A Watershed Year Read online

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Copyright © 2011 by Susan Schoenberger

  First edition published by Guideposts in 2011.

  Amazon Publishing edition published in 2013.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Amazon Publishing

  PO Box 400818

  Las Vegas, NV 89140

  ISBN-13: 9781477848012

  ISBN-10: 1477848010

  To my wonderful parents, Joyce and John

  contents

  one

  two

  three

  four

  five

  six

  seven

  eight

  nine

  ten

  eleven

  twelve

  thirteen

  fourteen

  fifteen

  sixteen

  seventeen

  eighteen

  nineteen

  twenty

  acknowledgements

  about the author

  a conversation with SUSAN SCHOENBERGER

  questions for discussion

  one

  * * *

  The tawdry mermaid painted on the inside of Harlan’s front door wore a bikini top made of undersized clamshells. A crude wave curled over her neon-green tail, and the door’s peephole left the impression of a third eye in her forehead. Lucy had recommended that Harlan repaint the door or ask his landlord to do it, but Harlan had decided the mermaid would be a great conversation starter at parties.

  Parties he had never had.

  Lucy lingered by the door, looking for bits of mermaid paint to flake off with a fingernail as she waited for Harlan to emerge from the bedroom, where he was speaking on the phone to one of his doctors. Lucy had spent the afternoon with Harlan, and she had already said good-bye when his phone started ringing. She should have let herself out, but she hated being separated from him. She sensed that he was slipping away, leaving her before she was ready.

  “Go,” Harlan said when he returned to the living room. He nudged Lucy gently through the door, and she could hear him twist the bolt lock into place with a rusty scrape. She was still standing on the welcome mat, ruffling its artificial grass with one of her clogs, when the bolt scraped in the direction of forgiveness. But Harlan only cracked the door wide enough to force her saddlebag purse through the opening.

  “Five more minutes,” she said. “Then I promise I’ll leave you alone.”

  He dropped the purse, and it fell like a bag of rocks, keys clattering onto the tile floor.

  “I know you mean well, but it’s my decision,” he said, before closing the door again.

  Lucy could picture him slumped against the mermaid: heavy lids blinking behind glasses so thick they left his face a blur; shadow-rimmed eyes peering out from the sallow skin that made him avoid mirrors. The same mirrors had once framed his thick, dark hair; the confident set of his shoulders; the well-defined lines of his jaw. All these, now gone. She knew his eyes were failing, his feet were numb, and he could barely taste or smell his food anymore. The experimental treatments had been ineffective, but she wanted him to give it more time.

  “You’re thirty-three,” she said, crouching to speak through the mail slot. “No one dies at thirty-three.”

  “Think about it, Lucy,” he said from his side of the door. “They do.”

  She snatched up her purse and keys, then stumbled down the hallway toward the stairs, reviewing the argument she never seemed to finish with him: You don’t give up at thirty-three. You fight until you can’t stand up anymore, because science might, at any moment, catch up with your disease. And medical miracles happen. She didn’t make them up, she saw them on Dateline at least three times a year. What about the orthodontist who lived on sun-dried tomatoes and watched an eight-pound abdominal tumor shrink to nothing? “The results astounded even me,” the orthodontist had said, patting his taut midsection with both hands and turning sideways as if posing for an “after” picture in a weight-loss ad.

  She drove to her own one-bedroom apartment on campus. Ellsworth College was highly respectable, but she found that it drew an odd mix of students to Baltimore: Midwest churchgoing valedictorians reared on beef, and East Coast vegetarian burnouts with high SAT scores.

  The moment she entered her apartment, she kicked off her clogs in the direction of the coat closet and unzipped her jean skirt, undressing as the room’s cluttered quality struck her anew. Plaster saint figurines were everywhere—on top of the television and perched on the windowsills, adorning the used bookcases and lining the kitchen counter—all mementos of her PhD research. What would happen if she got tenure? Would she stop cramming her saints inside the broken microwave and under the bed whenever she had to host the religion department’s monthly wine-and-cheese gathering? Were there any sins more shocking among her peers than a little spirituality?

  Harlan, who taught early European history at Ellsworth, once pointed out that impoverished Chinese factory workers—most likely atheists—had produced most of her little statues. But that didn’t bother her; it wasn’t the statues that mattered but what they represented. What could it hurt to ask for intercession, she had told Harlan more than once, as long as you weren’t careless about it, as in “Please, let there be enough mustard for my hot dog.”

  Standing in her underwear, she had a sudden impression of her life post-Harlan, which involved hours of sitting in chain-bookstore cafés, sipping lattes in absurdly large cups, in the vague hope that someone would find that her long dark hair, her deep-brown eyes, and her genuine smile made up for her thick ankles, the unfortunate legacy of the Sicilian farming stock on her mother’s side of the family.

  She sat down at the computer in a small alcove of her bedroom to e-mail Harlan, apologized for pushing the experimental drugs, and signed off as Mary Magdalene, patron saint of repentant sinners.

  “You and your saints,” he responded. “Want to know how I feel?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “I was in a movie theater once when the film broke, and they couldn’t fix it, and they sent me home with a coupon. That’s how I feel.”

