Leaving Lucy Pear(73)

The woman’s face changed then. The parts she’d been holding seemed to give way. She covered her eyes with her hands. “My husband told me your name,” she said pitifully, and Lucy’s pride withered. She crouched down, trying to see beneath the woman’s hands. “Would you like to see my perry shack?” It was the only thing she could think to say. “I built it. I was the boss. We can wait there, for my mother.”

Slowly, Mrs. Cohn lowered her hands.

“I have to tell my mother you’re here,” Lucy said, using the word purposefully now, watching it hit Mrs. Cohn. It was like watching wind hit a sheet—the sheet’s flailing gave away the strength of the wind.

“Of course,” Mrs. Cohn said at last. “Emma.”

“Yes. But not my father. Not yet. He’ll be angry.”

Mrs. Cohn nodded. “I don’t know if today . . . I don’t know if I should . . .”

Lucy filled with despair. “Please!” she begged, feeling fizzy, frantic. She should not have said my mother, not twice. She would drive the woman away, lose her all over again. “I’ve been asking her to take me to you. I’ve been asking and asking. Come on. We’ll wait in the perry until she’s back from Sven’s. I’ll show you everything. Come on.”

When the woman still didn’t move, Lucy took her hand—and she didn’t disappear, and it was just a hand, after all, bony but soft, and oddly cold on such a warm day—and dragged her like a stray toward home.

Bea followed the girl’s instructions: racing across Washington Street, high-stepping up through the woods instead of on the road, watching the ground for roots. She was grateful for the precision mimicry demanded, antidote to her mind’s flailing. Run away, run away! her mind cried, though of course she had known she would wind up here, known since Albert ran in calling, “You were right! You were right!” He had ignored Ira and Henry, dropped to his knees by the sofa, shaken Bea hard by the shoulders. “Sit up! You were right. It’s her. I saw her.” Bea rubbed her eyes. Was he mocking her? She doubted, again. Perhaps she had dreamed the girl, and Albert was only trying to placate her. “Where? Are you sure?” Albert cupped her face in his hands. “I couldn’t be more sure.”

He was crying, she saw. Birds winged in her chest. She began to tremble. Her father said, “Oy mein goht,” the first Yiddish she’d heard him speak, in a bare, strange voice. “Where?” she asked again. “Lanesville.” Why had Bea assumed the girl had gone so much farther? She had been to Lanesville. She could be there within an hour. She stood. “You’ll drive me.”

That was when Albert let his hands fall away from her face. “She’s been raised by Emma Murphy,” he said, and Bea sank back onto the sofa.

She had needed a few days after that, to wallow in shame, to work up to her courage. “You have no choice,” Albert kept reminding her. She thought of sending a letter to tell Emma she was coming, thought of driving to the house when Emma would be home, going to Emma first, falling at her mercy. But she did not, finally, have the courage for that. She was too afraid that Emma would keep her from seeing the girl. So here she was, behind her daughter, her very brave, very fast daughter, struggling to catch up, to step where the girl stepped, even as her mind hissed, Run away!

But now they tiptoed into the yard, now they ran into the shed so the father wouldn’t see, now Bea caught a glimpse of the house and realized she had been here before, on a diaphragm mission. Her hand clapped to her mouth—she must have shoved the thing at Emma! How humiliating, how crass! She had not connected the address she had sent the check to with this house—how could she have? The Ladies did not go by addresses, they went by the look of things. They went to the places that looked poor.

“She’ll be home at three,” Lucy said, and again Bea’s mind told her to run, but the girl told her where to sit and Bea sat, on a low pine box, and tried to listen as Lucy explained, in a loud, excited whisper, the box’s trick. Lucy’s hands flapped. Her eyes shone. “The bottom drops out and there’s a ladder! Do you climb ladders?” Bea moved her head in a noncommittal way, struggling to pay attention. She was thinking of Emma, who surely remembered Bea coming to this house, moralizing, scolding. She had been thinking of Emma constantly: Emma washing Ira’s sheets, bathing him, caring for him so well while she cared haphazardly for the rest of the house, scattered Bea’s shoes, disappeared her pens. She had been wearing a mask, Bea understood, in every moment, every time she smiled or nodded or spoke. Bea remembered making Emma ask her questions over Pinkham’s. She remembered her own stupid, lonely bossing, and Emma’s reluctance, almost a truculence as she complied. How superior she must have felt to Bea. And what about children, Mrs. Cohn? Did you never think to have any? She was not purely kind, as Bea had thought—nor should she have been. It had been her voice, low and calm, that had soothed Bea in the orchard. It had been her hands that changed Lucy’s diapers, fed her, bathed her. Ira, too. All Bea’s duties—Emma had done them.

“The trouble is,” Lucy was saying, “it takes a full year for the perry to come right, so you have to wait.” She folded her arms, looking suspiciously at Bea. “You don’t approve, I know. I read about it in the paper.”

Bea realized her expression was grim. She smiled, as much as she could smile. “I don’t care, really, not anymore,” she said, but the girl was already at the window, peering out. Her face caught the light and Bea saw, in her profile, the lieutenant’s long jaw. She took in the curve of the girl’s nose, the particular flatness of her forehead—she tallied these in her mind as her own. The girl turned to face Bea. “He’s probably sleeping,” she said—meaning the father, Bea understood. “He sleeps a lot now. He’s getting fat.” Lucy giggled, revealing the lieutenant’s tall, straight teeth. She moved carelessly, her arms jumping as she spoke. Bea had the thought that if Lucy had grown up with Bea, in Lillian’s house, she couldn’t possibly have been like this, her eyes full of mischief, her cheeks ruddy, her hair poufing plantlike around her head. She imagined Lillian, the first thing she would notice that jaw. Good for her, she would say, ignoring history, her vision singular and bitterly optimistic. It won’t droop.