Is This Tomorrow

by Caroline Leavitt

  The bomb shelter. All those years ago, he had taken an oath to forget they’d ever found it, to erase everything from that day, and now bits were resurfacing, like flotsam in a pond.

  It had been hot, he remembered that. The shiny yellow heat, the way they all had to squint their eyes. He was in fourth grade, and he and Jimmy and Rose were running around the neighborhood, crossing lawns, hoping to hear the tinkle of the Good Humor truck, money jingling in Jimmy’s pocket, enough for all of them. “It’s there! I hear it!” Rose shouted, and Lewis swore he heard the snappy little tune, too. He wanted a blue banana Popsicle so badly, his mouth was watering. They cut across Mr. Gallagher’s lawn, something they rarely did because either Eddy would be outside and want to tag along with them, and who wanted a baby trailing them, or Mr. Gallagher would yell at them for stamping on his precious grass. “It’s not your yard, it’s God’s yard!” Jimmy had always shouted, but Jimmy was always the first to run away from Mr. Gallagher, as if he were scared of him. “Quick! Hurry up, let’s get out of here!” Jimmy cried, racing after Lewis. That day, Lewis tripped over something and tumbled into the hemlock bushes, and it was then that he saw the loose sod, the ventilation pipe dotted with rust, and then the latch. “Hey, what the heck?” Lewis said. He pushed away more sod, clawing with his fingers, and there was a circular metal lid with some sort of handle. He crouched down, pulling the door open, peering into the dark. “There’s a room down here!” he said. “And a ladder!” Because they were curious, because they didn’t like Mr. Gallagher very much, they had gone down inside, climbing down one by one on the rickety ladder. There were twelve steps down, and by the time they hit the bottom, it was almost completely dark and twice as cool as it was outside, but it was also small and cramped, and as soon as Lewis was down there, he wanted to get out. He knocked elbows with Jimmy and bumped up against Rose, and when Jimmy grabbed him, he jumped. “Quit it!” he cried.

  “It’s too dark in here!” Jimmy said. “This place gives me the creeps.”

  “We’ve got a little light from the entrance,” Lewis said. He touched the wall, which was wet and sticky.

  “I found a flashlight!” Rose said, rolling the beam around the room, illuminating a narrow shelf with cans of niblet corn, string beans, and tuna, some deviled ham and chicken, and two big bottles of water. “Yuck, who wants to eat that?” Jimmy said. “Don’t they believe in potato chips?”

  “When did they even build this?” Rose said. “Who even knows it’s here?”

  “Creepy,” Lewis said.

  “Yeah,” Rose agreed.

  Lewis sneezed from the dust and Rose pasted her body next to his. “What is it, though?” she said. “Some sort of hideout? A bomb shelter?” Jimmy edged back toward the ladder, one hand on the rung. “I can’t breathe down here,” Jimmy said. His voice was like a skip on a record. “Can we go now, please?”

  He grabbed the ladder then, scrambling up the rungs until he was back onto the lawn, and then Rose and Lewis quickly followed. Once they were all outside, Jimmy broke into a run. “Jimmy, wait!” Rose shouted. “Where are you going?” Colors seemed suddenly dazzling and Lewis felt dizzy and sticky in the heat.

  “Come on!” Rose called to him and then she was running, too, and there was nothing to do but follow, springing across the lawn, following Jimmy into Lewis’s backyard, where Jimmy had stopped, scooped over, his hands on his knees, his head down. Rose shot Lewis a look, but he didn’t understand what she was trying to tell him, not until he saw the dark circle of pee spread on the back of Jimmy’s shorts. “Jimmy,” Rose said, and Jimmy sank to the ground, so he was sitting, so you couldn’t see. “You couldn’t get me to go in there again if you paid me a zillion dollars,” Jimmy said. His mouth trembled. He put his head in his hands.

  You couldn’t get me to go in there again.

  “It’s okay,” Rose said. She crouched beside him, sliding her arm about him, but he kept his head tucked down.

