A Watershed Year (39 page)

TWENTY MINUTES WENT BY before Lucy became aware that she had been sitting in the same position, her hand still on the phone. She felt numb, bound inside a dream.

It didn’t seem possible, but Harlan might have had two more years to live, and he had chosen to spare her the pain of watching him live—or more accurately, “not die.” She wondered briefly if this was her punishment for assuming she could have saved Harlan—or Mat, for that matter—when neither one had asked for salvation.

Outside, visible through one pane of her bedroom window, was the library spire. She got up, walked down the stairs, and passed
through the living room. She opened the front door and went outside, walking down the short steps of her tiny front porch without any shoes. The summer sun had been relentless, blaring down for days without a cloud to temper its heat, so the ground was baked into a hard, almost colorless cement relieved only by the straw that once was grass. Lucy stepped over
Saint Blaise
, still on the ground, and traversed the burning black asphalt of the duplex parking lot, turning toward the library spire, though she couldn’t see the tip of it, which disappeared into the glare of the sun.

She walked in as straight a line as possible, not feeling the soles of her feet, across curbstones and driveways, watered lawns and sidewalks, gravel pathways and wood-chipped flower beds until she stood in front of the library. A few summer students passed by on the sidewalk, glancing at her bare feet. She climbed the library stairs, holding tightly to the railing, and opened the door. The air-conditioning surrounded her, beckoning her onto the cool, clean tiles of the central hall, with its thirty-foot ceilings that commanded all who entered to look up and worship the words that lived there, hidden in stacks that went high into the sky as well as deep into the earth.

The library had been their common ground. Before Harlan got sick, in their first few weeks at Ellsworth, they had both come here to work, like students, because neither one had liked the solitary confinement of their offices. But they also came here to see each other, to crouch near the other’s pile of books and whisper conspiratorially about a mutual student or Dean Humphrey’s latest edict.

“That’s probably bogus, you know,” Harlan would say, picking up Lucy’s copy of
The Letters of St. Bernard of Clairvaux
. “The author’s a major-league idiot. He wears this incredibly pretentious, very long goatee. I met him at a conference once, and it was all I could do to stop myself from pulling it.”

“So a bad goatee makes him a bogus authority on Saint Bernard.”

“It doesn’t speak well for his judgment. That’s all I’m saying.”

Lucy let her feet absorb the cool of the tiles, then walked two floors up a wide central staircase that led to a hallway with four
doors. At the smallest door, she reached up and felt along the top of the frame for a key, which Harlan had learned about through a librarian who worked the night shift.

She climbed a narrow spiral staircase up to the bell tower, ducking under beams and brushing away cobwebs. In the small room that housed the bell, there wasn’t much room to maneuver around the antique machinery that activated its tolling. She stumbled over metal rods and gears and found her way next to the bell, which came up to the top of her head, and laid her left cheek against its smooth surface. The cold shocked her for a moment, then filtered through her body, along her torso, and into her legs.

She remembered the night Harlan had showed her the key and led her up the stairs to the tower, at the peak of her hopes that he might begin to view her as more than a friend. They had laughed at the bell, such a squat, primitive thing, and climbed over to the balcony of the cupola to view the campus at night, spread out before them with the precision of a map, talking as they always did. So much talking.

She thought, then, that he might kiss her, or touch her hand, break through the barrier named Sylvie that stood between them. But they had forgotten to look at the time, and the bell’s automatic timer went off at ten o’clock. The first clang had been deafening, and they had run down the stairs, hands over their ears. When they reached the hallway, a janitor standing with his mop had given them a reproachful look, and they had left the library, gone their separate ways, somehow chastened.

Lucy spread her arms around the bell, then turned to her other cheek as though finding a cool spot on her pillow; tears ran down, leaving tracks on the tarnished metal. She turned her head again and banged the bony part of her forehead against the bell, over and over, eliciting a dull thunk that had the effect of calming her.

