A Watershed Year (6 page)

SUNLIGHT SEEPED through the blinds, sending narrow stripes across the bedspread. Lucy peered at the light through reluctant eyelids until something in the back of her consciousness found its way to the front. She remembered that she had never picked up the dry cleaning she had dropped off several weeks before.

When she walked into the shop later that morning, the dry cleaner stretched out his arms, practically touching the walls of the small storefront.

“Hey, where you been?” he asked.

“I’m so sorry,” she said. “It’s almost your fault, in a way. Remember that business card you gave me? It actually got me thinking about adoption.”

The dry cleaner smiled. “So happy for you,” he said before he walked toward the back of the shop, she assumed, to get her clothes. A few minutes later, he emerged with an infant, perhaps three months old, in his arms.

“I think I gave you the wrong impression,” she said nervously. “I’m working with another agency. I hope I didn’t—”

“No,” he said. “This one mine. You try. For practice.”

The dry cleaner walked out from behind the counter and placed the infant in her arms, holding the back of the baby girl’s head until Lucy could support it.

“She’s beautiful,” Lucy said. “What’s her name?”

“American name, Lola.”

Lucy stared at the placid eyes and smooth skin, examined the miniature fingers and toes. There it was in front of her: every trip to the pediatrician and every school play, every tantrum and every report card, every forgotten lunch bag and every broken heart. And Harlan had missed it all. She smiled idiotically, fighting the urge to cry. Grief rose inside her until it focused itself inside her throat. She took a deep breath through her nose as a prayer from Blessed Julian of Norwich came to her. It was a maddeningly bland prayer, so nonspecific that it bordered on the useless; yet somehow it always made her feel better.

All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.

The baby squirmed and began to frown, so Lucy handed her back to the dry cleaner. Children, it seemed to her, came so easily to some—too many, sometimes, as if through an open faucet. For others, like her, they were like precious gems that could only be obtained at great expense and after many months of window shopping and filling out loan applications.

“Babies,” the dry cleaner said, as his daughter took in a breath to let out a wail. “Happy one second, crabby the next…”

“Aren’t we all?” Lucy said.

The dry cleaner left his daughter with someone in the back and returned with Lucy’s clothes, a foot-thick row of hangers.

“New life starting for you,” he said, running her credit card through the machine. “Good to have clean clothes.”

She laughed and lugged her dry cleaning outside, wishing she had parked closer to the door.

ON LUCY’S NEXT TRIP to the adoption agency, Yulia presented her with a picture of a little boy, probably three or four, with deep-brown eyes, full lips, a wide forehead, and wheat-colored hair with several cowlicks. His cheeks were round, though not enormously so.

“Little Azamat,” Yulia said. “Tell me what you think.”

The photo was smudged, its corners bent. She tried not to look at it.

“Didn’t we agree to look for a baby?”

“Let me tell you about this boy, though, because he is special. He has been with parents until recently. He was dropped at orphanage in Murmansk after his mother died, very young. His father could not care for him alone. This is not unusual in Russia.”

Lucy sat down on the pumpkin couch with the photo. The cowlicks made her want to reach into the picture to smooth the boy’s hair, but she had pictured herself singing a small baby to sleep in her great-grandmother’s cane-backed rocking chair. Just the day before, she had purchased a pair of miniature white socks while buying shampoo at Target. The socks were still in her purse.

“But wouldn’t it be a hard transition for him? I was really kind of set on a baby who wouldn’t remember anything about the orphanage.”

“Of course,” Yulia said. “Everyone wants baby. But Azamat is strong, healthy. He waits for someone to choose him.”

Lucy pictured a retail store with the orphans on shelves, one for babies propped up in bouncy chairs, and others for each year, progressively less crowded, until the shelf, up high, for the four-year-olds, who sat swinging their legs, poking each other, and sticking out their tongues. What would she do with a four-year-old?

“This is good,” Yulia continued. “You would have to find day care for infant, but this boy is almost ready for school. And such a sweet face.”

Yulia’s voice, though it seemed strangely animated in comparison to her first visit, faded. The more Lucy looked at the picture, the more those deep-brown eyes pulled her in. She wasn’t often impulsive—except when she was overtired and spoke sharply to telemarketers—but this seemed like the kind of decision she would either have to make quickly or torture from every angle and never make at all. The picture had to mean this boy was available, that a word from her would radically alter the course of his life—change his citizenship, his language, his socioeconomic status, everything but his genes.

“I must know today,” Yulia said.

“Today?

“Russian agency will go elsewhere if we do not answer.”

“I’m still working out the money issue.”

“For older child, there is small discount. Twenty thousand.”

Lucy took this in. If she could do the adoption for twenty thousand, she might not have to take out a loan. And Yulia was right, it would eliminate years of day-care issues for her. She had to keep her job, didn’t she? But a baby would be more malleable, less marked by what had come before. What if this four-year-old had a hard time adjusting?

