The Promised World (21 page)

Of course, Kyle was also sweet to her, and that was a big part of the reason she was glad he’d come to Pennsylvania. She was forty-four years old and she’d never had a guy really care what she had to say. It was freaky at first, but now she wondered how she’d ever put up with any guy who didn’t.

On the Friday that turned out to be their last date, she told Kyle a little more about her life with Billy, the way she always did, and he listened and sympathized, as usual. When she said it was time to change the topic, he said okay, but then he shook his head. “You’ve had some real shit luck. That’s one thing I know for sure.”

He was a little drunk, but Ashley had stuck to ginger ale all night. Still, she laughed like she was tipsy and he said, “What’s so funny?”

“Nothing,” she said, and put her arm around him. He was a little heavy, but she liked that. He felt like a big, warm bear. She’d
told him about the curse, but she didn’t expect him or anyone to understand why “shit luck” to describe her life would feel like such a relief to her.

“Well, it’s over now,” he said, grinning. “Stick with me, baby, and it’ll be smooth sailing from here on out.”

She smiled, though she didn’t believe it would all be smooth sailing. Bad things happened to everybody, like her mom always said. But sure, she felt like she was due some good luck for a change. Maybe she’d wake up tomorrow and William would be talking again. Pearl would smile at her like she used to. Hell, come to think of it, that was all she really wanted right now anyway. The other thing she’d always hoped for—that Billy would change, that Billy would stop being crazy, that Billy would love her the way she’d never stopped loving him—well, there was no point in thinking about that anymore. Now it was all about her kids. If only they were okay again, she’d be sitting on that pile of good luck she’d been waiting for for years.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

I
n Lila’s dreams, Billy told her how the story had to end. The two of them would be running through narrow corridors or up an unending flight of stairs or across a field that seemed to stretch out as far as the sky, trying to escape something horrible that Lila could never see. Billy saw it, though, and he would pull Lila’s arm until it ached to get her to move faster, to hurry before it destroyed them. “We have to win,” he would say, panting and out of breath. “It’s the only way any of this makes sense.”

Lila always woke up before they got away. This was true when she was a teenager, and it was still true through all the years she’d had these running dreams. It was her most common kind of dream, and sometimes the sole dream she’d had—or at least that she’d remembered the next morning—for months and months. She used
to tell Patrick she wasn’t the dreaming type. She wondered if she simply read so much that her imagination didn’t need the usual nightly exercise.

After Billy died, she dreamed more, but still far less than she would in the hospital—if dreaming was even the correct word for what was happening to her. Lila thought so, but she wasn’t aware that the doctors had given her heavy doses of drugs when they couldn’t get her to stop thrashing and screaming at them to let her go. She couldn’t know that the drugs were powerful enough to calm and subdue her, but not powerful enough to keep her asleep for very long. All she knew was that every time she gave up struggling and closed her eyes, she found her brother. This was enough to keep her lying still, hour after hour.

In one dream, she and Billy were sitting on cardboard boxes in a moldy basement, with spiderwebs draping every lightbulb and windowsill. He was holding her shoulders, looking right into her eyes, telling her that their mother wasn’t real. “What you see is what she’s become because of him. She’s weak, Lila. She doesn’t mean to do this.” The next minute—or the next dream?—they were in the bright white kitchen, sitting on wooden stools, eating pretzels, and Lila heard her stepfather whistling “Fly Me to the Moon.” “I’m not hungry,” she said, dropping a handful of pretzels back in the bag. But it was too late; she saw Harold’s shadow as he rounded the corner, holding that silver golf club.

Then she was outside in the woods behind their house, and she had a chess piece clutched in her fist. Billy was trying to talk her into giving it to him. “It will be worse if you wait.” Lila was sitting on a rock; Billy was standing above her. The sun made his head look like it was ringed by a halo. “It’ll be all right. I’ll convince her you’re sorry.”

She’d just handed over the ivory chess piece—and seen Billy
smile—when she came out of the dream to hear Patrick asking how this could possibly help his wife. He sounded angry, or was it guilty? “Christ, she’s done nothing but lie in bed at home for weeks. How is this any different?”

