The Promised World (10 page)

“Do you think your mother might have been crying because she felt helpless to stop your stepfather?”

“Give me a minute,” Lila said. She was trying to remember what her tea set looked like. Pearl had had a tea set, too, a cute white one with vines of pink roses curling around the handles of the cups. When the little girl was five or six, Lila had played tea with her, but Pearl had milk in the cups instead of water. Ashley was at work and Billy let Pearl wear her best dress for the tea party and let her pour the milk herself, even though she spilled a little. Billy was speaking with a British accent and holding his pinky out every time he picked up his cup. At some point, Pearl and Lila and Billy all broke down laughing.

She looked at the clock on the table by Nancy. The hour was almost over, but she didn’t want to go home. There was nowhere in the world that she wanted to be now. If only she could spend the rest of her life imagining that she was at one of those tea parties. If only she could hear Billy giggling as a boy, or laughing as a man with his own beautiful little girl. It knocked the breath out of her,
knowing that she could travel the world and it wouldn’t matter, she would never find her brother again.

“Lila?” Nancy said. “You still haven’t told me why your mother was crying. Is this hard for you to talk about?”

She had never discussed this with anyone but Billy, but he did all the talking, skimming over all the details she couldn’t remember, emphasizing only that their mother had been too weak to protect them. It struck her now that perhaps she got to remember the good things because he took responsibility for remembering all the bad. “We’re living a metaphor” was the way he put it once, but he was joking that her more cheerful disposition came from her having lighter-colored hair. He never complained that he had to live his life under the shadow of always knowing what Lila couldn’t bear to know. And whenever her pain got too bad, he would remind her of the second part of the plot, an elaborate story of the happy adulthood that he’d constructed out of thin air and taught her to believe in, too. The promised world; their lives, redeemed.

Nancy waited a while before suggesting, “Perhaps you don’t remember why your mother was crying when your stepfather hit you? If so, it’s all right, we can work on that next time. You’ve made good progress to—”

“But I think I do remember something,” she said, and her own voice surprised her. She hadn’t planned on talking about this. She’d only thought of it last night, while she was half-asleep, and this morning she’d woken up feeling like it couldn’t be real. It was something Billy had never told her, not once, and it didn’t seem to fit with their mother being weak. Was she losing the plot again? If only Billy were here, she would know what was happening to her. Without him, the fear was unbearable. What if she really was going crazy?

It was eleven o’clock, time for her to leave. Patrick was waiting.
Nancy stood up. Lila stood, too, but she didn’t move. “I have to ask you a question,” she said. “If something feels like a memory, but it didn’t really happen, is that another symptom of being depressed?”

“Go ahead and tell me this memory,” Nancy said. “We’ll talk about what it means next week. Right now, I think you need to say it.”

The phone on Nancy’s desk started ringing. Probably her receptionist, letting her know that the next patient had arrived. But Nancy didn’t answer it. Her eyes were encouraging.

“When you asked if my mother was crying because she was helpless to stop my stepfather… I think that’s true. But in my head, I don’t see my stepfather, I just hear her saying something while she’s crying.”

“What is she saying, Lila?”

“I know this didn’t happen, though. And I’m really scared what this means about me. What if I’m losing my mind?”

“I think you’re just afraid to tell me this. I also think you’re going to feel a lot better once you do.”

Lila wasn’t at all sure that she would feel better, but she didn’t know how she could feel much worse. So, after a moment, she took a breath and said, “My mother isn’t crying because she’s sad, but because she’s angry. I know this even before she says the words. And then she says them over and over again, and I can’t bear it, but she won’t stop.”

“What are the words?”

“I put my hand over my ears and beg her.” Lila could feel tears standing in her eyes. “ ‘Please, Mother, please don’t.’ But she doesn’t listen. She’s still saying it. She says it until I can’t take it any longer.” Lila wanted to move to the door, to get away from the therapist, but she was glued to the spot, hearing her mother shrieking those words.

“‘I’ve given birth to a monster,’ “ Lila finally muttered. A sense of quietness descended on her, but it was an odd feeling, less like being calm than being dead. “That’s what my mother was saying. About me.”

