by Ann Packer
“Well,” Mrs. Mayer said from behind me. “Well.” She clapped her hands together as if dusting them off. “Be sure there’s plenty of support under his head.”
Mike and I looked at each other. After a charged moment we both laughed. “Thanks,” he said.
“You’re quite welcome.”
• • •
He had outpatient physical therapy three times a week. I took him one day and watched from a chair by the window while an older woman with a squat, muscular body put his limbs through a series of movements. Mike lay on a mat, his arms and legs circling and bending and extending, front, side, front, side. I stood up and looked out the window. Lake Mendota was a mosaic of blue behind a stand of far trees. I hadn’t really seen the lake since I’d been back, not up close, not standing still. Now, seeing bits of it from far away, I longed to be near enough to feel the wind, to see the way the sky broke up in the surface of the water, rippled and blue-black. Out of my view but nearby was Picnic Point, and I thought of the long walk out, how you felt the lake near you as you went, the water lapping just beyond the trees.
When Mike was done we went to see Harvey, in a room down the hall from Mike’s old one. Heading along the familiar corridor, I felt tremulous and reluctant, and I stayed a pace or two behind Mike so he wouldn’t be able to see my face.
Harvey was in the far bed, a dark-haired man with a steel-gray beard, full and untended like a mountaineer’s. He had bright eyes and a quick smile, and he greeted me by name before Mike could introduce us. “So you finally brought her, huh?”
“It was her idea,” Mike joked. “I didn’t care if you guys ever met.”
I sat on a vinyl-padded chair against the wall and listened to them talk. Occasionally I stole glances at the man in the other bed, a thick tube attached to his throat. He wore a halo, couldn’t have turned to look at me if he’d wanted to.
A woman about my mother’s age came in. She was tall and athletic-looking, dressed in jeans and old running shoes, her hair in a careless ponytail. She did a double take at the sight of me, then bent to kiss Harvey’s cheek and then Mike’s. “Hello to you,” she said, “and to you, too. And is this Carrie?”
“It is,” Mike said. There was an awkward moment, and then he added, “Carrie, this is Maggie, Harvey’s wife.”
Maggie gave me a cold little smile. “Well,” she said. “Greetings.”
She pulled a spare chair over and sat down near Harvey, sighing in a loud, doesn’t-this-feel-good way, as if to say that she for one was perfectly comfortable here. “Chow’s coming, hon,” she said. “Want me to lock the door?”
“Don’t stop there—why not a small nuclear bomb on the kitchen?”
She smiled and reached into a bag she’d brought with her, withdrawing a Pyrex dish covered with foil. “Do stir-fried veggies and rice sound good?”
Harvey gave her a look of mock outrage. “No milkshake?”
Maggie turned to Mike. “Is that gratitude? Doesn’t this guy owe me some gratitude?”
Mike gave me an uneasy glance. I could see he wished she hadn’t come in—that he liked her but didn’t trust her. I wondered how he’d talked about me with her, if perhaps she was the person he’d complained to: another woman, stalwart. “Yeah, Harv,” Mike said. “Don’t you know a good thing when you’ve got it?”
Harvey laughed. “Stir-fried veggies and rice sound lovely,” he said. “Perfectly lovely.”
Maggie peeled the foil off the dish and set it on Harvey’s swing-arm table. She got a fork from the bag, speared a piece of zucchini, and held it to Harvey’s mouth. “We’re watching the dairy and citrus these days,” she said to Mike. “UTI prevention.”
Mike looked at me apologetically. “Urinary tract infection,” he said.
“Oh, sorry,” Maggie said. “I assumed you’d know.” She forked some rice and offered it to Harvey. His injury was higher up than Mike’s, I remembered. No bicep, so he couldn’t feed himself.
Half an hour later we left, heading to the elevator and then riding down in silence. Outside, I paused in a little plaza in front of the entrance so I could feel in my purse for the van keys. The parking lot was crowded, but we were right up front, in a handicapped spot.
