A Watershed Year

by Susan Schoenberger

  “Okay if I bring Vern?”

  “Sure,” she said. “But won’t he be bored?”

  “He’s got a Game Boy. He’s never bored,” Angela said. “I’ll be there in a half hour. Have to find my tools.”

  Lucy waited for Angela and Vern at the dining-room table with her feet on another chair. She took in the living room, with its miniature gas fireplace, wondering why she never sat in front of it. Would that change, she wondered, when there were two people living here instead of just one? For a moment, she felt a twinge of panic about how she was barreling along on the path toward this adoption, knowing full well that Yulia wasn’t following the normal protocols. But she had to believe that Yulia knew the system intimately enough to make it work; after all, hadn’t she handpicked Lucy to become her nephew’s new mother? Before Lucy could take the other side in her own argument, Angela came in with her large pink plastic tool kit, and Lucy didn’t see Vern at first, because he was right behind Angela, looking down at his Game Boy as he walked.

  “Hey, is that Vern, coming in on little cat’s feet?” Lucy said. She stood up and noticed, suddenly, that Louis was a few feet behind Vern. She admired his resilience, considering her last conversation with him on the quad.

  “He actually does have little cat’s feet,” Louis said. “I’ve seen them. Must be hard to find shoes for him, Angela.”

  “Yeah, it’s hard, but they’re more like rhinoceros feet. Boy wears double Ds.”

  Vern seemed not to hear any of it. He parked himself on the couch, never taking his eyes from the tiny screen.

  “What are you doing here?” Lucy asked Louis. He was wearing an old T-shirt and a pair of paint-spackled sweatpants.

  “I was picking up some window shades, and I saw Angela at the hardware store. I told her I’d help, if that’s okay,” he said.

  “You’re saving me,” she said. “I am a complete failure at home improvement. I’ll show you the damage.”

  She led Angela and Louis upstairs and showed them the bathroom, which was sticky from floor to ceiling with wallpaper glue. Wads of rejected wallpaper lay strewn around the bedroom floor like a Christmas morning gone horribly wrong.

  Angela looked at the wallpaper still on the roll and determined that enough remained to complete the job if they didn’t waste any.

  “Tell me again how you know about wallpaper?” Lucy asked.

  Angela opened her toolbox, which contained every tool Lucy could name and several others she could not.

  “My mother was a flipper. Fixed up old houses and sold them for a profit. My sister Paula specialized in the wallpaper, but I used to help her. I never told you how we lived in twelve different houses growing up?”

  “Never,” she said, and then, turning to Louis: “What’s your story?”

  “I just like to watch the home-and-garden channel.”

  “Which explains nothing.”

  “Don’t be so sure,” he said, stretching out a roll of wallpaper. “I’m a visual learner.”

  Lucy sat on the floor as Angela and Louis measured and cut. They brought in a chair to reach the ceiling and added water to the paste, and when the job was under control, they let Lucy help by holding one end of the wallpaper. At one point, Vern came in to ask for a snack, and Angela draped his arms with wallpaper sections. In two hours, the entire job was done. Angela packed her toolbox and snapped it shut.

  “Pizza on me,” Lucy said. “You deserve it.”

  “Thanks, hon,” Angela said, “but Vern’s got tai chi at five.”

  Louis was picking up bits of scrap wallpaper and stuffing them into a plastic bag. He absentmindedly ran a gluey hand through his long hair.

  “Sorry,” he said. “I’d really like to stay but—”

  “He has a date,” Angela said.

  “More like coffee with a friend,” Louis said, giving Angela a look that made Lucy think they had discussed this before.

  “Who?” Lucy asked. She was genuinely curious, slightly jealous, and somewhat annoyed that she had been left out of the loop.

  “Ellen Frist,” he said quickly. “Well, that was fun. See you later.”

  Louis let himself out as Angela checked the couch cushions for tiny Game Boy cartridges.

  “What’s going on with you two?” Angela asked.

