A Watershed Year (8 page)

“SO WHAT’S your question?” Lucy says, tucking one foot underneath her in the chair.

Harlan stares up at the ceiling for a moment, gathering his thoughts from the four corners. He rubs his hands on his splayed knees.

“I’m not sure how to put this.”

“What?” she says, worried.

He stands up, with more effort than she would have thought necessary, and takes his drink to the kitchen counter. He pulls out a stool, maybe to stretch out his knees. She notices that he looks pale, tired, under strain. It’s a look that reminds her of the day at Rutgers when he told her that she couldn’t leave messages on his home answering machine because Sylvie didn’t understand their friendship. She wonders if he’s here to say good-bye, to tell her that Sylvie is moving to Baltimore for good instead of staying with him only on weekends, or that he’s moving back to New Jersey to be with her. Maybe they’ve set a date for the wedding. Her stomach clenches.

“When the planes hit…” he says. “I passed out.”

“Passed out?”

“I guess you could call it fainting, although that sounds so feminine.”

“You lost consciousness?”

“I’ve been feeling a little off lately, but this was different. My mother called me from Florida and told me to turn on the television. One minute I was looking at the footage of the second tower, and the next minute I was waking up on the floor.”

“Have you seen a doctor? I don’t think that’s a normal reaction.”

She’s even more worried now; waves of uneasiness travel along the backs of her thighs. Her capacity for worry is as vast as the ocean. It’s one of the reasons she thinks she would make an excellent mother.

“I finally went for a checkup,” he says. “Do you have another beer?”

She untucks her foot, but he motions for her to stay where she is. He circles the counter and opens the refrigerator. As he does, she turns on the lamp next to her chair. The lightbulb pops and goes out.

“Want to split the last one?” he says. She notices the pebbles in his voice again, the rippling of uncertainty.

“It’s all yours,” she says. “What did the doctor say?”

He looks at her then, a look that is the equivalent of a phone call in the middle of the night.

LUCY MADE some hummus to bring to her brother’s house and then spent the rest of the afternoon tracking down documents she would need for the agency that would conduct her home study. For $1,200 of her $20,000 fee, a social worker would walk her through the paperwork, visit her home, and interview her at least twice. Yulia had told her that the process had two sides: first, to educate the adoptive parent on what to expect before and after the adoption; and second, to make sure the parent wasn’t dealing drugs, stealing cars, or possibly worse, taking antidepressants.

Lucy found her birth certificate in a folder in the bottom drawer of her bureau, underneath some old bathing suits. A copy of the apartment lease was shoved in a basket of papers underneath her desk, and her latest W-2 form was in a magazine rack that she sometimes used to organize her tax returns. The exception was her passport, which she kept in a plastic bag in the refrigerator at the insistence of her mother, who had read an article about identity theft and convinced Lucy that it was the only safe place if, God forbid, someone broke in. “Do you know what the terrorists would pay for your passport?” she had said. “A dark-haired American girl?”

That evening Lucy dressed in jeans, boots, and a thick turtleneck for dinner, because Paul and Cokie kept their house at sixty-three degrees to save energy ever since Paul’s software business had dried up. She mildly dreaded seeing them. Paul and Cokie, it turned out, had a relationship that centered on a joint interest in purchasing the latest technology. When the flat-screen television came on the market, they pored over issues of
Consumer Reports
and talked endlessly about which models offered the best features. Then the money dried up, and they couldn’t afford one. The tension had been rising ever since.

“Aunt Lucy’s here,” Cokie yelled over her shoulder as she opened the door and stuffed some used tissues into the pocket of her belted sweater. “Come on in, little mother.”

She took one of the tissues out again, blew her nose, then gave Lucy a hug, whispering into her hair, “What have you done?”

Before she could answer, Paul came out of the kitchen, wiping his hands on a barbecue apron.

“We’re making pizza,” he said. “Gotta use that bread maker for something. Hey, congratulations.”

