by Ann Packer
But Mike. Mike wheeling onto the deck after his shower Saturday morning, saying, The times, they have changed. He was rueful now: changed, like the times. Mike Mayer has a morose spell. He was rueful and deeper inside himself, looking out, looking in. Was a person an accumulation of past selves, or made new over and over again? I wanted to keep knowing him, to see where he went next. I wanted to keep seeing him, seeing his smile when he saw me; feeling mine when I saw him, pulling at the corners of my mouth. I thought of the September night I left Madison, heading through the darkness until I saw the sun rising over Lake Michigan, adrenaline keeping me going, adrenaline and coffee and despair. Isn’t it all so crystal clear now? Isn’t it just too perfect? Two people, each on the run from a tragedy named Mike. It was true: I’d turned Mike into a tragedy named Mike. And run from it—from him. I thought of yesterday at Clausen’s Reservoir, how I’d known what he wanted to hear. About the helicopter. The wait. There was so much more for me to tell him, for him to tell me.
That phrase of Kilroy’s again. Kilroy the listener, the questioner. With so much of himself he couldn’t tell. I don’t want to talk about my parents. Why not? Because they’d grieved and moved on, and he hadn’t? I didn’t know. It probably wasn’t nearly that simple, but I couldn’t have known and I couldn’t know now, not if he didn’t want to tell me. I knew what I knew, Lane had said of Miss Wolf. What I knew about Kilroy was what I’d always known, from the very beginning. That he didn’t want to tell, couldn’t tell. That he couldn’t risk it.
I went out for a walk. The afternoon light hung late in the sky, and I walked fast, seeking the strain in my muscles, the faint searing in my lungs that would tell me I was moving. On the Fletchers’ block someone was getting ready to barbecue: I smelled lighter fluid and burning briquets, the scent nostalgic and sustaining. I stopped and closed my eyes, and it seemed deeply significant that I could conjure what would come next, how the smell would veer in a few minutes to chicken, say, or lamb, or beef.
As I walked the smell got stronger. At the head of the Fletchers’ driveway I understood they were barbecuing—Mr. Fletcher and some assortment of his daughters. Jamie, I knew from my mother, had more or less moved home. Just like me.
I made my way along the house, stopping at the low gate into the yard. It was empty, the grass mowed and edged, the plum tree thick with purple leaves. The roses grew in beds along the side fence, as well-tended as Mrs. Fletcher could want. On the brick patio, a black Weber grill threw smoke into the sky.
The screen door of the mud room swung out, and Bill appeared on the porch, a platter of meat in hand. He caught the door with his foot just as it was about to clap shut, then he came down the steps and stopped at the barbecue, all without noticing me. He set the platter on the picnic table. He glanced around, found a long-handled fork hanging from the handle of the grill, and used it to stir the coals. Then suddenly he looked over his shoulder.
“Jeez, sneak up on a person, why don’t you.” He hesitated, then came over to the fence. After a moment we hugged clumsily, the gate between us. I wondered if my face was still blotchy from crying. Kilroy was a thousand miles away, alone. Was he in his apartment, on the couch with a book? Or at McClanahan’s, where he’d sit at the bar and drink a beer, entirely within himself? How could I have ever thought he confided in Joe?
“Fancy seeing you here,” Bill said.
“It’s called living dangerously,” I said. “Steak for two?”
“About.”
We stood there. The last time I’d seen Bill had been at the hospital, a week or so before I’d left. Bill in cargo shorts and Tevas; I wondered if he had Jamie hiking now. It was hard to fathom. Then again, it was hard to fathom them together at all. How would they look together, Jamie with her blond ponytail and skinny arms, Bill with his dark eyes and buck teeth? And that little silver stud in his earlobe. I tried to remember how he’d looked with Christine, and what I came up with was this: Nice. He’d looked nice.
“Well, I better go,” I said. I looked away for a moment, pulled my lips into my mouth and let them loose again. “How is she?”