“It wasn’t just you,” Mike said.
I turned and he was looking right at me, his gray eyes squinting against the sun. “I was sort of hoping it was.”
“People are more comfortable when other people conform to their standards. It validates their lives, kind of.” He gave me a sheepish look. “Thank you, Dave King,” he added.
I helped him into the van and climbed behind the steering wheel, but I didn’t start up. I was thinking that I’d like to pinch a handful of Maggie’s nose between my fingers and twist hard. That I’d like to tell Mrs. Mayer to get over herself. Here I am, I wanted to say. I’m here now, OK? Outside the van was a sea of cars, then a university, a lake, a city—a flat, flat stretch of land that was fertile and endless. What if I never walked across 14th Street again, with its bodega smells and crowds of men to step around? What if I never woke to the sound of half a dozen sirens again, screaming down Seventh Avenue? What if I never wandered through SoHo again, imagining this skirt that jacket those shoes right onto me, transforming me into someone unimaginable?
What if I never saw Kilroy again?
I turned and looked at Mike. He stared vacantly out the window, tired from physical therapy, from the exhaustion of wondering what was going on with me, when I was going back. Inside his polo shirt his shoulders were knobby and angular. The muscles he could still use were overtaxed, stringy. He looked up. “What?” he said. “What are you thinking?”
“That nothing I do will be enough now.” My face flamed, and I looked away. A row of birds sat on the arm of a streetlight, uneven black bumps like buttons along the shoulder of a dress.
“It won’t be,” he said.
I turned to see what he looked like, pissed off or fed up or what, but his expression was bland: bland as cream, bland as milk, bland as Wisconsin.
CHAPTER 38
Water splashed into the pan I was washing, a skillet in which I’d sautéed zucchini and onion to serve with the lamb chops I’d broiled. I added a ribbon of dishwashing liquid and ran a yellow-and-red scrubber over the cooking surface. My mother had already loaded our plates into the dishwasher, which I’d convinced her to start using, and now she moved around the kitchen behind me, putting our placemats away and wiping the table. Evenings in the kitchen together, talking or not—there was something provisional about them, something awkward.
The phone rang, and she stepped to the wall to answer it.
“Carrie,” she said, holding the receiver out. There was a question on her face, and my pulse sped up. Could it be Kilroy? I called him, not the other way around. Using my calling card, so the charges wouldn’t end up on my mother’s phone bill. Drying my hands, I felt a wave of guilt over not having told her about him. Why shouldn’t I tell my mother about Kilroy?
I took the receiver from her and said hello.
“Listen, missy, you’ve been MIA too long—I need an explanation.”
It was Simon, and I relaxed. I turned so I could mouth, “It’s Simon,” to my mother, but she’d tactfully left the room.
“So?” he said. “I’m all ears. What gives?”
I told him about things—how Jamie wouldn’t forgive me and how I’d started spending time with Mike and how I couldn’t leave.
“Yet,” he said. “You forgot to say yet.”
“I’m not sure.”
There was a long silence, and then, “Carrie, are you for real?”
“I don’t know what I’m for.”
“God.”
I stretched the phone cord over to the table and sat down. Simon and the brownstone and the room that was finally mine: I still wanted to paint. I wanted to get a rug, a lamp. I wanted a life in New York. I wanted to be with Kilroy.
“I can just picture it,” Simon said. “I’ll see you on
ce a year when I go home to Madison to visit. You’ll start frosting your hair and one day I’ll realize you’ve been shopping at the Lands’ End outlet store.”
“That’s so mean.”
“Then promise you’ll come back.”
I touched my cheek, my fingertips surprisingly cool. I couldn’t think of what to say.
“Carrie as in carry,” he said. “I was right that fateful day in James Madison Park, except I guess it’s not a canoe you’ll be carrying.”
“Simon,” I said. “That’s not how it is.”
“Then how is it?”
