A Watershed Year (4 page)

This may sound strange, but I had a dream about you one night back then, and you were you, but you were also Eleanor of Aquitaine, one of my favorites from the Crusades. You were riding off to the Second Crusade in your armor, on a white horse, young and fierce and determined to help your husband, Louis VII, as he battled the infidels. Technically, Eleanor didn’t even like her husband, and she ended up
dumping him after the Crusades. Later, she married a man a decade younger, who became King Henry II of England, bore him a pack of children, and then turned against him along with three of her sons. But the point is, I’ve never had such a literal dream: you in armor, ready for battle.

I never told you this, but in my third round of chemotherapy, when the visitors had dwindled to one or two a day, I woke up from a nap, and you were gone from your chair next to my bed. I don’t think five minutes went by before I started to panic—shortness of breath and everything. I even called the nurse, but you walked in with a cup of coffee before I could start drilling her on your whereabouts. I should have told you then, but I didn’t, so I’m telling you now: I couldn’t have survived the past year without you.

You have no obligation to receive these e-mails, Lucy. I realize this may upset you so much that you won’t want them. If that happens, just click on the link below to disable the program. You can do that any time. It just made me feel better to think that we could talk somehow, beyond the end of my life, that I could preserve my presence in some small way. And I haven’t told you everything I should have. I wasn’t finished yet, at least where you are concerned.

So, if it’s okay, you’ll receive an e-mail once a month, another part of my story, your story, our story. I can’t guess what will happen to you, Lucy. Your life surely will take some unexpected turns; you will adopt a whole new frame of reference. I believe that somehow you’re destined for motherhood (Eleanor, who lived into her eighties, had ten children, just so you know). We never talked much about it, but you seem to me like a natural mother. Clearly, you’re someone who knows how to give, and that’s what good mothers do.

Find out what most fulfills you, Lucy, and go after it. It may not be my place to tell you, but you sometimes deflect the obstacles that come your way instead of racing ahead of them to chart your own course. If I can play some small part in nudging you toward something wonderful, then it won’t be as if two-thirds of my life evaporated. You’ll take me along on your ride.

If you click on the link below, a prompt will ask if you’re sure you want to disable the program. If you click “yes,” there’s no going back. It’s up to you.

Otherwise, look for my message on the tenth of the month.

Love,

Harlan

Lucy rubbed her eyes as if that might make the whole thing disappear. On an impulse, she called up the link at the bottom of the e-mail, and a window popped up asking if she was
sure
she wanted to delete the program. She moved the cursor to “Yes” because she didn’t want to plunge into the depths of grief every month; she moved it to “No” and then back to “Yes” because she hated the idea of waiting a month at a time to hear what Harlan could have told her when he was alive. But she clicked on “No.”

It was as if she had blinked, and everything she thought she knew about the past year had changed. Had it been that obvious that she wanted to be a mother? She couldn’t remember talking about it. Had he caught her staring at babies in strollers? And his dream of her as Eleanor of Aquitaine? She seemed to recall that Eleanor got herself into loads of trouble. She flushed at the idea of Harlan imagining her on a white horse.

It was true, though, that she had wanted to fight the battle for him. She often cut him off when he started to talk about dying, in the belief that he needed to stay positive. All the articles had said a positive attitude helped in healing.

She read the message again.
And I wasn’t finished yet. At least where you are concerned.

Now she would second-guess every interaction, browbeat herself for not telling Harlan she loved him from the moment her car had rear-ended his car in the parking lot at Rutgers when they were both graduate students. She’d been feeling around on the floor of her car for a Chapstick that had fallen out of her purse, and her foot had slipped off the brake. Harlan had gotten out of his car to assess the
damage and stood there, arms crossed, looking half-annoyed, half-amused. She had opened her window and apologized extravagantly—flustered, disheveled, dry-lipped—but he had only laughed and told her it was nothing to worry about, just one more scratch among many. He was nice enough looking, tall and dark haired, with broad shoulders, a sincere smile. But it was his laugh that drew her in, made her want to touch the traces of childhood freckles on his face.

