“Sometimes I have my doubts,” Lewis said. She had dark circles under her eyes, like stains and he wanted to touch them.
Neither one of them talked about Jimmy at first. Instead, she told him about her third-grade class, about her apartment. “I never guessed you would have been a teacher,” he said. “You were such an adventurer. I thought you’d backpack around the world or live in Costa Rica.”
She laughed and he saw suddenly how beautiful she was, which made him feel uneasy and strange, as if something were off. “What about, you?” she asked. “Let me guess. A scientist. Or a shrink.” She looked at him expectantly. “Am I right?”
“I didn’t go to college,” he said.
“You didn’t? But you were so smart. You used to borrow all my books, remember?”
He didn’t want to talk about why he hadn’t gone, so instead he shrugged. “I thought I could get myself an education on my own. I’m a nurse’s aide,” he told Rose. “I like what I do.”
She nodded. “Okay then. That’s good.”
“No kids, no husband?” he blurted and she smiled ruefully.
“I just broke up with someone,” she said.
“I’m on my own, too.”
He told her about his job, how he was the one the patients called for by name, how they dubbed him “that nice young man who doesn’t hurt,” and Rose laughed again. The waitress came by and they both ordered spaghetti. “Back in a jiff,” the waitress said. Rose leaned forward on her elbows. She told him how Dot had died, how she had stopped talking about Jimmy, how she kept all the photos boxed away where you had to get a step stool to reach them. “I think maybe it’s good that she died when she did, that she didn’t know how it ended,” Rose said.
The waitress set down their plates, drowning in sauce. Lewis took a bite and then put it down. It was like hospital food. It had the same smell, that texture, like socks boiled on a stove.
“You never wrote,” Lewis said.
She picked at her spaghetti, winding the noodles around her fork. “What are you talking about? I did write you. Every week. You never wrote back and I couldn’t understand why.”
“I never got any letters from you,” Lewis said. “I would have written you whole novels if I had.”
Rose put her fork down. “None?” she said. He shook his head.
“I wrote so many,” she said. “Every week. My mother kept telling me that if you had wanted to write me, you would have, that I was wasting my time.”
“I don’t understand,” Lewis said. “You remembered your return address? The stamp? You mailed them?”
“My mother did,” she said.
Lewis frowned. He thought of how Dot used to send back the casseroles people brought her, how his mother would go over to talk to her and Dot would sometimes refuse to even open the door.
“Did she want you to write me?” Lewis asked.
“God, no. She said girls don’t chase boys.” Rose put her fork down and frowned. “Oh no,” she said abruptly. “I never once thought that she’d—”
“Me, either,” Lewis said. He looked at her and thought how different his life might have been if he had gotten her letters, if he had had her friendship to get him through high school. She wouldn’t have been like a phantom limb all those years, there but not there. Maybe he would have even tried to go to college where she went or at least near her. But he couldn’t say any of that to Rose, not now.
“I’m so sorry,” she said. “For both of us.”
“Me, too.” He pushed his plate away, no longer hungry.
“What about your mom? How’s she doing?”
“I don’t see her all that often.”
“You’re kidding. Why not?”
“I’m in Madison. She’s in Boston. You know.”
“Want to know something? I always wanted her to be my mother. She used to talk to me like I was important and smart and special. She listened to whatever I had to say, even if it was just about clothes, and she’d look at me like it was crucial information she just had to know. I ate dinner at your house every night, remember? She gave me her lipsticks.” Rose paused. “She was amazing. You know, in the mornings I used to hear her collecting bottles out of the trash for the refund money. I knew she didn’t want anyone to know.”
“My mom did that?” He felt hot with shame.
“One time, I saw Mr. Hill come out and he watched her collecting the bottles, not helping or anything, which made it sort of creepy, and she looked up at him and he said, ‘You don’t have to do that.’ He walked over to her and he put his arm on her shoulder in a funny way. He leaned in closer to her, and she froze and then he said something to her that I couldn’t hear and I don’t know why, I ran out in my nightgown and bare feet, and as soon as he saw me, he took his arm away, and then suddenly the conversation was about me being barefoot.” Rose dipped her head. “I wanted to stay outside and help her, but she wouldn’t let me. I told her she had to walk me home even though I could have gotten there by myself. Mr. Hill gave me this look, and then he finally turned and went back inside his house.”
