A Watershed Year

by Susan Schoenberger

  As Paul and Cokie emerged from the submarine, Mat ran to a wooden structure that resembled the Eiffel Tower. He climbed up to the first platform, then began to cry. They all ran to him.

  “What’s wrong, Mat?” Lucy said. He sat down, legs dangling, on the platform, which was about the height of Lucy’s shoulders, and held out his hand. A small splinter protruded from the side of his index finger, and Lucy pulled it out, pinching it tightly with her fingernails. Then he did something he had never done before. He held out his arms. Held them out to her.

  She lifted him off the platform and held him as he wrapped his legs around her waist. Then Rosalee hugged him from behind, and Paul and Cokie each took a side. Bertie, who by that time had emerged from the car, came over and threw his arms around Lucy. They stood there, one tangled mass of humanity, until Lucy couldn’t breathe anymore. She looked at her watch again as they all separated and she put Mat back on the ground. It was 4:15.

  “Where could they be?” Yulia wasn’t known for her punctuality, but wouldn’t Vasily have been impatient to see his son? Lucy had half expected him to be there waiting when they arrived. She felt Mat pulling on her hand toward the swings.

  “Mama, you push,” he said.

  She turned to her father. “Did he just say…?” but she didn’t wait for his response. The word rose up around her like a shawl, wrapping her in warmth. But why now, why this connection when she might have to watch motherhood slip away? She glanced again at the time—4:23.

  At 4:37, she called Yulia on her cell phone. Angela and Vern had arrived by then, having discovered where she was by calling Rosalee’s phone. Lucy’s anguish grew with each passing minute. It was cruel to keep them waiting.

  “Lucy,” Yulia said, sounding breathless on her end of the line. “I am just now calling your number.”

  “We’re waiting here on the playground, Yulia. Where’s Vasily? I thought you’d be here at four.”

  “But this is why I was calling,” she said. “Vasily is gone.”

  “He’s gone? I don’t understand.”

  “He tells me he needs to go for coffee, but then he doesn’t come back. He does not answer his phone.”

  Yulia sighed, and Lucy let her go on. “Before he left, I had long talk with him. I tell him what he must do to be good father to Azzie. I tell him you are good mother. Maybe he goes back to Russia.”

  Lucy looked at her family and friends, all hovering around Mat, and picked up the insulated snack bag. She should have been relieved, but now the question was out there, open-ended. Maybe he went back to Russia, but maybe he didn’t, and that “maybe” would hold her hostage until she knew what happened to Vasily.

  nineteen

  * * *

  Lucy shifted on the squeaky leather couch in the dean’s office, waiting for him to finish a phone conversation. She rubbed her fingers against the leather, testing its thickness. She was no longer worried about saving her job, but she felt compelled to meet with the dean when he called. What had consumed her just a year ago—her classes, her saint research, her academic standing—seemed like… work. The only thing that mattered now was keeping Mat.

  The dean hung up the phone. He tilted back in his chair and looked at her, widening his eyes, his reading glasses balanced on top of his head. She sensed he was sincerely puzzled by her behavior.

  “So, give me the story,” he said. “And I mean all of it. Why didn’t you tell me you were adopting? I only heard about it yesterday from Angela.”

  “I’m not sure.” And she wasn’t. Why had she assumed he wouldn’t be sympathetic? She watched him shuffle through some papers on his desk, looking for her article, she supposed. “I guess I thought you’d be worried about whether I could do my job.”

  He held up the paper and put on his reading glasses.

  “You could have tried me. What I don’t like is surprises, like the one I got when I read this.”

  He set the paper down on the desk, flicking off some unseen speck on its cover.

  “I was just as surprised as you were.” Lucy told him what had happened leading up to Vasily’s disappearance, including her trip to Russia and how she had asked Louis to deliver the paper. “Louis was trying to help. I mean, I threw it together, to be honest with you. I was hoping you’d give me a chance to rewrite it when I got back.”

