A Watershed Year

by Susan Schoenberger

  “He’s not going anywhere,” Angela said. “You got the fish wallpaper and everything. He belongs with you.”

  Lucy found a hangnail on her right thumb and tore it off, leaving a patch of raw skin.

  “Not that many weeks ago, we were complete strangers,” she said. “When I look at him now, I find that so hard to believe.”

  Lucy rested her forearms on the porch railing as Mat crawled into the hedges to look for the ball. The waiting was torture, a form of physical abuse that affected not only her stomach but her head, her vision, her muscles, her nervous system.

  The phone rang.

  “Lucy, it’s Yulia.”

  She almost dropped the phone into the bushes but caught it before it fell. Denial was the only acceptable path. She could speak to Yulia if she convinced herself that Vasily was on a plane back to Russia.

  “He wants to see Azamat.”

  “Absolutely not.”

  “He says he will meet with you first, then see his son. If not, he says he will call Russian Embassy.”

  Lucy still had the lawyer in her pocket, researching the case. She could meet with Vasily, size him up, stall.

  “Does he speak English?”

  “You come to my office at noon. I translate.”

  Lucy had the feeling Vasily was standing over Yulia’s shoulder, threatening her. She pictured him as a bully, a man who didn’t let women tell him what to do. She imagined the coarseness of his features, the fleshy neck, the ruddy skin. He would have meaty hands, like a butcher’s, and large pores on his face. Black, shapeless clothes and thick-soled shoes.

  “I’ll be there, but I’m not bringing Mat.” She could hear Yulia turn away from the phone and speak in Russia.

  “For now, he says this is okay. We see you at noon.”

  LUCY SENT MAT off with Angela and Vern, who wanted to take him to a video arcade. Then she went inside, took her black suit from the closet, and slipped into the jacket, which was too big. She started to take it off but changed her mind, sensing some residual power in its fabric. She wrapped the jacket around her, over her jeans, and fastened a thick black leather belt around her waist.

  On her way out, she stopped in Mat’s room, returned the stuffed penguin to the bed, and smoothed the comforter. Then she kneeled down and put her face on his pillow, breathing in the slightly sour little-boy scent lingering there. He had only been gone for ten minutes, but she missed him already. She ran her hand under the pillow and wondered who would tuck the tooth-fairy money under his sleeping head when he lost his first tooth. Would it be her? His father? Or no one at all?

  She stood up and brushed off her knees, taking the stairs slowly. She passed through the living room, trailing her fingers over the dark swath on the back of the couch. The house was so empty without Mat, quiet and still, funereal. Was it possible she had ever lived there alone?

  Before she left, the phone rang again. This time it was the lawyer.

  “Basically, you don’t have a lot of options,” he said, and she listened, nodding. “If he can prove this is his son and that it’s not his signature on the papers, then someone is in a whole mess of trouble.”

  Not someone. Her. And it wouldn’t matter that her heart was in the right place or that she simply wanted to believe in something so much that she let it block out all doubt.

  THE DOOR to Yulia’s office was open. Lucy could see the strip of fluorescent light from all the way down the long corridor. It grew wider as she neared the door, and she slowed her pace, halting completely about five feet away. A man appeared in the doorway: a thin man, early thirties, with a scrawny beard, pale blue eyes, and eyelashes so light they gave the impression he had just come in from the snow. He was wearing a green jogging suit with a white stripe down the arms and legs. Lucy thought he might be the janitor.

  “Lu-cy McVie?” he said.

  He opened the door a little wider, and Yulia motioned from where she was standing behind her desk for Lucy to come in. She wore an expression Lucy had never seen before—an expression of powerlessness—and her hands were moving here and there in a way that suggested she had no control over them. One hand pulled on her earlobe as the other twisted the swiveling office chair back and forth.

