Bea saw Emma bite back a grin. She smiled, trying to catch Emma’s eye, to tamp down the thumping at her clavicle: Please, look at me! It was so childish yet powerful, her longing for Emma’s attention, for some sort of acknowledgment. Each Saturday Bea went to Leverett Street to play piano with the children, but Emma barely looked at her. She stayed out on the porch with Lucy, acknowledging Bea only to say a curt “Good morning” and “We’ll see you next week.” Even when Bea had brought Cousin Rose to look at Emma’s wrist, Emma had thanked Rose heartily yet said little to Bea. She had spoken to her plenty back when she was working in the house, but Emma had had her secret then, Bea supposed—it had been a thing she held over Bea. She had pretended to be kind but now she could not.
Still, Bea liked the visits to Mrs. Greely’s house. She liked the disorder, and that no one ever remarked on it, liked that Mrs. Greely was so straightforwardly batty, which somehow did more for Bea than any treatment ever had to convince her of her own basic sanity. She liked teaching, too. It had been far simpler than she had imagined, to begin to play again: with Janie sitting beside her and the other children waiting, she had had to do it, to set her thumb upon the middle C and feel the ivory give as easily as water, and then it was done and she was doing it, just as she had begun speaking again, once upon a time, after her muteness. It was surprisingly easy, to make a different choice. It was easy to remember. She liked teaching the Murphy children. She liked seeing Lucy Pear, even if the girl shied from her and didn’t want her lessons. Bea brought a check each week, enough to cover groceries and more, which she handed to Emma inside a bag of something else, bread or sometimes chocolates, and Emma was cashing the checks now—so there was that. Bea had not managed to raise the issue of Lucy’s wound, or Mr. Murphy, though each time she passed the house on her way up the road a slickness rose at her neck. He didn’t want to meet her, clearly, and Bea didn’t especially want to meet him. She couldn’t imagine what she would do with her eyes—look at where his leg had been? Not look? Would she apologize? Would she ask him what he had to do with Lucy’s leg? And if she didn’t, wouldn’t she fail again, as she had failed from the beginning, to protect her? But Lucy’s injury was hard to categorize, and relatively minor—you could not go leaping to conclusions about such things or even asking questions without seeming hysterical. She could raise it with Emma but feared Emma would take it badly, as if Bea were accusing her, if not of inflicting the wound then of turning the other way. So she’d said nothing, only handed Emma the bag with the check tucked discreetly inside. She behaved in the most appropriate way possible, she thought, given the circumstance. She tried not to intrude. Protrude.
She could not expect Emma to like her. So what was it she wanted, when she stood here trying to chase down Emma’s eyes? What was it Bea wanted her to acknowledge?
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?”