People around us moved toward the shoreline, yelling and cheering, and Jamie and I climbed back onto the table to see over the crowd. I thought of the bitter look Rooster’d given me about Chicago, and though it terrified me, I had to ask myself: would I have gone with Jamie and Stu if he hadn’t been there to stop me?
“Go!” Jamie yelled. “Go!”
“Who are you yelling for?” I asked her.
“No one,” she admitted.
The first two guys were out of their canoe and running with it before I’d even seen them stop paddling. They’d inverted the boat so they were holding it over their heads, and they’d taken off, one in front of the other, legs pumping.
“Mike and I were going to do it this year,” Rooster said suddenly. “We were going to surprise you guys.”
I looked down at him. Sweat dripped down his flushed face, held his light blue polo shirt to him in damp patches.
“What?” he said. “We were. You know Mike—the man with the plan? He made a training schedule for us. He printed up a copy for me, must have been early last fall. We were going to start with running, then do weights. You know how he is, he had the whole thing figured out. We were going to buy a used canoe as soon as the lake thawed.”
I hadn’t heard a word about it, but it didn’t surprise me. Rooster was right: Mike was persistence itself. If he’d decided to do Paddle ’n’ Portage, he’d have done everything in his power to prepare himself for it. It wasn’t about competition, though he could be fiercely competitive; it was more a way of looking at life. A style of thinking. It was never too soon to plan something, and the more details you could nail down, the better. That weekend we went to Chicago after graduating from the U, he must have figured out options for every hour. “And what kind of candy are you going to get at the late-afternoon movie on Sunday?” I joked on the drive down. “Raisinets, of course,” he said with a smile. He didn’t mind being teased. It was sort of like how he teased me about my memory, but in reverse. For him, it was all about the future. For me, the past.
“So why didn’t you?” Stu said.
Rooster stared at me. “Mike dropped the idea,” he said, shrugging as if it were all a mystery to him. Then he shrugged again, and all at once I was afraid: he was
acting
baffled, but something was coming.
“He just dropped it?” Stu said. “Doesn’t sound like Mike.”
“Well,” Rooster said, “I think there was something else on his mind. I think he was actually really
worried
about something.”
My face filled with heat. This couldn’t be happening. After a moment I got off the table and walked away. Free of the crowd, I stopped and leaned against a tree. The bark felt rough under my thin T-shirt. I looked out at the lake, Picnic Point across the water, the anchored sailboat that marked the turning-around point of the race.
“He’s sorry,” Jamie said. She’d come to stand in front of me, her fingernail at her mouth again. “He really is, Care. Look at him.”
Rooster was sitting at the table now, his forehead resting on his palms.
“Let’s
us
do something tonight,” she said. “Go to a girl movie and then stop off somewhere for huge, disgusting sundaes. After you visit Mike—what do you say?”
I looked at her: at the strands of hair by her face, at the wrinkle of concern across the bridge of her nose. She wore a flirty, backless sundress, and I felt touched by her, by how clear she was to me—how she wanted to look cute and available, how she wanted to help me.
“Please?” she said.
“I don’t think so.”
Small lines appeared by the sides of her mouth. “Well, will you come and watch the end of the race with me? Without those guys?”
I reached for her hand and laced my fingers between hers. “I can’t,” I said. “I really can’t. Just go with them, OK? And I’ll call you tomorrow?”
She frowned and looked away.
“First thing tomorrow,” I said. “I promise.”
Once they’d left, I went back to the picnic table and sat down. I watched the end of the first heat and then the beginning of the second—watched without watching. The future and the past. I couldn’t think about the former, and the latter was a minefield of old pleasures and regrets. I remembered the night before the accident, Mike lying on my couch in old gym shorts while I made dinner. From my tiny kitchen I could see him perfectly: drinking a beer, scratching his balls if he felt like it, flipping through a magazine. Flicking the TV on with the remote. Flicking it off. And what was I doing? Washing lettuce, peeling a cucumber, checking the baked potatoes, forming hamburger into patties so he could carry them down to the hibachi on the driveway and grill them. And hating myself because none of it felt right anymore. For so long I’d thought of him as necessary, ballast that would keep me safe. Now the ballast was holding me down, holding me
back
—I wanted lightness, freedom. I started crying and he was off the couch and holding me in a minute, and I hated that, too, the easiness of it, the false comfort. I couldn’t stand how clearly I could see from one week into the next, and years down the line.
