The Promised World (20 page)

She was desperate, as usual, to prove a connection with him. This must have been why she didn’t pay attention to the obvious fact that Lila and Billy had grown up in the same house, with the same mother and stepfather, so how could Lila
always
have been younger, experience-wise?

When he said, “Maybe that’s true,” she was beaming. Until he continued, “But if it is, that’s another reason you and I shouldn’t
have more children. As I’ve said a hundred times, I know my life is not going to turn out well. As long as you’re with me, yours won’t, either. We can’t put anyone else at risk.”

He had said this a hundred times, but this time was different. She’d been waiting for the right moment to tell him that her gyne cologist had confirmed what she’d known for weeks. She was pregnant. A high-risk pregnancy, the doctor said, because of her age and her cancer, but he didn’t expect any problems. The baby would be born a few weeks after Ashley’s thirty-sixth birthday.

When she’d gone off birth control, she hadn’t told Billy, which she knew was wrong, but she figured she had plenty of time to deal with it later. The gynecologist said most women who stopped taking pills couldn’t get pregnant right away, and her case was trickier, since even if she did get pregnant, she might miscarry before she even knew. But she was eleven weeks pregnant without even any spotting, so everything was okay so far. The doctor would monitor her closely. Worst case, he said, she might have to spend the last part of her pregnancy in bed.

She took a deep breath and told Billy what she’d done. There was no choice; she was already getting thicker around the middle and tired of explaining away her occasional vomiting as “something I ate” or a “touch of flu.” Even Pearl knew something was up, because Ashley kept falling asleep right after dinner. She told her daughter that Mommy was just tired from working, but Pearl was too smart to buy that. She knew Ashley had been working for more than a year and recently she’d actually cut her hours down to take Pearl to dancing classes (Ashley’s choice) and chess club (Billy’s), still hoping the little girl would make a friend. Pearl had asked, “Are you sick?” so many times that Ashley felt horrible for worrying her daughter. It was time to let both her and her father know the wonderful truth.

But when she was finished telling Billy, all he said was, “Fine.”

“Fine?” she sputtered. “That’s it?”

“Oh, I’m sorry.” His tone was clearly sarcastic. “I forgot to add congratulations.”

She stood up and moved to the porch steps. “Billy, please.” She sat down next to him. “I want another baby so bad. And Pearl will have a little brother or sister.”

“If the child doesn’t die, she will. If you don’t die giving birth to it.”

“What a horrible thing to say!”

“No. The horrible thing is what’s going to happen.” His voice was quiet, hopeless. “The fact that you don’t see this is because you still don’t understand what I’ve been telling you for the last two years.”

She put her hand on his arm. “But remember what you said before Pearl was born? About us being a happy family?”

“I was quoting Tolstoy: ‘Happy families are all alike.’ “He looked at the sky, though it was too cloudy to see the moon or any stars. “I wanted that for us, but the universe wouldn’t allow it. I’ve accepted that. I’ll never be free of the past.”

She didn’t know what the past had to do with it, but she was afraid of getting sucked into the bad way he was looking at this. “Maybe this new baby will change our luck. Have you thought of that? Maybe we’ll be—”

“Saved?” He laughed harshly. “The baby-as-messiah motif?”

The whole conversation had hurt her, but his laughter was the final straw. “Whether you like it or not,” she said, “I’m having this baby. Better get used to it.” Then she went into the house and up to their bedroom, where she spent the next hour facedown on the bed, too depressed even to cry.

The next few days were awful, with Billy barely speaking and Pearl working harder than ever to get her father to smile or laugh or at least talk to her about chess or books or something he liked. But
on Sunday morning, he woke up and told Ashley he’d decided she was right. Maybe the new baby could be a chance for their family to regain their happiness. “Another shot at redemption,” he said. “Why not?” His voice changed the way it always did when he was quoting some dead guy: “ ‘Remember to the last that while there is life there is hope.’ “ Then he said, “Charles Dickens,” though she hadn’t asked.

