A Watershed Year

by Susan Schoenberger

  “And a glove,” Vern said. “Don’t forget the glove.”

  Her father came forward. She sensed some important shift in their relationship, one in which she had always been the protected child, the one who hadn’t quite grown up. But now she was about to find out what it was like to be rewarded and terrified by parenthood, just as he had been. His hands were jammed in the pockets of his rain jacket. Lucy used to think he kept candy or mints or change in his pockets, but now she realized it was a pose of submission, an acknowledgment of the many things over which he had no control.

  “My little girl, going to get her new son,” he said, his lower lip quivering. “You be safe, sweetheart.”

  “I will, Dad. Don’t worry, okay?”

  “Oh, I’ll worry,” he said, smiling through watery eyes. “But don’t you worry about me worrying.”

  Louis came forward next, putting an arm around her shoulders. She wished, then, that he was coming with her, if only for the company on the long plane flight. But then she would have had to send him home. She couldn’t afford to let Mat see him yet, when their relationship was so new. And in the smallest corner of her mind, she anticipated her own jealousy. She wanted Mat to need her most, couldn’t allow for the possibility that anyone else might bond with him first.

  Yulia emerged from behind a large rectangular pillar, as if she had been waiting for the good-byes to be over but had lost patience.

  “No time to waste,” she said, motioning for Louis to get it over with. “She must go.”

  Louis took Lucy in his arms and kissed her, knocking off the rain hat as everyone else applauded. She flushed as she bent over to pick it up, aware that her entire family was grateful to Louis: for his attention, his persistence, his obvious affection for her. She knew what they were thinking, too: He was young, sure, but wouldn’t they make a nice family when Lucy came back with her little son. And they could certainly have a few kids of their own. A new fantasy to replace the old one.

  “Good-bye, everyone. Thanks for coming to see me off.” Yulia took her arm and led her toward the security gates. “Good-bye.”

  Yulia squeezed her arm a little too hard as they stood in line, and Lucy shook her off. “What’s with the death grip?”

  “Just nervous.”

  “But aren’t you supposed to be reassuring me?”

  Lucy showed the security officer her driver’s license, airline ticket, and visa and began piling her belongings on the conveyer belt. She could still see Yulia, who couldn’t accompany her but appeared to be waiting for a last word.

  “Wish me luck,” she said.

  “Remember,” Yulia called through the gate. “No luck needed. Just cash.”

  Lucy looked around, hoping no one else had heard the invitation to mug her, then strode off down the concourse, relieved to be on her own, responsible—at least in part—for how all this turned out. She shifted her heavy carry-on bag higher onto her shoulder and lifted her chin, striding forward with a surprising degree of fake confidence until she stumbled over a slight ripple in the hideously patterned terminal carpeting. She caught herself, though, and kept going, certain that Harlan would say that fake confidence was better than no confidence at all.

  LUCY FLEW TO JFK in New York and then found her flight on the departures board in the terminal: Delta Flight 62 to Moscow, 5:39 p.m., On Time. She boarded the plane and settled in for the long flight. As they flew over the Atlantic, she watched a movie, ate something that might have been chicken, flipped through the airline magazine, then attempted to sleep in her narrow coach seat, with her raincoat bundled up for a pillow. After an hour, she gave up and remembered that Cokie had stuffed something into her pocket.

  She unrolled the raincoat and found the plastic bag, which contained an eye mask filled with a cooling gel. Feeling ridiculous, she tried it on, adjusted the elastic strap, and eventually relaxed, losing consciousness. When the plane landed in Moscow, she almost felt refreshed. She reset her watch to 11:10 a.m., then stood in the customs line for an hour, where an agent who spoke a little English directed her to the shuttle bus that took her to Vnukovo Airport for the flight to Murmansk.

  With less than an hour before her next flight, she was afraid to wander too far from the gate, so she sat down in the shabby, poorly lighted waiting area, which reminded her of a bus terminal, and ate a granola bar from her carry-on while rereading the information Yulia had given her. The description of her hotel, which touted its “original coziness,” made her smile until she read the descriptions of several other hotels and realized that they all claimed to have “original coziness.” So much for original, and now she had to wonder about the coziness as well.

