A Watershed Year (38 page)

“I’m okay,” she said as Bertie put his hand on top of her head, resting it gently on the dark curls. “But you realize, there are no guarantees. I still don’t have Vasily’s signature.”

In the past few days, she had made calls to the State Department and to Maryland’s congressional offices, only to hang up when the person on the other end asked for her name, terrified to provoke an investigation of her paperwork when Vasily might never come back.

“The way I see it, you’re getting a second chance,” he said, and she nodded.

Not everyone, she thought, finds the cure—the sun-dried tomatoes that shrink the tumor or the boy who is the hazelnut, all that is made. With Mat in her life, everything seemed more concrete—full of dirt and tears and raw emotions—and at the same time, more mysterious, the
how
of their coming together now less important than the
why
. If Vasily came back, she would never have the time to figure it out.

“Tell your mother the hot dogs are three minutes to perfection,” Bertie said. “For the hamburgers, more like five.”

She hugged her father and went inside.

It was a vividly sunny day, less humid than usual, but they ate their picnic food in the dining room because Mat was afraid of bees. When Rosalee brought out Molly’s cake with its lighted candles, they all sang “Happy Birthday” slowly, enunciating carefully, so Mat could catch the words. He seemed fascinated by the whole ritual, particularly the candles. After Molly blew them out, Rosalee lit them again so Mat could try it. Then he ate his cake and asked for seconds. How American he was becoming, Lucy thought, already addicted to sugar.

After the party, she drove back to the duplex and walked up the stairs, carrying a sleeping Mat. She wondered where Vasily was now,
picturing him in some rundown apartment in Russia, wanting to make it so. But it wasn’t so. After she tucked Mat into his bed, she listened to a message on her answering machine. It was from Yulia.

“Lucy, I hear from Vasily. He goes back to Atlantic City to think about his decision, but now he is to return. He wants to talk. Call me back.”

twenty

D
ear Lucy,

I know you’re not expecting this e-mail until July, but I only have one more thing to tell you, and that is how much I love you.

I certainly had feelings for you soon after we met, a gentle crush that I thought would pass in time. To be honest, I thought it was no match for Sylvie and this life she imagined us having together, so I stopped myself from acting on it.

After you and I both moved to Ellsworth, though, I realized that I needed to break off my engagement and have an honest talk with you, but I hated to hurt Sylvie, and I saw no need to rush. I also wasn’t completely sure how you felt about me. Then the planes hit the towers, and everything changed. Strange how that event is so intertwined with my illness, as if one precipitated the other.

The night I told you about my diagnosis, when we were locked out on the balcony, I finally reached out, tried to kiss you. You didn’t respond, never mentioned it, and that hurt. Later I came to realize how unfair it was to hit you with that on the same night you learned I might not have a future. Maybe you just didn’t know how to react.

So why am I telling you this now? I’ve debated about taking it with me to my grave on the hillside, but as I’ve written these e-mails and thought about the last year of my life—to which you virtually donated
a year of your own life—I thought you’d want to know. If you loved me the way I hope you did, you’d certainly want to know.

Do you remember how you responded to my question that morning, when the super finally let us inside? You said you thought two people, if they were meant to be together, would understand each other. But you and I never really did, at least not on the same day. When Sylvie got off that train, I sent her right back to New Jersey without telling her about my cancer. I told her there was someone else, and even after she learned I was sick, I kept her at a distance because I didn’t want her pity; yours was the only pity I could tolerate. There are times I wish I had been more honest, and other days I’m sure I did the right thing in trying to spare you even more grief.

Dr. Singh was the only one of my doctors who refused to give odds. He used to say: I’m not going to give you numbers, Harlan, because you’ll fixate on them and talk yourself out of any hope. But I didn’t talk myself out of hope, Lucy; I talked myself into taking control, into choosing a full life for the person I’m leaving behind, not a life spent in the shadows of a disease that would always hang over our heads.

