by Lisa Tucker
“In a few minutes,” Patrick said.
“Why wait?” Lila said cheerfully. “Let’s all head back together.” She put her right hand in Patrick’s and her left hand in Billy’s. As if she were trying to glue the three of them together after her brother’s outburst. As if she were trying to show she didn’t take sides, even if one of the “sides” was her own. Patrick was even more confused, and he tried to talk to Lila about it when they were in their room, changing out of their sandy bathing suits. She’d just gotten naked and she was shivering from the sudden blast of cold from the air-conditioner vent over by the dresser. He took her in his arms and told her it wasn’t right that Billy had yelled at her.
“He wasn’t yelling at me,” she said, stepping back. “I know it sounded like that, but Billy has always been exuberant. It’s just that he’s so passionate about everything he cares about. It matters to him in a way that it doesn’t to most people.”
It wasn’t the first time she’d explained away her brother’s bad behavior by some claim that Billy was different from most people—but it was the first time that Patrick didn’t buy it. This wasn’t Billy’s caustic wit or even just teasing. Her brother had gone off on her for no reason. It was a completely irrational way to behave.
But when he told her so, Lila insisted Billy did have a reason to be upset. That book was very important; some of her colleagues had been teaching it for years. Thomas Pynchon was one of the world’s greatest authors, and Gravity’s Rainbow was his masterpiece. Naturally, Billy cared that Lila read it as soon as possible. He wanted to discuss it with her before they went back to Philly on Saturday.
Patrick stood back and looked at his wife. “Okay, but why couldn’t he have been civil about it? Why didn’t he just say, ‘No thanks, keep reading’?”
“Because he felt alienated from me.” She threw her terry cloth robe on. “And that always hurts his feelings.”
“What about your feelings?” He felt frustrated as he wondered if he even understood what had just happened. “I thought you were hurt, too?”
She thought for a moment. “I was, but I should’ve known he’d react that way. I was being stupid.”
He hated Lila’s use of the word “stupid,” which she never applied to anyone but herself. He said, “You are not stupid,” firmly and forcefully, too forcefully, in fact. He sounded angry. No wonder Lila fled into the bathroom. They never talked that way to each other.
He dressed in silence, dreading an awkward lunch with Billy and his family. Lila had put on the cheerful pink-and-white sundress that he loved, but as they made their way into the kitchen she was quiet and distant and clearly still upset. Thankfully Billy, who was undoubtedly perceptive, despite whatever else he was, noticed immediately and insisted on blaming himself for the problem. He not only apologized, but he thanked Patrick for bringing him to his senses. A few minutes later, while Billy and Ashley were getting the kids settled at the table, Lila walked over to Patrick and hugged him. “I’m sorry, honey,” she whispered in his ear. “I didn’t mean to put you in the middle of this.”
“It’s okay,” he told her and smiled.
And it was okay now. His wife was back to herself and Billy had taken responsibility for causing the conflict. This was all Patrick wanted, or at least all he could think of to expect.
And it stayed fine the rest of the week. There were no more outbursts from Lila’s brother. If anything, Billy was friendlier than usual. He went so far as to insist that he would love Patrick’s take on Gravity’s Rainbow, too, since the author had studied science and used frequent math references. “I’m sure you’ll understand it on a level that I simply can’t,” Billy said. “Only if you have time to read it, of course. I know you’re working on an important proof. Lila told me about it.”
It wasn’t that important, really a minor result in his field, but at least it was a result and those had been in short supply for Patrick since he’d agreed to chair the calculus committee. He did need to work on it, but he started Gravity’s Rainbow the next morning, intending to relax a bit, too. Unfortunately the book was far from relaxing. He put it down before the vacation was over, and left it at page 57, never to pick it up again.
And the next spring, when the idea of renting a shore house came up again, Patrick surprised himself by surprising Lila with tickets to Paris instead.