  The dean put his open hands together, a prayerful pose, then sat for a moment with his index fingers touching his nose. She had never been in the principal’s office for punishment, but she imagined this is how it might feel.

  “I’m going to cut you a break, Lucy,” he said finally. “You have the summer to get your act together. I’ll give you one less course to teach in the fall, but you’ll have to show me you can handle the work as well as your research. The article, by the way, is very good. I think you should submit it to the journals, with Beauchamp’s permission, of course. I don’t condone what he did, but the circumstances were unusual, to say the least. I hope it works out with your son.”

  Lucy nodded and worked her way to the front of the leather couch, putting her weight into the black pumps she wore to such meetings. “Thank you,” she said.

  The dean walked her toward the door, and she whispered another “thank you” as he closed it gently on her words.

  BACK AT HOME, Lucy called her mother and told her to bring Mat home. Though her parents preferred to think Vasily was long gone, they had agreed to help move Mat from house to house a few times a day in case he showed up again. She had just opened a new Religion journal to the table of contents when the doorbell rang. She peeked through the curtains and saw that it was Louis.

  “Lucy, I need to talk to you,” he said through the door.

  She sat down on the floor, her back against the wall, and said nothing. When he spoke again, she touched the door, which vibrated slightly with the sound.

  “Angela told me what happened with Mat. I can’t believe it, Lucy. You could have lost him.”

  Could have lost him? Everyone else seemed convinced that Vasily had left for good, but she had none of their confidence, and nothing, not even Harlan’s death, had caused her as much distress as the thought that he might come back.

  “Are you okay? What can I do?” Louis said. She could hear that he wanted to be part of the story, felt left out, but she wasn’t sure how much sympathy he deserved.

  “You’ve done more than enough,” she said, finally opening the door. She wasn’t angry about the paper anymore. She even understood, intellectually, why he had interfered, but he should have confessed right away. It seemed like a cardinal relationship sin among people who worked together: thou shalt not withhold job-related information.

  Louis walked past her, straight to the kitchen.

  “Sit down,” he told her. “You need something. Tea? Water? Seltzer? Have you eaten today? I could go get some takeout.”

  Louis put a glass of water and an apple on the table, and she sat down. When she made no move toward the apple, he got a knife from the kitchen and peeled off the skin, cutting it into wedges, placing them in front of her on a napkin.

  She arranged the apple slices into the shape of a flower. “I spoke to the dean. He says we should submit the article.”

  Louis ran his fingers through his hair, shifting in his chair until he looked as if he might slide off. “He told me the same thing. That was the last thing I expected him to say.”

  She bit into one of the apple slices. It was sour, a McIntosh out of season.

  “When did you talk to him?”

  “He called me today. He wanted to remind me of my ethical responsibilities toward informing colleagues when I stick my nose in their work. But he also wanted to tell me about a job.”

  “At Ellsworth?” she said.

  “UMass.”

  This was how things went in academia. She knew that. Graduate students rarely found jobs at the institutions that granted their degrees. They went elsewhere. But for some reason, it had never occurred to her that Louis migh
t leave. For that, she blamed herself—her own insular mind-set these days—but she also blamed him. Surely he had given her the impression that he wasn’t looking around.

  “The religion department here is pretty small,” he said, pointing out the obvious. “So I have to think about it.”

  “Of course you do,” she said. It now seemed inevitable that he would leave. How could she not have seen that coming? On the other hand, their relationship couldn’t be repaired anyway. He had damaged the framework, delicate to begin with.

  “I’ve been meaning to ask you something,” he said.

  “Go ahead.”

  “Your friend, Harlan, the one who died last year. What’s with these e-mails?”

  “What?”

  “I saw one printed out on your desk when I was working on your article. I’m sorry, but it caught my eye. How is he sending you e-mails?”

  “He wrote them before he died,” she said, uninterested in his response. She looked down at his feet and saw that he was wearing flip-flops, like the students did. She wanted him to be six years older instead of six years younger. Then he might be able to help her instead of sitting there with his unlined face full of misdirected concern. “They’ve been coming on the tenth of every month since January.”

