A Watershed Year (15 page)

Harlan had brought up the topic once that most people are creatures of routine, but they resent it at the same time. What they don’t realize, he had said from his hospital bed, is that routine doesn’t look so unappealing when it’s snatched away from you. Then you’re all about routine, getting it back, craving it like a drug. You’re desperate to get the oil changed, read the comics, talk about the weather. He knew all about that.

When Lucy reached the central quad, she noticed a large group of students lying on the street in front of the main administration
building. From a distance, she saw Louis, who stood there with a heavy backpack slung over one shoulder, bunching up the sleeve of his T-shirt in a way that struck her as unbearably beautiful. She came up behind him and tapped him on the shoulder, unsure of whether he would want to see her.

“What’s going on?” she said.

“Oh, hey,” he said, slightly flustered. “I think they’re protesting the war, but no one seems to know for sure. How have you been?”

“Oh, I’ve been busy with the adoption, and my great-grandmother’s dying and my sister-in-law is having a breakdown and so on and so on. How’s Ellen these days?”

Louis grabbed her hand, pulled her away from the crowd toward the quad, and threw his backpack down underneath a tree.

“Sit down, right here, and don’t say anything,” he said.

She sat down on her book bag, and Louis sat on the ground, arms around his knees. Behind him, increasing numbers of students were joining those on the street. From a distance, she could see the campus security guards converging. Louis ran his hands through his hair and looked at her with eyes the same blue as the robe painted on her favorite Saint Jude statue.

“Ellen is a nice person. I respect and admire her. But I’m not interested in her. The person I’m interested in keeps dodging me, and I’m close to giving up. If this person isn’t interested back, I’d like to know before I make more of a fool of myself.”

Lucy wanted to look away—her eyes were tearing from the sun—but she didn’t.

“This person,” she said, “is several years older than you.”

“So what?” he said. “How is that relevant?”

“And this person is adopting a child, which will change her life, and not just a little. I mean it will change everything.”

Louis sighed.

“Lucy, do you know what happens to me when I meet people outside our department? Eventually they want to know what I do, and I have to tell them I’m writing my thesis on Thomas Aquinas.
And then their eyes glaze over, and that’s the end of it, unless I’m willing to pretend that my work isn’t important to me, that it’s just work. Seriously, Lucy, who else values what we know? This country is full of religious people who don’t care about the history, the facts. They just want it to mean what they’ve already decided it means. But you get it. You get why it matters. And it goes beyond that…”

The campus police began pushing through the crowd surrounding the protesters. Lucy looked down at her watch, saw the time, and realized that her seminar should have started five minutes before.

“My class,” she said. “I’m already late.”

Louis stood up and helped her to her feet. She grabbed her book bag and stood looking at the soft hollow at the base of his neck where it disappeared into his T-shirt. She wanted to inhabit that space, to curl up and go to sleep there. Their hands brushed.

“I’ll call you later,” he said. “Can we maybe just have dinner tonight?”

“I’ll try,” she managed to say and turned to go. Was it fair? Was it unfair? Did it matter anymore? She sensed the water spilling down on either side of a concrete divide: her wall of choices, her watershed year. She walked toward the Arts and Humanities building and glanced back at Louis, who was standing there watching her go. This time he didn’t look quite as disappointed. Behind him, on the street, the campus police apparently had decided to let the students have their way. The crowd had thinned, and the students lying there were starting to look uncomfortable. She wondered how long they would stay.

“SICK WITH WHAT? The flu? The flu could make you faint,” Lucy says.

He swallows audibly, looks down, then puts a palm to his forehead, rubbing it hard. She doesn’t want him to say anything now, because if the wrong words emerge, they will change him, and she
loves him just as he is. She begins to hum softly, stalling, flicking the switch on the dead lamp as if it might come back to life, but now he looks desperate to get it out, to confront the fear, to name it.

“Cancer,” he says. “I have cancer.”

She looks past him, not understanding the words, although they release images: a bald head, a hospital bed, bags of fluid hanging from an IV pole. A dryness starts in her throat, along with a faint hum in her ears. She feels as though she isn’t quite sitting on the chair anymore but hovering just above it. The backs of her thighs go numb with fear.

“How is that possible?” she says. “You’re young, you’re healthy.”

“Young, yes,” he says. “Healthy, apparently not. I’ve had some symptoms, but nothing I couldn’t explain, and then I fainted when the towers fell. I even ignored that for a week or two, but then I found this lump, and I knew it wasn’t good. I haven’t been to the doctor in years, and I didn’t have one here, so it took me a few days to find one. I had all kinds of tests. I’ll spare you the details, but it’s everywhere, including my bone marrow. They want me to start intensive chemo right away.”

She says nothing. The international drama of the past few weeks has left her feeling pummeled, but this hits her in a new place, a place she can’t protect.

Harlan begins to peel the label off his beer bottle.

“They’re not that hopeful, actually. I don’t have a good chance to survive this.”

She shakes her head. People survive cancer all the time. Years from now, among scores of survivors on a cancer walk, they’ll look back at this conversation and smile with hard-won wisdom. “Remember how you felt back then? Like the world was ending?”

He explains the terms: anaplastic large cell lymphoma, stage four. He describes the experience of entering the doctor’s office, hearing the diagnosis, sitting on his hands to stop them from shaking. The doctor had been reluctant to give him the odds, but Harlan had pressed. Thirty percent.

“Thirty percent die?” she says.