“OK. She’s actually doing a lot better.”
“Than?”
“Before.”
I lifted a hand to wave. “I’m glad I saw you. Maybe I’ll run into you again one of these days.” I took a few steps away and then looked back and smiled. “It’s so hard to think of you as Jamie’s boyfriend.”
“I felt that way too at first. You get used to it after a while.”
I turned to go. I was past Mrs. Fletcher’s station wagon when he called my name.
I looked back, and he motioned for me. “Try again,” he said in a low voice when I was close. “OK? I can understand how you wouldn’t want to, but—well, she misses you, I see it all the time.”
“How?”
He rubbed his hand along his jaw. “Just in the way you see things in people you know well. Just in this little sadness when your name comes up.”
I breathed in deeply. I waved again and made my way back out to the sidewalk. It was dusk now, and I walked back to my mother’s, where I sat at my desk. I vaguely remembered there being some stationery in the bottom drawer, and when I opened it I felt myself smile at the sight: a box of Snoopy stationery Jamie’d given me for my birthday in third grade. I took a piece out and saw that there was only one more left, and that someone had written on it.
Happy Birthday to you,
Happy Birthday to you,
You look like a monkey
And you smell like one, too.
I’m just kidding. Dear Carrie, happy birthday, your my best friend. Love and kisses from
Jamie
I set the page on my desk and uncapped a pen. I sat there thinking for a long time, and then I wrote this, just under Jamie’s loopy, third-grade signature:
It’s true, I smell like a monkey—even to myself. Can I tell you one last time how sorry I am? Apologetic, yes, but even more to the point just sorry for what you’ve gone through. I used to imagine us growing old together—or not growing old but being old, sitting on the porch of some nursing home in matching rockers and reminiscing about our teen years. Even once I was with Mike I never pictured anyone but the two of us, and I didn’t picture us sick, either, just wrinkled and white-haired and laughing about the time we tried to do our math homework by breaking potato chips into fractions and arranging them into equations on your bedroom floor.
I’m back for real, and what I know is this: Carrie — Jamie = too much loss.
I folded the page, put it in a Snoopy envelope, and walked back to the Fletchers’. The barbecue smell was gone, and I put the letter in the mailbox and walked home again in the sudden dark.
My mother was in the kitchen when I arrived. I told her a little about the weekend at the Mayers’—how tired Mike got, how the sheer business of living took so much out of him. Neither of us had eaten, and we made a big salad and carried our plates onto the back porch.
“You saw that box?” she said.
“It was my sewing machine.”
“Did Lane send it?”
I speared a slice of cucumber and put it in my mouth. It was thin enough to fold with my tongue, and I did that, then poked at the seeds to dislodge them. “Someone else,” I said, and my mother shook her head quickly.
“I’m not asking.”
“You can.”
She looked over at me. “Do you want me to?”
I studied her: her quiet, watchful face. “I guess I want you to want to—to want to know.”
“Of course I want to know.” She reached for her wine and drank a little, the stem of her glass catching a shard of light and glinting as she lowered it again.
“I had a boyfriend there.”
“I thought you might have.” Her fork scraped her plate, and she gathered some lettuce leaves into a small pile and put them in her mouth. We’d made an extravagant salad, a little of everything—asparagus, tiny steamed potatoes, green beans, baby ca
rrots, chopped basil leaves from the plant I’d bought her at the Farmers’ Market on Saturday.
I shifted. A mosquito whined in my ear, then disappeared. It was completely dark outside the circle of light cast by the dim porch fixture. “Did you have a feeling he was going to leave?” I said. “My father? Were there any hints, or did it just happen out of the blue?”
She set her plate onto the porch floor. She lifted her wineglass again but didn’t drink—she held the rim against her bottom lip. “I thought he was going to explode,” she said at last.
“You mean do something violent?”
