by Lisa Tucker
For as long as she lived, she would never forget those horrible battles with her two-year-old. Pearl fought her mother like her life depended on it, and too often, Ashley fought back. She slapped her child, she shoved Pearl away when she was hitting or kicking, and once or twice, she knocked Pearl down. She was just lucky that none of those shoves landed Pearl into the corner of a table or a sharp object. She would never have forgiven herself if she’d bruised her baby, much less seriously harmed her.
Thank God, by the time Pearl was three, the fights had completely stopped. At the pediatrician’s office, Ashley had discovered a booklet about disciplining a child without spanking using timeouts. She was surprised how much it helped. Using timeouts, she only had to slap Pearl’s hands occasionally, when the little girl was reaching for something dangerous, like a pot on the stove, or breakable, like her father’s computer. But Pearl still said “I hate you” to her mother just as much as ever, until Ashley thought she really meant it.
Her own family was no help. They all doted on Pearl, especially Ashley’s mom, who said her granddaughter was “cute as a pixie and sharp as a tack.” They were amazed that Pearl could read and write words at only three years old. Ashley’s mom told Billy, “That must be from your side of the family, ‘cause none of the Harris line could do that. Hell, some of us don’t read that well now!” Billy said something humble and kind, as he usually did—to them—and Ashley’s mom loved him more than ever. It was all just so perfect, from where Ashley’s family sat, that if Pearl hated her mother, it had to be a harmless phase.
In the end, it was Billy who fixed the problem, though he didn’t mean to and wasn’t even aware of it, really. Or maybe he was. Ashley was never sure what he was thinking during those nights when he would sit quietly staring out the window of their kitchen, or writing on the computer that Lila had given him for his twenty-second birthday. He was polite enough, answering any question Ashley put to him, discussing any problem they had with their bills or the house or the car, but he never said much about how he was doing beyond “tired,” “worn-out,” and the worst one: “empty.” He did seem empty, like he wasn’t even there when Pearl was asleep. Even when they made love, he went through the motions, and they were always finished before the news came on. Billy didn’t watch TV, but Ashley did. She had to do something to pass the time and lift her spirits a little.
Then one Saturday night Ashley got drunk with some friends from high school. Billy had told her to go out and have fun, but it was hard to have any fun, given the strong feeling she had that her husband was relieved to be rid of her. As she told her friend Deb, “He barely talks to me except about stupid crap like, ‘Should I do the dishes or are you going to?’ I don’t think he cares about me at all.” Deb got stuck on the fact that Billy was willing to do the dishes; she said her husband was a pig who wouldn’t lift a finger to help with housework or either of their two kids. “You’re lucky,” Deb said, and Ashley ordered another Captain Morgan and soda. And another. And another. Pretty soon, she was having fun, all right. And she was feeling so bold that, by the time she got home, she was determined to have it out with Billy. Force him to cut whatever this was the hell out.
He was sitting at his computer, as usual. He said Pearl had gone down to bed at eight. “I saved you some leftovers,” he said without looking up. “We had beef and noodles.”
“Well, I’m not hungry,” she said, plopping down across from him at the kitchen table. His desk was in the living room, but he always sat in here, closer to the hall that led to the bedrooms, so he could hear Pearl if she woke. “And I want you to tell me what you’re writing there.”
She’d asked him before, countless times, and he always said, “Nothing important” or “Just some ideas.” He tried a vague answer this time, too, but she slammed her hand on the table and said, “No.”
He looked up, finally, but he didn’t say anything. His eyes were unreadable.
“You’re not going to get away with this. Not this time. I want to know what my husband is doing. I think I have a right to know!”
“You’re drunk.” His voice was mild—or empty—as always.
“Irrelevant.” It was one of his favorite words, and she let out a laugh that she’d used it right. “Tell me what’s on that screen. What is it, a bunch of bitching about your stupid wife? Letters to another woman?”
He sat still for a moment. Maybe he thought, since she was already getting loud, Pearl would eventually hear her and wake up. Or maybe he’d really wanted to show her all along, but she’d never asked forcefully enough. Who knew, but he turned the heavy computer monitor around and said, “Be my guest.”
Ashley had no idea what she expected, but it sure wasn’t this. She was stunned to realize that he was writing about their family—and not just Pearl, but her, too. He wrote about them going out to breakfast at the diner that morning and what they’d talked about and what a “lovely scene” it had been. He wrote about Ashley buying Pearl a new pink jacket last week, which he called the “continuous grace of the mundane.” He wrote about the three of them going to the family center the evening before, how Ashley had swum laps, while he and Pearl were in the children’s pool, and said this was “more evidence of the surprising beauty of the ordinary.” Then he wrote a question: “Why has the ordinary been overlooked or actively denigrated by our greatest writers?”
She read screen after screen, and it was all the same: good things that had happened to them and comments by Billy that she didn’t really get but could tell weren’t bitches or complaints. Finally she turned the monitor back around and looked at him. Her voice was quieter, a little shy. “Why are you writing all this?”
