A Watershed Year (29 page)

“A little rascal, eh? Well, don’t worry about your article. I took care of it. I miss you, Lucy.”

“I miss you, too,” she said. The words felt strange, as though someone else were saying them. “But this won’t be easy.”

“What won’t be easy?”

“The transition. Having to be a mom all the time, and trying to get my work done, and…”

“I get it. I’m okay about it. Really,” he said, and though his words said one thing, she heard another.

“I’m not sure you sound okay.”

“I’m not much more mature than a four-year-old.”

Rosalee yelled from the basement for Lucy to come watch Mat use his new mini-trampoline.

“Gotta go.”

“Call me tomorrow.”

“I will. Bye.”

She hung up and returned to the basement to watch Mat jumping, literally, for joy.

THE HAGIOGRAPHERS were extremely annoyed. Lucy had missed a series of increasingly frantic e-mails from the Hagiography Society, asking if she could sit on a panel at the society’s annual meeting. The last one—from someone given the task of submitting a printed program—was a keeper:

You could be in Antarctica and still check your e-mails once in a while. If you’re not dead, you must be in a coma. If, and only if, you are dead, I apologize.

Lucy could have taken her laptop to Murmansk, but there had been too much to carry. So now her academic colleagues, of whom there were scant few around the world, were fed up with her. On top of that, her mother kept hinting that Lucy needed to bond with Mat more closely before she could take him back to her duplex. Louis kept calling, asking why she wouldn’t let him visit, and she hadn’t returned calls from Yulia, Angela, Paul, or Cokie. She was stuck in some sort of netherworld, webs of obligation crisscrossing so effectively that she couldn’t move at all. This went on for several more days—Lucy moving slowly around the house in her mother’s bathrobe—until Mat finally cut through all the angst. He started asking about his father.

“He keeps saying something,” Rosalee told Lucy at breakfast. “Sounds like
pa-pa
or
pap-ya
.”

Lucy flipped through the phrase book, examining the phonetic pronunciations. “Well, it’s probably ‘father,’ although it could be ‘pointe shoes.’”

“You need someone who speaks Russian to sort everything out for him, explain where he’s going and why,” Rosalee said. “This little boy is confused. He needs some help.”

“You’re right,” she said. “I’ll call Yulia.”

Rosalee handed her the phone and waited for her to dial.

YULIA SHOWED UP AT THE DOOR a few hours later with a tiny kitten in her hands.

“You’re kidding, right? You must be kidding,” Lucy said. “Don’t let him see it, Yulia. I’m allergic to cats.”

It was too late. Mat had heard the doorbell and came up the stairs from the basement. He took the kitten from Yulia and began talking to it in a sweet voice Lucy had never heard from him before. Yulia threw her bags in the corner of Rosalee’s dining room and sat down on the floor with Mat in a pool of sunlight that came through the narrow panes of glass on either side of the front door. Mat cradled the sleepy kitten in his lap as they began to speak in Russian. Lucy interrupted.

“What’s he saying? What are you telling him?” she said.

“I say ‘hello’ and that I am Auntie Yulia, and I say ‘Welcome to America.’ And he says he is naming cat Dinah like in
Alice and Wonderland
, and I say ‘It’s a boy cat,’ and he says ‘Oh.’”

“Fine. Good. Just explain to him that I’m his mother now, and I’ll be taking him to his new home in a few days. This is his grandmother’s home. I don’t think he understands that.”

Yulia stood up, with some effort, and spoke to Mat quietly. He said nothing in return but stood up with the kitten and left for the basement.

“What did you say?” Lucy said. The tears were close, and when they came, there would be no stopping them. Where were the hugs, the lullabies, the small hand grasping her own? Mat would tolerate everyone as long as the toys kept coming, but they wouldn’t become his family, just his suppliers.

“I told him to go play. We must talk first.”

“We don’t need to talk. I just need your help so he’ll understand…”

“Why is it that you worry so much? He will adjust. I have seen it many times.”

“But he’s asking about his father, Yulia. Does he think his father is coming back for him?”

“Oh,” Yulia said. Her weight shifted slightly, and she leaned against the door frame between the dining room and the foyer. “Did Zoya Minsky say anything about his father?”

“She said he’d been to visit him at the baby home several times but not at the children’s home. His termination papers were with all the paperwork they gave me in court.”

Yulia sighed heavily. “I’m not certain, but this may be why Zoya wanted more money,” she said.

So Yulia knew all about the extra $500; Lesta must have told her about it. Then Lucy remembered the scars and told Yulia about the medical exam in Moscow.

Yulia’s mouth turned down, and she showed her bottom teeth, which were crooked and yellow near the gum line. Lucy sensed disappointment but not surprise.

“This could be his father, but Mitya never told me this. This could be his day care, or a neighbor, anyone. Very sad,” she said.

Lucy stared down at her hands. A trick of the light from the windows made it look as though she could see through her pink palms. She shook them, wanting the color back.

“He is safe now,” Yulia said. “You passed through customs and immigration. You are legal parent. We go talk to him.”

