A Watershed Year (14 page)

“Just tell me what she’s saying.”

“Only if you promise not to tell her I told you.”

“I promise.”

“Well, she thinks you’re adopting this boy because you lost Harlan. She’s worried that you’re trying to replace one with the other.”

Lucy crossed her arms and gazed at the ceiling.

“She’s not completely wrong,” she said, looking back at Paul. The truth of it couldn’t be ignored, though it pained her a little to think that Cokie had perceived it. “That might have had something to do with it, at first. But I still think it’s a good thing, for both of us.”

“Makes sense to me,” he said. “But as Cokie often says, what do I know?”

EIGHTY THOUSAND TULIPS. They were categorized by color into defined spaces called beds, though nothing had ever seemed more awake, more alive. Lucy sat down on a stone bench across from a bed of frilly-edged white flowers with red and yellow stripes. A small green sign stuck in the grass identified them as Tulipa Carnival de Nice. She loved the order and precision of the place, imposed by garden-club ladies with wide-brimmed straw hats. She thought about the whole culture of gardening, about which she knew absolutely nothing except that Saint Fiacre, an Irish-born monk, was the most commonly cited patron saint. He was a healer, too, and the patron of cab drivers.

She settled in with her book, the one Louis had given her about Saint Blaise, and read for twenty minutes until the garden began to murmur, and she realized the place was now filled with couples and joggers and mothers pushing strollers. She looked up toward the
central gazebo and saw Louis standing there with Ellen Frist. They were examining the trellises and speaking in low voices. Lucy ducked her head and turned on the bench to face in the other direction. She made herself as small as possible, hoping, as she did that day with Harlan, that motionlessness was the first cousin to invisibility.

“Lucy!”

Louis ran over in his T-shirt and jeans and flip-flops. His hair looked as though he had combed it with his fingers just after getting out of bed. The remnants of sleep lingered around his eyes. He stood there, hopping up and down a few times against the morning chill, staring at her expectantly.

“Hey there,” she said. “You picked a great day.”

“This place is unbelievable,” he said. “Ellen showed up at my door this morning and dragged me over here.”

She noted certain words:
This morning. Dragged me over.

Ellen, who had stopped to examine the Carnival de Nice tulips, walked over and stood next to Louis in a manner Lucy interpreted as girl-friendly.

“Lucy,” she said. “Lovely to see you.”

“Lovely to see you, too.” Lucy had always been powerless to avoid repeating British turns of phrase. Ellen was holding an expensive-looking camera with a long lens. Lucy noticed the precision of her short blond bob. Someone must have used a ruler to cut it.

“You’re reading
Saint Blaise
,” Louis said. “Anything new in it?”

“I really just started,” Lucy said. “I’m going to sit here and enjoy it. Don’t feel like you have to keep me company.”

Louis sat down on the bench and stretched out his legs. “I could use a rest. Sit down, Ellen.”

“I’d rather not, actually,” she said, holding up the camera. “The light is brilliant just now.”

“Okay, then I’ll catch up with you in a minute,” Louis said.

Ellen turned slowly and walked down the stone pathway, adjusting her newsboy cap. Lucy noticed she was wearing riding boots with jeans, and she forced herself not to ask Louis where the crop was.

“That was rude,” she said when Ellen was out of hearing.

“No more rude than being forced to wake up at eight thirty on a Saturday morning.”

“Maybe,” Lucy said, considering this as she turned slightly toward Louis. She suddenly became aware of the fine hairs on the back of her neck.

“Would you mind if I sat here a minute?” Louis said. “She’s totally obsessed with that camera. Writes down the exposure for every frame. She wanted me to carry the notebook, but I refused.”

Lucy laughed and rubbed the back of her neck. She could have listened to him complain about Ellen all day.

“I don’t know why, but the British like to document everything,” she said. “I had this friend in London who had a collection of gum wrappers. He wrote down on the back of each wrapper what he was doing while chewing the gum and then pasted all the wrappers in a scrapbook. They would say things like ‘Saw
Evita
in West End. Wrigley’s Spearmint.’”

