A Watershed Year (3 page)

Don’t forget the dining-room table. It’s yours.

I love you very much.

Harlan

She read the e-mail again and ran the cursor gently over the letters in his name, caressing each one—H-a-r-l-a-n.

two

L
ucy’s love for Harlan had always been consigned to a box, like a piece of inherited jewelry—authentic, precious, burdened with history, and underinsured. When the paramedics took Harlan’s body away, it was as if the box disintegrated, and the love became a broad kind of yearning that radiated from deep within her core and colored everything around her a faint purplish blue. Her family seemed to sense this and tried to help during Christmas Eve dinner in Towson, the Baltimore suburb where Lucy had grown up.

“Maybe you should take a class,” Rosalee, Lucy’s mother, said during the meal, an ordeal of fish and pasta dishes in the Sicilian tradition. The air in her parents’ dining room smelled like the seashore after a hard rain.

“But I teach,” Lucy said, a forkful of cod halfway to her mouth. “The last thing I want to do is sit in another classroom.”

“No, I mean something social, like a cooking class. That’s where I learned to make the bûche de Noël. Wait till you see it. It’s got little candy mushrooms and bark and everything, exactly like a log.”

Lucy took a sip of eggnog, which tasted so thickly of optimism she had a hard time swallowing. Her family just wanted her to be happy, she knew that. But she questioned the obligation of happiness. Was there some ratio out there, some secret happiness-to-misery index by which everyone else measured their life and decided whether or not it was worth living? The McVie family—just as Irish
as it was Sicilian—seemed particularly intent on passing happiness down through the generations like a small business. But it wasn’t as though happiness could be trapped and sustained. Consider the saints she studied. They were celebrated for their unfortunate circumstances, their torture, their untimely deaths. Did anyone measure their happiness?

Her nephew Jack, who was sitting on her right, was pushing tiny clam bits around his plate with a fork and pretend-firing at them with one of the small Lego men he always seemed to be carrying.

“Can I have dessert now?” he asked Lucy.

She studied the curve of his cheek, still downy at ten, still full and soft and vulnerable, needing protection. Here was the crime of Harlan’s death. In the last stages of his illness—as Lucy’s midthirties became her late thirties—she came close to telling him how much she wanted a child. But, from Lucy’s perspective, they always had it backward: no sex, all commitment.

“You better ask your mother,” Lucy said. She looked across the table toward her sister-in-law, Cokie, who was pouring another glass of pinot grigio. When Cokie had married Lucy’s brother, Paul, they had all been astounded at the quantity of alcohol such a thin-wristed woman could consume without falling over.

Jack appeared to change his mind about dessert and left the table instead. Paul and Cokie’s other children, Sean and Molly, seemed to take Jack’s departure as a signal, and they drifted off as well, leaving their plates on the table. Lucy noticed that her father was rubbing his belly as though it needed encouragement. Her great-grandmother, Mavis, seemed to be dozing at the other end of the table.

“Let’s open some presents,” her mother said, standing up. “Just leave all this. I’ll get it later.”

The rest of the family ignored her, grabbing plates and glasses to deposit in the kitchen. Paul stacked several plates and tried to pick up four wine glasses at once. When he dropped a glass on the table, Mavis woke up, peering at everyone as if they were strangers. Lucy pulled Mavis’s wheelchair away from the table and steered her
into the living room, parking her next to the Christmas tree, which seemed to shimmer in a haze of blue. Mavis looked at the tree.

“And how are you, dear?” she said before her head began bobbing again, searching for a place to rest as though her neck had given up trying to support it.

The kids rummaged among the presents, each of them pushing the others’ hands out of the way, wanting to be first, determined to win, competition bred in their mid-Atlantic, lacrosse-obsessed bones.

“Here, Aunt Lucy,” Molly said, handing her a small package. She had clearly wrapped it herself. “We picked this out for you.”

Lucy looked at it, embarrassed. She had gotten everyone bookstore gift cards this year, having no enthusiasm for trips to the mall or the toy store. She had more or less managed to tune out Christmas altogether, until this small tape-tortured package with reindeer wrapping paper landed in her lap. She opened it, even though her mother was still audibly rinsing plates and bumping about in the kitchen. It was a Word of the Day calendar.

“We know you like words,” Molly said, and Lucy did. She liked their elegance, the shapes they made on paper, the musical way they could sound, the subtlety of meaning. She favored some words over others, leaning toward three-syllable words with forceful meanings like “kinetic” and despising mushy two-syllable words like “cuddle.”

“Give us one,” Molly said. “Maybe we’ll know it.”

Lucy opened the box and looked at the first page—January 1, 2003. “Providence,” she read.

“I think it’s in Rhode Island,” Molly said.

“True,” Lucy said. “But it also means: ‘one, the foreseeing care and guardianship of God over his creatures; two, God, especially when conceived of as exercising this; and three, a manifestation of divine care or direction.’”

“What’s the next one?” Sean asked, but Lucy didn’t answer. She stared at the word: “Providence.” She felt the density of the calendar’s pages in her hand—as if she were holding the days themselves—and it seemed to her suddenly that 2003 would be a watershed year. She
had no evidence for this, only the conviction that all her yearning would latch onto something eventually. It had to.

ON THE FIRST DAY of classes in the new year, Lucy found a prominent place for her Word of the Day calendar on the kitchen counter and tacked the “Providence” page on her small bulletin board to remind her that guidance might arrive when she least expected it. She brushed her long hair into a low, serious ponytail and applied enough lipstick to make it look as if she had pulled herself back together, which somehow made her feel as though she had.

