“Thank you,” she whispered to the patron of acute embarrassment, whoever that might be.
Lucy was still calming down an hour later when Mat woke up, refreshed and ready to begin wandering the aisle for trips to the bathroom, any one of which might actually be necessary. The bathroom trips were what she dreaded most, because Mat, unstrapped from his seat, was like a pinball launched into a maze of seats and flight attendants and drink carts and luggage. He seemed determined to bounce off all of them.
FLYING WITH A SMALL CHILD, Lucy discovered, was a perversion of physics, because time actually slowed down, moving at about one-fourth its usual pace. The flight seemed to take several days, interrupted only by small breaks when Mat would collapse into sleep, only to be awakened an hour later by engine noise or the screaming of another child.
When they landed in New York, she was covered with juice and chocolate stains, her clothes felt rough on her skin, her hair had escaped its ponytail holder and was frizzing around her head like some kind of novelty fright wig, and she was close to fainting from lack of food and water. Mat refused to hold her hand as they stumbled down the corridor to the gate.
Throughout the flight, she had been sustained by the image of emerging from the gate to find her family waiting for her, ready to shoulder her overstuffed bag and surround Mat with their inescapable love, a parachute of love that would descend on his unsuspecting head. But she had been dreaming in pre-September 11 time, and no one without a ticket was allowed at the gate.
She would have to take Mat through immigration by herself and bring her luggage through customs, with her parents waiting for what might be hours. She could only be glad that Louis wouldn’t be with them, although he had offered. She needed time to remake, remold, wash and dress, and repair the damage.
The immigration process was surprisingly smooth, and they made it through, with Mat’s passport stamped, in less than thirty minutes. Then she found a spot near the conveyor belt at baggage claim and waited as the minutes ticked by and nothing emerged from the fringed opening that separated the knowing from the unknowing. They had been at the airport for at least forty minutes. She felt dizzy and wondered if she could justify sitting on the ground when a woman yelled in her direction, “Excuse me, ma’am, is this your child?”
Mat had climbed to the top of the line of handcarts waiting in locked positions for the right number of quarters to release them. He was sitting in the wire basket on a cart at the front end on the row. Lucy ran over, paid for the cart, and pulled it out, then wheeled him back to where she had left her carry-on.
“You know,” an older woman with carnation pink lipstick observed, “you really shouldn’t leave your bag like that. Anyone could take it.”
Lucy had almost nothing left, just a shallow well of shame to berate herself for losing track of the one thing she would always—always—have to remember. Mat dug around in the carry-on, probably looking for some candy, as the conveyor belt finally roared to life and began spitting out luggage that looked as if it had traveled halfway across the world and back again, kicked and abused the entire way. She grabbed her large green suitcase off the belt—she barely had enough strength to pull it upright—and found her smaller duffel bag a few minutes later. She went through customs in a daze.
“Now let’s get out of here,” she said, aiming her rented luggage cart at a set of automatic double doors. American airports might have their flaws, she thought, but you could almost always count on the doors to fly open as soon as you approached them. Outside, she saw her mother—her blessed, blessed mother—jumping and waving, her bosom bobbing, in front of Bertie’s double-parked car. Lucy turned the cart in their direction as Mat began climbing out of his seat.
“No, Mat,” she said. “Just a couple more feet. Please don’t get out.”
“There’s my grandson,” Rosalee told the general population of the pickup area. “My beautiful little grandson.”
Rosalee ran toward them, her arms outstretched, and tried to give Mat a kiss on the cheek. He released a scream that rivaled the planes taking off on the runway.
“He really doesn’t like to be touched,” Lucy said. “It’ll take some time.”
Rosalee nodded, then stared at her. “What on earth? You look awful. Just awful. Are you sick?”
“I don’t think so… just incredibly tired,” she said, glancing at her reflection in the terminal windows. The vaguely familiar person looking back was teetering as though she might collapse. She had a flashback to the night Harlan told her about his diagnosis, describing his loss of consciousness. She was there with him, suddenly, watching television coverage of the planes hitting the twin towers, over and over, until the signal was interrupted. A solid wall of static filled the screen, and then she was inside it, unable to move, surrounded by a wordless scramble of light and noise.