As Lucy talked about the gum wrappers, Louis leaned back on the bench and closed his eyes. She wasn’t sure if she was boring him with her story, but he looked content. A slight smile lifted the corners of his mouth, as if he had just lain down on a warm beach after a long winter.

“I had a friend a lot like that, only he’s not English,” Louis said, opening his eyes. “He lived next door to me growing up in New Hampshire. He was obsessed with gum too, only it was those flat pink sticks that came inside baseball cards. For years he wrote down all the cards that came in the pack on the actual piece of gum, in tiny print with a ballpoint pen, and kept them in one of those magnetic photo albums. But then the gum started to disintegrate, and his mother made him throw the whole album away. I was never much of a collector. Just books.”

When Louis finished his story, he reached over the back side of the bench and picked a red tulip, down toward the leaves. Lucy looked around to see if any of the wide-brimmed hats were in sight.

“You can’t pick those,” she said. What would she do if he gave her a flower, with Ellen right there, probably watching them through her telephoto lens?

“I guess you’re right,” he said, trying to stand the flower back up among its leaves. It leaned awkwardly against another tulip. “It seemed like a good idea for a second.”

She remembered, then, why she had come to the garden. She was supposed to be praying for the safety of her future son and honoring the memory of her beloved friend.

“Ellen’s coming back,” she said, though this wasn’t true. “I better go.”

“Okay, well…”

Lucy threw the book in her purse, then hurried through the garden, hoping absurdly that Louis would come after her. It wasn’t right, though. He was too young, too sure of himself, too annoyingly attractive with his careless hair and his narrow hips and his academic obsessions. She just couldn’t see it working out. And she should stay focused on the adoption; she couldn’t afford to divide her attention. Louis was resilient; she had to give him that. But certainly, there would be one rejection that would end his efforts, and for all she knew, this had been the one.

eight

T
here were times when Lucy felt almost transparent, insubstantial, as though her body would offer no resistance if the wind chose to lift her into the sky. At such times, she wished she had a small brick house to call her own, something earthbound and solid that could keep her from getting swept away like the seeds of a dandelion.

She had considered herself a rare exception to the laws of gravity ever since she was a child. Paul would be down the street playing kickball with his friends, and she would be hiding inside the branches of an enormous copper beech in her front yard, climbing as high as she dared and then sitting on a narrow branch that would bend under her slight weight. She felt closer to nature there, without her feet on the ground; not above it all, exactly, but within, enfolded in the arms of a benevolent spirit.

But one night, when she was nine, she had a dream that she had flown up to the ceiling in her room and woke to find herself perched in the copper beech on a branch fifteen feet above the ground. She had been a sleepwalker as a preschooler but hadn’t done it in years. Shaking, she had climbed cautiously down the tree. She was almost there, about four feet from the bottom, when her bare feet slipped and she hit the ground with a thud. She crept back into the house with a sore shoulder and a bruised knee and went back to bed, never telling her parents. For the next year, she slept with a jump rope tied
to her wrist. It ran under the covers and looped around a bedpost. She told her mother she was afraid of being kidnapped.

The week after the tulip garden, that feeling of transparency returned. Mat’s adoption was held up in some bureaucratic tangle that Yulia described as “typical” but had Lucy in knots, Nana Mavis had developed pneumonia, and the United States was fighting a war that left her bewildered and saddened.

Then Cokie showed up on Lucy’s doorstep.

“I’m thinking of leaving Paul,” Cokie said, bursting into tears as she came in the door.

“You don’t mean that,” Lucy said. They sat down on the couch in front of the tiny fireplace. She patted Cokie awkwardly on the back.

“Do you have any tissues?” Cokie said. “I used up the ones in my purse on the way here.”

Lucy ran to the kitchen and found a small box of Kleenex.

“This might not be enough,” Cokie said, bleating again. “I’m sorry. I’m a complete wreck. I just don’t know what to do anymore.”

