The Promised World (39 page)

Now, as she moved closer to the headstone, she whispered, “I understand.” She knelt down in the dewy morning grass. “You wanted me to know. Even if you couldn’t tell me yourself, you wanted me to know.”

The sun was up but fighting with the clouds. She watched the yellow and pink struggling against the dark sky and remembered the first time she heard “The Piazza.” She and Billy were in North Carolina. They were sitting on their back porch, and he read it aloud to her. They were so young, the world was all before them, but her brother’s voice was tinged with sadness, as if he already knew the way the story would end.

THE WINTERS IN BLOOM

Lyrical, wise, and witty, The Winters in Bloom is an enchanting, life-affirming story that will surprise readers and leave them full of wonder at the stubborn strength of the human heart.

Kyra and David Winter are happier than they ever expected to be. They have a comfortable home, stable careers, and a young son, Michael, whom they adore. Though everyone who knows the Winters considers them extremely overprotective parents, both Kyra and David believe they have good reasons for fearing that something will happen to their little boy. And then, on a perfectly average summer day, it does, when Michael disappears from his own backyard. The only question is whose past has finally caught up with them: David feels sure that Michael was taken by his troubled ex-wife, while Kyra believes the kidnapper must be someone from her estranged family, someone she betrayed years ago.

Read on for a first look at Lisa Tucker’s dazzling new novel

The Winters in Bloom

Coming in September 2011 from Atria Books

One

H
e was the only child in a house full of doubt. In bed each night, though it wasn’t dark—the floor lights his father had installed—and it wasn’t entirely private—the nursery monitor both parents refused to give up—he rehearsed the things he was certain of, using his fingers to number them. He was just a little boy, but he wouldn’t allow himself to sleep until he’d gone through both hands twice. Twenty was a good number, he thought, though of course it paled in comparison with the number of doubts, partly because his parents had had so many years to discover them, but mainly because the doubt list was always growing, towering above him like the giant boy at his old school, the one his father had called a bully. The giant boy, whose name was Paul, had never done anything to Michael, but his parents
doubted
that Michael could learn in such an environment and took him out of that school. The three schools that followed had led to three other doubts, and now Michael was finishing first grade in home school, even though homeschooling had its doubts, too.
I doubt he’ll get the socialization he needs
, his mother said.
I doubt we can teach him laboratory science
, his father said,
but we’ll have to deal with that when the time comes.
And then the words his parents didn’t have to say—
if the time comes
—because the future was always the biggest doubt of all.

“I will get bigger.” Michael whispered it every night, holding up his thumb. Then he said, touching his index finger, “I will not die before I get to drive a car.” He would force himself not to think of all the ways he could die, the hundreds of things his parents had told him all his life. He would also force himself not to daydream about what his first car would be like, because then he would fall asleep before he finished his counting and dream about rows and rows of shiny cars, all with headlights that looked like eyes and grills that looked like mouths.

In the morning, he was often very tired. When he slumped down for breakfast, his mother would put her hand on his forehead and ask if he was feeling okay. He hardly ever got sick, except when he was two years old and then he was so sick he had to spend weeks in the hospital, though all he remembered about that now was the pattern of elephants and monkeys on the nurses’ clothes. His mother always made him touch his chin to his chest, even if he told her his neck didn’t hurt. Sometimes she would take his temperature and inspect his throat and ears with a flashlight and push on his belly to make sure his appendix wasn’t about to burst. Only after she was satisfied that he wasn’t coming down with something would she ask, “Did you have any nightmares?”

He used to tell her, but he’d stopped when he realized that she and his father discussed his dreams the same way they discussed all the books they were reading about Raising Your Gifted Child. So he didn’t tell her about the dream he kept having where the ocean came up to his bedroom window and he jumped in a boat and floated off. He only thought of it as a nightmare because he knew it should have been scary—if he was alone in the boat, this meant his parents must have drowned. In real life, he would have cried and cried for his parents: their love for him was one of the things he was most certain of; it was always somewhere in the first five things he counted every night. But in the dream, it never occurred to him to wonder where they were. He was sitting on a flat wooden seat in the middle of the boat, listening to the sound of the water lapping against the sides, blinking at the sun hanging so low in the sky it looked like he could row right to it. He felt like the biggest, scariest parts of the world were all gone, washed away by something that was winking at him in the soft fat cloud that floated overhead.