Another man said something long-winded that Lila didn’t catch, though she heard the words “agitation” and “antidepressants” and sleepily wondered if it was possible that every word he’d said had started with “a.” Then she heard Billy talking again.

“Every story needs a villain.”

They were in the basement—so many of the dreams took place in the basement or outside in the woods, even Lila’s dreaming mind noticed this and vaguely wondered why. Billy was explaining some book to her. Or was it a story he’d written? He was always writing stories. Lila was so jealous of his talent, even though she knew he wrote most of them for her, to keep her from being sad.

“Think about it,” Billy continued. “The villain shows the amount of good in everyone else. They are judged by how close or far they are from him.”

She nodded but didn’t say anything. She was eating the most delicious apple that Billy had brought down to her.

“What else do you want?” he said. “Mom just went to the store.”

Before Lila could answer, she heard her mother calling for Billy.

“I’ll come back later,” he said.

“No.” Lila reached to grab her brother’s arm, but he was already standing. She could feel tears welling in her eyes as he walked slowly up the stairs. Then she climbed up on the table by the basement window, maneuvered herself through the narrow opening, and ran into the woods, still choking back tears. There she met a woman in a white bridal gown, and Lila wondered who
would get married in this forlorn place. “It’s almost over,” the woman said, but her voice was strange, like it was coming from the radio. “You’ll know when it’s time.” Then the woman ascended to the sky, like Genevieve, Lila’s patron saint—or was it only the Virgin Mary who had ascended?

And indeed there will be time, Lila thought, waking up when a nurse walked into the room. It was a line from a T. S. Eliot poem. She continued reciting the poem in her mind until it finally hit her that she’d really had a patron saint named Genevieve. That part was true. They’d been Catholic before her mother remarried. How could she have forgotten that?

She fell asleep again and saw a man ice-skating, but when she got closer, she realized it wasn’t Billy or her stepfather; it was Patrick. Patrick, who’d never skated in his life as far as she knew, was jumping in the air and spinning to a landing, like the skaters in the Olympics. Every time he came close, she asked him, “How did you learn this?” but all he would do was wink and smile. He wasn’t the kind of guy to wink in real life, but Lila forgot that and thought he was so much more himself.

“Minor characters matter,” Billy told her.

“Patrick isn’t minor,” she mumbled, and then she realized Billy couldn’t hear her. He was still talking about
Huckleberry Finn.
“You can’t understand Huck without seeing him with all the people he meets.”

Was she still asleep? This seemed like a memory, not a dream. She and her brother really had read
Huck Finn
at least a half dozen times. Billy insisted, because he said this book would be a variation of their own plot. The reasons were obvious: Huck had to escape his cruel father. “But stepfather is so much more believable,” Billy said harshly. “Aren’t we lucky to have it work out like that?… Of course, the big question has to be why. In Huck’s case, his father is an alcoholic. That’s the nineteenth century for you: bad parents
are either drunk or poor or both. In the twentieth century, we use psychology, but to me the truly modern answer is no one knows. Because there are alcoholics who aren’t assholes, right? There are abused children who don’t abuse their kids. So we might as well call it old-fashioned evil as long as we understand that evil means nothing more than the howling emptiness of a soul with nothing to give.”

She thought she must be awake, when suddenly they were running up a hill and Billy was laughing and calling himself “Man of Steel.” They were young, maybe six or seven. Lila wanted a superhero name, too, and she picked “Grass Girl.” When Billy asked her what Grass Girl did, she said, “She can roll down hills faster than anyone.” It was the one thing she was better at than her brother: rolling down hills. She loved doing it, too, even though she always got dandelions and puffballs caught in her long hair.

Then the scene changed again. It was dark outside and her mother was crying loudly in another room, while Lila was slapping herself in the face. Billy was crying, too, but he walked over and grabbed Lila’s hands. “You didn’t do it.”

“I’m sorry,” Lila said. Her voice was still a child’s, like Grass Girl’s. But nothing about her was a child anymore. Even her room looked wrong to her now, with the pink bed covered with stuffed animals and the little white bookshelf where her dolls sat in a neat little row. The bears and elephants and dolls all looked at her as though they were waiting for her to come back and play with them. She picked up one of the dolls and ripped its head off and said, “No!”

