The Promised World (37 page)

Lila said she didn’t want to hear any more, but her mother ignored her. She knew from the thinly disguised glee in her mother’s voice that her mother had found an opening to hurt her, though she had no idea how badly.

“On Saturday night, when my boyfriend Harold came home, you tried to attack him with a butcher knife. You claimed that he was going to beat your brother, which was absolutely ludicrous. After that stunt, I had no choice, I had to put you in a hospital.”

Lila felt as stunned and disoriented as if she’d smashed into a wall. Her hands were knotted together as though she was literally holding on to what she’d always believed, what her brother had told her a thousand times about their past.

“Is she telling the truth?” Pearl looked at Lila. “There was something in Dad’s book about you trying to save him. He even had that page you wrote stuck in the middle of the chapter. Remember? I gave it to you at the cemetery.”

I know what my mother did, but I can’t hate her for this. It’s not her fault that she lacks imagination. But I have to be strong and save my brother. He told me he wished he were dead. I’m really afraid he’ll kill himself if we don’t get out of here. I’m writing this because I have to do whatever it takes to make sure he’s all right. He needs me now so badly. I can’t ever be weak again.

Lila had looked at this note Pearl had given her several times, even kept it in her purse, but she’d never guessed it was something she herself had written. The effect on her of this realization was as immediate as it was strange. Her mother was still talking about that night, and she was trying to concentrate, but she was barely able to breathe, much less respond. Something was happening
to her; she had to keep blinking to see her niece and the wall of books and the room they were sitting in. For a split second, she wondered if she could be having a seizure for the first time in years, but then the convulsion wracking her mind gave way to a clear vision that was less like a normal memory than like a veil parting in front of her eyes, revealing the past, timeless and all at once.

They were gathered in the front room for the Saturday afternoon debate: her mother, Lila, and Billy. Normally, Lila spent debate time in her room, reading and daydreaming, but today was different. Today, she was worried about her brother.

There was music playing, Bach’s concertos, which her mother believed helped clarify the mind. Her mother and Billy were sitting on the white couch; Lila was sitting on the blue chair across from them. The coffee table was new, a massive oak antique that her mother had purchased from a dealer in New York. They were having cakes served on the ivory china they’d had for years, an inheritance from her mother’s grandfather, like this house. Lila had broken one of the saucers a few months ago by throwing it against the wall. She didn’t remember this, but her mother had mentioned it so many times that simply seeing this china reminded her.

Their mother had just announced today’s topic: “Is gratitude an obligation?”

“Taking the affirmative,” her mother continued, “I will argue that when extreme sacrifices have been made, the beneficiary has an obligation to be grateful.” Her mother nodded at Billy. “You will argue the position you apparently hold: that of the spoiled child.”

“Come on,” Billy said. “I can’t debate this.” He sounded hopeless. “You know I don’t hold that position. Why are you—”

“I assure you I don’t know. I’d told you Friday night was going to be difficult for me.” She touched her face with her napkin. “You
were well aware that I was going to be alone, without Harold. Apparently, you didn’t care.”

Her brother had stayed out late on Friday with a friend. But he was a sophomore in high school, and it was normal to have friends; Lila knew that from her books.

“I’m sorry,” Billy said. “I’ve told you that over and over. I don’t know what else —”

Her mother pointed at Lila. “And what was she supposed to do while you were out with your quote-unquote
friend
? Even if you forgot about me, surely you didn’t forget about your darling twin.”

“I was okay,” Lila said. She was speaking as softly as possible, trying not to do anything that would make this worse for her brother.

“Don’t do this again,” Billy said, looking at their mother. “Please.”

“ ‘Oh, don’t make me choose,’ “ her mother said, mocking his voice. “ ‘I love you both. I love you, Mother, I really do.’ “

Lila was trying to concentrate on the conversation, but as it kept going on and on, this became increasingly difficult, especially as she was having one of her fuzzy days, when nothing seemed to make sense and her thoughts jumped around like popcorn kernels in a pan. But she liked listening to Bach; she imagined his fugues like green and gold kites, floating and bobbing across the sky.

