The Promised World: A Novel

by Lisa Tucker

  Billy agreed that she should go because he knew, as Lila did, that this was worse than a bad mood. As she ran up the hill, she wondered if her mother would ever forgive her. But she was proud, too, because she’d kept her brother from being beaten. She’d done the right thing.

  When she got to the tree house, she was so tired that she curled up on the floor to rest. At some point she must have fallen asleep, because the next thing she knew, her brother was standing at the base of the tree, telling her she had to come down now. He sounded so sad that she wondered if Harold had come back to threaten him again, and she rushed down to see if she could help. That’s when she saw that he wasn’t alone. In the light from the moon, she could see their mother standing next to him, and a few feet away, two strange men.

  As the men grabbed her, Lila wanted to fight or run away, but she couldn’t move. To say her heart was broken would be wrong. She felt like her heart had left her body and there was an empty space where her feelings should be.

  “I’ll come for you,” Billy said right before they took her away, with her hands bound up like a criminal. He was crying, but she didn’t shed a tear or even say goodbye.

  Lila came out of this memory gripping the arm of the love seat so tightly her knuckles had gone white. It was nothing like at Mrs. Lewis’s house, where she’d felt that on some level she’d always known about the night her father died. This day, the day she’d attacked Harold, and everything it meant, had been buried in her mind—and actively hidden from her by her brother, whose version of what happened had been completely at odds with the truth.

  Her mother was talking to Pearl as if nothing had changed. “As I’ve mentioned before, by the time your father and his sister were teenagers… well, I won’t go into that again, but suffice it to say, Billy couldn’t bear being away from her, so he ran away and managed to sneak her out of the hospital when the nurses weren’t paying attention. He showed terrible judgment, given that she needed to be treated, but when the hospital asked me if I agreed to her release, I said yes. Your father had already told me if I didn’t agree, he would never speak to me again. As it is, I didn’t see him for years, though he let me know that they were staying with their grandmother in North Carolina. I suppose I should have been grateful for small favors.”

  Pearl was looking at Lila, pleading with her to make sense of this. But how could she, when she was drowning herself? Everything Billy had told her was a lie. Harold had been mean, yes, but he was hardly the villain her brother had created. He wasn’t even tall or menacing; he was a guy she’d remembered in one of her dreams, the short bald man who’d given her pennies when she was a little girl. Were there other men, other boyfriends, who’d punished her at her mother’s behest? She felt sure there were. But worst of all was discovering that her belief that Billy had always protected her was an utter distortion of reality. He was the one who’d been called evil that night, and not by Harold, by their mother. And Lila had tried to protect him; yet Billy had told her mother and the men from the hospital about her hiding place. He’d led them right to her.

  Finally, she found the anger Dr. Kutchins had insisted she must have. Billy had always told her not to be weak; yet he was the one who’d really been weak. He’d never had the courage to tell her the truth. He’d even continued to visit their mother after they’d started their new life. How could he have betrayed her like this?

  “What does any of this have to do with you?” she finally said to her niece. She was trying to breathe slowly to keep herself from crying or screaming or running from this house. “Let’s say your father hated himself when he was child. What difference does it make now?”

  “No need to get snippy,” her mother said. She turned to Pearl. “You’ll have to forgive your aunt. She’s always been too selfish to sympathize when someone is obviously hurting.”

  For her mother to talk about sympathy was absolutely laughable. Yet Lila knew she’d sounded angry, and she was about to tell her niece she was sorry when Pearl whispered, “Because I hate myself, too. And I’m afraid I’m always going to, like he did.”

  Tears started rolling down Pearl’s cheeks and soon she was sobbing so hard she was hiccupping as she stammered out, “I told him on the phone that Mom was right about him putting William in danger. I just wanted him to understand and change so he could see us again.” She collapsed to her knees and hugged herself with her arms. The weapon was still in her hand, dangling like a purse. “It was only two days later when Daddy…”

  “It wasn’t your fault,” Lila said as gently as she could manage. “I promise you, that had nothing to do with the reason your father did what he did.” She paused. “And you know what? Your mom was right. Your little brother could have been seriously hurt.”

