A Watershed Year

by Susan Schoenberger

  Trees, she noticed as they walked from the parking lot to the education building, were a rare commodity. Efforts had been made, obviously in the recent past, to paint some of the downtown buildings in painfully bright colors—gaudy yellows, oranges, and blues. But a dark-gray soot covered most of the other buildings, continually replenished with exhaust from the flimsy-looking cars that darted between potholes and around pedestrians like insects.

  A half hour later, they emerged from the Department of Education building with their paperwork stamped and an appointment to see Mat that afternoon. Lesta had asked her for a hundred dollars to give to the clerk, which apparently went into the clerk’s pocket. But Lucy wasn’t about to complain if it got her closer to taking Mat home. She’d hand out hundred-dollar bills to everyone she met on the street if that’s what it took. She felt a cold sweat break out on her forehead, all the hours of anxiety and anticipation merging into a feverish peak. This would be the day she would meet her son, hear his voice, maybe even hold him and feel the warmth of his breath. She felt a sudden panic, remembering that her gifts for the children’s home and her list of medical questions were back at the hotel.

  “Do we have enough time to go back so I can get a few things?” she asked Lesta.

  “Certainly, Lucy McVie. And when papers are signed, we celebrate. My wife to make chicken Kiev.”

  Lucy nodded and smiled, though her stomach was a little upset from driving around in Lesta’s smoky sedan. He dropped her off at the hotel, and she ran inside, determined to call home before she had to dash out again. The hotel clerk seemed to understand the string of numbers she wrote on a piece of paper and placed the call to Rosalee and Bertie, handing her the desk phone and adding a note to her bill. She had expected to hear her mother’s voice, but instead she got the answering machine and had to leave a message.

  “Hi, it’s Lucy. I’m here, everything’s going like clockwork, and I’m going to meet Mat this afternoon. Wish I could hear your voices. I love you… Bye.”

  A surge of adrenalin propelled her up the stairs to the sixth floor; she was too impatient to wait for the elevator. She made a circuit of the room, stowing presents in an extra duffel bag she had brought and stuffing envelopes and a notebook in her purse. In fifteen minutes, she was ready and had to force herself to sit down to wait another half hour until Lesta was due to arrive. It was all too much.

  Lucy closed her eyes and thought again of the ecumenical Saint Julian of Norwich—All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well—who had written in the fourteenth century that God’s mystery was found in one’s self, in the depths of one’s soul. Julian—who technically wasn’t a saint because she had never been canonized—had had a famous vision in which Jesus put a hazelnut in her hand. “What is it?” she had asked, and he had responded, “It is all that is made.”

  The hazelnut. It was almost Lucy’s. In that moment, the weight of her grief came to rest on her shoulders, which still ached from flying overnight in coach. It had been six months since Harlan’s death, a time during which she had plumbed depths she never thought possible. But it was also when her watershed year had started—the year in which life would either flow uneventfully toward flat waters or rush joyously down a mountain stream—and she had found God’s mystery in the photo of a small Russian boy.

  It was a time during which she had waded in and out of grief and connected with a man who wouldn’t let her reject him, no matter how confused she seemed. It was a time during which her Nana Mavis had died, pushing her mother into the matriarch role, aging her in ways that were sad but inevitable. It was a time in which her brother had been humbled and in which Cokie, losing it, had turned to her—of all people. It was a time she had, for once, put just about everything else ahead of her job, and might end up regretting it. It was the time Harlan—in his own unique way—had come back to her again.

  She stopped in the bathroom, wiped her eyes with a piece of scratchy toilet paper, then took her duffel bag to the lobby to wait for Lesta. She was too nervous to eat anything, but she exchanged fifty dollars into rubles. She flipped through a magazine, checking the clock every few minutes, and heard what sounded like a dance class coming from the hotel ballroom. The staccato racket of metal on wood—it had to be Calvin and his Murmansk housewives—was almost unbearable. She paced the lobby, wondering if she would ever be able to find the children’s home on her own. Then Lesta walked in.

