A Watershed Year (36 page)

Vasily pulled at the few strands of hair in his beard as Yulia translated for him, her hands darting around as she spoke as though she were Italian. Lucy heard the words, but they refused to form any meaning, bouncing through the air like particles of dust that settled on the desk or on the floor. She remembered sitting on the pumpkin couch for the first time, and the exact moment Yulia had handed her a picture of Mat. She made fists and dug her knuckles into her thighs hard enough to cause a dull pain.

“Ask him about the scars, Yulia. Ask him to explain why his son was beaten.”

As Yulia translated, Lucy stood up and went to the single office window, peering through the plastic blinds at the sun baking the cars in the parking lot. The air-conditioning in Yulia’s office was either too weak or not working, and she felt a trickle of sweat run down her back beneath the black jacket.

“No,” Vasily said, and she turned. He opened his hand, palm up, and she thought he might make a run at her. He spoke rapidly in Russian, and Yulia nodded, finally holding up her hand to interrupt him.

“He say he only spank Azamat like this, with open hand. This is to make him better boy, for discipline.”

“Then why does he have scars on his backside? The doctor said they were old scars. They weren’t made at the orphanage.”

When Yulia asked the question, the tops of Vasily’s ears turned red. He spoke to Yulia with evident anger, and she translated that he disliked being accused of beating his son. He said that Azamat had climbed out of his crib when he was two and struck himself on the corner of the radiator. The stitches he needed must have left scars.

Lucy had been prepared for him to defend his beatings. She hadn’t expected another explanation, especially one she had no way to disprove. If she hadn’t rescued Mat, then what had she done? She felt as though a wall on which she had been standing was crumbling
beneath her feet. She hated this person, this Vasily, for his simplicity, his explanations. Because she had taken Mat away, she wanted him to live up to his side of the equation. The magnitude of her generosity, her sacrifices, had to offset his pettiness, his selfishness, his anger.

“What does he want, Yulia? Does he truly want to take Mat back to Russia? To raise him? Does he understand what it means to raise a child, to lift him up? Does he know his son anymore?”

Yulia and Vasily spoke in voices so low that Lucy strained to hear, as if she could understand the words. Vasily looked at her, opening his snowy eyelashes. What she saw there was resentment, perhaps anger that something had been taken away from him. But she also saw stubbornness. She saw that he wouldn’t go away until he got what he wanted.

“He wants to see his son, talk to him.”

Lucy cried then, telling Yulia to explain how much she loved Mat, how she couldn’t bear to part with him. She offered money, told Vasily to name his price, but he turned toward the desk with his hands in his pockets and stared at the dusty Beanie Babies on Yulia’s computer. He made no response.

She nodded, looking down at her hands again as if she might be able to see right through them. She felt fragile, transparent again, as it became clear that Vasily would not give up and even more clear that she had no right to keep Mat from seeing his father. She stood up and found a piece of paper on Yulia’s desk to write down the beltway exit to the playground where Mat had nearly killed them both on the slide. She wanted Vasily to see what a climber he was, how hard it was to watch him.

“We’ll be at the playground this afternoon, at four.”

As Lucy turned to go, Yulia mouthed the words “I’m sorry.”

Lucy left the office, feeling her way along the walls as though she had been blinded. She drove home without feeling the steering wheel or the seat beneath her, surrounded by a halo of numbness. She couldn’t ask a saint to intervene because she didn’t know what was right, what was best. When she reached the duplex, she rested her
forehead on the steering wheel and asked herself, what would Harlan do? She didn’t know the answer.

It was one thirty. Only two and a half hours left, and Mat wasn’t even home. She threw her purse on the floor and ran to the kitchen to call Angela’s cell phone, telling her to bring Mat home as soon as she could. Then she called her mother and gave her the news.

“Get back in the car and run,” Rosalee said. “You are his mother. This man abandoned him. He can’t be allowed to change his mind.”

“If I run, this will never end, Ma. I’m trying to do the right thing. I’m thinking about Mat. If he shows any fear at all, I won’t let his father get near him. I promise. And we only agreed to a meeting, nothing beyond that.” She said the words to comfort herself more than to comfort Rosalee.

“Where are you meeting him?”

“This giant playground off the beltway. But don’t come. That’ll just make things harder for Mat.” She thought of him now, blithely riding in a car with Vern and Angela, no inkling that his father was so near, that his life could shift again, the seismic plates over which he had no control moving him back to the other side of the world.