“Take a deep breath and start from the beginning,” Lucy said. “We’re going to talk this out until you can think clearly.”

Cokie drew in a gallon of air and let it out in one long, flattened sigh. Her head bowed, she spoke softly to her knees.

“It’s not that I don’t love Paul, because I do. I’m really fairly sure that I do. But I totally resent the house—why did we ever think we needed five bathrooms?—and I hate the bills and the cooking and the cleaning and the fighting over the remote control. I must be a terrible mother. I can’t stand to be around my kids anymore.”

“You’re not a terrible mother,” she said, handing Cokie another tissue. “You’ve just reached a breaking point.”

“That’s just it. A breaking point. Paul comes home every day smelling of beer and fried calamari. I bet those waitresses come on to him, too.”

“Cokie, even if they did…”

“I just feel like my life has turned into some kind of joke. I’m clipping coupons, pouring unused cereal back in the box, letting my hair go. I haven’t had a facial in six months.”

“Maybe I should try to reach Paul,” Lucy said.

“No, no. Don’t call him. I’ll be fine. I’ll be good. I’m leaving.” Cokie stood up, but Lucy stopped her.

“You’re not going anywhere. Stay here for a day or two until you can sort things out. You can have Mat’s room.”

“Who’s Mat?”

She refused to answer, so Cokie went on.

“But who’ll feed the kids and take them to practice and get their lunches ready?”

“Paul will have to rise to the challenge. Or maybe he’ll call my moth—”

“He has to promise not to call her, or I’ll get on a plane and never come back.”

“Just sit down, and we’ll figure this out.”

Lucy went to the kitchen to make Earl Grey—because tea seemed like what you should drink if your marriage only appeared to be falling apart but really wouldn’t—and arranged the cups on a tray with some Scottish shortbread someone gave her two Christmases ago. Cokie, in the meantime, had put her head down on a pillow and closed her eyes, so Lucy set down the tray and went upstairs to call Paul, who told her he’d be there in an hour.

Cokie woke up a half hour later. She was still agitated but less so, and she apologized for dumping her problems on Lucy’s doorstep.

“I can’t talk to my other friends,” she said. “They’re all in the same boat, but they won’t admit it. But you, Lucy, you have a chance to save yourself. You really are the smart one. You don’t have to answer to anyone but yourself.”

“The grass is always greener, Cokie,” she said.

“But I don’t think you really understand what it’s like,” Cokie said, her voice rising again. “Yesterday, Luke called me a nag. ‘You’re such a nag, Mom.’ And he’s right. That’s all I do, morning, noon, and
night. ‘Did you finish your science project?’ ‘Did you pick up your room?’ ‘Why can’t you ever screw the cap back on the toothpaste?’ That’s who I am now. The nag.”

While Cokie talked, Lucy straightened up the kitchen and tuned her out as best she could…
blah, blah, blah, air freshener floating in the bathtub… blah, blah, blah, drink cups everywhere, in every room, like they’re reproducing when my back is turned… blah, blah, hamster in the linen closet… blah, blah, blah, ketchup all over my nice clean blah, blah, blah.

By the time the doorbell rang, Cokie was just about talked out. Lucy answered the door, and Paul stood there, kneading one hand with the other. When Cokie continued to sit quietly on the couch, he came in and kneeled in front of her.

“Why don’t you stay here for a few days?” he said, looking hopefully at Lucy. “I can handle the kids.”

“I can’t possibly do that. Molly has a dentist appointment, and Jack’s book report is due soon, and he hasn’t even started it, and…”

“I’ll take care of it. All of it,” he said. “The important thing is for you to feel better.”

Lucy mumbled something about needing to get to a class and left Paul and Cokie to sort out their mess. She walked toward the center of campus, thinking about how you move along, day by day, collecting dirt on your shoes, until one day, you can’t put those shoes on anymore. They’re beat-up, out of style, and you can’t, for the life of you, imagine why you bought them in the first place.