A Watershed Year (5 page)

I miss you, Harlan. Terribly. It’s awful to admit, but I even miss going to the hospital, where all the nurses and doctors treated me like I was your girlfriend. I never told you, but I liked that… I never told you a lot of things… So, anyway, I had this idea about adopting a baby. Maybe it’s not what you meant, but it would be a new frame of reference, wouldn’t it? And you did say you thought I was meant to be a mother. I hope you’re well, Harlan, or at peace. I’ll be back again soon.

She stood up and brushed wet leaves from her jeans, then circled several gravestones before finding the stone statue of the Virgin Mary. It wasn’t quite hip high, so she had to bend down to look into the eyes, which stared back. Harlan had been so charmed by the statue, maybe assuming it would comfort her as it stood there spreading holiness across the hillside. But it gave her no comfort. The opposite, in fact, with its empty eyes and inscrutable face. Very unsaintlike. She felt
an urge to knock it down the hill. She gave it a little shove and was surprised to find that it moved slightly on its pedestal. She left it that way, an inch off center.

Back in the car, she decided to head home and start researching adoptions on the Internet. She passed beneath the stone archway that marked the cemetery entrance, noticing how the bare trees in the distance appeared to have only two dimensions against the flat and patient dove-gray sky, as though they were etched on ceramic tile.

YULIA DOLETSKAYA wore a polyester slacks suit in navy blue, her white shirt tucked inside the elastic waistband. Lucy glanced at the dandruff gathered on the jacket’s shoulders but tried not to look at the wiry hair that stuck out from a mole on Yulia’s left cheek. Her breath smelled of breakfast meat and strong coffee, and the top of her outdated computer monitor was crowded with dusty Beanie Babies. On the plus side, she had a firm handshake.

Lucy sat down, knees together, hands folded, toward the edge of a worn couch draped in some sort of tweedy pumpkin-colored slipcover. She had been to five other adoption agencies within the first week after visiting Harlan’s grave, and all of them told her she needed at least $25,000, which was a problem. She had $10,000 in a savings account from when her great-aunt Paloma had died, and a money-market account with another $9,000 or so—her new-car fund—but she had no idea where she’d get the rest. It didn’t seem wise to start out with loans on top of an empty savings account. In addition to that, two of the agencies had frowned on single-parent adoptions. One woman had handed her a stack of paperwork as thick as the Baltimore phone book, with a request for eight personal references. Lucy wasn’t sure she knew eight people she could ask to vouch for her moral character.

At first the roadblocks had only made her more determined, but increasingly, she had episodes of fevered anxiety. She combed
through adoption Web sites and read message boards. She called friends who knew friends who had adopted. She filled out applications and waited for the phone to ring. Then she spotted a tiny ad in the
Baltimore Sun
classifieds: Doletskaya Adoptions. The agency, which handled Russian and Ukrainian adoptions, had seemed a little more relaxed, and now she knew why. The office had a secondhand feel to it, like a used-car dealership. She imagined the orphans with “JUST REDUCED” stickers slapped on their tiny-footed pajama-onesies.

“So,” Yulia said, sitting down behind her desk. “I have important question: Do you want infant or older child?”

“I’m pretty sure I want a baby,” Lucy said.

“Most people want infant, but older children do very well. You say on the phone you have small apartment?”

“Yes, but I can move to a two-bedroom duplex on campus. I’m on the waiting list.”

“This is good,” Yulia said. “Social Services will want separate bedroom.”

Lucy shifted as the coarse fibers of the pumpkin couch began to prick her skin through her black tights. She had worn a conservative black skirt to look motherly. She cleared her throat.

“What kind of time line would we be talking about, assuming everything works out?” she asked.

Yulia glanced out the window, then looked down and worked at the skin around her fingernails in the manner of someone waiting in a long line at the post office.

“Russian system is very complex, some regions more demanding than others. Then we have also requirements from state and federal Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services. You could go to Russia over summer, depending on region. Many areas require two trips, but some can do entire adoption in one.”

Lucy nodded, pleased that she might be able to travel over the summer when she wasn’t teaching. She wondered if she could manage a little field research on a saint she had always found fascinating: Savvati of Solovki, the patron of bees. Yulia interrupted her thoughts.

“You have work, Miss McVie. You must arrange child care and support services. You must examine everything you do. You must be like nervous bride who tends to every detail before wedding,” she said, leaving her chair and circling the desk to stand in front of Lucy.

“I can do that. You’ll never see a more nervous bride,” she said, smiling.

Yulia ignored this and handed her a dingy manila folder that looked as if it had been sent home with other prospective parents and returned more than once. Lucy rose from the pumpkin couch and shook Yulia’s hand again, feeling dismissed by her brief and less-firm handshake.

“Cost is outlined in first section,” Yulia said. “Call when you decide.”

“It’ll just take me a day or two to go over this information,” she said. “You’ll be hearing from me soon.”

