A Watershed Year

by Susan Schoenberger

  But that had to change. It would change, was changing—no, had already changed. She looked toward the bell and thought of Mat, who would have climbed inside it or banged on it with his small fists, determined to make noise. She thought of how he was softening around the edges and finding his place. She thought of his perfect ears and the way his breath smelled of peanut butter and how he studied the pictures in his books, forming new words, absorbing a new lexicon. She thought of his stubborn streak and his need for sugar and his terrifying aptitude for putting himself in physical danger.

  Mat needed her, and unlike Harlan, she still had a chance to protect him. With the campus so quiet, she could hear the sounds of water rushing inside her head, sending her over the falls toward the frothing, churning pool beyond where life flourished. Adrenalin moved in, dissolving the dreaminess. Her feet hurt, and she noticed that her shirt was soaked in sweat. She turned her back on the new moon, climbed back over the partition, and walked down the stairs, striding numbly across the cool tiles, back across the white-hot sidewalks and parking lots and the dried-up patches of grass.

  She wouldn’t let Vasily anywhere near Mat. She would call more lawyers, the United Nations, the media. She didn’t have to listen to what Vasily had to say any more than she had to torture herself over caring about Harlan and wanting him to live.

  When she entered the parking lot near the duplex, she crossed it without looking either way for cars. She approached her little porch, climbed the stairs, opened the front door, and walked through the living room, now truly “lived-in,” with its toy-strewn floor and book-covered coffee table. She headed toward the kitchen drawer that contained Mat’s thick file of papers and his passport, wanting to see it and hold it as proof that he had legal status in his new country.

  She was rifling through the papers when the doorbell rang. She unlocked the door and let Angela in. Mat was in her arms, draped over one shoulder, fast asleep.

  “I dropped Vern at home,” she said. “Look at this boy. When he crashes, he crashes.”

  Lucy carried Mat upstairs and tucked him into his bed. She was on her way down the stairs when the doorbell rang again. She assumed it was her parents, who had planned to hold vigil with her as she waited for Yulia’s next call. Instead, she found Yulia on her tiny porch, and with her, Vasily, in the same green jogging suit he had worn the first time they met, the same sullen look on his face. Lucy appraised his physical strength, deciding that she was the stronger of the two, given his pallor and his rail-thin frame. She wanted to keep them out on the porch and moved toward the door, but Yulia pushed past her, pulling Vasily inside with her.

  “Vasily has something to say,” Yulia said.

  Angela came out of the kitchen, and Lucy could sense the heat from ten feet away.

  “He can say what he wants,” Angela said. “He’s not taking that boy, and I’ll pin his scrawny rear to the ground if he tries.”

  Lucy moved toward the staircase, feeling the need to block it, when Yulia moved forward again, thrusting out the tote bag.

  “Please,” she said. “Please look.”

  “Tell him this, Yulia,” Lucy said, ignoring the tote bag. “Tell him he had the chance to see his son, and he decided to drive to Atlantic City instead, and that tells me everything I need to know. Tell him to go back to Russia and let us get on with our lives.”

  Yulia said nothing to Vasily, who stood near the door and put his hands in the pockets of his warm-up jacket.

  “Please let him explain,” Yulia said.

  “Why should we let him explain?” Lucy said. “He didn’t think about Mat’s future when he packed up his things, took him by the hand, and brought him to an orphanage. That he can’t ever explain.”

  Yulia shook her head in frustration, opened the tote bag, then thrust a sheaf of papers toward Lucy, who was still blocking the staircase.

  “The termination papers,” she said. “They are signed. I tell Vasily that you are good mother, that you have family to help you. I tell him that this country gives him everything he could never hope to have in Russia. He decides that his son is better to stay here. He calls Zoya Minksy for new papers and waits for FedEx at his friend’s house in Atlantic City, because he has no money for hotel. Now he brings you papers. This is why he came.”

  Lucy took the papers from Yulia and sat down hard on the bottom step of the staircase. She flipped to the last page and stared at the signature: Vasily Andreyevich Panachev.

