Is This Tomorrow

by Caroline Leavitt

  He saw her shoulders visibly relax. She reached over and took his hand. “Look at me, getting so upset about the past,” she said. “I’m too old for this.” He noticed, then, the slight sag of her chin, a thread of gray in her hair. People were coming into her café, talking and laughing. The man who had taken her elbow was leaving. “I’m just glad to see you. That’s all I care about. The rest is nothing,” she said.

  “I’m glad to see you, too.”

  She stood up. “Come on,” she said. “I want you to taste my pie. Cinnamon plum and I guarantee it will knock your socks off.”

  He watched her get up, and his first inclination was to go help her, to make her sit down so he could serve her, but instead he sat back. When she returned with a red plate in her hands, silverware rolled into checkered linen, all he could say was, “I’m sorry.”

  “For what, honey?” She fussed over the table. She set the plate down, unfurling the napkin and handing him the fork. “Eat your pie,” she told him, but it wasn’t the same tone she used to get him to eat his dinner when he was a kid. No, this had pride in it. She waited while he took a forkful. Never had he tasted anything like this, the plum intense as a sparkle, a spice so mysterious that he couldn’t place it. “Is it good?” She put her hand to her mouth, waiting, and when he shut his eyes and sighed dramatically, she laughed. “I need a second slice to make sure,” he told her.

  THAT EVENING, WHEN she was done with work, he followed her home in his car, making the turn onto Abbott Road, and then to Warwick Avenue again. It always looked the same and different, the suburban houses, the streets he had roamed with Jimmy and Rose. It was like a newsreel of his past unspooling toward him and he couldn’t stop it. There it was, his old house, blue with white shutters and yellow flowers all around. Always the yellow flowers. Catty-corner across the street was Rose and Jimmy’s house and a few houses down, the empty lot that had been Mr. Gallagher’s.

  Ava parked in the driveway and he pulled up along the curb. She sprang out of the car, giddily waiting for him to join her. “With the café, I’ll be able to buy the house in a few years,” Ava told him. “I told you I would. And I’ll be able to fix it up more, too.” She couldn’t wait to open the door, to show him. “It might still smell a little like paint,” she told him. “I just finished yesterday.” As soon as he stepped inside, he felt disoriented. He touched the walls of the living room as if to ground himself. He remembered them white, but now they were a soft, soothing green, and she had a new darker green rug on the floor. “I splurged on that rug,” she told him. “But it’s so worth it, isn’t it?” The kitchen that used to be yellow was blue, and there was a big white formica table planted in the center of the floor. “Just got it. I needed something bigger for baking,” she said.

  “It’s really nice,” he told her.

  “I always knew it could be,” she said.

  THAT EVENING, THEY took a walk around the neighborhood. At first, all he could think about were the neighborhood patrol walks, the way the neighbors had peered out their windows, but tonight there were kids spilled out on the streets, biking, playing jump rope, hanging out. He didn’t recognize any of them, though they all knew Ava. “Hi Ava!” they called.

  “I test out my new pies with them by giving free samples,” she whispered to him. “That’s why they’re so happy to see me. I keep them sugared up.”

  “It’s got to be more than the pies.”

  “Well, maybe,” she said. “I treat them like people, not just kids.” She pointed out the houses, telling him who had moved and who had stayed. Bob Gallagher was gone, of course, but some of the old-timers were still there, including Debbie and Dick Hill. Debbie had taken a part-time job selling dresses at Grover Cronin’s and had even started a consciousness-raising group. “There’s a lot of new people, too,” Ava said. “I’m now introduced as ‘the woman who run the café.’ ”

  He looked at her. She was still lovely, but there wasn’t the shock of her anymore. When a woman came out of a house across the street, Lewis was surprised to see she was wearing the same black stretch pants Ava was, that her hair was as untamed as his mother’s. The neighborhood women had all caught up to her, or maybe she was still forging ahead in ways he couldn’t even imagine. Well then, good for her. “You’re really brave,” he said, and she smiled.

  “What brought that on?” she wanted to know, but he just shrugged.

  “I’ll come visit more often.”

