The Promised World (42 page)

Fifteen years later, she’d forgotten about the diorama—until that night, watching Billy die on television. Then it came back to her, and she felt tears spring to her eyes because she didn’t even know where it was. She told Patrick that she was going to the storage space in the basement of their building to find Billy’s diorama first thing tomorrow. He gripped her hand more tightly. No doubt he thought she was in shock. Maybe she was.

The news reporter had started by announcing that the gunman, William “Billy” Cole, was in the middle of being divorced by his wife, Ashley. Patrick hadn’t shared this fact with her, maybe because he didn’t know it, as he’d only heard about Billy’s death on the radio driving home, or maybe because he’d intuited it would upset her more. It stunned Lila, but it was the end of the broadcast that made her feel like her throat was closing up and it was becoming difficult to breathe. “Cole was thought to be depressed from the divorce and from his recent loss of visitation with his children after his wife’s allegation that he’d abused their middle child, an eight-year-old boy whose name is being withheld. Earlier in the
week, the district attorney had decided to bring charges against Cole for several counts of child endangerment. A warrant for his arrest had been expected today.”

While Lila watched, Patrick held her tight, trying to quiet her shaking, but when she shouted an obscenity at a close-up of Trashley, he looked very surprised, and Lila heard herself barking out a hysterical laugh. It was true she never cursed and certainly never shouted. The walls of their apartment were so thin they could hear the old lady next door coughing. Normally Lila worried about this, but now she longed to hear screaming or sirens or even the room exploding: something, anything, to match the turmoil inside her mind. She repeated the obscenity she’d used, louder than before, adding, “And I don’t care who hears me!”

She stormed into their bedroom, slammed the door, and collapsed to her knees. The sound that came from her was less a cry than a wail, too airless for anyone to recognize the sentences she kept moaning over and over. “It isn’t real, Lila. It can’t be real unless you decide that it is.”

How many times had Billy said this to her? Fifty? A hundred? How could she have forgotten?

She desperately wanted to believe this, but she couldn’t remember ever making any decisions about what was real and what wasn’t. Billy was the one who’d told her the nightmares weren’t real, the one who knew what had really happened in their past. It was Billy, too, who’d convinced her that their future would be beautiful with second chances, and then described that future so vividly it became more real to Lila than her sorrow and lost innocence. All she’d ever had to do was trust her brother, but that was the easiest thing in the world. It didn’t require imagination. It didn’t even require faith. Love was the only necessity. Her love for Billy, which had always been the truest thing in her life.

She used to think that without her brother she would simply
cease to exist. But now, as she heard her lungs gasping for air and felt the ache of her knees against the hardwood floor, she knew her body was stubborn; it would insist on remaining alive, even if her life no longer made sense to her. Even if she couldn’t comprehend the world in which she’d found herself. It was frankly impossible, and yet this was her reality now: a world without Billy.

Chapter Two

T
here were no words for what it was like for him, watching his wife grieve the loss of her brother. Torture wasn’t strong enough, as he would have willingly undergone enormous physical pain if only Lila could have had even a few hours of relief. Though they had been married longer than most of their friends, his feelings for her hadn’t diminished over the years. He loved his wife with his whole heart, in that desperate way of a man who never quite believes he deserves the love of the woman he can’t live without.

Sometimes he still caught himself wondering why Lila was with him. From the first time they met, he thought she was incredibly beautiful and stunningly elegant, both soft-spoken and sharply intelligent—and completely out of his league.

It was early in the fall, at a School of Arts and Sciences mixer
for graduate students preparing to go on the job market. Over wine and cheese and some gnarly meat lumps that were supposed to be sausage, everyone was talking about their fears: that they wouldn’t finish their dissertations, that their advisors were out to get them, and that they would never find a teaching position anyway in this awful market. Lila was on the other side of the room, with the humanities people, but Patrick noticed her because she was standing a little apart from the fray, as though she, too, felt shy. When he screwed up the courage to walk over to her, he held up a toothpick with one of the sausages and said, “Do you think this is some kind of alien life-form?”

Lila stared at him for several uncomfortable seconds before she laughed. She confessed she’d been daydreaming, but when he asked her what about, she said Jim’s return to slavery. “It’s just so disturbing, and no matter how many times I teach the book, I can’t get over it.”

