A Watershed Year by Susan Schoenberger Read Free Book Online

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