A Watershed Year

by Susan Schoenberger

  The night I told you about my diagnosis, when we were locked out on the balcony, I finally reached out, tried to kiss you. You didn’t respond, never mentioned it, and that hurt. Later I came to realize how unfair it was to hit you with that on the same night you learned I might not have a future. Maybe you just didn’t know how to react.

  So why am I telling you this now? I’ve debated about taking it with me to my grave on the hillside, but as I’ve written these e-mails and thought about the last year of my life—to which you virtually donated a year of your own life—I thought you’d want to know. If you loved me the way I hope you did, you’d certainly want to know.

  Do you remember how you responded to my question that morning, when the super finally let us inside? You said you thought two people, if they were meant to be together, would understand each other. But you and I never really did, at least not on the same day. When Sylvie got off that train, I sent her right back to New Jersey without telling her about my cancer. I told her there was someone else, and even after she learned I was sick, I kept her at a distance because I didn’t want her pity; yours was the only pity I could tolerate. There are times I wish I had been more honest, and other days I’m sure I did the right thing in trying to spare you even more grief.

  Dr. Singh was the only one of my doctors who refused to give odds. He used to say: I’m not going to give you numbers, Harlan, because you’ll fixate on them and talk yourself out of any hope. But I didn’t talk myself out of hope, Lucy; I talked myself into taking control, into choosing a full life for the person I’m leaving behind, not a life spent in the shadows of a disease that would always hang over our heads.

  Chemo brain is making it harder and harder for me to explain myself, or even to type. It takes me a long time to correct all my mistakes. I still haven’t told you the story behind my grandmother’s banjo accident, and I want you to hear my voice while I’m telling it, so I’m going to record it on an audiotape and fix it to the underside of her table. Maybe you already found it.

  This is my final message, Lucy. I don’t have much more to say except that I love you. In my eyes, you’re nothing less than one of those saints you admire so much.

  Yours always,

  Harlan

  In the flurry of phone calls that followed Yulia’s phone message, Lucy hadn’t checked her e-mail. When she did, she found an unexpected one from Harlan, weeks before the next one was due to arrive. She put her face down on the keyboard to feel closer to Harlan, grateful for the distraction because it helped block out the choking rage she felt when she thought about Vasily. She could only get through the day by believing that he could still be persuaded, or bribed, to leave Mat with her.

  So there it was. Harlan had loved her. He had loved her and had ditched the beauty queen, and she had kept him at arm’s length because she thought he was confusing his gratefulness for affection, like a wounded soldier falling for his nurse. How could she have assumed his question was about Sylvie, when he was asking about her? He was right. They never really understood each other, at least not on the same day.

  Lucy read through the e-mail again, stopping on the paragraph about Dr. Singh. I didn’t talk myself out of hope, Lucy; I talked myself into taking control, into choosing a full life for the person I’m leaving behind. The implications of that sentence, the confessional tone, were too disturbing to ignore. She lifted up stacks of papers on her desk and pulled out the drawer in search of her address book. When she finally found it, it took her several minutes to locate the phone number on a page of Harlan’s many doctors.

  She dialed Dr. Singh’s number and left a message with his answering service, requesting that he return her call; then she put her head back down on the keyboard. A few minutes later, Mat was standing by her chair, poking her in the arm with one finger as if he thought she was asleep. She sat up, feeling the indentations of the computer keys in her forehead.

  He took her limp arm and pulled her along until they reached the living room, where he guided her to the couch.

  “You read, Mama,” he said, handing her his picture book about construction equipment.

  She turned to the first page, then closed the book. “Just a minute, honey. I have to look for something.”

  She went to the dining-room table and crawled under it. Mat crawled under after her, holding out the book again. “You read.”

  She ran her hands along the wooden supports on the underside of the table until she found a small bump sealed with duct tape. She pulled off the tape and found a tiny audiocassette and a gift-card-sized envelope with “For Lucy” written on it. She stayed under the table, staring at the envelope, until Mat pulled her arm again and led her back to the couch.

  With her arm around Mat, she read about bulldozers, front loaders, and cranes—barely seeing the words—as she tried to remember if she had ever unpacked the small tape recorder she had used in graduate school to record an occasional lecture. And if she still had it, did it work? What kind of batteries did it take? Did she have any new batteries? At the end of the book, before Mat could say “again,” she stood and grabbed her purse. “Let’s go for a ride.”

  Lucy clutched the minicassette in one hand on the way to the office-supply store and, once there, clutched Mat with her other hand, worried that both might disappear if she let go of them. The first employee she stopped led her to a crowded aisle and pointed out which recorders used that kind of tape. At the counter, she bought the batteries, checking the package three times to make sure she had the right size.

  Back at home, she fed Mat lunch, silently urging the cat clock to slow down. Angela was due to arrive to take Mat for an hour so Lucy could examine his paperwork again and weigh the risks of another call to the State Department, but she hated to let him go. She still didn’t know what Vasily wanted, why he had left, or why he was coming back. He was both the poison—the only one who could take Mat away—and the antidote—the only one who could sign the papers that legalized her motherhood.