The lady who appeared that day was like the cloud, though she wasn’t fat and she wasn’t at all soft. Her arms were so skinny that when she bent her elbows, Michael thought of the paper clips he liked to twist apart when he was supposed to be learning geography. He didn’t really like geography, though he loved the maps hung up in the room where he studied—the
schoolroom
, his parents called it, though it was nothing like school, because there was only one desk. The map of the city was right in front of him, and he’d stared at it so many times that he knew the lady wasn’t lying when she said she was taking him to the ocean. He’d always wanted to go there, but his father said a jellyfish might bite him, or he might swallow a mouthful of dirty, germy sand, or, worst of all, a tide current might pull him out to the sea and he would never, ever come back.

The lady had asked him where he wanted to go more than anywhere in the world. She was so nice to him that he felt like it might be true when she said she loved him, even though he’d never seen her in his life until that morning. He was outside the house, in the backyard. It was the second day of the
outside alone half hour
, which his mother had decided he needed after she read a book about letting kids be
free range
, like the good-for-you kind of chicken. Michael didn’t know what to do outside—his mother had told him to go ahead and do whatever he wanted, but he was afraid to touch anything, because dirt on your hands could make worms grow in your stomach, and he knew he should never climb a tree, he could fall and break his neck—so he walked around in circles and waved back each time his mother waved at him. She could see him perfectly while she did the dishes. So she must have seen the lady, and it must have been okay for him to go with her, like the lady said.
It’s a surprise! Like on your birthday, except better!

He knew he wasn’t supposed to even talk to strangers, but the lady said she wasn’t a stranger.
You’re my little buddy
, the lady said, and she was crying, which made Michael feel bad for her. She was so skinny and sad, but in her car, she had lots of toys, just like she promised. She had toys he’d always wanted to play with, like robots with little parts that could break off and choke him, and bright red and blue and yellow cars that were probably made with lead paint. He was afraid to touch the toys at first, but then he decided that he wouldn’t choke or swallow lead paint unless the toy went in his mouth. And why would the toy go in his mouth, when it was so much more fun to move the robot arms and pretend the cars were zooming up and down his legs, like the lady’s car was zooming up the highway?

He might have had trouble believing that his parents had agreed to let the lady take him somewhere if he hadn’t overheard them just last night, talking about how they had to change.
It can’t be good for him to be trapped in the house all summer. Other children are out of school, going to camp, playing with their friends. The two of us are doing our best, but it’s not enough. He needs more people in his life.

His mother was the one who’d talked the most, but his father had made noises that sounded like agreement. So this trip with the lady that his parents had planned must be like the time they replaced the entire heating system in the house, rather than trying to get the old one fixed.
Sometimes you have to take extreme measures
, his father had said, and then he’d explained that an
extreme measure
was necessary when the problem was so big, the only way to deal with it was to give up on what you’d done before and start over from square one.

Being with this lady, sitting in a regular seat in the back of her car belted in with a regular seat belt, next to another seat covered with dangerous toys he’d taken out of a dangerous plastic bag, on the way to the ocean, was definitely an extreme measure. On some level Michael felt this, but most of him was just excited. The lady was happy now, too; her laughs sounded like Christmas bells. She had a really friendly smile and nice straight teeth, but when she pushed her hair back, he noticed a big scar on her wrist, and he wondered if it hurt sometimes, the way Mommy’s scar on her knee did whenever it rained.

If they talked about anything important on the way to the Jersey Shore, Michael didn’t remember it. What he remembered—and would for the rest of his life—was that afternoon on the boat. It wasn’t a rowboat like in his dream; it was a big fishing boat with an upper deck and a lower deck and lots and lots of people. Michael was on the upper deck looking out at the wavy sea when a giant fish jumped straight out of the ocean and landed with a huge splash. It was a humpback whale, the fisherman announced, and everybody on the boat was pointing and talking when the whale jumped up again! It did it seven times, which Michael heard people say was amazing, because a lot of times these whale-watching boats went out for hours and didn’t see anything.

