The Promised World (41 page)

Kyra felt so horrible that she went to Amy and put her arms around her and said she didn’t mean any of it. She said she must have PMS, and hoped Amy wouldn’t remember that her period had just ended last week. “Of course I love you,” she insisted. “You are the biggest part of everything to me. I can’t even imagine the future without you in it.” Amy looked up, and Kyra nodded. “God, Amy, everyone loves you. You are the kindest, smartest, person in—”

“I’m not that great,” Amy said. “I’m just trying really, really hard. And all those people don’t love me. They don’t even know me.” Her tears were wetting Kyra’s shoulder; her snot was dripping onto Kyra’s purple shirt. She cried silently for a while. Kyra could feel her sister’s chest shaking when she added, “Only you really know me.”

Kyra wondered what Amy meant, what Kyra knew about her sister that other people didn’t. It surely wasn’t the mundane details of the body: the barfed hot dog, the occasional stinky feet, the mole on Amy’s forearm that she had to keep shaving or face a long, curly hair growing out from its center that they both agreed was unfair and a little disgusting. It couldn’t be their stepmother’s random criticisms and punishments. She was hardly Cruella De Vil, and though Amy and Kyra complained about her constantly, part of Kyra knew she wasn’t that bad.

Their father’s indifference was more important, but Amy had told a few boyfriends about that. It wasn’t exactly a secret anyway. Every teacher had remarked on their father’s absence at the girls’ school functions and parent conferences. Even the priests could tell their father was not a true parent to the daughters in the pew next to him every Sunday at Mass.

What did Kyra know about Amy that no one else did? She snored. Big deal. She had to work very hard sometimes to get her perfect grades. Harder than Kyra herself, actually, but this was a recent development. Kyra had chalked it up to Amy working so much at the aluminum factory. She hadn’t let herself consider that she might be better than Amy at something.

Amy was crying harder when she stammered out the word
Mommy.
It wasn’t strange; even seventeen-year-old Amy still called for their mother on the rare occasions when she cried. But it reminded Kyra of what she should have known immediately, why Amy thought Kyra knew her better than any of her friends. And why, in fact, she did.

When their mother left, it was a Thursday in July and so hot and humid the gnats stuck to their eyelashes. She said she was going to Overland Park, a suburb of Kansas City where their grandmother lived. Grandma was dying, and she had to go to take care of her.

Their father was at work. She was standing on the curb, holding a liquor store box, pressing its weight against her chest. She’d packed up nearly everything she owned: her clothes and her books and dozens of framed pictures of the girls. The rest of the boxes filled the back of her old Plymouth. In the passenger seat, she’d wrapped a blanket around two limp plants.

Amy had run after her, grabbed her arm, felt it slip in her sweaty hand. “Wait,” she panted. “Take me with you.”

“Granny is sick, kiddo. I don’t think you want—” “I can help!” Amy said. “I won’t do anything wrong!” Though Kyra barely remembered this, the child Amy was nothing like Amy now. The child Amy was always getting into trouble. Knocking over her milk glass. Melting crayons in the radiator. Breaking their mother’s favorite blue bowl. Almost setting the house on fire trying to light a candle for a Barbie tea party.

It was all innocent enough, and it certainly had nothing to do with why their mother didn’t come back. Though it was true that their grandmother was dying, it was also true that their mother and father had already filed for divorce. Irreconcilable differences. Full custody awarded to the father but only because the mother did not request custody or even visitation. She did request that she not be required to pay child support, but since she had no steady source of income, the father saw no point in fighting her on that.

Their mother said nothing about the divorce. Instead, she told Amy that if she was a good girl, Mommy would come back for her. It was either an incredibly cruel thing to say or at least very immature. Possibly both.

“Until I come back, though, I want you to stay with your sister.” She pointed at the walkway, where Kyra was standing. Kyra was afraid of death. She didn’t like to think of Grandma dying. She couldn’t imagine wanting to go with Mommy like Amy did. “You two take care of each other,” their mother said, as she put the last box in the car. The closing of the trunk smacked the air and Kyra jumped.

Amy had to be pried off their mother and deposited next to Kyra. Their mother instructed Kyra to “hold your sister’s hand.” Kyra tried, but Amy managed to shake loose and she followed the Plymouth down the block, running as fast as her short legs would carry her. When their mother gunned the engine at the corner, Amy lost sight of the car and wailed her way back.