It was the night her father died; Lila opened her eyes and was suddenly sure of that. Except Billy had never told her she’d destroyed all her dolls, but she felt sure of that, too. Why had he never talked about that night?

She wanted to keep thinking about what this meant, but she couldn’t. She was already feeling so drowsy that she had to close her eyes.

The next thing she knew, they were in church; her mother was with a man but he didn’t look like Harold. He was a short, bald guy with a sweet smile, and Lila liked him because he always gave her pennies. “A little girl can never know when she’ll need to make a wish.”

Lila was holding Billy’s hand as they walked out of the pew. Her mother smiled at the unnamed guy and whispered, “Don’t my babies look adorable?”

Billy’s hand was sweating. They were never allowed to touch each other in front of their mother, but she’d told them this time was different. This time she wanted them to hold hands and act like “normal” children. “Do you think you can manage that?” their mother had said, looking straight at Lila. “It should be easy enough, assuming you’re not still trying to ruin my life.”

A statue of the Virgin Mary was above them, weeping. The prayer raced across Lila’s mind as if it were too frightened to pause long enough to become words:
HolyMaryMotherOfGodPray ForUsSinnersNowAndAtTheHourOfOurDeathAmen.

At the door of the church, a priest said to Lila, “We were worried about you.” He smiled. “We all prayed you’d recover, and look, here you are.”

She felt her face turning red. What was wrong with her that she didn’t know what he was talking about?

“You’re not crazy.” How many times had Billy told her that? He used to say it all the time; she was sure. But the voice speaking now was her own. She’d woken herself up, telling herself she wasn’t crazy. Which struck her as more than a little funny, given where she was. She couldn’t laugh, though. Her mouth felt as dry as if she’d been eating dust.

Then she was yelling, “Billy, Billy,” and he was downstairs with her, holding her in his skinny child’s arms. She told him about the man in the shiny silver truck who was coming to kill her. “It’s not real,” he said, shivering. It was always cold in the winter down here, despite the white cube with the hot red face that Lila was never supposed to touch.

A space heater, she thought now. It was right by the cot where she slept whenever she was being punished.

“You’re okay.” He sounded sleepy, but he said, “Do you need to hear a story?” She stammered out yes, and he said, “Once upon a time, there was a blond-haired baby who toddled off and got lost in a land of ugly trolls…”

She woke up shaking, as though the cold in her dream had followed her into the hospital. All at once, she realized she knew that story about the baby and the trolls. She remembered when Billy used to call her Baby Lila. She used to get so mad at him about that.

She managed to stay awake for several minutes this time, thinking. They were probably only ten when Billy came up with the story—no wonder the symbolism was so obvious. She was the baby, and her mother and stepfather were the trolls. Billy himself wasn’t in the story. He was just the one who’d created it.

The cot was real, too. She could see it so clearly, in the middle of the basement, surrounded by beige garment bags that looked like an army of faceless monsters when she was a child. She had her own room, but she was always being sent to the basement. Maybe Billy was, too? She couldn’t remember.

Lila fell asleep wondering why Billy was always comforting her and she was never comforting him. Maybe that was why her next dream was of a fight they’d had. They were in the woods and she was yelling, “Shut up! Shut up!”

She was older then, thirteen or so; it was after the growth spurt that left her taller than Billy. She didn’t have a coat on, but it wasn’t
warm. The leaves were turning; the forest looked like an explosion of red and yellow.

“What do you want me to say?” His brown curls looked messy in the wind. “You know it never happens when they aren’t here. How could she be right about—”

“I don’t believe you.” She was still yelling. “I’m going in. I’ll ask her myself.”

“Okay, but you know what will—”

Then she was running past the tree house her father built and down the hill, into the house. Her mother was home, for a change. Lila hadn’t seen her in what felt like weeks.

“Look who’s here,” her mother said. She was standing in the kitchen, but it didn’t look anything like the kitchen had looked before. It was all brand-new—again? Even the toaster was so shiny, reflected in the sun, that Lila blinked when she glanced at it.