Is This Tomorrow

by Caroline Leavitt

  Larry cleared his throat. “Ava,” he said, and it suddenly bothered her that he was calling her by her first name, that he wasn’t giving her the respect of calling her Mrs. Lark. “Of course you’re not a suspect. But you’ve had boyfriends. A lot of different ones, people said. Who knows how well you really knew them?”

  “I knew them. And they didn’t come over during the day or when Lewis was home,” Ava said, and then she flushed, realizing how that sounded. “I just didn’t want my son to meet anyone until I knew it was going to be something,” Ava said. “Some things didn’t work out.”

  “I see,” he said. “And you’re divorced.”

  “That’s not a crime. I’m allowed to date.”

  “So, these boyfriends, how many were there?” He tapped her arm with his pencil and her arm sprang back.

  “None of them would have touched Jimmy.”

  “Did I say that?” He wrote something down again. “Mrs. Lark, could you get me the names and numbers of all your boyfriends? We just want to ask them some questions. Nothing major. Same as we did here with you. It would be really helpful.”

  He pushed the pad to her. “I don’t remember the phone numbers,” she said, “I’d have to look them up.”

  He nodded, still friendly. “That’s okay. Just give me the names and we can find them.” She hesitated and he nodded encouragingly. He rolled the pen across the table and when she picked it up, it still felt warm from his hand.

  The faces swam up in her memory. Each name she wrote down conjured little bits of things, like different patches on one big quilt. Tom Sullivan. She had met him getting gas for her car. He had soft, pillowy lips that he would brush along her collarbone. Richard Meserve had been her accountant one year. He brought her flowers every date but then he yelled at a waitress for not bringing the water fast enough, and after that Ava didn’t want to see him again. None of her relationships had lasted very long. Not when they found out Ava wasn’t the good-time girl they expected. Ava wouldn’t pack up and take off for a weekend away because she had a son. Ava wouldn’t stay up drinking until two because she had to work. Ava wouldn’t peel off her dress and get right down to her skivvies after a first date. Ava wasn’t what they wanted, but they, too, had disappointed her.

  “Did any of them ever meet Jimmy?”

  “No. And they never met Lewis, either. Except for Jake, and that was after Jimmy was gone.” She hated saying that: gone. She felt a pang, remembering Jake’s dressy clothes, his gift. He had really tried. None of her other boyfriends had been terribly interested in Lewis as anything but a detriment.

  There were five names, and then six. Three a year, that wasn’t so many. She didn’t feel a single thing about any of them until she got to Jake, and then she began to tremble. She wrote out his name and it was all she could do not to touch the letters with her fingers, not to rest her face along the page. She pushed the pad across the table to Larry.

  He took it and studied the names. “That’s quite a list.” He stood up. “That’s all, Mrs. Lark. Just call us if you have any news, or you think of anything that might help us.”

  She stood up, glancing at her watch. Nine thirty. She was a half hour late to work. Even though the cop had called, Richard might still be furious. How was she going to explain what had taken so long? She thought of her in-box with all the invoices about claw-footed tubs and pedestal sinks she had to type, and she felt exhausted. She’d have to stay late to make up the time.

  AS SOON AS Ava walked into the office, Charmaine glanced at her. Betty tapped her watch. “I did some of your work,” Betty said to Ava. “Richard wanted it right away.” She held up the razor blade the women used to scratch mistakes from the carbons. “Lot of errors, Ava,” she said. Ava couldn’t tell if she was smirking or not. “Thank you,” Ava said. “I had an appointment.”

  Betty shrugged. “No skin off my nose. Long as you’re here now.”

  Richard hadn’t told them, then. It was one less thing for them to gossip about in the break room and thank God for that. She took off her coat and hung it up. Just as she had thought, her in-box was piled with papers. There were scribbled notes on her desk of the things Richard needed her to do, some of them with sharp little exclamation points after them, like stab wounds. She uncovered her typewriter and sat down.

  Then Cathy began talking about Maureen, a secretary in accounting who had run away and gotten married over the weekend and had called the office to announce she was quitting without notice. “Can you imagine?” Cathy marveled. “She said to just chuck her things.”

