A Watershed Year (22 page)

“First day?” Calvin asked. “You have that glazed look, that jet-lagged, can’t-fall-asleep-but-I’m-exhausted kind of look. Don’t worry, it gets worse.”

“Worse?” she said.

“Well, it might. I meet a lot of folks like you.”

“Do you actually live here?”

“I’m a tap-dance instructor. Remember
White Nights
with Mikhail Baryshnikov? They think I’m Gregory Hines or some crazy thing. I came over here with a production of
Tap
in 1997 and came back in 1998. Been here ever since. And they love me. I could teach seven days a week if I wanted to. Every housewife in Murmansk signs up for my classes.”

Lucy kept nodding, wishing the bartender would look her way. She caught Calvin’s words in snatches, intermingled with the purple-sequined singer’s Russian ballad.

“… one toe-ball-change away from Broadway, I swear, and then this kid named Savion Glover comes along, bringing in da noise and da funk, and I’m done. Over. Yesterday’s news…”

“Davay nikag-da ne ras-ta-vat-sya.”

“… so when I came back, the recreation director in Murmansk was like, ‘Calvin, whatever you need,’ and I was like, ‘Yeah, who needs that, traveling shows and bit parts, tapping till your feet fall off.’”

“Kak mee zshi-li drug bez dru-ga vse e-ti go-dee.”

“And they love me here. They like old school, Gregory Hines. Hey, let’s drink to Gregory Hines,” Calvin said, looking for the bartender, who was watching the singer.

“To Gregory Hines,” Lucy said, though Calvin wasn’t listening, and she had no drink to lift.

The audience applauded politely as the singer finished and her keyboardist began to pack up his equipment. Lucy turned around to say good night to Calvin, but he was gone. She walked back to the elevator and stared through the lobby windows. It had to be close to midnight, but the sky had only dimmed a bit, as though it were dusk.

She looked at her watch, disoriented, until she remembered how close she was to the North Pole. Like Alaska. Land of the Midnight Sun. When she finally found her room again, she pulled the heavy curtains closed, collapsed on the bed in her clothes, and didn’t wake up until morning, when she had about fifteen minutes to wash her face, brush her hair, change her clothes, and run down to the lobby to meet Lesta, her stomach still empty.

HARLAN LOOKS at Lucy and sighs as it becomes clear that they are stuck on the balcony for the night.

“I haven’t told my mother yet,” he says, as though this has been on his mind. “She hasn’t been the same since my father died twenty years ago. Once I left for college, she bought a bunch of sweat suits and moved to Florida and let her hair go gray. She just sits around her little complex with the other widows, acting way older than she is.”

Lucy thinks he must be exaggerating.

“She must have been a good mother, though, because look at you. You turned out fine.”

“A pleasure to have in class.”

“Of course you were.”

“I wonder what happened to all those report cards.”

Lucy thinks of the large trunk in her mother and father’s room, stuffed with her and Paul’s report cards and art projects and posters on the four basic food groups. Her past is almost too well preserved.

“I don’t know how to tell her I’m sick,” Harlan says. “I’m afraid she’ll cry.”

“I’d be surprised if she didn’t cry.”

“But that’s what I remember most about my dad’s death. She came home from the hospital and sobbed and wailed and screamed. It was pitiful. I couldn’t sleep until they sedated her.”

“That must have been awful for you.”

“You have no idea.”

And she didn’t. In her experience, a mother puts her own needs after the needs of her children. A mother skips her annual trip to Atlantic City so she can watch her daughter’s math team compete in the state finals. A mother lets her daughter borrow her new shoes for the high-school concert, shoes right out of the box. A mother on a diet sits with her daughter and eats a pint of ice cream when her daughter’s college boyfriend dumps her.

“My parents would adopt you,” she says, trying to make him laugh. “I’ll have them call a lawyer tomorrow.”

He smiles at her, but without mirth. The shadows under his eyes look deeper and darker in the yellow haze of the lights from the apartment parking lot.

“I want this to go away,” he says, closing his eyes. “I want to go to sleep and then wake up and shudder because I had a terrible nightmare. That’s what I want.”

“That’s what I want, too.”

LUCY DIDN’T SEE Lesta in the lobby, so she ducked into the coffee shop and pointed to the coffeepot, sizing up the cup with her hands. The clerk handed her the coffee and took the five-dollar bill she left on the counter, smiling at her in a way that made her realize she should
exchange some of her dollars for rubles. She was about to find the money exchange in the lobby when Lesta walked in the front door.

“Good morning, Lucy McVie,” he said. “Big day for you.”

“I hope so,” she said, putting her wallet back into her purse. “What’s first?”

“We go to Department of Education; then we set up appointment at children’s home, maybe for today. Would this be fortunate?”

“Yes, very fortunate,” she said. “Do I look okay? I didn’t sleep well last night.”

“Lucy McVie, you look fine. Nice shoes,” Lesta said, looking at Lucy’s plain black boots. Under her black winter coat, she was wearing a long vintage skirt with a muted flowered print and a white blouse, an outfit she had long ago picked out for her first meeting with Mat. They were conservative clothes, clothes a preschool teacher might have worn, meant to convey only one thing: trust me.

She took a sip of her coffee and asked Lesta if they could stop somewhere for a quick breakfast.

“You like Egg McMuffin?”

“I thought maybe something more Russian. What did you have this morning?”

“Cottage cheese and a little Cocoa Puffs.”

“An Egg McMuffin sounds great.”

