She boards the train as if climbing a tall, precariously tilted boulder in the Lanesville woods, her steps quick, already committed. Like a rock, the train seems to her at once alive and unthreatening, animate yet without preference—it lets her on but is unmoved by her weight. Lucy has with her clean underwear, two new dresses bought by Mrs. Cohn, the blanket Emma gave her, and a sack of sandwiches she made this morning in the dark kitchen before even the cook woke. Also, a book of children’s poetry Uncle Ira left on her pillow one night, inscribed: For Lucy, full of light. She was going to take Mrs. Haven’s rings, but then she found a stack of twenty-dollar bills in the top drawer of Mrs. Cohn’s desk, so she left the rings for her sisters. The wad is stuffed deep into one of Liam’s socks, though she keeps one bill, the gift from Estelle, separate, in the other sock, understanding that it did not come easily. She wears one of Liam’s sweaters, too, and a pair of his trousers, and Jeffrey’s extra cap, low over her eyes. Around her chest she has wrapped one of the bandages Emma saved from Roland’s first weeks home. The sweater is roomy, Lucy’s breasts still nearly imperceptible, but she wears the bandage anyway, as a cautionary measure. It keeps her warmer, if nothing else. She left her winter coat behind, unable to wear it—clearly a girl’s—or to fit it into her bag, a brown canvas duffel Roland used to bring on his fishing trips. Emma took the bag and nearly everything else from the house, including the bandages, the curtains, all the pillows but one. She left only Roland’s clothes and a few kitchen things. The children weren’t there when she did this. They were at school, except for Lucy and Joshua, whom Emma had sent down to the coffee shop. Afterward, she would say nothing of what happened, not even to Lucy. She did say that they could go back in the spring, for the perry. And she said that she had arranged for a nurse. The nurse would go to the house twice a day to check on him, keep the fire lit, keep the house. Emma looked, saying this, much older, and very beautiful.
If she were a girl, Lucy thinks, she would wrap the blanket around her shoulders, but because she is not supposed to be a girl, she hugs the duffel to her while she waits for the car to warm up and rests her feet on the opposite seat, like a boy can do. The train is not full—still, she was surprised when the conductor moved her to a place where she could have two seats, facing each other. At night, when the beds are set up, Lucy will have both the top and bottom bunks, a sort of closet all to herself. She doesn’t understand how the seats will change into beds—she sees no mechanism. She tries to look out the window, but instead stares at the porter as he carries another suitcase through the car. She hasn’t seen a colored person before.
? ? ?
For hours, as the train rolls north, she speaks to no one. She eats her sandwiches and wonders, as they disappear, if she has made a mistake. She was safe now, after all, with her siblings and Emma and Mrs. Cohn and Mr. Hirsch, with the cook and housekeeper and nurse. It was a kind of family—a good family, in many ways. The only man was old and sweet. There were two women, two mothers, home almost all the time. The children had space to run. There were enough beds that each child had one to herself—though often, by morning, she had found a sibling and crawled in with her—and enough money that it was no great hardship that Emma could no longer work at Sven’s. The men at the long counter glared at her. Lanesville was done with her. So she was home, and Mrs. Cohn was home, the house large enough to let them pass each other comfortably, like moons. But they were warming. The other day Lucy had seen them talking quietly on the screened porch, huddled close in their coats, Emma’s new—she had relented, accepted—so that they looked like equals. Like two women, friends even, having a conversation. Then, sensing Lucy, they’d looked up, their faces instantly lit, vying for her attention, praising, worrying, making way. She was everything to them.