A Watershed Year

by Susan Schoenberger

  But then she noticed he was singing. The words were garbled, but the tune was familiar, and she finally figured out what it was. The song of the White Rabbit from the Disney movie.

  He was pushing bubbles around and molding little mountains, singing the song over and over, or at least syllables that mimicked the song in English. She took a washcloth and rubbed his back before he could protest, discovering that his skin tone was about three shades lighter than she thought. She ran the wet washcloth over his hair stubble, careful not to get any water in his eyes. As the bubbles melted, she could see that the tub water had turned slightly gray.

  With the water draining, Mat climbed out of the bathtub, and she wrapped a big white towel around his tiny body, which had barely enough fat on it to hold him together. She took a risk and whisked him up into her arms, but he cried out, so she put him down again, and he ran out of the bathroom.

  She was picking up towels when he came back in, already dressed in the too-large pajamas she had laid out on the bed. He took her hand and pulled her up and out of the bathroom, half leading, half dragging her toward the television. So she found what looked like a children’s show, propped him up in bed with some pillows, and pulled over the brown armchair to watch him watching the show. Next thing she knew, it was morning, Mat was sleeping soundly, and the TV was still on.

  fourteen

  * * *

  Lucy tried to keep Mat on the doctor’s examining table, but he kept climbing down, crawling under chairs, and finding used tongue depressors. The clinic had the familiarity of all things medical—white walls, white ceiling, metallic instruments, cotton swabs in a clear glass jar—but it startled her to see that patients smoked in the waiting room, and the floor looked as though it hadn’t been cleaned for a week. She had washed Mat’s hands in the small examining-room sink three times before the doctor came in without knocking.

  His English was passable, enough to understand when she asked him to look at the scars.

  “Year or two old.” He shook his head but didn’t seem surprised. “I cannot say for sure, but possibly beating. Could be with belt.”

  She swallowed hard. He was so small, and yet he would have been smaller when he was beaten. Completely helpless. Who could have done this to him? Nothing in her experience could explain the kind of white-hot anger that led to such injuries. But if the scars were a year or two old, they hadn’t been inflicted by anyone at the children’s home. The doctor cleared his throat.

  “Boy is healthy,” he said, signing her forms. Something about the doctor’s face—a trace of freckles, maybe—had made her think of Harlan, and it saddened her, because she couldn’t ask for his advice. Harlan had always found a way to put the world’s ugliness in perspective. She imagined what he would tell her: Don’t dwell on the scars. Move forward. Help Mat feel as safe as possible. And that, she realized, was all she could do.

  THEY MADE their first trip to the US Embassy for Mat’s visa on the morning after the doctor’s appointment. She had checked and rechecked all the documents, and they all seemed to be there, though half of them were in Russian and could only be identified by a number on the top or by the color of the paper. She and Mat waited in a line outside the imposing US Embassy building, all white with gold accents, casting an aura of wealth and privilege.

  She noticed that most of the others in line were men, husbands who had apparently left their wives back at the hotel with their newly adopted children, or facilitators being paid to drop off the paperwork. They all looked exhausted or homesick or just sick, even the Russians. She couldn’t catch anyone’s eye to even start a conversation as the line shuffled toward a large black door that was propped open and guarded by an American soldier.

  Half the bag of lollipops was gone by the time they reached the window, where Lucy passed through her thick stack of documents and was given a ticket to return in the afternoon for the visa interview. It seemed like one of those archaic systems that had been set up decades ago and couldn’t be changed because it had its own momentum.

  Now they had three hours to kill. Enough time, she figured, to get to a place she had always wanted to visit and back.

  IT WAS A SMALL Russian Orthodox church, not one of the spectacular cathedrals in which tourists regularly walked about, gazing upward and bumping into one another. The taxi driver had even shaken his head in disgust when Lucy gave him the address, copied from a 2001 issue of Religion onto a scrap of paper. This part of the city had not been scrubbed and painted for foreign guests; the steps and sidewalks were crumbling as though the concrete had been watered down.