  Lewis sat down, too, so close to Jimmy, he could smell the pee. He nudged Jimmy. “Hey,” he said, but Jimmy shook his head, refusing to meet Lewis’s eyes.

  “Look,” Lewis said quietly. “We need to take a blood oath.” Jimmy looked up. “We need to all agree to never go back there again. No matter what,” Lewis said.

  “Never. Never. Ever,” Rose said.

  Jimmy pleated the edges of his shorts with his fingers. “And we can never talk about this,” Jimmy said. His voice sounded small and shaky. “Nothing about what happened today.”

  “Right,” said Lewis.

  “You promise?” Jimmy said. “No one can know?”

  “We can’t ever even mention it,” Rose said. “Not to each other, not to anyone. We shouldn’t even think about it.”

  “All in?” Lewis said.

  “In,” Rose said.

  “Me, too,” Jimmy said.

  Rose fumbled with a sparkly circle pin she had on her collar, springing the clasp and taking it off. She pricked her finger until a bead of blood showed and then she passed the pin to Lewis and then to Jimmy. “I’m going first,” Jimmy said, pressing his index finger to Lewis’s and then to Rose’s.

  “This never happened,” Lewis said.

  “It never happened,” Rose said.

  “This never happened,” Jimmy said.

  They wiped their fingers on the grass, and then the three of them got up and Lewis led them into his house. “My mom’s not home yet,” he said. He gave Jimmy a pair of his shorts, and when Jimmy changed in the bathroom, he took Jimmy’s old shorts and threw them in the garbage, covering them with trash so his mom wouldn’t see them.

  After that, they stopped walking across Mr. Gallagher’s yard. They never again talked about anything that happened that day. Lewis never even thought of it.

  Until now. Until his mother had told him where Jimmy had been found.

  If he or Rose had remembered that day, they might have found Jimmy. He might have been alive. They would have pulled him out, and Mrs. Rearson would have wept and hugged them, and he and Rose would have been heroes. And Jimmy would still be alive.

  Lewis rested his head in his hands. Jimmy hated it down there. Why would he even think to go in the shelter? It just didn’t make sense.

  Lewis got up from the table and went to work. He couldn’t shake the feeling that somehow he was to blame. Jimmy should have been with them. Lewis shouldn’t have dawdled at the library that day. But more than that, he should have known where Jimmy might be.

  All that day at work, he tried to pay attention to his patients, to concentrate on his job and do the things that made him feel good about himself. But when he brought the gallbladder patient in room 304 some magazines, she sniffed at him. “Who asked you for those?” she said. “Plus, you woke me up.” When he gave an asthmatic man a sponge bath, he turned around too quickly, spilling the water on the bed. “Oh, for crying out loud,” the man said, annoyed.

  Lewis wasn’t sleeping anymore. He couldn’t eat, and when he tried to force himself, the food tasted spoiled. He was desperate to talk to someone, to dislodge the ache in his throat, but he couldn’t talk to Ava because she was his mother. She’d want to protect him and he’d hear it in her voice, the way she wouldn’t be totally honest with him for fear of hurting him or making him feel worse about everything. He couldn’t talk to the guys he bowled with because they never talked about anything deeper than whether they should get chips or fries with their Cokes. Rita, too, was gone. He had even seen her walking in town the other night, holding some tall blond guy’s hand, and though he had felt happy for her, he had felt bereft, too.

  That was his fault, her leaving him.

  He scanned the roster of patients for the night, and when he saw Sheila’s name again, he went to see her. As soon as he walked in the room, he felt better. “Can’t stay away from this place, can you?” he teased.

  She winked at him. “Hello, handsome,” she said. She patted her chest. “My ticker doesn’t tock right again,” she said. Then s
he pointed to the chair by the bed. “Talk to me,” she said, and he sank down into the chair.

  He started to tell her the basics, how he and Jimmy and Rose had been so tight as kids, like a knot you couldn’t untie. He told her how much he had loved them, how he considered them family. She didn’t say anything, didn’t ask questions or judge, but she kept her eyes on him, occasionally nodding her head sympathetically, and every time she did he felt like telling her more. He was about to launch into his feelings about Jake when she reached across and squeezed his hand, and he suddenly noticed how frail she was, how tired she looked. “You’d better get to sleep,” he told her, rising.

