Is This Tomorrow

by Caroline Leavitt

  “I heard that there was no sign of struggle,” Stan said. “No evidence of anyone being around the shelter at all except for that kid. I heard the cops say that he must have known that place was there.” Stan looked past Ava. “Crazy kids,” he said. “They always think they’re invincible.” Stan folded his hat between his fingers. It was a cool day but his face was dappled with sweat. “Who’s going to buy this house now?” he said.

  IN THE FOLLOWING days, Ava tried repeatedly to reach Lewis, but to no avail. She watched the news constantly, wondering if any national channels would pick up the story. Every local channel aired photographs of Dot, Rose, and Jimmy, and every time she saw them, she flinched, but the news told her nothing new. All those nights, everyone had searched for Jimmy. They had all wondered and panicked, passing stories around like party nuts, about what they thought might have happened, and none of them had been true. He hadn’t been pulled into a car. He wasn’t kidnapped and living as someone else’s son.

  She turned the channel. Patsy Baker, the freckle-faced newscaster she liked, was staring out at her, talking about Jimmy. Ava hadn’t seen Patsy at the crime scene, but she was talking as if she knew all the facts. She talked to a cop Ava didn’t recognize, either, who looked uneasy and defensive, and when she asked him about the bomb shelter, when she asked why no one had looked for it back when Jimmy had first disappeared, he sighed. “No one told us about any bomb shelter,” he said. “Don’t you think we would have checked it out if we had known?” He pointed out that when a kid vanishes, the first twenty-four hours are the most important. “You have to do everything you can do fast,” the cop said. Patsy nodded gravely at him and then she mentioned that some people felt the detective in charge, Hank Maroni, had botched the case, hurrying it along, cutting corners because it was a working-class neighborhood rather than a wealthy one. He had been fired a few years ago for tampering with evidence on another case, and had died of a heart attack shortly after, believing he had been made a scapegoat.

  Ava sighed and then Patsy began talking about how they were calling in some of the old suspects. Ava felt relieved they hadn’t called her, but she wondered if they had found and called Jake or her other boyfriends, if once again, she’d be getting those angry phone calls. Then Patsy switched to talking about Bob Gallagher, how he had come back for questioning. He had insisted on a lie detector test, and the cops had had to call in to Boston to borrow a polygraph machine, and he had passed. “We have an interview tape,” Patsy said, and there was Bob, his face drawn, his forehead pinched in worry. Bob insisted that he had forgotten the shelter, that he had started building it when his son was a baby, but he had never even totally finished it. He’d given it up years ago, letting it rust shut, and he was sure that no one ever knew about it but him.

  The whole time Bob was talking Ava leaned forward, as if the real truth might be floating on top of his words and all she would have to do would be to be quick enough to skim it free. He kept talking and talking, revealing much more than the interviewer asked for.

  “I was afraid of Communists,” Bob said. He said he had read this pamphlet, Is This Tomorrow: America Under Communism! that spooked him every time he looked at the cover, where people were screaming in horror and running from a nuclear attack. What struck him most was the panic, the way neighbor clawed over neighbor to escape the bombs.

  He bought plans to build a fallout shelter, but he told no one what he was doing, because he couldn’t risk his neighbors wanting to storm the small space if there was an attack and jeopardize his family’s safety. There just wasn’t room. He hadn’t even told his wife, because he knew she was more soft-hearted than he was and she wouldn’t dream of shutting anyone out. He’d never tell his little boy who would consider it a playhouse, plus who could keep kids quiet about a thing like that? Instead, he crept outside at three in the morning, when his wife and son were sleeping. His yard was ringed by big trees and a fence. No one could see what he was doing. The building materials were all in the garage, mixed in with his workshop supplies, and he would carefully take them outside to the area he had specifically cleared, concealed by overgrown hemlock bushes. Surprisingly, no one seemed to wake at the noise, or if they did, not enough to come over and see what was going on. He worked by flashlight, hidden by the hedges and the trees and the dark night. When he was finished, he covered the opening with sod and then brought everything back inside or hid it in the yard. During the daytime, he yelled whenever he saw anyone even attempt to cross his lawn, and gradually people learned not to do it. Sometimes, walking in his backyard, he felt a surge of comfort just knowing it was there, that he could protect his wife and his son.

