A Watershed Year (28 page)

When she turned her attention back to Mat, he had half a crayon in his mouth.

“Yuck,” she said, pulling it away. “We don’t eat crayons. Here, have a Gummi Worm.”

She had been saving these for the plane, but her options seemed limited. She could only hope he would sleep through at least part of the eleven-hour flight back to JFK. As he chewed on the Gummi Worm, the enormity of what she had done became suddenly clear. This boy was hers, hers alone, and in the legal sense no different than if she had given birth to him. There was no going back, no matter how ill suited they seemed for each other. And if she screwed this up, Mat would be the one to suffer for the rest of his life.

She had already considered the minor issues: no more lazy weekend mornings reading the newspaper; no more vintage clothing expeditions; no spontaneous trips to an art gallery or days on end spent researching a saint. And other things: no more frozen dinners for one, no more nights alone at the movies, no more fear of growing old alone. But it had never occurred to her that Mat wouldn’t want to be adopted, that she would have to win him over with something more than his own yellow room.

What would happen, she wondered, on the day Mat came to her and asked why? Why had his mother died? Why had his father
abandoned him? But most terrifying of all, why had she adopted him? What would she say? She could tell him she had always wanted a child. That much was true. But wasn’t it also true that she had been lonely? That it gave her something else to think about besides Harlan?

She turned to Mat, who had found the bag of Gummi Worms and now had two or three in his mouth, their multicolored tails whipping across his chin as he chewed. The flight attendant had finally announced in Russian and English that it was time to board the plane. Mat, who seemed strangely compliant, stood with her behind two women cradling a baby with all four arms. She wanted to find out who had invented Gummi Worms and have him canonized.

As they neared the gate, though, Mat appeared to realize that they were at another airport. He tried to run away, yelling something over and over, but she caught him by the coat collar. She wanted to dig her Russian phrase book from her purse, but she couldn’t find it without letting go of him.

“Can someone tell me what he’s saying?” she yelled.

A flight attendant in a tight skirt and high heels approached them.

“He say he wants his car,” the woman said.

Lucy gripped the flight attendant’s arm with her one free hand before the woman could walk away. “Tell him, please, that his car is too big to fit on the airplane.” She had left it inside the closet at the hotel.

The flight attendant tried to speak to Mat in Russian, but he was beyond hearing. His face was a vibrant red, and his screaming had bypassed words and become something primal. Lucy wanted to clamp her hand over his mouth—
make it stop, just stop, please, please stop
—but two hundred passengers were watching. Instead, she picked him up and took him to the farthest corner of the waiting room, where she let him throw himself on the floor and pound it with his little fists. The line moved forward slowly, inevitably, until only a few passengers were left.

“Are you finished?” she asked, and he responded by spinning on his elbow and kicking the wall. So she picked him up and carried him
back to the end of the line as he thrashed against her carry-on and threw his head back at impossible angles.

“Let’s just get through this, okay?” she said. “I’ll buy you ten of those cars at home if you’ll just let me get through this flight.”

Though he understood none of it, Mat stopped struggling, probably due more to exhaustion than any attempt at cooperation. He allowed her to carry him onto the plane and fell asleep against her arm as they taxied down the runway, Mat in the window seat and Lucy in the middle, with an unlucky gray-haired man sitting next to her in the aisle seat.

“Thank you,” she whispered to the patron of acute embarrassment, whoever that might be.

Lucy was still calming down an hour later when Mat woke up, refreshed and ready to begin wandering the aisle for trips to the bathroom, any one of which might actually be necessary. The bathroom trips were what she dreaded most, because Mat, unstrapped from his seat, was like a pinball launched into a maze of seats and flight attendants and drink carts and luggage. He seemed determined to bounce off all of them.

FLYING WITH A SMALL CHILD, Lucy discovered, was a perversion of physics, because time actually slowed down, moving at about one-fourth its usual pace. The flight seemed to take several days, interrupted only by small breaks when Mat would collapse into sleep, only to be awakened an hour later by engine noise or the screaming of another child.

When they landed in New York, she was covered with juice and chocolate stains, her clothes felt rough on her skin, her hair had escaped its ponytail holder and was frizzing around her head like some kind of novelty fright wig, and she was close to fainting from lack of food and water. Mat refused to hold her hand as they stumbled down the corridor to the gate.

Throughout the flight, she had been sustained by the image of emerging from the gate to find her family waiting for her, ready to shoulder her overstuffed bag and surround Mat with their inescapable love, a parachute of love that would descend on his unsuspecting head. But she had been dreaming in pre-September 11 time, and no one without a ticket was allowed at the gate.

She would have to take Mat through immigration by herself and bring her luggage through customs, with her parents waiting for what might be hours. She could only be glad that Louis wouldn’t be with them, although he had offered. She needed time to remake, remold, wash and dress, and repair the damage.

The immigration process was surprisingly smooth, and they made it through, with Mat’s passport stamped, in less than thirty minutes. Then she found a spot near the conveyor belt at baggage claim and waited as the minutes ticked by and nothing emerged from the fringed opening that separated the knowing from the unknowing. They had been at the airport for at least forty minutes. She felt dizzy and wondered if she could justify sitting on the ground when a woman yelled in her direction, “Excuse me, ma’am, is this your child?”

Mat had climbed to the top of the line of handcarts waiting in locked positions for the right number of quarters to release them. He was sitting in the wire basket on a cart at the front end on the row. Lucy ran over, paid for the cart, and pulled it out, then wheeled him back to where she had left her carry-on.

“You know,” an older woman with carnation pink lipstick observed, “you really shouldn’t leave your bag like that. Anyone could take it.”

