A Watershed Year (19 page)

Lucy closed and locked the door, shutting out the funeral-party din. She had no plan, just a need to be alone with Louis. He looked around the room.

“Somebody likes lunchboxes,” he said, bending to examine a Roy Rogers in mint condition.

“You’d think so, wouldn’t you?” she said. “My mom got one for a present about five years ago, and she faked her enthusiasm so effectively that everyone gives her lunchboxes now. Then she got caught up in the buying and the selling and realized she was good at it. She has at least one for every year between 1950 and 1985. You wouldn’t believe what some of them are worth. That one you’re looking at, the 1953 Roy Rogers, is worth almost a thousand.”

“Dollars?” he said, moving back to where Lucy stood near the door. He put his arms around her and bent his head down until his forehead gently touched hers.

“I can’t believe you’re h—” she said, swallowing the “here” as Louis covered her mouth with his, pressing her up against the door. They slid down to the floor. The sounds of the funeral faded as they faced each other, kneeling.

“So you do like me,” Louis said, brushing her hair away from her face.

“I do,” she said.

“And you won’t send me away? Even if your life is complicated?”

“I won’t send you away,” she said.

Louis put a hand on either side of her head and kissed her for a long time. She had almost forgotten what it was like to be kissed that way. It seemed to eradicate all the doubt, all the second-guessing. It seemed like the only logical thing that had happened to her in months and months, and now that the fences were down, she wondered why she had thrown them up in the first place.

Then Louis, shifting on his knees, accidentally kicked one of the plastic cubes, knocking several lunchboxes to the floor. The din of the party ceased. Someone came to the door and rapped on it loudly.

“Who’s in there? What’s going on?” Rosalee said.

“It’s me, Ma. Everything’s fine,” Lucy said. “I just tripped.”

She and Louis sat with their backs against the door, waiting for the talking to resume. They both looked straight ahead until Louis threaded his fingers through hers, which she took to mean they were together in this, equally awkward and equally elated. A few minutes later, she stood up, unlocked the door, and left, leaving Louis to sneak out after her. Rosalee had moved away but must have had her eye on the door. She walked over, took Lucy’s arm, and whisked her into the master bedroom.

“Who is that young man?” Rosalee asked. “He said he was a friend of yours, but I’ve never heard you mention him.”

Lucy could feel the redness creeping down her neck. “He
is
a friend. I work with him, sort of. But I’m sorry about the lunchboxes. We were just—” she started, but Rosalee stopped her.

“Never mind all that.” She turned toward the mirror on her bureau and straightened her necklace. “I need to check on my lunchboxes.”

“I understand.” Lucy sat down on the bed, sinking into the too-soft mattress, and pulled her hair around her neck. Rosalee hadn’t left yet. As she rearranged her bangs in the mirror, Lucy saw her expression soften.

“Oh, doll,” Rosalee said, coming back to sit down on the bed. She could tell that her mother was in some way grateful to know that Lucy was capable of sneaking a man into a room and locking the door. It meant she was putting her grief behind her.

“Lunchboxes can be replaced. They can,” her mother said. “I want you to be happy. Look at me, Lucy. That’s all that really matters. So why didn’t you tell me about him before?”

“There wasn’t much to tell,” she said. “Honestly.”

Rosalee gave her a look of disbelief. She stood up to go, then turned back.

“He’s not one of your students, is he?”

“He’s thirty-two, Ma,” Lucy said, flipping over to bury her face in the mattress.

“I’m sorry; he looks like a boy. Now go out there and talk to some of these deaf people. I’m already hoarse from shouting.”

Lucy sat on the bed for another five minutes until the redness receded. Then she straightened her own hair in the mirror and left the bedroom. As she walked down the hallway, she could see Louis putting on his coat near the door. He left with the muted wave of a co-conspirator, and now she only had to get through the rest of the afternoon, which she did by deciding that Mavis would have forgiven her.
You’re too sensitive. Get over it.
It had been right there in her letter, a reminder that we all humiliate ourselves from time to time. But then we move on.

FOR THE NEXT WEEK, Lucy and Louis spent every day together, blocking out the world. They ate meals together, watched old movies on television, and sat on Lucy’s couch reading the newspaper, their legs intertwined. Then the pressure of her precarious job status intervened.

With only a month before the end of the semester, she had to come up with a topic, research it, and write an article, a task on the order of reading the complete works of Shakespeare in a week. Louis offered to let her use his data on the study of gender differences in religious devotion, but she refused.

“I can’t take your research,” she told him.

“But I haven’t written it yet. It’s just the raw numbers,” he said.

“It’s not even my specialty.”

“But if it means your job, don’t you think that takes precedence?”

“I just can’t do it that way.”

Finally she withdrew to the library to gather data on Pope John Paul II’s extraordinary rate of beatification. This papacy, she decided after reviewing the numbers, was Saints-R-Us. You still needed to be a martyr for the faith, or live a life of sacrifice, plus have your miracles verified after death. But John Paul II had lowered the requirement from four verified miracles to two and had dropped the Devil’s Advocate appointed by the Vatican to argue against sainthood. She would compare it to an earlier era of church history.

After three days of seclusion in the library, she called Louis and asked him to come over for dinner. She was chopping carrots for a salad when he arrived.

