The Promised World (17 page)

William said he would try. Finally, they dragged their duffel bags through the glass door and inside the lobby and Pearl told the man standing there who they’d come to visit. He picked up a phone and held it to his ear, but didn’t say anything. He told Pearl that Lila Cole wasn’t answering. “I’m sorry, but she doesn’t appear to be home.”

At which point, William did just what Pearl wanted: he started bawling like a big fat baby. He felt stupid, but it wasn’t that hard. He was scared, he was hungry, he was thirsty, and he was sure he was going to pee his pants if he didn’t get into Aunt Lila’s apartment right away.

“What’s wrong with the little guy?” the man said.

“We’ve been traveling all day to visit our aunt,” Pearl said. “She’s our father’s twin sister and my brother loves her so much.” She knelt down and put her arm around William. “It’s really been hard on him since our father died last month. Aunt Lila is all we have left of him now.”

“Aw, the poor little guy,” the man said. “What is he, about six? I have a boy his age.” He looked at William. “I’m sure she’ll be back in an hour or so. She never goes out anymore.”

William looked at Pearl and she nodded, which was good because it felt easier now to keep crying than to stop. The man guessing he was six years old was bad enough, but saying it might be an hour? He knew he’d never make it that long and then he’d pee all over the floor and this man would yell at him and call the police and he’d have to go to jail. His mom had told him peeing in pubic was illegal after they saw this homeless guy do it down by the river one time.

“Okay, okay,” the man said. “If you’re sure Ms. Cole is expecting you, I guess I can let you wait upstairs for her.”

“She is,” Pearl said. “We’ve been talking about this visit for weeks. I bet she’s just out buying some of William’s favorite foods.” She sighed. “He’s always been her favorite.”

“Will you stop crying if I let you wait upstairs?” the man said, smiling.

William nodded. Then the man took a big ring with zillions of keys out of a desk drawer, and they all headed to the elevator.

He pushed up his glasses and wiped his eyes with the sleeve of his jacket; he was still sniffing and coughing, but he was excited by all the lights in the elevator. The man let him push the button for floor nine; then the metal box shook a little and up they went.

Aunt Lila’s apartment number was 909. The man knocked three times before he opened the door, and even then he said,
“Ms. Cole?” and waited a minute before he stepped back and let them inside.

“Thank you,” Pearl said, smiling a weird, fakey smile. “My aunt being away was problematic, but you’ve solved the situation. I’m sure my aunt will thank you, too.”

As soon as the man nodded and left, Pearl took William down the hall to the bathroom and a few minutes later, he was fine again. His sister was in the living room, standing by the duffel bags, texting on her cell phone. When she clicked it shut, she said, “Danielle said they aren’t home yet. Good.” Then she came over and hugged William. “You were great with that doorman. The crying was brilliant.” She leaned back and smiled. “You’re a lot smarter than they give you credit for.”

He shrugged, but he felt warm and happy inside. Other than Daddy, nobody had ever called him smart before.

“I bet you’re hungry, aren’t you?” Pearl said. When he nodded, she said, “Okay, we’ll look for something to eat, but first let’s figure out where to put these duffel bags. We don’t want Aunt Lila to walk in the door and stumble over them. Plus, it looks like we’re planning on staying for a while.”

“We are,” William said.

“Of course, dummy,” Pearl said, lifting her bag. “But I want to explain that to her first.”

He wished he’d kept his mouth shut so he wouldn’t have switched back to “dummy” so soon. He was too short to lift his bag, but he scooted it along the wood floor, out of the living room, past the bathroom, past Aunt Lila and Uncle Patrick’s office, to where the two bedrooms faced each other on opposite sides of the hall. Pearl started into the one on the left and he was following so close that he ran into his sister when she suddenly stopped.

“Aunt Lila?” Pearl said.

William dropped the handles of his bag and moved to where his
sister was standing, and sure enough, there was Aunt Lila, asleep in bed.

“Aunt Lila,” Pearl said louder, moving a little closer. She repeated this four times, each time getting closer, until finally both Pearl and William were standing right by the bed, looking at their aunt’s face.

“She’s super tired,” William said.

Pearl wasn’t listening. She was shaking Aunt Lila and saying “wake up” really loudly.

