Outside, the air had cooled. Lucy kept to the far edge of the road, where any child knew to walk when her feet were bare—here the granite chips had been worn to a fine, velvety dust. She passed the Davies’ dark house, then the Solttis’, then Mrs. Greely’s. Here the lights were on. Lucy heard the sound of a piano being struck, apparently at random, the notes darting into the night like a riddle.
Five minutes into the woods, the noise had faded. Lucy’s eyes adjusted. She found her boulder and climbed to the top. She did not bother feeling her mossy seat for rainwater—except for a couple stormy days there had been little rain since May. The Mississippi River, she knew, had flooded. But she did not understand where that was, or what it meant. She sat, and thought about Emma. Lucy understood only about half of what adults said. She did not know, for instance, what it meant that Mr. Greely had died of a “venereal disease.” But she thought she understood what Emma meant when Lucy overheard her say: He wandered around on her. Mr. Greely had gone off somewhere in secret, just like Emma was going off somewhere in secret. That much was clear. Less clear to Lucy was whom Emma was wandering around on. Roland, probably, but he wasn’t home, so did it count? And if not, wasn’t she wandering around on the children? What did she do as she wandered? And why was she doing it with Mr. Story? Lucy recognized the car from the quarry. She had heard two men in the carving sheds arguing about Josiah Story: one said, You can’t expect a guy gets handed a silver spoon and turns it down, the other, Don’t think he’s your friend, he’s a sellout. I wouldn’t vote him in for mayor if he paid me, which he probably would, he’s such a whore. Lucy had not observed Josiah Story closely—she tried to keep her eyes down at the quarry. He was funding their perry operation, of course. There was that. But Emma never took him inside the shack. She climbed into his car and rode away.
Lucy would have liked to ask Peter. If she focused her eyes the right way in the moonlight, the forest floor looked made of fish skin, each leaf a glinting scale. Peter would see this, too, she thought. Yet when she called him up, when she sat him next to her on the rock with his perpetual smirk and his shrewd green eyes, his heavy fist curling out to knock her in the shoulder, she knew she wouldn’t dare ask him about Emma. And it was this, more than what she’d actually seen—she hadn’t seen anything, after all, but the car, and Emma fleeing—it was her understanding that she could not ask Peter that told Lucy something bad was going on. And though she didn’t know what the something was, knowing that it was seemed to make her somehow bad, too.
The air darkened as the moon went behind a cloud. The trees appeared to thicken, the ferns that grew from the boulder’s lower crack to grow a full foot, black creatures stretching toward her through the night. People liked to call Cape Ann the Rock, and sometimes, like now, Lucy could feel it: how hard the place was, hanging off the world with its back up. She wished she was like Janie and the others, sleeping through to morning, not realizing anything was amiss. Lucy’s knowing about Emma was another thing that separated her from them. It was lonely, being the only one awake, the one protecting their mother’s secret. She felt guilty for keeping it, guilty at her gladness that Roland was away, guilty that the family was not as it seemed to be, guilty for being one of them and also outside, looking in, seeing the seams but not how to stitch them up.
Mrs. Greely’s house was dark when Lucy left the woods. She crawled in beside Janie and fell quickly back to sleep. She was only nine, after all—she never did manage to stay up until Emma came home. Instead, she would wake with the others, eat Emma’s oatmeal, return Emma’s sleepless smile. Always, Emma needed Lucy to smile back—this was a need as clear to Lucy as her own need for food, a need that preceded her first memories or words. In smiling, Lucy would forgive her, because Emma needed that, too, and because Lucy, after all, had her own secrets. The quarry. Canada. She was getting closer each day.
Fourteen