A Watershed Year

by Susan Schoenberger

  As the rain let up, a slice of blue sky emerged on the eastern horizon. Then Mat woke up and said, “Potty.”

  She had to drive for another fifteen minutes before reaching one of the Jersey Turnpike’s enormous rest areas, and in that time she nailed down the boards again. She couldn’t afford to stop believing that something beyond her own feeble capacities guided her through this life. She couldn’t live without allowing for the possibility that Harlan’s soul carried on, someway, somehow. She took Mat out of his car seat and held one of his hands as he gripped the front of his pants with the other. They ran through the parking lot and made it to the toilet just in time.

  “One disaster avoided,” she whispered as she and Mat stood inside one of the long line of bathroom stalls. After she washed his hands, the two of them waited at McDonald’s for a Happy Meal. Here was the promise of America: happiness right there on the menu for the low, low price of $2.99. If she could drive straight through, they could be in Canada tonight, where happiness might cost a little more. Mat was talking to himself in Russian, which she hadn’t heard in a while. Then he became agitated, pulling on her arm. He was repeating a phrase, which Lucy finally realized was in English.

  “No airplane,” he said again and again.

  She looked around. The rest area didn’t look anything like an airport to her, but to Mat’s eyes, it must have been similar enough, with its food stalls and large bathrooms and extensive parking lot.

  “No, Mat, I won’t take you on another airplane for a long, long time,” she said. “We’re not leaving.”

  But they were leaving everything that was just becoming familiar to him—his room and his toys and his grandparents. They were leaving with no guarantee that they could ever return. She took the Happy Meal from the counter and found a table, spreading out the hamburger wrapper and french fries for Mat. Then she thought of Vasily, Mat’s father, and how he had traveled all the way from Russia. If he was a child beater with no interest in raising his son, then why had he come all this way? She opened Mat’s milk carton, inserting the straw.

  Was there even a chance he genuinely loved his son? And if he did, would he ever give up trying to find him?

  Mat ate his french fries methodically, dipping each into the tiny paper cup of ketchup she retrieved for him from the condiment bar. Then he ate a few bites of his hamburger and reached into the Happy Meal box for the toy. It was a purple plastic sound maker. One end was a whistle and had knobs that made various clicking sounds. He played with it as she held the hamburger up to his mouth for a couple more bites.

  What if Yulia had been misinformed about Mat’s history? What if Mat was placed in the orphanage without Vasily’s consent? On the other hand, who was this Vasily? How would she even know if he was Mat’s real father? She looked at Mat, who was spinning the sound maker on the table, which meant it could fly off into someone else’s Big Mac at any moment. Mat would know, she realized. He would recognize his father, even after months and months without contact.

  She cleared the wrappers and half-full milk carton from the table as Mat ran to pick up his sound maker, which had skidded under another table. She suddenly felt so empty, so drained, that she had to stand in line again to order a Filet-O-Fish so she wouldn’t faint. Mat stood next to her in line, looking up, worry playing around his eyes. He sat quietly as she ate her sandwich.

  “Follow me, Mat.” Her strength had returned just enough to contemplate getting behind the wheel again. She stopped near the front door of the rest area and bought a Coke from a soda machine for the drive home.

  She would have to find out for herself what kind of father Vasily was, his motives for sending Mat away and suddenly wanting him back. If she didn’t, she would dread that phone call, that knock on the door, for the rest of her life.

  LUCY OPENS HER EYES, aware that the blanket has slipped down, leaving her shoulders exposed. She pulls on it gently, and Harlan stirs, his arm pulling her closer. She closes her eyes again and shifts minutely, trying to ease the pressure on her hip bone.

  His mouth is near the back of her neck, where her long hair is pushed away. She feels the heat of his breath. Then she feels his lips graze her skin. It’s not a kiss exactly, maybe just inadvertent touching, which can happen when two people sleep so close together. She wants to turn toward him, but she’s afraid. What if he didn’t mean to touch her? She rests a hand on the cold cement floor to make sure she’s awake. She has wanted this for years, but not this way, not as the result of his fear.