From that day on, he treated her more gently than he ever had when she was pregnant before: making sure she rested and took her vitamins and ate good food, even going to the doctor with her several times. He said he was “throwing his weight against reality,” which she didn’t exactly get, but she was glad he was being so nice. Pearl was thrilled that she would have a sister or brother, and she liked the name Ashley picked out, too, after the ultrasound confirmed it was a boy. The little girl would put her mouth up to Ashley’s belly and say, “Hi William,” at least once a day. It was like they really were a normal family again, and Ashley was sure that another kid was just what they’d needed all along. Three people was too lonely, especially when one of them was moody, like Billy.

It honestly never crossed her mind that something would go wrong. With Pearl, she worried constantly that the baby would be born without all her fingers or toes or even would be stillborn, but with William, she was so sure he was going to be fine that she never even had those weird nightmares that her mom had told her were normal in pregnancy. It was almost like Billy had taken on the worry for both of them, or maybe she was so determined to believe he was wrong that her mind wouldn’t even go there. Sure, she tried to stay healthy and do everything right, and she really intended to stay in bed for the last four months, like the doctor said she had to, or she might go into premature labor. It was a pain in the ass, but she would do it. If nothing else, Billy would freak out completely
if she didn’t. “Don’t tempt fate,” he said, over and over. He even had Pearl trained to report if Ashley spent too much time standing in the shower or snuck downstairs to the kitchen for a drink or a sandwich.

But it was all sort of sweet, and Ashley wasn’t afraid of Billy. He never got mad at her during the pregnancy, and he didn’t even get mad when she ruined everything. He told her it wasn’t her fault, and she knew he believed it. It was the Cole curse again, “visited on another generation.” He sounded as sad and empty as a ghost as he looked through the clear plastic box in the newborn intensive care unit where two-and-a-half-pound William was locked away from them, hooked up to monitors to breathe for him and feed him and keep him alive. “The sins of the father visited on the son.”

It was Ashley’s sin though, not Billy’s, because she had gotten out of bed to pick up Pearl at day camp. She’d tried to call Billy when Pearl got sick, but his foreman said he’d have to page him and it would be a few minutes. When ten minutes went by, she decided to get Pearl herself. The day camp was only a mile and a half away; she could go and be back before Billy called home. She was anxious to get to her daughter, who was throwing up, but yeah, she was also dying to get out of the house. She’d been lying in that bed for a month. She felt like she would go crazy if she didn’t get a breath of fresh air.

But the real reason was that she was so sure nothing would go wrong. Billy never blamed her for that, but he did say she was “tragically mistaken” when she kept sobbing that it had been such a perfect summer day. He quoted a passage from some book. The singsong voice he used for the first person talking made the speaker sound as stupid as Ashley had been: “But the past is passed; why moralize upon it? Forget it. See, yon bright sun has forgotten it all, and the blue sea, and the blue sky; these have turned over new leaves.”

“Because they have no memory,” Billy answered, in his own depressed voice. “Because they are not human.”

Her husband never blamed her, but Ashley never stopped blaming herself. Not during the days she waited to hear if William would live or the weeks she waited to take him home. Not during the months she watched him in his crib, knowing his brain hadn’t developed right and he might die without the oxygen tank. Not during the year and a half while she waited to find out if his spine and hips would be deformed or his hearing damaged or something else so bad she couldn’t even let herself think about it; not during the three years while she charted his progress—so much slower than Pearl’s in every way it was heartbreaking—hoping he was only developmentally delayed, but fearing he was permanently retarded.

Their family was doomed; she believed that now. They would never be happy and she would always be guilty for not listening to Billy’s warnings. For being too stupid to understand what one moment of carelessness could do to her son.

By the time she found out that William was going to be all right—a little slow compared to the other kids his age, but nothing he couldn’t make up in time; no permanent issue except his poor eyesight, which was correctable with glasses, and which might have been a problem even if he hadn’t been premature—it was too late for Ashley. Her self-blame had led to a self-hatred that she was always drinking to escape. She didn’t go back to work; she let her friends drift away; she wouldn’t even talk to her mother or her sisters. Billy had said he knew he was going to die before he was forty; Ashley went to bed most nights hoping she would die before tomorrow, so she wouldn’t have to face another day of who she’d become.

