A Watershed Year

by Susan Schoenberger

  That little interlude almost made it more difficult when the tumors began to grow again. I never told you this, but Dr. Singh gave me the number of a hospice a few months ago, when I was at my lowest point. A week later, he called me to say I was eligible for the phase 1 trial. But it was always a long shot just to get me ready for a bone-marrow transplant, which was another long shot. I agreed to the experimental stuff in part because all these doctors wanted so badly to give me another chance and in part because of you. I didn’t want to let you down. We have one of those rare connections, Lucy. I’m my best and most comfortable self in your presence, and you’ve made it clear how much you want me to stick around. But after they chemo’d me into the ground for the umpteenth time, the color just drained away. I couldn’t do it anymore. As hackneyed as it may sound, there’s no point in fighting the battle when you don’t think you can win the war.

  I regret, sometimes, that we didn’t spend a lot of time together before my illness. If we had, if Sylvie had never been in the picture, I’m sure you would have better memories of me. Back in the day, I was a lot of fun. If I thought I could become that person again, I would force myself to wait, to see if medical science might catch up to my disease, as you so strongly advocate. But that person is gone, Lucy. I don’t know if he was suctioned out the first time they tested my bone marrow, or if he was blasted with toxic chemicals during my last chemo treatment, but he’s not coming back.

  It might seem a little contradictory for me to advise you to move on when I’m inserting myself into your monthly chores with these e-mails. I only want to remind you that you have a long, long story that’s yet to be told. I need to think that you’ll propel yourself ahead instead of dwelling on the past.

  Love, as always,

  Harlan

  Mat was calling her from the other room, but Lucy stayed in her chair, holding the words in front of her, letting them float in and out of focus.

  She had no idea that Harlan’s doctor had given him the number of a hospice before he started the experimental treatments. She couldn’t imagine what he did with that information or which part of his brain had tried to cope with the idea that no one could help him anymore. And yet, when the chance came for the phase 1 trial, he had agreed, not because he thought it would help, but because his doctors weren’t ready to give up and because Lucy had wanted to prolong his life. Maybe they had all just pushed him too far with their positive reinforcement and their desperate hope. He was the one living it, and they couldn’t have known—not even his doctors—what he was feeling inside.

  She went back to the top of the e-mail, to the arc. So that’s what happened when you knew you were dying; you sought patterns to make sense of it, to give it some shape that could be replicated, described by a mathematical equation. And that might explain the e-mails, too, the need to pass along something learned, something others could put to use, like those parents who started organizations against drunk driving or to prevent choking hazards or to require fences around swimming pools, so that their child wouldn’t have died in vain.

  She read the e-mail again, still lost in the words, which she could hear being spoken as though Harlan himself was standing by her side. His voice had been fading, but this note brought it back with all its resonance.

  Just as she closed her eyes, Mat came in on all fours, pushing his Tonka truck until he was close enough to tug on her leg.

  “Cokie,” he said.

  “Just a minute, Mat.” She could let him wait now, had finally realized that her constant ministrations and availability only diminished her in his eyes. She had grown more opaque, holding her need to be loved like a hand of cards, close to her chest. And it was working. More and more often now, Mat came to her.

  She turned back to the computer as Mat ran the Tonka truck under her chair. When he stood up next to her and stared at the computer screen, she felt somehow that he was reading Harlan’s e-mail, though she knew it wasn’t possible. She closed it quickly, as though she were hiding a love letter.

  “One more minute,” she said, glancing back at the e-mail directory. A new e-mail had arrived, apparently while she had been communing with Harlan’s ghost. This one was from Dean Humphrey.

  Lucy,

  While I appreciate your work on this piece—and it’s a good one—I don’t remember discussing a joint effort with you. Please call me as soon as possible to explain Louis Beauchamp’s role.

  Dean

  She read it again. A joint effort? She had hoped to scrape by with the article, just buy herself another year so she could settle in with Mat and get her academic life back on track. What did Louis have to do with it?