She snapped out of her reverie a few minutes later when their mother jumped up and began shaking Billy’s shoulders. “After all I’ve done for you. You evil, evil boy!” She was shrieking. “I’ve chosen you over everyone in my life, but you couldn’t choose me over someone you’d just met!”

Then she stomped out and, a moment later, Billy ran upstairs to his room. Lila followed him. She found him facedown on his bed.

She sat down next to him and rubbed his back. “It’ll be all right,” she said slowly. “Mother will get over it.”

“No, she won’t.” His voice was muffled against his pillow. “She knows about Jennifer. I don’t know how she knows, but she does. Christ, I wish I were dead.”

The friend he’d gone out with on Friday was a new girl in his school named Jennifer. And Billy liked Jennifer, Lila knew that, because he smiled whenever he said her name.

Her brother sounded so depressed that Lila begged him for the hundredth time to run away with her. “Is the world, then, so narrow?” she said. “Does the universe lie within the compass of this house?” She was alluding to
The Scarlet Letter,
a book she and Billy had read over and over. After a minute, she added, “We could take Jennifer with us, too, if you want.”

“Hester didn’t leave,” he muttered. “She stayed and took her punishment.”

“He’s going to punish you? That’s not right!” Harold often hit her when he came home, usually for something she’d said to her mother that she’d already forgotten about. Each time, she vowed to control what she said in the future, but then she would feel the angry words bubbling up from her stomach through her esophagus and right out of her mouth. But Billy was different. Even when their mother had screamed he was an evil boy, he hadn’t said anything back. He was always in control, and perfectly reasonable; he didn’t deserve this.

“I can’t stand to have him hurt you, too,” she said. “I won’t let him!”

Her brother turned over and looked at her. Then he surprised her by reaching up and touching her cheek so gently, as if she were the one about to be punished, not him. She laid her hand on his and tried to figure out what he was thinking. After a moment, maybe more, he pulled away and said he needed to be alone.

By the time she was back in her own room, she’d decided she had to do something to save him. She wrote it down to make sure she wouldn’t forget. She even wrote what Billy always said about their mother lacking imagination, which was why Mother didn’t see that her complaints about Lila to Harold would invariably lead to him beating Lila with his belt.

While her mother was busy dressing up for Harold’s return, Lila snuck into the kitchen and grabbed the butcher knife. She didn’t plan on hurting anyone, but she needed something to threaten Harold with if he even approached Billy. She took the knife into her room and sat, trembling, at her desk. She wanted to be strong for her brother but she was so afraid, especially after she heard the front door slam, meaning Harold was home. The only thing that worked to calm her was a passage from the book she was reading,
Moby-Dick.
Captain Ahab wasn’t scared of anyone. “I’d strike the sun if it insulted me,” Lila said, repeating Ahab’s words.

Still, when she heard Harold’s heavy footsteps as he climbed the stairs and stopped in front of Billy’s room, her heart was skipping like a frightened bird’s. She rushed into her twin’s room and held the knife pointed out, aimed right at Harold.

Her brother was sitting on the bed. He said, “Lila, no!” and Harold took a step back toward the window that faced the tree in the backyard.

She moved closer, still brandishing the knife at her stepfather. “You’re not going to hurt Billy.”

“Stay calm,” Harold said, holding up his hands. “There’s no need to overreact.”

Her mother must have heard Billy scream. She came into the doorway. She sounded bored. “Take the knife away from her.”

“Put it down,” Billy said. “Please, I’m all right.” Lila was thinking about doing what he asked until she glanced over and noticed
he was crying. Her brother never cried. Harold must have hit him before she got here. She couldn’t let him do it again.

Her mother barked at Harold, “Do it now, before she hurts someone!”

Billy hated Harold, but Lila never could, no matter how many times he hit her, and no matter how many times Billy said it was all Harold’s fault, the way their mother treated them. She wasn’t about to give him the knife, but she couldn’t watch it happen, either. So as Harold came closer and closer to her, she shut her eyes, and when she felt him try to grab her arm, she stabbed blindly in what she hoped was the right direction.

