The Promised World: A Novel

by Lisa Tucker

  When she didn’t say anything for a while, he said the only thing he could think of. “I’m sorry.”

  “You didn’t hurt Billy.” She was still looking at the ceiling. Her odd tears had stopped, but her expression was blank, unreadable. “I don’t think you were even there when Harold shot him, but I don’t know. I may be losing the plot again.”

  “Harold?” The name of the policeman who shot Lila’s brother had never made it into any of the news reports. Patrick thought this was because they didn’t know exactly whose bullet had killed Billy. He’d been shot multiple times by the SWAT team when he’d refused their demand that he move away from the window and drop the rifle he’d aimed at the second floor of the elementary school.

  “I don’t think you know him,” she said quietly, as though she was talking to herself, working out the details. “You weren’t invited to any of the parties, were you?”

  He was wondering what the hell she was talking about when he heard the screech of the metal rings as the curtain opened again. A man introduced himself as Dr. Samuels. He looked like all the other doctors Patrick had seen so far: younger than expected and unmistakably tired. He said he needed to talk to Lila for a few minutes, and turned to Patrick. “If you wouldn’t mind waiting outside. Someone will come and get you when the discussion is over. If we decide to move your wife to another room, you can go with her and help her get settled.”

  He’d already stood up when Lila begged, “Don’t leave me. Please.”

  “He’ll be right down the hall,” the doctor said. Then he looked at Patrick and nodded in the direction of the waiting room.

  Patrick reassured Lila he’d be back soon and walked away. Even after he closed the curtain, he could hear her repeated pleas that he stay with her.

  He made it to the waiting room, went into the bathroom to wash his face, and sat back down by the window, where the sun was already turning the horizon a pale orange. It took him a minute to realize it was Saturday now, almost morning. He wasn’t tired, at least his mind wasn’t, but his body ached a protest that he hadn’t slept in twenty-four hours.

  He wasn’t sure how long he’d been sitting there when the psychiatrist came out to talk to him. The sun was up; it looked like it was turning into a beautiful spring day, very few clouds. As expected, Dr. Samuels said that Lila was going to be held over the weekend and possibly longer. He said this would give them a chance to examine her and more aggressively treat her. He also admitted that Lila was very upset about this, but that was common enough for survivors of suicide attempts. Especially in a situation like hers. When Patrick asked what the last part meant, the doctor said, “From what your wife said, my guess is this isn’t her first encounter with the mental health system.”

  He nodded. “She went to a therapist, but didn’t feel it helped.”

  “I’m talking about as an inpatient. Do you know of any previous hospitalizations?”

  “No. Absolutely not. And I’ve known her for twelve years.”

  “Perhaps when she was younger? In college? Before?”

  Patrick wanted to say this was impossible, too, but he couldn’t. He had no way to know if this was another thing she’d lied to him about. “I don’t see how this is relevant,” he insisted. “She’s depressed because her twin brother committed suicide.”

  Dr. Samuels got out his notes. “Her brother Billy?” Patrick nodded, and the doctor said, “The one who got shot when she was fifteen?”

  He felt his throat constricting, but he managed, “Her brother died barely a month ago. I think whatever you gave my wife to wake her up has left her very confused.”

  “That’s possible,” Samuels said mildly. “She did say several times that she’d ‘lost the plot.’ Is that her way of saying she feels disoriented?”

  Patrick said yes before he realized he honestly didn’t know what Lila meant by that phrase. She’d been using it for years, but not often, and usually after she’d spent time talking to her brother. He’d always assumed it was one of Billy’s idiosyncratic expressions that needlessly complicated the situation. Whereas most people would say they couldn’t remember something, only Billy would say he’d “lost the plot.” Was that what it meant, that Lila couldn’t remember? Or did it mean she was confused?

  “She’s an English professor,” Patrick said, looking at the psychiatrist. “She tends to think in terms of plots and stories.”