Chemo brain is making it harder and harder for me to explain myself, or even to type. It takes me a long time to correct all my mistakes. I still haven’t told you the story behind my grandmother’s banjo accident, and I want you to hear my voice while I’m telling it, so I’m going to record it on an audiotape and fix it to the underside of her table. Maybe you already found it.

This is my final message, Lucy. I don’t have much more to say except that I love you. In my eyes, you’re nothing less than one of those saints you admire so much.

Yours always,

Harlan

In the flurry of phone calls that followed Yulia’s phone message, Lucy hadn’t checked her e-mail. When she did, she found an unexpected one from Harlan, weeks before the next one was due to arrive. She put her face down on the keyboard to feel closer to
Harlan, grateful for the distraction because it helped block out the choking rage she felt when she thought about Vasily. She could only get through the day by believing that he could still be persuaded, or bribed, to leave Mat with her.

So there it was. Harlan had loved her. He had loved her and had ditched the beauty queen, and she had kept him at arm’s length because she thought he was confusing his gratefulness for affection, like a wounded soldier falling for his nurse. How could she have assumed his question was about Sylvie, when he was asking about her? He was right. They never really understood each other, at least not on the same day.

Lucy read through the e-mail again, stopping on the paragraph about Dr. Singh.
I didn’t talk myself out of hope, Lucy; I talked myself into taking control, into choosing a full life for the person I’m leaving behind.
The implications of that sentence, the confessional tone, were too disturbing to ignore. She lifted up stacks of papers on her desk and pulled out the drawer in search of her address book. When she finally found it, it took her several minutes to locate the phone number on a page of Harlan’s many doctors.

She dialed Dr. Singh’s number and left a message with his answering service, requesting that he return her call; then she put her head back down on the keyboard. A few minutes later, Mat was standing by her chair, poking her in the arm with one finger as if he thought she was asleep. She sat up, feeling the indentations of the computer keys in her forehead.

He took her limp arm and pulled her along until they reached the living room, where he guided her to the couch.

“You read, Mama,” he said, handing her his picture book about construction equipment.

She turned to the first page, then closed the book. “Just a minute, honey. I have to look for something.”

She went to the dining-room table and crawled under it. Mat crawled under after her, holding out the book again. “You read.”

She ran her hands along the wooden supports on the underside of the table until she found a small bump sealed with duct tape. She pulled off the tape and found a tiny audiocassette and a gift-card-sized envelope with “For Lucy” written on it. She stayed under the table, staring at the envelope, until Mat pulled her arm again and led her back to the couch.

With her arm around Mat, she read about bulldozers, front loaders, and cranes—barely seeing the words—as she tried to remember if she had ever unpacked the small tape recorder she had used in graduate school to record an occasional lecture. And if she still had it, did it work? What kind of batteries did it take? Did she have any new batteries? At the end of the book, before Mat could say “again,” she stood and grabbed her purse. “Let’s go for a ride.”

Lucy clutched the minicassette in one hand on the way to the office-supply store and, once there, clutched Mat with her other hand, worried that both might disappear if she let go of them. The first employee she stopped led her to a crowded aisle and pointed out which recorders used that kind of tape. At the counter, she bought the batteries, checking the package three times to make sure she had the right size.

Back at home, she fed Mat lunch, silently urging the cat clock to slow down. Angela was due to arrive to take Mat for an hour so Lucy could examine his paperwork again and weigh the risks of another call to the State Department, but she hated to let him go. She still didn’t know what Vasily wanted, why he had left, or why he was coming back. He was both the poison—the only one who could take Mat away—and the antidote—the only one who could sign the papers that legalized her motherhood.

As Mat chewed slowly on a brownie, she took the small envelope from the kitchen counter and opened it. Inside was an old picture of Harlan, taken before his illness. He had a full head of hair and a broad smile. He looked tan, his freckles glowing, literally the picture of health.