  He had it just about finished, stocked with canned goods and water, even a little cot. And then, one day at the dentist, he had picked up a magazine and read a piece by a scientist that said that a bomb shelter wouldn’t be enough in an attack. It wouldn’t protect anyone, and people who thought so were objects of ridicule. Bob had felt hot with shame. The more he read, the more he began to agree with the writer, and the more embarrassed he became. He felt duped, and the only thing to do was to try to seal it up and forget about it. No one had to know he had made a fool of himself. Not his wife, or his kid, or any of the neighbors. He’d find another way to protect his family.

  Patsy Baker looked out at the audience, her face grave. “On a sunny day, when most of the neighborhood was away celebrating at a local church carnival, one young boy’s tomb was a bomb shelter hidden under hemlock bushes. His mother died without peace, never knowing what had happened to her only son.” Ava stood up, sweating. She hadn’t known Dot was dead. She wanted to shake Patsy, to tell her to shut up. Tears tripped down her cheeks, but she couldn’t stop watching. She wished Bob had come back to the neighborhood so she could have spoken to him.

  “Let’s go inside,” Patsy said meaningfully. Film flashed on the screen and Ava thought, when had the TV crew filmed this? Why had the cops even allowed it? The film showed the bomb shelter. It was a metal well with a circular hole, a rusted ladder torn from the wall. “He must have fallen because his ankle was broken,” Patsy said. The camera panned across the two empty glass bottles, which had held water. It pointed out the flashlight, with batteries that had worn out, the two cans of tuna and one can of corn niblets, punctured with the rusty can opener. There was the rusted cot propped up against the wall, almost like a ladder, almost as if Jimmy had tried to escape. “Sources say he could have lived a week,” Patsy said. There were no books, no phone, no window. Just those thick walls that kept anyone from hearing Jimmy. Just the sealed over ventilation system that would have suffocated him. “If more people had known, if the police investigation had been more thorough,” she said, “perhaps this tragedy could have been averted.”

  Ava swiped at her tears. She turned off the television. She thought of Jimmy showing up on her front step, standing there as if he knew he was somehow expected. She didn’t know what she had thought, but sometimes she had imagined that she would hear from Jimmy again, that he’d just appear. When she saw him in her mind, he was in his twenties, like her Lewis, tall and handsome and so very adult. “I remember you,” he’d tell her, and she could say, “I remember you, too,” right back at him. She could take him out for coffee, show him off, a big, strapping, handsome boy now, and ask him about the girls he was dating, the ones who were in love with him. All that promise.

  Poor Dot, she thought. And oh dear God, that sweet little Rose. She hadn’t heard from either of them in years. No one had. The police must have contacted Rose and maybe it was a blessing Dot was dead, because what mother could bear hearing such news? At least Ava knew Lewis was alive, that he had a job, that he seemed happy, or at least he made a show of it on the phone to her when she called.

  It could have been Lewis in that shelter.

  Ava picked up the phone and called Lewis again. The phone rang three times, and then there he was. “Lewis,” she said, breathing into the phone. “I have to tell you someth
ing.” The whole time she was spilling out the story, he was quiet. She couldn’t even hear his breathing, which unnerved her. “Lewis, are you there?” she said.

  “I don’t understand,” he said. “This can’t be right.”

  “It is,” Ava said. “The cops said there were dental records. The sneakers.”

  “Jimmy wouldn’t go near that bomb shelter.”

  Ava started. “You knew there was a shelter? How did you know?”

  “We came across it once and went inside. But none of us would go down there ever again. It was too scary.”

  “What? You were inside? Why didn’t I know this?”

  “Mom, I don’t know—I was a kid, I didn’t tell you everything.”

  “But when the cops were here, why didn’t you kids mention it?”