  Mat tugged on her sleeve, and she got up, following him downstairs to the kitchen. She handed him a cookie and spread some peanut butter—he never seemed to get enough—on a slice of bread. She had to call Louis. She opened the refrigerator for some milk and saw that she would have to go shopping again: bread, eggs, orange juice, cheese, apples, more peanut butter. What did it mean? A joint effort. Louis was supposed to walk the article from her desk to the dean’s office. Was Dean Humphrey upset that she hadn’t delivered it personally? She bent down to get a new sponge from under the sink. She needed dishwashing detergent, too. And more cookies. How could such a small boy consume so much?

  “Kotka?” Mat said, which surprised her, because she hadn’t heard him use a Russian word in at least a week. She picked up her Russian-English dictionary, which was on the counter near the kitchen phone, but she didn’t have to look it up because she noticed that Mat was pointing at the cat clock, its tail incessantly swinging.

  “Cat? Are you looking for the cat?” She wondered if he had just noticed it was gone. “The cat is with Nana.”

  “Nana?” he said.

  “Nana has kotka,” Lucy said, picking up a piece of paper and a blue crayon to draw a primitive sketch of her mother’s living room. She drew the cat, placing him on the floor near her mother’s couch. She had started to add some exaggerated whiskers when the phone rang.

  “Hello.” She held the phone with her shoulder so she could delineate the cat’s paws. She had never been particularly good at art, but she was quite pleased with her drawing. At least it was identifiable as a cat.

  “Lucy, this is Yulia. You are with Mat?”

  “He’s here. What’s wrong? You sound upset.”

  There was a pause on the other end of the line, a pause so blatantly awkward and long that Lucy felt it physically. An abdominal cramp nearly caused her to double over.

  “It’s Mat’s father, Vasily. He is here. He called from JFK. He is renting car to drive to Baltimore. He wants to see his son.”

  Lucy dropped the crayon, which hit the counter and rolled to the floor. This was both impossible to believe and the inevitable result of Yulia’s manipulations, as well as Lucy’s own complicity. A faint whine in her ear grew louder until she could barely hear herself when she spoke.

  “He doesn’t have a son anymore, Yulia. He signed the termination papers. He’s my son now.”

  “I’m afraid this may not be true,” Yulia said, sighing deeply. “Vasily says he never signed any papers. Zoya Minsky apparently signed for him. He says he agreed to the adoption but never sent paperwork. Now he has changed his mind.”

  “Changed his—how is that possible?” Mat was on the floor, retrieving the crayon. Lucy took the last few chocolate chip cookies out of the bag, gave him a small stack, and took the phone into the closet, closing the door.

  “I’ll get a lawyer. I’ll get a restraining order. He gave him up, Yulia, stuck him in that dark, sad place, and now he wants him back? And he probably beat him, too. Do you know how hard you have to beat a child to leave a permanent scar?”

  The musty coats in the closet brushed her face, closing her in. She reached around and pulled the chain on the light switch; the bare bulb half blinded her as she shifted the phone to the other ear in the absurd hope that it would change what Yulia was telling her.

 
“All this I know. But if Vasily didn’t sign, as he says, then you may have trouble for taking Mat out of his home country.”

  “I’m the one? I’m the—” It hit her now, everything she had feared and tucked into small hidden corners of her brain whenever Yulia made her excuses. Lucy realized she was on her own now, and she vowed that no one would take Mat away, not after she and her family had chipped away at his brittle exterior enough to see the vulnerable little boy beneath. She hung up on Yulia and emerged from the closet, wiping her face before Mat could see her tears.

  “More cat,” he said, handing her a blank sheet of paper.

  She drew him another cat with a curious calm, her hand perfectly steady as her mind raced into dead ends, all involving extended courtroom scenes that dissolved into Mat being torn from her arms. Mat’s father was driving down from New York, could be at her door within hours. She had a shocking image of Mat being dragged into a car with dark-tinted windows.

  “Come on, sport,” she said, faking a smile. “We’re going for a ride.”

  Lucy strapped Mat into his car seat, then ran back into the house to throw some of their clothes into a large plastic garbage bag. She grabbed his monkey and his penguin and dropped her keys twice before she could finally lock the door. The sky was so heavy with dark clouds that it looked as if one might be crowded out, dropping directly on them. Before getting in the car, she took out her cell phone.