  He kisses her neck again. This time she is sure it’s a kiss, but she holds her body still. She wants to give him time, to make sure he wants her, not just because she’s sympathetic and inches away.

  She waits for several minutes, but there are no more kisses. She feels him move and turns toward him.

  Harlan is on his back now. He is snoring softly as the sky behind the pine trees begins to lighten. She watches the sky as it takes on the subtle orange and pink gradations of a peach.

  He opens his eyes and blinks a few times, disoriented. She leans forward to see if he will meet her halfway.

  “My back,” he says, groaning.

  “What’s wrong? Is it bad?” she says.

  He rolls over onto his side and struggles to sit upright.

  “Just stiff, I think,” he says, twisting at the waist. He staggers up, stumbling over the cushions, then drapes himself over the balcony, letting his feet come just off the ground. He balances on his stomach, letting his arms dangle over his head.

  “Be careful,” she says. “You’ll fall.”

  “It feels good,” he says. “Gets the kinks out.”

  She sees a newspaper deliveryman walking up the sidewalk and asks him to call the super. “We’re locked out,” she says. He nods.

  Ten minutes later, the super lets them back inside the apartment, where she shakes off her chill. Harlan follows her to the kitchen as the super lets himself out, promising to come back later to fix the lock on the slider.

  “I had this problem last year on C block, but never on B,” he says. “You’re the first.”

  “Lucky me,” she says, turning to Harlan. “Coffee?”

  He looks at his watch.

  “I guess I have time,” he says. “I have to pick up Sylvie at nine.”

  The name, this time, is like the slip of a knife.

  IT WAS ALMOST DARK when Lucy pulled into her complex and saw Louis sitting on her porch. The rain had stopped, and the sky was now a dusty gray that reminded her of Murmansk. Louis stood up and held the door open for her as she carried a sleeping Mat inside and up the stairs. She deposited him on the bed, pulled a blanket over him, and left, leaving the door ajar. When she came back to the living room, Louis was on the couch, his head in his hands.

  “There’s something I should have told you the other night,” he said, looking up. “It’s about your paper.”

  She stood in front of the fireplace, nodding for him to go on. There was no sign that Vasily had been there, no note on the door, no phone message. She allowed herself to hope that Yulia had been wrong, mixed up, or that she had somehow convinced her brother-in-law to go back home and leave Mat with her.

  “It’s like this,” he said, taking a long breath. “The word was out after you left for Russia that they might not renew your contract. So when you asked me to deliver the paper to Dean Humphrey, I read it, and I thought you were right. It was rough. So I smoothed it out, rewrote it in parts. Actually, I rewrote most of it. I didn’t add any new information, but I realized that, ethically, I had to add my name as a secondary author.”

  As he said the words “secondary author,” her eyes fell on a tiny hole in the thin fabric of the gray T-shirt he wore. She could focus on nothing but the hole, which was on the seam of his right shoulder. It didn’t seem possible that he was telling her she might lose her job on the same day she had been told she might lose Mat and had almost ditched her life at Ellsworth and made a run for Canada.

  “You were
concerned about the ethics of it?” she said, finding her voice. “Well, ethically, you had no right to touch that paper. I didn’t even ask you to read it.”

  “But I had no way to get in touch with you. I thought you might lose your job if you turned it in the way it was.”

  The way it was. She took his words as an accusation, as though her efforts reflected poorly on all students of religion.

  “I still might lose my job, as if that matters anymore. The dean wants to know why your name is on it, and I don’t blame him… Why didn’t you say something the other night?”

  Louis sighed. “I tried. I did. I almost had it out a few times. I’m sorry.”

