Read A Watershed Year for Free Online Page B

or maybe even before then?
    She went to bed that night and dreamed of Russian babies with round cheeks, twenty or so in an oversized playpen, all holding out their arms to her.

    HARLAN CALLS. His voice sounds pebbly, grainy, thick with something Lucy can’t identify.
    “Do you mind if I come over?” he says.
    “I’m reading Aristotle. You know how I get when I read Aristotle.”
    “That’s okay. Advice is what I’m looking for.”
    Twenty minutes later, he knocks softly and she answers the door. As he walks inside, she notices that the skin around his eyes looks irritated, as if he’s been rubbing it.
    “Are your allergies acting up?” she says. “You look a little drained.”
    “It’s that image of the plane hitting the second tower. I see it every time I close my eyes. Why do they keep showing it on TV, over and over and over?”
    She gestures toward the secondhand couch, and he sits down. The seat is too low for him, and his knees point awkwardly away from each other. She walks to the kitchen and opens the refrigerator.
    “Okay, these are your beverage choices: Amstel Light, grapefruit juice, or half-and-half. Oh, wait, here’s a root beer in the vegetable drawer. I also have some cottage cheese and a jar of pickles, if you’re hungry.”
    She smiles over the refrigerator door.
    “My refrigerator’s better than yours,” he says. “I have four different kinds of cheese and a gallon of maple syrup I bought two years ago in Vermont. Oh, and a papaya.”
    “A papaya?”
    “From Sylvie. She thinks I should try new fruits.”
    Lucy returns with two beers and sits on her only other piece of legitimate furniture, a high-backed armchair she rescued at a yard sale. She had felt the chair was trying hard to be noticed, to retain a certain dignity despite sitting lopsidedly on its previous owner’s weed-plagued lawn. Harlan’s mention of Sylvie irritates her, as it always does, her name like a burr, like a bad taste. She shifts in her seat.
    He takes a sip of his beer.
    “I have a question I need to ask you,” he says.
    She assumes he is talking about the twin towers again.
    “They keep showing that image because they have nothing else. No way to put it into perspective.”
    “It’s not really about that…”
    “I’ve been waiting for a nightmare, but I haven’t had one. Maybe I can’t go there at night because I’m immersed in a bad dream all day. It’s like everything’s reversed. Know what I mean?”
    “I do,” he says. “For once, I know exactly what you mean.”

    SUNLIGHT SEEPED through the blinds, sending narrow stripes across the bedspread. Lucy peered at the light through reluctant eyelids until something in the back of her consciousness found its way to the front. She remembered that she had never picked up the dry cleaning she had dropped off several weeks before.
    When she walked into the shop later that morning, the dry cleaner stretched out his arms, practically touching the walls of the small storefront.
    “Hey, where you been?” he asked.
    “I’m so sorry,” she said. “It’s almost your fault, in a way. Remember that business card you gave me? It actually got me thinking about adoption.”
    The dry cleaner smiled. “So happy for you,” he said before he walked toward the back of the shop, she assumed, to get her clothes. A few minutes later, he emerged with an infant, perhaps three months old, in his arms.
    “I think I gave you the wrong impression,” she said nervously. “I’m working with another agency. I hope I didn’t—”
    “No,” he said. “This one mine. You try. For practice.”
    The dry cleaner walked out from behind the counter and placed the infant in her arms, holding the back of the baby girl’s head until Lucy could support it.
    “She’s beautiful,” Lucy said. “What’s her name?”
    “American name, Lola.”
    Lucy stared at the placid eyes and smooth skin, examined the miniature fingers and toes. There it was in front of her: every trip