Lesta swung through the McDonald’s drive-through, ordered for Lucy, then continued on to the Department of Education, a gray institutional building that reminded her of the federal building in Baltimore, a bureaucratic monolith. The downtown of Murmansk, plastered with signs she couldn’t even begin to decipher, had a few tall buildings and, above those, in the hills, street after street of what looked like identical apartment complexes.

Trees, she noticed as they walked from the parking lot to the education building, were a rare commodity. Efforts had been made, obviously in the recent past, to paint some of the downtown buildings in painfully bright colors—gaudy yellows, oranges, and blues. But a dark-gray soot covered most of the other buildings, continually
replenished with exhaust from the flimsy-looking cars that darted between potholes and around pedestrians like insects.

A half hour later, they emerged from the Department of Education building with their paperwork stamped and an appointment to see Mat that afternoon. Lesta had asked her for a hundred dollars to give to the clerk, which apparently went into the clerk’s pocket. But Lucy wasn’t about to complain if it got her closer to taking Mat home. She’d hand out hundred-dollar bills to everyone she met on the street if that’s what it took. She felt a cold sweat break out on her forehead, all the hours of anxiety and anticipation merging into a feverish peak. This would be the day she would meet her son, hear his voice, maybe even hold him and feel the warmth of his breath. She felt a sudden panic, remembering that her gifts for the children’s home and her list of medical questions were back at the hotel.

“Do we have enough time to go back so I can get a few things?” she asked Lesta.

“Certainly, Lucy McVie. And when papers are signed, we celebrate. My wife to make chicken Kiev.”

Lucy nodded and smiled, though her stomach was a little upset from driving around in Lesta’s smoky sedan. He dropped her off at the hotel, and she ran inside, determined to call home before she had to dash out again. The hotel clerk seemed to understand the string of numbers she wrote on a piece of paper and placed the call to Rosalee and Bertie, handing her the desk phone and adding a note to her bill. She had expected to hear her mother’s voice, but instead she got the answering machine and had to leave a message.

“Hi, it’s Lucy. I’m here, everything’s going like clockwork, and I’m going to meet Mat this afternoon. Wish I could hear your voices. I love you… Bye.”

A surge of adrenalin propelled her up the stairs to the sixth floor; she was too impatient to wait for the elevator. She made a circuit of the room, stowing presents in an extra duffel bag she had brought and stuffing envelopes and a notebook in her purse. In fifteen minutes,
she was ready and had to force herself to sit down to wait another half hour until Lesta was due to arrive. It was all too much.

Lucy closed her eyes and thought again of the ecumenical Saint Julian of Norwich—
All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well
—who had written in the fourteenth century that God’s mystery was found in one’s self, in the depths of one’s soul. Julian—who technically wasn’t a saint because she had never been canonized—had had a famous vision in which Jesus put a hazelnut in her hand. “What is it?” she had asked, and he had responded, “It is all that is made.”

The hazelnut. It was almost Lucy’s. In that moment, the weight of her grief came to rest on her shoulders, which still ached from flying overnight in coach. It had been six months since Harlan’s death, a time during which she had plumbed depths she never thought possible. But it was also when her watershed year had started—the year in which life would either flow uneventfully toward flat waters or rush joyously down a mountain stream—and she had found God’s mystery in the photo of a small Russian boy.

It was a time during which she had waded in and out of grief and connected with a man who wouldn’t let her reject him, no matter how confused she seemed. It was a time during which her Nana Mavis had died, pushing her mother into the matriarch role, aging her in ways that were sad but inevitable. It was a time in which her brother had been humbled and in which Cokie, losing it, had turned to her—of all people. It was a time she had, for once, put just about everything else ahead of her job, and might end up regretting it. It was the time Harlan—in his own unique way—had come back to her again.

She stopped in the bathroom, wiped her eyes with a piece of scratchy toilet paper, then took her duffel bag to the lobby to wait for Lesta. She was too nervous to eat anything, but she exchanged fifty dollars into rubles. She flipped through a magazine, checking the clock every few minutes, and heard what sounded like a dance class coming from the hotel ballroom. The staccato racket of metal on wood—it had to be Calvin and his Murmansk housewives—was
almost unbearable. She paced the lobby, wondering if she would ever be able to find the children’s home on her own. Then Lesta walked in.

“Lucy McVie, my apologies,” he said, waving his hand. “Traffic.”

“Lesta,” she said. “You’re here. I was going nuts.”

“Nuts,” he said, twirling a finger near his head. “I know this expression. In Russia we say, ‘Your roof is sliding.’”

“I can’t wait another second.”

“Of course, Lucy McVie. We go.”

On the way to the home, she had to open the window and lean out to prevent herself from fainting. She had no reserves, her nerve endings like electrical wires scraped bare of their protective coatings. She took deep breaths of the smoggy air and tried to pull herself together, for Mat’s sake. A four-year-old would have no sympathy for her distress.

When Lesta stopped the car, Lucy saw that the children’s home was just another institutional building on the edge of town. She saw no playground or bright colors, just another gray box with a small sign on the front. On the way over, Lesta had explained that children under four were kept in
dom rebyonka
, or baby homes.

Mat had been in a baby home briefly but went to this
detsky dom
when he turned four in March. Children who weren’t adopted would stay at the
detsky dom
until seven, after which they would move to a home that would care for them and educate them up to the age of seventeen. Some of these homes had their own schools, and others sent the orphans to outside schools. Growing up in an orphanage was a social stigma in Russia, Lesta said, confirming what Yulia had told her.