And then, without waiting to see how the therapist would take this, Lila escaped from the office. Once they were in the elevator, she told Patrick that she was never coming back.

CHAPTER EIGHT

W
illiam’s mother had told him a zillion times that some grown-ups didn’t like kids and so you couldn’t be too loud or silly in stores, even if you didn’t run around and hurt anything. “Those kind of grown-ups are bad guys,” Daddy said one day, after Mommy took Maisie upstairs for her nap. “That’s why you can’t trust any grown-up you don’t know. Even if they smile and act nice, don’t be fooled. They don’t care about you and some of them might want to hurt you.”

When the policeman came to ask him questions, after he was a stupid baby and told his mom about the camping Challenge, he did another stupid thing. He forgot what Daddy said about some grown-ups wanting to hurt you. The policeman must have been that kind of grown-up and that’s why he arrested William’s
father, to hurt William and his sisters by taking their dad away from them. William wrote himself a reminder to be super careful around grown-ups he didn’t know. And then, because he was afraid he wasn’t smart enough to know when someone was tricking him, he decided not to talk to any grown-ups, even those he did know. Even his own mom.

He had to keep reminding himself of how important this was, because Mommy kept saying she was worried. He knew this was why she kept taking him to places he didn’t like where another new grown-up wanted to talk to him about the Challenges, and how he felt about his daddy, and how he felt about everything. He couldn’t run away because the door was closed and his mom was right outside, ready to drag him back in. “You have to talk!” Mommy said. “Please! I know you understand what I’m saying!”

Since the day after the funeral, William hadn’t messed up even one time. He hadn’t said a word to anybody except Pearl, and she promised she wouldn’t tell that he could talk if he wanted to. At first, nobody cared too much, but after a week, his teacher got worried and called his mother in for a conference. It was the teacher’s idea to take William to see all these people who wanted to talk about his feelings. But he was safe from blurting anything out now. Even Kyle, his mom’s friend, couldn’t get him to talk. It was just like the Challenge about being a spy that he’d done with Daddy, but now he was not only listening really good to everything around him, but never opening his mouth about anything he heard. He hoped his father could see him in heaven, because he knew Daddy would be proud.

William knew he shouldn’t care how his mom felt. He’d heard Pearl and her friend Staci talking about how mean Mommy was for making them sneak around just to visit Daddy’s grave, and how stupid Mommy was for falling in love with a drunken idiot like Kyle, and how it was all her fault that Daddy got killed, and William
felt sort of dumb that he loved her so much. But he wasn’t going to be a baby about it. He wasn’t going to talk just because she sang him more songs at bedtime and made him extra snacks.

It was hard sometimes with his mother, but it was easy with the grown-ups in the ugly place. They asked all kinds of questions, but when William wouldn’t answer any of them, they gave him paper and crayons and told him to draw. He liked drawing, even if he wasn’t very good at it. He drew robots and cars and dinosaurs and whatever he felt like. Sometimes they told him to draw his family or himself, but he just acted like he hadn’t heard and drew another robot. When it was time to go, they had William wait out in the hall and brought Mommy inside the office, but they didn’t shut the door all the way and William could hear them talking sometimes. He had to put his hand over his mouth not to giggle when he heard one lady say William had drawn his daddy as a dinosaur. He told Pearl later and she laughed, too, and said, “Social workers are morons.”

He only talked to Pearl when they were in Staci’s car or all the way down by the edge of the creek behind their house, where nobody could hear. His big sister was so nice to him now that he could hardly remember when she used to call him a brat and tell him to get out of her room and out of her sight. He was glad he had her to talk to, because sometimes he was afraid if he kept quiet for too long, he’d forget how to speak and turn into a baby again. Pearl said that could probably happen, but it wouldn’t happen to him because he wouldn’t have to keep this up for much longer.

It was after school and they were down by the creek. Pearl had crooked her finger to get him to follow her. He could tell she was mad about something. He was glad it turned out to have nothing to do with him.

His sister said, “You know she’s planning to make us all move to godforsaken New Mexico, right?”

William didn’t know that, but he knew Mommy’s family lived
in New Mexico and he knew she missed her family something awful since their dad moved out.

