Free A Watershed Year by Susan Schoenberger Page A

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