At some point, she also had to face the fact that her husband looked down on her for being too weak to live under the curse
he’d dealt with his whole life. “Poor Ashley,” he would say. His voice was cold as death. “Forget about what your self-destruction is doing to Pearl and William. It’s all about you now, isn’t it?”

She knew he was right, and she finally made herself go to AA. It helped more than she expected, but it was still a struggle: she would quit drinking for months at a time, then slip up for a weekend, then climb back on the wagon. William was three and a half when she discovered she was pregnant again, an accident, of course, and she vowed she wouldn’t touch a drop for the whole nine months. She made it, but only by cutting herself when the fear got too bad. Though the amnio and all the tests showed the baby was okay, she wouldn’t let herself believe everything could work out until Maisie was born, perfectly normal; then she was so grateful she started attending Catholic church for the first time since she was a teenager. She went alone, early in the morning while Billy and the kids were still asleep, letting them think she was meeting a friend for coffee, wishing she didn’t have to lie, but afraid to start an argument with Billy. He believed in God, but he always said religion was the “opiate of the masses.” She had no idea he was quoting Karl Marx, but she knew he was wrong. The church was the place you went to fight off stuff like curses and destiny and doom. And she was fighting for all of them—and praying she would have the strength to be a good mother.

By the time Billy left, she felt like she was becoming the kind of mom her kids deserved. Yeah, it was hard for them to deal with the breakup of their parents, but she’d finally decided Billy was right when he used to insist that the Cole curse would only affect her and the kids if they were with him. He’d gotten crazier and crazier over the years, ranting to Pearl and William the way he used to do with Lila, for hours, on all his favorite subjects: the dumbing down of America, the terrible school system, the evils of watching TV, the corrupt government that relied on ignorant
voters to keep power. But the really weird thing was how he was always telling stories to Pearl or William about something or other that had happened when they were younger
that never happened.
His stories sounded so real, that was the weirdest part. Ashley caught herself more than once almost believing Billy’s bullshit; no wonder the kids had trouble figuring it out. When he told Pearl that, at six years old, she’d not only claimed she wanted to live in New York but kept a journal with pictures and stuff she’d written about the city, Pearl spent hours in the basement looking for a journal that didn’t exist. When he told William that when he was only three, he could already add dozens of numbers in his head, William beamed, then switched to sheepish embarrassment as he admitted he could only do sixteen numbers now. “That happens,” Billy said sadly. “If a child’s natural ability isn’t fostered in school, it atrophies a little. But don’t worry, your innate brain power hasn’t changed. Once we get you in the right school, you’ll be living up to your potential.”

They didn’t have the money for a private school and Billy knew it. For a few minutes, Ashley felt bad, thinking they were letting their son down, but then she remembered the truth that William could barely speak when he was three. Pearl had never mentioned she wanted to live in New York until she was a teenager. And Pearl’s first word had been “daddy,” not “problematic,” like Billy claimed in another long story about his daughter’s amazing vocabulary. William had torn apart the Rubik’s Cube he’d gotten for his fifth birthday—after trying to solve it for about a minute—and Billy’s “memory” of how proud he was that day was nothing but another sign that he was going over the edge.

Even visiting his father turned out to be dangerous for William. Ashley had been shocked by the things Billy was forcing that child to do, but she’d stepped up and protected her son when it mattered. Sure, she felt bad for Billy, but what choice did she have? Her husband was losing it. The police officer told her something
even worse was probably coming, and he turned out to be right. No matter how bad she felt when Billy went berserk and got himself killed—and God, the pain was damn near unbearable—she tried to be a good mother and focus on comforting her kids.

Sometimes she wondered if she’d made a mistake, letting Kyle live with them so soon after Billy moved out, but she hoped Kyle would actually make things better. The poor kids had never known a normal life with parents who did things for fun, like bowling and baseball games. Kyle could help her teach the kids that everyday stuff was all right. You didn’t have to be reading constantly like Pearl or listening to classical music night and day like William to have a good time. Most important, they didn’t have to please their father anymore. They could goof off and watch TV and Kyle would never say they were “wasting their minds.” Kyle would never tell them what to do, period—that was part of the deal before Ashley told him he could move in with them. She didn’t want any man thinking he had the right to discipline her kids.