The rhythmic slicing, the thunk of the knife on the cutting board, kept her mind from wandering. Louis opened a can of seltzer and sat on the stool, watching her chop.

“What can I do?” he said, and she glanced up from her carrots to see a look on his face that was unmistakable: the gratefulness of
belonging. The knife dropped from her hand, then she walked over and placed her forearms on Louis’s shoulders.

He tucked a few strands of hair behind her ear.

“Poor thing,” he said. “Those saints must be torture.”

“Some people say anyone who makes it to heaven becomes a saint,” she said.

“Sometimes I get the feeling you believe it yourself.”

“Not all of it, of course. Some saints aren’t even based on real people.”

“So you don’t believe in them. You don’t pray to them.”

“Technically, you’re supposed to pray
with
a saint, although I don’t think of it that way. I guess I just leave open the possibility of intercession because there’s so much genius in the idea that these humans somehow created pathways to God based on the way they lived their lives. If you’d done the research I have, you might be swayed. Some of the miracles are impossible to explain.”

“Give me an example.”

“Well, there are a few studies that show greater improvement among sick people who were prayed for. No, I’m serious. You can look it up. And if you want a specific case, a woman was cured of leukemia in 1978 after asking for the intercession of Saint Marie Marguerite d’Youville. Doctors testified at the Vatican. They called it miraculous.”

“But how does that prove anything? It just means they don’t understand it yet. There could be a hundred scientific explanations.”

“How were you raised?” she asked.

“Roman Catholic. But I never made my confirmation.”

“Why not?”

“Because I thought it was all bunk by the time I was twelve.”

The real miracle, she wanted to tell him, was the life of a saint. Marie Marguerite d’Youville had persevered with everything against her: a husband who died early, extreme poverty, the loss of four of her six children in infancy. But she who had nothing found it necessary—
necessary
—to be charitable. Every setback only renewed her need to
serve the poor. How could anyone hear about her and the Grey Nuns of Montreal and fail to be moved? And what about the pervasiveness of the saints in modern society?

Most Christian churches and schools were named after saints; they were immortalized in books, movies, songs. Beyond that, small groups devoted themselves to particular saints, supporting shrines and societies that offered hope to people who couldn’t live without it. And those people came week after week, even day after day, to petition, say novenas, move rosary beads swiftly through practiced fingers. They didn’t make the news, even if their prayers were answered, but that never stopped them. Lucy could accept the argument that it was all a human construct, but it couldn’t be called bunk.

None of this came out of her mouth. She wasn’t up for the inevitable debate that would follow.

“Will you miss me when I go to Russia?”

He let out a long breath.

“I’ve been thinking about that,” he said, talking to the ceiling. “I was wondering if I could come with you.”

“Come with me?” she said. “Why?”

“I don’t know. I’ve never been to Russia.”

“It’s not exactly a vacation.”

“I don’t like the idea of you being there all by yourself, with all those Russian men wearing black.”

“I’ll be fine,” she said, touching his cheek. “Not that I wouldn’t like the company.”

“I understand,” he said.

“You do?”

“I do,” he said. “But tell me if you change your mind.”

She nodded but felt somehow that he didn’t understand. He hadn’t thought any of this through—any more than she had—hadn’t truly acknowledged that she would have a child soon, who might need her more than anyone could anticipate. Louis wanted to help her; she felt his sincerity. But Mat was still just a mysterious boy in a
photo who liked to draw hearts. She wouldn’t know what to expect until she brought him home.

HARLAN’S MAY E-MAIL ARRIVED in the midst of an avalanche: Lucy’s frantic work on the research paper, her planning for the trip to Russia, and her deadline to grade a stack of philosophy term papers, one of which was titled “Kant Get(s) No Satisfaction.”

Dear Lucy,

The school year must be winding down for you by now. I had a chat with Dean Dean the other day. He called, I think, to see if I was still alive, and the discussion turned to you. He told me you were one of his “rising stars.” I probably wasn’t supposed to pass it along, but what’s he gonna do about it?

I had a good cry this morning, just bawled like a baby. I don’t do that often, but it seems to help release the stress, and let me tell you, dying this way is stressful. The doctors hold out hope, almost literally, dangling it there in front of you on a pole so that you’ll dive for it, strive for it, and yet you can’t do anything but curse the cells in your body that are responsible for making you sick and hope they’ll respond to the treatment. Even if they do, you spend every day knowing your cells could turn on you again. As stupid as it sounds after all this time, you just want to know: Why does it happen? What evolutionary purpose does cancer serve? And more important, the inescapable cliché: why me?

The second time I almost died wasn’t quite as bad as the first. I remember feeling feverish, and then a little nauseous when you were driving me to the hospital. After that, I was completely out of it until the next day, and when I came to, a bunch of doctors were standing around my bed looking at you, asking if I wanted a priest for last rites. Poor thing, you looked completely horrified, not only by the thought of me dying but by the idea that you would have to make that decision—you, who were neither my wife nor my girlfriend nor my sister nor my
mother, though you were all of those, Lucy, the closest person to me on this earth.

You shook your head, of course, but I could see that it was tearing you apart. You wanted someone to send me off to the hereafter with a freshly scrubbed soul. Then the infection subsided, and I surprised them all again by not dying. But not dying, I feel compelled to point out, is not quite the same as living.