  “But why did he do it then?” Pearl cried. “I have to know w—”

  “Oh, please,” her mother said. “How would your aunt know Billy’s—”

  “All right,” Lila said, and inhaled. “I’ll tell you what I think. I think he killed himself because he thought he was a coward. Because he didn’t protect me. And because… I stood up to Harold and he didn’t.”

  “But that can’t be true.” Pearl was sitting on her heels now, holding the gun with both hands, gingerly, as though it were a newborn baby. She swallowed hard. “My dad always talked about how important it was to be brave. And he meant that. I know he did!”

  Lila looked at the mantel of the fireplace covered with photographs of Billy as a child taken at chess tournaments, and a few pictures of the two of them, mostly taken by their father when they were small. Of course Pearl didn’t want to believe this about her father. She’d adored Billy since before she could walk.

  But all Lila wanted was to get that gun away from her niece. So she took a deep breath and decided to tell Pearl a story. She ignored all her mother’s interruptions as she told Pearl about a damaged little girl who’d fallen down the stairs and a brother who tried his best to make her better. The boy gave the girl books to read when she was frightened. He kept her from getting worse, mentally, by helping her to memorize passages from literature. And because she couldn’t really remember from day to day what happened, the boy invented a world for her. That world had a clear villain and two heroes: the boy and the girl. And that world held out the promise of a beautiful future, where the two of them could be safe.

  But when Lila got to the part of the story about Harold’s punishments, she didn’t shrink from the boy’s failure to protect the girl. She knew the story wouldn’t be convincing if she didn’t account for this. She repeated that the boy thought he was a coward—but she emphasized that he was wrong. He couldn’t see that he was the best part of the girl’s childhood. He couldn’t see what a great gift he’d given her by making her love stories. In truth, it was the boy and his stories that had protected the girl from despair and might have even saved her life.

  Finally, she looked into Pearl’s eyes. “He had to be brave to do all that, don’t you think? In a sense, you could even say it was worse for him, because he didn’t have someone like him to invent a better world. All he had was the painful truth.”

  “Bravo,” her mother said, smirking. “You’ve outdone yourself, though I suppose—”

  “Be quiet!” Pearl said, before turning back to Lila. “I think you’re right, you know? Because in his book, Dad talks about the imagination like it’s this force for good. In real life, he told me this quote about people not being able to bear too much reality. It sounds like he was trying to help you the only way he knew how.”

  Lila knew this quote; it was from Billy’s favorite poem, Eliot’s Four Quartets: “Go, said the bird, for the leaves were full of children Hidden excitedly, containing laughter. Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind / Cannot bear very much reality.”

  When her niece not only put down the gun but pushed it away from her, under the couch, Lila was so relieved her body felt limp and exhausted. She wondered what time it was. It was still dark outside, but a lighter dark, m
ore purple than black.

  A moment or two later, William appeared in the room, as though he’d been watching all this. She was concerned that it must have upset him, and he looked shaky and frightened, but his voice was confident when he said, “My mom and Uncle Patrick are coming to help us.”

  “How do you know that?” Lila said.

  “I called them on Pearl’s cell phone.” He handed the phone to his sister. “I’ve been looking out the window, so I could let them in.”

  Lila’s mother stood up and went into the hall, but before she could do whatever she planned to do—probably call CPS—William ran to the front door and then Patrick and Ashley were in the room, too. Ashley rushed to her daughter, and Patrick came over to Lila. It was so strange to have him in this house, knowing how much she’d wanted to keep all the tragedy of her past away from him.