“What’s ‘godforsaken’ mean?” he said.

“It means it’s ugly as hell. No trees, no water, no flowers, just these shrubs that look like cauliflower and make you sneeze.” Pearl flipped her hair over her shoulder. “It also means that the people who live there are illiterate barbarians. Did you know Mom’s fabulous home has one of the worst education systems in the country? The lowest rate of people who go to libraries? If we move there, we can forget Princeton. We’ll be lucky if we can get into community college.”

William knew Daddy wanted all of them to go to Princeton for college. He also knew Aunt Lila had gone there, because Mommy said that was the only reason Daddy thought the place was so great. “Everything Lila does is sooo perfect, isn’t it?” Mommy had said. Her voice was full of laughs, but they were mean-sounding. “We’ll be so lucky if our kids turn out anything like Her Royal Highness.”

William threw a stick in the creek. Pearl was still talking. “This is all because of that moron Kyle. Mom said maybe we would move back to Philadelphia, which would be cool because my old friends are there and it’s close enough that Staci could drive up and visit and we could see Aunt Lila, but Kyle said he couldn’t see himself living in ‘Filthydelphia.’ He wants to go home, he said. If Mom wasn’t a moron, too, she’d tell him to go back to the hell he came from and leave us alone. But nooooo. Mom decides we’re going with him. Without asking us! Without caring how we feel at all.”

“We don’t want to,” William said. Though he really didn’t know how he felt. He’d been to New Mexico the summer before he started kindergarten, but all he remembered was laughing and playing with Granny and Aunt Trish. He loved Aunt Trish best of
all his aunts because she never made him clean his glasses and she built a Lego spaceship with him. But he didn’t like Mom’s friend Kyle, ‘cause Kyle was always throwing beer cans in the trash and missing, and Kyle had icky breath. Plus, Kyle never did anything with him. He was always saying stuff like, “Let’s play catch together this afternoon,” or “We’re going to go to that race on Saturday,” but when afternoon or Saturday came, he was always sitting on the couch watching TV.

“Don’t worry,” Pearl said. “We’re not moving to New Mexico. They can take Maisie with them, but they’re not taking us. We’re running away.”

“For real?” William was a little scared, but he didn’t want Pearl to know. He was so proud that she’d picked him to take with her and not Maisie.

“I have it all planned out. On Friday night, while Mom and Kyle are out on their stupid weekly ‘date,’ Staci is coming to get us and drive us to Aunt Lila’s. Danielle is coming over to watch Maisie. All we have to do is get some stuff together beforehand.” Pearl looked at William. “But just one duffel bag of clothes and things you really, really need.”

“Like my boom box,” William said. He never went anywhere without that. He used it to listen to all the music Daddy had been giving him since he was little. His favorite used to be Bach, back when Daddy was alive, but now he liked the guy from Russia whose name he could never pronounce, spelled S-H-O-S-T-A-K-O-V-I-C-H. Mommy said she was sick of hearing that depressing music, but Pearl said their mom had never understood classical composers. “She likes country,” his sister said. “How could she?”

“Sure,” Pearl said now. “But only three or four CDs. Aunt Lila will have a lot more at her house, I promise.”

William thought for a moment. “Won’t Mommy ask where we’re going?”

Pearl frowned. “You have to pack in secret, dummy. Duh. Keep the duffel bag in your closet and cover it with your coat and some other clothes. If she opens the closet, which she won’t, all she’ll see is the usual mess of stuff that fell off the hangers. The worst that will happen is that she’ll yell at you again to clean up the closet. But probably not, because she’s too freaked out that you haven’t talked for over three weeks.”

She held up her hand and he raised his, too, so she could give him another slap five for keeping his mouth shut for so long. He was glad she did this, because he was feeling really bad that he was such a dummy he didn’t know the duffel bag should be hidden.

He found a big rock and threw it in the creek and then watched all the ripples as it hit the water and sank. After a minute, he said, “What if Aunt Lila doesn’t want us?”

“Haven’t you been paying attention? She calls like every day to see us, but our wonderful mother always tells her no. Aunt Lila is on our side. She’s just like Dad. She doesn’t want us to live out the rest of our lives working at the DMV.”