Is This Tomorrow

by Caroline Leavitt

  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.

  AFTER THAT, ROSE 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.

  ROSE 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.”

  When Rose graduated, she looked for local teaching jobs, but the market was flooded and the only jobs were out of state. “I can do something else,” she said, but her mother was adamant. “You’ll do no such thing,” she told her. “I’m fine here, and you’ll be fine away.” So Rose got a job teaching third grade in Ann Arbor, Michigan, at the Whittemore School.

  She returned to Pittsburgh to visit her mother every chance she could, which was usually during school breaks and the summer. One visit, during Christmas, Rose brought her mother some newspaper clippings she had found. One detective had found a missing child after six years! “There’s always hope,” Rose said, but her mother waved the clipping away and changed the subject. “Are you seeing anyone nice?’ Dot interrupted, and when Rose sighed, Dot announced she had a headache and went into the bedroom with a cool cloth and shut the door. Rose sat in the living room, her head in her hands, waiting for her mother to fall asleep. When she left two days later, she made her mother promise to see a doctor.

  But instead of getting medical attention, Dot began to do all the things she was always after Rose to do. She began to take classes in yoga and painting. She sent Rose photographs of her in full lotus. “Ten pounds thinner!” she scribbled across the picture. She sent Rose framed watercolors of the tree in her backyard. She joined a book club and mailed Rose all the books after she had read them, well-thumbed paperbacks with the pages turned back, which Rose read not because she enjoyed the books (she often didn’t) but because she liked the idea of reading the same book her mother had read. Dot got three raises in three months. She kept sending Rose photos about her new life as if it were a strange new country where she was vacationing—“Having a blast! Wish you were here.”

  But other times, Dot would swing in another direction. On the anniversary of Jimmy’s disappearance, she had called Rose at two in the morning, her voice thick with grief. “I have to get away,” Dot said.

  “Come here then for a visit,” Rose said, but her mother brushed her off. “You’ll be working. What will I do?” Dot asked.

  “You can read. You can hang out at my apartment or you can come to my class and read to the kids. You’d be a special guest. And I’m not working all the time. By three in the afternoon, I’m done. Please, I want to see you.”

  “I just needed to hear your voice,” Dot said, wearily.

  Rose went on trying to cheer her mother, talking about the third-grade boy who had kept a live mouse in his desk for two days before she had found out, regaling her with a story about how a student had brought her a gift, which turned out to be his mother’s best pearls. She heard her mother sigh. “I’m fine now, you go off to work,” Dot said.

  Rose’s mother was only forty-seven when she died. She had called Rose that morning, excited because she had a date, which astonished Rose because when was the last time her mother had even noticed men? “Why now?” Rose had asked and her mother had laughed.

  “Who knows?” Dot said. “Maybe it was just the right timing. He’s smart, h
e reads, and he’s single.” She told Rose that she had actually gone to a wine-tasting class, even though she didn’t usually drink wine or any alcohol, for that matter. She said all of the vintages tasted the same to her, no matter how hard she struggled to taste the cherry or the oranges or whatever else was supposedly lurking. Eventually, she became tipsy and she stumbled on her way out, and that’s when a man caught her arm. “His name is Tim,” she told Rose. He was a locksmith, and he helped her into a cab. He got her phone number, and later that night when he called and she said she didn’t feel well, he got worried and he came to her house. When she didn’t open the door, he jimmied it open, finding her fainted on the floor. “Wait, you fainted?” Rose said. “Wait! Are you okay?”

  “You’re missing the point of the story,” Dot said mildly. “It isn’t that I fainted—it’s that he came to check on me. It’s that he actually broke in to make sure I was all right.”

  “Are you all right? Do you need to see a doctor?” Rose swallowed. “I should come out there.”

  “Rose,” Dot said. “We’re going out to dinner tomorrow. He’s taking me to Nino’s and I’m going to Kaufmann’s to buy a new dress.”

  “But what about the fainting?”