“No, thirty percent survive,” he says. “For five years or more.”

She stays in her chair, unable to move, although she feels strongly that she should do or say something uplifting. Instead, a question forms.

“Was Sylvie with you in the doctor’s office? Was she there?”

He looks uncomfortable, and she wishes she hadn’t asked.

“I haven’t told her yet,” he says. “She’s coming down this weekend. I don’t know how she’ll take it.”

“She’ll be devastated, Harlan,” she says, “but she’ll help you through this. So will I.”

A manic laugh escapes him.

“I’m not prepared for this,” he says, looking down. “It definitely throws a wrench into my retirement plans.”

“THIS IS IT for Nana Mavis. I’m just… I can’t… Call me.”

Lucy returned home in the late afternoon to find a message from her mother on the answering machine. The strangled “call me” acknowledged all that was to come: the bedside vigil, the funeral arrangements, the luncheon, the burial, the distribution of Mavis’s belongings, the final yard sale, the end of a century.

Bertie answered the phone when she called back.

“Dad, I just got the message. Where’s Mom?”

“She’s with Mavis. My heartburn started acting up, so she sent me home.”

“I’ll go keep her company.”

“She’ll be happy to see you, hon.”

Lucy ran a brush through her hair and went to tell Cokie about Mavis.

“Should I come with you?” Cokie said, looking up from a fitness magazine she must have brought with her. Lucy was grateful for the offer, even if she could tell that Cokie was hoping she’d say no.

“I’ll call if you need to be there,” she said. “I left an extra set of house keys on the dining-room table.”

Lucy drove to the nursing home, more worried about her mother than Mavis. Rosalee knew Mavis couldn’t have asked for a longer life, wouldn’t have wanted to live with tubes up her nose or needles in her arm. But that didn’t make losing her any easier. Mavis had been one of Rosalee’s closest allies, her connection to European tradition and an authentic marinara. Rosalee was on her knees, saying the rosary, when Lucy entered the softly lighted room. She stood up with effort, bracing her hands on a small chair near the bedside. Lucy hugged her, pressing her face into her mother’s soft shoulder. Then Mavis shifted slightly, letting out a barely audible sigh, and they both turned toward the bed.

“You know her real name wasn’t Mavis,” Rosalee said. “It was Rosalia, which means ‘melody.’ I was named after her.”

“But everyone called her Mavis.”

“She took it as her American name. It was popular back then, and she wanted to fit in.”

“She never seemed like a conformist to me.”

“Oh, we all conform. But you’re right. She developed independence with age. By the time she was eighty-five, nobody could tell her what to do.”

“How much longer?”

“I’m not sure, but you can say good-bye.”

Lucy kneeled, took Mavis’s hand, and thought of Joseph, Jesus’s father and the patron of happy death. Mavis’s breath was almost inaudible, but Lucy could feel that her hand was still warm, pulsing with the same energy she had carried through more than a hundred years inside a frame that had been thin but muscular as a child, sturdy and straight as a yardstick during her childbearing years, thinner and slightly stooped after menopause, and now brittle, almost weightless, a husk of her former self. Her skin felt powdery.

Lucy rested her forehead on Mavis’s hand, hoping Saint Joseph would lead her to a better place, a place where she could reunite
with her dear Willard. Lucy could sense that Mavis was fading, life not draining away, as Harlan feared, as much as running its course, nearing the finish line. But then she heard footsteps and, through the open door, saw Paul run-walk down the hall as the three kids ran-walked behind him. Mavis’s breath resumed at a shallow but steady pace.

“I’m here, Ma. She’s not gone, is she?” Paul yelled before he was even to the door.

“Keep it down,” Rosalee said in a brusque whisper as Paul filled the frame of the doorway. “What if she can hear you?”

Sean, Molly, and Jack found places on the bench seat along the windowsill. Sean took out earphones and wedged them into his ears.

“Put that away,” Paul said. “Show some respect.”

“Just let me hear the rest of this song,” Sean said.

Paul walked over and yanked out the earphones.

“Take it easy, Dad.”

“Watch your mouth, young man.”

Rosalee came over and put her arm around Paul.

“I’ll take them to the cafeteria,” Rosalee said, shooing the kids toward the door. “You spend a little time with Nana.”

Paul went to Mavis’s side, made the sign of the cross, and stood with his head bowed. He couldn’t stay still for more than a few seconds.

“So what’s Cokie telling you,” he said. “Why isn’t she here?”

“Paul,” Lucy said. “Let’s worry about Nana Mavis, okay?”

“She’s a hundred and one,” Paul said, pinching the bridge of his nose. “I’m sorry. I just can’t take this with Cokie. Is she leaving me or what? I don’t know what to tell the kids.”

“She’s not leaving you,” Lucy said, although she had no idea what Cokie planned to do. “I think she needs to see someone, a therapist, and talk things out.”

“My medical insurance doesn’t kick in until the first of May.”

“Look, let’s just give it a couple days and see what happens. Maybe she’ll realize what she’s missing and turn things around on her own.”

“Well, she picked a fine time to lose it. We’re starting a new menu and a dessert promotion next week, and I’m up to my butt in ad copy. Did I tell you they made me the manager?”

“No, when?”

“Last week. The old guy took a transfer to a T.G.I. Friday’s in Silver Spring. You wouldn’t believe it, but this place is a gold mine, Luce. I’ll have it doubling its profits in under a year.”