Is This Tomorrow: A Novel (23 page)

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.

W
HEN
R
OSE 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 about 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.

She had loved the dark sweep of his hair, the flecks of green in one eye, like bottle glass. Other girls must notice how handsome he was. Lewis would have girls who weren’t damaged, who didn’t have a piece missing. Every time he looked at them, he wouldn’t be reminded of a terrible thing that had happened.

She sat up and suddenly felt too stupid to write to him. How could she tell him how unhappy her mother was? How could she tell him what her life was really like? She was fourteen and in ninth grade in a new school and all the girls clumped together and ignored her. When she walked into class with her hair still rough-cut like her brother’s, the girls, their hair teased into smooth bubbles, snickered. “Nice hair,” they laughed. When she asked a boy about the math homework in the hall, two kids walked by bumping her, so she dropped her notebook and pen. She had to dip to retrieve them and when she stood, the boy was gone.

Loser,
she heard.
Freak.
What had her mother done, moving them here? The first time she was invited to sit at a table with other girls in the cafeteria, she felt so glad and grateful she could have cried. She eased into a seat, half listening to the girls talking about mascara and whom they wanted to go steady with.

“You always look sad,” one girl announced, looking at Rose, and then all the other girls stared at her, too. “You do,” said one of the girls.

“My brother vanished,” Rose said.

There was silence. Rose could hear the girl next to her chewing her gum. And then one of the other girls dug in her pocketbook and pulled out a gold tube of lip gloss, swiveled it open and handed it to Rose. “You’d look good in this,” she said. “Purse your lips like you’re kissing someone. Try it on.” And then Rose did.

Rose kept trying to write to Lewis, but every time she did, she felt tongue-tied. She felt the same shame crowding in her life, making it so she couldn’t move from the table. She began to forget things about him. The sound of his voice. The exact color of his hair. Maybe it was a sign, she told herself. Maybe it meant that it wasn’t to be. She thought of him with another girl and imagined him leaning forward for his first kiss, only the girl wasn’t her, and she crumpled up the paper into a fist. She wished he could somehow just come find her. She smoothed the paper out again. She wrote to him about the day they were together in the woods, how she was afraid of the woods now, how she wanted him to write her, and then she sealed it.

“Can you mail this for me?” she asked her mother. Her mother looked at the address and then frowned. “Girls don’t chase boys. If he wanted to write you, he’d write you.”

Rose felt her mouth trembling. “He’s my friend.”

“Was. Was your friend.”

“He told me to write.” Rose could hear the desperation creeping up in her throat.

“Fine,” Dot said finally. “You make your own decisions. You don’t listen to me. You never did.” She watched Rose put the letter on the table, on top of the outgoing mail.

A
FTER THAT,
R
OSE
wrote Lewis every week. She told him about how gray and sooty Pittsburgh was, how the only part she liked was Schenley Park. She told him how she still had Jimmy’s map, that it made her feel better to still have it, because it was the one thing he’d want her to have for safekeeping. Was anything new going on in the neighborhood? Were people still looking for her brother? Was he? “Write me back,” she urged, printing her address in clear block letters with a big inky arrow pointing to it. She waited. She kept writing. Lewis never answered.

R
OSE GOT THROUGH
high school. She stopped writing Lewis, telling herself that he was part of a childhood she had outgrown. She forced herself not to look at the mail when it flopped in through the slot, not to get excited when the phone or the doorbell rang. When she was a senior and applying to colleges, she couldn’t figure out what she wanted to do. What would Jimmy have majored in, she wondered? He had liked so many things, maps and rocks and insects. They used to play school when they were little, Jimmy at the front of a portable chalkboard, being the teacher even though Rose was older. In the end, she decided to go into teaching, not just because it seemed like it might have been his path, but she liked the idea of watching over kids, seeing them grow. She got a scholarship to the University of Pittsburgh for a special four-year program where she could get her teaching certificate the same year she got her diploma. She lived at home, telling her mother it was so she could save money, but really, it was because she worried about her. Her mother’s jaw line had grown thick and slack, and she moved in a slow, careful way. At dinner, she often just picked at her food.

“Are you all right?” Rose asked her one night, and her mother waved her hand.

“I just want to lie down,” Dot said.

Dot spread out on the couch and slept so deeply that it alarmed Rose. Her mother would have slept through the night, but Rose shook her, wanting to make sure she was still alive. Her mother sat up, squinting, and then she took Rose’s face between her two hands. “I’m fine, honey,” her mother said, “just tired.”