“Because it’s true.”
“But there’s lots of true stuff. Why write about the stuff we did?”
“I’ve told you, our family is the most important thing to me.” He folded his hands. “I’m not interested in writing about anything else right now.”
She was still too drunk to make sense of what he was saying. His tone was as hollow as ever. He sure as hell didn’t sound like someone who would write about all these happy things they’d done.
“You know what I think?” she said. “I think you’re just pretending. Making everybody think you’re this happy family guy.” She forced a smirk, hoping it wasn’t true even as she said it. “That’s why you have to write it all down every night. It’s like you’ll forget your act if you don’t.”
“It’s not an act,” he said softly. “It’s who I’m trying to be.”
“But you have to try. You don’t really feel it.”
He frowned. “I shouldn’t have expected you to see any nobility in effort.”
She wasn’t sure what he was saying, but she was actually glad he frowned. This was the old Billy, the one she could talk to—or at least fight with—until she understood him. And that’s what she did.
She asked him why he had to try about a dozen times before he finally cut the vague horseshit and got mad. “Because I’m not happy,” he hissed. “And if you understood me at all, you would know why.”
She didn’t understand him, but she wanted to. “Is it because you have to work and can’t write your book?”
“I obviously could write my novel if I wanted to.” He rubbed his forehead like he had a headache. “I have over four hundred pages of observations about our lives.”
Four hundred pages? He must have been doing this for a long time, maybe even since Pearl was born. After a few minutes of awkward silence, she stood up and went to him. Now that she knew he was sad, it felt like a whole different ball game. She was sad, too. Maybe they could come up with something new, together, that would work for both of them.
“What is it then?” she said, and knelt down beside him and put her hand on his knee. She was wearing a sexy black blouse, unbuttoned to highlight her cleavage; she hoped he didn’t think it looked cheap. She hoped she didn’t smell too much like booze. Maybe if she could show him she cared, he would kiss her
the slow way he used to.
He didn’t shrug her off, but he didn’t look at her. “New Mexico is your home, Ashley. I would never ask you to give that up. But this isn’t my home and never has been.”
“You want to move back east? Is that it?”
“No. I wish I could go back, but I don’t see—”
“Fine. Let’s go to North Carolina.”
He finally turned around and looked at her. “Are you serious?”
“I love you.” She felt the tears coming, meaning the booze was wearing off. But it was true and she’d wanted to say it for so long. “I would do anything to make you happy, baby.”
“What about your mother and your sisters and your aunts and uncles? Are you saying you won’t miss them?”
“Sure I will. But I’ve missed you a hell of a lot more.”
He thought about this for a moment. Then he pulled her up to him and kissed her. It wasn’t particularly passionate, but it was grateful—and so was she when he led her into the bedroom. At some point while he was undressing her, he whispered, “I love you too, Ash,” and she started crying again, but softly. She didn’t want him to lose interest in what they were about to do.
A few days later, he told Ashley that he’d thought it out and he did want to move. But not to North Carolina, to Pennsylvania. A big city: Philadelphia. He said he picked it because, though it wasn’t that close to home, it was a lot closer than he was now and at least on the same side of the country. Plus, he knew he could get a job there; he’d read about a boom in construction. He also said it was close to where his sister was, and of course she was his only family left anyway.
Ashley immediately said yes, but it took her a week or two before she understood that being near Lila was always the point. Why Billy hadn’t mentioned this right off, she didn’t know. Ashley didn’t dislike Lila anymore; in fact, she was looking forward to getting closer to her. Billy’s sister seemed nice enough. She’d come to visit for a few weeks every summer, and she sent Pearl little presents all the time: books, mainly, but also dolls and dress-up clothes and even a pretty tea set.
And the best part of all, whenever Lila visited, Billy hung out and talked with his twin so much that Pearl lost interest in her wonderful father and happily glued herself to her mother’s side. So even as Ashley cried about leaving her family, she secretly hoped that moving would prove to be just the ticket for solving all her problems with her daughter. And Billy, too, of course. She hoped this faraway place would give all three of them a fresh start.
Still, she was nothing less than shocked when it worked. She was no fool. A good outcome was always the last thing she expected.
In Philadelphia, Billy was his old self again, talking to Ashley about all kinds of things, most of which she didn’t understand. Pearl no longer hated her, or at least she stopped saying the words. Maybe it had been a phase, but it seemed to Ashley that their new city was magic. She loved the old houses and the rain and even the crowds of people everywhere. She wrote her mom about the Italian market and the Liberty Bell and the first big snowstorm, which thrilled her—and meant Billy got to stay home with them for days.
They didn’t see Lila that much, but when they did, it was all right. Billy said Lila was working hard in her last year of graduate school, and she only had time for an occasional lunch and it had to be in Princeton. He drove there alone every once in a while, and Ashley was glad for him. He was always so much happier after he’d seen his twin.