  As Mat chewed slowly on a brownie, she took the small envelope from the kitchen counter and opened it. Inside was an old picture of Harlan, taken before his illness. He had a full head of hair and a broad smile. He looked tan, his freckles glowing, literally the picture of health.

  She stared at Harlan’s picture, wondering when it was taken, and remembered details about him that she had forgotten during his illness. Back when he had hair, one of his eyebrows was slightly thicker than the other because of a chicken-pox scar, which altered the symmetry of his face just enough to make it interesting. She ran her finger over the picture lightly so as not to leave a smudge. She had loved his freckles. They gave him the air of someone who stayed connected to childhood, who couldn’t take himself too seriously. This was a man who found humor in the Crusades, who had dreamed of her as Eleanor of Aquitaine.

  She looked up and realized that Mat had finished lunch and slipped out of his chair. She helped him fill his small backpack with Matchbox cars, and when Angela arrived, he pulled the backpack over one shoulder. He waved to Lucy a little forlornly, as if he might even miss her.

  “You’ll be back soon, buddy,” she said. “Vern needs you to help him play baseball.”

  He reached toward her with both arms. Harlan’s picture slipped out of her hand as she pulled him off the ground. He rested his head on her shoulder until Angela tapped him on the back and told him Vern had a new Matchbox car for him.

  When they left, Lucy retrieved Harlan’s picture from the floor. But before she could begin sorting through Mat’s paperwork, the phone rang.

  She picked it up with dread, certain it would be Yulia relaying demands from Vasily, but it was Dr. Singh. She had forgotten him almost entirely in the period of her deepest grief because he had existed only in the context of Harlan’s illness. Now she remembered that he was businesslike, not completely humorless but lacking in vitality, as though he never got enough sleep. He had been the only doctor to come to Harlan’s funeral.

  “Lucy?
This is Dr. Singh. My office said you called.”

  “I did,” she said, not sure what she should be asking. “I… I have some insurance forms left to fill out for Harlan Matthews, and I was wondering if you could answer some questions for me. I have medical power of attorney.”

  “I remember you, and I remember Harlan very well. Let me just open the file.”

  Lucy listened intently to the doctor’s footsteps, the sound of tapping on a keyboard, the push of a button, and the dull hum of her line being transferred to a speakerphone.

  “It’s all here,” the doctor said. “So unfortunate that he decided to stop his treatments. What is it you need to know?”

  She pulled the phone away from her ear for a moment, confused. Then it suddenly made sense, what Harlan had said about choosing a full life for the person he was leaving behind. She phrased her question as a statement.

  “So you’re saying that his experimental treatments were working?”

  “He had an ugly time ahead of him, as I’m sure you know, but we were seeing a reduction in his primary tumor. He decided not to continue. I’d be surprised if the insurance company had any complaints.”

  She paused for a moment, uncertain if she really wanted to know why Harlan would walk away from a treatment that might have helped him.

  “They want to know why he stopped the treatments,” she said finally. “They’re settling his final bills, and they want to know why he started the treatments only to stop them.”

  Dr. Singh waited a moment, and she could almost hear him gathering his thoughts.

  “What really seemed to bother him was the constant threat of a relapse, knowing that even if he saw a remission, it likely would be temporary. Of course, he wasn’t looking forward to the side effects of another round of intensive chemo. His liver was pretty much shot before we even started, so that was a factor. The infertility troubled him, too, although that seemed like a minor issue from my perspective.”

  She pressed on.

  “So were you surprised that he chose not to take advantage of the time he had left?”

  “Oh, it wasn’t much, mind you. We might have prolonged his life a year, two at the outside, but who knows what medical science might have come up with in the meantime. That’s what I kept saying.”

  Two years? Had Harlan taken two years from his already short life and tossed them away like garbage?

  The doctor continued.

  “In my experience, most patients will deal with just about anything for the chance to live a little longer, but Harlan had a fairly unusual perspective, so I wasn’t entirely surprised by his decision. He didn’t see the point of dragging it out. He used to say it wasn’t fair to those who had to watch him deteriorate.”

  Not fair to me, Lucy thought. Only me. She hung up the phone while the doctor was still talking, seeing no point in pretending that she cared enough to say good-bye. He couldn’t resurrect Harlan, and he couldn’t prevent Vasily from coming back. Those were the only two things that mattered.

  TWENTY MINUTES WENT BY before Lucy became aware that she had been sitting in the same position, her hand still on the phone. She felt numb, bound inside a dream.

  It didn’t seem possible, but Harlan might have had two more years to live, and he had chosen to spare her the pain of watching him live—or more accurately, “not die.” She wondered briefly if this was her punishment for assuming she could have saved Harlan—or Mat, for that matter—when neither one had asked for salvation.

  Outside, visible through one pane of her bedroom window, was the library spire. She got up, walked down the stairs, and passed through the living room. She opened the front door and went outside, walking down the short steps of her tiny front porch without any shoes. The summer sun had been relentless, blaring down for days without a cloud to temper its heat, so the ground was baked into a hard, almost colorless cement relieved only by the straw that once was grass. Lucy stepped over Saint Blaise, still on the ground, and traversed the burning black asphalt of the duplex parking lot, turning toward the library spire, though she couldn’t see the tip of it, which disappeared into the glare of the sun.

