The Promised World: A Novel

by Lisa Tucker

  Then she was outside in the woods behind their house, and she had a chess piece clutched in her fist. Billy was trying to talk her into giving it to him. “It will be worse if you wait.” Lila was sitting on a rock; Billy was standing above her. The sun made his head look like it was ringed by a halo. “It’ll be all right. I’ll convince her you’re sorry.”

  She’d just handed over the ivory chess piece—and seen Billy smile—when she came out of the dream to hear Patrick asking how this could possibly help his wife. He sounded angry, or was it guilty? “Christ, she’s done nothing but lie in bed at home for weeks. How is this any different?”

  Another man said something long-winded that Lila didn’t catch, though she heard the words “agitation” and “antidepressants” and sleepily wondered if it was possible that every word he’d said had started with “a.” Then she heard Billy talking again.

  “Every story needs a villain.”

  They were in the basement—so many of the dreams took place in the basement or outside in the woods, even Lila’s dreaming mind noticed this and vaguely wondered why. Billy was explaining some book to her. Or was it a story he’d written? He was always writing stories. Lila was so jealous of his talent, even though she knew he wrote most of them for her, to keep her from being sad.

  “Think about it,” Billy continued. “The villain shows the amount of good in everyone else. They are judged by how close or far they are from him.”

  She nodded but didn’t say anything. She was eating the most delicious apple that Billy had brought down to her.

  “What else do you want?” he said. “Mom just went to the store.”

  Before Lila could answer, she heard her mother calling for Billy.

  “I’ll come back later,” he said.

  “No.” Lila reached to grab her brother’s arm, but he was already standing. She could feel tears welling in her eyes as he walked slowly up the stairs. Then she climbed up on the table by the basement window, maneuvered herself through the narrow opening, and ran into the woods, still choking back tears. There she met a woman in a white bridal gown, and Lila wondered who would get married in this forlorn place. “It’s almost over,” the woman said, but her voice was strange, like it was coming from the radio. “You’ll know when it’s time.” Then the woman ascended to the sky, like Genevieve, Lila’s patron saint—or was it only the Virgin Mary who had ascended?

  And indeed there will be time, Lila thought, waking up when a nurse walked into the room. It was a line from a T. S. Eliot poem. She continued reciting the poem in her mind until it finally hit her that she’d really had a patron saint named Genevieve. That part was true. They’d been Catholic before her mother remarried. How could she have forgotten that?

  She fell asleep again and saw a man ice-skating, but when she got closer, she realized it wasn’t Billy or her stepfather; it was Patrick. Patrick, who’d never skated in his life as far as she knew, was jumping in the air and spinning to a landing, like the skaters in the Olympics. Every time he came close, she asked him, “How did you learn this?” but all he would do was wink and smile. He wasn’t the kind of guy to wink in real life, but Lila forgot that and thought he was so much more himself.

  “Minor characters matter,” Billy told her.

  “Patrick isn’t minor,” she mumbled, and then she realized Billy couldn’t hear her. He was still talking about Huckleberry Finn. “You can’t understand Huck without seeing him with all the people he meets.”

  Was she still asleep? This seemed like a memory, not a dream. She and her brother really had read Huck Finn at least a half dozen times. Billy insisted, because he said this book would be a variation of their own plot. The reasons were obvious: Huck had to escape his cruel father. “But stepfather is so much more believable,” Billy said harshly. “Aren’t we lucky to have it work out like that?… Of course, the big question has to be why. In Huck’s case, his father is an alcoholic. That’s the nineteenth century for you: bad parents are either drunk or poor or both. In the twentieth century, we use psychology, but to me the truly modern answer is no one knows. Because there are alcoholics who aren’t assholes, right? There are abused children who don’t abuse their kids. So we might as well call it old-fashioned evil as long as we understand that evil means nothing more than the howling emptiness of a soul with nothing to give.”

  She thought she must be awake, when suddenly they were running up a hill and Billy was laughing and calling himself “Man of Steel.” They were young, maybe six or seven. Lila wanted a superhero name, too, and she picked “Grass Girl.” When Billy asked her what Grass Girl did, she said, “She can roll down hills faster than anyone.” It was the one thing she was better at than her brother: rolling down hills. She loved doing it, too, even though she always got dandelions and puffballs caught in her long hair.

  Then the scene changed again. It was dark outside and her mother was crying loudly in another room, while Lila was slapping herself in the face. Billy was crying, too, but he walked over and grabbed Lila’s hands. “You didn’t do it.”