  “What about the dress?” Dot said. “You remember how you used to love Kaufmann’s.”

  Dot was trying on dresses at Kaufmann’s when she crumpled in the dressing room. It took half an hour for a salesperson to find her—casually slumped over, as if she were asleep, a silky green floral designer dress, more expensive than she had ever even considered buying, spilled over her lap—and then another half hour for a doctor to come and pronounce her dead of a heart attack. A policeman phoned Rose with all the details, his voice deep with sympathy. She pressed the receiver to her forehead and cried, feeling just how alone she was going to be in the world from now on. She didn’t even know the last name of her mother’s boyfriend to tell him.

  It hurt her at different times of day, missing her mother. It came in waves. Sometimes when she was explaining fractions on the board, she thought of how her mother used to try to help her and Jimmy with their homework, once using her pop beads to illustrate subtraction, snapping off beads to make her points. Once, when Rose was crossing the Diag on a beautiful spring day and she saw a mother walking with her daughter, stopping to smooth her girl’s hair, to lean in for a hug, it was like a punch to the heart. Rose went into Angell Hall, into one of the stalls, to cry in peace, and when she closed the door, she saw the whole stall was covered with writing, in red and even green ink, question after question that people had posed as if this stall were Dear Abby. What does an orgasm feel like? Why doesn’t my boyfriend love me anymore? Help! I cheated on my exam and I need to find out if the professor knows it! The answers spilled over the door, around the side of the stall. Rose traced her hand along the wall. She got out her pen and looked for a spare space. She wrote: My mother died, my brother is missing, the boy I loved is gone, and I feel lost. Then she left the stall.

  She went back a week later, sure the joke was on her. The bathroom was empty and she walked into the stall where she had written her piece, shutting the door, and there, filling all the space, were six or seven responses. I know how you feel. Give yourself time. Someone left her the phone number of a detective and the admonition, Call! He’s great—he found my dog. Someone else wrote, Let me know how you are doing. We’ve all been in tough places. Rose rested her head along the wall of the stall. The messages seemed like the whispers of friends.

  SHE MISSED HER mother, and Jimmy, and Lewis, almost always at odd times, when the memories would bite like a mosquito. She sometimes went to the question-and-answer stall, which she had discovered everyone somehow knew about. “Oh yeah, the oracle,” a woman she sometimes had coffee with told her, laughing. “We all use it at one time or another.” The woman leaned toward Rose. “I won’t ask you what your question is, if you don’t ask about mine,” she said conspiratorially.

  Rose kept coming back to the stall, reading the questions and answers avidly. It made her feel better that she wasn’t the only one who felt as if she were foundering, that there were answers, and hope. Every few weeks, all the messages were scrubbed clean by the janitor, which always made Rose feel bereft until she saw them start up again.

  Rose tried to get close to people. She had friends, of course, and every Thursday, they all went out to dinner at the local diner and then to a movie. She had dated a guy named Ted, an accountant. She had made the mistake of telling him about Jimmy and he said, “Well, that happened a long time ago.”

  It was funny how every man she dated she compared to Lewis, though really, she had no idea what he would be like as a man, as a real lover. She had wanted to kiss him that day in the woods, imagining his lips soft against hers, but she hadn’t dared. She had been so young! Back then, she had thought he was the whole world.

  NOW HERE SHE was in her class, at the end of the day. She had been teaching a unit about the space race, and the kids were all excited. She had posted pictures from Life and Look magazines all over her bulletin boards and brought in Tang to make because it had been taken up into space with the astronauts, even though no one really liked the taste, including her. Today she had had the kids write letters to Neil Armstrong, which Rose promised to mail for them. She had thought the day had gone well until one boy told her that his father thought it was a big hoax because no one could go into space. “It’s not a hoax,” Rose had said calmly. Josephine, who was the smartest girl in her class, and the most sensitive, suddenly burst into tears.

  “What if the Russians get to the moon first?” Josephine sobbed. “Will we still get to look at it every night?”

  “No one can take the moon out of the sky,” Rose assured her. “Not even the Russians.”

