A Watershed Year Read Online Free PDF Page A

got herself into loads of trouble. She flushed at the idea of Harlan imagining her on a white horse.
    It was true, though, that she had wanted to fight the battle for him. She often cut him off when he started to talk about dying, in the belief that he needed to stay positive. All the articles had said a positive attitude helped in healing.
    She read the message again.
And I wasn’t finished yet. At least where you are concerned.
    Now she would second-guess every interaction, browbeat herself for not telling Harlan she loved him from the moment her car had rear-ended his car in the parking lot at Rutgers when they were both graduate students. She’d been feeling around on the floor of her car for a Chapstick that had fallen out of her purse, and her foot had slipped off the brake. Harlan had gotten out of his car to assess thedamage and stood there, arms crossed, looking half-annoyed, half-amused. She had opened her window and apologized extravagantly—flustered, disheveled, dry-lipped—but he had only laughed and told her it was nothing to worry about, just one more scratch among many. He was nice enough looking, tall and dark haired, with broad shoulders, a sincere smile. But it was his laugh that drew her in, made her want to touch the traces of childhood freckles on his face.
    They had exchanged phone numbers because, Harlan had joked, he might experience delayed whiplash. She had called him that night to check on him and to apologize again for her Chapstick obsession.
    “I’m addicted,” she had said. “I can’t go more than two hours without it.”
    “I’m like that with cheese.”
    “Cheese?”
    “I lived on a dairy farm when I was a kid. It was a small one, in Tennessee, but you can’t take the cheese out of me.”
    “So maybe we could go out for fondue sometime.”
    The hesitation in his response, that one long second of dead air, had left her mortified, wishing she could reach into the phone and retract what she had just uttered. She had no balance in this regard, alternately saying what shouldn’t be said and not saying what should be said, a social affliction for which there was no cure.
    “My fiancée probably wouldn’t be too happy about that,” he had said.
    “Got it,” she had assured him. “Say no more.”
    “You said you were getting your PhD in religion though, right? Maybe we could get together to talk about the Crusades. That’s my specialty.”
    They had met now and then over coffee or a beer, exchanged e-mails, debated aspects of the Crusades. She had forced herself not to think about him on quiet nights—erasing his image from her mind as from a chalkboard—but when they were hired by the same small college, she had every reason to hope, to imagine that iridescent moment when he would tell her that Sylvie had dumped him, or viceversa. But Sylvie had the kind of smile often described as “winning,” and she had won, scheduling herself into Harlan’s weekends, brightening his apartment with decorative accessories from Crate and Barrel, advertising their future together with strategically placed and tastefully framed snapshots, until they broke up right before Sylvie learned about his diagnosis.
    Lucy glanced up and saw that her ten o’clock lecture was due to start in a few minutes. She closed the e-mail and walked to class, slightly stunned but fairly sure she wasn’t going to cry. The students followed along with their new-semester attentiveness as she delivered a smooth lecture on Aristotle. Then she strode back to her office to see if she had imagined Harlan’s e-mail.
    It was still there, the words unchanged, and she read it for a third time, seizing now on one phrase:
my story, your story, our story
. Now that the initial shock had passed, she realized that he was trying to give her answers to questions she had always wanted to ask. That meant he knew those questions were there, radiating between them like sound waves that could only be heard at the right frequency.