Anna Solomon - Leaving Lucy Pear

Frankie Silva found her with his foot. He was sitting on the other half of the seat, one arm stretched mightily across the wall of whiskey, a cigarette in his other hand, the most relaxed he’d felt in ages, when his left foot hit a thing that was not made of steel. He reached down and felt her cap. He slid his toe under her forehead, lifted it like a ball, then pulled her up by the nape, calling into the front, “Got a boarder!” Lucy’s hands flew to her head. She wore Liam’s dark coat. Sweat filled her ears. “Johnny Murphy,” she whispered. “Please…”

“And I’m Frankie Silva.” The man snorted. “That don’t make no difference.”

But the caravan had already rounded the last bend before the Goose Cove Bridge, where Dirk Parsons collected his toll. What could they do? The road was narrow — there was no room to turn around. Even if there were, Dirk and his brothers had seen their headlamps and would know if they changed direction. And that was no guarantee anyway: there was one dirt road they could try through Dogtown, there was the long way up and around the cape, but men ran rogue tolls along those routes, too. There was too much booze in Lanesville not to collect on it, booze in other caves, booze underwater, booze in chimneys and woodpiles and trees. Ten thousand bottles of whiskey were buried in Salvatore Santorini’s kitchen garden alone. The Feds came with steel rods, poking, poking, but they couldn’t find every cache. (In 1983, Salvatore’s great-grandson, digging for treasure, would pry up an unlabeled bottle of brown liquid and pour it into his boots.)

Dirk Parsons and his brothers had good rifles. Josiah Story had money invested in this trip. What could Frankie Silva do? He stuffed the kid back down, the drivers paid up, the caravan rolled on.

• • •

Through the yacht club gate Frankie rode with his foot on Lucy’s back. “Stay put,” he grumbled. “Stay, we’ll get you home. Won’t tell nobody. Not worth our time. Stupid kid.”

She was gone before they got back for their second load. She did not run. She slipped like a shadow over the club’s wall, clambered down through beach rose until the breakwater slid into view, judged by its distance how far she had to go, then stayed to the side of the road, to the hedges and walls, until she reached the gap in the honeysuckle.

It wasn’t until she was through, to where the air was thick with sugar and the pears hung in her face, that she felt afraid. She had been too worried about getting there to fear being there. But the smell choked her, and the pears were so close, and she was alone, very alone, her aloneness as abruptly apparent as if until a moment ago Janie had walked beside her, as if the whole Murphy clan had been wading together into the field, the children grabbing at once for the low fruit, hissing, Look how much I’ve grown! Last year I was only this high. Look!

And Roland would laugh and say, Who needs a doctor to measure you when we can go begging for pears? Now get to work! And a glow would run among them as they started to pick, a shared, almost sacred kind of joy, like what happened when they went to church on Christmas Eve but even more so, even better, because the orchard, and the joy they felt there, was never spoken of.

Lucy listened. Could she flag down the trucks on their way off the point, beg Frankie Silva to take her back? In a few days she would turn ten. Janie would bake her a cake. They would all sing to her. It could be as if she had never come here.

The night hung so still she heard her own breath. She heard her dress shift against Liam’s coat. She heard the photograph she’d torn from the newspaper rustle deep in the coat’s right pocket. She heard sweat roll off her nose and land in the grass.

She shed the coat. She pulled at a pear and it dropped into her palm like a stone. The stem was intact, the flesh firm under her thumb. Perfect. Look! she wanted to shout. Look how easy that was, how tall I am. Look how brave I am. Look! Come get me. Come and take me home.

She turned once, in a circle, as if Janie and Anne might be hiding behind the trees, tricking her, as if everything had been a trick and they would all come out now, Roland on his two legs and Emma all devotion and Lucy, too, before she had grown, before Roland started pinching her, before she had been split so definitively, irrevocably, from the others.

A noise. A crunching in the grass. She stopped. The crunching stopped. Of course. Her cheeks burned, her fear sang. She folded the pear into the coat, folded the coat in a neat pile on the ground, set her cap on top, pushed her hair into some kind of order, and walked on.

• • •

Lucy Pear walked past the place where she had been laid by her mother, and past the other place, where she had been laid by Emma. She fell into a hole — Vera’s old fish pond — and climbed out. She climbed the stone wall, passed the great, comforting pine tree beneath which Bea had nearly lost her resolve, and found herself standing, exposed, on a long, rolling lawn, facing the sort of house she had glimpsed only in fairy tales. She did not see its neglect — the night was too dark and she was too young to have believed it anyway. She saw the terrace, built of granite so white it seemed to glow, and the tall windows lined with heavy drapes. Each window appeared taller than her own house! She saw the many chimneys, and the vases the size of children set out across the terrace, and the long car parked in the drive.

She crept across the lawn’s lower edge, then up along its side. Her cheeks burned now with hope, her heart jigged, her mouth felt full of birds. This place! She might have come from it. She might belong to it. She might return.

Only as she reached the top of the lawn did the lower floor rise into view. The terrace had hidden it, but Lucy saw now: two lit windows. A woman on a bed, holding a glass.

Lucy knew right away. Even as she pulled herself over the railing, her cheeks began to cool. A chill swept through her. Weeds grew so densely in the terrace cracks they appeared to hold the stone together. She crouched behind a vase and watched the woman walk to the window and saw clearly that the woman’s bare ankles were her ankles. The woman’s skin was her skin. The woman was close to crying. It was the strangest thing, to watch a woman she had no memory of and know she was trying not to cry because that pinch in her brow, that flare of her nostrils, that was what Lucy’s face did when she tried not to cry.

She heard the trucks leaving the point. She wanted to cry. Her mouth was salty with tears. As surely as she knew that Beatrice Cohn was her mother, she knew she could not knock at this window. How could that woman possibly help her? What had Lucy imagined? She had barely thought it through. She had gotten as far as asking for a train ticket. Tonight, just now, she had wanted to move in! But Beatrice Cohn looked as wrecked as the Mendosa. There were men who wanted to kill her. There was Roland’s leg and Luis Pereira’s face and Emma, who no longer worked here.

How could she have worked here in the first place?

And behind the woman in the bed lay a long lump, an old man, judging from the white scraps of hair fringing his bald head. The uncle, clearly, Hirsch. He had been the one Emma nursed. His name had been in the papers, too. Did Lucy’s mother sleep in a bed with her own uncle? Was she as pitiful as that? Her stare, certainly, was pitiful, her eyes lit with misery. She swayed, as Roland used to do, when he stood drunk rather than sat drunk. She was staring, Lucy realized, at a dark window, lit from within. The only thing you could see standing at a window that way was yourself.

Lucy crawled closer. Against one of the house’s dark windows she stood, and regarded the woman’s figure from the side, through the cloth of her nightgown. She was not like Emma, who joked she was built like a ruler. Beatrice Cohn was very thin but not at all straight, nor flat: her bottom lifted the gown behind her; her breasts were twice the size of Emma’s; her thinness pulled at her curves, made them seem even more pronounced. Her nipples stood in a disconcerting, arrowlike way.