  She walked in as straight a line as possible, not feeling the soles of her feet, across curbstones and driveways, watered lawns and sidewalks, gravel pathways and wood-chipped flower beds until she stood in front of the library. A few summer students passed by on the sidewalk, glancing at her bare feet. She climbed the library stairs, holding tightly to the railing, and opened the door. The air-conditioning surrounded her, beckoning her onto the cool, clean tiles of the central hall, with its thirty-foot ceilings that commanded all who entered to look up and worship the words that lived there, hidden in stacks that went high into the sky as well as deep into the earth.

  The library had been their common ground. Before Harlan got sick, in their first few weeks at Ellsworth, they had both come here to work, like students, because neither one had liked the solitary confinement of their offices. But they also came here to see each other, to crouch near the other’s pile of books and whisper conspiratorially about a mutual student or Dean Humphrey’s latest edict.

  “That’s probably bogus, you know,” Harlan would say, picking up Lucy’s copy of The Letters of St. Bernard of Clairvaux. “The author’s a major-league idiot. He wears this incredibly pretentious, very long goatee. I met him at a conference once, and it was all I could do to stop myself from pulling it.”

  “So a bad goatee makes him a bogus authority on Saint Bernard.”

  “It doesn’t speak well for his judgment. That’s all I’m saying.”

  Lucy let her feet absorb the cool of the tiles, then walked two floors up a wide central staircase that led to a hallway with four doors. At the smallest door, she reached up and felt along the top of the frame for a key, which Harlan had learned about through a librarian who worked the night shift.

  She climbed a narrow spiral staircase up to the bell tower, ducking under beams and brushing away cobwebs. In the small room that housed the bell, there wasn’t much room to maneuver around the antique machinery that activated its tolling. She stumbled over metal rods and gears and found her way next to the bell, which came up to the top of her head, and laid her left cheek against its smooth surface. The cold shocked her for a moment, then filtered through her body, along her torso, and into her legs.

  She remembered the night Harlan had showed her the key and led her up the stairs to the tower, at the peak of her hopes that he might begin to view her as more than a friend. They had laughed at the bell, such a squat, primitive thing, and climbed over to the balcony of the cupola to view the campus at night, spread out before them with the precision of a map, talking as they always did. So much talking.

  She thought, then, that he might kiss her, or touch her hand, break through the barrier named Sylvie that stood between them. But they had forgotten to look at the time, and the bell’s automatic timer went off at ten o’clock. The first clang had been deafening, and they had run down the stairs, hands over their ears. When they reached the hallway, a janitor standing with his mop had given them a reproachful look, and they had left the library, gone their separate ways, somehow chastened.

  Lucy spread her arms around the bell, then turned to her other cheek as though finding a cool spot on her pillow; tears ran down, leaving tracks on the tarnished metal. She turned her head again and banged the bony part of her forehead against the bell, over and over, eliciting a dull thunk that had the effect of calming her.

  She left the bell’s side and climbed over the low partition to the balcony, which jutted out only a few feet from the bell tower. The railing surrounding the balcony came to just below her hip, and she leaned against it, stretching toward the moon, which floated, impartial and ghostly, behind the arts center. If someone were so inclined, she thought, it wouldn’t take much to climb over the railing, just the activation of a few large muscle groups. Then it would be a question of whether to crouch and spring out or to fall passively, eyes open and exp
ectant. The earth would receive such a person without shame, rushing up to greet her, welcoming her back into its womb.

  The quad was empty, as far as she could see. The summer session drew a few students, but by late afternoon, they were usually holed up in the air-conditioned student center. A bird flew by, just inside her field of peripheral vision. It looked like a hawk, although she couldn’t say for sure. She had the sense that she was alone on campus, that an evacuation alarm had sounded, and she had failed to hear it.

  “Har-lan,” she yelled, feeling as though she could watch the word itself drift over the trees and beyond, to a place where it would be received, a place that would send a response. But she heard nothing, not even the wind or a dog barking or a car passing by.

  Acknowledgment was what she wanted. Acknowledgment that she had tried, in the best way she knew how, to keep her friend from dying and to enrich the life of one small child with the love, the yearning that had to latch onto something. Would no one acknowledge that she had tried?

  She remembered then what she and Harlan had talked about when they had stood on the balcony of the bell tower.

  “Look at this,” he had said. “It’s so beautiful, right? The lights and the trees in the distance, the stone chapel. But I just read this article on how we acclimatize to beauty, even to happiness. If you saw this every day, you’d stop noticing the beauty. Instead, you’d notice the flaws: that plastic bag or that junker car over there under the streetlight. They’ve actually studied people who win lotteries, and it’s the same thing. They’re happier for a few months or a year, then they acclimatize to having money, and they slip right back into the same level of happiness they had before they won. Strange, huh?”

  She looked down at her hands on the balcony railing and wondered if she had acclimatized to sadness, to a state of wondering what could have been with Harlan. It had been there for so long, since even before he died, that she failed to notice it anymore. She had carried the burden of his death everywhere, afraid that if she put it down, he would be forgotten.