It’s because we’re lucky
, the lady said. She pointed at the whale’s tail, which seemed to be waving before it disappeared back into the water.
It likes you.

Michael closed his eyes tight, but when he opened them it was all still there: the bright blue sky and the soft pillow clouds and the endless ocean lapping at the sides of the boat. His hand was still tucked in the lady’s bony hand, and the boat hadn’t tipped over and the seagulls hadn’t pecked his eyes out and the big scary fish wasn’t really scary at all.

“It likes me,” Michael whispered; then he grinned as big as he could, in case the whale was looking up at him through the water. In case the whale was like the lady, who’d promised when she appeared in his backyard that all she wanted was to be Michael’s friend, more than anything in the world.

Two

A
t some point that afternoon, it did occur to Michael that his parents had to be very worried, without even a phone call to tell them that he was okay. Of course he was right, though his assumption that his parents knew this lady would also turn out to be true. (Actually, only one of his parents knew her, and
knew
was hardly a strong enough word for the relationship they’d had, but as this was a long time ago, it was all the same to Michael who, like most five-year-olds, thought of his mommy and daddy as fixed in time, with barely any life before he was born, much less complicated lives before they got married.) Even his feeling that the lady loved him was true, though her love was a desperate, entirely unexpected response that he couldn’t possibly have made sense of. But that his parents must be worried about him, that he understood all too well, even if he didn’t understand why. It had never occurred to Michael to wonder if something had happened to his parents to make them so chronically afraid. Until that afternoon on the boat, he had no basis of comparison other than the parents of his classmates at school, during the short periods he went to school, but since those parents weren’t in the classroom nearly every day, sitting in a corner, watching, as his mother or sometimes his father was, there was no way to tell what they were like.

Naturally, Michael had no idea that those other parents were often whispering about his mother and father, calling the Winters “ridiculously overprotective” and even “insane.” It made the other fathers and mothers feel better about themselves; for if they were a bit overprotective at times—or more truthfully,
when
they were overprotective—at least they were nowhere near as bad as David and Kyra Winter.

The other parents never wondered why Michael’s parents were this way, and no one else did, either: not the teachers at the four schools Michael briefly attended, not even the woman who’d been cleaning the Winters’ house since Michael was three and a half. The teachers did try to reassure Kyra and David: they insisted the bigger boys weren’t bullies, just high-spirited; that it was normal to catch colds the first few weeks of the school year; that Michael would have friends, if only they’d give it time—however, the teachers saw no mystery in the Winters’ behavior. To be fair, they hardly had a chance to think about it, and not because they were busy with their students, but because they had so many worried parents who required constant reassurance. Yes, the Winters were more extreme, but they still seemed like a type the teachers knew all too well: helicopter parents.

The cleaning woman who came every Friday thought the Winters were nice enough. They gave good tips; they kept the place tidy; they didn’t have any of the disgusting habits some of her other employers did.
Hey, they’re a hell of a lot better than the guy who trims his beard in the kitchen sink.
She did notice that the little boy was always there, that he seemed pale and lonely and kind of weird. Once she tried to give him a toy that her own kids had outgrown. It was a stuffed bear, “to sleep with,” she told him, because she thought it was sad that his little bed was as empty as a monk’s. He thanked her three times—always polite, that little boy, unlike her own kids—but he explained that he had allergies and so he couldn’t sleep with anything that might “harbor mold.” She might have known this if she’d washed Michael’s organic sheets the way she washed his parents’, but his mother always insisted on doing them herself. Must be because of the kid’s allergies, the woman thought, though she’d never seen the little boy sneeze or cough and part of her suspected these allergies were just something for the Winters to worry about. The cleaning woman had a theory that everybody needs worries. If rich people don’t have any, she figured, they have to make some up.