“She’s going to be mad,” William said. He was thinking of their mom, who yelled if they woke her up when she was super tired. Unless they were sick and going to vomit. Then it was okay to wake her up.

“There’s something wrong with her,” Pearl said. She was pulling on Aunt Lila’s arms. She finally managed to lift her up but as soon as she let go, Aunt Lila flopped back down again.

“Is she dead?” William whispered.

“No, she’s breathing,” Pearl said. She looked at the bedside table and picked up a pill bottle. She read the label and said, “Shit.”

“She forgot her medicine?” William said.

“I’ve heard of this stuff; some girl at school offered it to me after Dad died. It’s supposed to be a
serious
sleeping pill. Now she’ll never wake up until tomorrow morning!” Pearl shook her head so hard pieces of her blond hair were flopping against her back. “Which means we have a big problem!”

“Why?”

She ignored William and walked out of the bedroom. He followed her. When they got into the living room, she said, “Where the hell is Uncle Patrick anyway?”

“Maybe he’s at a bar like Mommy and Kyle.”

“No way. Haven’t you heard Mom talk about how Aunt Lila and Uncle Patrick never do anything fun? She thinks they live like
they’re a hundred years old. Mom and Dad used to fight about it. He said they lived a life of the mind, but Mom couldn’t understand that. Mom never understood anything about Dad or Lila. Or me.” Pearl crossed her arms and started tapping her foot on the floor. “There has to be some way to reach him. He has a cell phone, right?”

William didn’t know, but Pearl wasn’t really asking him, he could tell.

“I’m hungry,” he finally said, to remind her, but also to get her to be calm like she was before.

She frowned. “Okay, okay, Jesus! I’ll get you something to eat.” She took him into the kitchen and handed him a bag of bagels. After that she went crazy looking all over the apartment for Uncle Patrick’s cell phone number. She never did find it, so finally she decided to call a number under a magnet on the refrigerator. It said “Marriott,” which she said was a hotel. “It can’t be him, but maybe whoever it is knows how to reach him. If we don’t find him tonight, we’re fucked.”

“Will the policeman arrest us?” William was eating his second bagel, sitting on the couch, looking at a boring magazine called
The New Yorker.
He was getting a little sleepy—or at least he had been, until Pearl said that curse word, which Mommy said was the worst curse word of all.

“No, dummy. But we’ll have to go home.”

“Oh.” He felt a little guilty as she was dialing but he wasn’t sure he cared if this Marriott person knew where Uncle Patrick was. His own bed sounded good right now, but he didn’t want to ruin Pearl’s plan of running away.

He heard Pearl talking, then waiting, and talking again. “Please tell him that his niece Pearl called and there’s an emergency at his house. Ask him to come home right away. Thank you.”

After she shut her cell phone, she sat down next to him and
ripped off a big chunk from the bagel in his hand. He wasn’t going to gripe, but she pointed at the bag like he already had. “There are three more. You’re not going to starve.” She chewed for a while before she said, “Uncle Patrick is staying at that hotel. Must be some college thing. I left a message with the hotel front desk and on the room voicemail. They said the hotel isn’t very far from here. If he doesn’t come in the next two hours, I’ll try that number again.”

“Can we turn on the TV till he gets here?”

“Do you see a television?”

He didn’t, but he knew sometimes people hid their TVs behind wood doors. A lot of his friends had their TVs hidden like that. But Aunt Lila and Uncle Patrick didn’t have one of those cabinets with wood doors. All they had were rows and rows of bookshelves.

Pearl had her cell phone out again, texting someone. He asked if he could listen to his music now and she said not yet. When he asked her what he should do, she shrugged.

So he sat and looked at the pictures in one boring magazine after another, until he finished the stack on the coffee table. It didn’t take him long. Most of the magazines didn’t have many pictures. When Pearl was still on the phone, talking to Staci, he closed his eyes. He must have fallen asleep, because the next thing he knew, Uncle Patrick was bursting through the door.

“Where’s Lila?”

“She’s asleep,” Pearl said. “It’s not—”

William yawned and watched as Uncle Patrick rushed down the hall and peeked into the bedroom. The bedroom light was still on. He flicked off the switch before slowly walking back.

He looked at Pearl. “What’s the emergency?”

“It’s complicated.” She cleared her throat like she’d caught William’s tic. “That’s why I wanted to talk to you about it.”