  “You’re always here with me. Don’t you know that by now?” she said.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Three days later, Lewis was back in Madison, walking the halls of the surgical ward, his sneakers padding on the floor. He had returned with three of Ava’s pies, which the nurses had already made short work of. “You tell your mother to move here,” Elaine said. “I’ll find her a job just so I can eat these pies every day.” Already, he had been called to help lift a man from his bed to a gurney, the man thrashing against him, whacking Lewis in the chest and knocking the breath out of him. Lewis had cleaned up vomit in room 412, a young woman heaving into the sheets. He listened to Elaine snap at him for not draping a patient properly for a sponge bath. “Vacation is over, buddy,” Elaine said. “Two weeks and you forget everything?”

  He took an early lunch, going outside. It was always a surprise to be out in the fresh air.

  He walked. He hadn’t really been hungry since he had gotten back, but he forced himself to stop at a deli and get something to eat. His roast beef sandwich tasted chalky. His apple was spicy. No one at the hospital had really asked him about his vacation, and when in the nurse’s break room he had offered, saying, “I saw my father for the first time in years,” another nurse said, “I hope I never see my father. Let me tell you what he did to me, that stupid bastard . . . ” But this time, Lewis couldn’t focus the way he usually could on what the nurse was saying. His eyes wandered to the door and the nurse finally said, “What’s the matter, you sleeping?” and Lewis excused himself.

  After lunch, he went back to work. The woman in 401 needed to be walked, but when Lewis went to get her, she scowled, shrinking from his touch. “Don’t be so rough,” she snapped. “Just hang on to me so I don’t fall.” All he had to do was escort her up and down the hall for ten minutes so her muscles wouldn’t atrophy. Holding on to the tender skin of another person used to feel so intimate to him, but today, it just felt practical. He used to love to listen to his patients, to hear their stories, but this woman was complaining about how her daughter’s kids didn’t show respect, and Lewis tuned her out. “Tomorrow, I’ll tell you about my grandson,” she said. “He lives in Massachusetts.”

  “So does my mother,” Lewis said, and with a start he realized it was one of the first true things he had told patients about his life.

  He realized he was tired of making up his life, telling people stories. As the hallways stretched out in front of him, he saw he had all these people in all these rooms to talk to. He could march down the corridor to the pay phone and call his mother and she’d be delighted to hear from him, but it wouldn’t kill the jumpy feeling. It wouldn’t fill the hole. Ava had told him once that he could keep himself from getting lost if he just could pay attention to the signs and then he would know where he needed to be. But he didn’t see any signs now. There was no place he wanted to be, except with the person who knew everything about him, the person who had been through it all with him. He wanted to be where Rose was and no map had directions on how to get there.

  The next morning, he walked into Elaine’s office and quit. “I want to take some time, figure out what I want to do in life,” he told Elaine. To his surprise, she reached over and took his arm. “Don’t go,” she said. “You work harder than anyone else, and you’re smarter and faster, too. I can’t do without you.” She studied him. “What will it take to keep you? Do you want a raise? I could see about getting you trained to draw blood. It might be a little difficult, but I could do it.”

  “I need t
o go,” he said and she sighed. “I’ve been here long enough to know the doctors, which ones are good guys, which are not. Before you go, you see this one. Just in case.”

  “I don’t need a doctor,” Lewis said, but Elaine kept scribbling and then handed him a piece of paper. Dr. Mark Kawolski, it said. Lewis didn’t even know him.

  “He’s a psychiatrist,” Elaine said. “He’ll swear and so will I that you are totally mentally unbalanced and can’t go to Vietnam if you’re drafted. He’ll write you a letter.”

  “Why didn’t you give me this before?” He looked at it astonished.

  “I knew you didn’t need it before. If you go off, I won’t know that.”

  Impulsively, he reached across and hugged her, and when she pulled away, he saw her eyes were shiny with tears. “Don’t make me have to find you,” she said. “You keep in touch.”

  LEWIS DIDN’T HAVE a lot of money saved, but he wasn’t worried. There were hospitals everywhere, and he could pick up work wherever he went, and he didn’t really need all that much. He’d sleep in his car if he had to. If he got lonely, he could always find people who would talk to him. He knew he had that gift, but getting them to listen might be something else.

  Suddenly, the world felt brimming with possibilities. If he wanted, he could take the SATs again and apply to college and this time, with a work record behind him, he bet he’d get in somewhere and they’d give him money. He thought of all the things he could be. Maybe he’d even go to medical school. He didn’t have to make a final decision about anything in his life right now, but he was beginning to see the possibilities.

