A Watershed Year (9 page)

A wisp of smoke escaped from the oven door as Paul opened it and took out one pizza with a paddle.

“The edges are burned,” Cokie said. “Sean won’t even touch it. Check the other one.”

The other pizza emerged unscathed. Cokie threw back her head and finished the Amstel Light, then grabbed a pizza wheel and divided the pizza with startling efficiency.

“I don’t want to scare you, Lucy. I just want you to go into this with your eyes open,” she said more calmly, as if cutting the pizza had purged her frustration. She called into the family room. “Pizza’s ready.”

The kids sat down and began to eat pizza, telling jokes as they drank root beer.

“Aunt Lucy,” Sean said. “Spell
pig
backwards, and then say ‘pretty colors.’”

Lucy complied, glad to be talking to anyone other than Cokie. “G-I-P pretty colors.”

The three root-beer drinkers laughed until they gagged, as Lucy smiled indulgently. Cokie, meanwhile, stood by the sink, rubbing her eyes. Lucy came over and squeezed Cokie’s shoulder. “You okay?” she said.

“That was good,” Cokie said, laughing convulsively. “You should have seen your face.”

five

D
ear Lucy,

It should be March now, almost spring. If I were you, I’d get on that beat-up Schwinn you have and take the loop around the reservoir. Remember the day you got your skirt caught in the bike chain and fell off near the library?

I loved it that you didn’t need the latest gadget or the newest clothes. You had a way of making the right choices for yourself, like with the saints. I’m not saying I always got it, but it was right for you. See how tolerant I’ve become in my old age?

Last March, as I recall, you spent three or four nights sleeping in a waiting-room chair at the hospital when I had my first close brush with mortality. It’s not surprising that I developed pneumonia, but I remember being shocked, even in my fever-induced haze, that this might be the end. You can mourn your own mortality with every birthday, but it really doesn’t hit you until you can’t breathe without forcing yourself to think about inhaling and exhaling.

You finally talked them into letting you in the room, but you were wearing so many layers of paper and latex, I didn’t know you at first. Then you took my hand, and I saw your eyes, the only part of you left uncovered. You were pleading with me, willing me to stick around with the force of your stare. It wasn’t a conscious decision, but I think I got better because you made me.

My mother never even made it to the hospital that time. She told me later that she tried to get her doctor to prescribe some Valium so she could fly, but he was out of town, so she got in her car instead but had a flat tire in Georgia. She told me you called her when the crisis passed, and she was so drained by the whole experience, she went back home to Florida. I know I’ve told you before, Lucy, but you have no idea how lucky you are to have the parents you have. They have their faults, sure, but they’d do anything for you. Anything.

Writing these notes is getting harder and harder. I can’t guess where you are, who you’re with, what your life is like. I worry that I’ll seem pathetic to you. I also worry that I’ll say something to hurt you, and I won’t be around to make it right. Let me issue a blanket apology, right here, right now. The last thing I want to do is hurt someone who always had my best interests at heart. Someone I loved.

Until April,

Harlan

Lucy had been awake since six thirty, unpacking boxes of books in the new duplex in between checking her e-mail every ten minutes. Harlan’s first and second letters had clocked in at precisely 8:00 a.m., and this one arrived at the same time, just as normally as the ones from people presumably living. She wondered how long Harlan had spent on this project of his, tapping away at his keyboard for hours at a time, ticking off the months, the seasons, maybe even the years of her life with a story she couldn’t read ahead to finish. She couldn’t decide if she was deeply touched or terribly saddened that he would spend so many of his final hours thinking not of his own death but of her future.

The day he was admitted for pneumonia had been one of the most frustrating of her life, because the doctors had put Harlan in isolation and wouldn’t give her any information because she wasn’t a relative. But she had gleaned from the nurses that he might not recover, and so she had slept in the waiting room under the protection of a night-shift supervisor who felt sorry for her.

Days had passed in the pitiful way they do in hospitals, until they agreed to let her see him, maybe just to make her go away. She knew, though, when she saw him that he wasn’t going to die. She could tell that he hadn’t given up. What he had interpreted as her willing him to live had been her certainty that he would.

She read the e-mail again.

Someone I loved.
But in what way, Harlan? In exactly what way?

It could have meant that he loved the way she wore hats, or her uncanny memory for birthdays. It could have meant, “Should you ever require dialysis, count on me for rides.” It could have meant, as he had said, “I respect and admire the choices you’ve made.” Or it could have meant, “Would you mind if I kissed you?” There were categories of love. You couldn’t just throw the word out there without placing it in some sort of context, and though he was gone, she still needed to know.
Someone I loved.

She glanced at the clock. She threw on an old pair of jeans and a fleece jacket, ran a brush through her hair, nearly poked out her eye putting on a quick coat of mascara, and then headed for the car. The radio had nothing to offer but drivel—cheesy advertisements, pop songs by those big-breasted women who couldn’t sing, oldies that were carved into her brain so deeply, she couldn’t bear to hear them again. She switched off the radio and watched the trees go by, allowing herself to replay her favorite immature fantasy: Harlan shows up at her door and tells her that the past year was all a dream. He’s been away, in the Brazilian rain forest, where they’ve discovered a cure. Long embrace. Fade to black.

Inside the IHOP, plates and utensils clinked and scraped. Her parents were already sitting in a booth, drinking coffee. Bertie got up and hugged Lucy, then sat down next to her, leaving Rosalee the extra room.

“Ah, you’re a sight for sore eyes,” said Bertie. “Your mother’s after me with the Atkins. But when you’re in a pancake house, I say you order the pancakes. Or the waffles, depending on your preference.”