  “Why didn’t she at least stay for a party?” Betty said.

  “I’m so jealous of her I could spit,” Charmaine said.

  Ava kept silent. She couldn’t imagine having that luxury of quitting. She put a piece of paper into the roller, and Richard appeared. The other women straightened up, and Cathy fluffed her hair. Ava’s fingers froze on the keys. “Could you come into my office, please?” he said to Ava. He wasn’t smiling. The other women were watching her. She felt their stares, like a film on her body she wanted to scrub off. She walked into Richard’s office, sitting in the chair he pulled out for her.

  “I’ll work late to make up the hours,” she said.

  Richard waved his hand and sat down, putting his feet up on the desk. “First time in my life an officer of the law called me,” he said.

  “I’m sorry.”

  He waved his hand. “So what did they ask you?” His eyes were bright with interest. “What’s going on in that neighborhood of yours, Ava, and why would they ever question you?”

  “I’m not a suspect—”

  He laughed. “Of course you aren’t.”

  She didn’t know what else to tell him. “They just asked me some questions,” she said. She told him how she had driven around the other night in the cop car, helping to look for Jimmy, how everyone was worried. He listened, his eyes glazed with sympathy, but he didn’t say, “You have a son, take the day off,” or even, “If you need extra time, the break room is always open for you.”

  He let her go. She wound past him to the typing pool and sat down. “You get chewed out?” Betty asked, lowering her voice, not looking up from her typing. The return bell rang and she slammed the carriage back, frowning. Ava shook her head and stared at all the papers on her desk. She blinked hard, willing herself not to cry. She’d be lucky if she was able to leave by seven, let alone six, and she’d certainly have to work through lunch.

  She put paper and a carbon into the typewriter, trying to be careful so it wouldn’t smudge on her hands, and then her clothes. She should wear an apron, the way Betty did. The other women were busy typing. She put her hands on the keys.

  By three, when Lewis should be home, she felt anxious. Ava wasn’t supposed to make personal calls, so she waited until Richard was in a meeting and then dialed her home number. Lewis answered on the first ring. “Is your mother home?” she said, making her voice raspy, with a fake French accent she remembered from school, testing him.

  “Mom, I know it’s you,” he said. “And I’m fine.”

  Ava returned to her work, feeling better having spoken to Lewis. He had told her how everyone at school was acting weird because of Jimmy. “I have to work late, honey. Make yourself spaghetti for dinner,” she told him.

  The rest of the afternoon glided by. The sound of the typewriter keys, the steady ding of the carriage return bell hypnotized her. At four, the other women got up to go to the snack room for break, but Ava never went with them, so no one thought it odd that she was working straight through. She could hear them laughing and talking about hope chests and dresses and what to have for dinner. Plumes of their cigarette smoke swept out into the hallway. She kept typing when the five o’clock bell rang and the other women covered their typewriters, got their coats, and filed out. She kept typing when Richard walked by in his topcoat and hat, and for a moment, when she heard him clear his throat, she expected him to say, “Just go home. You’ve had a ro
ugh day.” Instead, he kept walking. The cleaning service came in, a woman who worked around her, and left quietly. She kept typing, only occasionally looking out one of the big windows that faced another building. She watched the other windows blink dark, one by one. A figure would move past her line of vision. A man in a coat. A woman in a beaded sweater and a fascinator, pulling on a pair of white gloves. She felt as if she were the only person left in the world.

  By the time she left, she was exhausted. She drove home in the silence, parking in the shadows. Opening the door, she found Lewis asleep on the couch, a book spread on his chest. His mouth was half-open, his forehead damp. She gently shook him. “Honey,” she said. “Go to bed.” He looked at her as if he were a kitten. “What time is it?” he asked.

  “It’s late. Go to bed, sweetie. I’m right about to follow you.”

  She made him wash his face, brush his teeth, and she leaned against his door watching as he fell into bed. “Good-night, Mom,” he murmured into his pillow.

  THE FOLLOWING MORNING, Ava woke to find a green flyer under her door. MEETING AT THE HILLS, THE JIMMY REARSON CASE, it said, 8:00. Ava was surprised she had been invited. She knew how the neighbors felt about her, and that she was somehow suspect because of all the time Jimmy had spent at her house. She knew, too, that the cops didn’t seem to appreciate the neighbors’ self-appointed search. Tough, she thought. She was determined to go.

