The Promised World (26 page)

His first thought was that she was being transferred somewhere else, somewhere worse. “What’s going on?” he said, hoping he didn’t sound afraid.

“You were right about our insurance,” she said softly. “It only pays for psychiatric hospitalization if you’re certifiably dangerous.” She paused. “When the doctor told them I probably wasn’t going to kill myself, the insurance company decided I have to be seen as an outpatient from now on.”

Probably
? He sat down on the bed next to her. “Are you going to do the outpatient treatment?”

“I have to.” She lowered her eyes. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me, but something is.”

She sounded so sad that he didn’t know what to say. The truth was he’d never known what to say when Lila was unhappy. So, who knew, maybe his father was right about him. This was his chance to change, but all he could think of were concrete things he could do for her. Take her out to lunch on the way home. Read aloud from one of her favorite books. Stop and get her a double latte or a cinnamon pastry or any of the other things she usually
enjoyed. But these ideas seemed so lame that finally, in desperation, he blurted out, “Is there anything you need me to do? I’ll do it, whatever it is.”

“There is something.” She took his hand and placed it between her own. “I know it sounds strange, but if you’re not too busy, could you drive me to North Carolina?”

While he certainly hadn’t expected this, he wasn’t exactly surprised, either. He could feel that there was a perfectly logical reason behind her request, a reason he almost grasped. It was the same sensation he often had right before he solved a proof: like a glimmer of possibility was about to turn into an idea that would not only end his confusion, but make that confusion look ridiculous in hindsight.

And then, suddenly, he thought he had it. “You’re not sure if you’re really from North Carolina?”

He had no idea how this could be true, but still, he felt oddly relieved. This could be the missing piece that would make it all consistent—the Lila he knew and the Lila he’d thought was a liar.

“If I’m not,” she said slowly, looking down at her knees, “then I must be crazy, right?”

He didn’t know the answer to this, but he forced a smile. “It doesn’t matter. You told me yourself that geniuses are always a little crazy.”

“That’s a myth. Look at you. You’re not crazy.”

He was stupidly grateful, but that wasn’t the reason he lifted her face and kissed her. He wanted to comfort her, but that wasn’t the only reason, either. She looked so beautiful to him. After eleven years together, he guessed she always would.

They agreed that they would go to North Carolina, together, that night. As they were walking to accounting to settle their bill, he said that perhaps this trip would help her figure out what she
needed to know about her past. “Every problem has a solution,” he said, repeating the first part of what he always told his graduate students. The rest he kept to himself, hoping it wouldn’t apply in this situation: Some of those solutions won’t be found by us, however. Some may not be found by anyone for a thousand years.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

T
he trip to Grayten, North Carolina, took longer than Patrick had estimated, and Lila felt bad for him. Each time she woke up, she told him how sorry she was that she couldn’t help with the drive. “It’s not your fault,” he said, before reminding her that drowsiness was a side effect of her medicines. Sometimes she got confused and thought she was on the train with Billy, going home after he’d freed her from the hospital—or at the end of the year she’d spent at prep school; she wasn’t sure which. She’d slept most of that trip, too, or at least she thought she had. That would explain why she didn’t remember anything about that journey years ago other than arriving at the house, which was completely different from the house in her mind. Even the rooms were in different places, but Billy said their mother had done extensive remodeling
and redecorated again. A moment later, she heard some woman start crying. Her name was Maria, and Billy said she was there to help them. Lila assumed she was a cleaner—their mother had always hired cleaners—and it turned out to be true, but Maria was different because, though she did keep house and cook for them, she lived with them all the time, night and day, until she died from a heart attack a few months later. After that, they had the house to themselves for a full year, until the fall after they turned seventeen, when Lila went off to college and her brother set out to travel and become a real writer. Sometime during that year alone with Billy, Lila began to have real, continuous memories, the way the people in her books did, the way she’d always suspected all normal people did. And so she had no trouble recognizing Grayten, North Carolina, when Patrick pulled into the town on Sunday morning, right after dawn.

It was still a tiny town with only one stoplight at the intersection of Johnson and Main. As they made their way down Main, she opened the window and held her face out to smell the familiar scents of pine trees, azaleas, and manure from the surrounding farms. The breeze helped her stay alert so she could point out to Patrick the local grocery store where she and Billy had bought a mix of healthy foods and the candy they were addicted to: Hershey’s bars, Good & Plenty, and especially bags of Reese’s Pieces, which they usually consumed on the long walk home. The memory was so real to her, she could feel those sweet, crunchy candies in her teeth. In the same strip mall as the grocery store, there used to be a doctor’s office and a pharmacy, a video rental place, and a small Sears that relied on catalog orders for everything but basic clothing and housewares. The Sears had grown; the video store was now a Blockbuster; and the doctor’s office had changed into a bank, but Lila told Patrick the way it had been and explained that she and Billy had gone in every place but the video rental, since they didn’t own a TV.

Lila knew full well that the only thing this proved was that she’d lived here for a year and a few months as a teenager. The much more important question was whether she’d actually grown up in Grayten. She’d always believed that she had—until the past week, when her psychologist, Dr. Kutchins, had worked hard to convince Lila that the vivid “memories” she’d been having in the hospital were at least reflective of reality, even if some of the details were off. But if those memories were in any sense real, then the place where she’d grown up was definitely north of here, with winters more like New York’s or Pennsylvania’s than like North Carolina’s. She’d come up with the idea for this trip hoping to find out for sure, though she was reluctant to find out, too, for fear her life would make even less sense than it did now.

Still, she was more relaxed, just driving through this town that was exactly as she remembered. Her husband also seemed more relaxed, but maybe he was simply relieved to be able to stop driving and have breakfast. The old diner at the entrance to the highway was gone, replaced by a Denny’s, but as Patrick pointed out, at least the place was open. He said the streets were as deserted as if the whole town was still asleep, but Lila said that everybody was probably getting ready for Sunday morning church.

