was standing, he could just make out Rose’s window across the street. He moved closer and pointed the flashlight at her window and clicked it on and off, like Morse code. S-O-S. Over and over. Rose, he thought, as if he were calling her on the phone. Pick up, pick up, pick up. He clicked the flashlight off. He was just about to put it down, to turn and go back to bed, when he saw something blinking, cutting through the darkness.
S-O-S. S-O-S. Rose was sending him a message.
HE DIDN’T SEE Rose the next morning or on the bus, but later that day, after school, he headed outside the building and there she was, waiting for him on the sidewalk. “What are you doing here?” he asked.
“I felt you wanted to see me and here I am,” she said. She crunched her boots in the snow. “I don’t want to take the school bus home. Come on, we’ll walk home together,” she said.
“How’d you know that?” he asked. They walked all the way to the Northeast schoolyard, dusted off the snow from the swings, and sat down. She leaned back on her swing, twisting it so it would wind her in circles.
“You can do it, too, you know,” she said. “Know where and when I might appear.” She told him when he was at school and feeling lost, to look for signs that she was around. “It can be as simple as a light suddenly going on,” Rose told him. “It can be someone humming a song that you know I like.” She tilted her chin to the air. “Sometimes when I think Jimmy’s near, it’s like everything has a charge. Like something is about to happen.”
“I don’t know,” Lewis said doubtfully. He turned his swing around, scraping his boots along the snow. “Shut your eyes,” she ordered.
He did. The world went white. He felt the frosty air on his face. “Stay still,” she said. “Concentrate. I’m going to walk away and you tell me which direction I went. Keep your eyes closed. When you know, you tell me.”
He heard the thump of her feet hitting the ground when she jumped off the swing, but then he couldn’t hear anything. He sniffed experimentally at the air. His knee itched and he yearned to scratch it. He felt hopeless. He pointed in back of him. “You’re there,” he guessed and Rose laughed, and he turned around and opened his eyes and there she was, smiling triumphantly at him while he blinked at her in amazement. “It was no guess,” she told him. “You knew.”
He felt dizzy. He wanted Rose to stop moving around so quickly, to stay in one place so he could really see her, but she was a blur. She walked over to him and pressed her forehead against his. “Read my thoughts,” she said. She closed her eyes. He shut his and he felt a pulse of heat. “What color am I thinking of?” she said. “Don’t think. Just let it happen.”
“Blue,” he guessed, and he opened his eyes to see her smiling at him.
“What did I tell you?” she said. “You knew. You just knew.”
“Come on, let’s get out of here,” he said.
They tore around the block to Greer Street and there was Mr. Corcoran, his head covered by a blue watch cap. He was shoveling snow along his walk, but when he saw them, he paused. “Why are you kids on your own?” he said.
“We’re with each other,” Rose said. “We aren’t alone.”
Mr. Corcoran dusted his hands off against his pants. “Your mothers know where you are?” he asked. “You’re sure about that?”
“My mother’s at work,” Lewis said.
“Well, maybe she ought to be home with you.”
Lewis scowled. He already hated that his mother worked, but it bothered him even more when people commented on it.
Mr. Corcoran studied Rose and Lewis, his gaze falling on the notebook Rose clutched to her chest, which had a photograph of Jimmy Stewart on the cover. “Jimmy Stewart, huh,” he said. “He’s more than a little pink, if you know what I mean.”
“He is?” Lewis asked.
“Look at that movie, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” he said. “You think a real American would interrupt a Senate proceeding the way he did? And smile while he was doing it?” He tapped his forehead. “Use your noggin.”
“I liked that movie,” Lewis said. He had watched it with his mother, a bowl of popcorn between them, and when his mother had cried, he had pretended not to notice.
“That’s just the point. You’re meant to like it. You’re meant to be sucked in and think one thing, while another is going on. You can’t trust these Communists,” he said. “And do you want to know why?”
“No, why?” Rose said, so politely that Lewis shot her a look.