  “Ah, I see,” Dr. Samuels said, though what he saw Patrick couldn’t say. He didn’t understand himself why he’d shared that. He had no idea what relevance it had.

  Finally, the doctor stood up. He told Patrick to wait there and they would come get him after they ran a few more tests and were ready to move Lila to the psychiatric unit. “It won’t be too long,” Samuels said before walking away.

  Patrick closed his eyes, desperate to relax, but his mind kept circling back through all the horrors of last night: the moment he realized his wife had overdosed, the terrifying ride in the ambulance, the life-and-death struggle he’d just witnessed in the ER. The guilt he felt for not being there for Lila was overwhelming, but the more he recoiled from what he’d seen, the more he couldn’t deny that he was also angry—and not simply with himself, but also with his wife. What she’d tried to do to herself was simply unfathomable to him. Right now, in this very hospital, there were hundreds of people struggling to get well, desperate to extend their lives another year or even another week. Innocent people who would have done absolutely anything for a chance at the life Lila wanted to throw away.

  That his own mother had been one of those people was not lost on him. It seemed both ironic and sad that the biggest reason his mother had wanted to live was to meet Patrick’s wife and hold his children, her grandchildren.

  He opened his eyes when someone came into the waiting room. The policeman was about Patrick’s age, but at least a hundred pounds heavier and several inches taller; he looked immense staring down at Patrick. When the officer said he needed to question him, Patrick assumed he wanted to know about Lila’s suicide attempt, and he asked if he could call the guy later. “I’m really not up to talking about it right now.”

  “I’m sorry, but this can’t wait.” He introduced himself. His name was Officer Curran. He looked around the waiting room, which was deserted at this early hour. Only the TV in the corner was still going, showing some kind of infomercial. “I need to know if you’re aware of any problems with your niece’s home life.”

  “You mean because she ran away?” Patrick looked at the ER doors through which Samuels had disappeared. It had been almost an hour. Maybe the doc had forgotten about him? “I really don’t see the urgency. “

  “She’s made some allegations.” Curran eased himself down in the blue plastic chair next to Patrick. “I’m hoping you have information that could help our investigation.”

  “Her father was arrested for child abuse, is that what you mean? But as he died a month ago, I see no point in finishing the investigation into—”

  “What do you know about Kyle Eaton?”

  “Who?” Patrick said, but then he remembered. Ashley’s new boyfriend. “I’ve never met him.”

  “Anything you’ve heard about the guy? You never know what could be important.”

  He hesitated, but he shared with Curran that he didn’t think Ashley knew her boyfriend very well, since she’d found him on a website that connected old high school friends. “But that’s really it. I’m sorry.”

  Curran wrote something down; then he asked if Patrick had any reason to think Ashley would look the other way if her child were being harmed. When Patrick didn’t answer, the officer said, “Let me put this as plainly as I can. Do you have any reason to believe she’s an unfit mother?”

  A month ago, the answer would have been an unequivocal no. Even now, if he hadn’t felt angry with Lila—and desperate to find some way out of this feeling—he would have kept his mouth closed. But instead, he found himself telling Curran the things Lila had been ranti
ng about for the last month as though they were facts. That Ashley was an alcoholic. That Ashley was prone to self-mutilating behavior, including cutting her arms and thighs. That Ashley had beaten Pearl when the little girl was just a baby.

  He might have felt nervous that he was violating his principles about truth and evidence if he hadn’t felt more furious with Ashley with each revelation. After all, she’d started this, hadn’t she? She had Billy arrested after she began her online relationship with Kyle Eaton, maybe even because of that relationship. She was responsible for destroying her family and possibly Patrick’s as well.

  Whatever minor qualms he had about what he’d said disappeared when the policeman said that Ashley’s boyfriend was being investigated for physically assaulting Pearl. Then he remembered what Lila told him about Ashley being unable to live without a man, any man, and he repeated this, too. He also shared his own reaction that he was shocked Ashley had let a virtual stranger move in with her children.