The adoption process, as complicated and nerve-racking as it was, had given Lucy a sense of purpose, had lifted her from the mourning sickness that might, strangely enough, produce a baby. If she had to deal with Yulia and her bacon breath, well, it would be worth it to feel the weight of a small warm head on her shoulder.

She flipped open the folder in her car and ran a finger down the cost estimates. Total: $22,000, which included travel expenses. She could swing it with a small loan, or maybe no loan at all. It seemed important that she didn’t overreach financially. A single mother needed to have the kind of fiscal restraint that told her to put back the Ben and Jerry’s and buy the store brand instead.

THE SMALL STATUE of Saint Jude on Lucy’s kitchen counter served to remind her that almost nothing in life could be ruled out. She called her mother.

“Don’t flip out,” she said when Rosalee picked up the phone. “I’m thinking about adopting a baby.”

“It’s about time,” Rosalee said.

“I’m sorry?”

“Your brother’s kids are practically grown.”

“But I’m not married, Ma. I thought you’d be shocked.”

“Why? It’s not like when Mavis came here from Sicily, sweetheart. Now we do what makes sense.”

Lucy turned the Saint Jude statue around on the kitchen counter. It seemed, to her, to be questioning her judgment.

“At first I didn’t think I could manage it, but then I found a Russian adoption agency. Their fees are pretty reasonable. I still have to fill out all the paperwork and get approved and all that. If I decide to go ahead, I’d probably go to Russia over the summer.”

“I can see it now. A little Russian baby with enormously round cheeks.”

“Enormously… round… cheeks,” Lucy said, pretending to write it down. “I’m adding it to my application.”

“This is a good thing, Lucy,” Rosalee said. “You’ll make a wonderful mother. I’m calling all my friends.”

“Maybe you should wait until I get approved, but put Dad on.”

Rosalee yelled for Bertie without covering the receiver, but Lucy couldn’t hear what he yelled back.

“I’ll have him call you later,” Rosalee said. “He’s rototilling the front garden.”

“In the middle of winter?”

“We lost our big rhododendron last year, and he’s convinced that the soil is too packed. Retirement has turned him into a home-improvement fanatic. I’d get him for you, but he’s renting the rototiller by the hour.”

“Rototillers don’t come cheap.”

“You’re telling me.”

“Ma?”

“What?”

“You always said Nana Mavis refused to die until I got married, but maybe I’ll never get married.”

“She’s a hundred and one, doll. She’ll go when she goes.”

When she hung up, Lucy realized she’d been secretly hoping that her mother would protest and tell her she’d surely find someone and have her own children before long. It was now obvious that everyone—including her own mother—had given up on that fantasy. So she’d be a mother anyway, celibate and devoted. She might call it a trade-off, but what was she trading in? Had she missed the boat in the year she had devoted herself to Harlan, or maybe even before then?

She went to bed that night and dreamed of Russian babies with round cheeks, twenty or so in an oversized playpen, all holding out their arms to her.

HARLAN CALLS. His voice sounds pebbly, grainy, thick with something Lucy can’t identify.

“Do you mind if I come over?” he says.

“I’m reading Aristotle. You know how I get when I read Aristotle.”

“That’s okay. Advice is what I’m looking for.”

Twenty minutes later, he knocks softly and she answers the door. As he walks inside, she notices that the skin around his eyes looks irritated, as if he’s been rubbing it.

“Are your allergies acting up?” she says. “You look a little drained.”

“It’s that image of the plane hitting the second tower. I see it every time I close my eyes. Why do they keep showing it on TV, over and over and over?”

She gestures toward the secondhand couch, and he sits down. The seat is too low for him, and his knees point awkwardly away from each other. She walks to the kitchen and opens the refrigerator.

“Okay, these are your beverage choices: Amstel Light, grapefruit juice, or half-and-half. Oh, wait, here’s a root beer in the vegetable drawer. I also have some cottage cheese and a jar of pickles, if you’re hungry.”

She smiles over the refrigerator door.

“My refrigerator’s better than yours,” he says. “I have four different kinds of cheese and a gallon of maple syrup I bought two years ago in Vermont. Oh, and a papaya.”

“A papaya?”

“From Sylvie. She thinks I should try new fruits.”

Lucy returns with two beers and sits on her only other piece of legitimate furniture, a high-backed armchair she rescued at a yard sale. She had felt the chair was trying hard to be noticed, to retain a certain dignity despite sitting lopsidedly on its previous owner’s weed-plagued lawn. Harlan’s mention of Sylvie irritates her, as it always does, her name like a burr, like a bad taste. She shifts in her seat.

He takes a sip of his beer.

“I have a question I need to ask you,” he says.

She assumes he is talking about the twin towers again.

“They keep showing that image because they have nothing else. No way to put it into perspective.”

“It’s not really about that…”

“I’ve been waiting for a nightmare, but I haven’t had one. Maybe I can’t go there at night because I’m immersed in a bad dream all day. It’s like everything’s reversed. Know what I mean?”

“I do,” he says. “For once, I know exactly what you mean.”