Something knocked in his head. “I never knew about that”
“You would have hated it if you had known, so I never told you. But me—I lay in bed and every night I knew she was outside and near me, collecting bottles, and I liked that. She seemed powerful to me. There were all these bad stories about your house, but it was the only place I ever felt safe.”
She tapped his hand. “You should go see her more often,” Rose said. “You can’t wait on these things because one moment people are here, and then they’re not.” She motioned to the waitress, making a check mark in the air.
They went to her place, a square little apartment in a squat building on East William Street. By the fifth flight up, Lewis could see how this would get old fast, but Rose didn’t seem to mind it. He trailed behind her, watching her legs flash on the stairs, and he suddenly wanted to take her hand. He dug his hands deeper into his pockets.
Her apartment was all wood and green plants, with a well-worn Oriental rug in the center of the floor, which had plant patterns in it, too, as if she were outdoors even while she was inside. He stopped as soon as he passed the photo of Jimmy she had hanging on her wall, staring at it because Jimmy seemed too real, so immediate. She touched his arm. “Sit,” she said, motioning to the red velvet couch and he did, running his hand along the nap, thinking of her mother’s orange and brown plaid couch back in Waltham. Rose sat on the couch, too, facing him.
“Do you think we would have stayed friends if we had kept in touch?” she asked.
“I wanted to,” he said.
She swept a curtain of hair to one side of her neck, leaving the other side exposed, and he suddenly couldn’t swallow. He looked away, embarrassed, and then back at her again. He had come to her apartment to talk more about Jimmy, but neither one of them had said a word.
“What’s wrong?” she asked. “You look worried.”
“I thought I was hiding it.”
“You still can’t hide anything from me,” she said, half smiling.
“I think I’m just tired,” he said, because he didn’t know what else to say, and as soon as he said it, he hated himself because she got up and started taking blankets from a side closet, ending the conversation.
AFTER ROSE SET Lewis up on the couch, she closed her door and though he heard her rustling in the other room, he couldn’t imagine what she was doing or how she was feeling, or if she’d be able to sleep. As soon as he shut his eyes, he saw Jimmy, crouched down in the bomb shelter, his arms around his knees, the way he had when he had peed his pants. Lewis turned over on the couch, so he was facing the window. There was no window in the bomb shelter. No air. He bolted upright, and then Rose’s door opened and she came out, a blue robe tied around her. “You, too?” she said and she came and sat opposite him.
“I keep thinking about Jimmy,” Lewis said.
“I never stop.” She rubbed her eyes and then leane
d toward him. “Why did he go in there?”
“We never would have thought to look there for him. Never,” Lewis said.
They talked about it, how the cops had searched everyone’s house, closet, basements. How it had been so chaotic and urgent. “Remember that one cop Maroni?” Rose asked. She shook her head. “Moron-i,” she said. “That’s what he was. A big Moron-i.”
Lewis remembered the cop, big and beefy with slicked-back hair. He was always clapping his hands at the kids, scattering them. He warned people not to mess things up. “Just let me do my job,” he snapped.
“It doesn’t make sense. Everyone was looking everywhere,” Lewis said.
“But we didn’t look there. We didn’t even think of it.”
“Neither did Mr. Gallagher.”
He thought of how the neighbors had made lists of all the areas that had been checked out so they wouldn’t waste time searching the same places. He remembered the checklist of places in one of the neighbor’s rec rooms. “It feels so awful. That we’ll never know.”
Rose adjusted and readjusted the pillow on her chair, settling one on top of another. There was a silence like taut wires. She went over to her bookcase. “I’m the family historian,” Rose said, crouching to the bottom shelf. “I keep looking at these things over and over.” She hesitated. “Do you want to see them? Some people don’t—”
“Of course I do.”
