“Lucy—”
“You take me from her, then you go back and don’t even tell me?”
“I didn’t take you.”
“You did!”
“She left you.”
Lucy glared at Emma. Her breath was ragged from crying, her hair wild, poor Lucy with her wild hair Emma had no idea how to care for.
“Where did she leave me?” Lucy asked quietly. She had started to shiver.
“In the orchard.”
“Where?”
“Under a tree.”
“Which tree?”
“The middle one.”
Lucy shivered harder now. Emma reached for her hands, and when Lucy didn’t pull away, she blew onto them. She rubbed the girl’s arms, but nothing helped. She wasn’t cold, she was inconsolable, she was weeping without tears. “Wait here, don’t go anywhere,” Emma said, and ducked out of the shack. She had forgotten Roland, filling the doorway of the house.
“Excuse me,” she said.
“What’s going on in there?” he asked.
“Later,” she said. She tried to squeeze past him, but he tilted on his leg, blocking her way.
“Now,” he said.
“She found Mrs. Cohn,” Emma said quietly. She was so determined to get inside she only noticed the fact of Roland giving way. She didn’t see the rise and fall of his Adam’s apple, or the color leaving his face. On her way back out, she nearly tripped on him—he had lowered himself to sit on the threshold—but she ran on toward the shack, afraid Lucy would be gone.
She was there, still shaking. Emma, wrapping the blanket around her shoulders, said, “This is what you were bundled in. When Peter found you.”
Lucy looked at the blanket.
“It’s yours,” Emma said.
“Peter?”
“Yes.”
Lucy nodded. She appeared to be thinking hard. The chatter of her teeth slowed. “What is she like?” she asked.
Emma didn’t understand at first. The question was almost bewilderingly obvious. It was so simple, and yet impossible to answer. What was Beatrice Cohn like? She wanted to be kind, for Lucy’s sake, but not overly kind, for her own. She wanted to be truthful, but Beatrice Cohn did not hold still in the mind. She was sensitive, selfish, fearful, overconfident; she was a Jew; she was homely, lovely, ancient, immature; her kindness was helplessly aggressive; she was lonely. “Lonely” would be the word, if one was forced to sum her up. But that did no one any good.
Finally, Emma said, “She means well.”
She would not forget how Lucy’s face sagged with disappointment then. Instantly, Emma regretted the paltriness of her answer. It had been so ungenerous! So sterile and meticulous as to be a lie. Yet Emma could not think how to say anything else. Lucy’s curiosity, however natural, was painful to behold. Emma felt as if a scaffold were buckling inside her.
“I almost died walking home, you know.” Lucy’s tone was heartbreaking in its matter-of-factness. “I thought I was going to die. And then by the time I got here the sun was rising and you hadn’t even noticed I was gone. You were asleep!” She lowered her voice. “I noticed every time you left in that car.”
Emma’s face grew hot. She filled with rage—how dare Lucy?—swept quickly under by shame: instinctively, she glanced toward the house. But Lucy had been quiet, careful, protective of Emma even as she confronted her, and Emma recognized the more essential crime of her affair: each time she had disappeared in Story’s Duesenberg, she had left Lucy lying awake and alone in the night.
Her throat burned. “O Lord. I am sorry.”
“Will you take me back?”
Emma felt relief bloom inside her. She thought Lucy meant one thing, until she saw that the girl’s eyes were bright with tears. Determined to hide her disappointment, Emma held her gaze. “We’ll see,” she said. It was a thing she said often to her children, a seemingly innocent way to put off their requests, but she heard now the trickery in it, for it implied a helplessness on her part. It belied—and therefore strengthened—her power over them.
“Please,” said Lucy, who rarely begged for anything, but Emma was too full of feeling to think, too overcome to promise anything. She didn’t want to promise anything. “We’ll see,” she said again. Then she went to help Roland up from the stoop.
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