Anna Solomon - Leaving Lucy Pear

She gasped as the mouth clamped onto her nipple, but the pain was a distraction, too, welcome in its own way. If the choice had been up to the Orphanage for Jewish Children woman, the infant would have been taken away before Bea even woke up. Aunt Vera was the one who noticed Bea, during the woman’s visit, turn bone white. Vera was weak but she had summoned the stick-straight posture she had been taught at Miss Winsor’s School and argued for a two-week delay. They would hire a wet nurse, she promised. And maybe because Vera was so ill, or so rich, or both, the woman relented. But then Aunt Vera hired a regular nurse and shocked Bea by putting the baby to her breast and Bea had gone along, in part because it justified her holding the baby, which she was desperate if terrified to do, and in part because the whole business was so uncomfortable it called up in her a resentment and resenting the baby had been a relief.

As the sucking went on, the pain quieted. She leaned forward, trying to make out the gap in the honeysuckle that was the lower entrance to the orchard. Still she saw no one. She heard nothing new. The baby pulled at her breast until the pain abandoned her entirely, leaving behind a fluttering twinge that was recognizable to Bea, despite herself, as pleasure.

• • •

A crack sounded from beyond the gap. Bea held her breath. She heard no footsteps on the road, no wheels scraping the dirt ruts. She had assumed they would push wheelbarrows for the pears, but the scuffling she heard now came from the small woods across the road. Beyond the woods were the rocks that led down to the harbor. So they had come by boat. Bea stuck a finger in the infant’s mouth, dislodged it from her breast, and started to walk toward the pear trees. The infant wailed. Bea stuck her finger back in its mouth and the baby sucked again, quiet, but the echo of its cry winged out over the trees. Bea’s blood began to pound. She worked to breathe, even to swallow, but her throat was full of the pounding; each step she took through the tall grass exploded in her ears. She looked back at the house. Vera’s hearing was weak and Uncle Ira slept like a stone, but the nurse was always half awake, it seemed, springing catlike when the infant so much as stirred.

Bea was looking back so intently she didn’t see the root that threw her forward. She caught herself with one hand but the infant’s head fell back roughly, as the nurse had instructed her it was never supposed to do. The baby howled. Bea filled its mouth again with her finger, bounced it, shushed in its ear.

In her fall she reached the pear tree she had chosen yesterday. She came down to the orchard in daylight, wanting to be sure that if for some reason the people picked from only one tree this year, they would find the baby waiting under it. She chose this one, and felt certain in her choice. But now she couldn’t see well and the infant struggled in her arms and the scent of pears was so strong she thought she would gag. Maybe the next tree produced the finest pears. Maybe this tree was understood to be the runt and the people wouldn’t even bother with it. Why had Bea thought herself capable of judging anything, let alone the worth of a tree?

Voices now, shout-whispers through the trees. Get up, said her mother. Give the thing back to the nurse. Go to sleep. Wait for the lady from the orphanage. You’re a good girl. You used to be. Don’t let a small mistake ruin your life. Aunt Vera said, Keep the baby, if it upsets you so much. We’ll raise it together. But that was a lie because Aunt Vera was dying. Do what you want, Uncle Ira said. You think your parents ever do a thing they don’t want? But Bea didn’t know what she wanted. She wanted to go back, she supposed, to before the lieutenant, before he smiled at her, before he pushed her against the wall, before he forced himself on her. Handsome, her mother had murmured in her ear that night. Handsome, she murmured now. Bea wanted to go back to when her greatest struggle was picking her way through Liszt. But she couldn’t go back and Aunt Vera would die soon and she didn’t trust Uncle Ira to defend her, when the time came; for all his talk, he snapped like a stick in front of her father. So if Bea kept the baby it would be taken anyway, only it would be the hideous orphanage woman who got it.

The small woods trembled with the people’s coming and Bea allowed herself a look down. Across the baby’s cheeks, she could trace the rash that had bloomed its second day of life, ferociously red and raw. Bea had convinced herself that the rash was a direct result of her unsuitability as a mother, and that it wouldn’t go away until she gave the thing up. She touched its cheek now, letting her fingers skid over the tiny bumps. They had receded, just as the nurse had said they would. The nurse couldn’t have known how her words, meant to comfort, would rattle Bea. The rash was perfectly common, she had said, nothing to trouble over. It would clear up soon and the girl would have Bea’s skin, “coffee ’n’ cream,” the nurse’s R rolling like water. “Baby girl,” she had cooed while Bea pretended not to listen. Baby girl. Darlin’. Luv. Girl.

Cradling it now as the people came closer, Bea experienced time slowing into a long, stuttering wave, her life at once paused and hurtling forward, her vision stretching to see the infant growing at an alarming rate, lengthening and fattening in her arms until it outgrew her grasp and unfurled to stand before her. It was so undeniably a girl, just like Bea — a girl in an orchard in the middle of the night — that Bea felt her own heart grow. She felt as if her ribs would crack.

Rubbish, said her mother. Sentiment. In three weeks Bea would recommence her musical instruction at the conservatory and enter the freshman class at Radcliffe, where she would continue her studies in the liberal arts and wear a brace to hold in her stomach and go to dances with the Harvard boys and act like all the other girls, as if she’d never lost a thing.

A crunching from the road — feet on gravel, close now. Bea’s breast went taut with goose bumps, reminding her of her exposure, and in the rapid, mindless act of buttoning her dress she was freed of decision. The baby’s eyes were closed. Bea’s arms shook as she set the bundle down in a clump of grass. The approaching footsteps were gentle, she told herself. The people were gentle thieves and they were Irish, like the nurse — they would know, she decided, how to care for babies. She had the whistle in case they didn’t. She stood, her shaking violent now and in every bone of her body so that it seemed to her that she must be audible. She clamped her jaw tight against its rattling. Then she ran, a pounding, rattling heart-bone, and threw herself down behind the stone wall.