Emma and the children were lost. A fog had dropped down, sudden and dense, blocking the moon. At first they had stayed to the edge of the river, but they must have swung into one of the creeks that looped and split and looped again and now they were spun around, nowhere. At least the tide was high, which allowed Emma and Liam to row the skiffs onto the marsh, where they rested in the tall grass, waiting, trying not to talk, the boats unnervingly echoey without any pears covering the floor. Emma knew she should have gotten them onto the marsh sooner, but she had been too frustrated to think clearly. When the fog fell, they had been within a quarter mile of tonight’s orchard on Thurston Point, their only destination on the Annisquam and—theoretically—their easiest row. They were only a few nights into their two-week harvest schedule, the moon just fatter than half, the air still, their best night for a smooth pick. Missing tonight would require a rearrangement, maybe a reduction in overall pears and profits. (Emma had already decided they would have to skip the Hirsch orchard this year, though she had not come up with a way to explain this to the children.) Worse, it would bring them closer to the day Roland walked up the road, saw the heaps of pears waiting to be pulped on the floor of the shack, and quite possibly called it all off.
The fog was cool, the children silent and good, but Emma’s insides jiggled and cried, Damn fog, damn fog! Not knowing when Roland would be home was like having a rope set around her neck that might or might not be yanked at any minute, dragging her back into her real life, even as that life started to feel like a dream and this one, the one she’d built in Roland’s absence, like the real one. A couple evenings ago Emma stood in the back of the Gilbert Club, wearing a broad hat to hide her face, and listened while Mrs. Cohn regaled the crowd with reasons to be afraid—indolence, criminals, all that was new in America, etc.—though how Josiah Story would protect them from all this wasn’t made entirely clear. Story followed Mrs. Cohn’s speech with a few words of thanks and a couple inarguable remarks, his hair slicked back, signs of Susannah all over him. With his handsome jaw, Emma thought, he could have stood there silently and the crowd would have cheered. Then he smiled a smile Emma knew wasn’t real, stepped down from the stage, and kissed Susannah, seated in the front row. Emma left before Susannah could turn around, before Emma could see whether she had started to show. She was glad for them, but jealous, too, a feeling that lowered her to a new depth of self-repugnance.
What surprised her, though, as she started the walk downtown to catch the bus that would take her home, was the realization that she hadn’t gone to see Susannah or Story as much as to see Mrs. Cohn. Emma hadn’t been able to imagine Mrs. Cohn giving a speech but there she was, her hair flattened even more extravagantly than Story’s, her face in unfamiliar relief, her eyes flashing behind spectacles. “Your vote is your opportunity not to inspire but to influence, not to be trampled on by popular trends but to trample upon them!” Her voice was powerful where it often warbled, her message singular where she hedged and circled. Not too long ago, Emma would have tossed this off as hypocrisy; she would have felt a cruel pride at having proved Mrs. Cohn’s falseness, for having seen her rocking on the bed, tearing at the locket, moaning uncontrollably. Instead, she found herself worrying for Mrs. Cohn, and for herself: her own slippery costumes, her lies. She’d taken the big hat off as soon as she was out of sight of the club, and spent more time than usual that night singing the children to sleep.
Lucy Pear watched her from the stern bench, where she sat beside Janie. She was oddly moody in recent days, almost furtive when Emma tried to look her in the eye, a change Emma connected to the girl’s heavier hips—all that was coming earlier for her than it had for Emma’s other girls. But the other children were growing up, too, at a disorienting pace—even Joshua strutted around the yard now, handing his sisters nails as they put the finishing touches on the perry shack. Meanwhile Emma went off to the Hirsch house to care for another family.
She set down the oars and rubbed at her hands, as if she might smooth the nicks and bruises that hundreds of pear branches had pounded into them. “Shh,” whispered Janie, at the sound Emma’s hands made. “Shh-shh,” Joshua said from the bow, and giggled. “Hush!” hissed Lucy Pear, her eyes darting wildly, though there was nothing to look at but fog, multiplied. Even Liam and Jeffrey, three feet away in Story’s father’s boat, were barely visible: vague brushstrokes through the white-black shroud of the night.
“All of you, calm,” Emma whispered. “Sing ‘Molly Malone’ to yourselves.”
Almost imperceptibly, the boats began to rock. Water slapped against the hulls, the marsh grass shifted and sighed. Emma knew they had gotten to the chorus—Alive alive oh-ho, alive alive oh-ho, crying cockles and mussels, alive alive oh-ho . . . —when the rhythm picked up slightly. She smiled. This, she knew, Roland would approve of. It had been his invention: Silent Singing. Sometimes he was sweet like that, in a way that could still make her swoon. He surprised her regularly, with little gifts: a rose “borrowed” from Mrs. Parson’s garden, or two sticks he’d whittled—when he was supposed to be gutting fish—for putting up her hair. This was the Roland she could not resist, the slyly rebellious man who long ago had come from a job painting boat bottoms at Niles Beach and told her how, on his lunch break, he had discovered a hidden field of pear trees.
“Mum?”
A third boat had materialized. It had simply slipped in beside them, holding two men. They might have been unicorns at first, the vision was so surreal, until Emma fully registered the guns raised at their ears. She swatted the children’s heads down, felt her body depart itself, try to float.
“Federal agents, ma’am. Prohibition Bureau.”
“Mummy!” cried Joshua behind her, his voice muffled in her dress.