Over the years they’d been together, Lila had often defended both Patrick and his profession by calling the idea that mathematicians don’t have feelings a “ridiculous pop-culture cliché.” He appreciated her support, though he suspected it might be true that, like himself, many mathematicians were a little uncomfortable with emotional complexity. Part of it was the job itself, which demanded that you check your feelings at the door to concentrate on a reality completely outside of yourself. One of his grad school professors had posted a sign on his wall: “Mathematics doesn’t care about what you want to be true or what you think might be true but only what is true.” Of course, discovering what that truth was could be immensely difficult, but that there was truth to be discovered was a given. Thousands of years of mathematics—and every single engineering and technological breakthrough—were hard to argue against.
Patrick considered his marriage to Lila to have turned out very well by and large, and not least because it had proven to be such a low-drama affair. Unlike some of his colleagues’ wives and girlfriends, Lila had never once demanded that he demonstrate his love by intuiting her feelings—and a good thing, too, because even on the rare occasion when he tried to, he usually couldn’t get there. His wife’s relationship with her brother, especially, had continued to be mostly incomprehensible to him. This was despite the dozen or so times he’d put aside a problem he was working on to google the topic of bonds between twins. He never gained any useful information, though each time he read that twins ran in families, he found himself vaguely hoping that he and Lila would never have them.
He did want children, though, and he didn’t understand why Lila kept putting it off. Most faculty couples tried to get pregnant as soon as the wife got tenure, if not before. Lila had had tenure for nearly four years when she and Patrick took a trip back to St. Louis, to visit Patrick’s father and babysit Patrick’s cousin Jason’s kids. Jason and his wife, Doreen, had an active toddler and a three-month-old baby and they desperately needed a break. They were going on a trip to California to celebrate their fifth wedding anniversary.
Patrick had always been close to his cousins on his mother’s side, and Jason had been his best friend throughout high school. The two of them had stayed close over the years. Lila liked Jason and his wife, but Patrick was still impressed and grateful when she didn’t hesitate to agree to use her spring break to help them out. Admittedly, she was worried she wouldn’t be able to keep a toddler and a baby happy, but Patrick understood since he felt the same way.
The first night was rough. The baby was fine, but the nineteen month-old boy, Theo, became hysterical when he had to face bedtime without his parents. Patrick walked him back and forth for fifteen minutes, which felt like hours, but the little kid was still letting out an earsplitting wail. When it was Lila’s turn to take over, Patrick had never been more relieved to get into bed and close his eyes. He knew he couldn’t sleep with that sound, but he was bone tired from all the activities of toddler care: the playing and talking and laughing and distracting he and Lila had been doing all day. At one point he told her, “Why can’t they stay babies forever?” The three-month-old girl had lain in her cradle or sat placidly in her bouncy chair most of the time, only needing to be fed and changed. Patrick enjoyed her big toothless grins and the odd motion she made with her legs, as if she were riding a bicycle only she could see.
He didn’t expect to fall asleep, and when he woke up and the clock by Jason and Doreen’s bed said 3:41, he was both surprised and a little worried. Lila had never joined him. Had she driven off into the night with Theo, hoping to calm him down with the motion of the car that had wor
ked so well for his nap? Or had she snapped and thrown the squalling kid out the window, as Patrick had joked about doing hours ago?
He found her on the couch, with Theo lying on her, snoring softly. Lila herself was awake and stroking his cheeks lightly with her fingers. She also kissed the top of Theo’s head before she noticed Patrick standing in the hallway, watching her.
“He didn’t want to sleep alone,” she whispered. “I didn’t mind. It’s been kind of nice, holding him next to me.” She paused and inhaled. “He smells so good. Have you ever noticed that about babies?”
Somehow they managed to get Theo into his crib without waking him. It was no small feat, and Patrick would have been thrilled if he wasn’t so tired.
