Anna Solomon - Leaving Lucy Pear

“Excuse me,” said the doctor, as he ducked out the door, “but the boy should be sure to sit on the right side.” He nodded apologetically at Roland’s lap. “For now.”

Roland looked after him blankly. A warm breeze swept through the room, throwing the wiggling, waving light against the walls. The door closed. It was dark in the house. Joshua asked, his mouth full of cookie, “When is Daddy’s leg coming back?”

“Hush,” Emma said. She went to lift the boy, but Roland held tight. Emma could not remember ever seeing him with any of his children on his lap.

“It’s not coming back,” he told Joshua. To Emma, he added, “I’m not getting a fake one.”

“You don’t have to decide now,” she said.

“I’m decided.”

“We’ll see. You’ll have to work again.”

“We could live a full year off people’s pity.”

“Rolly!”

“And this Story character seems to be on our side.”

Emma had told him almost everything: the perry press, the jobs for the boys at the quarry. She knew he would find out from the children if not from her. She had told him, too, about her job at the Hirsch mansion, because she could not see how that would not come out in the papers (though it never did, for Mr. Hirsch and Mrs. Cohn were as discreet as they had claimed to be). She answered his questions— What in hell? Did they make you clean? Do they really have horns? Did they suspect, about the pears? — but offered no more, just as she did with the children when they asked about dying or intimacy. Like the children, Roland came back for more when he was ready. Yesterday, in the hospital, he’d emerged from a silence to ask, “Did this Story character take a cut out of your nursing job?” and Emma had said, “No,” without clarifying that Story himself had paid her wages or that he’d done it to gain Mrs. Cohn’s favor or that now that Mrs. Cohn was despised, a political liability, he had no reason to continue doing such a thing, though he might pay Emma anyway if she asked him nicely. “He’s been very generous,” she said, fighting off thoughts of Story’s pale, freckled shoulders.

“You’ve got something saved up?” he asked.

“Some. What about you?”

“I did all right. Those runners would rather pay you in booze than cash, though. I had to put my foot down—”

“Somehow I’d bet you didn’t put it down hard.”

“Hey!” Roland made a doleful face. “I swear I did. But most of my stash went down with the fish. At least the whiskey’s safe.” He shook his head, chuckling. He had explained to Emma that he had come back on the Mendosa because of its side business, and that the reason one of the ship’s dories hadn’t made it in until noon the day after the wreck was because as soon as the fog had cleared two men had rowed out to Thacher Island to stash a hundred cases of rye. “You should see the place we picked it all up,” he said, and though he’d already told Emma twice what she knew he was about to tell again, she let him go on. “This little island off Newfie, you see the warehouses before the rock, rising up like a city of booze. You’d think the place would sink with it.”

“Daddy?” Joshua asked, slapping at the chair where Roland’s knee would have been, “Where did it really go?”

“I’ll take him outside,” Emma said, though she was wondering the same thing about the money Roland had made and whether he would in fact see any of the liquor profits. Men rarely liked Roland and she didn’t know if his missing a leg would change that.

This time Roland let her take the boy. She saw him wince with relief. Joshua was too old for lifting but she held him anyway, wanting him close, and maybe tempting Roland to chastise her, to act like himself. It was a confusion, her desire for Roland to be as he’d been, a surface to push against, and her awareness for the first time that the surface could give way. She had brought her older boys up to be like their father, but now she worried her preparation had been inadequate. “It’s beautiful out,” she said, shifting Joshua to her other hip.

Roland twisted to look out the window. “It’s a beautiful day,” he said. “Take him outside.”

“What about a wheelchair, Rolly?”

“It’s not hard to get around in this house. The road’s a load of gravel. Where would I go?”

“We could get a car.”

“A car. How would we get a car?”

Emma started to carry Joshua toward the door. She would treat the question as it was meant, a statement of impossibility. Even if she did deposit Mrs. Cohn’s check, she didn’t need to tell Roland about it: she had opened her own bank account in his absence.

Roland stuck out his right foot, blocking her way. “Emma-bee,” he said, a thing he hadn’t called her in years. “We won’t be going to the old place this year, I’m thinking.”

He meant the Hirsch estate, for pears. “We haven’t gone anywhere since you’ve been home,” she said.

“That’ll have to change,” he said. “You’ll have to get on with things. But not there. All right?”