  Finally, the officer was satisfied that Patrick had told him everything he knew. He said he appreciated the cooperation, adding, “I hope your wife gets better.”

  “Thank you.”

  Curran stood up. “Your niece told us what your wife has been through since her brother passed. It sounds like she’s had a tough time.”

  When the man walked away, it was 9:47. Patrick asked the front desk clerk how much longer it would be before Lila was moved. He desperately wanted to get Lila settled so he could head home and get a few hours of sleep. He was so tired his eyes were burning and simply lifting his arm was like lifting a fifty-pound weight. If only he could sleep, maybe he could face up to everything that had happened—and figure out what to do next.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Anyone but Billy would have called it a string of bad luck and that’s how Ashley saw it, though at some point she stopped trying to convince her husband, knowing he’d just look at her like she was a moron. He’d told her a hundred times that it was her prerogative not to examine her life. Then he’d quote some dead guy named Socrates to explain why he wouldn’t do the same: “The unexamined life is not worth living.”

  Well, the examined life was sure as hell not worth living, either, at least not the way Billy did it. Yeah, he put everything into a pattern and he threw in a bunch of fancy quotes from books to make it sound better, but the upshot was as simple as it was shitty: her cancer, his job loss, both car accidents, even Pearl’s problems at school—it was all because of the Cole curse. They weren’t just dealing with a lot of rotten crap; they were doomed.

  Later, she would see it as kind of pathetic, how hard she tried to cheer him up even though most of the bad stuff happened to her. She was the one who got cancer, after all. She was the one who was rear-ended twice: once down the street, just a fender bender, but once on the highway, leaving her with back pain for months. She was even the one who had to find another school for Pearl, after their daughter’s bizarre behavior in kindergarten got her thrown out of the public school.

  Even when Billy got laid off, it was Ashley who had to deal with the problem of making ends meet. She went back to work waiting tables and did all the scrimping and saving so they could keep paying their bills and the tuition at Pearl’s new Catholic school. After a few months, he got another job that paid better than the one he’d had before, but he wasn’t happy about that, either, except he was relieved they could afford to move Pearl from St. Peter’s to a private school just for smart kids, where Billy believed she’d always belonged. Just as well, as the nuns were threatening to throw Pearl out, too, since none of their punishments seemed to do a damn thing to change Pearl’s attitude problem. That was what they called it. Billy said she was just too smart to sit and act interested when they forced her to listen to some simple-minded book she could have read to herself two years ago.

  He turned out to be sort of right. At Pearl’s new private school, the teachers never called to complain that she’d thrown her crayons on the floor or told them they were stupid. But she didn’t talk much at all at the new school, and that was another thing to worry about. She had no friends in kindergarten and by first grade she never even mentioned the other kids in her class, as though she’d decided it didn’t matter who they were or what they thought of her. And she sure wasn’t happy, Ashley was positive about that—except when her father was around. Then she smiled and laughed and played like a normal kid, even if Billy wasn’t playing with her. Sometimes Ashley thought Pearl was trying to cheer her father up, which would have made her worry more if she wasn’t doing the very same thing. Like mother, like daughter. Every night, she and Pearl sat at the dinner table listening to Billy blather on about something or other that had nothing to do with anything real. At the end of it all, Pearl got a big smile and a pep talk about how smart she was. Ashley’s only reward was peace and quiet while she did the dishes.