  “Thank God,” Angela said. “Now get him out of here, before he changes his mind.”

  Yulia spoke to Vasily in Russian, and he nodded, thrusting his hands deeper into his pockets. He turned as if to go, but Lucy stood up and walked over to Vasily, who seemed to shrink into the wall. She opened her arms and pulled him toward her, sobbing into his shoulder. He seemed unsure of how to react and stood stiffly in her embrace as she whispered words he couldn’t understand: “Thank you, thank you; I’ll take such good care of him. Thank you, thank you.”

  When Lucy let him go, Vasily said something to Yulia, which she then translated. “Is it possible, he asks, to see his son one last time? He has come all this way.”

  Angela opened her mouth to speak, but Lucy held up her hand.

  “He’s sleeping,” she said. “I’m sorry, but I’d hate to wake him. And I’m not sure it’s a good idea. He might be confused.”

  Yulia translated, then Vasily spoke to her again.

  “Okay for him to peek? To take one last look. He promises not to wake him.”

  Lucy hesitated, wanting Vasily to leave so that she could call her parents, her brother, her friends. But then she looked at his face and, without words, understood what he was saying: I’m leaving him here; you owe me that much. She put the papers down on the couch and motioned to Vasily, leading him toward the stairs.

  “Lucy, I wouldn’t…” Angela said, but Lucy ignored her. She let Vasily follow her up the stairs and down the hall to Mat’s room, where the door was slightly ajar. She opened the door a little wider and slipped through as Vasily came in behind her. Then she stood aside as he knelt by the bed and stared at his son, who slept as if he were awake, eyelids moving, breath audibly passing through his open mouth, fists curled. Vasily reached out a hand as if he couldn’t stop himself, but he only waved it over Mat’s forehead—a blessing perhaps, or a wish or a hope for his future, or a gesture of apology, or all those combined.

  Air escaped from the back of Lucy’s throat, an involuntary rasp of sympathy, because she could have been the one saying good-bye. Mat stirred, rolling over to one side and tucking both hands under his cheek. Vasily stood up, bowed formally over his son in a gesture that seemed to reflect his resolve, and turned to go.

  Back downstairs, Yulia smiled and patted Lucy’s hand. As they moved toward the front door, Vasily said something to Yulia, who turned and translated for Lucy.

  “Vasily says he hopes you keep him informed of his son, and that you come visit Murmansk again someday, if he wants to meet his father.”

  “Of course,” Lucy said. “Tell him I’ll send him cards and pictures and drawings. He won’t be forgotten.”

  THREE MONTHS WENT BY, Lucy’s watershed year drawing to a close, and she still hadn’t listened to Harlan’s cassette tape, nor had she revisited any of his e-mails. Her relief about Mat had blunted her anger, but she still resented Harlan for lying to her. She wished he had been honest about why he was giving up. At the very least, she would have tried to understand.

  Mat had started preschool and, with the exception of a minor biting incident, seemed to be adjusting well. Then one Saturday in early November, she realized while cleaning the bathroom sink that she hadn’t thought about Harlan for at least a day. Her sense of loss had kept her company for so long that she felt guilty about watching it fade from inattention. Mat was napping, so she went to her room and found the cassette tape and the recorder. She cut through the packaging and loaded the batteries, inserted the tape, and adjusted the volume. And then…
Harlan’s unmistakable voice.

  Look at my picture while you’re listening to this, Lucy. I want you to remember me as I was before—the good-looking boy. (He laughs.) So my grandmother’s story, which I never told you in person because it chokes me up every time…

  It all happened the day I turned five.

  My grandmother had made me a chocolate cake, and it was there on the middle of the dining-room table, calling to me, at her house in Louisiana. My parents and I and assorted other relatives were sitting around the table—your table now—listening to my uncle Reston play the banjo. He could play, Uncle Reston. He would bend his head over the strings and pick so fast you couldn’t see his fingers move.