  When her mother returned, she frowned at Ashley. “I could have you arrested for taking the children, but I don’t want to traumatize Pearl after the night she’s had. I tried my best with them, but you obviously don’t appreciate it. Apparently, you’ve forgotten that I was doing you a favor.” She lifted her chin. “Ah, well. I have a hunch they’ll be back here before long.”

  Before her sister-in-law could respond, Lila said, “No, they won’t ever be back in this house. And if you try to force the issue with lawyers, I’ll fight you.” She took her husband’s hand; his wide palm was warm and so familiar, it gave her courage. “I’ll tell the court what it was like living with you.”

  Her mother didn’t defend herself for a change. It seemed like it was finally over. But when they were all at the door, packed and ready to leave, Pearl suddenly ran off in the direction of the stairs. Ashley was holding William, who was half-asleep, but she started after her until Lila said she would go. “Don’t worry,” she whispered, looking into her sister-in-law’s eyes. “She probably just forgot something.”

  She found Pearl in her bedroom, standing by the window, with her backpack lying at her feet. When Lila asked what was going on, Pearl said, “I don’t know.”

  Her niece clearly meant that. She sounded like a confused little girl. Then Lila noticed what she was looking at. In the corner, on top of the small dresser, was another framed picture of Billy. He was a teenager about Pearl’s age. He was standing in the woods in the snow, wearing a navy blue cap, pointing at something. Lila knew she’d taken this photo, and not only because he was smiling, but also because his body looked relaxed, the way it only did when their mother wasn’t there.

  She picked up the picture and asked Pearl if she wanted it.

  “Can I?” the girl whispered. “I really like thinking of him as happy. I mean, some of the time.”

  “Of course,” Lila said and handed it to Pearl. Her mother had hundreds of photos of Billy as a child; surely his daughter deserved at least one.

  As Lila watched Pearl putting the photograph in her backpack, carefully, as though she was trying to avoid bending her right arm, it suddenly struck Lila that she knew what had happened to her niece. “Your grandmother did that to you, didn’t she?”

  “How did you know?”

  “Because she hit me, too.” It was hard to admit, but she knew it was true: her mother had hit her and pulled her hair and even whipped her with a belt. She felt like she’d always known this on some level, which was why she’d needed Billy to keep telling her the plot. And maybe why Billy had made up the part about Harold being their stepfather? It was so much easier to accept having been beaten by a stepfather whom your “weak” mother couldn’t stand up to, rather than by a boyfriend whom she’d obviously told to punish you. It was so much easier to believe that this stepfather had been cruel to you rather than your own mom.

  Lila went to her niece and put her arms around her. At first, Pearl accepted the hug somewhat stiffly, but when Lila said, “I want to help you, honey,” the girl relaxed and leaned against Lila, and Lila could feel how worn-out she was. “I’m here for you,” she said softly. “And we’re going to get through this. I’m not sure how we’re going to get through it, but we have to, don’t we?”

  Pearl looked up. Her eyes were swollen from crying, but she said yes.

  Then Lila noticed her mother standing in the doorway.

  “I feel I should correct one thing in the tale of woe you told my granddaughter downstairs. Don’t worry, it doesn’t contradict the central theme of poor, poor Lila, who was always being mistreated.”

  “Save it, Mother. I know you left me alone for days to travel to chess tournaments with Billy. Even though I had seizures. You should have been arrested for that and—”

  “You were not alone. The housekeeper was with you, if not all day, then at least part of each day. And your seizures were controlled with medicines.”

  Lila turned to Pearl. “Go on down to your mom, okay? I’ll be there in a minute.”

  Pearl nodded and Lila waited until she heard her niece’s footsteps on the stairs before she hissed, “You hit that poor girl! How dare you?” She clutched her hands together. “And you hit me. I remember that, too, now. You hurt me and you—”

  “As I’ve already said, you were the kind of child who had to be punished. Blame me all you want, but I think you’d sing a different tune if you had the courage to have your own children, rather than judge me for how I raised mine.”