  “Absolutely nothing’s going on with me,” she said. “I just can’t figure out what’s going on with him. Ellen Frist is old enough to be his very young aunt.”

  “She’s your age,” Angela said.

  “There you go.”

  “Don’t give me that. He likes you, and you know it.”

  “No, he doesn’t. It’s just one of those little attractions academic people get when they admire another academic’s work. Happens all the time.”

  “Please,” Angela said. “I’m going home.”

  “Bye, and thanks again. Bye, Vern,” Lucy said. “I owe you a pizza.”

  Vern looked up from his Game Boy.

  “When you get your son, can I teach him to play baseball?”

  “Of course, Vern. That would be great,” she said. She had assumed that Vern had been dragged to her house and made to sit for hours without even knowing why.

  Angela put her arm around her son and kissed the top of his head. “Tai chi,” she whispered, pushing him through the front door.

  seven

  * * *

  My dear Lucy,

  Strange as it may sound, there is some small sense of relief in dying young. What I mean is, I won’t disappoint anyone by failing to reach my full potential; I won’t have to see those brown splotches appear on my skin; I won’t spend years in a nursing home without knowing my own name. It’s not that I want to die, but since I don’t have a choice, I sometimes try to look at the upside.

  I also try to think about September 11, and how those people working in the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, or the people getting on planes, couldn’t have anticipated dying when they did. I’ve had time to prepare. There are moments when I find enough emotional distance to realize I just got dealt a bad hand. At least I had thirty-some fairly nice and productive years.

  One of the hardest times for me this past year was having that brief remission, after my bout with pneumonia. I started feeling better, and the tests showed the tumors in my lymph nodes were shrinking, and yet I couldn’t enjoy it. I had this powerful sense that it would never be over, and you tried to talk me out of it. You dragged me to movies and plays—all with a message of hope, as if you thought I wouldn’t notice. You replaced the navy-blue towels in my bathroom with bright yellow ones. You drove me all the way out to New Market to look at antiques, as if to say, “Last, Harlan, last, just as long as these pieces of furniture. I insist that you last.”

  When my other friends stopped showing up, when my mother couldn’t overcome her fear of flying and had one excuse after another for not visiting, you were there. On the outside, you’re such a gentle person, Lucy, almost too passive sometimes. But your core is made of titanium, or at least it is where I’m concerned.

  I think you need to tap into that strength in your own life. Sometimes I wonder about your fascination with the saints, whether you truly believe in the possibility of intercession, or if it’s just an excuse to step back, to recede a bit from a challenge. I’m not saying I have the answers, but sometimes I wonder about it.

  April is when the tulips bloom in that beautiful garden near campus. I remember seeing you there once, when I was still with Sylvie and she came to visit. You turned away, as if you didn’t want us to see you. I brushed it off at the time, but for some reason, I keep coming back to that image: you reading on a stone bench surrounded by flowers, pretending not to be there.

  Don’t think I haven’t noticed that you gave up most of your social life to spend time with me over the last year. I hope that’s changed, now that I’m gone. I’m sorry I wasn’t strong enough to push you away.

  Go see the tulips for me,

  Harlan

 
; When Lucy finished reading, she was grateful to be at home at the computer in her bedroom, because she needed to throw herself down on the bed and cry just long enough to feel sorry for herself again.

  She had driven Harlan crazy, tortured him with her need to keep him alive. Even during his brief remission, she had insisted—insisted—that he refuse to backslide. The part about the saints didn’t surprise her; he had often made the observation that she had no business throwing problems into the hands of dead people who had mostly likely been brainwashed or delusional. He had never really understood her fascination with the persistence, century after century, of saintly petitions. But how could she, who knew so many of their stories, have ignored them when it cost so little—under dire circumstances—just to try?

  She returned to the chair in front of her computer, sitting now as though her spine had wilted. She was never one to spend much time documenting her life, but now she regretted not having a photo album with pictures of her with Harlan. She could have flipped through the pages—supplanting all this new information with a carefully edited mirage of good hair days and boisterous laughter.