  “Like the film or the coupon?” she wrote back. “Are you the coupon?”

  Ten minutes passed with no response, and Lucy thought she had pushed him too far with her belief in the healing power of humor. She pulled a long T-shirt over her head and brushed her teeth, checking and rechecking for a new e-mail.

  “Okay,” he finally wrote. “I’m the coupon. But I get folded up, put in your pocket, and thrown in the wash. I never get redeemed.”

  “Is anyone truly redeemed?” she wrote back.

  “Only in cartoons. Meet me for lunch on Thursday at Artie’s. Around noon. I’ll buy you some crab soup.”

  THAT THURSDAY, Lucy shifted her wire-mesh chair into the shade of the restaurant umbrella and thought of Elijah the Prophet, who was said to help motorists and might save Harlan a parking spot so he wouldn’t have to walk far in the midday sun of an unusually warm November day. Since the soles of his feet had gone numb, Harlan walked like an arthritic senior citizen, planting a cane before placing his weight on feet that were perpetually asleep.

  A few months before, she had gone with him to the medical-supply store to buy the cane, and they had wandered horrified among the prosthetic limbs and geriatric toilet seats until a saleswoman in a maroon velour swe
at suit steered them to a whole room full of canes, identified by a sign as the Largest Selection on the East Coast.

  The saleswoman let Harlan try out the specialty canes, including one that carried five brandy flasks inside the wooden shaft, one that concealed a twenty-three-inch stainless-steel sword, and one that converted into a pool stick with blue chalk inside the knobbed handle. Then she recommended a cane with a derby-shaped marble handle on an extralong walnut shaft, which Harlan tested, thumping around the store. Lucy remembered what he’d said as he yanked the price tag off his cane on the way out the door: “A good sales pitch is a rare and beautiful thing.”

  Lucy waited at the restaurant for an hour, drinking free refills of strong iced tea until her veins throbbed with anxiety and caffeine and her ankles swelled. She called Harlan’s apartment, but his answering machine picked up, with its complicated beeping and voice mailboxes and instructions, and she hung up. Just as she was dialing the Johns Hopkins emergency room, Harlan’s red Saturn lurched into a parking space on the other side of the street. He emerged slowly, grabbing his cane and a bottle of water and shuffling toward her, not looking either way for traffic.

  He looked decades older than thirty-three, with untrained wisps of gray hair growing from the nape of his bald head and just over his ears. He couldn’t stand up to his full six feet anymore; the treatments had softened his bones. At one point during early rounds of chemotherapy, he had lost fifty pounds and looked frail, but he had gained a bit of it back. Still, there was something awkward about him, as if his skin no longer fit correctly. A young boy at a nearby table stared as Harlan sat down.

  “What happened?” Lucy said, her voice rising. “You are never more than forty minutes late.”

  He shrugged and took a swig from the water bottle. His hands, she noticed, now seemed too small for the rest of his body, while his neck looked swollen. The proportions were all wrong, reinforcing her long-held belief that Harlan’s illness had been visited on the wrong person.

  “I’m having trouble swallowing solids,” he said. “I tried to eat some Cheerios for breakfast, and I almost had to give myself the Heimlich. But that’s not why I’m late.”

  Harlan leaned his cane against the table and tilted his head back to catch the sun on his face. Still waiting for his explanation, Lucy noticed he was wearing a hooded sweatshirt on a day when it had to be at least seventy-five degrees.

  “I was about to leave when I checked my calendar—out of habit—for doctors’ appointments and realized I didn’t have any. Then I flipped the page to January—it’s one of those calendars for procrastinators that gives you an extra month in the next year to buy a new calendar—and it was empty. Completely empty. Nothing but clean white squares. I do have an appointment in December to have my teeth cleaned, but I guess I can cancel that. It kills me to think about all that dental work I had two years ago.”

  The waitress approached abruptly, took a pen from over her ear, and wrote down Lucy’s order for crab soup and chicken salad, barely glancing at her. In better days, Harlan would have chatted with the waitress and cracked her brittle exterior with a smile, but in the past few weeks, illness had drained away his social skills, as if the niceties of human interaction now seemed pointless. He told the waitress he would have the soup if they could make it extra hot. She scribbled something on her notepad and left.

  “I just stared at the calendar for maybe half an hour,” Harlan continued. “Then I snapped out of it and drove over. I probably shouldn’t be driving anymore.”

  When his crab soup arrived, Harlan leaned over the bowl and let the steam float up around his cheeks, warming his face and condensing into tiny drops on his chin. Then he picked up his spoon, stirred it around in the bowl, and left it there, as if he had forgotten what to do with it. Lucy watched him as she ate her soup, the Old Bay spices and the sweet crab mingling on her tongue. She felt, oddly, as though she were eating for two, though not in the way she had always hoped.

  “I’m planning to die at home,” he said. “Would it be too much if I asked you to be there? Just to sit with me.”

  Lucy probed her chicken salad with a fork, as if the walnuts and raisins would give her an answer. “Give me a minute,” she said, blinking hard at the crab-shaped napkin holder.

