Leaving Lucy Pear(91)

With the curtains gone from the house, she could see easily into the front room, and in the front room, to her surprise, she saw Roland sitting in his chair, asleep. She had imagined that to see him she would have to creep to the bedroom window, but this—it was almost too easy, and sad. Had he slept there the whole night? She left the shack and went closer, until her face met the window and she saw that this man, covered in a blanket, was not Roland. She nearly banged on the window. What had happened to Roland? What had Emma done? Then the man’s face fell to the side, exposing a peculiar, lobe-heavy ear. Roland’s ear. He had shaved, that was it. She had never seen him without a beard. His face looked strange, doughy in places, the lines around his mouth deeper than she would have guessed, his skin fish white and soft. His sudden bareness seemed to suggest he had nothing to hide. Lucy went hot with guilt. She had overreacted. She had ruined him. He had brought her up as his child and she had ruined him. She let her forehead fall against the window and stared. But the noise made Roland flinch. His eyelids quivered and his hands emerged from the blanket to pull it tighter across his middle and his fingers were the same, thick and scarred, and Lucy’s fear was simple enough to flatten her doubt and push her down the hill, running the whole way, the duffel banging her knees, until she reached the bus stop, a panting boy.

The trees change. The hills grow steeper. A family of deer stares calmly at the train as it roars past. Lucy wonders how they know not to be afraid.

The sun sets. Her sandwiches are long gone.

In the dining car, where the walls are still decorated for Christmas with musk-scented wreaths and velvet bows, Lucy chooses a table in the corner and keeps her eyes down. But the place is nearly full and a woman asks if the seat across from Lucy is taken. Lucy shakes her head, resisting the urge to check that her hair is still well tucked into Jeffrey’s cap. She hopes Janie will forgive her for taking all her pins.

The woman is built like a tree trunk, Lucy thinks, the same from top to bottom, her brown velour dress probably bought for this trip given how she picks at it as she gets settled, pulling at the shoulders, tugging at the neckline. Her expression is similarly scattered: apologetic yet eager. For a large woman, her eyes are small. Her fidgeting calms Lucy—it suggests the woman will not look closely.

“Are you going all the way to Quebec by yourself?”

Lucy nods. The motion is like a hand opening a gate—it shakes loose her loneliness.

The woman smiles as she examines the menu. “What are you, twelve?” she asks. She raises a thick, gloved finger for the waiter, and Lucy nods again.

Over dinner, the woman—Mary Morse—tells Lucy her story. Her parents were poor, the children always hungry, Miss Morse the oldest and hungriest. She has lived in Medford, Massachusetts, since she was sent there, at thirteen, to take care of her dying aunt. The aunt was her father’s favorite sister. She was good to Miss Morse, made sure she kept up with school. She died, Miss Morse said, the way you hope a person will die, already used to the idea, and because she’d taught Sunday school, her funeral was well attended. Miss Morse became a history teacher. She met a man to marry but he ran off with her best girlfriend. (“Don’t you go doing that,” she says to Lucy with a coy, surprising grin.) For a while after that Miss Morse thought she would die of heartbreak—that was like a separate life, that time, a black pit between her first life and this one—but now she knows nothing like that will kill her. She likes her students, but she’s going back to Quebec, where she was born, to take care of her dying mother.

“See how it goes? New year, old journey. Nothing extraordinary in it, not the least little bit. Most people want to be extraordinary. Make a mark in the world. But for what? In my experience it’s the extraordinary people what aren’t happy, always expecting something better than they get. Whenever anything at all happens to me, I tell myself it’s happened to everyone else, too. It’s actually very comforting. I feel steady almost all the time because I know that nothing out of the ordinary will ever happen and if it did, or if it seemed like it did, it wouldn’t be, anyway. Well, aren’t you patient. I bet you want to be the next Charles Lindbergh when you grow up. But don’t you see how that makes you ordinary, too?”

Lucy nods vaguely. She hears little of the woman’s words—it’s the cadence of her voice she likes, its carelessness, an almost frothy cheer, and that it keeps on coming, like a tide.

? ? ?

Her bunks have been made up. She climbs into the top one and opens the book Uncle Ira gave her to a poem about a bluebird who is saying good-bye to a girl, but he can’t tell her himself because he has already flown away. He has told a crow, who tells another child, who will have to tell the girl. But before that happens, the poem ends. Lucy reads it twice, then shuts the book and turns out the light. Tears spill down her face. Her stomach is full in a way she’s unused to, the passing sky milky with clouds. She longs to be in bed with Janie. There are questions she would have liked to ask Miss Morse: Did you know, when you left, that you would one day go back? Why did your father live so far from his favorite sister? How can you be sure that the dangers you already know are worse than the ones you’re heading for?

The conductor passes through the car, telling a few people to talk more quietly, and Lucy is sorry for the silence that spreads behind him. She hears his accent as he nears her bunk, Quiet down, please, a bit quieter, please . . . Irish, she thinks, a different kind of Irish, maybe from a county near Emma’s, and Lucy lets this idea soothe her a little. She thinks of the first letter she will write, and wonders what she will have to say. (This: that she has found Peter, that he is the same, that he makes her go to school, that she has learned a little French, that they are neither rich nor poor. And this: She is sorry. She misses Emma. She misses them all. She addresses the letters to Emma, though everyone who can write writes to her, including Mrs. Cohn. She thinks she will devastate Emma if she writes to Mrs. Cohn and she is right, though this devastation would be nothing compared with what Lucy has already put them through. For months they wake to footfall and think it is her. They wonder silently which of them is more to blame for her leaving. They wish out loud that they had chained her to her bed.)