The Promised World (22 page)

She was afraid to speak. She’d told Billy she was going to ask her mother, but now that she was here, she couldn’t do it.

“Are you feeling better now?” her mother said. Her arms were crossed. The look on her face was so different than Lila remembered. If she remembered her mother’s expressions, which she wasn’t sure of at all.

She crossed her own arms, feigning defiance. “I want to play chess.”

“Oh, well, come on then,” her mother said, laughing. “Has your brother been coaching you?”

“No,” Lila said, because it was true; she and Billy never played chess. He hated chess, even though he played with their mother constantly.

But didn’t he teach his children chess? Lila thought, and wondered again if she was awake. If she was awake, she should be able to speak. But when she opened her mouth to say her husband’s name, it got swallowed up in the dream and came out as, “Where?”

“You poor thing, you haven’t even seen the new living room, have you?” Her mother crooked her finger and led Lila down a hall into what had been the guest room. Now a wall was missing and the living room was enormous. One corner was dedicated to her mother’s passion: chess. Along the wall were all the trophies her mother had won playing the game.

The chessboard was new and so were the ivory pieces. Lila gasped at how beautiful it was, and her mother smiled. “I’m glad you have the aesthetic sense to appreciate this. I consider that a good sign, if a relatively minor one.”

After she sat down, her mother said, “Are you sure you’re up to this?”

“I’m fine,” Lila said, though she didn’t feel fine. She felt like screaming. She knew she would lose again, and nothing would change. But she was smart, too, wasn’t she? Billy always said she was. He said there was nothing wrong with her, that Harold had made it all up.

But Billy was wrong. By the ninth move, she’d lost her queen. Her mother made that “tsk, tsk” sound that meant the game was over.

Lila felt tears standing in her eyes. They were so salty they burned, and she remembered again that she was dying of thirst.

“Why am I like this?” Lila finally said. Her mother was sitting back, looking at her as though examining a vaguely boring sculpture. But at least Lila had asked the question Billy kept refusing to answer. “Like what?” he always said, as though the question made no sense.

“I assure you, I don’t know. They told me you would grow out of it.” Her mother sounded like she was swallowing a laugh, but Lila wasn’t sure. That was the problem. She could never tell what was clearly outside of her and what was only in her head. “I wish you had; then I wouldn’t have to keep punishing you.”

She stood up to go back to Billy, but then she heard herself talking: “I felt a funeral, in my brain, And mourners, to and fro, Kept treading—treading—till it seemed, That sense was breaking through—”

“You’re reading Emily Dickinson!” her mother said, clapping, then standing, too. She was so much taller than Lila. Beautiful, tall, and brilliant. Billy said she could have married any man in the world, but instead she picked that bastard Harold. They met during one of her many trips, to cities all around the country, for chess tournaments. She’d never taken Lila on these trips, but she always took Billy. When Lila was younger, she would cry for days, alone in the big house, but now she read from the time she woke up in the morning until she went to bed. She read while she was eating cheese out of the package and running a bath for herself at night. When her brother returned, he would tell her wonderful stories about all the things he’d seen and all the marvelous places they could go when they were grown. They also talked about the books Lila had read, but nothing about what either of them had felt while he was gone. He said as long as they didn’t speak of that, it could never become real.

Now Lila nodded, suddenly shy. Had she been trying to impress her mother? She wasn’t aware of it, but since she had, she wondered if she should recite the rest of the poem. Maybe her mother would see that—

“I think poetry is a very good idea for you. After all, memorizing is a kind of thinking. A lower kind, perhaps, but still useful for developing your brain and moving away from your instincts.”

Her mother was laughing. Lila felt so humiliated that she reached for the chessboard and knocked it over and watched as all the lovely pieces spilled onto the rich gold carpet. She ignored her mother hissing at her to pick it up and shrugged off her mother’s promise that she would be punished for this. As she ran up the hill
and back to Billy, her mind kept repeating a quote he had given her: “Art still has truth, take refuge there.”

Then she woke up in the hospital, and the nurse was changing her IV bag, thank God. If only she could ask for a drink of water, but her voice wouldn’t cooperate.