  Lucy read, for the countless time, the section in her guidebook on Murmansk: population four hundred thousand… on Kola Bay… substantial downtown, several museums… the largest city in the world inside the Arctic Circle. She hoped she had enough warm clothes.

  She reassured herself that the facilitator would be waiting for her at the Murmansk Airport, remembering Saint Anthony of Padua, who helped travelers. She could say nothing in Russian besides do svidaniya, which meant simply good-bye but sounded more dramatic and tinged with finality. Yulia had gone on the Internet and printed out a phonetic phrase guide, which turned out to be from a Web site for mail-order brides. Lucy had looked through the phrases on the plane and wondered about the desperate American men who found it useful to say things in Russian like “I thank my destiny for sending you to me,” “My sincere greetings and best wishes!” or “Fly to me on wings of love.”

  Three hours later, after a nauseatingly rough flight, she landed in Murmansk. At takeoff, she had been reasonably sure someone would be there to meet her, but the bumps and vibrations had shaken the odds in her mind down to about fifty-fifty. She was the last in line to exit the cabin because everyone around her had unbuckled their seat belts and started unloading luggage from the overhead compartments as the plane was still taxiing toward the gate. When she stepped off the plane, her legs shaking, she spotted a rectangular piece of gray cardboard that said “Lucy McVie,” held by a short, stocky, balding man who was scanning the faces of the passengers. She lugged her carry-on over to him.

  “I’m Lucy McVie,” she said, extending her hand.

  “Zdravstvujte, hello,” he said, ignoring her hand. “Yes, I wait for you, Lucy McVie. I am Lesta Petrovich, facilitator for Yulia Doletskaya.”

  “Lester?” she said.

  “Les-TA,” he said, emphasizing the second syllable. “And this is what you may call me.”

  “Got it,” she said, relieved that she would be able to communicate with at least one person in this vast country with its unfamiliar alphabet. Following Lesta closely through the dim terminal—which smelled like an ashtray—Lucy feared that he might turn a corner and leave her alone in the maze of hallways. The last flight had left her feeling slightly dizzy, as though she had just stepped off an amusement park ride.

  Lesta found a cart for her baggage, and they waited with the other passengers for a half hour at what Lucy presumed was the baggage area, until someone became impatient and opened a door that led directly onto the tarmac. All the passengers trooped outside to haul their luggage from a little train that had been abandoned a few hundred feet from the terminal. Lucy pointed to a large green suitcase, and Lesta crawled over the others to retrieve it. It took them another twenty minutes to find her smaller blue duffel bag, which was buried under a mound of flattened cardboard boxes in the last car.

  Outside the terminal, the sky was almost indistinguishable from the murky gray inside the building. Lesta stored her luggage in the back of a battered blue sedan and held the passenger door open for her.

  “You must be very tired, Lucy McVie,” he said. “I take to hotel, and tomorrow we pick up paperwork.”

  “When will I go to the children’s home?” she said, gripping the car door as Lesta drove through the airport, one hand on the wheel, the other holding a cigarette, swerving around cars st
opped in the middle of the road. She felt around for a seat belt but couldn’t find one.

  “We call and set appointment,” he said. “Tomorrow or day after.”

  In the time it took to drive from the airport to the hotel, about thirty minutes, Lesta gave her a short history lesson on Murmansk.

  “You see the hills—here we say sopki—very different for Russian city, like your San Francisco, eh? In the ports, we have Northern Fleet and many nuclear-powered icebreakers. Outside city, we have Alyosha, giant concrete soldier built to celebrate hero of Great Patriotic War, who blew up Nazis and himself, too, with grenade. We also have beautiful St. Nicholas Church. Government made plans to tear down, but then we have perestroika—you know this word?—and church was saved.”

  After another few minutes of swerving around bicyclists, pedestrians, other cars, and various bits of debris in the streets, Lesta pulled up to the Best Eastern Arktika hotel. It was a white modern-looking building in the shape of a wedge of cheese. Lesta helped Lucy bring her bags into the lobby, which looked less promising than the exterior, with worn carpeting and a few uncomfortable-looking chairs. Still, it wasn’t too expensive, and the Web site had mentioned a bar, a beauty salon, a coffee shop, a currency exchange, a gift shop, a restaurant, and a sauna. Lesta took her to the front desk to check her in.

