Anna Solomon - Leaving Lucy Pear

He was sorry. He saw her winging, a cormorant, and he saw her standing, a stump at the edge of the far woods. His vision seemed at once to contract and grow stronger, so that he saw, at his feet, through a pool of water gathered in the pink crease of the rock, how the pink was made of white and gray and red, how the individual nubbles of white grew upon the gray and the gray upon the red. Susannah. He could not look up again to find her everywhere and nowhere. He had withheld affection from her, thinking it would toughen her up. He had feared if he loved her fully that her grief would become his own.

“Josiah!”

He scanned the water again, turning wildly, his sun-bleached eyes leaping with worms. He parsed out wind on the surface from a woman breaking through. Nothing.

“Joe!”

He felt mocked. He spun to face the trees. Had Caleb been watching him all this time?

“Over here, dummy!”

Susannah, out beyond the dock. Treading water. Waving. She was not coming from any direction he had expected her to come from. She must have swum straight across the bay, all the way to Crane Beach or Hog Island. More than a mile each way, and against the wind all the way back! Josiah started to laugh, a helpless, choking, hysterical laughter that heaved him forward, elbows to knees, then knees to rock. It took all his strength to lift his face to her, to lift an arm and wave. He was too pained by his laughter to call out. Susannah dropped under the water, stopping his heart. Then she was swimming toward him, her sharp, fine elbows pointing to the sky.

It was Lucy’s idea that the children should use Mrs. Greely’s piano for their lessons. Emma did not want them going to Mrs. Cohn’s house, and besides, transporting them there would have required a coach, so a deal was struck: each Saturday Mrs. Cohn would come to Leverett Street and, on the Steinway Mr. Greely had given Mrs. Greely as a wedding gift, teach the children and Mrs. Greely how to play. The piano was a black-painted upright with vines carved into its front, through which you could see the hammers strike and retreat.

The first Saturday, Lucy sat beside Mrs. Greely on Mrs. Greely’s cat hair — covered sofa as Jeffrey made his first tentative pokes at the keys. She had seen Mrs. Greely only once, on her way to the woods one night. Mrs. Greely had been leaning out an upstairs window without any clothes on, her breasts swinging like sinkers. Lucy had run. But up close, apart from a jiggle in her chin and her long white hair, the woman did not appear crazy: her skin was smooth and pink, her cheeks almost plump, her eyes sparkling. After Jeffrey went Liam, then Janie, then Maggie, then Anne, and all the way down to Joshua, who giggled as Mrs. Cohn showed him how to hold his wrists. Lucy winced, waiting for him to be admonished. It was her turn next. But Mrs. Cohn giggled back, and Lucy, bewildered, jealous, went outside to the porch, where she found Emma sitting by herself on the top step, her back to the music, like a guard dog.

“I don’t want my lesson,” Lucy said.

Emma looked up. “Are you sure?”

“I don’t think I’ll be any good at it.”

Emma nodded. She looked surprised, and also, Lucy could tell, pleased. Lucy sat down next to her. And so it went. During the fourth lesson, from their spot on the porch, Lucy and Emma listened to Janie, who had a natural talent, it seemed — already she was playing something recognizable as a song. It was almost October, the shadows purpling across Mrs. Greely’s cluttered yard, the flame-colored leaves of sugar maples drifting steadily down from the woods. Mrs. Cohn had had the piano tuned and it sounded so nice Lucy regretted, a little, not taking the lessons herself. She might be a natural, given her resemblance to Mrs. Cohn in almost every other way. She handed Emma one of the pears Mrs. Cohn had brought with her that morning, and bit into another one herself. Emma had told Lucy the story now, of the night they found her in the orchard. Still, Lucy saw her go pale when Mrs. Cohn lifted the sacks of fruit from the trunk of her uncle’s car. Mrs. Cohn had been learning to drive so she could make the trip to Lanesville by herself. “They’re overripe,” she apologized, setting bag after bag on the ground. “I forgot about them this year.”

“Sweet,” Emma said now, as juice dripped down her forearm into the sleeve of her dress. “Too sweet.”

Lucy nodded. The pears were too sweet, and a little mealy, but they would make good perry, she hoped. She peeled skin from hers with her teeth, and chewed that for a while before biting into the juicy part. Slowly, she made her way around the fruit like this, before she spoke the words she’d been rehearsing all morning. “Mrs. Cohn’s parents want to meet me.”

Emma wiped her arms on her skirt. She faltered with the right one — it hadn’t broken, but was badly bruised. “I guess that’s not surprising.”

Lucy waited. A loud, dissonant chord came from inside. Mrs. Greely.

Emma squinted into the yard. “Would you like to meet them?”

Lucy shrugged, her blood pounding.

“You can.”

Again Lucy shrugged. She thought she would cry if she started to talk. She couldn’t have said why. She wasn’t old enough yet to know that having choices could be as hard as not having them. She did want to meet her grandparents, of course she did. How could Emma not know that? Lucy squeezed the pear and it fell instantly apart, mush oozing through her fingers. In moments like this, Emma’s grip on Lucy made Lucy want to escape her, too. Last week, in Emma’s book, Lucy had found the address for Peter, a post office box in Quebec City, and, with the help of the postmistress, sent a postcard ( Are you still their? Your sister Lucy ) but immediately after she wondered if the postmistress would mention it to Emma and then she realized, if Peter wrote back, that Emma would see his response first. And she might show Roland, which would defeat the whole exercise. What are you, planning to go to Cah-nah-dah? Ha.

And just to send the postcard had cost a penny, so she was even further now from her ticket to Quebec.

Emma squinted into the yard. She gazed up at the trees. She turned at the sound of a chipmunk. She looked everywhere but at Lucy.

“I do. I want to go,” Lucy said. “I haven’t had any grandparents,” she added, meaning it as a kind of excuse or apology but hearing, as it came out, how it might hurt Emma further. Emma got letters from her own mother once a month, but none of her children had ever met her. Lucy wiped the mess she’d made of her pear on the underside of Mrs. Greely’s stair and Emma didn’t scold her. She didn’t seem to notice, or even to have heard what Lucy had said. But she had. Emma was thinking about how for so long she had let herself believe that she had saved Lucy from her beginnings — she had taken the girl’s maturity personally, felt deserving of her peculiar contentment. But Lucy was no happier than anyone else. She must have known, even before she saw Beatrice Cohn, that she had been abandoned, unwanted. If she had seemed happy, it was out of desperation. If she had been protective of Emma it was so that she would be protected. Her extraordinary love was her need.

Emma threw what was left of her own pear into the trees, then said, “I shouldn’t have done that. That was very rude.”

“To Mrs. Cohn?” Lucy asked.

“Oh. No, to Mrs. Greely.”

Which gave Lucy an excuse to slip off and look for the pear, which she pretended took a long time, which was plausible because the ground was buried in leaves.

Lillian brought three gifts. First, a trio of rings her own mother had given her, not the finest pieces but they would mean something, she hoped, and they sparkled like a young girl should want, one ruby, one emerald, one sapphire, each with a tiny diamond at its center. The bands were gold and skinny, good for young fingers that didn’t puff or swell. When Lillian’s father had given them to her mother after she closed her shop, Lillian had thought, Why bother now? Why not give her something when she could still appreciate it, wear it out to parties? She was partially right — her mother had lived only two more years — but mostly wrong, she understood now, not only because her father hadn’t had the money before that time but because he hadn’t yet felt the need to give them. Last week, in the office of her analyst, Dr. M., Lillian had come to the realization that gifts were mostly for the people who gave them.