I stood up and walked across the kitchen to the window. It was dusk, the sky a thick violet. I could see a lighted upstairs window in Rooster and Joan’s house. When I ran into her out front she always made a point of saying more than just hello. I have some extra nasturtium seeds, I wanted your opinion on this maternity dress, would you like to come in for some lemonade? A friend if I wanted her to be one.
“Let’s change the subject,” I said to Simon. “Tell me something funny.”
“That’s a tall order.”
“You’re a tall guy.”
He was silent for a moment. “OK, here’s something. Remember Benjamin, my ex? He’s madly in love with a dancer.”
“Oh, Simon. That’s hard.”
“A blond dancer. A blond dancer from Denmark. I’m like, if this is what you wanted all along what the fuck were you ever doing with me?”
“It’s not necessarily what he wanted all along. Maybe he really doesn’t know so he’s trying out some extremes.”
“That’s nice of you,” he said. There was a pause, and then he added, “I really miss you.”
I didn’t respond, and he cried, “Do you think I don’t mean it? I really miss you. You’re a big part of my life.”
I’d hardly thought of him since leaving, and I felt terrible. What was wrong with me? What kind of friend was I? “I’m sorry,” I said, and then I thought sorry, sorry, sorry, and felt worse still.
There was an awkward silence, and he said, “It’s not just me, you know—Lane was saying just yesterday that she wished you’d come back.”
“How is she?”
“Not so good,” he said. “Ever since Miss Wolf died she—”
“Miss Wolf died?” I said. “Oh my God, when?”
“You didn’t know? It must have been right after you left because it was a while ago, maybe a month.” He paused. “She had a heart attack. Three days in the hospital and that was it.”
“How awful,” I said. “Lane must be really upset. Was she with her when it happened?”
“She’d just left. She got home and there was a message on the machine from a nurse.”
I shook my head. I remembered how worried Lane had been when Miss Wolf had a cold. How she’d walked up the steps to the Plaza just behind Miss Wolf, her hands up and ready to help if Miss Wolf stumbled. “Is she there?” I said. “Can I talk to her?”
“After you promise to come back.”
“Simon.”
“All right,” he said, “but we will talk about this again. Hang on.”
The phone settled onto something hard, and as I stood there waiting I heard my mother moving around upstairs. Footsteps crossing her bedroom, the faint creak of her closet door. In a minute the water would go on in her bathroom. I was overcome suddenly by the knowledge that she made these same sounds whether anyone was present to hear them or not.
Lane came on the line, her voice faint and a little dull. She told me about Miss Wolf’s death, how for three days she’d sat there waiting for Miss Wolf to pull through. I know, I wanted to say, but of course I didn’t. I knew about waiting for Mike to pull through, but there was no telling how different it had been for Lane, a daughter or granddaughter figure, sitting there alone.
She was at loose ends, trying to decide on a next move. “Come visit me,” I said, and to my surprise she agreed to, the following week.
The next afternoon I learned that Mike had quit his computer job. He was tired of pretending it was more than just a way to feel useful. “I’m not useful,” he said, “and gathering data about fucking life expectancy rates isn’t going to change that, or how I feel about it.”
We were in the van together, on the way home from another visit to Harvey. We passed a car wash where Mike had worked one summer in high school, a line of blue and yellow pennants flapping in the breeze. I’d had a job just around the corner, at a drugstore that had since closed down, and I remembered walking over after work and watching while he drove people’s cars out of the chute and then dried them, both hands spinning blue rags.
I looked over at him, strapped into his wheelchair. His eyes drooped at the outside corners. Even his mustache drooped today, rimming the unhappy arc of his mouth.
“How’d your dad react?” I said.
“He was disappointed. Well, maybe not disappointed. He just—”
“Wants you to be happy?”
“I think he’d settle for a little less than that.”
We rode along in silence. It was a clear, green day, the shade trees knitting together for the summer ahead. Lilacs were in bloom, lush purple and satiny green, their thick, heady scent everywhere.