  “Ma, it’s me. I need your help, and I need some money.”

  A half hour later, Lucy pulled into Paul and Cokie’s driveway and rested her forehead on the steering wheel. A drop of blood fell onto her bare leg, just below where her shorts ended. She touched her mouth, and her fingers came away red from where she had bitten the inside of her lip until it was torn.

  Rosalee and Paul both emerged from the house. Rosalee took Mat out of his car seat as Paul gently opened the driver’s door as though Lucy were an invalid and might need help walking. She found a tissue, blotted her lip, then followed Paul into the cavernous foyer.

  Molly was the first to spot Mat.

  “Hey there, buddy. I’m your cousin Molly,” she said, kneeling in front of him. Mat backed away from her to stand behind Lucy. Then Sean and Jack came in with a soccer ball and rolled it toward Mat, who kicked it back.

  “Would he go with them to the backyard?” Paul asked. “I think the rain will hold off for a while.”

  “I’m not sure,” Lucy said, afraid to have Mat leave her, even for a few minutes. But when she turned around, Mat was already gone. She saw him running down the hallway behind Jack toward the back of the house. It struck her, painfully, that he probably missed playing with other children. She had kept him to herself, except for the one disastrous playground visit. She looked up, wishing the foyer didn’t have such a high ceiling. A smaller space would have helped her feel less exposed.

  Cokie came down the sweeping staircase, pausing just long enough in front of the ballerina painting to make it appear to Lucy that she was one of them: tall, slender, her hair now evenly and professionally blond.

  “C’mon.” Cokie herded them from the foyer into the kitchen, taking charge with the authority of her newly minted success. “Let’s all take a deep breath and figure this out.”

  Bertie emerged from the bathroom pale and weak, to join them around the kitchen counter. Lucy couldn’t bear to look at him, knowing her own face was just as drained, just as terrified. Rosalee spoke first.

  “You can’t go home, that’s a given. He’ll look there first. Then he’ll probably come to our house. Yulia knows where it is.”

  Paul interrupted. “Whose side is she on, anyway? Did you get the impression that she’s okay with her brother-in-law taking him back?”

  “She just sounded”—Lucy tried to think—“resigned, like she couldn’t do anything about it.”

  Cokie put a coffeepot on the counter and took mugs from the cabinet, grouping them near the pot. Lucy wanted to swipe them all to the floor, because coffee was what people drank during dramatic family discussions on television, in soap operas, consulting their cups as if they held all the answers. But there wouldn’t be any answers inside her cup, and she knew she couldn’t hold one without shaking.

  “Stay here,” Paul said. “We have room.”

  Lucy nodded, grateful for the offer, though she couldn’t accept it. She wrapped her arms around herself, warding off the chill from the air-conditioning, or was it from inside her, cold dread penetrating something central, her liver or her spleen. Vasily would find them here. The spaces were too large, too open, the ceilings too high. Yulia would be convinced, or forced, to reveal things. Vasily would find out that Lucy had a brother and look him up on the Internet. If she knew anything about Mat’s father, she knew that he was a sobaka. A dog. Yulia had told her as much on the day of her fingerprint scan.

  “I have to leave.” Her breath became shallow. “I need to get out of here, get a head start before he figures out where we might be.”

  Rosalee slipped off her stool, left the kitchen, and came back with her purse. She handed Bertie an ATM card.

  “Get whatever you can,” she said.

  “Let’s go,” Paul said, and Bertie followed him into the hallway, shuffling as though he had aged ten years.

  Lucy hated taking their money, but she had only a few hundred dollars in her own checking account and wasn’t due to be paid until the following week. She looked down at the car keys in her hand. She was gripping them so tightly her skin had turned white.

  Canada. Montreal. The Grey Nuns would take them in, hide them until Mat’s father gave up and went home. Saint Marguerite would guide them to safety. Cokie placed a cup of coffee in front of her.

  “Lucy,” she said. “Are you okay?”

  Lucy looked at her, seeing for the first time the spidery lines branching around Cokie’s eyes.

  “I have a plan,” Lucy said.

  “What is it?” Rosalee asked, peering out the kitchen windows at Mat in the backyard. She rattled her spoon in her coffee.