An hour later, Yulia left and Mat allowed her to give him a quick kiss good-bye. Lucy wasn’t sure how much he understood, but the cat
was now named “Bill.” She also discovered that Mat liked Spiderman and bubblegum, and that he had never been to a restaurant before the hotel in Murmansk. She learned that he remembered a few things about his mother, and she wrote these down. He remembered that she had a red sweater, that her hair was very short, and that she would sing to him. Yulia also asked him, gently, if anyone had ever hit him. “Yes,” he told her, “when I am bad boy.” When she asked him about his father, he said nothing and turned away, back to his toys.

Later that afternoon, Lucy repacked her luggage and ran out to buy kitty litter, cat food, and some new clothes for herself and Mat, since both of them had been walking around for weeks in ill-fitting ones. That evening, she told Rosalee she was ready to take Mat home.

“I’m so happy for you, sweetheart,” Rosalee said. “Happy, happy, happy.”

Lucy just smiled and said, “I’m happy, too,” though it wasn’t happiness she felt. It was more like resolve, a determination to go through the motions of parenthood, until one day, she would stop remembering what it was like to be a nonparent and embrace what parenting seemed to be: experimental treatment that might or might not work, the results too far in the future to know.

The next day, Mat picked out a dozen of his favorite toys from the mountain, and Lucy crammed them into the trunk of her parents’ car, along with her luggage. Bertie and Rosalee rode in the front seat, and she rode in the back after strapping Mat, with some difficulty, into his new car seat. They entered the Ellsworth campus through the front gates, the hot sun glinting off a modern aluminum sculpture in the shape of a giant paper clip. She had passed it hundreds of times before without wondering what it was supposed to mean, but now she saw it through Mat’s eyes and found it utterly baffling.

“This is your new home,” Bertie said, gesturing toward the lions on the pillars marking the entrance.

“Dad, don’t say that,” Lucy said. “He’ll be pretty disappointed when he sees where we really live.”

“This morning I taught him how to say something truly important for anyone living in Baltimore. What do we say, Mat?”

“Go O’s,” Mat said, thrusting his monkey in the air, and Bertie gave him the thumbs-up.

Lucy ruffled Mat’s buzz cut. For the first time since he had stuck out his tongue in Murmansk, she could see the promise. She could see that it would take countless small moments like this one to bring them together, and that those small moments would build on each other, only to be torpedoed by larger moments of frustration and loss. Eventually though, the small moments would win out.

She could also see right then that she hadn’t given Mat enough of a chance to deal with his own mourning: the loss of his mother and father, of course, but also the loss of words, sounds, experiences. She had removed him from everything that was predictable and familiar and expected him to embrace a new world before he had let go of the old one. Predictability, as Harlan had said, was definitely underrated.

When they pulled up to her duplex, Louis was on the porch. She looked at her mother, who, it was obvious, had called to let him know they were coming. In Lucy’s mind, Mat’s homecoming—his first view of his new room, his new life—should have been separate from her own with Louis. Now she had no choice but to merge them.

“Hey, welcome back. I bought some groceries,” he said as Lucy and Mat came up the stairs. Hands behind his back, he bent slightly at the waist as if he were a butler. “And this, young man, is for you.” He pulled from behind his back a large Spiderman action figure and showed Mat how to push a button on the back that made Spiderman’s wrist fling out, as if he were about to let out some string.

Mat grabbed the Spiderman and ran inside as Rosalee slowly climbed the stairs, cradling Bill the kitten in her hands. Lucy kissed Louis briefly and turned to go inside.

“Lucy, wait,” he said, taking her by the wrist. He kissed her again until she pulled away. She wanted to be the one to lead Mat around the house, introduce him to the rooms, give him the Tonka truck and the stuffed penguin.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I just feel like I need to be inside, helping Mat get adjusted.”

But she had missed the moment she had dreamed about for months. Mat was already in his room, playing with the large yellow truck.

“Did he like it?” she asked her parents, who were admiring the room. “What did he say?”

“His little face just lit right up, didn’t it?” Rosalee said, turning to Bertie. “He went straight for the truck.”

“Straight for it.” Bertie’s hands were folded over his belly, and he rocked forward on the balls of his feet. “All boy.”

Lucy tried to shake off her disappointment. She opened the blinds, grateful in the full disclosure of the sunshine that she had decided against the sponge effect.

“Tell Louis to come in and see how much he likes his room,” she told her mother. “He helped me with the bathroom wallpaper.”

Rosalee left but returned a few minutes later. “He’s not here,” she said. “And his car is gone.”

“He left?” Lucy said.

She wandered back into the living room and noticed that Louis had left a gift on the dining-room table: a Felix the Cat clock with a tail that swung back and forth to mark the seconds. Its whiskers were the hands. She had almost forgotten she had told him about the spare key. In fact, the time they spent together—such a short time ago—had no bearing on her present reality. She felt postpartum, if that was possible, passionately wrapped up in the details of caring for a child. At the same time, she didn’t want Louis to leave. She just wanted him to wait.