  The man in the jogging suit half sat, half leaned against Yulia’s desk. It took Lucy a few seconds to realize that this was Vasily. This was Mat’s father. And he wasn’t a hulking brute but a man of below-average height who looked as though he needed a drink. She moved into the office and stood three or four feet away from Vasily, waiting for him to look up again. But he kept his gaze trained at the floor, his arms crossed, until Yulia left her position behind the desk, shut the door, and then came back to stand between them, as if they might throw punches at each other.

  Vasily spoke in Russian to Yulia, who translated for Lucy.

  “He wants that you hear his story,” Yulia said. “Please sit down.”

  Lucy moved hesitantly toward the pumpkin slip-covered couch but couldn’t bring herself to sit down on it. Instead, she balanced on the couch’s arm and looked at Vasily, who still wouldn’t look at her. His eyelids looked heavy, and his pockmarked skin told the story of teenage acne. He turned to Yulia and began speaking in a low voice as she paced from one end of the small office to the other and translated.

  “He says Zoya Minksy sent him papers many months ago. He was very busy with business meetings and so forth and could not take the time to find witnesses and such. Then he could not find the papers, so he calls Zoya to get new papers, and she tells him his son has left for America. When he realizes this, he makes a plane flight to come to America, because he has been defrauded, and he lets no woman do this to him.”

  Vasily glanced at her then. He had an insecure-looking face that suggested poor nutrition and chain-smoking and the bitterness of a man who had never lived up to his own expectations.

  “How do I know this is even Mat’s father?” Lucy asked Yulia. “What if this is some con artist who heard about the adoption? You said you only met him once.”

  Yulia translated, and Vasily jumped up, pulling his wallet from a pocket in the sagging pants of the jogging suit. He opened it and pulled out a picture, thrusting it at Yulia, as though she had questioned his identity, not Lucy. Yulia took the picture and carried it over to Lucy, holding it open on the palm of her hand. It was Mat, at least a year younger, on the right, and his mother, Mitya, in the middle, with the short brown hair Mat had described, and this man, Vasily, on the left, sitting on the steps of what in America would be called a tenement.

  None of them was smiling, and yet Lucy could tell that it had been a rare moment of family unity preserved on film. In the picture, Mat’s little arm was resting on his mother’s leg, as surely as if he were still an extension of her body. Mitya had her arm around Mat, and Vasily was leaning back with his elbows on the step behind him. The picture meant Lucy couldn’t deny that Vasily was Mat’s father, but she could see that he had held himself apart from his wife and son. She looked away.

  “He brought his son to the children’s home, Yulia. Ask him why he did that in the first place.”

  Yulia translated, and Vasily answered.

  “After Mitya died, he say, he was very busy with work, with electronics store he manages. He work many hours and could not find good woman to watch his son and cook and clean for them. His parents are dead, and Mitya’s parents—my parents—also dead. Nobody lives long in Russia anymore. So friends, er, people he knows, tell him he must give his son to the children’s home and forget him. So he does this, because it is not a man’s job to raise children.”

  Vasily pulled at the few strands of hair in his beard as Yulia translated for him, her hands darting around as she spoke as though she were Italian. Lucy heard the words, but they refused to form any meaning, bouncing through the air like particles of dust that settled on the desk or on the floor. She remembered sitting on the pumpkin couch for the first time, and the exact moment Yulia had handed her a picture of Ma
t. She made fists and dug her knuckles into her thighs hard enough to cause a dull pain.

  “Ask him about the scars, Yulia. Ask him to explain why his son was beaten.”

  As Yulia translated, Lucy stood up and went to the single office window, peering through the plastic blinds at the sun baking the cars in the parking lot. The air-conditioning in Yulia’s office was either too weak or not working, and she felt a trickle of sweat run down her back beneath the black jacket.

  “No,” Vasily said, and she turned. He opened his hand, palm up, and she thought he might make a run at her. He spoke rapidly in Russian, and Yulia nodded, finally holding up her hand to interrupt him.

  “He say he only spank Azamat like this, with open hand. This is to make him better boy, for discipline.”

  “Then why does he have scars on his backside? The doctor said they were old scars. They weren’t made at the orphanage.”