  So why did she keep loving him? As stupid as it sounds, she would let herself forget all about the bad times whenever Billy was in a good mood. Only Billy could turn an ordinary Saturday into a wild adventure, dragging Ashley and Pearl all over the city: down to Penn’s Landing to count the ships, over to South Street to look for cool, cheap things for the house, up to the museum to find which painting had the most purple or a head shaped like a triangle or some other funny thing that he’d decided to turn into a contest for her and Pearl, with the winner deciding whether to eat vendor hot dogs or Chinese. After one of these days, Ashley felt like Billy was the smartest, most exciting man she would ever meet in her life. He could also be so kind—sitting up with Pearl when she had nightmares, even if he had to be up early for work; bringing home little gifts for Ashley, like the lavender candles she loved and her favorite painted locket that he bought from a street artist; writing sweet poems for both Ashley and Pearl on their birthdays and Christmas and sometimes for no reason at all other than he’d been thinking about them. The problem was that Ashley could never figure out what changed him from kind and exciting to gloomy and withdrawn, and so she drove herself nuts trying to figure out how to get him to change back.

  She really didn’t understand how much work it was, being with Billy, until years later when she went online and started talking to Kyle Eaton, who’d been her very first crush in high school. It shocked her that Kyle not only asked her things like “How is your day going?” but actually seemed interested in her answers. Billy thought small talk like that was an utter waste of time. And time was the one thing they didn’t have anymore, as he always said, with that note of fear in his voice that never failed to make Ashley a little afraid, too.

  Because she was the only one he shared his darkest stuff with, she figured he had to love her, too, at least a little bit. Pearl was a kid, so naturally he didn’t tell her when he “realized,” somehow, that he wouldn’t live to be forty. But he didn’t tell Lila, either. With his twin, he always kept up the bullshit that everything was fine, no matter what they were going through. When he lost his job the day before Lila and her husband Patrick came to dinner, Billy didn’t even mention it and insisted on having expensive steaks so Lila wouldn’t worry. Too much stress could be bad for her, he said—like it wasn’t already bad for them.

  Whenever Ashley asked him why he treated his sister like this, he didn’t get mad; if anything, he was more patient than usual as he explained how determined he was that Lila escape the Cole destiny, which was his usual way of talking about the curse. He said the same thing about Pearl, though he worried constantly that their daughter was so close to him that he’d have to work hard to make sure she escaped. Lila was easier, now that she was safely married to an “innocent” man like Patrick.

  “She’s going to have a good life,” Billy would conclude. “It’s the one thing I can give her after what we went through.”

  Usually Ashley let it drop here, but one time she couldn’t resist asking, “But why do you have to give her anything? Why are you always so damn protective of Lila?”

  They were sitting
on the front porch: Ashley on the swing, Billy on the steps, facing away from her. It was just getting dark, but it was a school night and Pearl was already in bed. Ashley was hoping Billy would open up about the rotten childhood he’d hinted at but never explained. She’d figured out that his stepfather was some kind of bastard, but she honestly didn’t know why that was such a big deal. She’d known a lot of people who had asshole stepfathers or stepmothers. It sucked, but it didn’t mean the rest of their lives were doomed.

  When he didn’t answer, Ashley said, “She’s your sister, not your daughter. Hell, you’re even the same age.”

  “That’s true if you use the most simplistic metric of chronological age.”

  “And what metric do you use?” She knew what he meant by metric: not the metric system like they taught kids in school, but just a way of measuring something. He used this word all the time.

  “Mental age. And before you ask, I don’t mean that Lila has a lower IQ. I think IQ is meaningless, because—”

  “I know.” She couldn’t help interrupting, anything to avoid hearing his rant about this again. “So what do you mean?”

  “She’s had fewer life experiences than I have.” He paused. “In a very real sense, she’s always been younger.”

  “Well, how about me?” Ashley was staring at him, willing him to turn around and look at her. “I’ve had a lot of experiences, so I guess we’re kind of the same.”

  She was desperate, as usual, to prove a connection with him. This must have been why she didn’t pay attention to the obvious fact that Lila and Billy had grown up in the same house, with the same mother and stepfather, so how could Lila always have been younger, experience-wise?

  When he said, “Maybe that’s true,” she was beaming. Until he continued, “But if it is, that’s another reason you and I shouldn’t have more children. As I’ve said a hundred times, I know my life is not going to turn out well. As long as you’re with me, yours won’t, either. We can’t put anyone else at risk.”