  “We’d never, ever, think of it as a place he’d be. It never entered our minds.”

  She hesitated. “Do you want to come home?” She heard Lewis rustling in the background. “I have a job, Mom. I can’t just leave it.” His voice was so sad she wanted to burrow into it. He hung up the phone. For a while, Ava sat there, listening to the dial tone.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Two weeks before Rose heard about her brother, she was standing in the middle of a playground, watching her third-grade class swarming around with the fourth graders. Though it was the beginning of April, it was still cold, and her breath was pluming out in front of her. Her hands were buried in her coat, her collar turned up against the freezing wind. She tried to concentrate on the kids, to make sure no one was getting pummeled or teased, but the wind kept whipping her hair into her face and making her blink. She was twenty-three and she had been teaching less than a year, and she hated being in charge of two grades. No one was listening to her today. She kept shivering, clutching her coat tighter around her, wishing she had brought a sweater to layer under it. The kids were running wild, screaming like banshees, and every time she thought she knew where one kid was, he or she would run someplace else and vanish, and Rose would feel a clip in her heart. Just like that. They’d be gone.

  Usually, there’d be another teacher out here, someone who would huddle near Rose and gossip with her. She liked the other teachers, for the most part. When Rose was hired, the other third-grade teacher, Emily, had put her arm around Rose and said, “I’m taking you under my wing,” and she had. Emily not only helped Rose with lesson plans, she made her join the teachers’ Friday night pizza parties.

  Rose wished Emily was outside with her now. Sometimes there’d be a Thermos of milky hot coffee they could share, something to warm their hands, but it was flu season and half the teachers were out, including Emily, and the substitute had to watch another class. They couldn’t spare two adults for recess today. But they shouldn’t have left her alone out here.

  As her hair flew against her face, Rose grabbed a hank of it and tried to braid it as best she could. Through her bangs, she watched the kids prowling around the edges of the playground, by the woods, something they weren’t supposed to do. A boy in a too-big camel hair jacket, headed for the big maple tree the kids liked to climb. “Bobby!” she shouted, but the wind swallowed her voice. She waved her arms and he saw her. He dragged his feet coming back toward the other kids.

  She hated the woods. She didn’t understand why a school would want to be so close to a forest, without even a fence to separate all that wildness from the pavement. The woods were so vast, filled with lush and inviting plants, with bushes and trees that could hide so much. The principal wouldn’t listen when she suggested at least putting a fence up. “Fences cost money,” he had told her. “What are you so worried about?” he had asked.

  She told herself that she was in Ann Arbor now, far away from Waltham. There was no apparent danger here in this schoolyard. No one seemed afraid. She lived on East William Street, in a small apartment in a big white house, surrounded by university students and families. Crimes, when they happened, were usually petty robberies or someone crashing a car because they had drunk too much. Last month, a group of college kids had been busted for breaking into houses, but they never stole a thing. They had rearranged the furniture in funny ways, putting an armchair in the kitchen, a kitchen table upside down. They made and ate cheese sandwiches, leaving the crusts and the crumbs behind, using up all the fancy mustard. When they were caught and asked why they had done it, one of the kids had said, “Because we could,” and it had unnerved Rose. It made her think anything could happen.

  Rose stared into the woods. There it was, that feeling. Like she was thirteen years old again and she had swallowed ice. Like she knew something would happen. All she had to do was shut her eyes and she could remember how the woods smelled that day Jimmy had disappeared. She remembered the crunch of the leaves under her feet, the scratch of Lewis’s breathing next to hers. She could still feel the neighbors looking at her, as if they either blamed her or thought she knew something that she wasn’t telling.

  She wrapped her coat around her thin rayon dress, another vintage find from the thrift shops she loved. The kids thought the way she dressed was weird. “When are you going to get some style?” one of her students, a little girl in white go-go boots and a velvet headband had asked, and Rose had just laughed. She knew they thought she was mysterious, that she harbored some dark secret. Every time she taught them current events, they applied it to her in the most personal and strange way. A boy asked her if she had Negro blood. A shy little girl wanted to know if she was Vietnamese. Flabbergasted, Rose promptly taught a lesson on tolerance. But if Rose knew anything, she knew that you couldn’t stop people from believing whatever it was they wanted to believe.