  When Yulia asked the question, the tops of Vasily’s ears turned red. He spoke to Yulia with evident anger, and she translated that he disliked being accused of beating his son. He said that Azamat had climbed out of his crib when he was two and struck himself on the corner of the radiator. The stitches he needed must have left scars.

  Lucy had been prepared for him to defend his beatings. She hadn’t expected another explanation, especially one she had no way to disprove. If she hadn’t rescued Mat, then what had she done? She felt as though a wall on which she had been standing was crumbling beneath her feet. She hated this person, this Vasily, for his simplicity, his explanations. Because she had taken Mat away, she wanted him to live up to his side of the equation. The magnitude of her generosity, her sacrifices, had to offset his pettiness, his selfishness, his anger.

  “What does he want, Yulia? Does he truly want to take Mat back to Russia? To raise him? Does he understand what it means to raise a child, to lift him up? Does he know his son anymore?”

  Yulia and Vasily spoke in voices so low that Lucy strained to hear, as if she could understand the words. Vasily looked at her, opening his snowy eyelashes. What she saw there was resentment, perhaps anger that something had been taken away from him. But she also saw stubbornness. She saw that he wouldn’t go away until he got what he wanted.

  “He wants to see his son, talk to him.”

  Lucy cried then, telling Yulia to explain how much she loved Mat, how she couldn’t bear to part with him. She offered money, told Vasily to name his price, but he turned toward the desk with his hands in his pockets and stared at the dusty Beanie Babies on Yulia’s computer. He made no response.

  She nodded, looking down at her hands again as if she might be able to see right through them. She felt fragile, transparent again, as it became clear that Vasily would not give up and even more clear that she had no right to keep Mat from seeing his father. She stood up and found a piece of paper on Yulia’s desk to write down the beltway exit to the playground where Mat had nearly killed them both on the slide. She wanted Vasily to see what a climber he was, how hard it was to watch him.

  “We’ll be at the playground this afternoon, at four.”

  As Lucy turned to go, Yulia mouthed the words “I’m sorry.”

  Lucy left the office, feeling her way along the walls as though she had been blinded. She drove home without feeling the steering wheel or the seat beneath her, surrounded by a halo of numbness. She couldn’t ask a saint to intervene because she didn’t know what was right, what was best. When she reached the duplex, she rested her forehead on the steering wheel and asked herself, what would Harlan do? She didn’t know the answer.

  It was one thirty. Only two and a half hours left, and Mat wasn’t even home. She threw her purse on the floor and ran to the kitchen to call Angela’s cell phone, telling her to bring Mat home as soon as she could. Then she called her mother and gave her the news.

  “Get back in the car and run,” Rosalee said. “You are his mother. This man abandoned him. He can’t be allowed to change his mind.”

  “If I run, this will never end, Ma. I’m trying to do the right thing. I’m thinking about Mat. If he shows any fear at all, I won’t let his father get near him. I promise. And we only agreed to a meeting, nothing beyond that.” She said the words to comfort herself more than to comfort Rosalee.

  “Where are you meeting him?”

  “This giant playground off the beltway. But don’t come. That’ll just make things harder for Mat.” She thought of him now, blithely riding in a car with Vern and Angela, no inkling that his father was so near, that his life could shift again, the seismic plates over which he had no control moving him back to the other side of the world.

  The language would come back to him quickly, she knew that. In another few months, she would fade from his memory until there was nothing left but vague images: the stuffed penguin, the taste of peanut butter, a room painted yellow. It was what Harlan had feared most: being forgotten.

  She heard a car pulling into the parking lot.

  “Mat’s here,” she told her mother. “I have to go.”

  Angela opened the door, and Mat came into the duplex first, holding an enormous wad of cotton candy. Vern followed, carrying a plastic bag full of small stuffed animals.

  “He’s a little sticky,” Angela said. “Man, you’ve got a hot one. He never stops moving.”