She watched the nurse, thinking about Billy’s quote. It was from Matthew Arnold, a nineteenth-century writer, who claimed that this was what the German poet Goethe had believed. The first time Billy told her this she was young, maybe eleven or twelve? He said that reading not only offered truth but was
safe.
Nothing in her books would ever hurt her, Billy promised. And years later, when she was a professor, she kept Billy’s quote on her desk, along with one of her own by Melville: “Those whom books will hurt will not be proof against events. Events, not books, should be forbid.”

She’d never cared that she couldn’t remember most of her real life before the age of sixteen. It didn’t matter because she could remember all the stories and poems. In college and grad school, her professors said she had an extraordinary recall for quotes and scenes and characters.

But the dream was so disturbing. She was absolutely certain that something had been wrong with her when she was a child. She could feel the familiar sense of being profoundly flawed. She could also feel Billy throwing himself against this with all his childish force, as though his life depended on saving Lila from knowing whatever
this
was.

Then she was sitting in her bedroom, at the white vanity desk with the mirror she hated. She was looking at Harold, who was standing in the doorway. He was a giant man with huge shoulders and what Billy called a perpetual sneer.

He said, “Planning to grace us with your presence at dinner tonight?”

Lila was trying to stop eating. A girl in one of her books said it
was easy to do. The girl had done it to lose weight, but Lila liked it because it made it hard to sleep. She needed to stay awake and focus her mind to prove to her mother that she could go to school, too, like Billy. And if she didn’t sleep, she wouldn’t have so many nightmares.

“You know you’ll end up in the hospital if you keep going with this,” Harold said. “Do you want to put your mother through that after everything else?”

Lila stood to go downstairs, as Harold knew she would. He was always threatening to put her in a hospital, and though her mother had resisted so far, Lila was terrified that someday Harold would win, and she would be taken away from her brother for good.

Billy was already sitting at the table, reading Kafka. He nodded his head very slightly—and Lila knew he was signaling her that it was starting again.

Her stomach tightened, but she forced herself to eat a little steak and asparagus. She nibbled on the crust of bread. And she tried to focus her mind on the most recent poem she’d memorized, like Billy told her to, instead of on what her mother and Harold were saying. But she still heard enough of it to make her feel like a dirty, abnormal girl.

“Lila hasn’t had a fit all week,” her mother was saying. “It’s been positively calm around here.”

Whose woods these are I think I know, his house is in the village though, he will not see me stopping here, to watch his woods fill up with snow.

“That must be a new record for her,” Harold said, but he didn’t look like he’d looked upstairs. He seemed smaller and younger, and he’d even grown a beard. She was so confused, but she knew it had to be Harold because of his sneering tone. He was holding his fork up, emphasizing his point with a jab at the air. “Although she still managed to cause trouble. She seems to have a talent for that.”

Lila knew what he was referring to. A few days before, she’d been helping Billy rehearse his part in the high school play,
My Fair Lady.
They were doing the scene where Higgins kisses Eliza Doolittle, a scene they’d done a dozen times without acting out that part, but this time Lila impulsively leaned over and kissed her brother on the lips. It was a horribly wrong thing to do, and Lila knew it even before she realized her mother had walked into the room. She wanted to apologize like Billy told her to do, but when the time came, her mouth refused to cooperate and Harold had beaten her on the legs. Only ten strokes from his belt, and she didn’t have many bruises, but still, why hadn’t she said she was sorry? She was so stubborn. It was one of many things she disliked about herself.

My little horse must think it queer, to stop without a farmhouse near, between the woods and frozen lake, the darkest evening of the year.

“It’s really quite understandable,” her mother said. She sounded surprisingly kind. “One of the problems with Lila is that she’s not a thinker. She uses her body to express herself, unlike the rest of us.”

Lila had heard this so many times, but it always upset her. Billy had warned her repeatedly that it would only get worse if she defended herself, but each and every stupid time, she blurted out something that annoyed Harold. Unfortunately, this time was no exception. The beautiful Robert Frost poem had disappeared; in its place was her own loud voice. She was always too loud at the dinner table. “I wouldn’t call hitting someone with a belt using your mind. I would call it barbaric!”