“Because they lie. They couldn’t tell the truth if they wanted to. My Stanley knows that. You kids should know it, too.”
Lewis bit down on his lip so he wouldn’t laugh. Mr. Corcoran pointed at the sky. “You kids think it’s funny, but any second a missile could come down at us,” he insisted. “And we wouldn’t even see it or be prepared. One minute we’re here talking in this nice neighborhood, and two seconds later, boom, we’re ash. You think it can’t happen?” He lifted his two hands in the air and then kamikazied them down. “The Russians hide explosives, did you know that? And there are lots of Reds right here in America. They could be in this neighborhood and we wouldn’t even know it.”
“Who?” Rose asked. “Who in this neighborhood?”
He tapped Lewis’s notebook, the photo of Tony Curtis.
“Him for one.”
“He’s an actor. He played Houdini,” Lewis said. “And he doesn’t live here.”
“A Jew. Both of them. Houdini was a Commie, though I don’t know about Curtis.”
“I’m Jewish.” A flare of pain rose in his belly. He didn’t like the way Mr. Corcoran folded his arms and rocked on his heels. If his Jesus was so great, why hadn’t He helped them find Jimmy? He wanted to say it out loud to Mr. Corcoran to see what happened, but he chickened out.
“You kids better get home now,” Mr. Corcoran said, dismissing them.
As soon as they were out of sight, Rose made “he’s crazy” circles, spinning her hands about her temple, but her mood seemed to have darkened. Lewis didn’t feel like roaming the neighborhood anymore. A plane zoomed across the sky. Lewis looked up. He imagined Mr. Corcoran’s missile flying down from the sky, aimed right at them, lean and silver as a needle. Would he see it before it struck or would it happen so fast that everything would be obliterated? Would he know a Communist if he saw one? “Rose, do you know any Communists?” he asked, worried.
“Yeah, me. I’m a big, dirty Red and I’m going to eat you. And you’re a big, dirty Jew and you drink the blood of babies.” She bared her teeth, tickling him until he laughed, too.
Lewis’s stomach growled, but Rose seemed in no hurry to go home to dinner. “You hungry?” he asked. She shrugged. “Because I am,” he said.
“Then go home and eat.”
He studied her, the way she was kicking at the snow in front of her, not going anywhere. “Come with me,” he said.
As soon as Lewis brought Rose into his kitchen, where Ava was stirring something in a pot, Rose dipped her head shyly.
“Hi, honey,” Ava said. “Did you want to eat with us? Would it be all right with your mother?”
“My mother ate already,” Rose said quietly.
“Call her and tell her you’re having dinner here,” Ava said. “You don’t want her to worry.”
Rose curled around the phone, speaking in a low voice. “Yes. Okay, I will,” she said. She hung up the phone, and for a minute, it almost looked as if she were disappointed. “She said it’s fine,” Rose said.
“Your company is just what we need,” Ava said, setting a plate for Rose. Lewis had eaten enough meals at Dot’s to know that his mother wasn’t nearly as good a cook as Dot was, but he noticed how Rose was looking longingly at Ava’s potatoes boiling on the stove. “Make yourself at home, honey,” Ava said.
Every night after that, Ava simply set a plate for Rose and stretched whatever she had planned for dinner. There was never a lot, but all through the winter Ava boiled up spaghetti as a side dish s
o it would be enough, adding water to the sauce or more milk to the potatoes to increase the servings. Rose showed up and ate every bite of whatever it was, and afterward, Ava always gave her a Tupperware container of food to take home for Dot. “She has to eat,” Ava said. “And if not, then you have yourself a nice snack for later.” Ava and Lewis always walked Rose home. “I’d love to talk to Dot,” Ava said one evening, but the windows were dark, and when Ava knocked, no one came to the door. “You go inside then, honey,” Ava said gently. They waited until Rose unlocked the door herself, got inside safely, and closed the door again. Only then did they turn and head back.