The creases on her forehead smoothed. She tugged out a big wicker box, dragging it over to the couch, opening its lid like a mouth.
She pulled out an old photograph album, the black paper pages filled with clumsily pasted pictures. There Jimmy was at ten, grinning, flashing silver toy pistols into the air. There was a photo of Jimmy with Rose, the two of them dressed up for church, Rose in a fussy plaid coat buttoned to her throat, Jimmy in a tie and a dark suit. She traced one finger over it. “God, but I hated that coat,” she said. She pointed to another picture. The three of them, Rose, Lewis and Jimmy, standing in Lewis’s backyard, their arms around each other, in shorts.
Now his hands were trembling. “I don’t think I ever saw these photos.”
“Sure you did,” she said.
She dug deeper into the box and then brought out a folded, tattered piece of paper and handed it slowly to him, like it was something important. Her face was grave and he opened it. The map. She had saved the map. He touched the soft surface as if it were ancient parchment. The map was riddled with pinpricks and he followed their path marks as if they were Braille. If he shut his eyes, he could see the colored pushpins he and Jimmy had placed in each point, the blue pins for the places they had to go to, the red ones for side trips. Every place and every pushpin had meant something to both of them, like prophecies they were determined to fulfill.
“My mother threw out almost everything of Jimmy’s, but I held on to this.”
He could just barely make out the notes Jimmy and he had written under each state, the writing so faded now, he had to squint. Our First stop. Uncle Bob lived here. Lewis looked up at Rose helplessly. “Let me show you some more things,” she said, and he reluctantly gave her the map and watched her fold it back up.
She pulled out birthday cards from Jimmy, one with a cartoon dog wearing a birthday hat, another with a duck perched on top of a cake. There was one from Rose’s mother, with garlands all over it, and then one expensive-looking big one that was all purple with white lettering made out of lace that said simply “Happy Birthday,” and when he opened it, Ava’s name, like a shock, jolted him. With lots of love, Ava had written. “My mother sent you cards?” he said, and Rose nodded. “She was really good to me,” she said.
Lewis fingered the card. Why did his mother’s secrets always ambush him? He felt a flare of jealousy that Rose had known this soft, loving side of his mother. He looked back down in the box, rummaging a bit, and then as he was about to lift up a plastic slider puzzle, he spotted half of Jimmy Stewart’s face on Rose’s old notebook, the same one she had used to collect clues about Jimmy’s disappearance, and his hand stopped in midair.
Rose glanced at the notebook. “I saved everything. I thought I’d be able to give it to Jimmy when I found him.”
Lewis’s own notebook was long gone. He had stuffed it in a drawer the week Rose had left, and when he took off for Madison, he didn’t even think to take it with him.
He had never even seen what was inside her notebook before. They had always planned to compare notes, but they never had somehow. He leafed through the pages. His notebook had been full of facts: the times neighbors came and went, the license plate numbers of cars he didn’t recognize, and lists of all the places Jimmy might have gone: the Star Market, Harvard Square, the zoo. But Rose’s notebook was full of poems, drawings, letters to Jimmy, and even what looked like stories. “I thought we were putting clues in here,” he said, turning the pages, and she shrugged, embarrassed. “They were my kind of clues,” she said.
He turned a few more pages and caught sight of his name scribbled in a girlish looping slant. No one knows how much I love Lewis.
He looked at it, shocked, reading a few more lines. Even Jimmy never knew, though he sometimes wondered why I wanted to hang around with someone younger all the time. I don’t know what to do, who to talk to about this. I can’t talk to my other friends because a) I don’t have any and b) they’re all too busy having crushes on older boys in high school, and c) they think I’m immature, that I don’t feel as much as they do, but I know I feel more. I can’t talk to my mother because she’s busy blaming me, and forget Ava because she’s Lewis’s mother. Worst of all, I can’t talk to Lewis because he doesn’t know I love him, either.
“Oh, no,” Rose said, her voice lowering, “No, no, no,” and she put her hand over the page. She tugged the journal back to her, but not before he saw another line: How can I love Lewis like this when my own brother is missing? She quickly began stacking things back in the wicker box, closing the lid and latching it tight.