She thought Paul looked a little thicker around the middle, but maybe it was the apron. It still surprised her a little to see him as a suburban father. To her, he would always be the brother who let her fold his newspapers and follow him on his route as he darted through the neighborhood on his bike. Or the brother who had talked one of his baseball teammates into asking Lucy to the junior prom when she had already given up hope.

“Kids,” he yelled into the family room. “Aunt Lucy’s here.”

As usual, she found herself slightly unnerved by the cavernous two-story foyer, with its elaborate chandelier, which seemed to rise above them like the lobby of an office building. Beyond Paul, on the wall behind the sweeping staircase, was something new: an enormous painting, six feet high at least, a Degas-like scene of ballerinas in a gold-painted frame.

“Holy cow,” Lucy said, nodding in the direction of the painting.

“That’s how Paul’s latest client paid his bill,” Cokie said, blowing her nose again. “You love it, right? Because I love it. We all love it.”

“Don’t start,” Paul said.

Cokie shrugged and went toward the kitchen as her children trooped into the foyer. She touched each of them along the way, a light skim across their foreheads as if she needed to verify that they were real, hers, still fresh and lovely. Sean was the only one to protest.

“Hey, Mom, you have a cold or the plague or something,” he said, yelling into the kitchen. “Don’t touch that pizza dough either.”

Molly and Jack hugged Lucy around her waist. Sean stood off to one side and seemed to be looking for something in his pockets.

“Will you let me babysit, Aunt Lucy?” Molly said, grabbing Lucy’s arm. “Please? I’m taking this babysitting class in school, and then I get this certificate. I’d be totally responsible.”

“I’m sure you would, Mol,” Lucy said, gently peeling Molly’s hand from her arm. “Let me go get the hummus. I left it in the car. I’ll meet you guys in the kitchen.”

Paul turned on the front porch light and walked outside with Lucy.

“So how’s everything?” she said, meaning it almost literally: Cokie, the bills, the business, what it was like to face middle age, and all the angst in between.

“Lousy,” he said with a smile. “But we have our health.”

“Cokie looks tired,” she said.

“She has a cold. Nothing serious,” he said. “I’ve got a client on the fence. If I can nail a decent contract, we’ll be solvent again. But don’t say anything, okay, because the kids don’t know.”

“They don’t know?”

“They think we’ve gone green, conserving energy and reusing aluminum foil.”

“So how are you paying for the braces and the piano lessons and the mortgage, Paul?”

“Home-equity loan, credit cards. We’re coping. And I’m looking for a job in case this client doesn’t come through. The mailman told me they need an assistant manager at T.G.I. Friday’s.”

“Good for you, keeping your sense of humor,” Lucy said, opening the car door to retrieve the hummus. Paul waited until she turned around and handed him the ceramic bowl.

“I’m dead serious,” he said, and she could see by his half-sick expression that he was. “Cokie would die, but we gotta pay the bills. Do you know what a new lacrosse stick costs?”

“Not really,” she said. “I guess I’m about to find out.”

“Yes, you are. Jumping right on the roller coaster, poor girl.”

Paul laughed a little too loudly at his own remark, and she found herself in the odd position of being worried about him. She was accustomed to being the one people worried about, with her excessive schooling and lack of a boyfriend.

They walked back with the hummus and found Cokie in the kitchen with the kids, rolling pizza dough. Lucy always thought of their kitchen as a little too antiseptic, with its stainless-steel center island and its gleaming KitchenAid mixer squatting on the counter near the sink. A medieval-style pot rack hung above the six-burner Viking range, and a glass-fronted hutch displayed Cokie’s collection of tiny enameled boxes.

Cokie rubbed her nose with the back of her hand to prevent a sneeze, leaving traces of flour across her right cheek and eyebrow. She rinsed her hands and took a box of cold tablets from the cabinet near the sink, washing two of them down with a swig of Amstel Light. By the set of her shoulders, Lucy could tell that she would rather be in bed watching
Entertainment Tonight
.

“So tell us about your baby,” Cokie said. “What’s his name?”