“Come on, baby,” her mother said, helping her into the car. “Let’s get you home.”
fifteen
* * *
When Lucy woke up, twenty-four hours had passed since the plane landed. She was in her parents’ bed, wearing one of her mother’s voluminous nightgowns. She wandered dizzily into the kitchen, where Mat was sitting at the table eating a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich and drinking a glass of milk.
“Ma,” she said, pushing hair out of her face. “I’m not sure he can eat peanut butter.”
“Oh, please,” she said. “He’s fine.”
“But he might have an allergy.”
“He’s already had three of those,” Rosalee said, wiping some jelly off Mat’s face with a wet paper towel. “We thought you’d never wake up.”
“I feel like a train hit me,” she said.
“Go take a shower. He’s just taking a break from playing with his new toys.”
“So the fabled mountain exists.”
“He’s been riding around the basement with his new tricycle. I can’t understand his Russian, but I bought a phrase book, and he seems to understand me.”
Lucy nodded and wandered to the bathroom, hoping the hot water from the shower would wash away her confusion. Could it be this easy? Did she lack some essential mothering instinct or display some deficiency Mat could sense, or was it just the mountain of toys? She stood under the showerhead, letting the water tamp down her overwrought hair, finding it hard to believe she had ever been in Russia, ever met a saint named Lesta, ever sat through the longest plane flight in history. Her mother leaned in through the bathroom door.
“Louis called. He’s very anxious to talk to you.”
“Thanks, Ma,” Lucy yelled through the steam. She wasn’t ready to face Louis. Their relationship was so new, so fragile, that it seemed certain to change radically with Mat in the picture. They would either break up or become an old married couple raising their adopted son. She couldn’t think of any alternatives. When the water began to lose its heat, she finally emerged, wrapping herself in a pink towel. The door opened and Mat walked in, wearing a pair of shorts she had never seen before. He made his way to the toilet as if she wasn’t there.
He used the toilet and flushed it. Then he turned around, reached up, and flicked the light switch on and off a few times without any expression on his face, then left.
“But you need to wash your hands,” she yelled out the door in time to see his little head bobbing down the stairs to the basement.
A half hour later, dried and dressed in clothes that sagged as if her shoulders were the points of a hanger, Lucy discovered the true meaning of a mountain of toys. The basement rec room was filled with them, some still in wrapping paper, and Rosalee had draped the low-hung beams with streamers and wrapped them around the center basement pole. Mat was squatting near a collection of Matchbox cars lined up in a perfect row, and her father was lying on his side, belly resting on the floor. Mat would take a car and run it over Bertie’s belly as if it was going over a hill, then line it back up. Her mother, on her knees collecting wrapping paper, put a free hand on Mat’s head. He looked up a
nd smiled.
“You realize he thinks he’s staying here,” Lucy said.
“We’ll deal with that when the time comes,” Rosalee said.
“But I don’t have a basement full of toys.”
“Well, take some of these or go shopping. Little boys need toys. That’s all I know.”
Lucy sat down on the floor with an old-fashioned wooden toy and began pounding pegs with a small mallet. Mat came over and grabbed the mallet.
“Mah-yee.”
“That means ‘mine,’” Rosalee told her.
Lucy nodded and went upstairs to call Louis, feeling the need to speak to someone who actually wanted to speak to her. She dialed his home number.
“Hello,” he said urgently, as if he’d been waiting for the phone to ring.
“Hi, it’s Lucy,” she said, unable to mask the fatigue in her voice. “I’m back.”
“Are you okay?” he said, clearly worried. “You don’t sound like yourself.”
“I don’t think I slept more than a few hours the whole time I was gone. You know how you feel when you’re just starting to come down with something terrible? This is like that, only without the vomiting.”
