A Watershed Year (35 page)

“Well, hello,” she said. Mat looked up at her, his eyes half-closed. “Did we wake you up?”

Yulia sat up with a start, her too-long bangs falling across one eye. She brushed them away.

“Look at you, Azzie,” she said, as though she had forgotten that he was the object of all her scheming. “His face has filled out. He looks so much like his mother.”

Envy, with all its irrational force, hit Lucy like a slap.
She
was his mother, not some careless young Russian woman who didn’t know enough to stay out of the way of a speeding car. She wanted to push Yulia off the stool, shove her out the door, and lock it behind her. But then she looked at Mat, who was rubbing his eyes. She noticed the altered shape of his cheeks, the glow of sufficient calories and vitamin-packed cereals and juices. Was it his fault he looked like his mother? She poured him a cup of orange juice.

“How much should I offer him?” she asked Yulia, handing Mat the cup. He took a sip.

“Let me talk to him, try to find out what he wants, and then I call you. Stay here.”

Yulia slugged down a half cup of coffee in one gulp, tousled Mat’s hair, then grabbed her raincoat, slipped on the men’s shoes, and left.

“WHAT ARE YOU talking about? You can’t be serious.”

Angela stood on the porch watching Vern toss a white plastic baseball to Matt on the tiny patch of grass in front of Lucy’s duplex. They had shown up a few hours after Yulia left, Angela barging in with a gift bag for Mat stuffed with a plastic baseball bat, a mitt, and a dozen plastic balls. “We decided not to wait for an invitation,” she had said.

“His father is here? In the US?” Angela went on. “Why on earth would he be here?”

“I wish I knew. Apparently he didn’t sign the adoption papers. Yulia thinks he wants money. And if that’s all he wants, I’ll hock my furniture, my car, my parents’ furniture, and their car. But would he come all this way just to ask for money, when he could have bribed me over the phone? It would have cost him a fortune for the plane ticket.”

Lucy flipped through her mental Rolodex of saints for one who could deliver her from this mess. She could have called on three or four, but it seemed more prudent to direct all her energies to one, and she settled on Saint Rita of Cascia. Saint Rita took on desperate cases, like Saint Jude, but Lucy reasoned that Saint Jude, being better known, got many more requests. There was a shrine to Saint Rita in Philadelphia, just a few hours away.

Angela pinched her hard on the arm. “Why are you standing here? You should be on the phone with a lawyer.”

She was right, of course. It was possible that Mat’s father had no legal standing, even if he hadn’t signed the papers. She ducked into the house for her cordless phone, came back to the porch, and let Angela dial the lawyer who had handled her divorce.

Mat opened his tiny glove and caught a ball that Vern had tossed from about four feet away. Mat grinned, holding up the glove for her to see. Lucy’s heart shifted in her chest, almost crowding out her lungs and stifling her breath. She wondered if he felt even a fraction of that love for her.

“Here, talk to him.” Angela handed her the phone.

Lucy condensed her story as much as possible but got across the point that Mat’s father hadn’t signed the termination papers and might want his son back. The lawyer said he’d look up whatever case law or statutes he could find and call her back. She put the phone down on the porch railing as Angela put her hand on the middle of Lucy’s back, holding it there, propping Lucy up as she watched her son discover the thrill of baseball.

“He’s not going anywhere,” Angela said. “You got the fish wallpaper and everything. He belongs with you.”

Lucy found a hangnail on her right thumb and tore it off, leaving a patch of raw skin.

“Not that many weeks ago, we were complete strangers,” she said. “When I look at him now, I find that so hard to believe.”

Lucy rested her forearms on the porch railing as Mat crawled into the hedges to look for the ball. The waiting was torture, a form of physical abuse that affected not only her stomach but her head, her vision, her muscles, her nervous system.

The phone rang.

“Lucy, it’s Yulia.”

She almost dropped the phone into the bushes but caught it before it fell. Denial was the only acceptable path. She could speak to Yulia if she convinced herself that Vasily was on a plane back to Russia.

“He wants to see Azamat.”

“Absolutely not.”

“He says he will meet with you first, then see his son. If not, he says he will call Russian Embassy.”

Lucy still had the lawyer in her pocket, researching the case. She could meet with Vasily, size him up, stall.

“Does he speak English?”

“You come to my office at noon. I translate.”

Lucy had the feeling Vasily was standing over Yulia’s shoulder, threatening her. She pictured him as a bully, a man who didn’t let women tell him what to do. She imagined the coarseness of his features, the fleshy neck, the ruddy skin. He would have meaty hands, like a butcher’s, and large pores on his face. Black, shapeless clothes and thick-soled shoes.

“I’ll be there, but I’m not bringing Mat.” She could hear Yulia turn away from the phone and speak in Russia.

“For now, he says this is okay. We see you at noon.”