  She knew very little, really, about how he was dying, though it seemed to her like small footsteps toward the grave—two forward, one back. But she knew why he needed her. His other friends had swarmed at first, suffocating him in their need to comfort themselves. But after more than a year of procedures and hospital stays and days on the brink, the calls came only once or twice a week. Even then, Harlan sometimes complained, they probably had “call Harlan” written in their planners, right up there with “clean gutters.” Emotionally, he said they had already chosen the suits and dresses they would wear to his funeral.

  He could have called his mother in Florida, who thought he was in remission, but she would have fussed at him mercilessly with her antibacterial spray and her pillow plumping and her fluttering hands. His father had died in a car accident when Harlan was twelve. As Harlan’s illness had progressed, the circle of friends and family around him had grown smaller and smaller.

  In the end, he had only Lucy.

  “Do you have to…?” she said. “There must be some alternative.”

  She had loved Harlan from the time they met in graduate school three years before, but he had been engaged then, and she had kept it to herself, guiltily, like a shoplifter. She had put off telling him for so long that it didn’t seem right to spill it now. She had almost stopped wondering whether he returned her feelings; she knew it was all he could do to get through another day.

  He cleared his throat as the waitress took his uneaten bowl of soup. His friend at the hospital, he said, would bring him a syringe. He only needed Lucy there for moral support.

  “I’d rather not be alone.”

  “What if it doesn’t work?” she said.

  “Trust me, it’ll work.”

  “But why can’t you hold off for just—”

  “The alternative, since you asked, is one organ failing after the other, nurses mopping up the fluids as they leak away. It could take months. Is that more comfortable for you?”

  She looked down at the table, reminding herself that he wasn’t annoyed with her, only with the universe.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m having one of those days where I’m just angry about the whole thing. It comes and goes.”

  He blew his nose on a crumpled white handkerchief and stood up unsteadily. She pulled some cash from her wallet, left it on the table, and followed him as he crossed the street, leaning heavily on his cane.

  “Tell me what you need,” she said. “I can do this.”

  “Would you mind coming over Saturday?” he said. He slid the cane into the backseat of the car and then folded himself stiffly into the front.

  “I’ll be there first thing,” she said.

  “Thanks. I have a few things I’d like to take care of first, and really, I shouldn’t be driving,” he said before pulling away.

  ON SATURDAY, Lucy knocked on Harlan’s door, balancing a cardboard tray of hot coffees and cranberry muffins. She pushed on the door, which was open, and walked into a room that seemed too bright, overexposed, like a roadside bar before noon. The curtains and shades were gone, shedding an unflattering light on the mermaid as Lucy closed the door behind her.

  Three-quarters of the living room had been emptied—going out of business—with the exception of a few unconnected wires scattered on the floor. The dining-room table was still there, and Harlan, inexplicably wearing suspenders, sat at one end, hunched over like an aging accountant, surrounded by stacks of papers and books.

  “Hey there,” he said, his voice light with decisions made. “Come help me give away my money.”

  She set the cardboard tray on the table, kissed him on the cheek, and handed him a coffee, which he cradled with both hands. He pulled off the pla
stic lid to let the steam drift out and held the cup in front of his nose as if to recall, at least, the olfactory memory. In the center of the table was a foot-high plastic statue of Saint Apollonia, which Lucy had given him as a joke a few years before when he was having his wisdom teeth removed. Apollonia was the patron saint of toothaches because she had been tortured for her beliefs by having all her teeth pulled out.

  “I’m closing out the old checking account,” he said. “After funeral expenses and the final bills, my net worth is about eight thousand dollars. I’m returning it to the neighborhood.”

  Harlan wrote a check for $500 to Best Dry Cleaning, whose Korean owner called him “Har-LAN.” The letters on the check slanted in both directions, unsure of themselves. Harlan seemed to have trouble holding the pen.

  “My mother doesn’t need it,” he said, in answer to a question Lucy hadn’t asked. “And I never could bring myself to make a will, so probate might tie it up for years.”

  He wrote another check to his barber, for $1,000, and asked Lucy to find the address in the phone book.

  “This guy cried when my hair fell out,” he said. “He actually shed tears over it. I couldn’t go back when the gray hair came in.”

  She wrote down the addresses as Harlan made out checks to his landlord, the mailman, and the single mother next door, who once baked him a loaf of banana bread. Lucy suggested including a short note with an explanation, and Harlan spent half an hour on the wording, which finally read: “Please accept this small gift from someone who appreciated your kindness.” On the landlord’s note, he also added, “If you want my opinion, the mermaid should stay.”

  He removed his thick glasses and massaged the puffy skin around his eyes. Lucy watched him and wondered how it would feel to know—Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners—the hour of your death.

  “Anything here you want?” he said. “I gave it all away, except for my bed, this table, my laptop, and my books. It was all junk anyway, except the table, which belonged to my Cajun grandmother, who broke her nose in a banjo accident. I keep meaning to tell you that story—I know you’d like it—but I always get choked up when I think about my grandmother, and there’s nothing worse than seeing a grown man cry. It’s genuine rosewood. I was hoping you’d take it.”