Briefly, Lucy’s mother seemed to have disappeared. Lucy pressed her face to the glass. She felt her body drain of hope, felt her knees turn to mud. Then two pricks of light gazed out at her, as startling a sight as a raccoon’s eyes in the woods. Like a raccoon’s eyes, they glinted, lit by the moon and apparent menace. Like a raccoon’s eyes, they seemed to look straight through her, as if in warning.
Lucy ran. She ran off the terrace, across the lawn, past the pine, over the wall, through the orchard. She found the coat and grabbed it up. She looked back, up toward the house, but saw no light. Had the woman seen her? Lucy waited. She had not seen her. Of course not. She was a woman who looked at herself in windows. She didn’t care enough to see Lucy. And if she had seen her, she wasn’t coming. No noise came from above, no light. Lucy’s stupidity was crushing. Beatrice Cohn had left her. She hadn’t asked her to come back.
Still, Lucy waited, her arms hugging Liam’s coat. The pear within split as she waited. She took a step backward, then froze, took another step, froze. She punched a low branch, knocking pears to the ground, froze again, waited. She waited until she could not bear the disappointment, until fatigue darkened her senses, until all she could do was shake the pear chunks from the coat, twist her hair into the cap, and start the long walk home.
Part Three
Twenty-six
Post for Mrs. Cohn!” the mailman sang, his voice resounding through the house, for he had taken the trouble to kneel down, poke open the flap, and push his lips into the hole. His words arrived in all their snide glory in the great room, where Bea lay on a sofa with her arms covering her face, Albert stood looking out the window, and Ira and Henry sat with three newspapers between them. Sacco and Vanzetti were supposed to have been executed the night before, but thirty minutes out, as Robert G. Elliott, widely admired as the gentlest executioner in New England, checked his voltage, Governor Fuller sent a last-minute reprieve, giving the defendants twelve days to find a judge willing to retry their case.
Bea appeared to be asleep but wasn’t, Ira knew, because when the mail flap crashed down she rolled over at once and sat up, her response as automatic as a dog’s.
Poor Bea, who had gone finally, truly, mad, who swore she had seen her baby, grown into a girl, peering in the window one night. She had told Albert, who had told Ira and Henry, and then Henry had told Lillian, which made Bea even crazier—she accused Albert of betraying her. Ira just shook his head. He knew she had drowned the baby, but he couldn’t possibly say that to her now. Henry kept reminding Bea that the baby (as far as he knew) had gone to the orphanage, and that the orphanage kept no records. Bea had nothing sensible to say about any of it. “But the pears,” she kept saying. “They didn’t come this year, for the pears. They’re still on the trees, they’ll go soft . . .” As if that explained anything.