Naturally, Ashley still had complaints: Pearl wasn’t sleeping that well; Billy was boring sometimes; Ashley was often lonely without her friends and family. But compared to before, it was damn good. And compared to what happened after, it was heaven.
That first year in Philadelphia would turn out to be the only truly good year in her marriage. Even years later, Ashley would remember it that way. She was never sure why it changed, though she knew when it did: when Pearl was four and a half, and Ashley was diagnosed with cervical cancer.
They cured it so easily, only surgery to remove part of the cervix and the surrounding lymph nodes: no hysterectomy, no chemotherapy, no radiation. They even said she might be able to have more kids, which turned out to be true. In the scheme of things, it really wasn’t that bad, but Billy didn’t see it that way. He kept repeating, “This is the first appearance of the snake in the garden,” until finally Ashley went back and read the first part of the Bible, hoping to understand what the hell he was talking about. She didn’t understand, and the explanation he gave spooked her. He told her he had been cursed all his life and now that “Cole curse” was affecting his family, too.
“There’s no way out,” he said. Ashley would never forget the look on his face; he was not only dead serious, he actually seemed afraid. “I was a fool to think I could ever escape this.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
When Patrick came home from work on Wednesday, Lila expected him to be pleased that she’d showered and washed her hair without any prompting from him. Not only that, she was in their living room, sitting in her usual chair by the bookshelves, rather than lying in bed. She was still wearing pajamas, but they were the relatively new white-and-gray–striped flannel pants—no holes, not faded—and the purple Henley shirt that he liked so much when she got it last year that he’d told her it wasn’t really pajamas at all and she could wear it anywhere.
She’d been inspired to do all this at six-thirty, when Patrick was already an hour and a half late coming home. She imagined him having a hideous day, with lines of students outside his office, all of them anxious for help before finals. He walked in the door at 9:52, and it was even worse than she feared. He was so worn-out that he didn’t even look in her direction, but instead marched down the hall toward their bedroom, saying, “Get up, Lila,” in a tone that was so aggravated, she was relieved she’d thought to get up on her own, so he could relax and not deal with her tonight.
“I’m in here.” When he came into the living room, she forced a smile. “I’ve already eaten, too. I even answered the phone when your dad called. Not much of an accomplishment, I know, but I’m glad I talked to him. I didn’t realize how worried he’d been that he couldn’t get through to us.”
He nodded, but he didn’t smile back. His expression was so strange that Lila instantly knew something very bad had happened to him today. Her first thought was that one of his students had cheated. He always took that very badly. She told Billy it was one of the first things she’d loved about Patrick: he was a fair, honest person who believed in a fair, honest world.
He dropped his backpack on the floor and fell into the over-stuffed chair across the room, farthest away from her. He sat with his eyes closed for several minutes, long enough for Lila to wonder if he’d fallen asleep. She wasn’t sleepy herself, but she knew she would be very soon; she’d broken down and taken her sedative only minutes before Patrick arrived. She was planning to write him a note before she hit the bed: a friendly apology for not waiting up, a cheerful explanation that, this time, he didn’t need to drag her into the shower or force food down her throat, but nothing about the reason she’d given up and taken the sedative, nothing about the last four hours, when she’d been fully awake—and obsessing over something that she knew was meaningless, even trivial.
It started with the conversation she’d had with the therapist about Kingston, the prep school she’d attended when she was fifteen. The therapist had thought it was odd that Lila graduated in two years, but Lila knew it was true because she’d seen her transcript many times, though not for over a decade. This evening after her shower, while she was waiting for Patrick, she’d looked through box after box of old files and finally unearthed the Kingston transcript, which clearly stated that she’d graduated in June 1988, when she was still fifteen. Close to sixteen, though. Her and Billy’s birthday was July 12.
So she was right that she’d left Kingston because she was finished with high school, but something else was bothering her. The transcript included credits
from her hometown high school in North Carolina: just a listing, no grades, because Kingston, like most private schools, didn’t calculate grades from other schools in its GPA. The listing included all the usual subjects and the courses she’d tested out of, but it also included two classes in theater, one in the fall, one in the spring. That Lila didn’t remember taking theater wasn’t a problem—she didn’t remember taking half these courses and those she did remember weren’t necessarily her own real memories, since they were all classes she and Billy had taken together and he’d talked about with her over the years. The problem was that Lila knew she’d been way too shy, at fourteen years old, to take drama or chorus or anything that would have required her to do more than sit in the corner and listen to the teacher. She’d never even had any friends, not that she could remember anyway. This was why Billy had been the one who took theater, not Lila. She was absolutely positive about this because they’d talked about it only a few years ago, when Pearl tried out for her middle school play. She didn’t get the part, but Billy was proud of her for trying. He mentioned loving drama when he was in school and something about believing that Pearl could be good at it if she wanted to. Then Lila said, “I’m glad she’s not too afraid like I was.” And Billy said, “William is more like you. He’s so quiet; I’m sure he’ll never take theater, but it won’t matter. He’ll be doing genius-level work by the time he’s in high school.”