  Rose glanced at her watch. They had five more minutes out here, but she had had enough. She took the whistle around her neck and blew it and the kids all turned toward her. They were all arms and legs, and it still astonished her that she was in charge of them, that they trusted her and did what she said for the most part. It always astounded her when their parents called her to ask for advice. Mostly, though, they listened intently, as if she held the key to their children. She knew what to say: that one child needed more attention at home; that another sometimes came in half-asleep, which made her wonder why he wasn’t sleeping at night. The parents nodded and leaned forward as if they had to catch every word she said, writing down her advice and singing her praises to her principal, who gave her a raise and clapped her on the back, telling her how valued she was. “You work harder than any of the other teachers,” he said. But how could Rose tell him that she worked so hard because what else was there?

  Rose got the kids into a semblance of a line and watched them go in the building. They socked one another, they chattered and hooted, but they did get inside, every last one of them. She made sure of it. And then, before she followed them inside, as she always did, she took one last walk around the playground, just to make sure no one had gone astray.

  WHEN ROSE AND her mother first moved to Pittsburgh, Rose had hated it. Pittsburgh was dirty and gray and the air always smelled like it had been dunked in iron. She asked her mother to buy her a big wicker box, lying, saying it was for school papers, and she kept all her clues about Jimmy in there: an old T-shirt of his, a wallet, her notebooks. She was the family historian, keeping it all alive. Every night, after her mother and Aunt Hope were asleep, she’d pull the box out from under the bed and touch the objects as if they were talismans.

  Living with Aunt Hope was worse than she had imagined. Hope had a horse face and wore clunky orthopedic shoes that sounded like drumbeats on the floor, and she was always yelling at Rose to set the table, to help fold the wash, to stop being so fresh even though Rose hadn’t said anything. Rose had her own room, but it was small, and it had a window that was painted shut. Every night Rose wished to be back home, to see Lewis’s window from her own, to feel soft carpet beneath her feet instead of this hard wood.

  Rose’s mother took off her wedding band and put it in a drawer. She stopped talking ab
out her husband. She never talked about Jimmy. “How many kids do you have?” a new neighbor asked and Rose heard her mother say, “One.”

  A few days later, Dot put on a brand-new red dress and took the bus into town. When she came back, flushed, she held up a bakery box, tied with red and white string. “Guess who’s the newest cashier at the Giant Eagle supermarket?” she said.

  It wasn’t much, but it was enough for them to rent their own place, a small one-bedroom on Howe Street with a fake gold lion at the front door. The Lion’s Head, the building was called, even though it was just a crummy block of apartments with green shag carpeting and fake wood beams stretching across the lobby ceiling.

  As soon as they moved, Rose couldn’t wait to write Lewis. She opened her Jimmy Stewart journal, half-filled with letters to him already. She turned to a clean page, sitting at the small white desk in her room.

  Dear Lewis.

  She didn’t know what to say. It was one thing to be right there with him, but here she was in a strange place, and without seeing his face, she had no idea what he might be thinking. I miss you, she wrote, but it didn’t seem like enough. She pushed the paper aside, figuring she would do it later. Lying in bed late at night, she began telling herself stories. Maybe he had new friends now. Maybe he even had a girlfriend. Was Lewis even still looking for Jimmy? She picked at the chenille spread. Jimmy was Lewis’s best friend, but he wasn’t his brother, no matter how close they were. Did Lewis still care?

  Out of sight, out of mind. That was something her mother always said. Every time she looked in a mirror, she saw Jimmy in her own face. Every time she watched her mother staring into space, she knew what her mother was thinking about and she knew she was somehow responsible for her mother’s sadness. But Lewis was on his own. Did that make him more vulnerable or less? She got up and went back to her letter. Dear Lewis, she started again.