  She didn’t care as much about the paper as she did about Louis’s smug assumption that she needed his help. But none of it mattered anymore. She came close to telling him about Mat’s father but decided he would just start telling her what to do. Her copy of the Saint Blaise biography was on the side table near the couch. She grabbed the book, opened the front door, and pitched it as far as she could. It bounced a few times, then landed on the grass, its pages spread open to the murky sky.

  “I didn’t ask for your help. I’m thirty-eight years old, and I take responsibility for my own mistakes.”

  He appeared to be working on an addendum to his explanation, so she waited. He stalled, tugging on the short sleeves of his T-shirt until they were almost down to his elbows. The hole grew bigger.

  “I didn’t think it through. I just wanted to help.”

  “Did I appear to be so incompetent that I couldn’t help myself? Am I so clueless that you had to step in and show me the way? Is that what happened? Did it ever occur to you that I would have taken care of it when I got back?”

  He mumbled something she couldn’t hear.

  “I really don’t need this right now,” she said.

  He got up slowly and walked to the front door, looking back at her.

  “I just wanted you to have another chance, and I thought it would take the pressure off, so you could focus on Mat. Doesn’t that count for something?”

  “Go home,” she said. “I can’t talk about this anymore.”

  She watched as he went down the porch steps, struck that people interceded in her life so much more frequently than the saints and without her asking. Even Harlan fit into this category, deciding that she needed his advice even after he was dead. When Louis reached the Saint Blaise book, he picked it up, closed it, dusted the dirt off the spine, and placed it back on the grass. Then he walked off in the direction of the library spire without looking back.

  eighteen

  * * *

  Lucy woke suddenly from a fitful sleep. Just before she went to bed, she had spoken on the phone for an hour with her mother, who had wanted her to drive back to Paul and Cokie’s in case Mat’s father showed up in the middle of the night. She squinted at the digital clock and saw that the first number was a five, the second was a zero, and the third was an eight, sharp-edged and red. She wanted the rounded eights of her youth back, the eights that represented infinity, which didn’t have corners.

  She began to drift off again, swirling around on the endless loops of a rounded eight, but some noise kept her from sleeping, drove out all thoughts of past or present numerals, hammered into her consciousness like a nail, and triggered the memory of all that had happened the day before. Someone was knocking at the door.

  She slipped her legs past the cool edges of the sheets and put her feet flat on the floor. The knocking grew louder, and she grabbed her robe, hoping Mat wouldn’t wake up. Downstairs, she peeled aside the curtain at the window closest to the door, expecting to see a hulking Russian man dressed in black. Instead, she saw only Yulia, who was using the curved wooden handle of her umbrella to rap on the door. She wore a raincoat and men’s dress shoes that were way too large for her feet, the laces dangling. Lucy let her in.

  “I hope you’re here to tell me your brother-in-law went back to Russia.”

  “I wish it were so,” Yulia said. She slipped her feet out of the men’s shoes and took off her raincoat, draping it over the back of the couch. “He called last night from Atlantic City, where he stayed with friend he used to know in Russia. He will arrive this morning, so we need plan. I call you many times yesterday, but no answer, so I come as early as possible to give us time.”

  Lucy didn’t want to plan. Planning would acknowledge that Mat’s father had some leverage. In the hours that had passed since she turned around in New Jersey, she had become convinced that the law would protect her. No court would hand Mat back to a father who put him in an orphanage. She crossed her arms.

  “If you think he’s going to walk in here and take Mat, you’re wrong,” she said. “I’ll call the police.”

  Yulia pinched the bridge of her nose. “Do you have coffee?” She followed Lucy to the kitchen and sat down on a stool at the counter.

  “Vasily did not sign papers,” Yulia said, fiddling with a crayon Mat had left on the counter. “He says he can prove this.”

  “I don’t care if he didn’t sign the papers. You said he was a dog, Yulia. A dog. How could you let him take Mat?”

  “Maybe he just wants money. So we offer him money to sign papers and go away.”