  She had never discussed Harlan with Louis before. He had known about their friendship, of course, of how she cared for Harlan during his illness, but he had never asked her why.

  “Wasn’t it hard on you that he ended his life the way he did?” Louis asked.

  “Why are we talking about this?” Harlan had become a cottage industry, of sorts, inside her mind. She wanted to silkscreen his words on T-shirts and sell them, but only to a small but devoted following.

  “At the time, I thought it was selfish, what he did,” Louis said. “You could have been the one to find him.”

  “It wasn’t selfish,” she said. She rolled up the napkin around the apple slices, bunched it in her hand. “He wanted to spare me, and everyone else, watching him waste away. I can’t put myself in his place. Neither can you.”

  “He loved you, though. I could tell from what he wrote,” Louis said. “Did you love him?”

  She looked at him, unsure of whether he wanted the truth, then slowly nodded. There was no point in lying. She got up and threw the apple slices away.

  “Good-bye, Lucy,” he said. “I’ll be in touch.”

  She walked him to the door and watched him go.

  LUCY HANDS HARLAN a cup of coffee.

  “You never asked your question,” she says. “The one you came over to ask.”

  “That’s right,” he says, blowing on the coffee. “I never did.”

  She takes her cup to the counter and sits on a stool. She pushes her hair aside and rubs her face, certain that it’s creased and distorted, speckled with migratory mascara. She feels frumpy, imagining Sylvie with her freshly brushed smile emerging from the train.

  “It’s a weird question,” he says.

  “Just ask it,” she says, irritated now, having forgotten for a moment why he came over in the first place.

  He sits down on the other stool, holding his mug as though it’s something precious, an ancient artifact or a piece of antique porcelain.

  “When two people should be together…” he says, trailing off.

  She says nothing, for once leaving the void unfilled.

  “When two people are meant for each other,” he says, trying again, “can they still misunderstand each other? Can they still find it hard to explain what they need?”

  She imagines him waiting at the platform for Sylvie, preparing to tell her about his illness, bracing for her response.

  “If you want me to be honest, I think love transcends that. Two people, if they’re meant to be together, shouldn’t find it hard to explain what they need from each other. That’s what I think.”

  “I see,” he says, putting down his mug. He gives her a look she can’t quite interpret. She detects sadness there, or disappointment, as though she has given him the wrong answer. “I guess you’re right.”

  As he leaves, glancing at his watch, she wants to ask him a question. About the kiss. But he looks preoccupied, as well he might be. And so she says nothing. Only good-bye.

  COKIE HANDED Lucy a bag of pretzels, and she emptied them into a large bowl from a Tupperware set kept in its original cardboard box in one of her mother’s lower cabinets. The box was so old it was soft, almost like cloth. It had been in the kitchen for as long as Lucy could remember, and she found comfort in its familiarity. She allowed herself to think, for the first time, that Vasily might not resurface. It had been four days since he was supposed to meet them on the playground, and Yulia hadn’t heard from him. The anxiety lessened with each hour he stayed away.

  Paul came in and wrapped his arms around Cokie from behind, kissing her hair. “Can you believe Molly’s twelve?” he said.

  “No, I can’t,” Cokie said, taking a pretzel. “I told her she had to stop having birthdays. Twelve is enough.”

  Paul was still working on his wife to purchase a T.G.I. Friday’s franchise, and Lucy had heard that Cokie was beginning to cave. They both had that entrepreneurial drive, a divining rod for making money that Lucy had never possessed. They didn’t worry about how they made it, either; they didn’t torture themselves about whether the world needed onion rings or mozzarella sticks, or whether they needed a flat-screen television. It was there, so it was theirs. A part of her envied them for lacking a sense of moral ambiguity.

  “So what’s the story with Louis?” Paul said. “I haven’t seen him around lately.”

  Lucy had just taken a can of frozen lemonade out of her mother’s freezer and dumped it in a pitcher. Paul waited as she let the water run until the pitcher was full.