Lucy had almost nothing left, just a shallow well of shame to berate herself for losing track of the one thing she would always—always—have to remember. Mat dug around in the carry-on, probably looking for some candy, as the conveyor belt finally roared to life and began spitting out luggage that looked as if it had traveled halfway across the world and back again, kicked and abused the entire way.
She grabbed her large green suitcase off the belt—she barely had enough strength to pull it upright—and found her smaller duffel bag a few minutes later. She went through customs in a daze.

“Now let’s get out of here,” she said, aiming her rented luggage cart at a set of automatic double doors. American airports might have their flaws, she thought, but you could almost always count on the doors to fly open as soon as you approached them. Outside, she saw her mother—her blessed, blessed mother—jumping and waving, her bosom bobbing, in front of Bertie’s double-parked car. Lucy turned the cart in their direction as Mat began climbing out of his seat.

“No, Mat,” she said. “Just a couple more feet. Please don’t get out.”

“There’s my grandson,” Rosalee told the general population of the pickup area. “My beautiful little grandson.”

Rosalee ran toward them, her arms outstretched, and tried to give Mat a kiss on the cheek. He released a scream that rivaled the planes taking off on the runway.

“He really doesn’t like to be touched,” Lucy said. “It’ll take some time.”

Rosalee nodded, then stared at her. “What on earth? You look awful. Just awful. Are you sick?”

“I don’t think so… just incredibly tired,” she said, glancing at her reflection in the terminal windows. The vaguely familiar person looking back was teetering as though she might collapse. She had a flashback to the night Harlan told her about his diagnosis, describing his loss of consciousness. She was there with him, suddenly, watching television coverage of the planes hitting the twin towers, over and over, until the signal was interrupted. A solid wall of static filled the screen, and then she was inside it, unable to move, surrounded by a wordless scramble of light and noise.

“Come on, baby,” her mother said, helping her into the car. “Let’s get you home.”

fifteen

W
hen Lucy woke up, twenty-four hours had passed since the plane landed. She was in her parents’ bed, wearing one of her mother’s voluminous nightgowns. She wandered dizzily into the kitchen, where Mat was sitting at the table eating a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich and drinking a glass of milk.

“Ma,” she said, pushing hair out of her face. “I’m not sure he can eat peanut butter.”

“Oh, please,” she said. “He’s fine.”

“But he might have an allergy.”

“He’s already had three of those,” Rosalee said, wiping some jelly off Mat’s face with a wet paper towel. “We thought you’d never wake up.”

“I feel like a train hit me,” she said.

“Go take a shower. He’s just taking a break from playing with his new toys.”

“So the fabled mountain exists.”

“He’s been riding around the basement with his new tricycle. I can’t understand his Russian, but I bought a phrase book, and he seems to understand me.”

Lucy nodded and wandered to the bathroom, hoping the hot water from the shower would wash away her confusion. Could it be this easy? Did she lack some essential mothering instinct or display some deficiency Mat could sense, or was it just the mountain
of toys? She stood under the showerhead, letting the water tamp down her overwrought hair, finding it hard to believe she had ever been in Russia, ever met a saint named Lesta, ever sat through the longest plane flight in history. Her mother leaned in through the bathroom door.

“Louis called. He’s very anxious to talk to you.”

“Thanks, Ma,” Lucy yelled through the steam. She wasn’t ready to face Louis. Their relationship was so new, so fragile, that it seemed certain to change radically with Mat in the picture. They would either break up or become an old married couple raising their adopted son. She couldn’t think of any alternatives. When the water began to lose its heat, she finally emerged, wrapping herself in a pink towel. The door opened and Mat walked in, wearing a pair of shorts she had never seen before. He made his way to the toilet as if she wasn’t there.

He used the toilet and flushed it. Then he turned around, reached up, and flicked the light switch on and off a few times without any expression on his face, then left.

“But you need to wash your hands,” she yelled out the door in time to see his little head bobbing down the stairs to the basement.

A half hour later, dried and dressed in clothes that sagged as if her shoulders were the points of a hanger, Lucy discovered the true meaning of a mountain of toys. The basement rec room was filled with them, some still in wrapping paper, and Rosalee had draped the low-hung beams with streamers and wrapped them around the center basement pole. Mat was squatting near a collection of Matchbox cars lined up in a perfect row, and her father was lying on his side, belly resting on the floor. Mat would take a car and run it over Bertie’s belly as if it was going over a hill, then line it back up. Her mother, on her knees collecting wrapping paper, put a free hand on Mat’s head. He looked up and smiled.

“You realize he thinks he’s staying here,” Lucy said.

“We’ll deal with that when the time comes,” Rosalee said.

“But I don’t have a basement full of toys.”

“Well, take some of these or go shopping. Little boys need toys. That’s all I know.”

Lucy sat down on the floor with an old-fashioned wooden toy and began pounding pegs with a small mallet. Mat came over and grabbed the mallet.

“Mah-yee.”

“That means ‘mine,’” Rosalee told her.

Lucy nodded and went upstairs to call Louis, feeling the need to speak to someone who actually wanted to speak to her. She dialed his home number.

“Hello,” he said urgently, as if he’d been waiting for the phone to ring.

“Hi, it’s Lucy,” she said, unable to mask the fatigue in her voice. “I’m back.”

“Are you okay?” he said, clearly worried. “You don’t sound like yourself.”

“I don’t think I slept more than a few hours the whole time I was gone. You know how you feel when you’re just starting to come down with something terrible? This is like that, only without the vomiting.”

“So when are you coming back to campus?”

“I think I need to stay with my parents for a couple days, let my mom help with Mat. He needs some time to adjust.”