A Watershed Year (10 page)

“Thanks for coming by, and thanks for the book,” she said, standing up again. It seemed important to be friendly yet brisk until she could sort out whether she wanted his attention.

“Hey, I was thinking,” Louis said, turning on the threshold. “Ellen Frist is letting me borrow her class to practice my lecture on Aquinas, and I was hoping you’d come. Then maybe we could get some lunch when it’s over. I’m afraid the students will give me the same reaction my parents do—the ‘Why-am-I-supposed-to-care?’ look—when I get going on my research.”

“I know that look. I’ll have to check my schedule and let you know,” she said, rubbing her forehead. She found herself looking at his arms, which were thin but muscular. An emotion long buried flickered for an instant but went out. She had poured so much into her grief, which could still pull her under like a riptide, and into the idea of becoming a mother. The reservoir felt close to empty.

When Louis left, Lucy took out her photo of Mat and smoothed it on the edge of the kitchen counter. The boy in the photo was wearing a white T-shirt, thin-looking pants, and round-toed sneakers that looked too big for him. He was looking at the camera, but his body was turned, as though he were being asked to abandon a ball or a tricycle to say “cheese,” or the Russian equivalent. Soft light-brown hair framed his broad face. His lips, opened slightly, were red and full, and Lucy could make out a few tiny white teeth. His eyes drew her in, just as they had in Yulia’s office, deep and brown and mystical, holding some secret longing. Boys like this, she realized, would be hugged more often than they wanted. Already she loved him. Already she anticipated how he would resist that love, struggle for his independence, keep her at arm’s length. It seemed inevitable.

She crawled back into bed with her jeans and sneakers on, though it wasn’t yet noon, exhausted by images of her relationship with Mat, who, in her mind, had already left home at sixteen to join a cult or a band or a cult-inspired band. But she couldn’t sleep. Harlan’s voice poked and prodded her.
Don’t forget the dining-room table. It’s yours…

She got out of bed and went to the dining room. On one end of the table were the home-study papers, which she had to complete before the end of the week. Next to the home-study papers were stacks of her students’ essays that should have been graded days ago. Near the essays were piles of newspapers, the
Baltimore Sun
and the
New York Times
, which she had never even scanned: the United States was on the verge of invading Iraq, and she hadn’t been keeping up with the news. The table was waiting for her, offering space for her to plan her future, just as it had been Harlan’s workplace, where he had planned his own exit and where she imagined he had composed his monthly e-mails to her.

The student essays came first. When they were finished, she opened the home-study folder, which she had started three or four times before but never finished. At the end of the first section, she read that the home-study process could take up to three months,
after which she would be given a child referral. But she already had a child referral, didn’t she? What was Mat’s picture if not a referral for this specific child? She called Yulia’s cell phone and left a message: “Yulia, this is Lucy McVie, and I need to speak to you right away.”

She flipped through the stacks of newspapers, nerves exposed, until the phone rang.

“Lucy? Yulia. Is something wrong?”

“The home study says I’ll receive a child referral once everything’s complete, after I get all my approvals, but I already have one, don’t I? Is there a chance I wouldn’t get Mat?”

Yulia didn’t speak for a few moments. Lucy hadn’t known Yulia long, but she knew her well enough to sense she wasn’t going to like the answer when she finally received it.

“Remember I told you Azamat is special boy?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I was waiting for right time, but… he is, you see, my nephew.”

“Your nephew?”

“It was my sister who died. A car accident. When I heard his father sent him to children’s home, I decide to find someone here to adopt him because this is my business.”

Lucy could breathe, but with a shallowness that made her dizzy. Her eyes fell on a newspaper photo of a young Iraqi boy selling batteries. A trickle of sweat ran down the side of his thin face.

“So were you planning to take him back once he got here?” she asked, hearing an echo of her own voice.

“He will be yours, yours alone, unless you think he needs his aunt Yulia now and then. This is good for little Azzie. This is why I give you special price.”

Lucy held the phone away from her face and tried to absorb what Yulia had just told her. She could hang up now and stop the whole process, and her rational side told her she should. Yulia had lied to her, and she might have to deal with “Aunt Yulia” long past the
final paperwork. She should start over or maybe even forget about adopting altogether, just throw Mat’s picture away.

But then Mat—whose photo alone already had absorbed so much of her yearning—would not come to live in her second bedroom, would not learn to ride a bike on the college quad, would not draw pictures for her lonely refrigerator. He might never be adopted at all, or he would go to someone else and draw pictures for a refrigerator in a house that could be anywhere on the map.

“I’ll be at your office at ten on Tuesday, and we’ll discuss this,” Lucy said in even tones.

“I understand,” Yulia said. “I’ll see you at ten, Tuesday.”

When she hung up the phone, Lucy contemplated calling her parents and asking for advice but decided against it. Her mother clearly thought she was overly sensitive, couldn’t accept reality, needed to be protected from the world. If she was going to be a mother, she had to prove to herself that it wasn’t true. She filled out as much of the home study as she could and wrote out a list of questions she would have to be prepared to answer.

No matter how much she worried about trusting Yulia, she couldn’t face going back to the other agencies. And she knew that if Mat didn’t come to live with her, she’d spend the rest of her life worrying about where he had ended up. For a moment, she wondered if the beautiful little boy in the photo even existed. Maybe Yulia would just take her money and disappear, leaving her with a gaping hole in her heart. She had no way to assess the risk.