One night, though, when Rose didn’t show up for dinner, Lewis went to find her. “I’ll keep everything on warm,” Ava said. He ran to her house, and there she was, standing on the front porch as if she were waiting for him. “Aren’t you eating with us tonight?” Lewis said. Then he noticed how red her eyes were, how her hands were trembling. “What aren’t you telling me?” he asked.
“You’re nuts. I tell you everything,” she said. She looked past him, at the blinking street light. Her breath looked like puffs of smoke in the air.
“You can’t tell me to sense things about you and then, when I do, tell me it doesn’t exist.”
“In this case, it doesn’t.” She shook her head. “I’m just not hungry tonight.”
“Fine. I’ll see you tomorrow,” he said. Lewis got up and bounded back to his own house.
Ava was in the living room, curled up with a book, in dungarees and a sweater, her hair tied back with a kerchief. She looked like a mother, not like a working woman, not like the divorcée the neighbors all talked about.
“What do you think happens when we die?” he asked. Ava started. She turned to him, her face serious. “Why do you want to know that?”
“I just do.”
“I’m smart enough to know I don’t know,” she said finally. “What do you believe?”
He bit on his lip, the place where it was chapped. “I don’t know. Maybe there’s another parallel world.”
“That sounds as good as anything,” she told him. Lewis thought of Jimmy, lost in a parallel world, with a whole new set of friends and family, but instead of making him feel better, he felt as if he were trapped inside a maze.
“Rose can’t make dinner tonight,” he said.
“We’ll see her next time,” his mother reassured him.
That night, Lewis woke up in the darkness. He blinked at the clock. Four o’clock in the morning. His mother called it the hour of the wolf, the time when nightmares were at their most fierce. He put his hand over his heart, feeling the pulse thump against his fingers. He thought of Rose. After their dinner tonight, his mother had brought a container of chicken and noodles over to Rose and Dot. When she came back, it seemed as if she had been gone for a long time. “What took so long?” Lewis said and Ava shrugged. “We were talking.”
“About what?” Lewis said.
“Just things.”
“What was Rose doing?” he asked, but Ava walked past him into the kitchen.
Now Lewis went to the window with the flashlight and blinked it, S-O-S, over and over. He waited, but the night stayed dark. She didn’t answer, and he felt something loose and unsettling inside of him, like a lightbulb that wasn’t screwed in tightly enough.
Chapter Twelve
Rose stood in the kitchen, foraging for breakfast, trying to find something that wasn’t stale or with an expiration date of two weeks ago. She found an unopened package of cheese crackers and an apple that was only brown on one side.
She chewed on one of the crackers, which turned powdery on her tongue. Her mother used to wake up at six and have breakfast ready: eggs and toast with bacon or sausage. There used to be clean clothes laid out on her bed, lunch bags for her and Jimmy to take to school. Dot had always kept busy cooking and cleaning, playing cards with neighbors, but now she didn’t seem to do anything.
Everything familiar was vanishing, and it scared her. Rose had to wet the chips in the soap dish so she could mash them together into a semblance of a bar. When she came home from school, her mother looked relieved when she saw her, but she never asked her any questions about school or homework, and when Rose brought home a D on a math test for her mother to sign, sure her mother would yell, Dot just scribbled her name without comment. Her mother didn’t even suggest Rose go to the teacher and ask for a makeup.
BY SPRING, HER mother was someone she didn’t know. Rose couldn’t even have Lewis over the house anymore because she didn’t know how her mother was going to act, if she’d be dressed and speaking in monosyllables or if she’d just be lying on the couch in her ratty nightgown. “I want you home,” her mother said, “not traipsing around.” But when Rose stayed around, her mother ignored her.
One afternoon, when the only thing in the fridge was an old casserole someone had brought over from the previous week, Rose made a decision. She leafed out a ten from her mother’s wallet and went out, even though she wasn’t supposed to. If she didn’t go and buy groceries, there would be nothing to eat.
