Leaving Lucy Pear(87)

“Don’t be blue,” Emma said. Though she was blue, too. She had walked Lucy through all the reasons the perry didn’t really matter anymore: There was the job at Sven’s. The weekly check from Mrs. Cohn. There was the fact that Lucy no longer needed to go to Canada. Any time Roland called her to him, Emma called her away. What should they care about the perry? Yet they did. Perhaps its meagerness made them care more.

“Where should we start?” Emma said. “You choose.”

Lucy walked to the nearest barrel, holding out her free hand for a bung. It was cold and dark in the cellar, the only light what drifted down through the turnip-bin hole from the already-dim shack above, and as Emma passed Lucy the bung, she was suddenly uncertain that Lucy’s hand was as close as it appeared to be. This was an illusion—the bung made a flawless trip from Emma’s fingers to Lucy’s—but it left Emma with a kind of vertigo, the sense that she was drifting, only half real, through a shifting scenery, the edges of things blunter or sharper or further or closer than they’d been a moment ago, the known world untrustworthy. She experienced this frequently since she overheard Mrs. Cohn and Lucy in the orchard, since she looked for herself at Lucy’s leg—it was her hip, really, that nascently curving hip—a dizziness close to dread except it wasn’t dread because it was a feeling about something that had already happened. And it wasn’t as straightforward as rage, either, because Lucy’s wounds were nothing Emma recognized, they weren’t slaps or burns, they were in a category she had no name for. Lucy would not speak about them—they had to speak for themselves. Their very strangeness, their inexplicability, allowed Emma, most of the time, to be more mystified than she was angry. She was repulsed by Roland’s behavior, but because she could not understand or classify it, it didn’t seem quite to count. Yet she couldn’t discount it either—even if Emma had been able to, Lucy would not let her. Every day at some point Lucy asked why, after the perry was put up, they couldn’t go away, to Mrs. Cohn’s, for instance, or somewhere else? And Emma would say, in a placid, queer voice, He’s a broken man, Lucy-boo. He’ll come out of it. We’ve got to give him time, even as her innards rebelled, twisting and snagging. She had the runs nearly all the time now.

Lucy set the bung in the hole, hammered once, twice.

“All set?” Emma asked.

Lucy nodded.

“Want me to do the next one?”

“I’ll do it.”

No matter how many times Emma said to Lucy, I won’t let him do it anymore, the girl’s edge would not loosen. Emma tried not talking about it, but that didn’t seem to help. She tried spoiling Lucy, giving her extra honey in her porridge, singing her two songs at bedtime, but Lucy didn’t want anything extra. She wanted to be like everyone else. She wanted Emma to leave her alone—if they weren’t going to leave, she could at least leave her alone. Emma understood this, but she couldn’t do it. Instead she crowded her, watched her incessantly. She was physically incapable of anything else.

The second bung, the third. Thwing, went the hammer. Thwing. The fourth. Lucy tapped it once more, then said, “I should get to school.”

Emma nodded. Sorrow jammed her throat like a fist. Lucy was extraordinary. Capable. Self-sufficient. Mature. But all her precociousness seemed to Emma double-sided now: a thing to behold, a thing to regret. And her body, too, how fast she was growing, changing, compared with her sisters—Emma could not think of that and she could not avoid thinking of it. If Lucy wasn’t so special, Emma felt certain, Roland wouldn’t have hurt her.

Which was the worst way of blaming the girl, really. It made Emma like everyone else in the world. And because it wasn’t something she had said—because it didn’t need to be said—it was something she couldn’t take back. She could only nod as Lucy started up the ladder. The girl’s trials had leaped even further beyond Emma’s own—there seemed to be no way to catch her now, no way to know or comfort her.

“It’s going to work,” Emma said. “You’ll see. In the spring. We’ll pour it out and boom! Perry of the highest order.”

Lucy turned. “How do you know?”

Emma looked around at all the barrels they hadn’t filled (barrels paid for by Josiah Story, who had rejected Emma with such abrupt certainty she felt she’d been slapped). She didn’t know. She didn’t know how the perry would fare—or Lucy, either. She didn’t know how to help her. She found herself wishing the girl would say it for her, accuse her outright: You don’t know. But Lucy wouldn’t do that. It wasn’t her job to do that. Emma was a coward. If she weren’t such a coward, she would tell Lucy the truth. If she weren’t such a coward, she would leave Roland. She did think of it. Of course she did. Before they left the orchard Mrs. Cohn had offered her uncle’s house as a sort of way station for Emma and the children. I know you wouldn’t want to live here, but for a while . . . she’d said, as Emma braced herself. Saying yes, she was almost certain, would be an admission of failure on an intolerable scale. She considered asking Sven’s wife if she would temporarily take them in; or going to Sacred Heart, asking there, though the parish knowing the situation was almost unimaginable. Emma even wondered if Mrs. Greely would take them for a time, until Roland . . . But what? What would Emma wait for Roland to do or not do? Emma had not confronted him. She couldn’t imagine what she would say. Each time she thought of it, she heard him laughing, heard her own confusion—Emma would leave because of the nonsense with Lucy, was that all?—saw herself slithering away.