  “You come back, though,” she told him. “You have to always come and talk to me. You promise?”

  “I do,” he said.

  He did come back, the next day, and the next. He made sure she had fresh water, enough blankets, and company. “Sit and talk,” she ordered. Each time, he told her a little bit more about his past.

  He came home but couldn’t sleep. Talking about Jimmy with Sheila had just brought back so much. He picked up one of his library books, about a scientist who journeys to the North Pole with a team of sled dogs, but he couldn’t stop thinking about Jimmy.

  Jimmy had missed so much, the world had gone on without him. Jimmy had never heard the Beatles. He didn’t know how to do the twist and he’d never seen Star Trek. He had never heard about Vietnam or had a first kiss or slept with a woman. He had never grown older than twelve.

  Lewis let the book drop. Because he had to do something, he took apart his kitchen and cleaned it. Finally, at five in the morning, he was exhausted enough to fall asleep. But the next day, he was a mess at work. He forgot to bring a patient a bedpan and she wet the bed, and even though he apologized and gave her clean linens and a fresh johnny to wear, she wouldn’t look at him, and he heard later that she had requested he not come to her room again. “You look like hell,” Elaine snapped at him. “Pull yourself together and don’t make more work for people here.”

  He felt it building inside of him all day, this voracious need to talk. He wanted to tell Sheila about the last part of the story, the part about the bomb shelter, but the more he thought about it, the more anxious he felt. Was she even really understanding him or was it just the wash of words that she liked? She never really asked him questions or said much, so was it really a conversation or was he fooling himself? Still, he couldn’t wait to get to her room, to unburden himself and talk, and in the end, what did it matter what was going on as long as they both felt better?

  By the time he got to Sheila’s room, it was past midnight and his shift was over. When he walked in, her bed was empty, the sheets pulled off. All the personal items on her end table were gone. A nurse walked by and he called to her. “Sheila went home?” he asked, and the nurse shook her head, continuing to walk. “She died,” she called to Lewis. “Peacefully in her sleep.”

  Lewis couldn’t move. He sat by Sheila’s empty bed, his hands over his face. She had been old and sick and frail and he knew patients died in the hospital all the time, that you had to steel yourself against it, but this time, he couldn’t. He wished that Sheila had had family, because then there might be someone he could tell how much he had liked her, how she had helped him, probably without even knowing it, and how he hoped that he had helped her. He stayed, not moving, until he heard footsteps, and he turned, but it was only another aide, her arms filled with linens. “Got to make up the bed,” she said, and Lewis got up and left the room.

  That night, he walked all over Madison. He passed the shops and the lakes, but he couldn’t stop moving. He ended up at the library and combed through four sets of Boston newspapers until he found all the articles on Jimmy. They all said the same thing, mentioning the bones, the old bomb shelter, the surprise that Jimmy was there in the neighborhood the whole time, under their noses, just waiting to be discovered. It didn’t make sense, not any of it. There was no sign of a struggle. Lewis was about to leave, when he saw the line, buried at the end of one of the articles and his mouth went dry: James Rearson is survived by his sister, Rose, a school teacher in Ann Arbor.

  Rose. He could always talk to Rose.

  SHE WAS NO longer hard to find. All he had do was get an Ann Arbor white pages in the library and trail his hand down the line of R names, and there she was. She had fallen out of his life when they were kids, but they were adults now, and they had shared this past. He didn’t know what to expect, or even what she’d be like. He only knew that he had to try. He copied the number down, put it in his pocket, and went home to call her.

  When she answered, her voice was so close, she seemed to be standing next to him. He heard papers rustling in the background. He swallowed, unable to speak. She sounded the same, and different, too, as if her voice had gone down a register. “Is someone there?” she asked, and then he straightened. “Rose,” he managed to get out. “It’s Lewis.”

  He heard her sip in her breath. “Lewis,” she said. “My God. Lewis.”