“Very clever.” Her stepfather tilted his head in her direction; his mouth was moving, but the voice sounded like her mother’s. “I suppose you would have us reason with a barbarian, too? Say if we encountered Attila the Hun?”

“I’m not Attila the Hun.”

“Did I say you were? Stick to the argument.”

“No,” she stammered, looking down at her plate of uneaten food. Both Harold and her mother believed in using “logic” at all times. Billy never screwed it up, but Lila did constantly.

Harold took a drink of his scotch. “The incest taboo has been around for centuries. I think it’s safe to say that only a barbarian wouldn’t understand that and comply.”

“Come on,” Billy said mildly. “It was an innocent—”

“Though that, too, is probably understandable,” Lila’s mother said to Harold. “The two of them have been together since they were in the womb. Perhaps it’s natural that she desires him. The real question is how to teach her to act from what she knows to be right rather than her instincts.” She was looking at her husband. “I promise I don’t know the answer to that.”

This isn’t a dream, Lila thought. She could see herself. You never see yourself in dreams.

She tried to think about Patrick, but her face was on fire. She was that girl again, the one who had to listen to a litany of her faults whenever Harold returned. Since he was an executive at an international bank, his job required him to travel all over the world, but he always came home eventually. And when he did, he would invariably have to assess Lila’s development. The older she got, the more Harold and her mother felt like she was a danger to Billy. They never said it that way, but they always looked at Lila when they were talking about this embarrassing “incest taboo” topic. As though they could see things inside her that she couldn’t see.

And now that she’d kissed Billy, she felt condemned and so guilty. She did love her brother, but she didn’t really know any other boys because she was always at home. Yet shouldn’t she have a crush on someone, if she was a normal girl? What was wrong with her that she had sort of liked kissing her twin?

Billy had said that kiss had meant nothing. He said only a
pervert like Harold would think it did, but Billy couldn’t see inside of Lila. He didn’t even know about the “moral assessments” with Harold and her mother. Lila was afraid to tell, because her brother already hated Harold so much that he told Lila someday he would kill him.

She had to be awake now; she could see her psych ward room. Maybe she had told the nurse she was thirsty, because there was a cup of water by her bed, and she reached for it and drank it down in one gulp. It helped a little, but she still felt dry and shaky, like she was recovering from the flu.

She lay in her bed, looking out the window at the wispy clouds floating across the sky, a beautiful spring day. She disliked this place, but it wasn’t as bad as the other one. And there had been another one; she was suddenly and absolutely sure about this. She even knew the name of the other place: the Westwood Psychiatric Hospital.

She wasn’t there very long, maybe a few weeks, but it felt like a year. By the time he came to save her, she was disoriented and half-crazy with grief.

Of all the things Lila remembered—asleep, awake, or somewhere in between—this was the one that made her cry: Billy, appearing out of nowhere, like an answered prayer, the proof of a merciful God. He had money and train tickets and he said he was taking her home. He also said their mother had left them for good, finally.

The attendants were distracted by another screaming girl. Billy was able to lead Lila out of the hospital yard without anyone trying to stop them. They were already down the hill and running up toward the train station when she thought to ask about Harold.

Billy seemed surprised by the question, but he didn’t flinch when he answered. “He won’t be a problem for us anymore. He’s dead, Lila. I shot him.”

“When?”

“It’s not important now.” He took her hand as they rushed to catch the train that was already there, as though it were waiting just for them. “This is the end of that story. Now begins the new era, into the world I always promised you, where we write our own lives.”

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

W
hen William found out they weren’t going home, he smiled to let the social worker know he was glad. She said, “Are you afraid of your mom’s boyfriend?” and he nodded, like Pearl had told him to do. It wasn’t exactly a lie ‘cause he was very afraid of seeing Kyle and having to do the last Challenge. Pearl said if everything went as she planned, they’d never have to see Kyle again. He hoped she was right about that.