Anna Solomon - Leaving Lucy Pear

She turned back, citing some need of Ira’s, or an order of business for the cause — the word gross in her mouth, her cheeks raging with humiliation. But they didn’t notice. Or she was so good at hiding — how many years she had spent hiding! — that they couldn’t see. “B’bye, Bea-Bea,” they called cheerfully. “B’bye, see you later!”

She returned, and took off her dry suit, and sat in her room. Ira was asleep. Emma was helping Helen, the nanny, set up a game or make beds — of course she liked the help better than she liked Bea. Everyone was doing what they ought to be doing except Bea, who dreamed of the pool and of Julian kissing her and of Oakes’s deep, fat voice filling the house as she sat on her bed listening to the whistle buoy wail.

Where did Emma go?

Into the window slid the big moon, bathing Lucy’s face in blue. Next to her Janie rolled away. Lucy kneed her gently in the bottom. She willed her awake but Janie sighed and slept on. Lucy woke every night, at some point — this had been true for as long as she could remember. Usually she fell back to sleep without trouble. But every time the long, yellow car came for Emma, a jolt ran through her: her heart started to thump and her back to sweat; she woke as fully as if it were noon. The headlights filled the trees outside her window, so bright they seemed to be laughing at the moon. She heard the house’s misfitted back door close. Another thud, a car door. The crunch of tires as Mr. Story’s car pulled away down the road.

Lucy had thought — she had hoped — all that was over. For a while, the car had stopped coming. Now its rumbling would not leave her chest.

Why would Emma run away like that?

Lucy couldn’t help but feel that Emma’s sneaking off had something to do with her, just as she felt an unaccountable anger at Emma for Roland’s nastiness toward her, his bizarre pokings and proddings. She was too young to try to account for such things; instead she experienced them as an old nick, a sharp silence in her bones. She had been pulled from sleep, then abandoned. Janie and the others did not stir. Up the hill, Mrs. Greely hollered: “Lover!”

Outside, the air had cooled. Lucy kept to the far edge of the road, where any child knew to walk when her feet were bare — here the granite chips had been worn to a fine, velvety dust. She passed the Davies’ dark house, then the Solttis’, then Mrs. Greely’s. Here the lights were on. Lucy heard the sound of a piano being struck, apparently at random, the notes darting into the night like a riddle.

Five minutes into the woods, the noise had faded. Lucy’s eyes adjusted. She found her boulder and climbed to the top. She did not bother feeling her mossy seat for rainwater — except for a couple stormy days there had been little rain since May. The Mississippi River, she knew, had flooded. But she did not understand where that was, or what it meant. She sat, and thought about Emma. Lucy understood only about half of what adults said. She did not know, for instance, what it meant that Mr. Greely had died of a “venereal disease.” But she thought she understood what Emma meant when Lucy overheard her say: He wandered around on her. Mr. Greely had gone off somewhere in secret, just like Emma was going off somewhere in secret. That much was clear. Less clear to Lucy was whom Emma was wandering around on. Roland, probably, but he wasn’t home, so did it count? And if not, wasn’t she wandering around on the children? What did she do as she wandered? And why was she doing it with Mr. Story? Lucy recognized the car from the quarry. She had heard two men in the carving sheds arguing about Josiah Story: one said, You can’t expect a guy gets handed a silver spoon and turns it down, the other, Don’t think he’s your friend, he’s a sellout. I wouldn’t vote him in for mayor if he paid me, which he probably would, he’s such a whore. Lucy had not observed Josiah Story closely — she tried to keep her eyes down at the quarry. He was funding their perry operation, of course. There was that. But Emma never took him inside the shack. She climbed into his car and rode away.

Lucy would have liked to ask Peter. If she focused her eyes the right way in the moonlight, the forest floor looked made of fish skin, each leaf a glinting scale. Peter would see this, too, she thought. Yet when she called him up, when she sat him next to her on the rock with his perpetual smirk and his shrewd green eyes, his heavy fist curling out to knock her in the shoulder, she knew she wouldn’t dare ask him about Emma. And it was this, more than what she’d actually seen — she hadn’t seen anything, after all, but the car, and Emma fleeing — it was her understanding that she could not ask Peter that told Lucy something bad was going on. And though she didn’t know what the something was, knowing that it was seemed to make her somehow bad, too.

The air darkened as the moon went behind a cloud. The trees appeared to thicken, the ferns that grew from the boulder’s lower crack to grow a full foot, black creatures stretching toward her through the night. People liked to call Cape Ann the Rock, and sometimes, like now, Lucy could feel it: how hard the place was, hanging off the world with its back up. She wished she was like Janie and the others, sleeping through to morning, not realizing anything was amiss. Lucy’s knowing about Emma was another thing that separated her from them. It was lonely, being the only one awake, the one protecting their mother’s secret. She felt guilty for keeping it, guilty at her gladness that Roland was away, guilty that the family was not as it seemed to be, guilty for being one of them and also outside, looking in, seeing the seams but not how to stitch them up.

Mrs. Greely’s house was dark when Lucy left the woods. She crawled in beside Janie and fell quickly back to sleep. She was only nine, after all — she never did manage to stay up until Emma came home. Instead, she would wake with the others, eat Emma’s oatmeal, return Emma’s sleepless smile. Always, Emma needed Lucy to smile back — this was a need as clear to Lucy as her own need for food, a need that preceded her first memories or words. In smiling, Lucy would forgive her, because Emma needed that, too, and because Lucy, after all, had her own secrets. The quarry. Canada. She was getting closer each day.

The Annisquam River was tidal from both mouths, water flowing toward itself and away, the harbor at one end, Ipswich Bay at the other, both saltwater, an infinite exchange. The river cut the Rock from the mainland. It was what made the cape an island. Emma knew this. She was from away and so she knew, because to get here you had to cross the river. But Josiah had lived most of his life not leaving the island, not knowing where the river went. Eight years ago, when Susannah walked past him outside his father’s shop and decided against all reason and familial threat that he was the man she wanted to marry, he didn’t even know the river had a northern mouth. He was scared of the water and so had not traveled the Annisquam by boat, and he had never been shown Cape Ann on a map. But soon he found himself in Caleb Stanton’s house, wandering the map-lined halls, half lost and half evading the mystery of cocktails-on-the-terrace. Some maps showed places Caleb had conquered in his rail and timber days, others the European cities to which he’d traveled with his children, others — these under glass — exotic places like Africa and the Amazon. When Josiah first came to the map of Cape Ann it might as well have been Cape Horn — he did not recognize it as the place he lived. Other capes and islands looked like moons or squirrels or whales or hearts, but this place — though Josiah could divine a finger here, a mouth there — lacked any coherent shape. It was lumpish, and ragged. And slicing its disorder in two was the tortuous river, represented by the blackest of inks, its many dead-end tributaries obscuring its outlets. A dark, defiant vein. Josiah got stuck there, mesmerized, until Susannah found him, and laughed. She had a beautiful laugh, chimelike and knowing, and she took his arm with a certainty that soothed him even as he knew that she was the one who had caused him to feel uncertain. She was revealing the world to him like sunlight to a dark room and he felt toward her alternately grateful and petulant. He let her lead him out to the terrace, where he drank his first gin and tonic and listened to his future father-in-law talk of profits and paving stones while Josiah thought about the map’s lumps and the river and the vast woods he had glimpsed at the center of the island, and when he could get back to them unnoticed.