  The next morning, he packed the car. He spread out Jimmy’s map on the seat and tried to feel where he needed to go.

  ALTHOUGH THE DREAMS stopped the day Lewis left, Rose was surprised to find she didn’t feel any better without them. At least she had seen her brother in them. She popped Sominex every night, waking astonished that the world was still going on and there she was in it, not having a clue what to do next.

  Rose arranged for her brother’s remains to be sent to a local funeral parlor where she had them cremated. When they called her to pick them up, she was handed a small brown box, which she carried carefully. Anyone looking might have thought she was bringing home cupcakes from the bakeshop. She put the box in the living room, staring at it, trying to figure out what to do with it. Burial was out of the question. Her brother had been shut up underground in a small enclosed space for too many years. She wouldn’t do that to him again. Jimmy needed to be out in the open, in the broad daylight, and the only thing she needed to figure out was where.

  She loved Ann Arbor, all the parks and lakes. She wanted him someplace where she could always go and feel him there. She had to trust that she’d know the right place when she saw it.

  It was something to do, these nights, walking around Ann Arbor, trying to scout out the perfect area. She walked by herself, her hands in her pockets, though she could have walked with the casual friends she had. One night, she had tried to call Lewis just to hear his voice, but he hadn’t picked up, and she told herself, well, maybe that was a sign, part of moving on. It made her feel she had done the right thing, sending him away. Still, she felt lost and lonely. It wouldn’t always feel this way, she told herself, or maybe she’d always feel as if a chip of herself was missing, and if so, then she’d just have to find a way to live with it.

  She walked through Burns Park and the Bird Hills Nature area. She wandered by one of the ponds in Logan, circling around so many times, unsure, that a man fishing, finally turned to her. “Are you lost?” the man asked. He held up his fishing pole, and she saw the lure, glittering on the end of the line. She looked at him, considering. “Yes,” she said, finally. “I believe I am.” She let him give her directions out again, even though she knew her way. She walked deeper into the woods, her head down, her whole body expectant. In the end, she made her way to the Arb, walking until she got to a stream.

  Here. Here was the place. When he was a kid, Jimmy loved jumping across the rocky streams in the woods behind their house. The place he talked most about visiting was California, where he could be by the water always. She looked around, feeling the sky around her, the breeze.

  At school the next day, she asked for a personal day. “Again?” Peggy, the secretary said, tapping her pencil on the desk. “I’m scattering my brother’s ashes in the Arb,” Rose said. The words hung in the air and as soon as Rose said them, she wished she could take them back. Peggy stopped tapping. “You take the time you need,” Peggy said quietly.

  The next day, the box carefully placed in her backpack, Rose walked to the Arb. She didn’t know anymore what she believed about death, but sometimes she thought, maybe if she finally put Jimmy to rest, she’d feel him alive again in some way. She’d sense a connection. Maybe he’d come back in her dreams in a better way, and she’d be ready to know him again.

  She walked past Central Campus to Geddes Road to the lip of the Arb. The gravel path crunched under her feet. She reached up for one of the leaves on a tree, fingering it. Brady had taught her how to tell what a tree was just by the shape of the leaves, like it was the easiest thing in the world. She counted the ribs on it. Five. Maple. She still knew it. She let the leaves go. There was nothing to be afraid of.

  Jimmy would never be alone.

  She walked until she reached the first big clearing in the Arb. There were a few people, a boy wrapping his girlfriend up in a big blanket, a couple sprawled on the lawn kissing, a woman reading under a tree. No one was looking at her. She passed them, walking to the rocky stream.

  She opened the box and took a handful of ashes out. She had thought it would be all dust, but there were chunks of bone here, a gritty weight in her palm. All she wanted to do was cup her hands over the ashes, hold him in her hands and not let go. I’ve got you, she had said, when he fell back against her in the bomb shelter in her dream. I’ll keep you whole. She gathered more ashes. She held her arms out and opened her fingers, and there he was, sparkling in the air, floating down among the water and the rocks, and she wanted to grab him back. She could hear a bird in the tree. She sifted out more of his ashes, and by the time she got to the bottom of the box, she was crying. Now she knew where he was and she would be here with him when she could. She dusted her hands off on her coat and turned, tears streaming down her cheeks. She had wanted her grief to be over, to bury the whole experience along with her brother, but she might as well have swallowed the ashes because it all felt huge and immeasurable. By the time she got back to the main clearing, her sobs had stopped. She could feel how red and raw her eyes were.