  The Hills lived opposite Ava, but Ava had never been inside their house. She knocked on the door and Debbie ushered her in, as if seeing Ava was the most natural thing in the world. “We’re in the rec room,” she told Ava, showing her to the basement, which was so darkly wood-paneled it seemed to leach all the light from the room. A painting of a deer in the woods, carefully framed, gleamed above a wet bar. The deer looked so pained and startled that Ava wanted to tell it that she knew how it felt. A plaque hung beside the painting, festooned with a silly drawing of a man with his tongue lolling out, and a caption underneath: THIS PLACE RECOMMENDED BY DRUNKEN HINES.

  “Come on, I’ll get you seated,” Debbie said. She led Ava to the six card tables in the back, each one already filled with neighbors munching on cookies and sipping from bright, sweating aluminum glasses. “God bless Green Stamps,” Debbie said. “Those tumblers make even fruit punch look pretty.”

  Debbie’s husband, Dick, walked over, his hands filled with fliers that he held against his burly belly. “Dick, look who’s here,” Debbie said, touching her husband’s arm.

  “Where’s Lewis?” he asked. He nodded to all the kids scattered about the room, running around aimlessly or playing games. Ava had deliberately left Lewis at home because she didn’t want to subject him to the neighbors’ interest in what he might know.

  “Safe at home,” Ava said.

  “Let’s get you seated,” Debbie said. She put Ava at a table with the Corcorans, who lived one block down on Greer and had a son, Stanley, a year older than Lewis. Bob Gallagher, beside Ted Corcoran, nodded pleasantly. “Ava,” he said. Dick moved from table to table, handing out fliers. “We need to put these up everywhere,” Dick said. “On the bottom is a checklist of all the places we’ve looked already.”

  “Aren’t the police supposed to be doing this?” someone said, and Dick snorted. “Yeah. The police,” he said. “Like they get everything right.”

  There were all sorts of rumors floating around. There had been a TV crew to interview Dot, who had wept and begged people to come forward. Dot had offered to sell the house for reward money. “Is Dot here?” Ava asked.

  “Doesn’t Dot have enough to think about?” Dick said. “We’re doing this for her.”

  The flyer floated in Ava’s hands. HAVE YOU SEEN THIS BOY? the flyers said, and there was Jimmy’s grainy picture, reprinted from the Waltham Tribune. Ava touched his face. Below the picture was a hand-drawn set of eyes, the pupils dark so the eyes seemed to follow you. WE ARE WATCHING YOU, the signs said.

  Frank Fitzgerald, the locksmith, stood up. “I want to put deadbolts on everyone’s doors, free of charge,” he said. Ted, who owned a toy store, handled out silver whistles on silver chains to all the kids, stopping to hand one to Ava. “Any car or person comes near you or your kid,” he said, “you blow this like a hurricane.” Someone blew the whistle so it sounded like a scream and then Ted clapped his hands to his ears. “I’d like to keep what’s left of my hearing, if you don’t mind,” he said.

  “Kids, if you ever need to, you bite,” he said. “Kick them where it counts.” He gestured to his groin and Ava turned away, her face hot with embarrassment. “Go for the throat, the eyes, anywhere tender,” he insisted. The kids shuffled their feet and socked one another in the arm. “I’m carrying my Daisy rifle with me all the time,” Stanley said.

  “We could have seen him without even knowing it,” one of the neighbors said. “We could have brushed right past him.”

  “How do we know it’s a him?” Debbie asked, and Ava sipped her watery lime punch, and then set it down again.

  “We don’t. We don’t know anything,” said one of the mothers, but Dick snorted. “Women don’t do things like that. They wouldn’t know how.”

  “Things like this just don’t happen,” Ted said. Not in Belmont, not in Waltham, and certainly not in this new development where they lived, with rows of ranch houses and driveways and leafy backyards, an enclave where everyone knew everyone else, where every summer there were barbecues, the fathers in plaid shorts, the mothers in starchy cotton dresses, and the kids all got to stay up late and drink Shirley Temples in paper cups.