It wasn’t until the next day that he realized something had changed. At the first sound of Theo coming awake, Lila was out of bed and at the little boy’s side—and there she remained for the next few days, almost all of the time, surprising Patrick’s father, who called Lila a natural at mothering, and, of course, surprising Patrick himself. When a grateful Jason and Doreen returned, looking decidedly younger after a short time away from parenting, and asked how everything had gone, Lila said, “Perfectly. Theo is wonderful.” She sounded oddly shy. After a pause, she added, “Both your children are.”
It was the last thing Patrick expected: his wife had apparently become smitten with a toddler. Though Patrick himself had found parenting a lot more difficult than he’d anticipated, he still felt relieved. He wanted a family and now he felt confident Lila would, too.
He decided to wait a few days to discuss it with her. He wanted to be careful how he brought it up; he suspected she might have been embarrassed that she’d burst into tears when they’d left the little boy. Maybe he was hoping she’d bring it up herself? He wasn’t sure anymore; in any case, they never had the discussion. They went back to Philadelphia and back to work, since spring break was over. And then, only three days later, her brother committed suicide.
Watching Lila’s grief was so terrible that in some ways, he was glad whenever she started another rant about Ashley, though these rants also made him uncomfortable. He wanted to believe that Lila was right, and he agreed with his wife that if Ashley had no basis to accuse Billy of child abuse, then Ashley herself was the abusive one for keeping the children from their father. The operative word, though, was “if.” If the charges against Billy—which, after all, had been supported by the court, though the one time he reminded Lila of this, he instantly regretted it, as she went back to bed and stayed there for hours, sobbing like her heart would break—but if those charges were really baseless, then Ashley was an abuser and yes, as Lila kept saying, an unfit mother. Someone who should not be caring for Billy’s beautiful children.
Even so, he was stunned when Lila said she’d contacted a lawyer because she planned to raise those kids herself. “With your help, of course,” she added slowly. Her eyes were swollen; her lovely hair was a tangled mess. “I couldn’t do it without you.”
He said he would help, because it was the only answer he could think of. But he did talk her into waiting a while, giving the kids time to grieve for their father before their young lives were turned upside down again. He knew if his wife still wanted custody of Billy’s kids later on, they’d have to deal with it, but for now, his only focus was getting through the memorial service and the next few days.
The night before the funeral at a little after three a.m., he woke with the feeling that something was wrong. He looked over at Lila, but she was sound asleep. The room seemed cold; he got up and turned the heat up, and then he sat on the edge of the bed with his back straight and his feet on the floor, still alert, still listening for something: an intruder, a dog barking in the apartment next door, whatever it was that had woken him up. But there was no sound except Lila’s breathing and the usual traffic sounds in the street below.
Patrick had never understood or respected the kind of people who claimed to believe in psychic premonitions. To him it was irrational, even ludicrous, that whenever something bad happened, apparently sane people would insist that they’d known it was going to, that they’d dreamed it a month before or seen it in a vision or read it in their horoscope. Lila used to insist that what they were really expressing was their despair at human helplessness—that deep wish within us all that if only we could have known, we could have done something to stop it, or at least had time to prepare ourselves.
In Patrick’s case, though, even if he’d known what was about to happen to Lila, he wouldn’t have known how to stop it or how to prepare for it. This was what kept him up that night, back in bed but lying still so he wouldn’t wake her: the suspicion that he was inadequate in some essential way to what his wife needed from him now, and his fear that he might lose her for good if he couldn’t figure out how to change.
CHAPTER THREE
Her brother’s funeral was being held in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, where Billy had lived with his family for the last two years. Lila thought it was grotesquely unfair that Ashley got to decide where to hold the funeral, when and where she wanted him buried, even who would be allowed to be part of the ceremony, but as Patrick pointed out, Ashley was still Billy’s wife, legally, at least. Lila knew the quote-unquote law could not care less that Billy’s wife had been responsible for his death. Why should the law care, when the law had been responsible, too, by taking Ashley’s word that Billy had harmed one of his children?