  “Lucy McVie, my apologies,” he said, waving his hand. “Traffic.”

  “Lesta,” she said. “You’re here. I was going nuts.”

  “Nuts,” he said, twirling a finger near his head. “I know this expression. In Russia we say, ‘Your roof is sliding.’”

  “I can’t wait another second.”

  “Of course, Lucy McVie. We go.”

  On the way to the home, she had to open the window and lean out to prevent herself from fainting. She had no reserves, her nerve endings like electrical wires scraped bare of their protective coatings. She took deep breaths of the smoggy air and tried to pull herself together, for Mat’s sake. A four-year-old would have no sympathy for her distress.

  When Lesta stopped the car, Lucy saw that the children’s home was just another institutional building on the edge of town. She saw no playground or bright colors, just another gray box with a small sign on the front. On the way over, Lesta had explained that children under four were kept in dom rebyonka, or baby homes.

  Mat had been in a baby home briefly but went to this detsky dom when he turned four in March. Children who weren’t adopted would stay at the detsky dom until seven, after which they would move to a home that would care for them and educate them up to the age of seventeen. Some of these homes had their own schools, and others sent the orphans to outside schools. Growing up in an orphanage was a social stigma in Russia, Lesta said, confirming what Yulia had told her.

  “We Russians, you must understand, we like to suffer. It gives us something to complain about,” Lesta said. “But children… left here… It makes me glad to think they go to better place.”

  Lesta carried her duffel bag to the front door. He rang the bell, and a woman in cleaning clothes opened the door, waving them into a dark entryway. The foyer, devoid of furniture and painted a bland off-white, smelled like vegetable soup. The floor was covered in green-and-white linoleum squares that Lucy could have sworn were identical to the ones in her elementary school back in the seventies.

  When the director finally emerged, she greeted Lucy with a stiff nod. Her graying hair was cut close to her head, and she wore the kind of narrow black skirt that said she didn’t sit on the floor with the children. With her excellent posture, she was a good head taller than Lucy, who could tell she liked being in charge. She said something in Russian to Lesta, who translated.

  “This is director Zoya Nikolayevna Minsky. She say Azamat is sleeping now,” he said, looking upset. “Best for us to come back in morning.”

  twelve

  * * *

  Lucy couldn’t wait another day. She was here, doors away from Mat, wearing her white blouse and her trustworthy skirt. She had come all this way. Telling her to come back in the morning was like telling her to stop breathing. But Lesta shook his head, not even translating, as if to say, “Don’t bother.”

  “Couldn’t I just take a peek at him while he’s sleeping? I promise not to wake him. Or we could wait until he’s finished his nap.”

  Lesta translated this to Mrs. Minsky, who blew through her lips like a horse, which needed no translation. But as Lucy was gathering her things to go, the woman seemed to relent, pulling Lesta aside and speaking to him in a low voice.

  Lesta touched Lucy’s arm. “You peek. She say okay.”

  Mrs. Minsky led them down a long corridor, past a playroom for the children with a few toys and books on open shelves, and then opened the door to a spare dormitory with eight cots. The shades were drawn. All the children slept silently. She pointed to a boy with a bl
ue wool blanket pulled up to his chin. Lucy took a wide step to an area rug on the linoleum to muffle her footsteps. She walked over to the cot and knelt down beside it, her heartbeat quickening as though she had just run a mile.

  He was small; she noticed that right away. Certainly smaller than most American four-year-olds. The light-brown hair she had seen in the photograph had been shaved down to a short stubble on his round little head. His full lips were open, and he breathed softly through his mouth, slowly, deeply. As her eyes adjusted to the light, she could see the tiny veins that ran across his eyelids, the eyes moving slightly underneath as though he were watching her from inside a dream. He had a scrape, about a half-inch long, on the left side of his nose. His ear, the one she could see, was perfect and so lovely that she almost couldn’t stop herself from touching it. This was the child in which she had invested so much, the one whose picture had allowed her to forget her grief for small, healing moments.

  The hazelnut. All that is made.