Their mother really did go to Grandma’s, but when Grandma died, she traveled to all kinds of places, none of them even close to their small town. She sent postcards to Amy and Kyra; she wrote things like, “You should see the Pacific. It’s FANTASTIC.” “The Liberty Bell isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Ha, ha.” She never once asked how her daughters were. Kyra didn’t care that much, since they obviously couldn’t have answered her anyway. None of the postcards had a return address.

They never talked about their mother, not really. Up until Kyra was eleven or so, Amy would occasionally say, “We should save this for Mommy” when they found some treasure in the woods: a shiny rock, a perfect daisy, a snail or a butterfly. It ended one afternoon after Kyra yelled, “She’s never coming back!” and smashed something to the ground, she no longer remembered what. But inside Amy’s heart, it had not ended. This was what Kyra knew that no one else did.

As Kyra held her crying sister in her arms, she felt sad, but stronger, too. Her sister obviously needed her. When Amy had calmed down, Kyra thought how surprising it was that her sister seemed so perfect on the outside, yet on the inside she was as troubled as anyone, maybe even more troubled than most.

That thinking of Amy this way seemed oddly cheering to Kyra is probably forgivable. She was only a teenager. To the grown-up Kyra, that day would always be memorable not because she’d discovered that Amy had problems, but because she’d been there for her sister. She’d held her sister while she wept. And she’d told her sister the truth, though she didn’t know how true it was then—she couldn’t imagine the future without Amy in it.

THE PROMISED WORLD

In acclaimed bestselling author Lisa Tucker’s mesmerizing and suspenseful tale of intimacy, betrayal, and lost innocence, a literature professor’s carefully constructed life shatters after her twin brother’s death.

On a March afternoon, while Lila Cole is working in her quiet office, her twin brother, Billy, points an unloaded rifle out a hotel window, closing down a city block. The aftermath of his death brings shock after shock for Lila when she discovers that her brilliant but troubled twin was not only estranged from his wife, but also charged with endangering the life of his middle child and namesake, eight-year-old William. As Lila struggles to figure out what was truth and what was fiction in her brother’s complicated past, she will put her job, her marriage, and even her sanity at risk.

Read on for a look at Lisa Tucker’s

The Promised World

Currently available from Atria Books

Chapter One

W
hile millions of people watched her brother die, Lila sat in her quiet office at the university, working on a paper about Herman Melville’s later years. Someone else might have found it ironic that, on that very afternoon, she’d been thinking about Melville’s son, who shot himself. Lila herself didn’t make the connection until much later, and by then, she was so lost she could only see it as an obvious sign that she should have known, that she’d failed Billy when he needed her most.

Though Billy didn’t shoot himself, his death was considered a suicide. Patrick, Lila’s husband, had to explain it to her twice before she realized what he was saying. Her mind was working so slowly, but she finally understood that “suicide by police”
happened enough that it had its own label. Billy had holed himself up inside a Center City Philadelphia hotel with a rifle, unloaded but aimed at an elementary school, so a SWAT team would have to do what he couldn’t or wouldn’t do to himself. As far as Lila knew, Billy had never owned a gun, but she hadn’t talked to her twin much in the last two years, since he’d moved with his family to central Pennsylvania. Still, everyone knew Lila was a twin, because she talked about her brother constantly. And many of those people were probably watching as Lila’s brother closed down an entire city block and sent parents and teachers and children into a terrified panic. As one of the fathers told the reporters, after the threat had been “nullified”: “Of course parents are afraid of violence these days. Seems like every week, there’s another nut job with an ax to grind.”

Her beautiful, sensitive brother Billy—the most intelligent person she’d ever known, who taught her to climb trees and read her stories when she couldn’t sleep and told her flowers were the only proof we needed that God loved us—reduced to a nut job. She wanted to scream at this father, this stranger, but the only sound she could make was a muffled cry.

