A Watershed Year

The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

Copyright © 2011 by Susan Schoenberger
First edition published by Guideposts in 2011.
Amazon Publishing edition published in 2013.
All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

Published by Amazon Publishing

PO Box 400818
Las Vegas, NV 89140

ISBN-13: 9781477848012
ISBN-10: 1477848010

To my wonderful parents, Joyce and John

contents

one

two

three

four

five

six

seven

eight

nine

ten

eleven

twelve

thirteen

fourteen

fifteen

sixteen

seventeen

eighteen

nineteen

twenty

acknowledgements

about the author

a conversation with SUSAN SCHOENBERGER

questions for discussion

one

T
he tawdry mermaid painted on the inside of Harlan’s front door wore a bikini top made of undersized clamshells. A crude wave curled over her neon-green tail, and the door’s peephole left the impression of a third eye in her forehead. Lucy had recommended that Harlan repaint the door or ask his landlord to do it, but Harlan had decided the mermaid would be a great conversation starter at parties.

Parties he had never had.

Lucy lingered by the door, looking for bits of mermaid paint to flake off with a fingernail as she waited for Harlan to emerge from the bedroom, where he was speaking on the phone to one of his doctors. Lucy had spent the afternoon with Harlan, and she had already said good-bye when his phone started ringing. She should have let herself out, but she hated being separated from him. She sensed that he was slipping away, leaving her before she was ready.

“Go,” Harlan said when he returned to the living room. He nudged Lucy gently through the door, and she could hear him twist the bolt lock into place with a rusty scrape. She was still standing on the welcome mat, ruffling its artificial grass with one of her clogs, when the bolt scraped in the direction of forgiveness. But Harlan only cracked the door wide enough to force her saddlebag purse through the opening.

“Five more minutes,” she said. “Then I promise I’ll leave you alone.”

He dropped the purse, and it fell like a bag of rocks, keys clattering onto the tile floor.

“I know you mean well, but it’s my decision,” he said, before closing the door again.

Lucy could picture him slumped against the mermaid: heavy lids blinking behind glasses so thick they left his face a blur; shadow-rimmed eyes peering out from the sallow skin that made him avoid mirrors. The same mirrors had once framed his thick, dark hair; the confident set of his shoulders; the well-defined lines of his jaw. All these, now gone. She knew his eyes were failing, his feet were numb, and he could barely taste or smell his food anymore. The experimental treatments had been ineffective, but she wanted him to give it more time.

“You’re thirty-three,” she said, crouching to speak through the mail slot. “No one dies at thirty-three.”

“Think about it, Lucy,” he said from his side of the door. “They do.”

She snatched up her purse and keys, then stumbled down the hallway toward the stairs, reviewing the argument she never seemed to finish with him: You don’t give up at thirty-three. You fight until you can’t stand up anymore, because science might, at any moment, catch up with your disease. And medical miracles happen. She didn’t make them up, she saw them on
Dateline
at least three times a year. What about the orthodontist who lived on sun-dried tomatoes and watched an eight-pound abdominal tumor shrink to nothing? “The results astounded even me,” the orthodontist had said, patting his taut midsection with both hands and turning sideways as if posing for an “after” picture in a weight-loss ad.

She drove to her own one-bedroom apartment on campus. Ellsworth College was highly respectable, but she found that it drew an odd mix of students to Baltimore: Midwest churchgoing valedictorians reared on beef, and East Coast vegetarian burnouts with high SAT scores.

The moment she entered her apartment, she kicked off her clogs in the direction of the coat closet and unzipped her jean skirt, undressing as the room’s cluttered quality struck her anew. Plaster saint figurines were everywhere—on top of the television and perched on the windowsills, adorning the used bookcases and lining the kitchen counter—all mementos of her PhD research. What would happen if she got tenure? Would she stop cramming her saints inside the broken microwave and under the bed whenever she had to host the religion department’s monthly wine-and-cheese gathering? Were there any sins more shocking among her peers than a little spirituality?

Harlan, who taught early European history at Ellsworth, once pointed out that impoverished Chinese factory workers—most likely atheists—had produced most of her little statues. But that didn’t bother her; it wasn’t the statues that mattered but what they represented. What could it hurt to ask for intercession, she had told Harlan more than once, as long as you weren’t careless about it, as in “Please, let there be enough mustard for my hot dog.”