  She clapped her hands for the kids to put their things away, and then she rounded up the kids to go home, counting their heads to make sure they were all accounted for. “See you tomorrow!” she called.

  She came home to her little apartment and got ready to go meet her latest boyfriend, Brady, at We All Scream, their favorite ice cream place. They had been dating for six months now, and to her relief, it was only slightly awkward. He was the new sixth-grade teacher at the school, and as soon as she saw him, she liked him for his dark hair as thick as a beaver pelt, and mostly for his mischievous grin. He was a botany nut who was always taking the kids on nature walks, helping them find lady’s slippers and identify maple trees just by the shape of the leaves. Her friend Emily had brought him around to Rose’s classroom to introduce him, and when he left, Emily nudged Rose. “Bet you two would like each other,” Emily said. Teachers weren’t really supposed to date, but when they did, they all kept it under the radar, sometimes not even saying casual hellos to one another when they passed in the hall.

  Brady was the same age as Rose. All the kids liked Brady, and the other female teachers crowded around him at the tables in the teacher’s lounge. Rose watched how easily they flirted, how they managed to swing over to Brady’s classroom and offer an extra stapler or home-baked brownies and cookies. Rose would see Brady out of the corner of her eye eating the treats, laughing, one arm thrown over the back of his chair. Before he began to date her, Rose could always tell when he was dating another teacher, because there would be a kind of intimacy just in the way he would pluck a grape from a stem and hand it to the other woman. Rose could tell, too, when a relationship soured, because the woman would start to eat lunch in her classroom rather than in the teacher’s break room. Nancy Lovell was so traumatized by the breakup that she stopped covering her short raggedy black hair with her fall. Flora cried and then began telling one joke after another, but she was never really laughing when she told them. All that fake pretense hid a smashed heart.

  Still, Rose couldn’t take her eyes off him. She loved when she and Brady shared a recess because she could watch him teaching his class how to bounce a soccer ball off their heads. None of the kids really knew what soccer
was, but they were game to try. “Use your noggins!” he shouted at them, demonstrating, thunking the ball with his forehead while the kids watched, openmouthed. He jumped up, his face shining. When he threw back his head and laughed, she felt her own mouth curving. He was such a big kid.

  When he had first asked her out, she was rolling out butcher-block paper and tracing her kids’ bodies on it. They were making life-sized as-exact-as-they-could-get-them replicas of themselves, cutting them out and coloring them, matching their hair, their eye color, the clothes they had on that day. Then they’d all tape the replicas to their chairs at their desks for the parent-teacher conference that evening. “You’ll be attending your first parent-teacher conference!” she joked with the kids. “These will be the first things your parents see when they walk in our room!” The kids squirmed on the paper while she carefully traced their outlines. Rose made a plump little boy a couple of pounds leaner. She gave a girl with thin wispy hair an outline of a more glorious mane. “Looks just like you!” she proclaimed. The kids took their time cutting out their figures, and then one kid, a girl named Janey Adams, tugged on Rose’s sleeve. “You should do it, too, Miss Rearson,” she said.

  “I’ll be there for real,” Rose said, but Janey shook her head. “Oh, come on,” Janey said. So Rose lay down on the paper and allowed her class to trace her. It felt funny being prone on the floor, the kids crouched around her, the smell of the heavy paper rising up like yeast, the sound of the tracing crayon skittering. From this angle, she could see a purple crayon ground into the floor in the corner, a drinking-straw wrapper deep under her desk. There was a tiny spider crawling along one of the open windows. One of her kids was tracing along her arm and she laughed. “That tickles!” she said and then she looked up and there, leaning along the door, looking down at her and grinning, was Brady. She got up, suddenly embarrassed, brushing down her skirt, smoothing her hair with her fingers. “We’re going to paste the pictures on our seats,” Rose said to him. She held out her hands, as if she were demonstrating holding onto the top of the desk. “It’ll look like the kids are here in the class, even though they aren’t.”