Uncle Patrick sat down in a dark green chair. He rubbed his
face, which was all stubbly like Kyle’s got when he wouldn’t listen to Mommy and shave. Finally he said, “What are you kids doing here?”

“Nothing,” Pearl said. “We just came to be with you and Aunt Lila.”

“Really?”

His eyebrows were raised like Mommy’s always were when she thought someone was lying. So William said, “Pearl isn’t lying! We runned away tonight to be with you guys.”

He knew he’d messed up when Pearl elbowed him in the ribs, hard. He felt like crying, but instead he started clearing his throat again. Nobody seemed to notice so maybe the tic wasn’t that loud.

“All right,” Uncle Patrick said. “Unfortunately, it’s illegal for you to be here without your mother’s permission. I’m sorry, I’m going to have to call her, and I’m sure she’ll demand that I bring you back immediately.”

“But we can’t go back,” Pearl said. “That’s what I have to tell you. There’s a good reason.”

Uncle Patrick stared at nothing for a minute. “Why didn’t you talk to your aunt about this? Why call me instead of waking her up?”

“I tried,” Pearl said. “I think she took sleeping pills, because I said her name and shook her and even tried to drag her by the arms.”

“Oh my God,” Patrick said. And then he was running down the hall again. Pearl got up, too, and William followed his sister. They found Patrick standing by the bed, holding the pill bottle. He grabbed the phone and said some stuff really quickly that William couldn’t follow. When he hung up, things were so confusing that William sat on the floor and held his head in his hands. His tic had gotten so bad it was making his throat hurt.

Pearl and Patrick were both talking at once. They were both crying, too, which made William so scared.

“I thought she was just asleep,” Pearl said. “I’m so sorry.”

“They’ll be here soon.” Uncle Patrick was talking to Aunt Lila, holding her up in his arms. He sounded as upset as Mommy when the police came to tell her Daddy died. “Any minute. Hang on.”

“I’m so sorry,” Pearl repeated. “I didn’t know you could still wake up if you take sleeping pills.” She was twisting her hands together like she was cold. “Is Aunt Lila going to die?”

“I never should have left you,” Uncle Patrick said. “Oh my God.”

Then there was a banging on the door, and Pearl ran to open it, and after that there were two men and a woman standing over Aunt Lila and behind them, a policeman. William scooted into a corner and stayed very quiet, so nobody would notice him. He watched as Aunt Lila was taken out of the room on a rolling bed, still asleep, even though all these people were doing things to her and Uncle Patrick was shouting, “Is she going to be all right? Please, just tell me what’s going on!”

The policeman told Uncle Patrick he could ride with his wife in the ambulance, but not the kids. Uncle Patrick nodded, but he said quickly, “Their mother needs to be called. They ran away to come here.” Then he was following the rolling bed down the hall and out of the apartment. William knew they were all gone because it got so quiet. Only he and Pearl and the policeman were left in Aunt Lila’s bedroom.

“What’s your mother’s phone number?” the policeman said.

Pearl leaned against the dresser and kept crying. She didn’t say anything.

He asked for the number two more times. Then he said, “Do you understand that running away is a serious matter?”

“I don’t care,” Pearl said, coughing. “I’m not going back. I love
my aunt. She’s my dad’s twin. She understands who I am. I want to live here with her.”

“Even if your mom agreed, this isn’t the right time.” The policeman sounded sort of nice all of a sudden. “Let me take you home and maybe you can come back when your aunt is feeling better.”

“I know my aunt tried to kill herself, but I know why she did it, too. She misses my dad, and my mother wouldn’t even let her talk to us.” Pearl rubbed her arm across her eyes, but she couldn’t stop crying. William was crying, too, now, because he finally understood what had happened. Aunt Lila had tried to do the same thing Daddy did. She might die, too.

“Your little brother is tired,” the policeman said. “Just tell me the number and we can get you both home and get him in bed.”

When Pearl didn’t answer, the policeman turned to William. “Do you know your phone number, little fellow?”

“Yeah,” William cried. He was so insulted by everyone assuming he was a baby just because he was so small for his age. And how dumb would he have to be not to know the phone number? He was good with numbers. But he wasn’t going to let himself be tricked again. He put his hand over his mouth and decided not to say another word to this policeman.