“So when are you coming back to campus?”
“I think I need to stay with my parents for a couple days, let my mom help with Mat. He needs some time to adjust.”
“A little rascal, eh? Well, don’t worry about your article. I took care of it. I miss you, Lucy.”
“I miss you, too,” she said. The words felt strange, as though someone else were saying them. “But this won’t be easy.”
“What won’t be easy?”
“The transition. Having to be a mom all the time, and trying to get my work done, and…”
“I get it. I’m okay about it. Really,” he said, and though his words said one thing, she heard another.
“I’m not sure you sound okay.”
“I’m not much more mature than a four-year-old.”
Rosalee yelled from the basement for Lucy to come watch Mat use his new mini-trampoline.
“Gotta go.”
“Call me tomorrow.”
“I will. Bye.”
She hung up and returned to the basement to watch Mat jumping, literally, for joy.
THE HAGIOGRAPHERS were extremely annoyed. Lucy had missed a series of increasingly frantic e-mails from the Hagiography Society, asking if she could sit on a panel at the society’s annual meeting. The last one—from someone given the task of submitting a printed program—was a keeper:
You could be in Antarctica and still check your e-mails once in a while. If you’re not dead, you must be in a coma. If, and only if, you are dead, I apologize.
Lucy could have taken her laptop to Murmansk, but there had been too much to carry. So now her academic colleagues, of whom there were scant few around the world, were fed up with her. On top of that, her mother kept hinting that Lucy needed to bond with Mat more closely before she could take him back to her duplex. Louis kept calling, asking why she wouldn’t let him visit, and she hadn’t returned calls from Yulia, Angela, Paul, or Cokie. She was stuck in some sort of netherworld, webs of obligation crisscrossing so effectively that she couldn’t move at all. This went on for several more days—Lucy moving slowly around the house in her mother’s bathrobe—until Mat finally cut through all the angst. He started asking about his father.
“He keeps saying something,” Rosalee told Lucy at breakfast. “Sounds like pa-pa or pap-ya.”
Lucy flipped through the phrase book, examining the phonetic pronunciations. “Well, it’s probably ‘father,’ although it could be ‘pointe shoes.’”
“You need someone who speaks Russian to sort everything out for him, explain where he’s going and why,” Rosalee said. “This little boy is confused. He needs some help.”
“You’re right,” she said. “I’ll call Yulia.”
Rosalee handed her the phone and waited for her to dial.
YULIA SHOWED UP AT THE DOOR a few hours later with a tiny kitten in her hands.
“You’re kidding, right? You must be kidding,” Lucy said. “Don’t let him see it, Yulia. I’m allergic to cats.”
It was too late. Mat had heard the doorbell and came up the stairs from the basement. He took the kitten from Yulia and began talking to it in a sweet voice Lucy had never heard from him before. Yulia threw her bags in the corner of Rosalee’s dining room and sat down on the floor with Mat in a pool of sunlight that came through the narrow panes of glass on either side of the front door. Mat cradled the sleepy kitten in his lap as they began to speak in Russian. Lucy interrupted.
“What’s he saying? What are you telling him?” she said.
“I say ‘hello’ and that I am Auntie Yulia, and I say ‘Welcome to America.’ And he says he is naming cat Dinah like in Alice and Wonderland, and I say ‘It’s a boy cat,’ and he says ‘Oh.’”
“Fine. Good. Just explain to him that I’m his mother now, and I’ll be taking him to his new home in a few days. This is his grandmother’s home. I don’t think he understands that.”
Yulia stood up, with some effort, and spoke to Mat quietly. He said nothing in return but stood up with the kitten and left for the basement.
“What did you say?” Lucy said. The tears were close, and when they came, there would be no stopping them. Where were the hugs, the lullabies, the small hand grasping her own? Mat would tolerate everyone as long as the toys kept coming, but they wouldn’t become his family, just his suppliers.
“I told him to go play. We must talk first.”