Logically, she knew she should give herself some time to consider Yulia’s offer, weighing the pros and cons of adopting an older child, but the tangle of grief and longing inside spoke for her.

“What would I have to do next?”

“We submit I-600A to Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services, complete state papers and home study. FBI does fingerprints and background check. Then we plan trip to Russia.”

“You’ll come with me, right?”

“No, but we have facilitator in Murmansk. Very easy.”

“So I’m about to become a mother?” Lucy said. An emotion she couldn’t identify filled her chest, something with enough power to push the anvil of grief aside. She put a hand over her mouth, unsure of how to process the excitement, the terror, the joy, the finality of the moment. She looked at Yulia, who gave her a rare smile.

“In Russia, we say
mama
.”

AS A TEENAGER, Lucy would dread being kissed by her great-grandmother’s wet, quavering lips, already so wrinkled they had lost their definition from the rest of the face. But now she enjoyed spending time with Mavis, who could be counted on to forget anything Lucy told her. She liked stroking the delicate meringue of white hair, which had been wiry at one time but now felt as soft and fine as a toddler’s. Mavis couldn’t say what year it was, but she sometimes talked about what milk cost in Sicily when she was a girl.

“How is she today?” Lucy asked the receptionist on duty in the front lobby of the nursing home.

“Lovin’ life,” the woman said. “Just told me I needed a breath mint. She don’t hold back.”

This was true. Whatever mechanism prevented people from saying what they thought had worn out for Mavis. She opened fire and then blew on the gun without a trace of guilt. Lucy found her propped up in her wheelchair in front of the television, watching, of all things,
I Love Lucy
.

“Hi, Nana,” she said, kissing the top of Mavis’s head.

“Well, how are you, dear? Did you see that? She just lit her nose on fire,” Mavis said.

“I thought I’d take you out for ice cream,” Lucy said.

“As long you’re paying.”

She signed Mavis out, and a male nurse arrived to help Lucy take her great-grandmother out to the car. Mavis weighed no more than eighty pounds and couldn’t have been more than five feet tall, but she retained the vocal power of her younger years, when she was a full-figured woman who always wore heels.

“Look at this mess,” Mavis said loudly as the nurse buckled the seat belt around her delicate bones, which Lucy knew would snap like balsa wood under the slightest pressure. “Wadded-up tissues, wrappers, coffee cups. I’m so sorry, dear. If I’d known it was this much of a disaster, I would have suggested we take your car.”

“This
is
my car, Nana.”

“It is? I could have sworn mine was blue.”

“You haven’t had a car for fifteen years.”

“Wait, it was aquamarine. A Pontiac with automatic windows. I used to drive it down to the…” Her voice trailed off, then she looked at Lucy as if seeing her for the first time, which made Lucy wonder whether Mavis perceived the passage of time as a forward motion anymore.

At Friendly’s, Lucy parked the car and then helped Mavis into her wheelchair, relying on passersby to help her push it over the curb and through the heavy glass doors. Harlan, whose upbringing compelled him to open doors for Lucy, had taught her over the years that accepting help was a form of giving. “It’s a greater gift than the opening of the door,” he would say. “It takes a strong person to accept assistance.”

Inside Friendly’s, the hostess showed them to a booth, helping park Mavis on the open end.

“Two Fribbles, please,” Lucy said when the waitress arrived. “One chocolate, one vanilla.”

“Chocolate gives me gas,” Mavis told the waitress.

Lucy held a water glass up to Mavis’s mouth and tipped it past her dentures. She hoped Mavis would be able to handle a straw.

“Guess what,” Lucy said, wiping Mavis’s mouth with a wad of paper napkins. “I’m going to adopt a little boy from Russia.”

“A Commie?” Mavis said, frowning. “Mean, those Commies. Heartless.”

“No, a little boy. He’s almost four. His name is Azamat, but we’ll call him Mat. Want to see his picture?”

Lucy took the worn photo from her purse and smoothed it out on the table. Mavis’s nose almost touched it as she examined the face and began, suddenly, to cry.

“Looks just like my dear Willard. Oh, I do miss him,” she said, weeping loudly, though without tears.

“Who’s Willard, Nana?”

“What’s that?” She had stopped crying.

“Who’s Willard?”

“Who?”

When the Fribbles arrived, Mavis demonstrated what she could do with a straw, sucking up the blended ice cream with more power than Lucy could muster, and Lucy realized that she’d probably been sucking her meals through straws for the past ten years.

“So I’m going to be a mother,” Lucy said, smiling at Mavis as she drained the last of her Fribble.

“It’s not all it’s cracked up to be,” Mavis said.

“What does that mean?”

“And you’re still not married, so you’ll be all by yourself. A boy needs a father.”

Lucy was surprised to hear such doubts from Mavis, who, she assumed, had been only half listening.

“I know it won’t be easy, but I can help him,” Lucy said. “I can save him from a place where he’d have no future. I can give him a better life.”

Mavis raised her eyebrows, then went back to her Fribble without another word.