She left the bell’s side and climbed over the low partition to the balcony, which jutted out only a few feet from the bell tower. The railing surrounding the balcony came to just below her hip, and she leaned against it, stretching toward the moon, which floated,
impartial and ghostly, behind the arts center. If someone were so inclined, she thought, it wouldn’t take much to climb over the railing, just the activation of a few large muscle groups. Then it would be a question of whether to crouch and spring out or to fall passively, eyes open and expectant. The earth would receive such a person without shame, rushing up to greet her, welcoming her back into its womb.

The quad was empty, as far as she could see. The summer session drew a few students, but by late afternoon, they were usually holed up in the air-conditioned student center. A bird flew by, just inside her field of peripheral vision. It looked like a hawk, although she couldn’t say for sure. She had the sense that she was alone on campus, that an evacuation alarm had sounded, and she had failed to hear it.

“Har-lan,” she yelled, feeling as though she could watch the word itself drift over the trees and beyond, to a place where it would be received, a place that would send a response. But she heard nothing, not even the wind or a dog barking or a car passing by.

Acknowledgment was what she wanted. Acknowledgment that she had tried, in the best way she knew how, to keep her friend from dying and to enrich the life of one small child with the love, the yearning that had to latch onto something. Would no one acknowledge that she had tried?

She remembered then what she and Harlan had talked about when they had stood on the balcony of the bell tower.

“Look at this,” he had said. “It’s so beautiful, right? The lights and the trees in the distance, the stone chapel. But I just read this article on how we acclimatize to beauty, even to happiness. If you saw this every day, you’d stop noticing the beauty. Instead, you’d notice the flaws: that plastic bag or that junker car over there under the streetlight. They’ve actually studied people who win lotteries, and it’s the same thing. They’re happier for a few months or a year, then they acclimatize to having money, and they slip right back into the same level of happiness they had before they won. Strange, huh?”

She looked down at her hands on the balcony railing and wondered if she had acclimatized to sadness, to a state of wondering
what could have been with Harlan. It had been there for so long, since even before he died, that she failed to notice it anymore. She had carried the burden of his death everywhere, afraid that if she put it down, he would be forgotten.

But that had to change. It would change, was changing—no, had already changed. She looked toward the bell and thought of Mat, who would have climbed inside it or banged on it with his small fists, determined to make noise. She thought of how he was softening around the edges and finding his place. She thought of his perfect ears and the way his breath smelled of peanut butter and how he studied the pictures in his books, forming new words, absorbing a new lexicon. She thought of his stubborn streak and his need for sugar and his terrifying aptitude for putting himself in physical danger.

Mat needed her, and unlike Harlan, she still had a chance to protect him. With the campus so quiet, she could hear the sounds of water rushing inside her head, sending her over the falls toward the frothing, churning pool beyond where life flourished. Adrenalin moved in, dissolving the dreaminess. Her feet hurt, and she noticed that her shirt was soaked in sweat. She turned her back on the new moon, climbed back over the partition, and walked down the stairs, striding numbly across the cool tiles, back across the white-hot sidewalks and parking lots and the dried-up patches of grass.

She wouldn’t let Vasily anywhere near Mat. She would call more lawyers, the United Nations, the media. She didn’t have to listen to what Vasily had to say any more than she had to torture herself over caring about Harlan and wanting him to live.

When she entered the parking lot near the duplex, she crossed it without looking either way for cars. She approached her little porch, climbed the stairs, opened the front door, and walked through the living room, now truly “lived-in,” with its toy-strewn floor and book-covered coffee table. She headed toward the kitchen drawer that contained Mat’s thick file of papers and his passport, wanting to see it and hold it as proof that he had legal status in his new country.

She was rifling through the papers when the doorbell rang. She unlocked the door and let Angela in. Mat was in her arms, draped over one shoulder, fast asleep.

“I dropped Vern at home,” she said. “Look at this boy. When he crashes, he crashes.”