“No, I mean I actually had a recurring image of his head literally exploding. Which was probably the closest I could come to wanting to kill him. So in answer to your question, I don’t think I had a feeling he was going to leave, but it didn’t happen out of the blue, either. He had a lot of momentum going.” She tilted her glass and drank a little wine, then turned to me and smiled. “To quote one of my clients today, he was not a happy camper.” She bent over, and for an instant I thought she was going to pick up her plate and go into the house. Instead, she set her glass down and sank more deeply into her chair, and something in me settled into place.
I put my glass down, too. “Were you horribly lonely?”
“Not really. More relieved. Hugely relieved, in fact, and of course really angry, too. I had you, though, and that’s what mattered.”
I looked at my hands. She’d had me, but only until she hadn’t. I remembered all those dinners at the Mayers’, all those weekend afternoons. Thanksgivings, when I took her with me. Christmases, when I wanted to go but didn’t. I looked across the porch at her taut chin, the still-young contours of her face. Seven years older than Kilroy. She had something in common with him, the possibility of spending Christmas alone with nothing for company but a big book. And something else: a kind of stillness in the face of being left. She had friends, she had her work, but in some essential way the important thing had already happened to her. I was back, yes, but I didn’t ever want to feel that way, that there was nothing new up ahead.
“Are you lonely now?”
She looked over at me, my mother in her burgundy linen work dress, glasses hanging from a cord around her neck. She shook her head. “Lonely is a funny thing,” she said slowly. “It’s almost like another person. After a while, it’ll keep you company if you’ll let it.”
CHAPTER 42
I sat at the dining room table, the morning sun shining onto my sewing machine. It was a week since my conversation with Kilroy. I’d called the woman whose Marshall Field’s dress I’d altered, and we’d met at Fabrications, where I’d steered her to a lovely cornflower blue silk. I’d drawn her away from the dowdy shape she wanted, instead resurrecting the vision I’d had weeks earlier, when she’d picked up the red silk dress I’d altered for her. A boatneck top over a flared skirt, just right for her narrow-shouldered height. I’d had her buy a couple of patterns, but I was using them more as a starting place than anything else. I had my experience at Parsons to help, although I also felt that I’d left it behind, a bright flag receding in the distance. Sitting in those classes, being encouraged by Piero: I remembered the excitement and knew I’d only scratched the surface. That day I stood with Maté on the busy sidewalk and listened to him pontificate: I want women to wear lime green dresses with white embroidery this summer. I wasn’t going to have that after all.
But I had this: the perfect thing for one Midwestern woman. The skirt was six-gored with a trumpet-flare at the bottom, and I was working on the cutting line, completely absorbed by the question of how to shape it, when the doorbell rang at a little after eleven.
Jamie was on the doorstep. Blond hair hanging by her face, a pink tank top showing her pale shoulders. It would sound better to say we both burst into tears, that we fell into each other’s arms right there, but in fact it was very awkward, the two of us with our arms folded across our chests, standing outside and then standing in the kitchen and finally sitting down, glasses of iced tea gripped in our trembly hands. We talked in the way of two people with something enormous and impossible to speak of: we talked about movies, the weather, a new CD she wondered if I’d heard. Gradually I relaxed. I realized we didn’t have to say everything that morning. Or soon. Or ever.
She stayed for half an hour. Exactly, as if she’d decided in advance. Standing to leave, she asked if I’d like to come for dinner some night. “We take turns cooking,” she said. “You can come on one of my nights, I’m the only one who ever cooks a green vegetable.”
I said I’d like to. Walking to the front door, we passed the dining room. She glanced in at my work, and I told her what I was doing.
“Didn’t I tell you you could make a ton of money sewing?” She smiled and tipped her head to the side. “Maybe I’ll hire you next.”
“What makes you think you can afford me?”
“Hey, I’m rich—I don’t pay rent anymore.”
I looked at her clear green eyes. I reached over and touched her arm, and she glanced away. I said, “Are you going to stay home for a while?”
She nodded.
“How is she?”
“She came home for a visit last weekend. Mixie and Lynn and I said it was like having this very polite houseguest.”