Lucy glanced down at her father’s belly, which ballooned over his pants, the legacy of forty years with a cook who thought of mozzarella as a food group. She found that people with potbellies tended not to be overly critical of others, as if the belly itself was a repository of sympathy. It reminded her of the time she had come home from second grade, upset because she had gotten a spelling word wrong on a test. She had been reading since she was four, and she had become accustomed to perfection. Her mother had brushed it off, but her father had picked her up and hugged her. “So, my little genius, you’re human,” he had said, kissing her hair. “I’m relieved.”

She turned over her coffee cup for the waitress to fill. “So how’d that rototiller work out for you?”

“Like angels singing the ‘Hallelujah’ chorus,” said Bertie. “Cuts through the ground like butter.”

“And straight through the hose,” Rosalee said.

“Which shouldn’t have been where it was,” he said under his breath, winking at Lucy.

“Never mind about the rototiller,” Rosalee said, brushing the dark bangs from her wide forehead. “We wanted to talk to you about the adoption. My friend Patty says you should check out any adoption agency with the Department of Consumer Protection. Just make sure everything’s on the up-and-up.”

“You think I should be worried?” Lucy asked.

“Patty says some of them give false information about the children: disabilities, wrong birth dates, things like that. It’s just wise to check.”

“Cokie thinks I should call it off,” Lucy said flatly.

She felt the discomfort of minor guilt, knowing this pronouncement would bring her parents to her defense. They had no idea she had already picked out the color she would paint Mat’s bedroom, already purchased a Tonka dump truck and a stuffed penguin to place on his bed, already anticipated the way his brown eyes would widen when he saw his own small bathroom decorated with the fish wallpaper she had ordered from a catalog. They clearly
thought her toes were in the water, when she had already jumped into the lake.

“Call it off?” Rosalee said. “Did she really tell you to call it off?”

“Basically, yes.”

“That’s just the stress talking,” she said. “The woman is too thin. It’s a little-known fact, but stress is actually absorbed by fat cells. It gets diluted.”

“On that note,” Bertie said, “I’ll be having the tall stack of pancakes with a side of bacon.”

When the food arrived and Bertie had tried out all six varieties of syrup, Lucy remembered something she had wanted to ask her mother.

“Ma, who’s Willard? I showed Nana Mavis a picture of Mat, and she started crying over someone named Willard.”

Rosalee put down her fork. “To think that she remembers.”

“Remembers what?”

“He would have been my brother, but he died before I was born. He was your Gram and Gramps’s firstborn, Mavis’s first grandchild, and she came to see him every day, or so I’ve been told. He died when he was three, and I was born five years later.”

“Poor Mavis,” Lucy said. “So why is this the first time I’m hearing this?”

“You know why, Lucy. You cried when Aunt Bonnie threw out her old sewing machine because you couldn’t stand to see it abandoned. Why should you suffer over something that happened long before you were born, before even I was born? And besides, it just never came up. I don’t remember Mavis ever talking about Willard. Gram and Gramps, rest their souls, only mentioned him once a year, on his birthday in April.”

Lucy took this in. She certainly felt for Mavis, but she wasn’t going to cry about someone who died more than a half century ago. Her mother, evidently, couldn’t separate the sensitive child she had been from the pragmatic adult she had become. She pushed
her annoyance aside, given what Harlan had said in his e-mail. She smiled at her mother.

“Just so you know, I don’t take on everyone’s pain anymore. I’ve reformed.”

“Of course you do, hon. It’s what makes you special.”

Lucy shrugged and distributed the whipped cream more evenly across her Belgian waffle. The air in the pancake house suddenly felt too warm, and the waffle tasted too sweet, or maybe she could only learn so much about herself in one morning.

BACK AT THE DUPLEX, Lucy saw Louis outside her door, arms crossed, sitting in a frayed folding lawn chair that had been left on the tiny front porch when she moved in. She was a little startled to see him, realizing he must have trekked all the way across campus. He appeared to be dozing, but he opened his eyes as soon as she approached.

“I’ve never been down here before,” he said, getting up and stretching. “It looks like they built this place in about three weeks.”

“I know,” she said, running a finger over the white porch railing. “I’m already worried about Mat picking up splinters.”

“You were out early for a Sunday,” he said. “I thought you might be running or something.”

“I had breakfast with my parents,” she said, opening the door. “Is there something you need help with? Aquinas?”

“Not really,” Louis said, following her inside. “I just miss having you around. Some poet moved into your apartment. He leaves his door open and walks around with a baseball hat on.”

She went back to the first part of what he said. He missed her. He came all this way to tell her so. She couldn’t decide if this was something she should encourage, so she jumped to the second part.

“You’re complaining about a baseball hat?”

“
Just
a baseball hat. We’re chipping in to buy him a robe.”

She laughed and found herself a little sorry she had moved to the other end of the campus. They wouldn’t run into each other by chance anymore.

“I brought you a book,” Louis said. “From the library sale.”

She picked up the narrow volume, which had a blank red cover, and opened to the title page:
The Life and Times of Saint Blaise
. So thoughtful. Most people seemed a little put off by her interest in saints.

“Do you know anything about Saint Blaise?” she said. “He was this Armenian doctor in the third or fourth century who healed a boy with a fish bone stuck in his throat. So he’s the patron saint of sore-throat sufferers.”

“I thought you’d like it,” he said, straightening some mail on her kitchen counter. “You and your saints.”

She sat down at Harlan’s rosewood table, which fit snugly into the small dining space opening onto the kitchen, and pressed the heels of her hands into her eye sockets. She knew it wasn’t rational, but she had some weird sense that Louis was trying to take Harlan’s place. And what if he did? Would he get sick too?