A Watershed Year (26 page)

“All will be fine, Lucy McVie,” Lesta said with a solemn expression on his face. “I enjoy the knowing of you.”

“Me, too, Lesta,” Lucy said. “I’m sorry I never got to try your wife’s chicken Kiev.”

“For this you come back to Murmansk,” he said. “Someday.”

As she nodded and smiled, Mat squirmed away. She saw him pick up an old tissue from another ashtray.

“I’ll miss you, Lesta. You have no idea how much.”

THROUGHOUT THE FLIGHT, Mat refused to stay buckled into his worn seat, the frayed upholstery of which barely covered the foam padding beneath. She took him to the bathroom three times, because he seemed to enjoy seeing the tiny sink and toilet, though he never actually went. The novelty and enormity of being on an airplane seemed to impress him enough to keep the screaming to a minimum, except when they were descending, and he did, at that point, apparently need to go to the bathroom. She kept an arm tightly across his seat belt and wondered if her eardrums might suffer permanent damage. When they landed, she was grateful for the exposed foam padding, which seemed to have absorbed the puddle Mat had produced. She hustled him off the plane before any of the flight attendants had a chance to notice the sharp odor emanating from seat 14A.

In the half-light of the airport bathroom, Lucy attempted to wrestle the wet pants and underwear off Mat’s kicking legs to at least rinse them out a bit in the sink. He was small and light, but he was wiry and strong—much stronger than she could have imagined when studying his picture back in Baltimore—and he refused to cooperate. She finally picked him up and held his wet rear, pants still on, in front of the hand-dryer until her arms gave out. In the future, she told herself, always bring extra clothes.

Emerging from the bathroom, they followed other passengers to the baggage claim, winding through the smoky terminal and out into the cold drizzle of Moscow in May. They took a taxi to a hotel Yulia had recommended near the American Embassy, traveling through woods and countryside until the suburbs appeared with the same gray, apartment high-rises Lucy had seen in Murmansk.

As they made their way into the center of Moscow, she barely had a chance to look out the window and glimpse what she had only seen in pictures—the fantastical onion domes of St. Basil’s Cathedral, the Kremlin, or the vast stretch of Red Square—because Mat had pulled a big wad of stuffing out of a gash in the vinyl seat of the cab, requiring her to stuff it back in. When she did glance up as the cab driver slowed to turn into the hotel’s entrance, the first sign she saw was for T.G.I. Friday’s, unmistakable even if the letters were different. She would have to tell Paul that even Russians—or at least their tourists—appreciated large hamburgers.

Mat followed her cautiously into the hotel lobby, which was smaller than the Best Eastern’s but cleaner and decorated in bold floral fabrics. The bas-relief cherubs on the ceiling were gilded, as was every available surface on the furniture and moldings, as though the Western visitors who patronized the place would feel more comfortable if the whole place glittered with gold paint.

The front-desk clerk spoke to Lucy in English. After they checked in, she walked Mat up the stairs to the second floor and found their room, which blessedly smelled of Lysol and not smoke. The bellhop had already placed their luggage near a small brown armchair in the corner that looked just as battered and worn as Lucy felt. As she was on the phone to arrange for Mat’s medical exam the next day, he climbed up on one of the double beds, burrowed under the floral covers, and fell asleep.

An hour later, it broke her heart to wake him, but they needed to get his visa photo taken before the shop nearby closed, according to her guidebook, at five. In the tiny lobby gift store, she bought a bag of lollipops, though strategically, this backfired. The photographer
had to pull the lollipop out of Mat’s mouth to take the picture, which left him howling, his mouth wide open in the picture they would have to use.

As they walked back from the photographer’s shop, the city came into focus for brief intervals: a babushka in a bright blue apron sold grilled meats from a cart; an anemic-looking young man with a scruffy beard manipulated a marionette to a Fleetwood Mac song playing on a boom box; an elderly man in black socks and sandals shuffled down the street on the arm of a stunning woman in high heels, her lips red and full. Lucy tried to smile and nod at a few people, but they looked at her as if she were mentally unstable, so she concluded it was best to keep her expression fixed. Mat seemed to know this already. His face was unreadable, though his eyes opened a little wider each time he saw someone selling food.

The air had the gritty feel of Manhattan in the summer, thick with particulates she had no choice but to breathe into her lungs. Bicyclists fought for the street with taxis, Mercedes with tinted windows, cheap Russian tin cans, buses, and trams. The expensive cars, she noticed, seemed to push past the other cars as if sticker price dictated the right-of-way.

She stopped at a bookstore to buy a Russian-English phrase book for children, which had large type and drawings, and she grabbed a disposable camera as well, having forgotten hers. Then she spotted a toy store and decided to stock up on bribes for the long plane ride back home. Mat, who had been drop-kicking his monkey and following her reluctantly down the sidewalk, smiled when they entered the store. He jumped into a bright red car with pedals and drove it around as Lucy filled a basket with small rubber balls and blocks of clay and Matchbox-style vehicles. When she had paid, he refused to get out of the car, locking his hands to the small plastic steering wheel. She asked an English-speaking clerk to explain to Mat that the car wouldn’t fit on the airplane.

“He say, ‘No more airplane,’” the clerk told Lucy.

She said nothing else, just handed over the cash, and a few minutes later, Mat was pedaling next to her down the wide but busy sidewalk, a blissful expression on his face. When they came to a cross street, she stopped and took a picture: Mat smiling broadly from over the little steering wheel. It seemed necessary to preserve this moment, not only because it was sure to be brief and certainly not because she had acquired it through bribery, but because a photograph would distill the joy, fix it, and focus it in a way her memory could not. The look on his face, as she saw it through the tiny digital camera window, instantly changed her mood.