“I’m calling him Mat,” Lucy said. “He’s four, and if everything works out, I should be going to Russia over the summer to pick him up.”

Jack was sitting at the counter, quietly creating something robotic looking out of Legos. Sean, having been sent to the refrigerator to get some presliced pepperoni, threw an elbow as he walked by, sending
Jack’s Lego robot to the floor. Jack slipped off the stool, stood behind Sean, who was sorting through the cold-cut drawer in the refrigerator, and punched him in the kidney.

“Mom, did you see that?” Sean said. “Jack just punched me for no reason.”

Cokie turned a glazed eye toward the refrigerator. “Out of my sight,” she said.

“Both of us?” Sean said.

“All of you,” Cokie said. “I need to speak to Aunt Lucy privately.”

The boys and Molly left for the family room to watch TV as Paul put the pizzas on their browning stones in the oven. Cokie sat down on a stool and ran her hands through her multicolored hair.

“I just want to say, Lucy McVie, that you astound me,” she said, looking up at Lucy, who was dipping a carrot in hummus. “Don’t you think you should have called me
before
you made this life-altering decision?”

“Here we go,” Paul said.

“Stay out of it, Paul,” Cokie said. “I’m just telling my sister-in-law that it might have been wise for her to consult with someone, a close and caring relative, before she decided to bring a child into this world.”

“He’s already in this world,” Lucy said, nervously biting the carrot. She tried to think of a reason to leave before the pizza was out of the oven.

“I mean
this
world,” Cokie said, exasperated. “I mean the world of Cub Scout fund-raisers and kindergarten homework and going to three, yes, three sporting-goods stores to find the regulation mouth guard for lacrosse camp. Do you have any,
any
idea what you’re getting yourself into?”

“She didn’t check with Mom,” Paul said, “so why should she check with you?”

Lucy became aware, instantly, that her decision had prompted a flurry of phone calls, probably hours spent discussing her situation and whether this was “wise” from the perspective of people who had
“been there.” She could imagine them all, eyes lifted to the ceiling: “What does she know about sitting up all night with a kid who keeps throwing up on the bedspread?”

“It’s what I want. I thought you’d be excited about it,” Lucy said.

“I just think you need to open your eyes,” Cokie said.

Lucy could see that Cokie needed to have her say. She decided to get it over with.

“Enlighten me…”

“Let me just give you a little rundown of my week,” Cokie said, slurring slightly, the cold tablets kicking in. “On Monday, I got up at six, made coffee, three lunches, five breakfasts, cleaned the kitchen, packed a snack and a water bottle for each kid, spent ten minutes looking for Jack’s sneakers, which turned out to be in the laundry hamper, found Sean’s overdue library book, and dropped the kids off late at three different schools, which prompted a call from Molly’s principal, whose helpful suggestion was that I leave the house just a few minutes earlier, because my kid was missing valuable instructional time.

“Then I went to work, where I listened to the dentist complain about the car insurance on his fully loaded BMW. I worked until three, came home to find the house full of Sean’s hockey friends, who were also kind enough to empty the refrigerator, which meant I had to go grocery shopping, drop Molly off at Irish step, come home, clean up, run back to pick up Molly, cook dinner, clean up, help everyone with homework, do two loads of laundry, bake cupcakes for the chess-club bake sale, and clean up again. Do you see where I’m going with this?”

“Of course,” Lucy said. “But I don’t think—”

“And that was Monday,” Cokie continued. “That was a
good
day. By Friday, I am completely incapable—”

“Incapable,” Paul agreed.

“—of putting dinner together. I just can’t face it, cooking and setting the table and begging them to eat broccoli, just to dump half of it in the garbage and clean up for the fiftieth time this week.
And this never ends. The seasons change, the mess may look a little different, but it’s always there. Twenty-one meals a week, and since no one in this house likes the same food, you can at least triple that. Week in, week out, that’s thousands of meals a year I have to plan for. And if I don’t do it, I’m a bad mother. Check the pizzas, Paul.”