Is This Tomorrow: A Novel by Caroline Leavitt Page A

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 rough 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.
    T HE 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