Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

by Gabrielle Zevin

The sun was coming up, and the snowfall had mostly stopped, and Sam walked home, feeling warm, despite the cold, and filled with gratitude that he was alive, and that Sadie Green had come into that game room that day. The universe, he felt, was just—or if not just, fair enough. It might take your mother, but it might give you someone else in return. As he rounded Kennedy Street, he began to chant to himself a poem that he had heard once, he wasn’t sure where. “That love is all there is; is all we know of love. It is enough; the freight should be proportioned to the groove.” What is the “freight”? he wondered. What is the “groove”? The mysteries of the poem entertained him, and the poem was so jaunty in its meter (almost, he thought, like the sound of a train barreling down the tracks), and he felt so uncharacteristically light and happy that he found himself skipping a little—Sam Masur! skipping!—which is why he took a less than careful step off the curb. His foot slipped out from under him. Sam was so used to pain. He barely felt it, really. He passed out, for the second time that winter. “We should stop running into each other like this,” he said to no one. As he lay on the street, his bruised cheek on an icy cobblestone pillow, he had a vision of his mother, standing over him in the ice, wearing a huge white parka that went down to her ankles. Anna is the size of Godzilla, and under the tent of her parka, Sam knows he is safe. His Korean American mother is speaking Japa...