Bea smiled, assuming a joke. “Canada?” she asked.
Lucy shrugged, her hands full of pears. “My brother Peter’s there.” Her voice was breezy but Bea glimpsed, in the lieutenant’s long chin, a quivering. “I had a job,” she said, “but not anymore. I pretended to be a boy, in the quarry. Then I got caught. Now I have to wait again, a whole year.” The pears sounded hollow as she dumped them into the press.
“You want to leave here?” Bea ventured.
“Please don’t tell.” Lucy flashed a painfully eager smile. “I was thinking . . . maybe . . . you could help?”
“Help?” Bea couldn’t hide her surprise.
“With the ticket, I mean.”
Bea swallowed hard. Again she tried to smile, but it was a lopsided effort—she could no longer process the conversation, she knew so little about Lucy’s life. Did she want Bea to help her with some kind of escape? Bea had left her daughter when she’d barely been able to see. Why should the girl trust her now? “But your mother . . .” Bea sputtered.
“Look!” Lucy lifted her skirt, turned sideways, set her foot on the box next to Bea’s. High up on the backside of her leg, Bea saw a wound the size of a quarter, bright red at its center, fading to pink at its edges. It could be a burn, she thought. She had seen plenty of burns. Nearby a few old bruises lay quietly under the skin, like dim moons around a sun. Bea felt her temperature rise—her ears and fingers swelled with blood. Rage shot through her. What had she allowed to happen? She asked as calmly as she could: “What is this?”
Lucy let her skirt fall.
“This is why you want to leave?”
Lucy turned away and resumed cranking. “What is my father like?” she asked.
“Your father?” It was a natural question, and connected, Bea presumed, to the wound, yet she was not prepared for it. “Lucy.”
“Is he Mr. Cohn?”
“No.”
“Is he dead?”
“No!”
Lucy looked doubtful. “He’s dead.”
“He’s not dead.”
“Then what?”
“He was a very honorable man. He would have wanted you to be—”
“You talk like he’s dead!” The girl bit her lip. She appeared in awe of her own impertinence. “You didn’t know him,” she said, realizing. “He didn’t know me.”
Bea reached a hand toward Lucy. Lucy didn’t take it.
“That was how it had to be done.”
“Why?”
Bea thought how to explain it. But the explanation was about certain types of people and schools and mothers and concerts. It was about a sort of life, a world, that didn’t sound so hard. She tried another tack. “Imagine one of your sisters . . .”
“My mother got pregnant with Juliet before she was married,” Lucy said. “I did the math.”
Bea took a deep breath. She could smell the girl. She smelled of sun and sweat, girl sweat—Bea remembered—tangy but appealing, like citrus. “Forget it,” Bea said. “What I mean to say is that it was a mistake. Not to have kept you. I mean to say I’m sorry. I know he is, too. Which sounds completely useless, I know. I’d understand if you hate me. But I am. I’m sorry. I’m here now. I—” She nodded vaguely at Lucy’s leg. “Maybe I can help.”
That was when Emma peered in. She was backlit, and breathing heavily from her walk up the hill, her shoulders rising and falling, and Bea’s first thought was of Nurse Lugton, here to stop the strangeness, wake her, tell her it was all a dream.
? ? ?
Emma was so quick to think of Roland, to account for him, to smooth the world for him, to protect the children from his wrath, which was mounting again, a toothier, maimed cousin of its earlier self—he was unwilling to try a prosthetic or even leave the house yet too large and roving to be contained in a chair—that she made no sound. A howl of lightning from her head to her heels, a twisting through her ribs, a silent, wrenching mewl. Why had she thought it could go on forever? She had been stupid, delusional, as if Lucy would forget, as if Mrs. Cohn might not have seen her, as if Mr. Cohn were blind. We’ll see, she’d said to Lucy. Maybe, mmm, we’ll see, though Lucy begged. We’ll see, and off Emma went to work in the mornings, We’ll see, and off she went in the night with Josiah Story, We’ll see, and twice more to the woods with him during the day. She had been there now! He had picked her up from work, saying to the room that one of her sons was hurt, while he whispered in her ear, Not true. The memory of it filled her with horror, their thumping against the car door, his hands pulling her roughly. He had been rough and she had liked it, liked thumping like that, liked it so much heat flooded her lap at the thought of it, even as she stood in the window, looking at Lucy and Mrs. Cohn. I’m here now. Here now. Lucy, Lucy, her eyes brimming with tears.
“Go in the house,” Emma said.
Lucy shook her head.
“Go.”