Patrick hadn’t wanted Lila to watch the eleven o’clock news, but she had insisted. They both knew this would still be the top story, though the city undoubtedly had murders and rapes and robberies to report that day. The elementary school was an upscale, private place, where lawyers and executives and professors like Lila dropped their children off on the way to work. Except Lila didn’t have any children because, though she and Patrick were in their mid-thirties now and had been married for more than a decade, she kept begging him to wait just a little longer to start their family. What she was waiting for, Lila could never explain. She honestly didn’t know.

Her brother certainly hadn’t waited. When Billy showed up at
her college graduation, Lila hadn’t seen him in almost a year and she was giddy with the thrill of reunion. He said he was there to give her a present and handed her a large, brown box with nothing on it except a cluster of
FRAGILE
stickers. He told her to open it later, in her room. She thought it might be pot, since Billy always had pot, no matter how poor he was. They were both poor then (because they’d refused to take any of their stepfather’s money), but Lila had gotten a full scholarship to a prestigious school while Billy had embarked on his adventure to see America, funded by a string of jobs he hated.

She took the box to the room that she was being kicked out of the next day. The dorms were already closed—classes had ended weeks ago—but Lila had gotten special permission to remain until her summer camp teaching job began. Every year it was like that: piecing together a place to stay by begging favors from people who liked Lila and sympathized with her circumstances. Her parents were dead (Billy had forged the death certificates way back, when Lila first started applying for college) and her only relative, a brother, was traveling full-time for his company. “That’s true, too,” Billy had said. “I’m going to be traveling for my own company—and to avoid the company of the undead.”

Lila opened the box. On top, she found a baggie with three perfectly rolled joints and a note that said, “Do this in memory of me.” Below that, a copy of
Highlights for Children
magazine, which Billy had probably ripped off from a doctor’s office. On page twelve, at the top of the cartoon, he’d written “Billy = Gallant, Lila = Goofus.” It was an old joke between them: Lila, the rule follower, had always been Gallant, and Billy, the rebel, Goofus. But in this particular comic strip, Gallant had brought a present to someone and Goofus was empty-handed.

Touché, bro, Lila thought, and smiled.

Finally, underneath an insane number of foam peanuts was a large shoe box, which he’d made into a diorama. It was so intricate, worthy of any grade school prize, except Lila and Billy had never made dioramas in grade school, not that she could remember anyway. Her memories of her childhood were so fragmented that she sometimes felt those years had disappeared from her mind even as she’d lived them. Of course, she could always ask Billy what really happened. He remembered everything.

Inside the shoe box, there were two houses made of broken Popsicle sticks in front of a multicolored landscape, complete with purple clouds and a blue sky and a pink and yellow sun. The houses had tiny toothpick mailboxes to identify them: the one on the left was Lila’s, the one on the right, Billy’s. In Lila’s house, a clay man and woman stood watch over a clay baby inside a lumpy clay crib. In Billy’s house, a clay man and woman were sitting on the floor, smoking an obscenely large joint, but a clay baby was asleep in another room, on a mattress. Billy’s house was dirtier, with straw floors and very little furniture, but it was still a house and, most important, it was still next door to Lila’s. They’d always planned on living next to each other when they were grown. Of course whoever Billy married would love Lila and whoever Lila married would love Billy. How could it be any other way?

Lila knew something was wrong when she saw the note Billy had attached to the bottom of the diorama: “Don’t worry, I haven’t lost the plot. This won’t change anything.” She knew what the first sentence meant since Billy had been saying this for years, but the second one was too cryptic to understand. Stranger still was how short the note was. Billy had been writing long letters from the time he could hold a crayon. He was a born writer. He’d already written dozens of stories when they were kids and he was planning to start his novel on the road trip. Lila liked to imagine him writing
in seedy hotels while she learned how to interpret novels in her English courses.

She found out what he was telling her only a few days later, when he called to invite her to his wedding. He’d gotten a woman pregnant. Her name was Ashley and she was twenty-nine—eight years older than Lila and Billy. She was a waitress in a bar in Los Lunas, New Mexico. She didn’t write novels or read them, but she claimed to think it was “cool” that Billy did. “He’s got himself a real imagination, that boy,” Ashley said, and laughed. She and Lila were sitting on barstools, waiting to drive to the justice of the peace with Billy and one of Ashley’s friends. Lila tried not to hate her for that laugh, but from that point on, she couldn’t help thinking of her as Trashley, though she never shared that fact with anyone, not even Patrick.