“And your dad?”
She shrugged. “He didn’t say much.” She looked at me and then looked away and grasped her shoulders, her elbows coming together in front of her chest. “I shouldn’t have blamed you,” she whispered.
I shook my head. “It’s—”
“I shouldn’t have.”
We reached the front door. I opened it, and we stood there looking at one another, the moment for putting our palms together suddenly upon us.
I held the doorknob. She kept hold of her shoulders. Out on the sidewalk, a tabby cat stopped to look at us, then trotted away.
“Your dad,” I said. “Does he cook, too?”
She broke into a smile. “Are you kidding? You think we’d let him get away with that?” Her smile widened. “He’s Mr. Taco King. He makes tacos every Sunday night.”
• • •
After Jamie left I called Mike and suggested lunch, then cleaned up the dining room and headed over. He was on the deck waiting, dressed in a short-sleeved blue-and-red plaid madras shirt, tennis hat firmly on his head.
We’d been eating a lot of ethnic food, or as ethnic as it got in Madison—enchiladas and pad thai. Today he suggested the Union terrace. We drove over and I found an easy parking place right on Langdon—graduation was over and summer school hadn’t started yet. We went out to the lake and took the ramp up to the terrace. Mike waited at a shady table while I went inside for deli sandwiches, thinking that the deli sandwiches I’d gotten for us there must number in the hundreds. Back outside I sat next to him, both of us facing the lake.
We didn’t talk much. It was one of those noontimes when all of Madison seemed to be on the lakefront, students and professors and secretaries and eccentrics, sitting or walking in the sun. The lake itself was a deep, deep azure, calm under a windless sky.
I put a straw in his iced tea and positioned it near the edge of the table so he could bend over for a drink. He’d asked for turkey and swiss but I’d forgotten to say no lettuce, and for a while he fed himself amid a shower of chopped iceberg until he asked me to give him bites instead.
He swallowed and looked over at me. “Dirk Nann called yesterday. He said they could use some help. He said I could start with twenty hours a week and then see.”
Dirk Nann was his old boss at the bank, and I tried to contain my excitement. Mike could go on and on about the uselessness of trying to be useful, but I thought going back to the bank would be the best possible thing for him. “Are you going to?”
He made a face. “I thought I’d never go back there. It’s so out there. Meet the public. But I realized the main thing I wouldn’t be able to do is shake hands with people.”
“Which doesn’t
matter.”
He looked at me, something stirring way back behind his eyes. “It does matter. But it’s not the end of the world.”
He motioned for his sandwich, and I held it up so he could have another bite, cupping my hand underneath to catch what fell. His forearms rested on the armrests of the wheelchair, freckles showing between the hairs. I set the sandwich down and put my hand on his bare leg, just above the knee. “Can you feel that at all?”
He hesitated. “No, but I think I’d know it was there with my eyes closed.” He closed his eyes. “Don’t say anything,” he whispered.
I didn’t. I kept my hand where it was, curved over his leg, my diamond catching the light. I breathed in, breathed out again. I looked around while I waited for him to speak. I saw a pair of frat boys strutting by, a barefoot girl with a golden retriever, an elderly woman with a purple scarf around her neck, sitting on a bench in the sun. I thought of the weight of their lives, the long, hidden history each of them carried. That the frat boys were also sons, maybe brothers. That the girl might be from another continent. That the woman had thoughts about people no one on the terrace had ever seen, for reasons we couldn’t imagine. I looked across the water, and there was Picnic Point, a finger of land pointing into the lake. I remembered Stu’s story, of walking across the ice with Mike and Rooster, and I imagined Mike out there, wrapped in a down jacket, huge boots on his feet as he took step after dangerous step in the drifting chill of a December night.
“I’m not sure,” he said at last, opening his eyes. “This’ll sound sick, but sometimes I ask myself, Would you rather be blind? Would you rather be deaf?”
“And what do you answer?”
“Either, but not both.”