  “I’m sorry,” Lila said. Her voice was still a child’s, like Grass Girl’s. But nothing about her was a child anymore. Even her room looked wrong to her now, with the pink bed covered with stuffed animals and the little white bookshelf where her dolls sat in a neat little row. The bears and elephants and dolls all looked at her as though they were waiting for her to come back and play with them. She picked up one of the dolls and ripped its head off and said, “No!”

  It was the night her father died; Lila opened her eyes and was suddenly sure of that. Except Billy had never told her she’d destroyed all her dolls, but she felt sure of that, too. Why had he never talked about that night?

  She wanted to keep thinking about what this meant, but she couldn’t. She was already feeling so drowsy that she had to close her eyes.

  The next thing she knew, they were in church; her mother was with a man but he didn’t look like Harold. He was a short, bald guy with a sweet smile, and Lila liked him because he always gave her pennies. “A little girl can never know when she’ll need to make a wish.”

  Lila was holding Billy’s hand as they walked out of the pew. Her mother smiled at the unnamed guy and whispered, “Don’t my babies look adorable?”

  Billy’s hand was sweating. They were never allowed to touch each other in front of their mother, but she’d told them this time was different. This time she wanted them to hold hands and act like “normal” children. “Do you think you can manage that?” their mother had said, looking straight at Lila. “It should be easy enough, assuming you’re not still trying to ruin my life.”

  A statue of the Virgin Mary was above them, weeping. The prayer raced across Lila’s mind as if it were too frightened to pause long enough to become words: HolyMaryMotherOfGodPray ForUsSinnersNowAndAtTheHourOfOurDeathAmen.

  At the door of the church, a priest said to Lila, “We were worried about you.” He smiled. “We all prayed you’d recover, and look, here you are.”

  She felt her face turning red. What was wrong with her that she didn’t know what he was talking about?

  “You’re not crazy.” How many times had Billy told her that? He used to say it all the time; she was sure. But the voice speaking now was her own. She’d woken herself up, telling herself she wasn’t crazy. Which struck her as more than a little funny, given where she was. She couldn’t laugh, though. Her mouth felt as dry as if she’d been eating dust.

  Then she was yelling, “Billy, Billy,” and he was downstairs with her, holding her in his skinny child’s arms. She told him about the man in the shiny silver truck who was coming to kill her. “It’s not real,” he said, shivering. It was always cold in the winter down here, despite the white cube with the hot red face that Lila was never supposed to touch.

  A space heater, she thought now. It was right by the cot where she slept whenever she was being punished.

  “You’re okay.” He sounded sleepy, but he said, “Do you need to hear
a story?” She stammered out yes, and he said, “Once upon a time, there was a blond-haired baby who toddled off and got lost in a land of ugly trolls…”

  She woke up shaking, as though the cold in her dream had followed her into the hospital. All at once, she realized she knew that story about the baby and the trolls. She remembered when Billy used to call her Baby Lila. She used to get so mad at him about that.

  She managed to stay awake for several minutes this time, thinking. They were probably only ten when Billy came up with the story—no wonder the symbolism was so obvious. She was the baby, and her mother and stepfather were the trolls. Billy himself wasn’t in the story. He was just the one who’d created it.

  The cot was real, too. She could see it so clearly, in the middle of the basement, surrounded by beige garment bags that looked like an army of faceless monsters when she was a child. She had her own room, but she was always being sent to the basement. Maybe Billy was, too? She couldn’t remember.

  Lila fell asleep wondering why Billy was always comforting her and she was never comforting him. Maybe that was why her next dream was of a fight they’d had. They were in the woods and she was yelling, “Shut up! Shut up!”

  She was older then, thirteen or so; it was after the growth spurt that left her taller than Billy. She didn’t have a coat on, but it wasn’t warm. The leaves were turning; the forest looked like an explosion of red and yellow.

  “What do you want me to say?” His brown curls looked messy in the wind. “You know it never happens when they aren’t here. How could she be right about—”

  “I don’t believe you.” She was still yelling. “I’m going in. I’ll ask her myself.”

  “Okay, but you know what will—”

  Then she was running past the tree house her father built and down the hill, into the house. Her mother was home, for a change. Lila hadn’t seen her in what felt like weeks.

  “Look who’s here,” her mother said. She was standing in the kitchen, but it didn’t look anything like the kitchen had looked before. It was all brand-new—again? Even the toaster was so shiny, reflected in the sun, that Lila blinked when she glanced at it.

  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 thoug
h 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.”