“You’re very brave.”
This is my mother, Lucy told herself. This is your mother. This was her mother, praising her. Surely she was meant to feel grateful. Perhaps she should move closer. But her limbs might have been rubber. Her feet held to the berm. The longer she looked at Beatrice Cohn’s face, its familiarities seemed to recede and the fact of her utter strangeness came forward. Lucy knew nothing apart from what the paper said. She didn’t know what this woman liked to eat, or what her laugh sounded like—did she laugh?—or whether she drank tea. And the woman had kept it that way. She had not come looking for Lucy. Lucy had been the one to look—she had stowed herself in a whiskey truck to find this woman who sat so stiffly now, with her stiff face and her stiff hair in its bun and her hands in her lap like she was waiting for Lucy to tell her what to do. What did she want, for Lucy to say, Thank you, you’re brave, too? Emma taught the children to always repay a compliment but Lucy couldn’t make herself do that now because it just wasn’t true and the longer she looked at the woman’s face, the less true it seemed. Lucy felt an excruciating loneliness. Why hadn’t Janie and the others come back for her? Did they think she had gone back to the house? Did they think she had run off again to the quarry? She heard herself say, with a firmness that belied her confusion, shored her up against tears: “I’m ten now.”
The woman’s face changed then. The parts she’d been holding seemed to give way. She covered her eyes with her hands. “My husband told me your name,” she said pitifully, and Lucy’s pride withered. She crouched down, trying to see beneath the woman’s hands. “Would you like to see my perry shack?” It was the only thing she could think to say. “I built it. I was the boss. We can wait there, for my mother.”
Slowly, Mrs. Cohn lowered her hands.
“I have to tell my mother you’re here,” Lucy said, using the word purposefully now, watching it hit Mrs. Cohn. It was like watching wind hit a sheet—the sheet’s flailing gave away the strength of the wind.
“Of course,” Mrs. Cohn said at last. “Emma.”
“Yes. But not my father. Not yet. He’ll be angry.”
Mrs. Cohn nodded. “I don’t know if today . . . I don’t know if I should . . .”
Lucy filled with despair. “Please!” she begged, feeling fizzy, frantic. She should not have said my mother, not twice. She would drive the woman away, lose her all over again. “I’ve been asking her to take me to you. I’ve been asking and asking. Come on. We’ll wait in the perry until she’s back from Sven’s. I’ll show you everything. Come on.”
When the woman still didn’t move, Lucy took her hand—and she didn’t disappear, and it was just a hand, after all, bony but soft, and oddly cold on such a warm day—and dragged her like a stray toward home.
Bea followed the girl’s instructions: racing across Washington Street, high-stepping up through the woods instead of on the road, watching the ground for roots. She was grateful for the precision mimicry demanded, antidote to her mind’s flailing. Run away, run away! her mind cried, though of course she had known she would wind up here, known since Albert ran in calling, “You were right! You were right!” He had ignored Ira and Henry, dropped to his knees by the sofa, shaken Bea hard by the shoulders. “Sit up! You were right. It’s her. I saw her.” Bea rubbed her eyes. Was he mocking her? She doubted, again. Perhaps she had dreamed the girl, and Albert was only trying to placate her. “Where? Are you sure?” Albert cupped her face in his hands. “I couldn’t be more sure.”
He was crying, she saw. Birds winged in her chest. She began to tremble. Her father said, “Oy mein goht,” the first Yiddish she’d heard him speak, in a bare, strange voice. “Where?” she asked again. “Lanesville.” Why had Bea assumed the girl had gone so much farther? She had been to Lanesville. She could be there within an hour. She stood. “You’ll drive me.”
That was when Albert let his hands fall away from her face. “She’s been raised by Emma Murphy,” he said, and Bea sank back onto the sofa.