  After waiting and listening to Uncle Reston, I apparently decided it was time for cake, or so the story goes. So I stood up on my chair and reached toward the cake in the middle of the table. As I stood up, the chair slipped out from under me, so my grandmother lunged to stop me from falling. Uncle Reston lunged too, banjo and all, and the handle flew up and cracked my grandmother right in the face as though she’d been hit with a baseball bat. Her nose was broken, and she lost the vision in her left eye.

  Now, you might say, that’s a terrible accident, but worse things have happened, and I would agree (I’m a case in point). But what you don’t know is that my grandfather had died a year earlier, and my grandmother’s taxes were already in arrears. She made her living as a seamstress, but she couldn’t sew anymore because of her injuries, so she lost the house to foreclosure. The only thing salvaged was the dining-room table.

  But just so you know, things improved for my grandmother. She moved into an apartment building, taking only her clothes and the table. She was down, Lucy, but she had her faith, just like you have yours. A few months later, she met a retired insurance salesman, fell in love, and got married again. The two of them had twelve years together. She died in 1987—I miss her still—and he died a few months later. The table went to my mother for a few years, but she gave it to me after she moved into her Florida condo. She said it didn’t go with the decor.

  So take care of it, Lucy. If you have any kids, just cover it up with newspaper for ten or twenty years. There’s no reason it shouldn’t last another hundred years, no reason at all. It’s a tough old table, and it wants your stories, too.

  Good-bye, Lucy… I hope you enjoyed hearing about the table… I love you.

  She turned off the tape recorder and smiled. It was all so absurd, Harlan’s grandmother and the banjo. It brought back memories of Harlan’s sense of humor that had long ago evaporated. His throat had been sore when he recorded his message; she could tell by the strain and thickness of it. At the end, it had seemed that every part of his body had been forced to join in the suffering. But he had managed to sound as if none of that bothered him. He had choked up only when he spoke of his grandmother’s death, wanting to provide the image of a little boy lunging for a cake so that Lucy could balance it with the cane-dependent invalid emptying his savings account.

  She had sat down at her desk to reread Harlan’s final e-mail when Mat came into her bedroom with his hair pushed into little devil horns from his nap. Framed on her desk was the picture of him driving his red car in Moscow, eyes gleaming, and he pointed at it.

  “Car.”

  “Yes, that was the car you left in Moscow. We’ll go back there someday.”

  Mat reached over her arms to type on the keyboard and hit something that brought up the prompt asking Lucy if she was sure she wanted to delete Harlan’s e-mail program. She pulled Mat’s hands away from the keyboard and stared at the question: Are you sure?

  Then she reached for the mouse and clicked on Yes. Even though she knew no more e-mails were coming, it felt right to say yes, it’s over.

  She realized now that Harlan had never accepted her commitment to him, never understood that she would have been grateful to preserve what was left of him, because even a fragment of Harlan was better than no Harlan at all. At the same moment, it took her aback to realize that she could be just as self-centered as any child. She had cared for Harlan out of love, but she had also wanted the reward of a grateful Harlan, a Harlan who recovered and would never forget her devotion. She had wanted him to live because she needed him, more than he needed her. The truth of it hurt, but she couldn’t change it. All she could do was take a little of his advice into the next phase of her life. She stood up and turned off the computer screen.

  “Let’s go somewhere,” she told Mat, who ran to his room to get his sneakers.

  It was cool outside, but not cold, the November sun shimmering behind a milky haze of clouds. They stopped at a Friendly’s in the western suburbs and ordered from the takeout window. Lucy decided on a vanilla Fribble in honor of Nana Mavis, and Mat had soft-serve chocolate. His face was the picture of concentration as the thick ribbon of ice cream curled into the stubby waffle cone, as if something might go wrong if he didn’t supervise carefully.

  “Thank you,” he told the clerk who handed it to him, and she felt a surge of pride. A mother’s pride.

  When they got back into the car, she wrapped Mat’s cone in layers of napkins and drove west again, letting the car take her to a place she felt she needed to go. They parked at the bottom of the hill, and she held the chocolate cone as Mat unbuckled his own car seat. He was, she had discovered, remarkably adept at removing anything that might restrict his movements. They climbed the hill and found Harlan’s headstone. Grass covered the soil, erasing the outline where his grave had been dug the previous November, when her watershed year had truly started.