  “Here is your key,” Lesta said, smiling. “Get some rest, and tomorrow I pick you up in lobby at nine. Restaurant is terrible, but you find something.”

  “Do you really have to go?” Lucy said, feeling suddenly very fond of Lesta, with his head the shape of a volleyball and his matching volleyball paunch. He had straight teeth with the exception of one canine that was turned sideways, and her eyes were pulled to the imperfection. She realized he wasn’t as old as she had originally thought, just prematurely bald. “Let’s get a cup of coffee.”

  “I’m sorry, Lucy McVie,” he said. “I must get home. Wife is waiting.”

  “Just call me Lucy.”

  “Okay, Lucy McVie,” he said. “Be in lobby at nine.”

  She went to her room, which was a double in standard, overused Holiday Inn decor—no sign of Original Coziness. She had requested a nonsmoking room, but everything, including the bathroom towels, smelled of smoke. She took a bath in the surprisingly large tub and changed into her nightgown. Then she made an attempt to call home through the room phone but gave up when she kept getting recordings in Russian. Her cell phone had no service.

  She had no one to talk to, nothing to read that she hadn’t already read twice on the plane, so she finally fell asleep out of sheer boredom. It was ten o’clock when she woke up, eerily alert. She paced the room, turned on the television, and watched ten minutes of Seinfeld in Russian, then she put on jeans and a sweater, thinking a glass of wine might help.

  The lobby was empty except for a couple waiting at the front desk with two sleeping children draped over their shoulders like sacks of grain. Lucy found the dark-paneled lounge behind double doors of etched glass and sat down on a stool at the bar. A singer in a purple-sequined head wrap crooned Russian ballads into a microphone, with a single keyboard player behind her.

  The ten or twelve other people in the bar didn’t seem to notice her, and neither did the bartender, who was watching the singer. Lucy—who could be struck with ordering anxiety at McDonald’s—had no idea how to get his attention without seeming rude, so she sat there self-consciously, until a slender middle-aged man with dark skin and a goatee sat down next to her.

  “Hello,” he said, extending his hand. “Calvin Olmstead. I’m gonna take a wild stab and guess that you’re here to adopt.”

  “How did you know?” she said.

  “First day?” Calvin asked. “You have that glazed look, that jet-lagged, can’t-fall-asleep-but-I’m-exhausted kind of look. Don’t worry, it gets worse.”

  “Worse?” she said.

  “Well, it might. I meet a lot of folks like you.”

  “Do you actually live here?”

  “I’m a tap-dance instructor. Remember White Nights with Mikhail Baryshnikov? They think I’m Gregory Hines or some crazy thing. I came over here with a production of Tap in 1997 and came back in 1998. Been here ever since. And they love me. I could teach seven days a week if I wanted to. Every housewife in Murmansk signs up for my classes.”

  Lucy kept nodding, wishing the bartender would look her way. She caught Calvin’s words in snatches, intermingled with the purple-sequined singer’s Russian ballad.

  “… one toe-ball-change away from Broadway, I swear, and then this kid named Savion Glover comes along, bringing in da noise and da funk, and I’m done. Over. Yesterday’s news…”

  “Davay nikag-da ne ras-ta-vat-sya.”

  “… so when I came back, the recreation director in Murmansk was like, ‘Calvin, whatever you need,’ and I was like, ‘Yeah, who needs that, traveling shows and bit parts, tapping till your feet fall off.’”

  “Kak mee zshi-li drug bez dru-ga vse e-ti go-dee.”

  “And they love me here. They like old school, Gregory Hines. Hey, let’s drink to Gregory Hines,” Calvin said, looking for the bartender, who was watching the singer.

  “To Gregory Hines,” Lucy said, though Calvin wasn’t listening, and she had no drink to lift.

  The audience applauded politely as the singer finished and her keyboardist began to pack up his equipment. Lucy turned around to say good night to Calvin, but he was gone. She walked back to the elevator and stared through the lobby windows. It had to be close to midnight, but the sky had only dimmed a bit, as though it were dusk.

