Anna Solomon - Leaving Lucy Pear

He had gone, leaving almost no instructions about the quarry or the estate. Josiah and Susannah were left to handle paydays, the union, the shrinking demand for stone. Despite pressure from his father, Josiah had not added his own name to the company sign. He would not try to replace Caleb. The trees on the estate had not been trimmed. When Josiah looked back at it now from the middle of the bay, the buildings were barely visible, the bathhouse a little white lump behind the pines.

Susannah stopped to rest. She didn’t hold on to the boat — holding on was a disqualification — but treaded water, her eyes on the still distant mound of Hog Island.

“Your lips are purple,” he said.

“I’m cold.”

“Come in.”

She swam on. Her pace was slowing, but he would say nothing more. His fear was nothing compared with her desire. The muscles in her arms twisting and pulling, the gust of her inhale when her face lifted from the water. Her beauty stunned him, and not in a brotherly sort of way.

The day after their dinner at Caleb’s, he had picked up Emma at the coffee shop and surprised her by staying parked on Washington Street, in full view. He was the opposite of artful. His sternum felt bruised. He could not look her in the eye. “I can’t see you again,” he said. Why was he surprised when she did not weep or berate him but sat still as a rock, forcing him to look at her face in profile, her hard jaw, her throat visibly working back tears? “I’ll get myself home,” she said after a few minutes in silence. Then she was gone from his car and walking toward Leverett Street. Josiah, feverish, thinking what did he have to lose, thinking, Go, go, finish cleaning up the messes you’ve made, drove straight from there to the Hirsch estate, to apologize to Beatrice Cohn for the way he’d dropped her from the campaign. She looked different — less standoffish. She listened. He was focused on getting back to Susannah, determined to do the deed and run, but Mrs. Cohn’s face, listening, was so reminiscent of Emma’s dark girl, who had looked out at him from the perry shack with her dark eyes that bore through you, asking for something, though he couldn’t figure what, it shook loose a quaking in Josiah. And though he did not put it all together the way it was, he did have the thought, as he drove home to Susannah, that some people try very hard to have children and others not to have them but that there is never, ever a way to even it all out.

“Okay.” Susannah’s bone white fingers gripped the gunwale. “I’m done.”

As Josiah moved to help her up, the boat tilting drastically, the dark water sloshing beneath him, he saw that he could never do what Susannah did. No matter how strong he got at rowing, he could not get into that water and swim. Nausea choked him. But he remembered to spread his legs and hold the back one firm for counterbalance and he managed, grunting, Susannah’s legs nearly useless with cold, to haul her up onto the bench. He wrapped her in blankets, poured her the chocolate he’d brought, and turned the boat toward the shore. The beach swung into view, then a pair of seals, flopping up onto an edge of exposed rock. The tide was turning. He rowed harder. “It’ll be all right,” he said. “Even Ederle trains in a pool, you know.”

Susannah nodded. Her teeth chattered. Her goggles had left deep circles around her eyes. A chunk of lard had congealed at the tip of her nose. She smiled. Even her gums were purple. He had not noticed Susannah’s gums before. “It’ll be fine,” she said, and closed her eyes, letting steam from the cup warm her face. “I can see now that I’m going to make it.”

In the dug-out cellar under the perry shack, Emma and Lucy faced the barrels. There were four — a little better than Emma had feared but not a fifth of what they dreamed in their dreaming days, which seemed dream-like now: Emma hunched over the PEAR VARIETIES pamphlet, Lucy reading over her shoulder, trying out the words, “bung,” “bunghole,” “wintering.” Now Emma held the bungs, and Lucy the hammer. She had been full of her usual questions last night — were the bungholes in the barrels in fact big enough, and was the juice actually done fermenting, and what would happen if they put the bungs back in before it wasn’t? — but now that they stood here, ready to complete the task, which was simple after all, and so much smaller than they had hoped, she was silent. The other children had left for school. They had lost interest in the perry long ago.

“Don’t be blue,” Emma said. Though she was blue, too. She had walked Lucy through all the reasons the perry didn’t really matter anymore: There was the job at Sven’s. The weekly check from Mrs. Cohn. There was the fact that Lucy no longer needed to go to Canada. Any time Roland called her to him, Emma called her away. What should they care about the perry? Yet they did. Perhaps its meagerness made them care more.

“Where should we start?” Emma said. “You choose.”

Lucy walked to the nearest barrel, holding out her free hand for a bung. It was cold and dark in the cellar, the only light what drifted down through the turnip-bin hole from the already-dim shack above, and as Emma passed Lucy the bung, she was suddenly uncertain that Lucy’s hand was as close as it appeared to be. This was an illusion — the bung made a flawless trip from Emma’s fingers to Lucy’s — but it left Emma with a kind of vertigo, the sense that she was drifting, only half real, through a shifting scenery, the edges of things blunter or sharper or further or closer than they’d been a moment ago, the known world untrustworthy. She experienced this frequently since she overheard Mrs. Cohn and Lucy in the orchard, since she looked for herself at Lucy’s leg — it was her hip, really, that nascently curving hip — a dizziness close to dread except it wasn’t dread because it was a feeling about something that had already happened. And it wasn’t as straightforward as rage, either, because Lucy’s wounds were nothing Emma recognized, they weren’t slaps or burns, they were in a category she had no name for. Lucy would not speak about them — they had to speak for themselves. Their very strangeness, their inexplicability, allowed Emma, most of the time, to be more mystified than she was angry. She was repulsed by Roland’s behavior, but because she could not understand or classify it, it didn’t seem quite to count. Yet she couldn’t discount it either — even if Emma had been able to, Lucy would not let her. Every day at some point Lucy asked why, after the perry was put up, they couldn’t go away, to Mrs. Cohn’s, for instance, or somewhere else? And Emma would say, in a placid, queer voice, He’s a broken man, Lucy-boo. He’ll come out of it. We’ve got to give him time, even as her innards rebelled, twisting and snagging. She had the runs nearly all the time now.

Lucy set the bung in the hole, hammered once, twice.

“All set?” Emma asked.

Lucy nodded.

“Want me to do the next one?”

“I’ll do it.”

No matter how many times Emma said to Lucy, I won’t let him do it anymore, the girl’s edge would not loosen. Emma tried not talking about it, but that didn’t seem to help. She tried spoiling Lucy, giving her extra honey in her porridge, singing her two songs at bedtime, but Lucy didn’t want anything extra. She wanted to be like everyone else. She wanted Emma to leave her alone — if they weren’t going to leave, she could at least leave her alone. Emma understood this, but she couldn’t do it. Instead she crowded her, watched her incessantly. She was physically incapable of anything else.

The second bung, the third. Thwing, went the hammer. Thwing. The fourth. Lucy tapped it once more, then said, “I should get to school.”