  Lila was standing near the closet. Though she hadn’t thought about it when Pearl was with her, this used to be her bedroom. It had been completely redecorated, but she could feel the ghost of the child she’d been. She could feel the way her mother had been, too, that night when she’d stood in this same doorway and blamed her for her father’s death.

  “I have to go,” she said.

  “This won’t take long. I just want to tell you about the day you fell down the stairs. The doctor said you might never remember that, because trauma victims often don’t. But it was the day of your father’s funeral.” She sighed. “A difficult time for me, of course. I’d lost the only man I’d ever loved and been left a single mother of twins. I didn’t know how I’d—”

  Lila felt suddenly nervous, but she said, “It’s always about you, isn’t it? Nothing else matters but how you feel and what you want.”

  “I can’t believe I raised such a rude child.”

  “That’s it,” Lila said, “I’m leaving.” She rushed past her mother and into the hall, but her mother followed her.

  “You seem to think your brother was a saint,” her mother continued, “but the truth is he was a lot like me. He had, shall we say, no patience for fools.”

  “He wasn’t like you,” Lila said without turning around. “He made mistakes, but he was capable of loving other people.”

  “Believe what you wish. I only wanted you to know that you didn’t fall down the stairs, Lila. I didn’t push you, and you didn’t fall. Make of it what you will.”

  Lila felt like she was falling again, but this time she could hear her brother screaming. She felt immediately that it was true; her mother lied about feelings and minimized the damage, but she rarely lied so blatantly about facts. She didn’t need to; she could always present any fact in a way that defended her, while devastating the other person.

  But if her mother seriously expected Lila to wonder whether Billy pushed her on purpose, she didn’t understand anything about the two of them—or anything about the nature of love. They might have been squabbling, as all children do, but of course he’d never meant to really hurt her. She’d remembered the way they were before she fell: crying when they got stung by bees, reading together in the tree house, rolling down the hill as superheroes, swimming and playing and laughing and talking about his stories. He was a little boy. If only someone had told him that this was not his fault.

  She could feel tears welling up, but she heard Patrick’s deep voice and the surprising sound of Pearl’s laughter. “My family is waiting for me,” she said. Then she headed to where they were standing by the front door and told them she was ready t
o go home.

  EPILOGUE

  A few days later, early in the morning, Lila was standing at Billy’s grave. It was a little after sunrise and the first time she’d seen the headstone. Most of the words Ashley had chosen were traditional: his name and dates, along with the acknowledgment that he was a father, a husband, and a brother, but across the top she’d had them carve: Step Softly, a Dream Lies Buried Here. She wasn’t sure where Ashley had found this epitaph—maybe the funeral home suggested it—but it seemed simple, sad, and true.

  She’d decided to come to the cemetery the night before, when Pearl had given her a blue folder. “It was really supposed to be yours all along,” Pearl said. “I’m sorry.”

  Lila’s heart jumped into her throat when she realized what she was holding in her hands. It was Billy’s book. On the front was a sticker where he’d written: “For LEC: Truth Comes in with Darkness.”

  The phrase was from “The Piazza,” one of Melville’s stories she’d written about in her dissertation. The story is about a man who imagines that a glittering house on a faraway mountain is an enchanted fairyland. Then one day the man journeys to the house and finds that Marianna, the girl who lives there, is not only wretchedly poor, but near despair: an orphan, living alone with a brother who must work constantly and is never home. Yet the one thing that keeps her going is her belief that the house she sees down in the valley is a magical place. She believes if only she could meet the happy person who lives there her sorrow might abate. Of course, the man himself is this person and it is his house that she sees. But he leaves without telling her, and the story ends with him saying that he will not set out for fairyland again.

  Billy’s manuscript was typed, obviously written years ago; yet it felt as intensely personal as if it were a three-hundred-and something-page letter he’d written to her. As she’d carefully flipped through the pages, seeing her name and Billy’s on nearly every one, she’d begun to grasp what this meant.