  She scrolled through the e-mail again.

  Dealt a bad hand. She so admired his ability to distance himself from something that couldn’t be more personal. And that last part: I’m sorry I wasn’t strong enough to push you away. He had always been honest about how much he needed her, and she had never regretted the time spent rubbing his back as he vomited or reading the newspaper to him in a hospital room. He had been the strong one, in accepting her help, in allowing her to see him as vulnerable. She had always been glad he hadn’t pushed her away until the very end.

  What stung, though, was the part about her attempt to disappear in the garden. She had never known how to react when she saw him with Sylvie, who had a way of looking at her as if she had something in her teeth, whose silk camisole she had found in Harlan’s laundry basket days after their breakup and had thrown away, stuffing it deep down inside his kitchen garbage with the orange peels and coffee grounds.

  She went downstairs to the kitchen, washed down a piece of dry toast with a swallow of cranberry juice, grabbed her book bag, and attempted to tap into the titanium core Harlan said she had. Yulia had pulled some strings to move the adoption forward a bit, but she wasn’t sure she could wait until June, given a recurring nightmare that involved Mat falling out of a plane without a parachute. He would tumble down in slow motion like a character from Alice in Wonderland, singing his little “Jabberwocky” song, and she would run around on the ground below, arms outstretched, trying to guess where the air currents might take him.

  Less than an hour later, she sat on a cold metal bench outside the federal building and flipped through her new Russian adoption guidebook. Around her, lawyer types walked briskly to and from the federal building, with its dark, monolithic slabs. She peered up, noticing the building was virtually windowless. A chill crept through the plaza, seeping, it seemed, out of the concrete itself. Small bursts of wind sent bits of gravel into motion around her feet. The sky, the benches, the walls, the ground all merged into shades of gray, with the exception of a large stone container filled with half-dead daffodils in one corner of the plaza. She walked toward the daffodils, drawn to their struggle, as Yulia walked into the plaza from the other direction and caught up with her. She put down several plastic bags, pulled a pack of cigarettes out of her coat pocket, and lit one.

  “I didn’t know you smoked,” Lucy said.

  “Not so much,” Yulia told her, sucking on the cigarette like it was an oxygen mask. “No lecture, please.”

  “It’s your life,” she said. “What time do we have to be inside?”

  “Five or ten minutes.”

  Lucy looked up at the building again, trying to imagine what it would be like to work in a windowless building every day, never seeing the sky, always out of sync with the weather. “So tell me something about your kids.”

  Yulia leaned back against the planter, took another drag from the cigarette, and exhaled. “They go to school,” she said, picking a tiny shred of tobacco from her tongue. “Oldest is seventeen, from first marriage. Younger two—fourteen and twelve—from my husband’s first marriage. They stay with us on weekends, holidays.”

  Lucy nodded. Yulia, clearly, was a big-picture person, someone for whom the troubling intricacies of blended families or tax codes wouldn’t much matter. As someone who found God in the details—or at least in the categories—it worried Lucy.

  The metal detector inside the federal building scanned Yulia’s plastic bags and Lucy’s purse. A security guard checked their IDs and filled out temporary badges, directing them to the fourth floor for fingerprinting. Once in the elevator, Lucy thought of Saint Blaise, who might relieve the tightness in her throat from the cigarette smoke, and Saint Basil the Great, the patron of those facing court appearances. The fingerprinting wasn’t really a court appearance, but it felt like some kind of judgment would be made. On the other hand, she couldn’t think of anything the FBI might find, except for an unpaid parking ticket from a trip to Boston twelve years ago. She still felt guilty about it.

  “Relax,” Yulia said. “You press fingers. Boom. Done. How is home study?”

