Leaving Lucy Pear(52)

Lucy Pear watched her from the stern bench, where she sat beside Janie. She was oddly moody in recent days, almost furtive when Emma tried to look her in the eye, a change Emma connected to the girl’s heavier hips—all that was coming earlier for her than it had for Emma’s other girls. But the other children were growing up, too, at a disorienting pace—even Joshua strutted around the yard now, handing his sisters nails as they put the finishing touches on the perry shack. Meanwhile Emma went off to the Hirsch house to care for another family.

She set down the oars and rubbed at her hands, as if she might smooth the nicks and bruises that hundreds of pear branches had pounded into them. “Shh,” whispered Janie, at the sound Emma’s hands made. “Shh-shh,” Joshua said from the bow, and giggled. “Hush!” hissed Lucy Pear, her eyes darting wildly, though there was nothing to look at but fog, multiplied. Even Liam and Jeffrey, three feet away in Story’s father’s boat, were barely visible: vague brushstrokes through the white-black shroud of the night.

“All of you, calm,” Emma whispered. “Sing ‘Molly Malone’ to yourselves.”

Almost imperceptibly, the boats began to rock. Water slapped against the hulls, the marsh grass shifted and sighed. Emma knew they had gotten to the chorus—Alive alive oh-ho, alive alive oh-ho, crying cockles and mussels, alive alive oh-ho . . . —when the rhythm picked up slightly. She smiled. This, she knew, Roland would approve of. It had been his invention: Silent Singing. Sometimes he was sweet like that, in a way that could still make her swoon. He surprised her regularly, with little gifts: a rose “borrowed” from Mrs. Parson’s garden, or two sticks he’d whittled—when he was supposed to be gutting fish—for putting up her hair. This was the Roland she could not resist, the slyly rebellious man who long ago had come from a job painting boat bottoms at Niles Beach and told her how, on his lunch break, he had discovered a hidden field of pear trees.

“Mum?”

A third boat had materialized. It had simply slipped in beside them, holding two men. They might have been unicorns at first, the vision was so surreal, until Emma fully registered the guns raised at their ears. She swatted the children’s heads down, felt her body depart itself, try to float.

“Federal agents, ma’am. Prohibition Bureau.”

“Mummy!” cried Joshua behind her, his voice muffled in her dress.

“Please. It’s just me and my children. Will you put down the guns?”

The larger man, his jowls softening, returned his gun to its holster, but his companion, bouncing a skinny leg, only dropped his hand slightly.

“What’s this?” he said, standing to peer into their boats.

“It’s nothing,” Emma said.

The larger man, in front, grabbed the gunwale of Emma’s boat and pulled her and the children in, as if reeling in fish. He leaned over to look, his shaggy head nearly brushing Lucy Pear, whose face twisted as if waiting to be hit—a fear Emma had not seen in her before. The man didn’t notice. “It really is,” he said as he peered into the boat. He looked quizzically at Emma. “What are you doing out here?”

She shrugged. “A tradition. The moon. We live just up the creek. We didn’t expect a fog.”

“A tradition,” sneered the thin man. “That’s what they all say. What about the moon? It’s not full, it’s not new. It’s nothing.”

“There’s nothing in the boats, Finny,” said the large man. “What’s your name, ma’am?”

“O’Hara. Maryann O’Hara,” Emma said. When even Joshua didn’t protest, she was relieved and disheartened. He was either so scared of the men, or so cognizant of the family’s guilt, or both, that he knew before he should have to keep his mouth shut.

“You want a ride?” asked the thin man, his gun bouncing on his thigh. “Back home? We got power.” He jerked his head at an outboard motor strapped to the stern, which appeared to Emma like a large, ornate eggbeater.

“That’s kind of you to offer,” Emma said. “That’s very kind.” She spoke slowly, trying to delay, so she could think—think! Why didn’t she have a gun? What had Story been thinking, giving her these boats and not a gun? Roland had a gun but he’d taken it with him and besides, if she had a gun, what would she do with it? Even Liam, the oldest boy, could not reliably shoot a squirrel. So there was no gun and no one to shoot a gun and she had wasted time thinking of it. “Thank you, but we’re not far,” she said, wondering, as she said it, if maybe, if the men knew where they were and Emma told them how to go from here, she and the children could be dropped at the Thurston property, easy as that. But the Thurstons had no dock, and though their house was a distance from the creek, they might wake at the sound of a motor, and anyhow, wherever the men dropped them, they would surely wait to see—or hear, given the fog—Emma and the children enter a house. It would never work. She considered a sacrifice: she could ask the men to tow her and the kids back to the boatyard they had launched from, admit to “borrowing” the boats—no need to get into the business of their being (sort of) legitimately borrowed—declare that as her wrongdoing and get on with it. But there was an itchiness about the skinny one. He was angry, maybe, at not yet having busted anything up tonight, or stewing about some other thing, needing someone to nab. Who knew what such a man would do? If not to her or the children, then to Buzzi, who would be waiting for them, asleep in the black Chrysler that Story’s drivers used for such dealings, kind, bawdy Buzzi, who not tonight but regularly delivered other people to do other, more clearly illegal things. “Thank you,” she repeated. “We’ll wait for the fog to clear.”