The whole walk down Trapelo Road to the Star Market, Rose was nervous. Walk fast, like you know where you are going, the teacher had told the kids. Swing your arms purposefully. Be prepared to run.
She bought two bagfuls of groceries, green peppers and tomatoes and apples, detergent and soap, and when she got home, she put the groceries away and read the back of all the cleaning products to see what to do.
By the end of the night, she had scrubbed the kitchen floor and washed the wood floors in the living room, dining room, and her own bedroom. She had dusted the venetian blinds and folded the laundry, and all she had left to do was straighten up the den. But as soon as she walked in and saw the pile of newspapers, she couldn’t help scouring the pages for photographs. Secrets, she knew, could hide in all sorts of places. She looked for the articles that had crowd shots, and then poured over the faces, just in case one might be his. She rummaged in the drawers and found a magnifying glass, then studied each and every face, sure that one might belong to her brother. She stopped at a blurry head of a boy, in the back of the crowd. She circled his face with a pen, so she wouldn’t lose sight of him.
“What are you doing?”
Rose looked up. Dot was standing in the doorway in her nightgown, her hair awry. “Doesn’t this look like Jimmy?” Rose showed Dot the shot, the place where she had circled a face. Dot took the page to the wastebasket and buried it, and then walked out of room.
Rose fished it out again, smoothing it down. She squinted at the photo. The eyes were wrong. She saw it now.
Rose heard her mother in the kitchen and she went in to find her staring at the cupboards filled with food. “Where did this come from?” Dot demanded. “Did neighbors bring this by?”
“I bought it,” Rose said. Dot stared at her. “Do you want to take a walk?” Rose asked her mother.
“What for?” Dot said.
“To be with me, to do something,” Rose told her mother. “At least get dressed. Let me wash your bathrobe.” She reached out, but Rose’s mother flinched and drew the robe more tightly around her. Dot looked around. “Did someone clean in here?” she said. For a moment, Rose thought her mother was going to roll up her robe sleeves and dig into the cleaning that was left, but instead, she shook her head. “I’m just going to lie down,” she said.
“We have overdue bills,” Rose blurted, waiting for her mother to get mad, to tell her to mind her own beeswax, but Dot just waved her hand. “I’ll take care of that,” she said, but Rose didn’t believe her, and she was terrified.
Rose had just turned fourteen. She couldn’t handle all this herself, the cooking, the cleaning, the worrying about her mother and money. She needed to tell someone, but who could she tell? Lewis couldn’t really help with something like this. A grown-up could call Social Services and they might take Rose away because she was still a minor. She had heard of things like that happening. It would kill
her mother, and it would probably kill Rose, too, having to live with a strange family, with new rules, people who might say they loved her, but you knew deep down that they really didn’t.
Her mother was in the other room, probably asleep by now. Rose flew out of the house. She gulped at the air. Come with me, she wanted to scream at her mother. Come with me.
ROSE WAS IN her home economics class, trying to figure out how to thread the needle in her sewing machine, when there was a knock on the classroom door. All the girls looked up. A hall monitor, one of the kids, came in and whispered something to the teacher, who looked sternly at Rose and beckoned her over. “Go to the principal’s office,” she whispered.
The whole way to the principal, Rose knew it was about Jimmy. Jimmy would be standing there. She bit down her lip to keep from crying, stilled her legs to keep from running.
But as soon as she got to the office, the only person standing there was stern-faced Mr. Morang (the kids all called him Lemon, snickering at the joke). “Your mother called,” he said. “She wants you to go right home.”
“Did something happen?”
Mr. Morang shrugged. “I think she just wants you home,” he said gently, and then he went to call her a cab. He told her the secretary would wait outside with her and make sure she got in the car safely.
WHEN ROSE GOT home, there was an envelope attached to the door that said CABBIE on it, a fistful of money inside. She gave it to the driver and came inside, calling, “Mom?”
Is This Tomorrow Page 15