  The facade of the church was missing large swatches of its light blue paint, and the large iron door-pull swung loose as she yanked on it. One determined screw was all that kept it from falling off. She and Mat wandered through the sanctuary, which, unlike the exterior, had been beautifully maintained, all polished wood moldings and sparkling stained glass. Since it was tradition to stand through the service, there were no pews, so she found herself studying the frescoed ceiling. As they neared the altar, she saw the nook she had been seeking to the right. She had a lollipop at the ready, but Mat had become unusually quiet.

  “See that,” she said, pointing to a statue of a woman in a long cloak, her head surrounded by what looked like a sunburst. “That’s Saint Princess Olga.”

  Mat climbed onto the bottom rung of a railing that separated the faithful from the shrine. He stretched out his hand but couldn’t quite reach the votives burning in rows just in front of Olga’s statue. Lucy stood behind him, ready to catch him if he fell.

  “Olga was a real princess who lived about a thousand years ago,” she said, hoping some of the spiritual message, the reverence in her voice, would find its way through. “She married a prince, but he was killed, and years later, she went to a place called Constantinople and visited a church that changed her completely. She became filled with light, and she wanted to spread that light to everyone she met. After that, they say she never got any wrinkles, and her blue eyes sparkled.”

  Mat stepped down from the railing and tugged on her coat, pointing to his open mouth, and she gave him a lollipop. “Holy Olga,” who had a complicated history that included episodes of merciless revenge before her conversion, had always been one of her favorites, and she was hoping this visit would inspire her for the rest of her journey with Mat. But it wasn’t enough to be filled with light, she realized. The coercive power of sugar could not be underestimated.

  Lucy had asked the cab driver to wait outside the church, and she found him there, reading a newspaper. She and Mat rode back to the US Embassy, then bought grilled sausages from a wagon on the street. When it was time for their appointment, she handed over her interview ticket and passport to a guard, who asked to see her driver’s license and then directed them to the second floor.

  Mat was fading. He dragged his feet up the broad staircase and let his monkey bump off each step. At the top of the stairs was a wide hallway with a brocade couch against one wall and a small reception desk manned by a thin young American wearing a white shirt and a red tie with an American flag pin on it. He took their appointment ticket and nodded toward the couch.

  “It’ll just be a few minutes,” he said. “Make yourself comfortable.”

  For some reason, this prompted Mat to throw himself on his stomach and wriggle under the couch with his monkey. He emerged with an unwrapped peppermint hard candy, which he popped into his mouth, dust and all, before Lucy could stop him. She sat down on the couch and rested her head in her hands, exhausted. A few minutes later, the young receptionist directed them to a small office down the hall.

  Lucy had high hopes that they could make it through what was supposed to be a fifteen-minute process. It started out promisingly enough, with their American interviewer—a heavy blond girl with overly large front teeth—beaming at both of them and telling Lucy this was her last week in Moscow before she went home to Illinois. Springfield area. Did Lucy know Illinois? Ever been to Sprin
gfield?

  But then Mat took a small glass giraffe from the woman’s desk and refused to give it back. Lucy tried to trade him for a lollipop, but he made a face and ran out of the office, making her chase him back to the brocade couch. When she brought him back, he threw himself to the ground, and the figurine spun across the floor, the neck breaking cleanly in two. He screamed so loudly that several embassy employees ducked their heads into the office to make sure everything was okay.

  The interviewer looked as if she was counting the hours, already on Illinois time. She flipped through the papers and pulled out the ones Lucy needed to sign, finally handing her the sealed visa package. As Lucy hurried back through the waiting room, she could only be glad she would never see these people again. She could just imagine the interviewer telling the story to her friends at a T.G.I. Friday’s in Springfield.

  THE NIGHT AIR keeps Lucy and Harlan awake as they discuss before and after his diagnosis.