They had exchanged phone numbers because, Harlan had joked, he might experience delayed whiplash. She had called him that night to check on him and to apologize again for her Chapstick obsession.

“I’m addicted,” she had said. “I can’t go more than two hours without it.”

“I’m like that with cheese.”

“Cheese?”

“I lived on a dairy farm when I was a kid. It was a small one, in Tennessee, but you can’t take the cheese out of me.”

“So maybe we could go out for fondue sometime.”

The hesitation in his response, that one long second of dead air, had left her mortified, wishing she could reach into the phone and retract what she had just uttered. She had no balance in this regard, alternately saying what shouldn’t be said and not saying what should be said, a social affliction for which there was no cure.

“My fiancée probably wouldn’t be too happy about that,” he had said.

“Got it,” she had assured him. “Say no more.”

“You said you were getting your PhD in religion though, right? Maybe we could get together to talk about the Crusades. That’s my specialty.”

They had met now and then over coffee or a beer, exchanged e-mails, debated aspects of the Crusades. She had forced herself not to think about him on quiet nights—erasing his image from her mind as from a chalkboard—but when they were hired by the same small college, she had every reason to hope, to imagine that iridescent moment when he would tell her that Sylvie had dumped him, or vice
versa. But Sylvie had the kind of smile often described as “winning,” and she had won, scheduling herself into Harlan’s weekends, brightening his apartment with decorative accessories from Crate and Barrel, advertising their future together with strategically placed and tastefully framed snapshots, until they broke up right before Sylvie learned about his diagnosis.

Lucy glanced up and saw that her ten o’clock lecture was due to start in a few minutes. She closed the e-mail and walked to class, slightly stunned but fairly sure she wasn’t going to cry. The students followed along with their new-semester attentiveness as she delivered a smooth lecture on Aristotle. Then she strode back to her office to see if she had imagined Harlan’s e-mail.

It was still there, the words unchanged, and she read it for a third time, seizing now on one phrase:
my story, your story, our story
. Now that the initial shock had passed, she realized that he was trying to give her answers to questions she had always wanted to ask. That meant he knew those questions were there, radiating between them like sound waves that could only be heard at the right frequency. She decided to view it as a blessing of powerful measure. At a time when Harlan had every right to gather his resources toward the center, to pull inward, he had reached out, thought of her instead. She thanked every saint she could think of for bringing Harlan—in his own inimitable way—back into her life.

three

W
ith the advent of Harlan’s messages, the anvil of grief pressing down on her either weighed less or Lucy had learned to balance it more effectively. She had lost weight—her ankles seemed almost normal—and she noticed in the pearly light of the bathroom mirror that her face had acquired a new maturity during her period of virtual hibernation. Still, she was rusty on living. She had a hard time making conversation with casual acquaintances like Harlan’s dry cleaner, to whom she took a big armload of clothes that had accumulated in the bottom of her closet.

“Morning, miss,” the dry cleaner said. “You friend of Har-LAN. So sad.”

“Yes, very sad,” she said, not knowing whether to put the clothes on the counter or stand there holding them. It seemed wrong to follow “very sad” with “What do you charge for sweaters?” So she waited, nodding her head, until the dry cleaner—square jawed and muscular, clearly the outgoing son in the family business—reached out his hands.

“What you got?”

“A lot,” she said. “I’ve been putting this off for too long.”

“Ah,” he said, as though detecting some hidden meaning in her words. “I fix everything.”

He sorted quickly through the clothes and filled out a slip, letting her write in her name, address, and phone number. She glanced up at
the dry cleaner’s bristling hair, which reminded her of Harlan when he cut his hair short in the summer.

Then the dry cleaner handed her a business card, which listed the hours of operation. On the flip side was another business with the same address but on the second floor. It said U-Bet Adoptions—Arlene Kim, Proprietor.

“U-Bet,” the dry cleaner said, noticing that Lucy had turned over the card. “My mother find best babies. Top quality.”