“I’m in math,” Patrick said. “Sorry.” And he was sorry at that moment, though being a mathematician had been his dream since he was a kid. But if only he knew what this woman was talking about, he wouldn’t have to wander back to the science people, huddled over by the windows.

“Wait,” she said. “I’m sure you know
Huckleberry Finn.
” When he nodded—though he didn’t remember the book that well, since he’d read it years ago, in middle school—she said, “Then I can explain it to you.” She looked at the wall behind him. “If you’re interested, that is.”

Of course he was. He loved listening to her airy voice as she explained the critical controversy about the end of Twain’s novel: why Twain spent so much time sending Jim and Huck down the river, to freedom, only to have Jim freely decide to return to his owner. “I don’t believe he was trying to undermine his own book,” she said. “That’s such a cynical way to look at it, don’t you think?”
She paused. “I suppose I sound too excited. I’m a great believer in stories. I used to tell Billy I was afraid we loved stories more than real life, but he said, ‘What is life but a story we don’t know the meaning of yet?’ “

Patrick stood up straighter. So there was a boyfriend already. Of course. By the last year of grad school, most people had paired off with someone—if they hadn’t arrived with someone they’d met as an undergraduate. Why he hadn’t was simple, though most people didn’t understand. His mother had gotten sick. For three years, he’d spent all of his free time flying back and forth from Princeton to St. Louis to take care of her. His father was there, but his father had always ignored Patrick’s mother, favoring his golf buddies and drinking buddies over his wife. At the funeral that previous summer, Patrick had decided he would never speak to his father again, though he’d already broken that vow several times. Whenever his father would call late at night, drunk, lonely, filled with regret, Patrick would soften enough to hang on the phone and listen. If he couldn’t offer the forgiveness the old man wanted—this was still his father. He had to give him something.

Back at school, getting over his grief, no question he was lonely. He’d made a few friends in the math department, but he hadn’t had a real girlfriend since his mom had fallen ill. The weekends were particularly hard because he wasn’t teaching, though at least he always had plenty of work to get done.

Now he noticed Lila Cole’s ring. It wasn’t a diamond, but it was on the third finger of her left hand, probably an engagement ring. She must have seen him looking at it, because she said, “It’s very unusual, isn’t it?”

He nodded. “Your boyfriend must have unusual taste.”

“Oh, it’s not from a boyfriend. It’s what Billy calls a ‘twin ring.’ “ She held out her lovely white hand. “See the two snakes entwined together?” She laughed softly. “I told him that I’d prefer something
less hostile than snakes, but he said they don’t make rings with two teddy bears.”

“You’re a twin?” Patrick said. Trying to imagine a man who could look like this woman with pale yellow hair, eyebrows so light you could barely see them, a frame so small it seemed not only delicate but fragile, as though you could break her wrist if you grabbed it too quickly.

Another reason she was out of his league. Though she was very slight, she was also a good two inches taller than he was. He’d thought it was the shoes she was wearing, but now he saw she had on flat black shoes like ballet dancers wear. He would have to lean up to kiss her, which wouldn’t have bothered him in the slightest—her bottom lip was fatter than the top and it looked so plump and kissable—but he knew it would probably bother her. He was five feet nine, not that short, but he’d been rejected by several girls in college for not being tall enough. Or so he assumed. He was never really sure why his first dates didn’t lead to second dates, or why his handful of relationships just hadn’t worked out. Whenever he tried to apply his mind to the problem, he never got anywhere, though at least it proved he wasn’t a total geek like some of his friends. He did want to meet a woman on her own terms, even if he couldn’t understand how to do that.

Obviously, he had his issues in the romance department. And sometimes when he was afraid of disappointment, he said things that were a bit stupid, as when he admitted to Lila that he was having a hard time conjuring up a male version of her.

“We don’t look alike.” She blinked, no doubt wondering how someone so uneducated could be at Princeton, even if he was in math. “Fraternal twins?”

He could feel himself blushing as he said, “Oh, right. Sorry,” but Lila Cole waved her hand, the one with the twin ring, and said she’d just remembered something else that bothered her about
Jim’s return to slavery. Before he could say he’d like to hear it, she was telling him about it. As the room started to empty, she was still talking, and he decided to ask her if she wanted to get coffee.