Lucy carried Mat upstairs and tucked him into his bed. She was on her way down the stairs when the doorbell rang again. She assumed it was her parents, who had planned to hold vigil with her as she waited for Yulia’s next call. Instead, she found Yulia on her tiny porch, and with her, Vasily, in the same green jogging suit he had worn the first time they met, the same sullen look on his face. Lucy appraised his physical strength, deciding that she was the stronger of the two, given his pallor and his rail-thin frame. She wanted to keep them out on the porch and moved toward the door, but Yulia pushed past her, pulling Vasily inside with her.

“Vasily has something to say,” Yulia said.

Angela came out of the kitchen, and Lucy could sense the heat from ten feet away.

“He can say what he wants,” Angela said. “He’s not taking that boy, and I’ll pin his scrawny rear to the ground if he tries.”

Lucy moved toward the staircase, feeling the need to block it, when Yulia moved forward again, thrusting out the tote bag.

“Please,” she said. “Please look.”

“Tell him this, Yulia,” Lucy said, ignoring the tote bag. “Tell him he had the chance to see his son, and he decided to drive to Atlantic City instead, and that tells me everything I need to know. Tell him to go back to Russia and let us get on with our lives.”

Yulia said nothing to Vasily, who stood near the door and put his hands in the pockets of his warm-up jacket.

“Please let him explain,” Yulia said.

“Why should we let him explain?” Lucy said. “He didn’t think about Mat’s future when he packed up his things, took him by the hand, and brought him to an orphanage. That he can’t ever explain.”

Yulia shook her head in frustration, opened the tote bag, then thrust a sheaf of papers toward Lucy, who was still blocking the staircase.

“The termination papers,” she said. “They are signed. I tell Vasily that you are good mother, that you have family to help you. I tell him that this country gives him everything he could never hope to have in Russia. He decides that his son is better to stay here. He calls Zoya Minksy for new papers and waits for FedEx at his friend’s house in Atlantic City, because he has no money for hotel. Now he brings you papers. This is why he came.”

Lucy took the papers from Yulia and sat down hard on the bottom step of the staircase. She flipped to the last page and stared at the signature:
Vasily Andreyevich Panachev.

“Thank God,” Angela said. “Now get him out of here, before he changes his mind.”

Yulia spoke to Vasily in Russian, and he nodded, thrusting his hands deeper into his pockets. He turned as if to go, but Lucy stood up and walked over to Vasily, who seemed to shrink into the wall. She opened her arms and pulled him toward her, sobbing into his shoulder. He seemed unsure of how to react and stood stiffly in her embrace as she whispered words he couldn’t understand: “Thank you, thank you; I’ll take such good care of him. Thank you, thank you.”

When Lucy let him go, Vasily said something to Yulia, which she then translated. “Is it possible, he asks, to see his son one last time? He has come all this way.”

Angela opened her mouth to speak, but Lucy held up her hand.

“He’s sleeping,” she said. “I’m sorry, but I’d hate to wake him. And I’m not sure it’s a good idea. He might be confused.”

Yulia translated, then Vasily spoke to her again.

“Okay for him to peek? To take one last look. He promises not to wake him.”

Lucy hesitated, wanting Vasily to leave so that she could call her parents, her brother, her friends. But then she looked at his face and, without words, understood what he was saying: I’m leaving him here;
you owe me that much. She put the papers down on the couch and motioned to Vasily, leading him toward the stairs.

“Lucy, I wouldn’t…” Angela said, but Lucy ignored her. She let Vasily follow her up the stairs and down the hall to Mat’s room, where the door was slightly ajar. She opened the door a little wider and slipped through as Vasily came in behind her. Then she stood aside as he knelt by the bed and stared at his son, who slept as if he were awake, eyelids moving, breath audibly passing through his open mouth, fists curled. Vasily reached out a hand as if he couldn’t stop himself, but he only waved it over Mat’s forehead—a blessing perhaps, or a wish or a hope for his future, or a gesture of apology, or all those combined.