  “I was so much happier before,” he says. “It was bad enough that the whole world convulsed a few weeks ago; now it’s happening to me personally. Even if I’m cured, nothing will be the same. I had this outline, you know, these assumptions about my future. Now I can’t predict anything.”

  “But now you can do something about it. You can treat it.”

  He ignores what she said.

  “Predictability is definitely underrated.”

  He bends down, unties his laces, and kicks his shoes toward a corner of the balcony.

  “What if I can’t do anything?” he says. “What if I die from this?”

  “You won’t die,” she says. “It might be rough going through the treatment, but you have your whole life ahead of you. I really believe that.”

  He rubs his upper arms below the sleeves of his T-shirt, and she hands him the blanket.

  “Thanks,” he says. “I wish I had your outlook.”

  “It’s yours,” she says. “I want you to have it. I insist.”

  “Lucy,” he says. “It doesn’t work that way.”

  He looks at his watch.

  “It’s one in the morning,” he says, peering over the balcony. “Maybe I can climb down.”

  “Don’t even think about it,” she says. “You’ll fall and break your legs.”

  “I don’t really have the energy,” he says. “It’s sad, but now that I know I’m sick, I feel that way.”

  She calls out into the void: “Can anyone hear me? We’re trapped on the balcony.”

  No response.

  She calls again, as loudly as she can. She sees a light flick on for a moment in an apartment on the first floor. But then it goes off. She’s suddenly exhausted, knowing that her bed is yards away but inaccessible. The glass looks too thick to break.

  She looks at the lounge chair, which isn’t wide enough for two people.

  “At least we have the blanket,” she says. “Let’s put the cushions on the ground.”

  At another time, before Harlan’s news, she might have fantasized about such a mishap, a chance to be alone with him, thrown together for warmth. Now it just seems cruel.

  They spread out the cushions and lie down on their sides, draping the blanket over their midsections. It’s a throw, not a full-size blanket, so it only reaches to Harlan’s knees. She lies motionless, afraid to disturb him, but she feels his closeness as a revelation.

  “Do you mind if I…?” Harlan places an arm around her. She tries to relax, to welcome sleep.

  “I’m sorry about the door,” she says. “Try to get some rest.”

  His breathing has already slowed.

  It occurs to her that he never asked the question he had mentioned when he first came over. Advice, he had said, was what he was looking for.

  “Hey, what did you want to ask me about?” she says. But he doesn’t respond except to snore, very softly, in her ear.

  A RESTLESS EVENING passed with Mat driving his red car into the walls of their hotel room and Lucy scouring the phonetic Russian phrase book for words meaning “Get down,” ah-zheesh, “Be careful,” asta-roe-zhna, and “Don’t touch,” nee troe-gee.

  In the morning, they took a cab to the airport for the trip home. They arrived an hour and a half before necessary, but the waiting area was already jammed with carry-ons and strollers and babies and toddlers—mostly adoptive parents just as desperate to get home as she was. She found a small space by the wall and made a little cushion of coats for Mat, who was momentarily interested in the crayons she had found in her bag when digging around for her paperwork to go through customs. She couldn’t remember buying them. Maybe her mother, always thinking ahead, had put them there.

  Another family arrived about a half hour later and propped itself against the same wall.

  “Hi, I’m Lucy,” she said, extending her hand to a harried-looking new mother with a baby girl who looked to be about ten months old and a toddler boy of about three. The father was attempting to read a battered section of the Wall Street Journal, but the three-year-old kept running off to crawl under the seats and take toys out of other people’s bags.

  “That’s not yours,” the father said, prying a wooden train out of the boy’s hand. “Come sit with Daddy.”

  As Lucy wondered to herself why Mat wasn’t doing the same, she turned back to check on him and saw that he was coloring on the airport wall.

  “No, no, no, no, no,” she said. “On the paper, Mat, only on the paper.”

  He answered this by running the crayon over his forearm and attempting to color the bottom of his shoes.