“We don’t need to talk. I just need your help so he’ll understand…”
“Why is it that you worry so much? He will adjust. I have seen it many times.”
“But he’s asking about his father, Yulia. Does he think his father is coming back for him?”
“Oh,” Yulia said. Her weight shifted slightly, and she leaned against the door frame between the dining room and the foyer. “Did Zoya Minsky say anything about his father?”
“She said he’d been to visit him at the baby home several times but not at the children’s home. His termination papers were with all the paperwork they gave me in court.”
Yulia sighed heavily. “I’m not certain, but this may be why Zoya wanted more money,” she said.
So Yulia knew all about the extra $500; Lesta must have told her about it. Then Lucy remembered the scars and told Yulia about the medical exam in Moscow.
Yulia’s mouth turned down, and she showed her bottom teeth, which were crooked and yellow near the gum line. Lucy sensed disappointment but not surprise.
“This could be his father, but Mitya never told me this. This could be his day care, or a neighbor, anyone. Very sad,” she said.
Lucy stared down at her hands. A trick of the light from the windows made it look as though she could see through her pink palms. She shook them, wanting the color back.
“He is safe now,” Yulia said. “You passed through customs and immigration. You are legal parent. We go talk to him.”
An hour later, Yulia left and Mat allowed her to give him a quick kiss good-bye. Lucy wasn’t sure how much he understood, but the cat was now named “Bill.” She also discovered that Mat liked Spiderman and bubblegum, and that he had never been to a restaurant before the hotel in Murmansk. She learned that he remembered a few things about his mother, and she wrote these down. He remembered that she had a red sweater, that her hair was very short, and that she would sing to him. Yulia also asked him, gently, if anyone had ever hit him. “Yes,” he told her, “when I am bad boy.” When she asked him about his father, he said nothing and turned away, back to his toys.
Later that afternoon, Lucy repacked her luggage and ran out to buy kitty litter, cat food, and some new clothes for herself and Mat, since both of them had been walking around for weeks in ill-fitting ones. That evening, she told Rosalee she was ready to take Mat home.
“I’m so happy for you, sweetheart,” Rosalee sai
d. “Happy, happy, happy.”
Lucy just smiled and said, “I’m happy, too,” though it wasn’t happiness she felt. It was more like resolve, a determination to go through the motions of parenthood, until one day, she would stop remembering what it was like to be a nonparent and embrace what parenting seemed to be: experimental treatment that might or might not work, the results too far in the future to know.
The next day, Mat picked out a dozen of his favorite toys from the mountain, and Lucy crammed them into the trunk of her parents’ car, along with her luggage. Bertie and Rosalee rode in the front seat, and she rode in the back after strapping Mat, with some difficulty, into his new car seat. They entered the Ellsworth campus through the front gates, the hot sun glinting off a modern aluminum sculpture in the shape of a giant paper clip. She had passed it hundreds of times before without wondering what it was supposed to mean, but now she saw it through Mat’s eyes and found it utterly baffling.
“This is your new home,” Bertie said, gesturing toward the lions on the pillars marking the entrance.
“Dad, don’t say that,” Lucy said. “He’ll be pretty disappointed when he sees where we really live.”
“This morning I taught him how to say something truly important for anyone living in Baltimore. What do we say, Mat?”
“Go O’s,” Mat said, thrusting his monkey in the air, and Bertie gave him the thumbs-up.
Lucy ruffled Mat’s buzz cut. For the first time since he had stuck out his tongue in Murmansk, she could see the promise. She could see that it would take countless small moments like this one to bring them together, and that those small moments would build on each other, only to be torpedoed by larger moments of frustration and loss. Eventually though, the small moments would win out.
She could also see right then that she hadn’t given Mat enough of a chance to deal with his own mourning: the loss of his mother and father, of course, but also the loss of words, sounds, experiences. She had removed him from everything that was predictable and familiar and expected him to embrace a new world before he had let go of the old one. Predictability, as Harlan had said, was definitely underrated.
A Watershed Year Page 20