Leaving Lucy Pear(82)

Bea couldn’t have said exactly, but Emma knew. Even as she avoided Mrs. Cohn’s eyes, she understood that the woman now grasped what she had done, and that she was sorry, and sorrowful, and grateful, that she felt she owed Emma her life. Mrs. Cohn couldn’t say this, which was fine by Emma. For her part, she would not tell Mrs. Cohn that she had seen how she suffered. She would not tell her she was forgiven. There were certain things—simple, yet immeasurable things—that could not pass directly between two people without seeming false, even crass, and these were among them.

“I’m happy to make your tea,” Emma said to Mrs. Haven. “But first . . .” She squeezed Lucy’s shoulder. “Tell Mrs. Cohn where you’d like to go.”

Lucy stared at Emma. She had said nothing about wanting to go anywhere.

“It’s all right. Tell her.” Emma tilted her chin toward the end of the terrace, where the stairs led down into the trees. “You’d like to see the orchard.”

Lucy’s cheeks flushed the color of plums.

“Oh!” Mrs. Cohn cried, a beat too late, as stunned as Lucy. She smiled. “Of course!”

“It’s all right,” Emma said again, giving Lucy a tiny, invisible push. “Go on. I’ll be in the kitchen, then I’ll be right here. I’m not going anywhere.”

? ? ?

The orchard was not as Lucy had understood it to be. In the dark, it had seemed to her vast and pungent, a whole country of pears. But it wasn’t an orchard so much as a field with a few pear trees in it. They were bare and gray. The middle one—Lucy’s tree—looked no different. The ground was splotched with rotting fruit and overgrown with thorns. Mrs. Cohn talked about how the soil was this and the pears were that and then she started to say that she wasn’t actually sure about anything she was saying because she’d heard it so long ago, and from Uncle Ira, when Lucy, unable to listen any longer, broke in to ask, “Will someone clear it? Before it’s back to brambles?”

Mrs. Cohn stopped walking. “I don’t honestly know.” She pointed. “That’s the old fish pond my aunt Vera used to keep.”

“Did she die?”

But Mrs. Cohn was looking up, at the tree above her, or the sky. Lucy caught a low branch and started to pull it back and forth as she watched the long stretch of Mrs. Cohn’s neck, its slight undulation as she spoke. “I told you, before, that I forgot about the pears this year. That was untrue.”

Lucy said nothing. It seemed to be a mild lie.

“I thought you should know.” Mrs. Cohn looked at her. “I don’t forget.”

Lucy nodded. “Okay.”

“Shall we sit?”

Lucy sat. A look of regret came over Mrs. Cohn’s face. “Are they painful? The prickers?”

“Not really.”

Slowly, Mrs. Cohn knelt next to her, taking care to tweeze the brambles back with her fingers, though once she was seated in her little clearing, they popped back into place, surrounding her. She smiled an effortful smile. A gull called. From the slide of its shriek, Lucy could tell it was diving. She watched a caterpillar crawl onto her mother’s skirt. It was the black and gold kind, so fat and furry its progress was barely perceptible—Lucy knew it moved only because its colors rippled, and because after a little while it rounded Mrs. Cohn’s knee and began the long trip up her thigh. For a long moment Lucy allowed herself to imagine that this was her life, that there was no Emma or Janie, no quarry, no hoarding of pennies, that it was just Lucy and her mother sitting in a field together until they decided to walk back up the hill to their enormous house. She imagined piano lessons in her own living room, trips to Boston, marble floors in department stores, plush red seats in theaters.

“Lucy. Remember when you showed me the wound on your leg?”

The caterpillar paused. It lifted its fat head and swung it around.

“Was it your . . . Was Mr. Murphy responsible for that?”

Woolly caterpillar, Lucy remembered. Peter had taught her that. Also, Peter had shown her how the gulls got their meat. Look, he’d said, pushing her cheek to make her turn, focus: he wanted her to see how one gull dropped a mussel from the sky and another gull stole it before the first could fly down.

“Lucy?”

She didn’t like how Mrs. Cohn said her name. Loo-See. The syllables were too distinct, the thing broke into pieces. Lucy had shown her. But that didn’t mean she wanted to talk about it. She wanted it to be solved, wanted it to stop. There was a new blister on her other side now, in the crease where her leg joined her hip. But it, like all the others, didn’t look so bad. It could be from banging into a chair at school. It could have happened in any number of ways. It could be that Roland never meant to hurt her. It could be he couldn’t stop himself. He loved her. She knew he loved her. She felt shame roll through her, a black, heavy sludge through a small, small space.

“Lucy. I don’t mean . . . What I’m saying . . . I want to help you.”

Lucy jumped up. She was sure she should run, and equally sure that she had nowhere to go. The field seemed private, the road hidden, but Lucy had walked from here to Lanesville—she understood now that neither was as it appeared. Any distance could be closed, any secret stolen. Everything she’d had for herself—the quarry, Emma’s nighttime wanderings, Roland’s punishments, Lucy’s own beginnings—had been taken from her, or exposed.