Standing in her underwear, she had a sudden impression of her life post-Harlan, which involved hours of sitting in chain-bookstore cafés, sipping lattes in absurdly large cups, in the vague hope that someone would find that her long dark hair, her deep-brown eyes, and her genuine smile made up for her thick ankles, the unfortunate legacy of the Sicilian farming stock on her mother’s side of the family.

She sat down at the computer in a small alcove of her bedroom to e-mail Harlan, apologized for pushing the experimental drugs, and signed off as Mary Magdalene, patron saint of repentant sinners.

“You and your saints,” he responded. “Want to know how I feel?”

“Yes, I do.”

“I was in a movie theater once when the film broke, and they couldn’t fix it, and they sent me home with a coupon. That’s how I feel.”

“Like the film or the coupon?” she wrote back. “Are you the coupon?”

Ten minutes passed with no response, and Lucy thought she had pushed him too far with her belief in the healing power of humor. She pulled a long T-shirt over her head and brushed her teeth, checking and rechecking for a new e-mail.

“Okay,” he finally wrote. “I’m the coupon. But I get folded up, put in your pocket, and thrown in the wash. I never get redeemed.”

“Is anyone truly redeemed?” she wrote back.

“Only in cartoons. Meet me for lunch on Thursday at Artie’s. Around noon. I’ll buy you some crab soup.”

THAT THURSDAY, Lucy shifted her wire-mesh chair into the shade of the restaurant umbrella and thought of Elijah the Prophet, who was said to help motorists and might save Harlan a parking spot so he wouldn’t have to walk far in the midday sun of an unusually warm November day. Since the soles of his feet had gone numb, Harlan walked like an arthritic senior citizen, planting a cane before placing his weight on feet that were perpetually asleep.

A few months before, she had gone with him to the medical-supply store to buy the cane, and they had wandered horrified among the prosthetic limbs and geriatric toilet seats until a saleswoman in a maroon velour sweat suit steered them to a whole room full of canes, identified by a sign as the Largest Selection on the East Coast.

The saleswoman let Harlan try out the specialty canes, including one that carried five brandy flasks inside the wooden shaft, one that concealed a twenty-three-inch stainless-steel sword, and one that converted into a pool stick with blue chalk inside the knobbed handle. Then she recommended a cane with a derby-shaped marble handle on an extralong walnut shaft, which Harlan tested, thumping around the store. Lucy remembered what he’d said as he yanked the price tag off his cane on the way out the door: “A good sales pitch is a rare and beautiful thing.”

Lucy waited at the restaurant for an hour, drinking free refills of strong iced tea until her veins throbbed with anxiety and caffeine and her ankles swelled. She called Harlan’s apartment, but his answering machine picked up, with its complicated beeping and voice mailboxes and instructions, and she hung up. Just as she was dialing the Johns Hopkins emergency room, Harlan’s red Saturn lurched into a parking space on the other side of the street. He emerged slowly, grabbing his cane and a bottle of water and shuffling toward her, not looking either way for traffic.

He looked decades older than thirty-three, with untrained wisps of gray hair growing from the nape of his bald head and just over his ears. He couldn’t stand up to his full six feet anymore; the treatments had softened his bones. At one point during early rounds of chemotherapy, he had lost fifty pounds and looked frail, but he had gained a bit of it back. Still, there was something awkward about him, as if his skin no longer fit correctly. A young boy at a nearby table stared as Harlan sat down.

“What happened?” Lucy said, her voice rising. “You are
never
more than forty minutes late.”

He shrugged and took a swig from the water bottle. His hands, she noticed, now seemed too small for the rest of his body, while his neck looked swollen. The proportions were all wrong, reinforcing her long-held belief that Harlan’s illness had been visited on the wrong person.

“I’m having trouble swallowing solids,” he said. “I tried to eat some Cheerios for breakfast, and I almost had to give myself the Heimlich. But that’s not why I’m late.”

Harlan leaned his cane against the table and tilted his head back to catch the sun on his face. Still waiting for his explanation, Lucy noticed he was wearing a hooded sweatshirt on a day when it had to be at least seventy-five degrees.

“I was about to leave when I checked my calendar—out of habit—for doctors’ appointments and realized I didn’t have any. Then I flipped the page to January—it’s one of those calendars for
procrastinators that gives you an extra month in the next year to buy a new calendar—and it was empty. Completely empty. Nothing but clean white squares. I do have an appointment in December to have my teeth cleaned, but I guess I can cancel that. It kills me to think about all that dental work I had two years ago.”