Read Is This Tomorrow: A Novel for Free Online

Lewis had no sense of direction. He had once left their table at a restaurant to go to the men’s room, and on the way back, he had gotten lost. He wouldn’t ask any of the waiters for help, and she had finally gotten up to look for him and found him wandering in another room by a tropical fish tank. She had tried to teach him how to find his way, from home to the school, from the Star Market to home. “Pick out signposts,” she had told him. “Look for trees, a white house, a mark on the wall.” She thought of Lewis out somewhere in the dark and she braced one hand against Jake’s arm.
    “Who saw the kids last?” one of the cops asked.
    “Jimmy came to my house this afternoon,” Ava said, and as soon as she said it, the cop looked at her with interest. “Lewis was at the dentist.”
    “Again at your house?” Dot said. “Again?” Her voice slid up an octave.
    “What do you mean, again? Of course at my house. The kids are always at my house. He was waiting for Lewis. I don’t like kids being in my house without me so I shooed him out so I could get to work. He went right home. I saw him.”
    “Who were these kids’ other friends?” the cop asked. “Did they have any enemies? What do they do to blow off steam?”
    Ava told them everything she remembered. How Jimmy had looked standing on his front porch, the day shiny with heat. How Lewis had promised to be home by six. A metallic taste filled her throat and her heart was beating so hard she felt it pushing against her skin.
    She watched one of the cops writing something down. And then, like a mirage, in the distance, she saw Lewis and Rose stumbling toward them, in a gold halo of streetlight.

Chapter Three
    A t four o’clock, earlier that day, after the dentist cleaned his teeth (“You need to brush better,” the dentist had scolded Lewis, smacking a new red toothbrush onto Lewis’s palm), Lewis walked to the library to pick up a book he needed for school. He was supposed to meet Jimmy at his house, something they’d planned earlier at school, and though Lewis had sort of wanted to check out the carnival, Jimmy wouldn’t even consider it. “Bunch of junk and parents,” Jimmy said.
    Sometimes Lewis wondered if Jimmy only hung around him because of Ava, which was an absolutely creepy thought. “Is your mom going to be home?” Jimmy had asked this morning, which irritated Lewis. “What if she isn’t?” he had asked and Jimmy just shrugged. “I have to go to the dentist, but I’ll meet you at your house around four,” Lewis told him. Then later, at lunch in the cafeteria, when two of the rougher boys, Billy D’Adario and Tommy Scanell, had pried Lewis’s sandwich from his hands to show there was no filling in the middle, to laugh (“Haw! A bread sandwich!” Tommy had said), Jimmy had just sat there. Billy flung a handful of rusty pennies on the table. “You’re a Jew, pick them up,” he said, and for one horrible moment Lewis had wanted to, because he could have used those pennies. There were enough there so he could have put the coins in his pocket, along with the cab money Ava had given him, adding it all to the stash he was saving for his trip across the country with Jimmy when they were older. Instead, he did what his mother had told him to do. He turned away. He pretended it didn’t hurt, looked bored, and the boys scattered.
    “Why didn’t you stand up for me?” Lewis asked Jimmy.
    “You can’t win with those guys,” Jimmy said. He sipped grape juice from a plaid thermos.
    “You’re just scared,” Lewis muttered, and Jimmy flushed, which meant that Lewis was right. But Lewis was scared, too. He stared down at his bread sandwich, manhandled by the boys, and shoved it aside. He saw the pennies were still there, but he wouldn’t touch them, either.
    That had been earlier, but he was still upset about it at the dentist, and even here in the library. He wandered into the main room, which was cool and dark, and as soon as he