  “He took a new job,” she said. “He’s moving to Massachusetts.”

  From the kitchen, she could see across the hall to the door of the lunchbox room, which her mother kept locked when Mat was around.

  “That’s too bad,” Paul said. “He seemed like a nice guy.”

  A nice guy, which was all they ever wanted for her. Maybe it looked simple from their perspective: Combine one lonely woman with one nice guy. Mix. Bake. Test for doneness. Decorate and top with plastic bride and groom. She couldn’t blame them for wanting her family to have three members instead of two. But at this point, all she wanted was a little reassurance that her tiny family wouldn’t be reduced to one again.

  “He was,” she said. “Very nice. He wants me to come visit, but I’m not sure I will. I don’t think it would have worked out anyway. Hey, I brought that money you loaned me. Let me get it.”

  Paul shook his head. “Keep it,” he said. “Start a college fund or something.”

  Lucy began to protest, but Paul ignored her and took the bowl of pretzels into the dining room. She went out the back door to check on Mat and keep her father company at the grill. Mat was playing in the backyard with Molly, who was giving him piggyback rides.

  Bertie flipped a hamburger. “Mat’s not going back to Russia, sweetheart. He’s staying with us,” he said.

  Lucy squinted into the sun, trying to catch a glimpse of Mat as Molly rounded a tree. “I wish I could be sure, but until I hear that his father went back, I’m not going to sleep much.”

  “How are you holding up?”

  “I’m okay,” she said as Bertie put his hand on top of her head, resting it gently on the dark curls. “But you realize, there are no guarantees. I still don’t have Vasily’s signature.”

  In the past few days, she had made calls to the State Department and to Maryland’s congressional offices, only to hang up when the person on the other end asked for her name, terrified to provoke an investigation of her paperwork when Vasily might never come back.

  “The way I see it, you’re getting a second chance,” he said, and she nodded.

  Not everyone, she thought, finds the cure—the sun-dried tomatoes that shrink the tumor or the b
oy who is the hazelnut, all that is made. With Mat in her life, everything seemed more concrete—full of dirt and tears and raw emotions—and at the same time, more mysterious, the how of their coming together now less important than the why. If Vasily came back, she would never have the time to figure it out.

  “Tell your mother the hot dogs are three minutes to perfection,” Bertie said. “For the hamburgers, more like five.”

  She hugged her father and went inside.

  It was a vividly sunny day, less humid than usual, but they ate their picnic food in the dining room because Mat was afraid of bees. When Rosalee brought out Molly’s cake with its lighted candles, they all sang “Happy Birthday” slowly, enunciating carefully, so Mat could catch the words. He seemed fascinated by the whole ritual, particularly the candles. After Molly blew them out, Rosalee lit them again so Mat could try it. Then he ate his cake and asked for seconds. How American he was becoming, Lucy thought, already addicted to sugar.

  After the party, she drove back to the duplex and walked up the stairs, carrying a sleeping Mat. She wondered where Vasily was now, picturing him in some rundown apartment in Russia, wanting to make it so. But it wasn’t so. After she tucked Mat into his bed, she listened to a message on her answering machine. It was from Yulia.

  “Lucy, I hear from Vasily. He goes back to Atlantic City to think about his decision, but now he is to return. He wants to talk. Call me back.”

  twenty

  * * *

  Dear Lucy,

  I know you’re not expecting this e-mail until July, but I only have one more thing to tell you, and that is how much I love you.

  I certainly had feelings for you soon after we met, a gentle crush that I thought would pass in time. To be honest, I thought it was no match for Sylvie and this life she imagined us having together, so I stopped myself from acting on it.

  After you and I both moved to Ellsworth, though, I realized that I needed to break off my engagement and have an honest talk with you, but I hated to hurt Sylvie, and I saw no need to rush. I also wasn’t completely sure how you felt about me. Then the planes hit the towers, and everything changed. Strange how that event is so intertwined with my illness, as if one precipitated the other.