She nodded nonchalantly, but he was as nervous as if she’d agreed to go out on a date. And he didn’t mind that she kept talking for another twenty minutes or more, long enough for them to finish their first cup. She was so passionate about her work; he liked that in a woman. Of course he cared deeply about his own, too, and he hoped at some point she would ask him what he was working on. Not because he needed to talk about it—in truth, he could barely think, he was so worried about screwing this up—but because if she didn’t, it probably meant this coffee was just a chance to finish her point. She had no interest in him.

He couldn’t believe his luck. She not only asked, she listened and came up with intelligent questions. They spent two hours at the café, made plans for lunch the next day, and even then, she seemed reluctant to leave. It was tempting to think that she was lonely, too, but she’d already told him she never got lonely. “Like Billy said a long time ago, there’s no loneliness as long as you have stories. My books are my friends.” She smiled. “Too bad I have so many friends at this point that they’re threatening to take over my apartment.”

So maybe she just liked him? Though Patrick had a hard time believing it, it turned out to be true. Much later, she told him what she’d been thinking at that café, the first time they were together. She numbered her thoughts with her fingers, a habit of hers that never failed to charm him. One, he was an excellent listener. Two, he seemed really fascinated by what she thought about books. Three, he was “adorable” in his white sweater and old jeans. Four, he made her understand a math conversation, which she’d thought was impossible. Five, he never once asked her that ridiculous question everyone asks about what it’s like to be a twin.

Five wasn’t a sign of his intuitive powers. He’d almost asked that “ridiculous question,” but something she said made him forget to. He’d gotten lucky again.

Patrick didn’t meet Lila’s twin for almost eight months. He was nervous about the encounter, knowing that Lila had no living parents and Billy was her entire family. He’d also heard things that made him worry that no matter how hard he tried, he wouldn’t like Lila’s brother. At least once a week, she mentioned that Billy was “brilliant,” which wouldn’t have bothered him except she often added that her brother had always been the smarter twin. Lila had won prestigious scholarships, finished her PhD in four years, and already received three tenure-track job offers at excellent schools. In fact, the one she’d just accepted, in Philadelphia—where she was determined to live because Billy and his family had settled there—was at a name-brand college where Patrick would have killed to work since the teaching load was so light, allowing plenty of time for research. Patrick had one offer in Philadelphia, at a small college in the suburbs, where he would have to teach two sessions of introductory algebra for every two real courses he got to teach. But he was planning to take the job if Lila would agree to marry him, and the visit to Billy’s house was his prelude to asking her. Patrick knew if he didn’t get along with her fabulous brother, she’d never consider accepting his proposal.

Billy lived in a row house in a blue-collar neighborhood west of the city. Patrick knew Lila’s brother had gotten married because he’d gotten a woman pregnant, but he’d never understood why they hadn’t considered abortion or adoption, rather than the old-fashioned solution of marriage. Lila had said they weren’t against abortion; she’d also explained that her brother was not in love with this woman, though Patrick wondered if she was wrong about this.
He knew Lila had never gotten close to her brother’s wife and once or twice it occurred to him that Lila might be somehow jealous of Ashley, but he put that idea out of his mind as unfounded and probably ridiculous.

On this particular Sunday, Billy, Ashley, and their almost five-year-old daughter, Pearl, were all at home. The inside of the row house was dark and a little shabby, but it looked like it had been recently cleaned. Pearl’s dolls were neatly arranged in a plastic tub, wedged behind the door. The wood floors had been swept, and the whole place smelled of lemon dusting spray. Ashley was dressed up like she’d just come from church, though her skirt was a little too short for any church Patrick had ever been in. She was pretty in an earthy kind of way: big breasts, round face, flat nose, nice green eyes. Pearl, their daughter, looked a little like what Lila must have looked like as a kid: hair so blond it was almost white, tiny as an elf, a sweet smile. Patrick smiled back at her, and Lila knelt down and gave Pearl a hug. Next, Lila hugged Ashley and spoke to her for a few minutes; only then did she finally throw her arms around her twin.