“Rose,” he said.
“I was such a kid,” she said quickly. “So dramatic.” She smoothed the cover of the basket, and he saw how flustered she suddenly was, and it made him feel unmoored, as if everything he had thought he had known about his past wasn’t quite true anymore.
“Why didn’t you ever tell me?” he said quietly.
She hesitated, fanning her fingers over her mouth for a moment, before letting her hand drift back into her lap. “I was afraid.”
“But we were always together and you never said anything. And when you left, when I didn’t hear from you, I assumed I didn’t matter.”
“You mattered,” she said. He heard her swallow. “Remember how we used to touch foreheads? How I’d think the color red and you’d just know what it was?” she said.
“I didn’t always know.” He remembered thinking he was always guessing, trying to please her. She’d smile and clap him on the back no matter what he said.
“Every time we did it, I knew how I felt about you,” she said.
“Rose, I’m so sorry—” he started to say, but her smile had turned funny. He didn’t know what else to say to her. She got up and slid the closed box back into the bookcase, shrugging. “It’s in the past,” she said, but she wouldn’t look at him.
“It’s late. We should get some sleep,” she said shortly, and then retreated to her room.
THE NEXT DAY was Saturday and they were awkward around each other in the morning. Lewis didn’t know what to say or do. “My apartment is your apartment,” she said, opening the cupboard and showing him the collection of cereal boxes. He chose the Sugar Frosted Flakes and poured them each a bowl. Neither one of them was talking much, and the click of their spoons was driving Lewis crazy.
“I have an idea,” Rose said, her whole body brightening. “Let’s go swimming. I know the perfect place, Pickerel Lake. It’s only a twenty-minute drive from here.”
“Swimming?” He remembered when they were kids and Rose would take them to th
e pool at Green Acres Day Camp when no one was there. Lewis couldn’t swim, but he didn’t want anyone to know. He knew Jimmy would tease him, so he stayed in the shallow end, pretending that he wanted to be just lazily walking around the pool on his tiptoes, occasionally dunking his head. But one day, when Jimmy was at the doctor, Rose took him swimming, just the two of them. Rose dove into the water and then swam over to him in the shallows. “Hey,” she said. “I learned this cool new stroke.” She paddled her hands in the water, her eyes on his, and then he mimicked her. “Come on, let’s have a dog-paddle race,” she said, and he had lowered himself in the water, scooping at it, and to his surprise, he was moving, swimming, actually covering ground. When he finally stopped, grabbing on to the edge of the pool, he turned and saw her treading water, acting as if this were no big deal at all, but her eyes were shining. “You won,” she had said casually.
He had loved swimming after that, but he hadn’t gone since he had been living in Madison.
“We can stop on State Street and grab you a swimsuit,” Rose said.
AS SOON AS they got to the lake, Rose wondered if she had made a mistake. She remembered when Lewis was little, the one way she could get him to relax was to get him out of his head, to make him run races with her, or go for a bike ride or anything physical. She’d suggest crazy things to do back then, and he would just do them with her. This morning, when he was so silent and strange about the cereal, she hadn’t known what to do or what to say, and swimming seemed like a good idea. But now, here she was, in her little black bathing suit, the one Brady always said made him want to carry her off to her bedroom, and she suddenly felt naked and embarrassed. It was a small lake with a beautiful sandy beach, and no motors were allowed, so it was quiet and private. She had thought it would be pretty, and it was. You could see bluegills, sunfish, and she had spotted a catfish already. She looked up at the sky and a hawk was lazily swooping in the air. And there Lewis was, in the swimsuit he had bought, and she could see his strong chest, the muscles in his arms and legs, the warm olive tone to his skin. She felt her face heat up. She ran into the water and began swimming, the shock of the cold water making her shiver. She could hear him, and then she turned and watched him in the water. She didn’t know why she expected to see him sloppily swimming, still doing a dog paddle. Instead, his strokes were graceful. He looked as if he had been born in the water.
Is This Tomorrow Page 28