Lucy, on the ladder, looked at her with impatience. “I’m sorry,” Emma said, but Lucy was already disappearing through the hole above. Emma followed her up and out into the yard, where the breeze coming up off the cove bit through her dress.
“Lucy!” cried Joshua, running out of the house. “Don’t go to school. Stay with me.” He jumped up and down, tugging on Lucy’s hand, begging her, “Don’t go!” A fresh fear spun through Emma. She dressed Joshua, and bathed him when Lucy didn’t. She had not seen marks on him, but was there something she missed? She had seen nothing of what Roland had done to Lucy. When he tickled and squeezed the other children, did he hurt them in some way, too? She had thought it sweet—before the accident, he had not touched them at all. She had gone on pretending it was sweet even after seeing Lucy’s leg—she refused to watch him obsessively, refused to suspect. Who could live like that? But what if she was wrong? What if her delusion ran that deep? Nausea rolled through her. They would have to leave, she understood—it was the only way forward, the only way to live right again. She cradled her wrist, though it was fully healed now, the cradling a habit that would break of its own accord once she and the children were gone from him. She did not think to worry about herself. Other people would do that, later: her children, Sven and his wife, Mr. Hirsch. Mrs. Cohn, though she did not offend Emma by saying it. The men whose coffee she poured in a different shop, in Rockport, where she and the children were living—in Juliet’s house—by the time summer came around again. The women in her new parish. Everyone worried that Emma was lonely. And she was, sometimes. Sometimes she woke to find that she was groping herself—she woke from dreams of Roland, or Josiah, or another man, a stranger. But that kind of loneliness lived in one corner. Her days were filled with people. She did not often have time to dwell. And when she did, she found that her thoughts were not unhappy. She had a great capacity, inherited from her father and passed on to Lucy, for close, consuming observation. This was a discovery, once she broke through her pride and asked her own daughter to take her and the children in; and later, when she found a place she could afford on her wages alone; and later still, when her children did not need her so acutely: how long and with what pleasure Emma could sit watching a bird building a nest or a flag snapping in a wind or other people’s children running in circles.
“Play with me, please?” begged Joshua.
“I’ve got to go to school, boy-boy.”
Joshua’s face crumpled as Lucy patted his head. He whimpered, “Don’t go.”
Lucy looked to Emma for help, but Emma shrugged. She wanted Lucy to stay, too. She could take them both to work with her. She could set them up in the sunny part of the room, buy them pencils and paper at the penny store, watch them draw as she worked.
Lucy squatted next to the boy. “I’ll be back. Cheer up. Be good. Take care of Mummy. If you’re good, I’ll help you make a Halloween costume tonight.”
But she didn’t go. It was as if her will had deflated, as if she’d used it all up in the cellar, shutting the bungholes. She took Joshua’s hand and walked with him at his slow, tottery pace to the coffee shop and sat with him in the sunny half of the room and drew and took him down to the cove and brought him back and spent the rest of the day where Emma could see them, just as Emma had hoped.
Thirty-seven