Anna Solomon - Leaving Lucy Pear

Emma nodded. Sorrow jammed her throat like a fist. Lucy was extraordinary. Capable. Self-sufficient. Mature. But all her precociousness seemed to Emma double-sided now: a thing to behold, a thing to regret. And her body, too, how fast she was growing, changing, compared with her sisters — Emma could not think of that and she could not avoid thinking of it. If Lucy wasn’t so special, Emma felt certain, Roland wouldn’t have hurt her.

Which was the worst way of blaming the girl, really. It made Emma like everyone else in the world. And because it wasn’t something she had said — because it didn’t need to be said — it was something she couldn’t take back. She could only nod as Lucy started up the ladder. The girl’s trials had leaped even further beyond Emma’s own — there seemed to be no way to catch her now, no way to know or comfort her.

“It’s going to work,” Emma said. “You’ll see. In the spring. We’ll pour it out and boom! Perry of the highest order.”

Lucy turned. “How do you know?”

Emma looked around at all the barrels they hadn’t filled (barrels paid for by Josiah Story, who had rejected Emma with such abrupt certainty she felt she’d been slapped). She didn’t know. She didn’t know how the perry would fare — or Lucy, either. She didn’t know how to help her. She found herself wishing the girl would say it for her, accuse her outright: You don’t know. But Lucy wouldn’t do that. It wasn’t her job to do that. Emma was a coward. If she weren’t such a coward, she would tell Lucy the truth. If she weren’t such a coward, she would leave Roland. She did think of it. Of course she did. Before they left the orchard Mrs. Cohn had offered her uncle’s house as a sort of way station for Emma and the children. I know you wouldn’t want to live here, but for a while… she’d said, as Emma braced herself. Saying yes, she was almost certain, would be an admission of failure on an intolerable scale. She considered asking Sven’s wife if she would temporarily take them in; or going to Sacred Heart, asking there, though the parish knowing the situation was almost unimaginable. Emma even wondered if Mrs. Greely would take them for a time, until Roland… But what? What would Emma wait for Roland to do or not do? Emma had not confronted him. She couldn’t imagine what she would say. Each time she thought of it, she heard him laughing, heard her own confusion — Emma would leave because of the nonsense with Lucy, was that all? — saw herself slithering away.

Lucy waited on the ladder. Emma didn’t have to talk to him, of course. She could just leave. Women did this. They left. But Emma was scared. She was scared of what she knew people would think. Leaving was sin enough— A woman might as well run naked through a butcher shop, Emma’s mother used to say — but to leave the poor, maimed fisherman? She was scared, too, about the chimney catching fire. How would Roland put it out? How would he fetch wood in the first place? She worried about his loneliness. She worried about his dying from it, worried he was the sort of man who might, who fought people off but needed them to survive. She loved him, though the love was deformed now, much of it piled up behind her, though she felt hate for him, too. She envied Josiah, going back to stay with Susannah with such apparent confidence. That was how he’d phrased it, coldly: going back to stay. As if otherwise Emma might stand around waiting for him to defect again. No. She had gone and confessed. At last. Then she had knelt on the bare wood floor of her bedroom and done what Roland wanted her to. That was not how the priest phrased her penance— Go tell your husband you love him, he’d said — but it was Emma’s interpretation.

“I don’t know,” she said at last. “I don’t know if the perry will work.”

Lucy, on the ladder, looked at her with impatience. “I’m sorry,” Emma said, but Lucy was already disappearing through the hole above. Emma followed her up and out into the yard, where the breeze coming up off the cove bit through her dress.

“Lucy!” cried Joshua, running out of the house. “Don’t go to school. Stay with me.” He jumped up and down, tugging on Lucy’s hand, begging her, “Don’t go!” A fresh fear spun through Emma. She dressed Joshua, and bathed him when Lucy didn’t. She had not seen marks on him, but was there something she missed? She had seen nothing of what Roland had done to Lucy. When he tickled and squeezed the other children, did he hurt them in some way, too? She had thought it sweet — before the accident, he had not touched them at all. She had gone on pretending it was sweet even after seeing Lucy’s leg — she refused to watch him obsessively, refused to suspect. Who could live like that? But what if she was wrong? What if her delusion ran that deep? Nausea rolled through her. They would have to leave, she understood — it was the only way forward, the only way to live right again. She cradled her wrist, though it was fully healed now, the cradling a habit that would break of its own accord once she and the children were gone from him. She did not think to worry about herself. Other people would do that, later: her children, Sven and his wife, Mr. Hirsch. Mrs. Cohn, though she did not offend Emma by saying it. The men whose coffee she poured in a different shop, in Rockport, where she and the children were living — in Juliet’s house — by the time summer came around again. The women in her new parish. Everyone worried that Emma was lonely. And she was, sometimes. Sometimes she woke to find that she was groping herself — she woke from dreams of Roland, or Josiah, or another man, a stranger. But that kind of loneliness lived in one corner. Her days were filled with people. She did not often have time to dwell. And when she did, she found that her thoughts were not unhappy. She had a great capacity, inherited from her father and passed on to Lucy, for close, consuming observation. This was a discovery, once she broke through her pride and asked her own daughter to take her and the children in; and later, when she found a place she could afford on her wages alone; and later still, when her children did not need her so acutely: how long and with what pleasure Emma could sit watching a bird building a nest or a flag snapping in a wind or other people’s children running in circles.

“Play with me, please?” begged Joshua.

“I’ve got to go to school, boy-boy.”

Joshua’s face crumpled as Lucy patted his head. He whimpered, “Don’t go.”

Lucy looked to Emma for help, but Emma shrugged. She wanted Lucy to stay, too. She could take them both to work with her. She could set them up in the sunny part of the room, buy them pencils and paper at the penny store, watch them draw as she worked.

Lucy squatted next to the boy. “I’ll be back. Cheer up. Be good. Take care of Mummy. If you’re good, I’ll help you make a Halloween costume tonight.”

But she didn’t go. It was as if her will had deflated, as if she’d used it all up in the cellar, shutting the bungholes. She took Joshua’s hand and walked with him at his slow, tottery pace to the coffee shop and sat with him in the sunny half of the room and drew and took him down to the cove and brought him back and spent the rest of the day where Emma could see them, just as Emma had hoped.

By the middle of November, Bea had gained twelve pounds. When her cycle came, she bled heavily. She had forgotten how nearly black the blood could be, forgotten amid the meek, irregular dribbling of the past decade that there was something reassuring about a dark, monthly, soil-smelling exodus. She had forgotten her body. It returned to her now, flesh at her hips, her chin. Proof. Padding. Shelter. She slept more deeply. Her face took on color. She hadn’t realized how unreal she had often felt, how close to breaking or floating away. She started pushing Ira down to Mother Rock once a day — he could walk again, but not for any distance — and her legs and arms grew strong.