But just as quickly as her mood lifted, it plunged again. She gestured for Mat to get out of the car so they could cross the street, but he refused and stood up, turned the car around, and started pedaling in the opposite direction.

“Mat, Mat, Mat,” she said, trotting along beside him. “We have to go the other way. The hotel is that way.”

He looked at her as if she were someone he might have met once before but couldn’t quite place and kept pedaling down the street. When he got to the curb on the other end of the block, he turned the car around and pedaled back the other way. She finally lost her patience.

“Okay, then, if that’s the way you want it,” she said. She reached into the car, worked his little fingers off the steering wheel, and pulled him out of it, tucking him under one arm. She slid her other arm under the car’s plastic dashboard and lumbered across the street, dodging cars that failed to stop at the crosswalk. Mat writhed and screamed, and she came within inches of dropping him, but she held on, finding some preternatural strength, some shot of maternal adrenalin that allowed her to reach the other side.

Mat stopped screaming when she let him get back in the car, and in this way—contentment alternating with street-crossing meltdown—they made it back to the hotel, six blocks away. The clerks in the lobby, thankfully, said nothing as Mat pedaled across the carpeted floor, and into the elevator.

Once in the room, he pedaled as far as he could until he crashed into one wall, then turned around and pedaled back, crashing into the opposite wall. Lucy unpacked her cosmetics bag, trying to ignore the noise, until the phone rang and a clerk asked her in broken English if there was a problem.

“No, no problem,” she said. “I’ll take care of it.”

She filled the bathtub with water, an attempt to drown out the crashing noises, then poured in a small packet of bubble bath she had found in her bag. She pulled Mat out of the car, and before he could get a good lungful of air, ran into the bathroom to show him the bubbles.

“Look, Mat, bubbles,” she said, trying to make them sound exotic.

She blew into the bathtub and sent bits of bubbles cascading around them. In the warm, moist air of the bathroom, Mat’s resistance seemed to falter. He finally allowed her to take off his coat, then his shirt and the pants from the plane, which were finally dry. Underneath, he was wearing new, overly large briefs, perhaps his parting gift from the children’s home. His rib cage pressed against the skin of his torso in a way that looked painful, his constant hunger on display. On his rear, she noticed as he climbed into the tub, were two long pinkish marks, and she bent down to look more closely. They looked like scars. Her stomach seized up and she turned away, hanging her head over the sink. She felt light-headed and flushed. This poor, poor boy. No, her poor, poor boy.

As he played in the tub, she sat on the floor of the bathroom and tried to reconstruct what his short life had been like up to this point. He had been born into a harsh climate above the Arctic Circle, possibly beaten as a toddler, and then his mother had died. He had been abandoned by his father, transferred from one orphanage to another. And then she had shown up, taking him away from what was, if not comfortable, at least familiar. Was it any wonder he kept his fists up?

But then she noticed he was singing. The words were garbled, but the tune was familiar, and she finally figured out what it was. The song of the White Rabbit from the Disney movie.

He was pushing bubbles around and molding little mountains, singing the song over and over, or at least syllables that mimicked the song in English. She took a washcloth and rubbed his back before he could protest, discovering that his skin tone was about three shades lighter than she thought. She ran the wet washcloth over his hair stubble, careful not to get any water in his eyes. As the bubbles melted, she could see that the tub water had turned slightly gray.

With the water draining, Mat climbed out of the bathtub, and she wrapped a big white towel around his tiny body, which had barely enough fat on it to hold him together. She took a risk and whisked him up into her arms, but he cried out, so she put him down again, and he ran out of the bathroom.

She was picking up towels when he came back in, already dressed in the too-large pajamas she had laid out on the bed. He took her hand and pulled her up and out of the bathroom, half leading, half dragging her toward the television. So she found what looked like a children’s show, propped him up in bed with some pillows, and pulled over the brown armchair to watch him watching the show. Next thing she knew, it was morning, Mat was sleeping soundly, and the TV was still on.

fourteen

L
ucy tried to keep Mat on the doctor’s examining table, but he kept climbing down, crawling under chairs, and finding used tongue depressors. The clinic had the familiarity of all things medical—white walls, white ceiling, metallic instruments, cotton swabs in a clear glass jar—but it startled her to see that patients smoked in the waiting room, and the floor looked as though it hadn’t been cleaned for a week. She had washed Mat’s hands in the small examining-room sink three times before the doctor came in without knocking.

His English was passable, enough to understand when she asked him to look at the scars.

“Year or two old.” He shook his head but didn’t seem surprised. “I cannot say for sure, but possibly beating. Could be with belt.”

She swallowed hard. He was so small, and yet he would have been smaller when he was beaten. Completely helpless. Who could have done this to him? Nothing in her experience could explain the kind of white-hot anger that led to such injuries. But if the scars were a year or two old, they hadn’t been inflicted by anyone at the children’s home. The doctor cleared his throat.

“Boy is healthy,” he said, signing her forms. Something about the doctor’s face—a trace of freckles, maybe—had made her think of Harlan, and it saddened her, because she couldn’t ask for his advice. Harlan had always found a way to put the world’s ugliness in perspective. She imagined what he would tell her: Don’t dwell on the
scars. Move forward. Help Mat feel as safe as possible. And that, she realized, was all she could do.