She read the card again and thought of Harlan’s message, his certainty that she was destined for motherhood.
Your life surely will take some unexpected turns; you will adopt a whole new frame of reference.

“You pick up Thursday,” the dry cleaner said.

“A baby?”

“Clothes,” he said, laughing. “Clothes ready Thursday. Babies take six, seven month.”

“Of course they do,” she said, trying to laugh along. She stuffed the dry-cleaning slip and the business card into her wallet. “See you Thursday.”

She walked slowly back to her car, glancing at the battered storefronts: Ferdie’s Franks ’N Stuff, Charm City Shoe Repair, the House of Foam. She had been living in Baltimore for a year and a half now but never failed to wonder at how the whole messy conglomerate of package stores and check-cashing joints, Italian bakeries and cramped bars, Greek restaurants and sticky-floored sandwich shops managed to function without devolving into chaos. She swore the whole place was held together with fryolator grease and old habits.

In sections of the city, vandals had stolen all the copper pipes from deteriorating row houses; in others, whole blocks had been abandoned. But the city bottled its own brand of charm. It all but dared people to love it, to embrace its dark alleys and its crab-fixated, tourist-plagued waterfront, its overly earnest street performers and its mumbling homeless. It was a place that attracted the kind of entrepreneur for whom success was all about defying the odds:
when a tailor went bankrupt near the college, a twelve-seat sushi bar wedged itself into the narrow storefront and regularly turned people away.

Lucy rested her purse on the car’s hood and took out the dry cleaner’s business card. She had turned thirty-eight the day after Thanksgiving. The statistical probability of a woman with a PhD finding a spouse after thirty-five had been well documented and was something in the neighborhood of bowling a perfect game. Even by optimistic calculations, she would be well into panic mode by the time she met someone new, forced him to propose, and tried to get pregnant.

The adoption side of the card had slightly raised lettering, and she ran her fingers over the braille-like surface.

She wondered how she had reached this moment in her life. There had been near misses and long-term disasters—in her midtwenties, there was even a marriage proposal from an old boyfriend who was drunk at the time but half meant it. Then time had slipped by in its insidious way, and Harlan had gotten sick, and next thing she knew she was thirty-eight and single without even a long-shot prospect.

Before Harlan’s death, Lucy had certainly lived under the false premise that she had all the time she would ever need to speak fluent French, finally learn to do a cartwheel, write a book, get married, have a couple of children. The day after his funeral, she had glimpsed the end of her life in the distance like a boat on the horizon that might swing toward land at any time: only so many Christmases, only so many birthdays, only so many unfertilized eggs, their numbers dwindling as her body rejected one every month, the little futures of those that remained fraught with invasive testing.

She looked at the card again. U-Bet Adoptions was a frightening thought. The agency could be legitimate, but aside from sharing a business card with the dry cleaners beneath it, the name alone gave her pause. She seemed to remember a chocolate syrup called “U-Bet.” There were other adoption agencies, of course.

She got into her car to head home but changed her mind and drove south past block after block of hundred-year-old row houses with white marble steps. Finally, she rose on a highway ramp above the thick columns of industrial smoke and past the city’s harbor, with its vast containerships and its complex web of cargo-lifting cranes. The ramp soared over the parallel lines of row houses until it descended gently, unfurling into the western suburbs, deliverance of a sort that only highways can give.

Lucy had been to Harlan’s grave several times since his death, always on a rainy day in the depths of her gloom. This time it was the start of a new year, with the slight swelling of hope that things might be different. She knelt in front of the polished gravestone and traced the carved letters with her finger. HARLAN MATTHEWS (1969–2002). Harlan’s mother had wanted to bury him in Florida near her home, but he had already purchased the plot, and the funeral director wouldn’t be swayed.

“He had his own map of the cemetery,” the director told Harlan’s mother the day before the funeral. “He requested southern exposure.”

And so the grave was facing south, just above where she stood when Harlan had showed her his plot. She faced the granite.