LUCY SENT MAT off with Angela and Vern, who wanted to take him to a video arcade. Then she went inside, took her black suit from the closet, and slipped into the jacket, which was too big. She started to take it off but changed her mind, sensing some residual power in its fabric. She wrapped the jacket around her, over her jeans, and fastened a thick black leather belt around her waist.

On her way out, she stopped in Mat’s room, returned the stuffed penguin to the bed, and smoothed the comforter. Then she kneeled down and put her face on his pillow, breathing in the slightly sour little-boy scent lingering there. He had only been gone for ten minutes, but she missed him already. She ran her hand under the pillow and wondered who would tuck the tooth-fairy money under his sleeping head when he lost his first tooth. Would it be her? His father? Or no one at all?

She stood up and brushed off her knees, taking the stairs slowly. She passed through the living room, trailing her fingers over the dark swath on the back of the couch. The house was so empty without Mat, quiet and still, funereal. Was it possible she had ever lived there alone?

Before she left, the phone rang again. This time it was the lawyer.

“Basically, you don’t have a lot of options,” he said, and she listened, nodding. “If he can prove this is his son and that it’s not his signature on the papers, then someone is in a whole mess of trouble.”

Not someone. Her. And it wouldn’t matter that her heart was in the right place or that she simply wanted to believe in something so much that she let it block out all doubt.

THE DOOR to Yulia’s office was open. Lucy could see the strip of fluorescent light from all the way down the long corridor. It grew wider as she neared the door, and she slowed her pace, halting completely about five feet away. A man appeared in the doorway: a
thin man, early thirties, with a scrawny beard, pale blue eyes, and eyelashes so light they gave the impression he had just come in from the snow. He was wearing a green jogging suit with a white stripe down the arms and legs. Lucy thought he might be the janitor.

“Lu-cy McVie?” he said.

He opened the door a little wider, and Yulia motioned from where she was standing behind her desk for Lucy to come in. She wore an expression Lucy had never seen before—an expression of powerlessness—and her hands were moving here and there in a way that suggested she had no control over them. One hand pulled on her earlobe as the other twisted the swiveling office chair back and forth.

The man in the jogging suit half sat, half leaned against Yulia’s desk. It took Lucy a few seconds to realize that this was Vasily. This was Mat’s father. And he wasn’t a hulking brute but a man of below-average height who looked as though he needed a drink. She moved into the office and stood three or four feet away from Vasily, waiting for him to look up again. But he kept his gaze trained at the floor, his arms crossed, until Yulia left her position behind the desk, shut the door, and then came back to stand between them, as if they might throw punches at each other.

Vasily spoke in Russian to Yulia, who translated for Lucy.

“He wants that you hear his story,” Yulia said. “Please sit down.”

Lucy moved hesitantly toward the pumpkin slip-covered couch but couldn’t bring herself to sit down on it. Instead, she balanced on the couch’s arm and looked at Vasily, who still wouldn’t look at her. His eyelids looked heavy, and his pockmarked skin told the story of teenage acne. He turned to Yulia and began speaking in a low voice as she paced from one end of the small office to the other and translated.

“He says Zoya Minksy sent him papers many months ago. He was very busy with business meetings and so forth and could not take the time to find witnesses and such. Then he could not find the papers, so he calls Zoya to get new papers, and she tells him his son has left for America. When he realizes this, he makes a plane flight
to come to America, because he has been defrauded, and he lets no woman do this to him.”

Vasily glanced at her then. He had an insecure-looking face that suggested poor nutrition and chain-smoking and the bitterness of a man who had never lived up to his own expectations.

“How do I know this is even Mat’s father?” Lucy asked Yulia. “What if this is some con artist who heard about the adoption? You said you only met him once.”

Yulia translated, and Vasily jumped up, pulling his wallet from a pocket in the sagging pants of the jogging suit. He opened it and pulled out a picture, thrusting it at Yulia, as though she had questioned his identity, not Lucy. Yulia took the picture and carried it over to Lucy, holding it open on the palm of her hand. It was Mat, at least a year younger, on the right, and his mother, Mitya, in the middle, with the short brown hair Mat had described, and this man, Vasily, on the left, sitting on the steps of what in America would be called a tenement.

None of them was smiling, and yet Lucy could tell that it had been a rare moment of family unity preserved on film. In the picture, Mat’s little arm was resting on his mother’s leg, as surely as if he were still an extension of her body. Mitya had her arm around Mat, and Vasily was leaning back with his elbows on the step behind him. The picture meant Lucy couldn’t deny that Vasily was Mat’s father, but she could see that he had held himself apart from his wife and son. She looked away.

“He brought his son to the children’s home, Yulia. Ask him why he did that in the first place.”

Yulia translated, and Vasily answered.

“After Mitya died, he say, he was very busy with work, with electronics store he manages. He work many hours and could not find good woman to watch his son and cook and clean for them. His parents are dead, and Mitya’s parents—my parents—also dead. Nobody lives long in Russia anymore. So friends, er, people he knows,
tell him he must give his son to the children’s home and forget him. So he does this, because it is not a man’s job to raise children.”