  Angela refused to look at Lucy, bringing Mat to the bathroom to wash his hands. Lucy stood in the living room smiling stupidly at Vern, finally taking the bag of toys from his outstretched hand. When Angela returned with Mat, she looked at Lucy and began to cry.

  “No.” Angela pressed her fingers into her eyelids. “This is all wrong.”

  “Vern,” Lucy said. “Would you play with Mat for a minute?” Angela followed her to the kitchen and watched as Lucy leaned over the sink to splash cold water on her face. She dried it with a paper towel.

  “I agreed to let him see Mat, that’s all,” she said. “Then I’ll know what to do.”

  “Why does he deserve a second chance?”

  “I’m not sure he does. But he came all this way, so I’m also not sure he doesn’t. I can’t spend the rest of my life wondering if I took a child away from his father for all the wrong reasons.”

  Mat came into the kitchen to show Lucy his arcade winnings, and she ran a hand lightly across his forehead, just as she had seen Cokie once do with Sean. He seemed not to notice, and she realized he was gradually abandoning his aversion to being touched. She wanted to hold him then, to rock him like a baby and beg him not to leave her, because the act of his leaving would wrench open the void again, letting the mist of her yearning back in.

  “Look at this alligator,” she said, holding it up. “Did Vern win it for you?”

  “He won it all by himself,” Angela said. “The boy is a Skee-Ball prodigy. Hey, Vern, put your shoes back on. It’s time to go.”

  “Thanks, Angela,” Lucy said, walking her to the door. “For everything.”

  When Angela and Vern left, Lucy sat down on the couch, wondering if she should begin preparing Mat for what might happen next. Should she get him to talk about his father? Should she question him again about the scars? Before she could decide, he pulled a stack of books from a magazine rack next to the couch and climbed onto Lucy’s lap. He rested his head against her shoulder, held up a book on construction equipment, and said, “You read.” The weight and warmth of his little body was an offering she had almost stopped hoping to receive. It filled her, made her whole, and she would never forget it, even if he forgot her.

  She read the construction book six times—at the last page, he would flip to the front and say “again”—and then she took out her camera, snapping pictures of him from every angle, trying to capture his true nature in a photograph that might have to sustain her for years to come. When he tired of smiling, she took him into the kitchen and fed him peanut-butter crackers with milk, watching the minutes tick by on the cat clock, which sent them into the terrifying future with every indiscriminate swish of its t
ail.

  When it was time to go, she packed a water bottle and some snacks and a hat for Mat, in case there was too much glare on the playground. She drove in silence. If Mat ran to his father, embraced him, cried tears of joy, she would have to give him back. If he showed any fear, she would fight for him, offer more money, beg, plead, insist. If he showed no emotions at all, well, she would figure out what to do when the time came. There, a plan.

  She pulled into the playground parking lot at 3:45, finding a space in the sea of minivans that belonged to mothers who wondered when they would ever be free of obligation, just when she might be forced to relinquish hers.

  As she and Mat walked toward the entrance, she recalled the fear of the slide debacle and noticed the metallic taste in her throat, though maybe that had more to do with her new fear. Mat climbed onto some old tires and grabbed a rope hanging from a thick wooden beam, letting himself swing in a wide circle. Lucy sat on the pile of tires and rubbed her sticky palms on her knees. It was a warm day, but her armpits were cold with sweat. She glanced at her watch: 3:50.

  At 3:55, she began looking around obsessively as Mat moved to a ladder that ended in a cone-shaped structure with a floor. A modern tree house. At 4:05, her mother emerged from behind a rocking wooden ship.

  “I thought he was supposed to be here at four,” Rosalee said.

  “I told you not to come, Ma.” Lucy looked around again. She caught a glimpse of a stout woman who could have been Yulia but turned out not to be. She looked at her watch again. Six after.

  “How could I not come? We drove around the entire beltway to find it,” she said. “Your father’s in the car, and Paul and Cokie are in that submarine over there. We couldn’t let you do this alone.”

  “Nana,” Mat said as he slid down a connecting slide.