Anna Solomon - Leaving Lucy Pear

She could not expect Emma to like her. So what was it she wanted, when she stood here trying to chase down Emma’s eyes? What was it Bea wanted her to acknowledge?

Bea couldn’t have said exactly, but Emma knew. Even as she avoided Mrs. Cohn’s eyes, she understood that the woman now grasped what she had done, and that she was sorry, and sorrowful, and grateful, that she felt she owed Emma her life. Mrs. Cohn couldn’t say this, which was fine by Emma. For her part, she would not tell Mrs. Cohn that she had seen how she suffered. She would not tell her she was forgiven. There were certain things — simple, yet immeasurable things — that could not pass directly between two people without seeming false, even crass, and these were among them.

“I’m happy to make your tea,” Emma said to Mrs. Haven. “But first…” She squeezed Lucy’s shoulder. “Tell Mrs. Cohn where you’d like to go.”

Lucy stared at Emma. She had said nothing about wanting to go anywhere.

“It’s all right. Tell her.” Emma tilted her chin toward the end of the terrace, where the stairs led down into the trees. “You’d like to see the orchard.”

Lucy’s cheeks flushed the color of plums.

“Oh!” Mrs. Cohn cried, a beat too late, as stunned as Lucy. She smiled. “Of course!”

“It’s all right,” Emma said again, giving Lucy a tiny, invisible push. “Go on. I’ll be in the kitchen, then I’ll be right here. I’m not going anywhere.”

• • •

The orchard was not as Lucy had understood it to be. In the dark, it had seemed to her vast and pungent, a whole country of pears. But it wasn’t an orchard so much as a field with a few pear trees in it. They were bare and gray. The middle one — Lucy’s tree — looked no different. The ground was splotched with rotting fruit and overgrown with thorns. Mrs. Cohn talked about how the soil was this and the pears were that and then she started to say that she wasn’t actually sure about anything she was saying because she’d heard it so long ago, and from Uncle Ira, when Lucy, unable to listen any longer, broke in to ask, “Will someone clear it? Before it’s back to brambles?”

Mrs. Cohn stopped walking. “I don’t honestly know.” She pointed. “That’s the old fish pond my aunt Vera used to keep.”

“Did she die?”

But Mrs. Cohn was looking up, at the tree above her, or the sky. Lucy caught a low branch and started to pull it back and forth as she watched the long stretch of Mrs. Cohn’s neck, its slight undulation as she spoke. “I told you, before, that I forgot about the pears this year. That was untrue.”

Lucy said nothing. It seemed to be a mild lie.

“I thought you should know.” Mrs. Cohn looked at her. “I don’t forget.”

Lucy nodded. “Okay.”

“Shall we sit?”

Lucy sat. A look of regret came over Mrs. Cohn’s face. “Are they painful? The prickers?”

“Not really.”

Slowly, Mrs. Cohn knelt next to her, taking care to tweeze the brambles back with her fingers, though once she was seated in her little clearing, they popped back into place, surrounding her. She smiled an effortful smile. A gull called. From the slide of its shriek, Lucy could tell it was diving. She watched a caterpillar crawl onto her mother’s skirt. It was the black and gold kind, so fat and furry its progress was barely perceptible — Lucy knew it moved only because its colors rippled, and because after a little while it rounded Mrs. Cohn’s knee and began the long trip up her thigh. For a long moment Lucy allowed herself to imagine that this was her life, that there was no Emma or Janie, no quarry, no hoarding of pennies, that it was just Lucy and her mother sitting in a field together until they decided to walk back up the hill to their enormous house. She imagined piano lessons in her own living room, trips to Boston, marble floors in department stores, plush red seats in theaters.

“Lucy. Remember when you showed me the wound on your leg?”

The caterpillar paused. It lifted its fat head and swung it around.

“Was it your… Was Mr. Murphy responsible for that?”

Woolly caterpillar, Lucy remembered. Peter had taught her that. Also, Peter had shown her how the gulls got their meat. Look, he’d said, pushing her cheek to make her turn, focus: he wanted her to see how one gull dropped a mussel from the sky and another gull stole it before the first could fly down.

“Lucy?”

She didn’t like how Mrs. Cohn said her name. Loo-See. The syllables were too distinct, the thing broke into pieces. Lucy had shown her. But that didn’t mean she wanted to talk about it. She wanted it to be solved, wanted it to stop. There was a new blister on her other side now, in the crease where her leg joined her hip. But it, like all the others, didn’t look so bad. It could be from banging into a chair at school. It could have happened in any number of ways. It could be that Roland never meant to hurt her. It could be he couldn’t stop himself. He loved her. She knew he loved her. She felt shame roll through her, a black, heavy sludge through a small, small space.

“Lucy. I don’t mean… What I’m saying… I want to help you.”

Lucy jumped up. She was sure she should run, and equally sure that she had nowhere to go. The field seemed private, the road hidden, but Lucy had walked from here to Lanesville — she understood now that neither was as it appeared. Any distance could be closed, any secret stolen. Everything she’d had for herself — the quarry, Emma’s nighttime wanderings, Roland’s punishments, Lucy’s own beginnings — had been taken from her, or exposed.

She hoisted herself into the lowest notch of the middle tree and began to climb. Up, the sky blue, open wide. But the tree was short, the trip over too quickly, and from the highest branch she couldn’t see anything she hadn’t been able to see before. Mrs. Cohn looked up at her and Lucy saw that it wasn’t easy for her to watch Lucy up there, balanced, no hands, and so she stayed, the sun hot in her hair, and called down: “You want me to come live here, with you? That’s what you’re saying?”

“No! No.”

Mrs. Cohn’s vehemence was startling. “You wouldn’t want me….”

“Of course I would! I would. But Emma… What I’m saying—”

“She would never.”

“Never.”

“Plus you don’t want me.”

“Lucy.”

Loo-See.

“What I’m saying…”

“Why don’t you just say it!”

Lucy waited. She wanted to be scolded, punished, but she didn’t know this — she knew only that the sun was hot and her throat full with the shame. Then she saw that Mrs. Cohn was standing. She wasn’t looking at Lucy anymore but at something ahead of her, something Lucy couldn’t see. She noted the top of her mother’s head, the pale part amidst the dark, kelpy hair, how much paler it was than the rest of her. Lucy had the urge to curl up in that narrow place, protected and unseen.

“Lucy. Come down.”

This was said firmly, by Emma. It had been her job from the beginning, to enter quietly, and now she had done it again, she had found she couldn’t not do it, she had placed the teacup and saucer in Mrs. Haven’s lap and excused herself, followed them, heard everything.

Lucy stayed in the tree.

“This is what you were trying to tell me? He’s done something to her?”

Mrs. Cohn’s voice was a threadbare string. “You couldn’t have known.”

“Of course I could. I’m her mother.”

Lucy crouched in the branches. She stared at her shoes, which Emma had polished for this occasion.

“You’re not to blame,” said Mrs. Cohn.

“We’re all to blame.”

They were silent. The gulls, having moved on, called gently. Lucy watched as Mrs. Cohn discovered the caterpillar crawling up her arm and did not scream but — surprising Lucy, and comforting her, and breaking her heart all over again — took the thing and cradled it in her hand.