Leaving Lucy Pear(63)
A noise. A crunching in the grass. She stopped. The crunching stopped. Of course. Her cheeks burned, her fear sang. She folded the pear into the coat, folded the coat in a neat pile on the ground, set her cap on top, pushed her hair into some kind of order, and walked on.
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Lucy Pear walked past the place where she had been laid by her mother, and past the other place, where she had been laid by Emma. She fell into a hole—Vera’s old fish pond—and climbed out. She climbed the stone wall, passed the great, comforting pine tree beneath which Bea had nearly lost her resolve, and found herself standing, exposed, on a long, rolling lawn, facing the sort of house she had glimpsed only in fairy tales. She did not see its neglect—the night was too dark and she was too young to have believed it anyway. She saw the terrace, built of granite so white it seemed to glow, and the tall windows lined with heavy drapes. Each window appeared taller than her own house! She saw the many chimneys, and the vases the size of children set out across the terrace, and the long car parked in the drive.
She crept across the lawn’s lower edge, then up along its side. Her cheeks burned now with hope, her heart jigged, her mouth felt full of birds. This place! She might have come from it. She might belong to it. She might return.
Only as she reached the top of the lawn did the lower floor rise into view. The terrace had hidden it, but Lucy saw now: two lit windows. A woman on a bed, holding a glass.
Lucy knew right away. Even as she pulled herself over the railing, her cheeks began to cool. A chill swept through her. Weeds grew so densely in the terrace cracks they appeared to hold the stone together. She crouched behind a vase and watched the woman walk to the window and saw clearly that the woman’s bare ankles were her ankles. The woman’s skin was her skin. The woman was close to crying. It was the strangest thing, to watch a woman she had no memory of and know she was trying not to cry because that pinch in her brow, that flare of her nostrils, that was what Lucy’s face did when she tried not to cry.
She heard the trucks leaving the point. She wanted to cry. Her mouth was salty with tears. As surely as she knew that Beatrice Cohn was her mother, she knew she could not knock at this window. How could that woman possibly help her? What had Lucy imagined? She had barely thought it through. She had gotten as far as asking for a train ticket. Tonight, just now, she had wanted to move in! But Beatrice Cohn looked as wrecked as the Mendosa. There were men who wanted to kill her. There was Roland’s leg and Luis Pereira’s face and Emma, who no longer worked here.
How could she have worked here in the first place?
And behind the woman in the bed lay a long lump, an old man, judging from the white scraps of hair fringing his bald head. The uncle, clearly, Hirsch. He had been the one Emma nursed. His name had been in the papers, too. Did Lucy’s mother sleep in a bed with her own uncle? Was she as pitiful as that? Her stare, certainly, was pitiful, her eyes lit with misery. She swayed, as Roland used to do, when he stood drunk rather than sat drunk. She was staring, Lucy realized, at a dark window, lit from within. The only thing you could see standing at a window that way was yourself.
Lucy crawled closer. Against one of the house’s dark windows she stood, and regarded the woman’s figure from the side, through the cloth of her nightgown. She was not like Emma, who joked she was built like a ruler. Beatrice Cohn was very thin but not at all straight, nor flat: her bottom lifted the gown behind her; her breasts were twice the size of Emma’s; her thinness pulled at her curves, made them seem even more pronounced. Her nipples stood in a disconcerting, arrowlike way.
Lucy would have rather her mother had no breasts at all. Then at least Lucy might get her wish, to stay like a boy forever—at least some promise would have been eked from this encounter. She inched closer, trying to see the color of Mrs. Cohn’s eyes, noting as she neared that she was still a head shorter than the woman. This was such a simple observation, the sort of thing people said all the time, still a head shorter, yet its very simplicity, its commonness, caused Lucy to break sweat again. She heard it as if someone else were saying it, a neighbor or a teacher, offering it up as thoughtlessly as any other daily remark, about rain clouds or pie. Still a head shorter! As if all this time Lucy had been growing to grow as tall as this woman. As if the woman had been waiting for her to arrive. Longing poured into Lucy, filled her to her neck, brought her hand into a fist, daring to knock: Take me in! But before she could work up the courage, Beatrice Cohn grimaced, spun away from the window, and put out the light.
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Bea finished her rye in darkness, set the glass on the floor, wove a wide arc to make sure she cleared the glass, and lay beside Ira in the dark, her back to his side, her head spinning. She could no longer see the window but she knew it was there because she could see the quarter moon. Her eyes closed. The moon hung in the private room behind her eyelids, a white, wiggling echo of itself. She opened her eyes again, closed them, let the moon swim through her, putting her and her circles to sleep. Her eyes fluttered. Then they were open, and she was looking at herself, on the other side of the window, a child, Bea-Bea, staring in.
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Briefly, Lucy’s mother seemed to have disappeared. Lucy pressed her face to the glass. She felt her body drain of hope, felt her knees turn to mud. Then two pricks of light gazed out at her, as startling a sight as a raccoon’s eyes in the woods. Like a raccoon’s eyes, they glinted, lit by the moon and apparent menace. Like a raccoon’s eyes, they seemed to look straight through her, as if in warning.