  Mat’s cone began to melt down his arm, and she cleaned him up with the extra napkins she now remembered to take. She sat down on the grass, cross-legged, and Mat found his place in her lap.

  I know, Harlan. I know that you could have continued with the experimental treatments, and it breaks my heart that you couldn’t tell me why you were stopping. But you were right; it was your decision. I’m sorry if I pushed you too hard. What I see now is that you feared your illness, while I feared your death. And what I really feared was how much I would miss you.

  I thought I’d introduce you to my new son, Mat. I wish you could see him. He’s so beautiful. He’s a handful, of course, but he’s worth it. I also wanted to thank you for the tape, and for your e-mails. I’m working to find this titanium core you say I have. I’m trying to be the strong one, allowing you to open the door for me. You may not have realized it, Harlan, but grief was your gift to me. Grief is what led me to Mat, and he’s the reason I can put it behind me. For that, I can’t thank you enough.

  I only regret one thing, and that’s never telling you when you were alive how much I loved you. But I think, somehow, you knew.

  She paused and looked toward Mat, who had gotten up from her lap. He wandered over to the Virgin Mary statue, resting one chocolate-stained hand on her head as he crunched the edge of his waffle cone.

  “Poor Mary,” Lucy said, standing up and wiping off the ice cream with napkins.

  She shoved the statue back a bit, centering it once again on its pedestal. Then she bent down and put her arms around her son, conferring on him the family legacy of happiness that she had so long resisted but was now, unmistakably, her own.

  acknowledgements

  I will be forever grateful to Lindsay Guzzardo, my warm and wise-beyond-her-years editor, and to Jessica Regel, my extremely talented and ever-optimistic agent. Jennifer Lonas, it should be noted, did an outstanding job copyediting the manuscript.

  I must thank the Connecticut Commission on Culture and Tourism for supporting me with an Artist Fellowship and the Faulkner Society for honoring me with the gold medal for best novel in the 2006 William Faulkner–William Wisdom Creative Writing Competition.

  To my friends, family, and early readers, I can honestly say that you fueled me with your enthusiasm. I must mention a few of you: Theresa Sullivan Barger, Karen O’Brien, Mary Ann Schoenberger, Nancy Schoenberger King, John Schoenberger Jr.,
Colleen Porth, Beth Papermaster, Michelle Souza, Mary Collins, Steve Courtney, Sally Lynch, Laura Giannone, Susan Fabry Daniels, Kristin Higgins, Deborah Hornblow, and Tima Smith. I am very grateful to Rebecca Homes for sharing her adoption story and to Dr. Michael Isakoff for his medical expertise.

  I would also like to recognize my dear friend and former Baltimore Sun colleague Dan Reese, whose all-too-brief life inspired everyone who knew him.

  Finally, I would like to thank my family. My parents, to whom this book is dedicated, never once told me that writing a novel wasn’t an entirely realistic goal. My wonderful husband, Kevin, has worked tirelessly to support our family while allowing me to pursue a dream. I’m also truly grateful to my children—Andrew, Jenna, and Claire—whose love and support and dinnertime jokes managed to turn all the ups and downs of the writing process into a joyful ride.

  about the author

  Photograph © Shana Sureck

  Susan Schoenber is a writer and editor who lives in West Hartford, Connecticut, with her husband, three children, and a dog named Jackson. A Watershed Year, which won the gold medal in the William Faulkner–William Wisdom Creative Writing Competition, is her first novel. Her short stories and essays have appeared in Inkwell, Village Rambler, Bartleby Snopes, the Double Dealer, and Reader’s Digest. A longtime journalist, Susan has worked for the Baltimore Sun, the Hartford Courant, and many other publications. She reads a lot, runs, and plays the piano when she’s feeling nostalgic. Please visit her Web site at www.susanschoenberger.com.

  a conversation with

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  SUSAN SCHOENBERGER