Leaving Lucy Pear(62)

She turned off the light so she wouldn’t have to look at herself anymore.

? ? ?

Somewhere between Folly Point and Hodgkins Cove, in a part of the woods called No Man’s Land, in a cave blown into one wall of an old two-man pit that was mostly filled in now with scrap, a great quantity of whiskey was stored. The quality varied, depending on what was running—Blues or herring? the men liked to wink—but quantity could be counted on. “Bottles’ll be there” is how Lucy heard it said in one of the paving sheds. “Eastern Point schmancies tonight. Story’s got his pinkies in this one. ’Leven o’clock.”

She hid behind a boulder, leaning out to watch the men work. The wind had fallen, the night was hot. A bullfrog groaned. A pine needle came to rest on one of her hands. I could hear a butterfly fart is what Roland would say—it was that kind of night. When the last box was loaded, the men gathered on the other side of the trucks, their cigarettes twinkling, their voices soft, Lucy slipped into the middle truck, balled up on the floor between the front seat and the back—on the left side, where the seat above her was loaded with boxes—and waited.

The trucks kicked to life and rattled out of the woods, knocking Lucy’s nose against the floorboards. She had been on the bus, but not in a car. It was very loud. When her face stopped bouncing, she knew they had turned onto Washington.

Frankie Silva found her with his foot. He was sitting on the other half of the seat, one arm stretched mightily across the wall of whiskey, a cigarette in his other hand, the most relaxed he’d felt in ages, when his left foot hit a thing that was not made of steel. He reached down and felt her cap. He slid his toe under her forehead, lifted it like a ball, then pulled her up by the nape, calling into the front, “Got a boarder!” Lucy’s hands flew to her head. She wore Liam’s dark coat. Sweat filled her ears. “Johnny Murphy,” she whispered. “Please . . .”

“And I’m Frankie Silva.” The man snorted. “That don’t make no difference.”

But the caravan had already rounded the last bend before the Goose Cove Bridge, where Dirk Parsons collected his toll. What could they do? The road was narrow—there was no room to turn around. Even if there were, Dirk and his brothers had seen their headlamps and would know if they changed direction. And that was no guarantee anyway: there was one dirt road they could try through Dogtown, there was the long way up and around the cape, but men ran rogue tolls along those routes, too. There was too much booze in Lanesville not to collect on it, booze in other caves, booze underwater, booze in chimneys and woodpiles and trees. Ten thousand bottles of whiskey were buried in Salvatore Santorini’s kitchen garden alone. The Feds came with steel rods, poking, poking, but they couldn’t find every cache. (In 1983, Salvatore’s great-grandson, digging for treasure, would pry up an unlabeled bottle of brown liquid and pour it into his boots.)

Dirk Parsons and his brothers had good rifles. Josiah Story had money invested in this trip. What could Frankie Silva do? He stuffed the kid back down, the drivers paid up, the caravan rolled on.

? ? ?

Through the yacht club gate Frankie rode with his foot on Lucy’s back. “Stay put,” he grumbled. “Stay, we’ll get you home. Won’t tell nobody. Not worth our time. Stupid kid.”

She was gone before they got back for their second load. She did not run. She slipped like a shadow over the club’s wall, clambered down through beach rose until the breakwater slid into view, judged by its distance how far she had to go, then stayed to the side of the road, to the hedges and walls, until she reached the gap in the honeysuckle.

It wasn’t until she was through, to where the air was thick with sugar and the pears hung in her face, that she felt afraid. She had been too worried about getting there to fear being there. But the smell choked her, and the pears were so close, and she was alone, very alone, her aloneness as abruptly apparent as if until a moment ago Janie had walked beside her, as if the whole Murphy clan had been wading together into the field, the children grabbing at once for the low fruit, hissing, Look how much I’ve grown! Last year I was only this high. Look!

And Roland would laugh and say, Who needs a doctor to measure you when we can go begging for pears? Now get to work! And a glow would run among them as they started to pick, a shared, almost sacred kind of joy, like what happened when they went to church on Christmas Eve but even more so, even better, because the orchard, and the joy they felt there, was never spoken of.

Lucy listened. Could she flag down the trucks on their way off the point, beg Frankie Silva to take her back? In a few days she would turn ten. Janie would bake her a cake. They would all sing to her. It could be as if she had never come here.

The night hung so still she heard her own breath. She heard her dress shift against Liam’s coat. She heard the photograph she’d torn from the newspaper rustle deep in the coat’s right pocket. She heard sweat roll off her nose and land in the grass.

She shed the coat. She pulled at a pear and it dropped into her palm like a stone. The stem was intact, the flesh firm under her thumb. Perfect. Look! she wanted to shout. Look how easy that was, how tall I am. Look how brave I am. Look! Come get me. Come and take me home.

She turned once, in a circle, as if Janie and Anne might be hiding behind the trees, tricking her, as if everything had been a trick and they would all come out now, Roland on his two legs and Emma all devotion and Lucy, too, before she had grown, before Roland started pinching her, before she had been split so definitively, irrevocably, from the others.