The language would come back to him quickly, she knew that. In another few months, she would fade from his memory until there was nothing left but vague images: the stuffed penguin, the taste of peanut butter, a room painted yellow. It was what Harlan had feared most: being forgotten.

She heard a car pulling into the parking lot.

“Mat’s here,” she told her mother. “I have to go.”

Angela opened the door, and Mat came into the duplex first, holding an enormous wad of cotton candy. Vern followed, carrying a plastic bag full of small stuffed animals.

“He’s a little sticky,” Angela said. “Man, you’ve got a hot one. He never stops moving.”

Angela refused to look at Lucy, bringing Mat to the bathroom to wash his hands. Lucy stood in the living room smiling stupidly at
Vern, finally taking the bag of toys from his outstretched hand. When Angela returned with Mat, she looked at Lucy and began to cry.

“No.” Angela pressed her fingers into her eyelids. “This is all wrong.”

“Vern,” Lucy said. “Would you play with Mat for a minute?” Angela followed her to the kitchen and watched as Lucy leaned over the sink to splash cold water on her face. She dried it with a paper towel.

“I agreed to let him see Mat, that’s all,” she said. “Then I’ll know what to do.”

“Why does he deserve a second chance?”

“I’m not sure he does. But he came all this way, so I’m also not sure he doesn’t. I can’t spend the rest of my life wondering if I took a child away from his father for all the wrong reasons.”

Mat came into the kitchen to show Lucy his arcade winnings, and she ran a hand lightly across his forehead, just as she had seen Cokie once do with Sean. He seemed not to notice, and she realized he was gradually abandoning his aversion to being touched. She wanted to hold him then, to rock him like a baby and beg him not to leave her, because the act of his leaving would wrench open the void again, letting the mist of her yearning back in.

“Look at this alligator,” she said, holding it up. “Did Vern win it for you?”

“He won it all by himself,” Angela said. “The boy is a Skee-Ball prodigy. Hey, Vern, put your shoes back on. It’s time to go.”

“Thanks, Angela,” Lucy said, walking her to the door. “For everything.”

When Angela and Vern left, Lucy sat down on the couch, wondering if she should begin preparing Mat for what might happen next. Should she get him to talk about his father? Should she question him again about the scars? Before she could decide, he pulled a stack of books from a magazine rack next to the couch and climbed onto Lucy’s lap. He rested his head against her shoulder, held up a book on construction equipment, and said, “You read.” The weight and
warmth of his little body was an offering she had almost stopped hoping to receive. It filled her, made her whole, and she would never forget it, even if he forgot her.

She read the construction book six times—at the last page, he would flip to the front and say “again”—and then she took out her camera, snapping pictures of him from every angle, trying to capture his true nature in a photograph that might have to sustain her for years to come. When he tired of smiling, she took him into the kitchen and fed him peanut-butter crackers with milk, watching the minutes tick by on the cat clock, which sent them into the terrifying future with every indiscriminate swish of its tail.

When it was time to go, she packed a water bottle and some snacks and a hat for Mat, in case there was too much glare on the playground. She drove in silence. If Mat ran to his father, embraced him, cried tears of joy, she would have to give him back. If he showed any fear, she would fight for him, offer more money, beg, plead, insist. If he showed no emotions at all, well, she would figure out what to do when the time came. There, a plan.

She pulled into the playground parking lot at 3:45, finding a space in the sea of minivans that belonged to mothers who wondered when they would ever be free of obligation, just when she might be forced to relinquish hers.

As she and Mat walked toward the entrance, she recalled the fear of the slide debacle and noticed the metallic taste in her throat, though maybe that had more to do with her new fear. Mat climbed onto some old tires and grabbed a rope hanging from a thick wooden beam, letting himself swing in a wide circle. Lucy sat on the pile of tires and rubbed her sticky palms on her knees. It was a warm day, but her armpits were cold with sweat. She glanced at her watch: 3:50.

At 3:55, she began looking around obsessively as Mat moved to a ladder that ended in a cone-shaped structure with a floor. A modern tree house. At 4:05, her mother emerged from behind a rocking wooden ship.

“I thought he was supposed to be here at four,” Rosalee said.

“I told you not to come, Ma.” Lucy looked around again. She caught a glimpse of a stout woman who could have been Yulia but turned out not to be. She looked at her watch again. Six after.

“How could I not come? We drove around the entire beltway to find it,” she said. “Your father’s in the car, and Paul and Cokie are in that submarine over there. We couldn’t let you do this alone.”

“Nana,” Mat said as he slid down a connecting slide.

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

L
ucy 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.