Leaving Lucy Pear(14)

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Emma had never been to Eastern Point by land. Past downtown, the car turned sharply, hugging the shore, and for a mile or so she recognized nothing of the boatyards or artists’ cottages that clung barnacle-like to the high-tide line above Smith’s Cove. All this had been sheltered from the Murphy family as they rowed darkly past on the other side of Rocky Neck.

Beyond the cove, the road grew narrow and great privets sprang up, towering walls of green that briefly distracted Emma: could they be as soft as they appeared? One saw nothing through their denseness. Then a curve swung the car and the Dog Bar Breakwater came into view, a half-mile bed of flint against the horizon. This Emma knew well, for even at night it hung in front of their boats, the harbor’s limit, their silent guide: other markings might change over the course of a year, but the breakwater stood still, telling them by its distance when they had reached the Hirsch rocks.

Emma’s stomach fisted again, a hot knot. All night she had lain awake. Three times in the past week she had walked down to the coffee shop and asked Mrs. Sven if she could use the telephone. She had picked up the earpiece and heard the operator’s voice. She would tell Josiah Story she had changed her mind. “Hello?” The earpiece was heavy and cold. Emma stood against the wall in the back of the shop but the men at the counter watched her anyway, baldly curious. “Can I help you?” She hung up. She would take the bus to the quarry, tell him in person. But even as she tripped out of Sven’s she knew she could not do that, knew she could not walk into Josiah Story’s office again with a straight face. His wife might be there—she was often there, he’d said. A good Company Wife.

Hedges on one side, a stone wall on the other, not plopped together like Lanesville’s walls but tall and mortared, solid, the car moving too fast for Emma to track where they were—she could no longer see the breakwater. She heard Roland’s voice: Slow it down! His admonishment when the oars rubbed too hastily in their locks. Slower! You’re making a hullabaloo!

He was talking to her now. He could see her in the backseat of Josiah Story’s car, flying past hedges. She had been a bad wife. Vile. And now—what kind of mother was she? What was she doing? When Lucy was a baby, a woman had hovered at the fringes of Emma’s thoughts, without face or name, a receptacle for whatever Emma might feel for her at any given moment. Pity. Incomprehension. Disgust. Pity again. She even felt guilty toward her, as if Emma had stolen Lucy against the woman’s wishes. Her guilt, perhaps, helped explain why the Murphys had not found another orchard for their pears. Maybe, though her heart did not stop clanging the entire time they picked, Emma felt she had to give the woman the chance to take Lucy back. Maybe, too, each time the woman didn’t come, Lucy became more irrevocably, rightfully, hers.

She made her a servant of the house, rather than a daughter. Always Emma returned to pity, settled there—it was easiest on her heart. Then, for years, the shadow woman had retreated, replaced by the reality of Lucy, her ever-growing body, the habits of her tenderness, her deer-quiet footsteps in the house. Lucy belonged there as firmly as any threshold or drawer. They were so far from the beginning now. Why risk going back? What was wrong with Emma that she could not say, Turn the car around, I’ve changed my mind? But the car was slowing and turning up a long, sycamore-lined drive, and Emma saw, up ahead, the old gravel path the Murphys tiptoed across each year. The Duesenberg sailed it without pause, knowing nothing of the sharp pebbles and ruts. Through the sycamores, Emma saw the pear trees, in full flower. She wiped her hands on her skirt. Despite her stillness and the mild day, she was sticking to the seat; creeks of sweat ran from her underarms. The house came into view, the first time she had seen it in daylight: mortar flaking, hedges mushrooming, shutters missing slats, an ailing monument of stone. A woman’s figure appeared at an upstairs window and Emma’s fear cracked open.

“Tah-dah!”

A poem came to Emma, one her mother had sung to her and her siblings to scare them off straying:

Come away, O human child

To the waters and the wild.

With a faery, hand in hand,

For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.

“Emma?”

She had not sung it to her own children. It was too sad.

“Here we are!”

The figure was gone from the window. Story’s eyes in the rearview mirror twitched with nerves. He had trimmed his hair, Emma realized. Or more likely Susannah had trimmed it. His nape was visible: a dark, clean point.

“Did you tell her”—Emma’s voice a husk until she cleared it, began again—“Did you tell her we were coming?”

“I told her I was coming. With a little gift.”

“A gift?”

“I don’t know what I said. A token of my appreciation for all her hard, important work. And so on.”

Emma’s annoyance was swamped by dread as the front door to the house opened and the figure from upstairs stepped out into the sunlight. Sweat pooled in Emma’s elbow cracks and between her thighs. Even from a distance, the resemblance was unmistakable. There was Lucy’s formidable brow, her dark, springy hair, her stance: feet flat, toes out, arms loose at her sides. Lucy had been the only person Emma knew to stand comfortably like that. Not an hour ago, Lucy had stood like that in the yard, her hammer cocked in one hand, her head cocked to one side, watching as Emma ducked into the Duesenberg. Emma had not told the children where she would be working, only that the new job was on the other side of town.