She opened her eyes when she heard him groan. She’d only nicked him in the arm, but he stepped back immediately. “That’s it,” he said. “I’m through with this!”

“What?” her mother said.

“All of this! You tell me every time I get back that Lila has to be punished because she’s been hitting you and Billy. This time, you said Billy had to be punished because he hit Lila.” He was pressing his fingers against the cut, but Lila saw the blood running down his arm. “If you ask me, everyone in this house is crazy as hell.”

He left the room, taking care to stay as far away from Lila as possible. Her mother went after him, and a few minutes later, they heard him yell a curse and then the front door banging shut.

Lila whispered to her brother, “I think I’d better go to the tree house.”

It was the one hiding place where their mother never thought to look for her, because her mother still believed the tree house wasn’t strong enough to hold a teenager. She didn’t know that Billy had reinforced the boards in the floor last spring, to give Lila somewhere to read in peace when he was at school and her mother was in a bad mood.

Billy agreed that she should go because he knew, as Lila did, that this was worse than a bad mood. As she ran up the hill, she wondered if her mother would ever forgive her. But she was proud, too, because she’d kept her brother from being beaten. She’d done the right thing.

When she got to the tree house, she was so tired that she curled up on the floor to rest. At some point she must have fallen asleep, because the next thing she knew, her brother was standing at the base of the tree, telling her she had to come down now. He sounded so sad that she wondered if Harold had come back to threaten him again, and she rushed down to see if she could help. That’s when she saw that he wasn’t alone. In the light from the moon, she could see their mother standing next to him, and a few feet away, two strange men.

As the men grabbed her, Lila wanted to fight or run away, but she couldn’t move. To say her heart was broken would be wrong. She felt like her heart had left her body and there was an empty space where her feelings should be.

“I’ll come for you,” Billy said right before they took her away, with her hands bound up like a criminal. He was crying, but she didn’t shed a tear or even say good-bye.

Lila came out of this memory gripping the arm of the love seat so tightly her knuckles had gone white. It was nothing like at Mrs. Lewis’s house, where she’d felt that on some level she’d always known about the night her father died. This day, the day she’d attacked Harold, and everything it meant, had been buried in her mind—and actively hidden from her by her brother, whose version of what happened had been completely at odds with the truth.

Her mother was talking to Pearl as if nothing had changed. “As I’ve mentioned before, by the time your father and his sister were teenagers… well, I won’t go into that again, but suffice it to say,
Billy couldn’t bear being away from her, so he ran away and managed to sneak her out of the hospital when the nurses weren’t paying attention. He showed terrible judgment, given that she needed to be treated, but when the hospital asked me if I agreed to her release, I said yes. Your father had already told me if I didn’t agree, he would never speak to me again. As it is, I didn’t see him for years, though he let me know that they were staying with their grandmother in North Carolina. I suppose I should have been grateful for small favors.”

Pearl was looking at Lila, pleading with her to make sense of this. But how could she, when she was drowning herself? Everything Billy had told her was a lie. Harold had been mean, yes, but he was hardly the villain her brother had created. He wasn’t even tall or menacing; he was a guy she’d remembered in one of her dreams, the short bald man who’d given her pennies when she was a little girl. Were there other men, other boyfriends, who’d punished her at her mother’s behest? She felt sure there were. But worst of all was discovering that her belief that Billy had always protected her was an utter distortion of reality. He was the one who’d been called evil that night, and not by Harold, by their mother. And Lila had tried to protect him; yet Billy had told her mother and the men from the hospital about her hiding place. He’d led them right to her.

Finally, she found the anger Dr. Kutchins had insisted she must have. Billy had always told her not to be weak; yet he was the one who’d really been weak. He’d never had the courage to tell her the truth. He’d even continued to visit their mother after they’d started their new life. How could he have betrayed her like this?

“What does any of this have to do with you?” she finally said to her niece. She was trying to breathe slowly to keep herself from crying or screaming or running from this house. “Let’s say your father hated himself when he was child. What difference does it make now?”