  Mechanically, Lucy placed the filter in the coffeemaker and filled it with coffee grounds. She pushed the button, then realized she had forgotten to put in the water. When she filled the reservoir, the pot hissed.

  “You think that’s all he wants?”

  “I meet him only once, at Mitya’s wedding. But she wrote letters, so I know that he buys many things—iPod, stereo, game system.”

  Could it be that easy? If she managed to scrape together a few thousand more dollars, would he just go away? She was back in the used-car lot, finding out she would have to shell out far more than she thought for a car that actually ran. She felt a tug on her robe and looked down, thinking she had caught it on the edge of the counter. It was Mat, and now it was too late to pretend to Yulia that she had hidden him away with a distant relative.

  “Well, hello,” she said. Mat looked up at her, his eyes half-closed. “Did we wake you up?”

  Yulia sat up with a start, her too-long bangs falling across one eye. She brushed them away.

  “Look at you, Azzie,” she said, as though she had forgotten that he was the object of all her scheming. “His face has filled out. He looks so much like his mother.”

  Envy, with all its irrational force, hit Lucy like a slap. She was his mother, not some careless young Russian woman who didn’t know enough to stay out of the way of a speeding car. She wanted to push Yulia off the stool, shove her out the door, and lock it behind her. But then she looked at Mat, who was rubbing his eyes. She noticed the altered shape of his cheeks, the glow of sufficient calories and vitamin-packed cereals and juices. Was it his fault he looked like his mother? She poured him a cup of orange juice.

  “How much should I offer him?” she asked Yulia, handing Mat the cup. He took a sip.

  “Let me talk to him, try to find out what he wants, and then I call you. Stay here.”

  Yulia slugged down a half cup of coffee in one gulp, tousled Mat’s hair, then grabbed her raincoat, slipped on the men’s shoes, and left.

  “WHAT ARE YOU talking about? You can’t be serious.”

  Angela stood on the porch watching Vern toss a white plastic baseball to Matt on the tiny patch of grass in front of Lucy’s duplex. They had shown up a few hours after Yulia left, Angela barging in with a gift bag for Mat stuffed with a plastic baseball bat, a mitt, and a dozen plastic balls. “We decided not to wait for an invitation,” she had said.

  “His father is here? In the US?” Angela went on. “Why on earth would he be here?”

  “I wish I knew. Apparently he didn’t sign the adoption papers. Yulia thinks he wants money. And if that’s all he wants, I’ll hock my furniture, my car, my parents’ furniture, and their car. But would he come all this way just to ask for money, when he could
have bribed me over the phone? It would have cost him a fortune for the plane ticket.”

  Lucy flipped through her mental Rolodex of saints for one who could deliver her from this mess. She could have called on three or four, but it seemed more prudent to direct all her energies to one, and she settled on Saint Rita of Cascia. Saint Rita took on desperate cases, like Saint Jude, but Lucy reasoned that Saint Jude, being better known, got many more requests. There was a shrine to Saint Rita in Philadelphia, just a few hours away.

  Angela pinched her hard on the arm. “Why are you standing here? You should be on the phone with a lawyer.”

  She was right, of course. It was possible that Mat’s father had no legal standing, even if he hadn’t signed the papers. She ducked into the house for her cordless phone, came back to the porch, and let Angela dial the lawyer who had handled her divorce.

  Mat opened his tiny glove and caught a ball that Vern had tossed from about four feet away. Mat grinned, holding up the glove for her to see. Lucy’s heart shifted in her chest, almost crowding out her lungs and stifling her breath. She wondered if he felt even a fraction of that love for her.

  “Here, talk to him.” Angela handed her the phone.

  Lucy condensed her story as much as possible but got across the point that Mat’s father hadn’t signed the termination papers and might want his son back. The lawyer said he’d look up whatever case law or statutes he could find and call her back. She put the phone down on the porch railing as Angela put her hand on the middle of Lucy’s back, holding it there, propping Lucy up as she watched her son discover the thrill of baseball.