  “How the hell could this have happened?” Ted said angrily. “A twelve-year-old boy.”

  “The cops swarmed over my place like bees,” Bob Gallagher said. “I’m surprised they didn’t want to look down my throat. Especially that Maroni guy.”

  “I told him we were doing this neighborhood patrol and you might have thought I told him we had an atom bomb in here,” Ted said. “He told me it was a poor choice of time and resources, that speed was of the essence, but I don’t see them having any success. Why shouldn’t we look? Why shouldn’t we do what we can?”

  One of the other men handed out a list he had made of all the fathers who would scan the neighborhood every night, along with what things to watch out for. Unfamiliar cars. Strange people. “Stay in groups,” one of the men advised. “Be on the lookout.”

  Other groups were going to go into the woods behind the Northeast Elementary School to see what they could find. “Didn’t the cops look there already?” Debbie said. “We don’t want to waste time here.”

  “They sure as hell did,” someone said.

  “Not very deep,” Ava said and everyone turned and looked at her.

  “Well, we’ll go deeper then,” Bob Gallagher said.

  Debbie stood up, waving her hands as people began to get up. “Tomorrow night,” she said. “We meet here at seven and we scout the area. We see what we can find.”

  “What exactly are we looking for?” Ava asked and Ted frowned.

  “We’ll know it when we see it,” he said.

  WHEN AVA GOT home, it was nearly ten and the house was quiet. Lewis’s door was shut, but she cracked it open to check on him. He was sleeping. Then she walked back to the living room and stood at the picture window and watched the street, and the few times a car drove by, she tensed until she recognized a neighbor’s sedan. She kept going over and over the day of Jimmy’s disappearance in her mind, how Jimmy had looked, what he had said to her, and how quiet the neighborhood had been, and when she finally slunk down in a chair, her eyes wet, she was thinking about Lewis, too. You won’t take him from me, she had told Brian.

  She couldn’t sleep. She watched a little TV, until the test pattern came on, and then she read Marjorie Morningstar until it was two in the morning and she had finished it. When she closed the book, she felt vague and uneasy, and annoyed with Marjorie’s choices to give up her theater career, but what really could she have done differentl
y? She was about to make some coffee when she heard a soft knock at her front door. For a moment she was scared. Who would be coming by so late? Was this danger or simply some bad news she didn’t want to hear? Was it Jimmy? She cautiously parted the curtains, and there on the porch, his hands in his pockets, was Jake. He was never supposed to come at night when Lewis was there, but even so, she was so relieved to see him, she threw open the door. “I didn’t even hear your bike,” she said, but he stepped back from her, leaving her hands in midair, and then she saw how angry he was. “The cops visited me,” he said.

  She remembered Larry making her write down all those names. “Come inside,” she whispered.

  They sat in the living room. He told her how the police had come to the club. The cops approached him after his first set and wanted him to leave with them. “Can I finish my second set?” he asked politely, sure it was going to be okay, but the cops frowned.

  “Now,” one of them said.

  What do I have to hide, he thought, but the manager of the club was annoyed. “They can’t wait?” he asked Jake. “People came to see you play.” Jake didn’t like it, either, the way the cops escorted him out. They kept telling him it was no big deal, it was just routine questioning, but it was still pretty humiliating, especially when one cop automatically put one hand over Jake’s head as he got into the backseat. “They asked me if I was a beatnik,” he said wearily.

  Ava tried to touch him, but he moved away. “They’re asking everyone questions,” she said.

  “They asked me if I had ever touched Lewis.”

  Ava sat up. “That’s a disgusting question.”

  “Yeah, well, they asked me. They wanted to know what games I played with Lewis, what we did together.”

  “You only met Lewis the other night.”

  “They asked me if I had ever talked to any of the kids. I told them that I came to see you late at night when Lewis was sleeping over at a friend’s, so the neighborhood wouldn’t talk, but he seemed to think that was even more suspicious. He kept asking me where I was that afternoon, if I could prove it.” Then Jake stood up. “Jesus, Ava, I live alone. I play saxophone, I see you. That’s my life.”