She stared at Harlan’s picture, wondering when it was taken, and remembered details about him that she had forgotten during his illness. Back when he had hair, one of his eyebrows was slightly thicker than the other because of a chicken-pox scar, which altered the symmetry of his face just enough to make it interesting. She ran her finger over the picture lightly so as not to leave a smudge. She had loved his freckles. They gave him the air of someone who stayed connected to childhood, who couldn’t take himself too seriously. This was a man who found humor in the Crusades, who had dreamed of her as Eleanor of Aquitaine.

She looked up and realized that Mat had finished lunch and slipped out of his chair. She helped him fill his small backpack with Matchbox cars, and when Angela arrived, he pulled the backpack over one shoulder. He waved to Lucy a little forlornly, as if he might even miss her.

“You’ll be back soon, buddy,” she said. “Vern needs you to help him play baseball.”

He reached toward her with both arms. Harlan’s picture slipped out of her hand as she pulled him off the ground. He rested his head on her shoulder until Angela tapped him on the back and told him Vern had a new Matchbox car for him.

When they left, Lucy retrieved Harlan’s picture from the floor. But before she could begin sorting through Mat’s paperwork, the phone rang.

She picked it up with dread, certain it would be Yulia relaying demands from Vasily, but it was Dr. Singh. She had forgotten him almost entirely in the period of her deepest grief because he had existed only in the context of Harlan’s illness. Now she remembered that he was businesslike, not completely humorless but lacking in vitality, as though he never got enough sleep. He had been the only doctor to come to Harlan’s funeral.

“Lucy? This is Dr. Singh. My office said you called.”

“I did,” she said, not sure what she should be asking. “I… I have some insurance forms left to fill out for Harlan Matthews, and
I was wondering if you could answer some questions for me. I have medical power of attorney.”

“I remember you, and I remember Harlan very well. Let me just open the file.”

Lucy listened intently to the doctor’s footsteps, the sound of tapping on a keyboard, the push of a button, and the dull hum of her line being transferred to a speakerphone.

“It’s all here,” the doctor said. “So unfortunate that he decided to stop his treatments. What is it you need to know?”

She pulled the phone away from her ear for a moment, confused. Then it suddenly made sense, what Harlan had said about choosing a full life for the person he was leaving behind. She phrased her question as a statement.

“So you’re saying that his experimental treatments were working?”

“He had an ugly time ahead of him, as I’m sure you know, but we were seeing a reduction in his primary tumor. He decided not to continue. I’d be surprised if the insurance company had any complaints.”

She paused for a moment, uncertain if she really wanted to know why Harlan would walk away from a treatment that might have helped him.

“They want to know why he stopped the treatments,” she said finally. “They’re settling his final bills, and they want to know why he started the treatments only to stop them.”

Dr. Singh waited a moment, and she could almost hear him gathering his thoughts.

“What really seemed to bother him was the constant threat of a relapse, knowing that even if he saw a remission, it likely would be temporary. Of course, he wasn’t looking forward to the side effects of another round of intensive chemo. His liver was pretty much shot before we even started, so that was a factor. The infertility
troubled him, too, although that seemed like a minor issue from my perspective.”

She pressed on.

“So were you surprised that he chose not to take advantage of the time he had left?”

“Oh, it wasn’t much, mind you. We might have prolonged his life a year, two at the outside, but who knows what medical science might have come up with in the meantime. That’s what I kept saying.”

Two years? Had Harlan taken two years from his already short life and tossed them away like garbage?

The doctor continued.

“In my experience, most patients will deal with just about anything for the chance to live a little longer, but Harlan had a fairly unusual perspective, so I wasn’t entirely surprised by his decision. He didn’t see the point of dragging it out. He used to say it wasn’t fair to those who had to watch him deteriorate.”

Not fair to me,
Lucy thought.
Only me.
She hung up the phone while the doctor was still talking, seeing no point in pretending that she cared enough to say good-bye. He couldn’t resurrect Harlan, and he couldn’t prevent Vasily from coming back. Those were the only two things that mattered.