“Of course. I already decided that. But I think we’re done, Rolly. They were so afraid that night. I was…”

Roland grabbed her free arm and pulled her down hard, so that her ear was at his mouth. “Emma-bee,” he said. “The little one… Is she… This Cohn… She’s… her mother?”

Even after there were more little ones, he had always called Lucy Pear the little one.

“Yes,” Emma said.

“She doesn’t know.”

“No.”

“And Cohn doesn’t know.”

“No.”

He nodded. “Good.”

“Rolly, please, I’m going to fall over.” He let her go and she carried Joshua out into the crazy light.

• • •

Emma woke, her first thought a baby, before she realized. Roland whimpered in his sleep. It was after midnight, the time the Duesenberg would have been coming up the road. Maneuvering so that her legs stayed at a distance, Emma put her arm around her husband. He was sweating, his heart beating too fast like it did when he drank. But he hadn’t had a drink. The doctor had set the whiskey bottles on a high shelf and told Emma to keep them there. For now, he added kindly, though Roland barely seemed to hear. He hadn’t asked for a drink. But he had taken one of the pills. Gingerly, Emma turned him onto his back, undid the buttons of his shirt, and started working his arms out of the sleeves. He cried out and she stopped, looking at him, his bushy beard, his muscled shoulders, his chest twice the bulk of Story’s, testing to see what she felt. Still he didn’t wake, so she went on, touching her face to his arms as she wriggled the sleeves toward his hands, reorienting herself, running a finger along his veins. Despite his sweat, he was clean from his hospital stay — she had to sniff at his armpits to find his scent. She expected him to wake then, but he slept, his face pinched as if fending off pain. “Emma-bee” was the name Roland had used when he was sorry for something, and wanted nothing from her but forgiveness. Emma-bee was a girl, exempt from his desires.

She rolled him back onto his side. His skin cooled. His breathing slowed. She drew up the sheet and wrapped her arm over him again and this time, Roland took her hand and drew it into his chest. Still, she kept her lower half away. After the war, plenty of men were without legs or arms, but somehow Emma hadn’t thought beyond them, to their wives.

Josiah woke for the third day to the smell of Susannah’s blood-soaked cloths wafting up from the sheets and knew immediately that he could not stand to be there when she woke. The skin around her eyes was raw, her cheeks chalky with dried tears, that smell — like pennies in mud — unmistakable. Yet she had said nothing of a miscarriage, had gone on yesterday and the day before as if nothing at all out of the ordinary were happening. And maybe it felt that way to her, because it had happened so often before — maybe it seemed nothing needed saying. Or maybe she was afraid to say it, knowing by now how a thing like that didn’t have to be exactly real until you said it. Josiah understood this, though Susannah didn’t know he did, though the point was never, had never been, Josiah: he had experienced how speaking a thing made it irretrievable, shameful, how shared disappointment — the instant their eyes met — was a million times worse than bearing it on your own. He should feel sympathy for her, he knew. Always, always, he had been sympathetic! He had listened and kissed her and agreed to continue wanting what she wanted, he had agreed with everything she’d ever said. But now he was filled with rage: rage that she was keeping it from him, rage that she kept trying and trying, that she had never been taught as a child that you don’t always get what you want (he forgot, in his rage, that she had wanted a mother), rage that she couldn’t just make a goddamn baby. He pushed the Duesenberg faster than he had before — sixty miles per hour, sixty-five, seventy — jerked her roughly around the curves. He was dizzy with his anger, dizzy with the road, astonished as he wound toward Lanesville at how many other roads split off from the one he was on. He felt as he had when he’d first learned to drive, after he and Susannah were married: overwhelmed at every fork, stupid, hesitant. Only now he didn’t hesitate, he mowed through his fear, drove like a battering ram, angry at Caleb, too, for what Josiah knew must be the man’s judgments, that it was all Josiah’s fault, Josiah’s inferior bloodline, though the Stantons were so loyal to the Stantons they were practically inbred. Across the Cut Bridge Josiah gunned the engine, angry about the canal that ran underneath and the problem of dredging it and the speech Caleb had written for him, angry about all the words Caleb had taught him and that Josiah had repeated. He drove toward Lanesville, past the quarry, where he would soon be expected. His men were antsy, talking low about Sacco and Vanzetti. The Lowell commission had released its report: there would be no more appeals. At the sight of his slogan up on the wall—