  The Arb was now empty. The woman who had been reading was gone. The couple kissing by the tree had vanished. It was just Rose alone under the warm sun in the silence, holding an empty box, but then, at the entrance, she saw a man, his hands in his pockets, not moving, watching her.

  Lewis was standing there.

  He wasn’t moving and she stared at him, amazed, unsure how she felt. How had he found her here? She felt a breeze ruffling the edge of her skirt. Lewis took his hands out of his pockets and she saw that he had a map in his hand and she knew it was Jimmy’s, the one she had thought she had thrown out. Imagine that. The guy with no sense of direction had come to find her, and while tracking the streets of Ann Arbor wasn’t difficult, finding her here in the Arb was. Yet, he had done it.

  There was a shadow stretched out like an arm across the lawn, hurtling toward her. It struck her then, as if she were suddenly flooded with light.

  Here we all are together. In this beautiful, green forest, the Three Mouseketeers, she, Lewis, and Jimmy, finally, the one thing she had always wanted, only she hadn’t expected it would be this way. She saw everything in front of her. A world that wasn’t ever really safe. A lover whose presence still hurt her. A brother who was both with her and not. Then she thought of all the blood oaths they had ever taken. She thought of all the flashlight signals she and Lewis had blinked out
across to each other when they were kids. S-O-S. S-O-S. I’m here. I’m here. That’s what those lights said.

  They had been so young then, nothing but kids. They had thought the whole world was theirs.

  “Lewis.” She called his name, but she couldn’t move forward. Not yet. She waited to see what would happen next.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I’m thrilled I get to say “thank you for changing my life” to the gods and goddesses at Algonquin, especially to my genius editor Andra Miller. Huge thanks to the amazing Bob Miller, Ina Stern, Elisabeth Scharlatt, Peter Workman, Michael Taeckens, Megan Fishmann, Kelly Bowen, Craig Popelars, Lauren Moseley, Brunson Hoole, Carol Schneider, Sara Rose Nordgren, Emma Boyer, Katie Ford, and the rest of the stellar team. I can never thank my adored agent Gail Hochman enough, and big thanks, too, to Jody Klein, Bill Contardi, Gabe Szabo, and Joanne Brownstein.

  For research help, thanks to my two young, wonderful assistants, Madison Wilson and Robby Auld, and profound thanks to researcher Victoria Romero. Joe Flores gave legal help and hilarious stories of male nursing in the 1960s; police officers Peter Noonan and Al Loustalot (thanks to his granddaughter Victoria, too), were invaluable; and Kathleen Decosmo, Pat Carey, Amelia Quinn, Maggie Balistreri, Wendy Schwartz Kaplan, Loucille Fournier, and Mo Bordenca opened up the world of 1950s and 1960s nursing to me. Joseph Clark and John McHugh solved my forensics problems and I had delicious help about pie baking from master pastry chef Gale Gand. Thanks, too, to Jeff Clarke, Judy Cohen, Cara DeBeer, Gina Hyams, Bonni Miller, Linda Matlow, Eileen Oliver, and Caroline Muir.

  For wading through drafts and offering insights: I have depended on Rochelle Jewell Shapiro, Leora Skolkin-Smith, Katharine Weber, Robb Forman Dew, Liza Nelson, Gina Sorell, Jane Praeger, Lisa Cron, Jeff Lyons, Jeff Tamarkin, Molly Moynahan, Jennifer Gooch Hummer, Jessica Brilliant Keener, Clea Simon, and Dori Ostermiller. For support and cheer: Victoria Zackheim, John Truby, Leslie Lehr, Linda Corcoran, Jo Fisher, Sarah McCoy, Amy McKinnon, Dawn Tripp, Jo-Ann Mapson, Elizabeth Brundage, Liz Flock, Peter Salzano, Sandy Novack, Sheila Weller, Helen Leavitt, Ruth Leavitt, Nancy Lattanzi, Kathy L. Patrick and the Pulpwood Queens, and Barbara Drummond Mead, whom I miss dearly. I would be remiss if I did not also thank my Facebook and Twitter friends who cheered me on as I posted about writing this novel.