  She looked at her watch, disoriented, until she remembered how close she was to the North Pole. Like Alaska. Land of the Midnight Sun. When she finally found her room again, she pulled the heavy curtains closed, collapsed on the bed in her clothes, and didn’t wake up until morning, when she had about fifteen minutes to wash her face, brush her hair, change her clothes, and run down to the lobby to meet Lesta, her stomach still empty.

  HARLAN LOOKS at Lucy and sighs as it becomes clear that they are stuck on the balcony for the night.

  “I haven’t told my mother yet,” he says, as though this has been on his mind. “She hasn’t been the same since my father died twenty years ago. Once I left for college, she bought a bunch of sweat suits and moved to Florida and let her hair go gray. She just sits around her little complex with the other widows, acting way older than she is.”

  Lucy thinks he must be exaggerating.

  “She must have been a good mother, though, because look at you. You turned out fine.”

  “A pleasure to have in class.”

  “Of course you were.”

  “I wonder what happened to all those report cards.”

  Lucy thinks of the large trunk in her mother and father’s room, stuffed with her and Paul’s report cards and art projects and posters on the four basic food groups. Her past is almost too well preserved.

  “I don’t know how to tell her I’m sick,” Harlan says. “I’m afraid she’ll cry.”

  “I’d be surprised if she didn’t cry.”

  “But that’s what I remember most about my dad’s death. She came home from the hospital and sobbed and wailed and screamed. It was pitiful. I couldn’t sleep until they sedated her.”

  “That must have been awful for you.”

  “You have no idea.”

  And she didn’t. In her experience, a mother puts her own needs after the needs of her children. A mother skips her annual trip to Atlantic City so she can watch her daughter’s math team compete in the state finals. A mother lets her daughter borrow her new shoes for the high-school concert, shoes right out of the box. A mother on a diet sits with her daughter and eats a pint of ice cream when her daughter’s college boyfriend dumps her.

  “My parents would adopt you,” she says, trying to make him laugh. “I’ll have them call a lawyer tomorrow.”

  He smiles at her, but without mirth. The shadows under his eyes look deeper and darke
r in the yellow haze of the lights from the apartment parking lot.

  “I want this to go away,” he says, closing his eyes. “I want to go to sleep and then wake up and shudder because I had a terrible nightmare. That’s what I want.”

  “That’s what I want, too.”

  LUCY DIDN’T SEE Lesta in the lobby, so she ducked into the coffee shop and pointed to the coffeepot, sizing up the cup with her hands. The clerk handed her the coffee and took the five-dollar bill she left on the counter, smiling at her in a way that made her realize she should exchange some of her dollars for rubles. She was about to find the money exchange in the lobby when Lesta walked in the front door.

  “Good morning, Lucy McVie,” he said. “Big day for you.”

  “I hope so,” she said, putting her wallet back into her purse. “What’s first?”

  “We go to Department of Education; then we set up appointment at children’s home, maybe for today. Would this be fortunate?”

  “Yes, very fortunate,” she said. “Do I look okay? I didn’t sleep well last night.”

  “Lucy McVie, you look fine. Nice shoes,” Lesta said, looking at Lucy’s plain black boots. Under her black winter coat, she was wearing a long vintage skirt with a muted flowered print and a white blouse, an outfit she had long ago picked out for her first meeting with Mat. They were conservative clothes, clothes a preschool teacher might have worn, meant to convey only one thing: trust me.

  She took a sip of her coffee and asked Lesta if they could stop somewhere for a quick breakfast.

  “You like Egg McMuffin?”

  “I thought maybe something more Russian. What did you have this morning?”

  “Cottage cheese and a little Cocoa Puffs.”

  “An Egg McMuffin sounds great.”

  Lesta swung through the McDonald’s drive-through, ordered for Lucy, then continued on to the Department of Education, a gray institutional building that reminded her of the federal building in Baltimore, a bureaucratic monolith. The downtown of Murmansk, plastered with signs she couldn’t even begin to decipher, had a few tall buildings and, above those, in the hills, street after street of what looked like identical apartment complexes.