LUCY DRESSED in the black pantsuit she had worn to Harlan’s funeral. Normally she was drawn to long skirts, gauzy scarves, clogs, and dark tights; wide-legged jeans and embroidered cotton tops; and she owned more than one vintage leopard-print coat. This suit was different. It was expensive and fitted and had a board-meeting look to it, and she had chosen it to keep her pulled together during the
funeral, believing that the actual fabric would hold her emotions inside and allow her to stand upright. But the suit was looser than before; anxiety spilled from the gaps.

Standing on the miniature porch of the duplex with her coffee cup, she took in the morning light, which had some true warmth to it. It would be one of those mid-March days that felt like the middle of spring, despite the calendar. Baltimore was like that. In addition to an early spring, it offered summer days in May and a freakishly warm day or two well into November. It was ideal, she thought, if you could stand the furnace blast of July and August and the cinder-block gray of winter.

Her view took in other duplexes with identical miniature porches, some of which had been personalized with hanging plants or nylon kites or wind chimes or, in one case, several empty beer kegs. Hard to the left, Lucy noticed for the first time that the bell tower of the college library could be seen through the trees. The spire, spiking the sky, gave her evidence of something outside the stultifying sameness of the duplex world.

She drove to Yulia’s office, sitting with her back straight, not even touching the car seat behind her, absorbing the residual power of her black suit. When she arrived at the office building, she didn’t see Yulia’s car in its usual place in the parking lot. She took the elevator to the third floor, then wound her way down the narrow corridors, whose walls looked as if they could be punctured with a sturdy fork. The door to Yulia’s agency was locked. She looked at her watch: 9:59. A slight growl escaped from the back of her throat as she dug through her purse, looking for a scrap of paper on which to write Yulia an extremely unpleasant note. But just as she was testing pens to find one that worked, Yulia came huffing down the corridor, clutching her chest.

“You are early,” she said, plastic and canvas bags flying around her.

“No, I’m on time,” Lucy said. “If you don’t already know this, I’m habitually punctual.”

“I got stuck on beltway, some kind of accident. I had to drive on shoulder and take back road.”

Still breathing heavily, Yulia unlocked the door with bags hanging from her wrists, and Lucy walked inside, straightening the hem of her jacket.

“Nice suit,” Yulia said. “I will make coffee.”

“Thanks, but no,” Lucy said. “I’d like to discuss my situation.”

“Of course,” Yulia said. “Please sit down.”

Lucy started toward the pumpkin couch but stopped. Sitting down would give Yulia a position of superiority. She crossed her arms and turned.

“I’d rather stand. Now, please explain to me what’s going on. If Mat is your nephew, why can’t you take him?”

“I considered, of course. But I have three children already. My husband has bad back and cannot work. I hear from friends in Russia that Azamat’s father has new girlfriend, but they still leave him at orphanage. He deserves chance to live better life. I owe this to Mitya.”

“So I’m supposed to believe all this?”

“Wait,” she said. “I have something.”

Yulia tore through the plastic bags she had left in a clump by her desk and took out a videotape. Lucy surrendered to the pumpkin couch as Yulia inserted the tape into a small television with a VCR. On the screen, a small boy pushed a Matchbox-style car along the ground, making motor noises and smiling at the video camera. The camera followed him to a pile of sand, where he sat down and dug with a small shovel. He seemed to forget the camera at one point and began to sing a little song.

“Can you turn up the volume?” Lucy asked. “What’s he singing?”

Yulia rewound the video and turned it up so that Lucy could hear Mat’s voice. Some of the words were garbled, but she caught most of them.

“’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves

Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;

All mimsy were the borogoves

And the mome raths outgrabe.”

As the video went on, the little boy repeated the same verse over and over, sometimes in a high voice, sometimes in a lower one. A chill traveled down Lucy’s spine as the two-dimensional Mat of her worn picture became three-dimensional, took on sound and personality, acquired a beating heart.

“It’s ‘Jabberwocky,’” Lucy said. “He must have seen the Disney version of
Alice in Wonderland
.”

“Mitya bought many Disney movies for him. As you can see, he has excellent memory. He is good boy. Very healthy. You take him. Please.”

“What happens if I don’t take him?” she asked.

“Maybe he gets adopted by someone else, though this is less likely because he is no longer a baby. Maybe he grows up in orphanage—this is stigma in Russia—and trains for job. Maybe he never leaves Murmansk.”

Lucy leaned back, her sharp jacket askew. It was obvious that Yulia knew she was hooked, that she wouldn’t jeopardize her chances of getting Mat, so what was the point of pretending? She hated that her emotions were always too close to the surface, behind a flimsy veil that could be swept aside when she least expected it.

“No more surprises, Yulia,” Lucy said, one hand pressing her forehead. They had crossed some barrier now, beyond polite business talk. They were, for all practical purposes, about to be related by a small Russian boy obsessed with
Alice in Wonderland
as interpreted by Disney. Nothing had prepared her for that.

When Lucy went home, she found her copy of Lewis Carroll’s
Through the Looking Glass
and looked up “Jabberwocky,” which Alice had read by viewing the backward text in a mirror.

“Beware the Jabberwock, my son!

The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!

Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun

The frumious Bandersnatch!”

Lucy was amused to read that Alice said the poem was a bit hard to understand, at which point Lewis Carroll added this aside: “You see she didn’t like to confess, even to herself, that she couldn’t make it out at all.”

six

Y
ou’re an intelligent girl, Lucy,” Paul said, taking a sip of his Sprite. “But you’re missing the point. Springsteen doesn’t sugarcoat the truth.”

She looked at him, then glanced at the large pieces of romaine in her Caesar salad. She would have to cut them with a knife and fork.

“I still say ‘You ain’t a beauty, but, hey, you’re alright’ is the harshest lyric ever written,” she said.

“You’re forgetting what comes next: ‘And that’s alright with me.’”

“Like that takes the sting out of it.”