  “It’s going well,” she said, deciding not to tell Yulia that the social worker had knocked on her door while she was arguing over the phone with her mother, who had accused her of hiding Cokie and Paul’s financial troubles. It turned out that T.G.I. Friday’s wasn’t beneath Bertie and his Thursday-morning golfing buddies. The social worker, luckily, had seemed more interested in whether Lucy kept a fire extinguisher in the house and where the household cleaners were stored.

  The waiting room in the fingerprinting office was packed with people, all flipping through magazines. The ones in chairs seemed to anchor themselves more deeply as newcomers arrived. Lucy leaned her back against the wall in a small space near a magazine rack. Yulia followed and dropped her bags.

  “What’s in all those bags anyway?” Lucy asked.

  Yulia brightened a bit at the opportunity to explain.

  “This one, knitting. I took course at community college. This one, hair dye and rubber gloves. I thought I might have chance for touch-up. This one, laptop, which needs to be fixed, and files. And this one is bathing suit to return. Too small.”

  “Why didn’t you leave all that in your car?”

  Yulia shrugged. “I took bus. Car is in shop.”

  They finally found seats, then waited another fifteen minutes until Lucy was called in. She let the fingerprint technician place her hand on a glass plate, which took a computerized scan. She was grateful it wasn’t ink, but she still felt like a criminal. She walked back into the waiting room to find Yulia knitting what looked like a striped afghan. As they walked back down the corridor, Lucy realized that she could have done this on her own.

  “You really didn’t need to come,” she said as they waited for the elevator. “Don’t you have other cases to work on?”

  “A few,” Yulia said. “But this one is most important. I hate to mention, but my brother-in-law is… sobaka. Dog.”

  Lucy’s heart stopped for several beats.

  “What are you saying, Yulia? Could he interfere, could he stop the adoption?” she said. The six or seven other people on the elevator looked toward Yulia.

  “Well…” Yulia said. “This is very unlikely.”

  Lucy took a deep breath as they left the building. Between Harlan’s e-mail that morning and Yulia’s commentary on her brother-in-law, she felt as if her seams might come apart again, and she wasn’t wearing her black suit to keep everything in. When they were back out on the concrete plaza, she grabbed Yulia’s forearm.

  “You need to tell me if the rug might be yanked out from under me. I’m not sure I could take another loss right now.”

  Yulia put down her bags and wrapped a thick arm around Lucy’s shoulders.

  “He is meant to be with you. I feel it. I came to America te
n years ago, when Mitya was just a girl. I do this for her.”

  And the way she said it, the utter conviction in her voice, allowed Lucy to move one foot in front of the other. She dropped Yulia off at her office and went back to campus, alternately terrified and resigned that she couldn’t predict how all this would turn out. From her computer at work, she read Harlan’s e-mail again and decided that she would see the tulips on Saturday. And she would stand there in the midst of the beauty that Aquinas said was evidence of God’s existence, and she would pray.

  PAUL SQUASHED a paint-filled sponge on the wall and turned to Lucy. “It’s a little too regular,” he said. “I’m too type A for this. You need a random touch.”

  Lucy took a step back from the wall in Mat’s bedroom, which they were sponging in sunrise yellow over an off-white background.

  “I hate it,” she said. “Why don’t we just get some rollers and make it all yellow?”

  “Sounds good to me,” he said. “I never took you for a sponge painter anyway.”

  “It was Angela’s idea. Since she helped me so much with the wallpaper, I thought I should take her suggestion. But this looks like creamed corn thrown against the wall.”

  “Cokie likes the sponge effect,” Paul said. “But only when it’s professionally done.”

  “Anything new on that front?” she asked. She had been waiting for Paul to bring it up.

  “We’ve reached détente. She works, I work, the kids do whatever it is they do, and we’re not going to lose the house, for now. But I’m bringing bologna sandwiches to work, and Cokie brings cheese and crackers. She actually clipped a coupon the other day.”

  “You’re lying.”

  “She figures she can afford to go back to the hairdresser if she saves fifty bucks at the grocery store. And she’s putting in a few more hours at the dentist’s office. He says she’s the best receptionist he’s ever had.”