He said, “Mom, on the other hand, was all for it. ‘Why should you spend your time on something you hate when you don’t need the money, dear?’ She’d be perfectly content to have me be like that Tom guy.”
“Mike, she wouldn’t.” Tom was Harvey’s roommate, a C3 who’d never breathe without a ventilator.
“You know what I mean.”
I knew: Mrs. Mayer wanted Mike to count on her no matter what. She didn’t always see how hard it was that he had to.
“He’s a head on a pillow,” Mike blurted. “If that were me I’d rather be dead.”
I braked and turned to face him. “Mike.”
“I would.” He looked at me defiantly, and my first impulse was to look away, brush it off, bury it. You didn’t say that. But he had.
“Will you—” I hesitated. “Will you tell me more?” Immediately I felt my face fill with heat. Tell me: Kilroy’s phrase. What would Mike say? How would I react? I was nervous but forced myself to wait, to not fill the silence with words, and after a while he sighed and began to speak.
“I read somewhere that after something like this you spend your life either looking for a reason or looking for a cure. But you know what? There isn’t a reason and there isn’t a cure. There just isn’t. I went to this church thing a few times and it was crazy, it was like all these people were just dying to have me decide that God had a plan for me. Why would that make a difference? I think I stopped really believing in God around the same time I stopped believing in Santa Claus, and if breaking my neck was supposed to help me start believing again, why on earth would that be a comforting idea? If you had half a brain it would make you really pissed off instead.” He shook his head. “Dave King says maybe the hardest challenge is having to live with suicidal thoughts, having to accept them as part of the whole damn package.” He stared at me. “Are you going to take me home or not?”
I took my foot off the brake and drove the rest of the way to the Mayers’. At the driveway I eased up the bump and stopped in front of the garage. I cut the engine. My heart was pounding. I said, “Do you have suicidal thoughts a lot?”
He looked at me and looked away. “I did. I mean, I still do, but not as much.”
“That must be—” I searched for what to say. “That must be hard.”
He sighed. “It’s exhausting. It’s like, you have these pictures in your mind, and you’re pulled toward them at the same time that you’re trying like hell to stay away from them.”
“Mike,” I said softly. “God.”
He looked away. After a while he said, “I’m ready to go in now,” and I climbed down from the van and went around to the other side, then stood waiting while the lift lowered him. I walked up the ramp behind him, his wheelchair humming. At the top we stopp
ed. “Want to sit out here for a while?” I said. “Would you like something to drink?”
“No, thanks.”
Neither of us spoke. I leaned against the railing. Mrs. Mayer was in the kitchen, her shape as she moved around just visible through the clean windows.
“Mike Mayer has a morose spell,” he said, glancing at me and smiling a little. “He sits in his wheelchair and contemplates the back lawn.”
CHAPTER 39
On the phone the night before Lane was due, I walked her through my dresser and closet, telling her what I wanted—this shirt, that skirt, those pants. When she asked if Kilroy knew I was getting her to bring me so much of my stuff, I said he didn’t. The fact was, he didn’t even know she was coming. I hadn’t talked to him in a week, nothing to say until it was clear what I was going to do. Seeing Lane at the airport the next day, a tiny shoulder bag of her stuff and a giant duffel of mine, what I was going to do suddenly seemed obvious, and I thought: OK, then. Eight months earlier I’d left Madison abruptly, on the spur of a moment, though one that had been coming for a long time. Now, these past weeks, I’d been swinging back and forth between staying here and going back—swinging without even thinking about it all that much because thinking couldn’t really help me choose as well as seeing could: my clothing, here. My life, here. Was this it?
Lane and I grinned at each other, awkward for a moment and then hugging hard. She wore a pair of chinos and a plain white T-shirt, like a little boy going to summer camp.
“It’s so good to see you!”
I bent over and hefted the duffel, then slung the long strap over my shoulder. I started toward the parking lot, but she didn’t follow.