With her book bag over one shoulder, she took the stairs down two floors and left her apartment building—only one step up from living in a dorm—and followed the narrow path between the arts center and the gymnasium, passing a rusted iron sculpture that had always looked to her like some kind of weird urban cactus. The sharp smell of the rusted iron, the bite of cold dry air, and the evidence of frost on the ground surprised her. It was winter now, as if the seasons would go on changing just as they always had, without any regard for Harlan’s passing.

She crossed the main quad and nodded at the freshmen running past her, late to class. A year from now, those same freshmen would either schedule later classes or walk in with a coffee after class had started, nodding casually to the professor, and new freshmen with different faces but the same expression would run past her. The cycle of academic life.

Lucy’s small book-lined office in the Arts and Humanities building was on the second floor. She felt fortunate to have the type of office designated for assistant professors in line for tenure, which meant that it had five shelves instead of four and a chair for students in addition to the one behind the desk. The short-term-contract professors had offices that were little more than closets, and the adjunct professors hired to teach individual classes didn’t have offices
at all. But as she put down her book bag, she wondered if she deserved that fifth shelf, which was so crowded with books that it looked as if it might collapse under the weight.

She made a silent vow to redouble her research efforts and crank out at least one notable work of original thought before the end of the school year. She picked up the phone and began dialing Harlan’s number—he had a way of helping her clarify her research ideas—when it struck her again, with fresh pain, that he was gone. It seemed, at times, that her need was great enough to bring him back. Who else would let her rattle on about saints or shake her shoulders when she started feeling sorry for him or for herself?

After Harlan’s death, there had been days so dark they ran into each other like flickering silent movies. The anticipation of missing him, the thumbtack inside her chest, had turned out to be nothing like the real thing, which was an anvil of terrifying weight that seemed to restrict her breathing.

She sat down at her desk, every muscle aching as the anvil pressed down on her. She heard a knock at the door.

“Lucy?”

Angela poked her head in, then rested it against the door frame.

“Hi,” Lucy said, surprised at her ability to speak with so much weight bearing down on her body.

“You’re back,” Angela said.

In the days after Harlan’s death, Angela, who worked in the admissions office, had insisted on coming to see her. She was one of those people who could never seem to sort out her own problems but seemed to enjoy untangling other people’s messy lives. It had been Angela who told her the dean was worried about her, concerned that she had stopped publishing, had sidelined her own career. It had been Angela to whom Lucy had confessed her deep desire to have a baby, her anguish and guilt at the thought of the time that had slipped by as she took care of Harlan; Angela who had rubbed her back with a circular motion that made her feel dizzy, imparting these words: “Somehow these things work out, Lucy. It’s all part of the ride.”

And now it was Angela passing on more condolences. More “I’m sorrys” from the dean, colleagues, students, friends.

How many times had she heard those two words in the past few weeks, spoken with the same sincere tone? She could fill a swimming pool with the sorrow other people felt for her grief, but then what? Was she expected to immerse herself, dive to the bottom, and then rise up through their offerings, becoming whole again? She wished she knew how it was supposed to work. Her vision, which had become briefly blurred, returned when she focused on the dark skin on Angela’s smooth forehead.

“I’m sorry, too,” she said, though it came out in a cracked, strangled voice she didn’t recognize. Angela nodded and closed the door.

Lucy took a deep breath and opened her laptop, trying to decide if she could teach her ten o’clock class without bursting into tears. She had called up her e-mail, hoping to be distracted by the task of deleting spam, when she saw a subject line that said “A Message from Harlan.”

Her heart began to thump in a frightening, arrhythmic way. The e-mail had been sent from an address she didn’t recognize. She checked the date, assuming it had somehow been held up for months in some shadowy Internet limbo. It had been sent that morning. She then assumed it was a cruel joke, or a perverse spam message that had copied a frequently used name from her old e-mails. A sudden palsy in her hand made it difficult to open the message.

Dearest Lucy,

First off, I’m not talking to you from the grave. I had my old friend from MIT set up a program that sends e-mails on specified dates in the future. I’m writing this in November, but if it works, you won’t see it until January. I debated about sending the first one earlier, but I thought it might be cruel to hit you with this too soon after my death. By now, I hope you will have forgiven me.

So why am I sending this at all? Maybe it’s only a selfish impulse to leave something of myself behind: I won’t have any children, I never
wrote that book on the Crusades, I made nothing with my own two hands that will stand the test of time. But I hope it’s more than that. I hope it gives me a chance to explain why I chose to leave the way I did, to document the journey of the past year, and to let you know how much you mean to me. Yes, I could have told you face-to-face, but I was afraid I’d make a mess of it. I needed to write my drafts, see the words, and make them right. That’s what I’m trying to do now as much as my energy allows.

I remember so clearly the night I told you about my diagnosis and how you refused to believe it. Even I didn’t quite believe it then, although a small voice was already telling me to accept the inevitable. So strange that we were locked out on your balcony that night. In a way, that set me up for what was to come: peering inside at the warm and comfortable place I want to be but having no way to get there.

They had a catheter pumping chemo drugs into my chest just a few days later, and you refused to leave, punishing the doctors with questions based on your Internet research. You sat beside my bed with your laptop and a notebook, drilling me on my symptoms and test results as if you could turn yourself into an oncologist in a matter of days if you tried hard enough. You came close, too.

I didn’t really mind that first chemo treatment. I had a few days of nausea, but I was distracted by all the cards and letters and friends. Remember when I was the popular sick man? The nurses used to joke that I needed an auditorium for all my visitors. But you kept them moving, ushering them in and out, telling them not to tire me. And when my mother came to visit from Florida, you sat with her and muted her hysteria and made sure she didn’t tuck too many pillows under my head. That’s all she seemed able to do.