  She wanted him to stir, to open his eyes and see her there, devoted to him. She willed him to wake up, but he slept on, immobile. After several minutes, Lesta touched her on the shoulder and nodded toward the door. Only then did she become fully and guiltily aware of the seven other little boys breathing softly under their blankets. Would others come to kneel by their cots? Who decided, she wondered, which child went and which child stayed? Was there a complicated rubric, or did someone simply choose at random to send one child off to parts unknown while his little friends ate vegetable soup until they were seventeen?

  Back in the spartan foyer, Lucy made another plea to wait until Mat woke up.

  “But that would not be possible,” Lesta translated, “because they have a lesson, then dinner, then bath time, then bed. There is no time for visiting.”

  “Then why did she make this appointment in the first place?” Lucy asked, but Lesta only shrugged. Lucy stood with her arms folded, trying to convey her frustration through facial expressions, which were completely inadequate. Then she saw, very suddenly, that this was a test, that the director was putting her in an awkward position to see how she would react. The director was directing, and it was her play. Lucy was an out-of-work actor brought on the scene to make a plot point. She could be replaced, or the scene could be cut altogether.

  She picked up her duffel bag and smiled at Mrs. Minsky, who nodded in response.

  “I’m looking forward to seeing Mat tomorrow,” she said.

  Lesta translated, and they left.

  LUCY SAT AT THE HOTEL BAR with a glass of red wine that night and told her troubles to Calvin, who proved to be a surprisingly good listener.

  “So she makes this appointment and then won’t let me see him when we get there,” she said. “I finally talked her into letting me peek at him while he was asleep. So I do know he exists. That’s one worry to check off.”

  “Sounds like they’re giving you the business.”

  “Let’s just say his adoption may be a little unconventional.”

  “Hey, that don’t surprise me. Nothing’s conventional here. It’s all about the back door and the cash. Russians love to stick it to Americans. Payback for the Cold War, one sucker at a time.”

  “Well, if she doesn’t let me see him tomorrow…”

  She couldn’t finish the sentence because she realized she had no recourse. The only person who might take pity on her was Lesta, but she wasn’t sure how far he could push her case. She got the impression that he just followed orders.

  “Hey, have some of these,” Calvin said, pushing over a plate of pierogi. “Heavy food interferes with my dancing.”

  Lucy took a bite of the pierogi, which held some kind of bland potato-like filling. She hadn’t been impressed with Russian cuisine, what little she had seen of it. They all seemed to subsist on tea and cigarettes anyway, looking down their narrow noses at anything as prosaic as nutrition.

  “So what are you gonna do?” Calvin asked, downing the last of his beer.

  “I don’t know,” Lucy said. “I think I’ll just say a few prayers and hope for the best.”

  “You religious and all? Well, put me down for a prayer or two. I could use the help.”

  Lucy laughed and ordered another glass of wine. She seemed to be living some parallel version of her life in which she sat in bars and drank with strangers. She found the company completely benign, just other lonely people looking for a laugh or a sympathetic ear. Why had no one told her that bars didn’t have to be about getting picked up? And for what perverse reason had she discovered this on the eve of becoming a mother? Somehow she felt less sad about Harlan here, as if he, too, were off in some foreign country and would return with amusing stories about the price of bottled water.

  Calvin, meanwhile, had called over a friend, another expatriate who had chucked an American nightmare for a Russian one. He was a ship’s cook who had docked in Murmansk a few summers ago and decided to stay, picking up jobs in hotels and restaurants between ships. He reminded Lucy of a pug—a broad face with an underbite, all rolls and ripples underneath a straining sweatshirt, yet somehow sweet and unthreatening.

  “Here’s how I see it,” the cook said, settling himself on a bar stool next to Lucy and taking a sip of his Budweiser. “Your haves in America got nothin’ to complain about. Great health care, decent schools, five hundred channels, and pay-per-view to boot. But your have-nots? Not only do they miss out on the health care and the schools and the five hundred channels, but they have to look at it every day.