  “I heard about Jimmy,” he said.

  “I just—” she said, and then she stopped.

  “Are you okay?” he asked. “Oh Jesus, that’s a stupid question.”

  “I don’t know if I am,” she said. “Are you?”

  “No.”

  “I was so sure he was alive.”

  “I know,” he said.

  “I never gave up,” she said. “Never. I talked to everyone about him. I followed leads—”

  He rested his head against the receiver. “I never forgot him, either.”

  Her voice came at him like a rush. “People keep telling me now you can move on, now it’s over. But Lewis, it’s still not over, you know? If anything, there’s even more to figure out. I keep going through all the newspapers, even the old ones I kept. I keep calling the cops, but they don’t want to take my calls anymore.”

  There was a funny silence. “He wouldn’t go in that shelter willingly,” Lewis said finally.

  “That’s what I thought,” she said, her voice rising. “That’s exactly what I thought.”

  “It wasn’t an accident.”

  “No, no, I don’t think so, either. He’d never go even near there if he could help it,” she said. “There’s got to be more to this, more reason why he was there. People think I’m wallowing in this, that I’m crazy, that I need help, but something isn’t right. I just feel it. And I need to know what happened.”

  He heard the papers in the background stop rustling. When they were kids, she was always telling him to look at her face, that her expression or her eyes would tell him what he needed to know, but all he could see now was his shabby apartment, the phone in his hands. He wished that she were right there in front of him. “Can I come to see you?” he asked.

  She was quiet, and for a moment he was afraid she was going to say no.

  “You want to come here?” she asked.

  “Please, Rose.”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I’m not good company these days. I don’t sleep. I don’t eat. I burst into tears at the cookie aisle at the supermarket yesterday because I saw a whole rack of Sno Balls.”

  “Who else but me would know Jimmy only liked the white ones? And fuck being good company. I just want to see you. Rose, I’m a mess, too. But maybe we can talk about this. We can figure it out together.”

  She was quiet again.

  “Rose, please. Isn’t it worth a try?” He tried to think about what he would do if she said no, how he’d get through the endless long days ahead. “I’ll come just for a few days.”

  “I’m a teacher,” she said finally. “Spring break is coming up in a week.” I’ll have nearly ten days off. He heard the hum of the wires. “I have two weeks vacation coming to me,” he said. “You could come here, if you want, I suppose,” she said slowly. “You could even come a little early and see my class. You could camp on my couch if you wanted to.”

  THE WHOLE TIME Lewis was in Madison, he had only taken a
few brief vacations, and those were to visit his mother. He stayed only three days in Waltham each time because it was too strange being back in the neighborhood. The truth was that he liked working, being busy, being on his own. He liked the buzz of the hospital, the feeling of community. Now, though, he called in his vacation days. “You deserve it,” Elaine said, “Go somewhere fun and don’t think of us slaving here.”

  Before he knew it, there he was, on a Friday evening in Ann Arbor, three days earlier than he said he’d come because he couldn’t wait, and maybe, too, because he was afraid to give her too much time to change her mind. He was sitting in a small café. He had never thought he’d see her again, and he wasn’t even sure what he would say to her.

  “Lewis?”

  There was that shock of time, the way he felt when he once saw a photo of himself as a kid that he never remembered had even been taken. She was and wasn’t familiar. She still had that long hair, shiny as glass. Those bangs that hid her eyes. She was wearing cowboy boots and some sort of minidress. As soon as he saw her he realized he didn’t know anything about her. Did she have a husband? A child? He hadn’t even thought to ask her about her life when he called, but she hadn’t asked him about his, either. He glanced at her hands. There were no rings.

  She sat down. A waitress ambled over and set down two red plastic menus. “I can’t believe I’m seeing you,” Rose said.

  “Me, too,” he said. He didn’t know what he expected, that like in the movies, it might seem that no time at all had passed. That he’d feel instantly close to her and connected, but instead, he felt as if he were floating

  She studied him and then reached across and brushed her fingers against his hair. “I just wanted to see if you were real,” she said.