  “It’s somewhere safe. I’ll find a way for you to let me know when Vasily leaves.”

  Rosalee kept her eyes trained on Mat, still fiddling with the spoon.

  “Ma, look at me.”

  Rosalee turned her wide brown eyes toward Lucy, who had expected to see resentment—because it must now be clear to her mother that she hadn’t checked out the agency thoroughly enough, had rushed headlong off a cliff without regard for the people standing on the rim shouting warnings. But there was only fear.

  “Don’t let anyone take our baby,” Rosalee said. The mug dropped from her hand, splattering the floor and the cabinets with coffee, and the spoon bounced away, landing near the sink. Cokie grabbed a roll of paper towels from the dispenser and unspooled them onto the floor. They were still wiping down the cabinets when Paul and Bertie returned.

  Paul laid a thick white cash envelope on the counter, and Bertie placed another one on top of it.

  “That should see you for a couple weeks,” Paul said. “We can always send more.”

  “I should get going.” Lucy looked out the window and saw the boys kicking soccer balls. Mat kicked a ball that bounced off a tree and ricocheted back to hit him on the forehead. She almost ran out until she saw that he was laughing as Sean rubbed his own head and threw himself to the ground.

  “Thanks for the money, really. I’ll pay you back.” As she walked out the back door, they all followed: Rosalee, Bertie, Paul, and Cokie, moving almost as one as Lucy approached Mat and took his hand.

  “Thanks, guys, we’ll see you soon.”

  Mat pulled his hand away from Lucy and ran back toward one of the soccer balls. She turned around, imploring her little knot of supporters to help.

  “Get in your car, Lucy,” Cokie said, taking charge again. “We’ll bring him out.”

  Lucy followed the slate path from the back of the house around to the driveway. The rain clouds had merged into one thick layer, a vast gray
mattress above her head. She kept blinking, but the path blurred in front of her, the colors merging and re-forming into an abstract mosaic. She got into the car and stuffed the envelopes of cash into her purse, peeling the keys from the palm of her left hand, which was pockmarked as though she had been gripping a grenade.

  Rosalee emerged first, then Bertie, then Cokie, followed by Paul, who was carrying Mat upside down by his ankles. Mat’s mouth was hanging open, and Lucy couldn’t tell if he was laughing or crying. Paul flipped him right side up. Oh, good. Laughing. But then crying, no howling, as Paul strapped him into his car seat.

  Her parents leaned into the driver’s-side window to kiss her good-bye as Paul closed the door on Mat’s screams, which trapped them in the car with her, giving them extra volume. She was almost grateful for the screaming, which hastened her exit, left no time to rethink. She backed down the driveway.

  “I know, I know,” Lucy said over and over, although she realized she couldn’t know, could never put herself completely inside his confusion, just as she could never put herself inside Harlan’s pain. As they made their way toward the interstate, the mantra either calmed Mat down or annoyed him so much that he fell asleep. She drove north on I-95, her foot bearing down on the accelerator, easing up only when she saw she was approaching eighty. She couldn’t afford a speeding ticket.

  The rain finally started as she drove across the Delaware Memorial Bridge, with its central towers spiraling above her and its elegantly curved supports, both rigid and fluid at the same time—one of those feats of engineering indecipherable to a student of religion but which seemed to have some spiritual meaning all the same. In the mood that overcame her, she saw tragedy there, the reaching, reaching, reaching, and the inevitable return to earth. Harlan’s arc. The rain pounded on the windshield, and the wipers whipped a reprimand back and forth: your-fault, your-fault, your-fault.

  She couldn’t comprehend how her life had imploded in the course of one morning. As she passed the Welcome to New Jersey sign, it occurred to her that she might never be able to go back. What if Mat’s father stayed here, ignoring the return date on his visa? Or what if he returned to Russia, and she came back to Baltimore, and then Yulia ratted her out? What would prevent him from getting on a plane again? Doubts pelted her like the rain on the roof of the car. What if there was no God, no saintly intercession, only you and your half-blind choices and the random collision of events in the universe and, in the end, only death? She fought it, but the doubts crept into her brain, prying up the boards of faith she had so carefully nailed down.