  “Walk down the street and see the Hummers you can’t have and the big house you can’t have and the doggy bakery selling pastries you can’t afford. I mean, when dogs are eating birthday cakes, there’s something wrong with the values. The values, man. In Murmansk, we’re all in the same boat together, am I right, Calvin?”

  “Absolutely,” Calvin said, clicking his second beer against the cook’s bottle. “But you know what I miss?”

  “What?” Lucy said, having no idea what a tap-dance instructor would miss most about the country of his birth.

  “Toast,” Calvin said. “Ain’t no regular toasters here; everything’s grilled or fried. Just give me a nice piece of toast. Whole wheat with a little butter on top.”

  Lucy left Calvin and the ship’s cook to their discussion of toasters versus toaster ovens and went upstairs. They were right, of course. America seemed even more confused in the new millennium than it had when she was growing up. And yet, for the most part, its people had good intentions. They liked to see themselves as the benevolent hosts of the planet, mediating disputes and only bringing down the hammer when they had no choice.

  She climbed into bed and tried to remember the features of Mat’s little face, which had already blurred in the course of a few hours. The resistance she had seen in his photo hadn’t been there as he lay sleeping. She hoped he would welcome her, couldn’t wait to find out if her own good intentions—or foolishness or blind faith or wishful thinking—would be rewarded.

  AFTER A QUICK BREAKFAST at the hotel café, Lucy asked the hotel desk clerk to call Louis as she waited for Lesta in the lobby. It would have been one in the morning in Baltimore, she calculated, but she had remembered at breakfast that she had never dropped her article off to the dean. She had forgotten about it in the rush to arrange her trip, and she wasn’t sure exactly when she would be back. Louis answered the phone after three rings.

  “Hello?”

  “Louis? It’s me. I’m sorry to call so late. I’m waiting for a ride over to the orphanage to meet Mat. We went yesterday, but he was sleeping. I did get to peek at him though, and he’s exactly how I imagined him from the picture. Only smaller. I can’t wait to see what he’s like when he’s awake.”

  “It’s so nice to hear your voice.” He yawned. “Sorry, I’m a little sleepy. I guess I passed out while I was reading. So when do you bring him home?”

  “A few days, or maybe a week. I’m not sure. I’m worried, though. The director of the
children’s home wasn’t exactly friendly when I met her yesterday. But he’ll like me, right? Is there any reason he wouldn’t like me?”

  She hadn’t intended to seek out comfort so blatantly, but now that her questions were out there, hovering across the Atlantic, Louis did what was required.

  “Of course, he’ll like you, Lucy; he’ll love you. It’s all gonna work out fine. Trust me.”

  The desk clerk glanced at her and looked at his watch. This phone call would probably cost another hundred dollars.

  “So call my mom, okay, because I couldn’t talk to her the other day, and I had to leave a message.”

  “I will.”

  “Oh, and I forgot to drop off my article to the dean. It’s rough, but I’m hoping I can smooth it out and send it off to a journal when I get back. Would you go to my house—the key’s under the plastic frog on the front porch—and bring it over to his office? It should be on my desk, right next to the computer.”

  “I’ll take care of it. I promise,” Louis said.

  “Thank you. I can’t believe I forgot about the paper. Yulia had me in a panic before I left.”

  “Lucy?”

  “What?”

  “I miss you. I wish I could—”

  “I have to go,” she whispered, because the clerk was looking her way again, as if she had tied up the phone too long. “I miss you, too. Bye.”

  And she did miss him, missed the comfort of lying next to him, his skin keeping hers warm, missed being part of a pair. But then Lesta showed up, grinning broadly, and she was back in the parallel universe. She found herself smiling, too, as she marveled at the circumstances that brought them together.

  If Lesta had been American, he would have been one of those people who blended into the crush of humanity for her—a middle-aged married man with neither the looks nor the education to stand out in any crowd. She couldn’t think of many situations in which they might become friends, have a beer together, go see a movie, discuss politics. But here, Lesta was more than just her candle in the darkness; he was the light itself. He could make her happy just by smiling.