She didn’t plan on speaking to Ashley, but she did want to see the kids and talk to them alone, if possible. She wasn’t sure what to say to them, and she was thinking about it as she and Patrick drove down the turnpike, on the way to Harrisburg. He was holding her hand, squeezing it every once in a while. She knew her husband was worried about her, and it would have touched her if she’d been capable of feeling anything other than her grief.
Even thinking was hard for her right now, though she’d tried to present her idea of raising Billy’s children to Patrick as reasonably as possible, knowing she’d need her husband’s approval to go forward. The lawyer she’d consulted—while Patrick was out getting groceries—had mentioned that one of the things in Lila’s favor was her long marriage. One of the only things. If it did turn out that Ashley had brainwashed any of the children against their father, “this brainwashing,” the lawyer said, “or ‘parental alienation syndrome’ as it’s sometimes called, is not always treated as child abuse by judges. It depends on who we get. We might need other evidence that she’s an unfit mother, in addition to a sterling report on you and your husband. Being professors will help, but being married for eleven years is even better. Happily married. Both ready to make sacrifices to take care of these kids.”
Before she hung up, the lawyer promised to get a copy of the charges against Billy—and warned Lila again that they were in for an uphill battle. “Are you sure you want to proceed? Your odds of winning aren’t good unless you can prove Mrs. Cole is unfit.”
Lila insisted she wanted to go forward. She had a lot of damaging information about Ashley that she could use, if it came right down to it. Billy had told her that Ashley had started drinking again. It was one of the reasons he’d taken the job in Harrisburg, to get his wife away from her drinking buddies. Apparently, she hadn’t gone to a single AA meeting since Maisie was a baby, which proved she wasn’t even trying to recover anymore. And she was still cutting herself; Billy mentioned this only last summer, when Lila asked if that was the reason Ashley never wore anything but long-sleeve T-shirts. And there were other things, too, things Lila didn’t want to bring up but would if there was no other way.
She’d never been a fighter, but then she’d never had to be; Billy had always done the fighting for them. When they were kids, her worst fear was that he would leave her. He would usually reassure her that he wasn’t going anywhere, but one time he said, “You’re braver than you think.” They were in the woods at the end of their neighborhood, sitting on a rotting log, plotting their escape from their p
arents, as always. “You’ll know what to do if the time ever comes when you have to handle all this alone.”
The moment had come, but her mind wasn’t cooperating. She couldn’t think about what to do next because she was stuck in the past, daydreaming about Billy. For so many years, she hadn’t remembered most of her childhood and now was no different, but of course she remembered the things they’d talked about hundreds of times. The day Billy created the death certificates. The night he stood up to their stepfather the last time, after their stepfather tried to hurt Lila.
“My children will never be raised by another man,” Billy had told her over and over when they were teenagers, and also that day in New Mexico, when he was explaining why he’d decided to marry a woman he didn’t love. Ashley had waited too long to get a pregnancy test—or to tell Billy she was pregnant, Lila was never sure which. It was too late for an abortion, but Ashley was considering adoption. Or so she said, but maybe she already knew how strongly Billy felt about this.
The thought that Ashley would probably remarry someday brought Lila back to the present. She had no choice; she had to do whatever it took to save Billy’s kids from being raised by a stepfather. This had always been the major theme, according to Billy: not letting it ever happen again.
Loss and sorrow had to take a backseat to that meaning; Billy used to tell her that constantly. “We can’t afford to be weak, Lila. I’ve told you a hundred times that the hero is never destroyed by the bad guy, but by some weakness within himself.”
As she walked into the small suburban church, she could hear him telling her to be strong. She made her way up the center aisle and managed to keep her head held high, though she could hear people whispering, probably gossiping about her and her brother. Ashley had packed the church with her friends and family. Patrick and Lila seemed to be the only ones here for Billy.