“There’s a big church only a mile or so from where we lived,” Lila said. The waitress had seated them and handed them large plastic menus that felt a little sticky. “Billy and I could hear the bells on Sunday morning, and we always headed outside, to what he called God’s church, to pray to the trees and the flowers and the sky.”

“Your parents never made you go to church?”

“I think my mother did. I remembered something in the hospital about being Catholic before she married my stepfather.”

“It’s a Catholic church then?”

“I’m not sure,” Lila said.

“This town seems too small to have two churches,” he said. The waitress returned, ready to take their order. They both chose pancakes, and after the waitress left, Patrick joked that the stickiness of the menu must have subliminally predisposed them to think of syrup.

They ate quickly, because they were starving, but also because Lila had told Patrick she was anxious to go out on Route 6 and see the house. She was hoping whoever lived there now would let them in, but worst case, they would be able to examine the property. She didn’t remember ever going beyond the backyard with Billy when the two of them lived there alone, but she wanted to confirm that all the other things from childhood she’d “dreamed” in the hospital had not happened here. That there wasn’t a woods backing up against the lawn, or a steep hill she and her brother had liked to roll down, or especially that tree house their father had made for them: the one thing she knew had to be real, as she’d always remembered sitting in it with Billy, reading that children’s book about heroes and ice cream.

She knew exactly how to get to the place from the grocery store, so they went back to Main and then Patrick followed her directions until they reached Route 6. Everything looked vaguely familiar until they got to the spot where the house should have been—where the house
had
been, Lila was sure, because she recognized the farmhouse on the other side of the road, set about an acre back, surrounded by tobacco fields. She remembered sitting in the rocking chair Maria had moved into her bedroom and looking at that farm from her window, though she and Billy had never met the family who’d lived there. Not during the year she could remember, anyway.

“It used to be right there,” she whispered, pointing at a large rectangular space bounded by trees. Patrick insisted on driving a little farther, but she knew it wouldn’t make a difference. The
house of her happiest memories with Billy was gone, disappeared from the face of the earth, just like her brother.

She felt like crying, but she asked her husband to double back and pull over on the road. She was determined to walk to the line of tall trees at the far edge of the empty field, to see what was on the other side. She was overwhelmed by a sudden, desperate hope that she really had grown up here. If only she could stand in the woods where she and her twin had spent so much of their time as children, then maybe she would experience a flood of memories that could comfort her by bringing her brother close again, even if it was only in the past.

As she got out of the car, she heard the church bells ringing, which she took to be a good sign. But when she rushed across the field and through the trees, she found nothing but another farm. No hill, no woods, nothing that even resembled what she’d imagined in the hospital. Of course, it had been twenty years, but she knew instinctively that this was not the same place, and she was so disheartened that she slumped onto the ground.

“What’s wrong?” Patrick said, kneeling beside her.

“This isn’t the right town.”

“It has to be. You knew the strip mall, knew the way to get here, knew about—”

“I did live here, but only for a year or so, when I was sixteen.”

“But both of your high school transcripts list this as your home.”

She looked at him, surprised he knew this. Then she said that her brother must have forged those transcripts, the same way he’d forged her parents’ death certificates. She only meant that Billy had changed the address on the transcripts, but she was immediately gripped by the possibility that he’d forged it all: both of her transcripts and even the recommendation letters she’d used to get into college. Her brother was good enough to pull it off, and he would
have done it without hesitating if he’d decided she needed fake records, but why would she have needed them? Was the real situation closer to what she’d imagined in the hospital: that her mother hadn’t ever let her go to school, and the only train trip she and Billy had taken “home” was when he’d freed her from Westwood Psychiatric Hospital?

“But if your brother did that, you would know.” Patrick swatted a fly off his jeans. He sounded as confused as she felt. “This doesn’t make any sense.”

“I don’t understand it, either.” She paused. “Will you just hold me for a while?”

He sat down and stretched his legs out; then he pulled her to him, so her head was leaning against his chest. She listened to the reassuring sound of her husband’s heartbeat as she tried to think about what all this could mean. If the memory of Billy freeing her from Westwood was real—and she’d been wide awake when she’d remembered that, as Dr. Kutchins had repeatedly emphasized—then her brother had let her enter college and spend her adult life with no conscious knowledge of ever having been in a psychiatric hospital. He’d never mentioned a word about it, though this didn’t explain why she herself hadn’t known. Even Dr. Kutchins hadn’t come up with an answer for that, though she said they’d continue to explore it on an outpatient basis—after Lila’s insurance company had refused the psychologist’s petition to keep Lila in the hospital for at least another week.

Billy always said Lila’s lack of memories wasn’t that abnormal, given what they’d gone through with Harold, and she’d believed him. She’d believed what he’d told her about her formal schooling, too, especially as he’d told the same stories a hundred times. He said she’d cried through most of the year at prep school, because she didn’t like being away from home. She’d never made many friends, because she was too shy. She’d gotten all As. She’d been
a perfect rule follower, a Gallant, while he was busy getting into trouble like the Goofus he’d always been.

She told Dr. Kutchins that Billy probably came up with the Goofus/Gallant comparison to keep Lila from remembering that her parents seemed to view her and her twin precisely the opposite. It was an innocent story, Lila insisted—and she was still holding on to that. Even if Billy had made up their entire lives, his only motive had been to protect her; of this she was positive. This was why he’d rehearsed the past with her constantly and told her she was losing the plot whenever she forgot any of the details. He was trying to protect her from something, just like when they were children. She missed him more for this, even as she felt determined to discover, finally, what that something was.

Lila looked up at Patrick. “I want to go to church.”