“Please. It’s just me and my children. Will you put down the guns?”
The larger man, his jowls softening, returned his gun to its holster, but his companion, bouncing a skinny leg, only dropped his hand slightly.
“What’s this?” he said, standing to peer into their boats.
“It’s nothing,” Emma said.
The larger man, in front, grabbed the gunwale of Emma’s boat and pulled her and the children in, as if reeling in fish. He leaned over to look, his shaggy head nearly brushing Lucy Pear, whose face twisted as if waiting to be hit—a fear Emma had not seen in her before. The man didn’t notice. “It really is,” he said as he peered into the boat. He looked quizzically at Emma. “What are you doing out here?”
She shrugged. “A tradition. The moon. We live just up the creek. We didn’t expect a fog.”
“A tradition,” sneered the thin man. “That’s what they all say. What about the moon? It’s not full, it’s not new. It’s nothing.”
“There’s nothing in the boats, Finny,” said the large man. “What’s your name, ma’am?”
“O’Hara. Maryann O’Hara,” Emma said. When even Joshua didn’t protest, she was relieved and disheartened. He was either so scared of the men, or so cognizant of the family’s guilt, or both, that he knew before he should have to keep his mouth shut.
“You want a ride?” asked the thin man, his gun bouncing on his thigh. “Back home? We got power.” He jerked his head at an outboard motor strapped to the stern, which appeared to Emma like a large, ornate eggbeater.
“That’s kind of you to offer,” Emma said. “That’s very kind.” She spoke slowly, trying to delay, so she could think—think! Why didn’t she have a gun? What had Story been thinking, giving her these boats and not a gun? Roland had a gun but he’d taken it with him and besides, if she had a gun, what would she do with it? Even Liam, the oldest boy, could not reliably shoot a squirrel. So there was no gun and no one to shoot a gun and she had wasted time thinking of it. “Thank you, but we’re not far,” she said, wondering, as she said it, if maybe, if the men knew where they were and Emma told them how to go from here, she and the children could be dropped at the Thurston property, easy as that. But the Thurstons had no dock, and though their house was a distance from the creek, they might wake at the sound of a motor, and anyhow, wherever the men dropped them, they would surely wait to see—or hear, given the fog—Emma and the children enter a house. It would never work. She considered a sacrifice: she could ask the men to tow her and the kids back to the boatyard they had launched from, admit to “borrowing” the boats—no need to get into the business of their being (sort of) legitimately borrowed—declare that as her wrongdoing and get on with it. But there was an itchiness about the skinny one. He was angry, maybe, at not yet having busted anything up tonight, or stewing about some other thing, needing someone to nab. Who knew what such a man would do? If not to her or the children, then to Buzzi, who would be waiting for them, asleep in the black Chrysler that Story’s drivers used for such dealings, kind, bawdy Buzzi, who not tonight but regularly delivered other people to do other, more clearly illegal things. “Thank you,” she repeated. “We’ll wait for the fog to clear.”
“Maybe I’m not being clear,” said the skinny man. “It’s our pleasure to escort you. Make sure a lady gets home safe.”
“I’m grateful for your concern, Officer, but it’s our pleasure to stay.”
“I’m a federal agent!” He leaned forward, both hands on his gun, squinting at her. “What. You the ones taking all them pears? The serial harvesters?” He laughed nastily.
“I haven’t heard about that.”
“Local cops told us. Weren’t supposed to. They kept it out the papers, some reason.” He scrunched his nose as if he’d smelled something bad, and Emma understood that Josiah Story must have been the reason. Her stomach rolled. “You’re doing something out here, lady.”
“We’re waiting out the fog, sir.”
He spit over the side of the boat. It must have been a large, well-made wad because it sounded like a rock, hitting the water. “Well, then. We’ll just wait with you.”
Emma did not look at her children. Her breath was sour with panic. The fog was beginning to loosen into tendrils; slivers of black could be seen; the men’s faces sharpened into view. The large one grinned. She calculated uselessly: if she admitted to the pear situation, their run would be over, the shack emptied, and Roland would come home to failure and scandal; if she tried for a lesser offense, having taken the skiffs, Buzzi might get caught up, and the local cops notified, who in turn would notify the boat owners, Story’s brother and Story’s father, who would question Story about Emma, which would likely lead to other revelations, about Emma’s pears, both actual and metaphorical, which would make for another, worse sort of scandal.
A groan split the air, distant yet clear: a vast, creaking, cracking chorus, as if a forest were coming down all at once. The marsh shuddered.
“What the fuck was that?”
The men’s eyes lit up. They might have licked their lips, their hunger was so clear. The big one yanked the motor to life, and they were gone.
Emma prayed, O Lord. O Lord in heaven, thank you. But as she watched the Feds disappear down the creek, as she heard the thrum of their motor die off, she knew that whoever or whatever had made that crashing sound—her first, implausible thought was a string of derricks collapsing—was in far more danger than she and the children had been and that this, their reprieve, had nothing to do with Jesus or Mary and everything to do with luck. Every one of her children had at some point come close to disaster. They had almost poked their eyes out, almost chopped their fingers off, almost expired from fever. There was polio, there was the woodstove, there were Roland’s axes, there was abandonment. Yet here they were, staring at her with astonishment. Adrenaline snaked up her legs. She gripped the oars hard to stop the shaking of her hands. The fog lifted, making way.