“And I’m Frankie Silva.” The man snorted. “That don’t make no difference.”
But the caravan had already rounded the last bend before the Goose Cove Bridge, where Dirk Parsons collected his toll. What could they do? The road was narrow—there was no room to turn around. Even if there were, Dirk and his brothers had seen their headlamps and would know if they changed direction. And that was no guarantee anyway: there was one dirt road they could try through Dogtown, there was the long way up and around the cape, but men ran rogue tolls along those routes, too. There was too much booze in Lanesville not to collect on it, booze in other caves, booze underwater, booze in chimneys and woodpiles and trees. Ten thousand bottles of whiskey were buried in Salvatore Santorini’s kitchen garden alone. The Feds came with steel rods, poking, poking, but they couldn’t find every cache. (In 1983, Salvatore’s great-grandson, digging for treasure, would pry up an unlabeled bottle of brown liquid and pour it into his boots.)
Dirk Parsons and his brothers had good rifles. Josiah Story had money invested in this trip. What could Frankie Silva do? He stuffed the kid back down, the drivers paid up, the caravan rolled on.
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Through the yacht club gate Frankie rode with his foot on Lucy’s back. “Stay put,” he grumbled. “Stay, we’ll get you home. Won’t tell nobody. Not worth our time. Stupid kid.”
She was gone before they got back for their second load. She did not run. She slipped like a shadow over the club’s wall, clambered down through beach rose until the breakwater slid into view, judged by its distance how far she had to go, then stayed to the side of the road, to the hedges and walls, until she reached the gap in the honeysuckle.
It wasn’t until she was through, to where the air was thick with sugar and the pears hung in her face, that she felt afraid. She had been too worried about getting there to fear being there. But the smell choked her, and the pears were so close, and she was alone, very alone, her aloneness as abruptly apparent as if until a moment ago Janie had walked beside her, as if the whole Murphy clan had been wading together into the field, the children grabbing at once for the low fruit, hissing, Look how much I’ve grown! Last year I was only this high. Look!
And Roland would laugh and say, Who needs a doctor to measure you when we can go begging for pears? Now get to work! And a glow would run among them as they started to pick, a shared, almost sacred kind of joy, like what happened when they went to church on Christmas Eve but even more so, even better, because the orchard, and the joy they felt there, was never spoken of.
Lucy listened. Could she flag down the trucks on their way off the point, beg Frankie Silva to take her back? In a few days she would turn ten. Janie would bake her a cake. They would all sing to her. It could be as if she had never come here.
The night hung so still she heard her own breath. She heard her dress shift against Liam’s coat. She heard the photograph she’d torn from the newspaper rustle deep in the coat’s right pocket. She heard sweat roll off her nose and land in the grass.
She shed the coat. She pulled at a pear and it dropped into her palm like a stone. The stem was intact, the flesh firm under her thumb. Perfect. Look! she wanted to shout. Look how easy that was, how tall I am. Look how brave I am. Look! Come get me. Come and take me home.
She turned once, in a circle, as if Janie and Anne might be hiding behind the trees, tricking her, as if everything had been a trick and they would all come out now, Roland on his two legs and Emma all devotion and Lucy, too, before she had grown, before Roland started pinching her, before she had been split so definitively, irrevocably, from the others.
A noise. A crunching in the grass. She stopped. The crunching stopped. Of course. Her cheeks burned, her fear sang. She folded the pear into the coat, folded the coat in a neat pile on the ground, set her cap on top, pushed her hair into some kind of order, and walked on.
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