  “I know he can’t understand me, but I keep talking to him anyway,” she said to the woman with the baby. “I guess it’s hard to turn off that need to communicate.”

  “Look, no offense, but I’m not capable of carrying on a conversation,” said the woman, whose baby was now asleep. “I haven’t slept in a week, and I can’t even form a thought much less a sentence.”

  “No, I understand,” she said, and she did, while at the same time feeling humiliated. She glanced around and saw only couples, husbands and wives facing each other like quotation marks around their newly adopted children, defining them. In her noncoupled state, Lucy felt inadequate, defective, the only one in gym class without a partner for the square dance.

  When she turned her attention back to Mat, he had half a crayon in his mouth.

  “Yuck,” she said, pulling it away. “We don’t eat crayons. Here, have a Gummi Worm.”

  She had been saving these for the plane, but her options seemed limited. She could only hope he would sleep through at least part of the eleven-hour flight back to JFK. As he chewed on the Gummi Worm, the enormity of what she had done became suddenly clear. This boy was hers, hers alone, and in the legal sense no different than if she had given birth to him. There was no going back, no matter how ill suited they seemed for each other. And if she screwed this up, Mat would be the one to suffer for the rest of his life.

  She had already considered the minor issues: no more lazy weekend mornings reading the newspaper; no more vintage clothing expeditions; no spontaneous trips to an art gallery or days on end spent researching a saint. And other things: no more frozen dinners for one, no more nights alone at the movies, no more fear of growing old alone. But it had never occurred to her that Mat wouldn’t want to be adopted, that she would have to win him over with something more than his own yellow room.

  What would happen, she wondered, on the day Mat came to her and asked why? Why had his mother died? Why had his father abandoned him? But most terrifying of all, why had she adopted him? What would she say? She could tell him she had always wanted a child. That much was true. But wasn’t it also true that she had been lonely? That it gave her something else to think about besides Harlan?

  She turned to Mat, who had found the bag of Gummi Worms and now had two or three in his mouth, their multicolored tails whipping across his chin as he chewed. The flight attendant had finally announced in Russian and English that it was time to board the pla
ne. Mat, who seemed strangely compliant, stood with her behind two women cradling a baby with all four arms. She wanted to find out who had invented Gummi Worms and have him canonized.

  As they neared the gate, though, Mat appeared to realize that they were at another airport. He tried to run away, yelling something over and over, but she caught him by the coat collar. She wanted to dig her Russian phrase book from her purse, but she couldn’t find it without letting go of him.

  “Can someone tell me what he’s saying?” she yelled.

  A flight attendant in a tight skirt and high heels approached them.

  “He say he wants his car,” the woman said.

  Lucy gripped the flight attendant’s arm with her one free hand before the woman could walk away. “Tell him, please, that his car is too big to fit on the airplane.” She had left it inside the closet at the hotel.

  The flight attendant tried to speak to Mat in Russian, but he was beyond hearing. His face was a vibrant red, and his screaming had bypassed words and become something primal. Lucy wanted to clamp her hand over his mouth—make it stop, just stop, please, please stop—but two hundred passengers were watching. Instead, she picked him up and took him to the farthest corner of the waiting room, where she let him throw himself on the floor and pound it with his little fists. The line moved forward slowly, inevitably, until only a few passengers were left.

  “Are you finished?” she asked, and he responded by spinning on his elbow and kicking the wall. So she picked him up and carried him back to the end of the line as he thrashed against her carry-on and threw his head back at impossible angles.

  “Let’s just get through this, okay?” she said. “I’ll buy you ten of those cars at home if you’ll just let me get through this flight.”

  Though he understood none of it, Mat stopped struggling, probably due more to exhaustion than any attempt at cooperation. He allowed her to carry him onto the plane and fell asleep against her arm as they taxied down the runway, Mat in the window seat and Lucy in the middle, with an unlucky gray-haired man sitting next to her in the aisle seat.