The stragglers of the second heat were coming in and dragging their canoes out of the water, and I stood up and started walking away. I thought of Mike planning to enter the race, and all at once I remembered him sitting on the seat of a rowboat at Lake Superior one summer, oars
crossed over his tanned legs, and the particular, private smile he gave me as I came down the dock to join him. I closed my eyes and I was practically there, at Lake Superior, the sun shining through leaves to dapple the floor of the boat and Mike’s legs. I felt the boat tip as I climbed in, smelled the warm-water smell, greenish in the August heat. A bird trilled and then fell silent. Something bothered me, though, and gradually, with great resignation, I understood what it was. Another memory pressing in, of the night before the accident: he left right after our silent dinner, and in bed later, alone, I hated him for that, too.
A guy was coming toward me with a cautiously friendly look on his face, as if he thought he knew me but wasn’t sure. He had light brown hair and wire-frame glasses, and he wore a retro shirt, burgundy and cream nylon in wide vertical stripes. “Carrie? Carrie Bell?”
I nodded, and he gave me a wide smile. “It’s Simon Rhodes. From Mrs. Eriksson’s French class, in twelfth grade?”
I clapped a hand to my mouth. “I’m so sorry. Simon, you look totally different. You look great,” I added, and he laughed before I had time to be embarrassed.
“I look human. I decided to sacrifice my beauteous locks for a more up-to-date look.”
At seventeen he’d hidden behind a curtain of hair. He sat a few rows over from me, spent whole class periods doodling in a notebook. Walking by his desk once on my way to conjugate some verbs on the blackboard, I glimpsed a caricature of Mrs. Eriksson that was so cuttingly accurate I could never really look at her in the same way afterward.
“What’s up?” I said to him now. “How are you? Do you still live in Madison?”
He shook his head. “New York. I’m visiting the ’rents.” He turned and watched a couple of middle-aged men trudge by with a canoe. “What exactly is going on here, anyway?”
I laughed. “Paddle ’n’ Portage, don’t you remember?”
“Paddle ’n’ what?”
“Portage.” I said it again, with a French accent: “Por-tahj.”
“Ah, por-tahj. As in carry.” He laughed a little. “So why aren’t you doing it?”
“Huh?”
“Well, you’re pretty much destined for it, aren’t you? Carrie—as in carry?”
I laughed, but I thought of Mike and Rooster’s name collection, then of Rooster at the picnic table with his head in his hands.
“So tell me,” he said. “What ever happened to Carrie Bell?
Dites-moi ce que tu fais maintenant
. Are you still in touch with Jamie Fletcher? I seem to recall a certain inseparableness.”
“She was just here,” I said. “Twenty minutes ago.”
“And Mike Mayer? Cutest couple in the senior class?”
I blushed: even then it had made me cringe. The yearbook staff had made us pose for a picture, and it was the only picture of the two of us I didn’t like—holding hands and looking moony. Mike thought it made us both look retarded.
“We’re engaged,” I told Simon.
“When’s the happy day?”
I looked at the lake. A last couple paddled their canoe along the shoreline, evidently just for fun. I watched them stroke, the guy in back, a black nylon tank shirt falling from his muscled shoulders.
“Carrie?”
I turned back. “Mike’s in the hospital. He was in a diving accident six weeks ago and he broke his neck.”
“Oh, my God,” Simon said. “I’m so sorry.”
“Thanks.”
We stood there without saying any more for what seemed like an age. The park was emptying, the last spectators climbing the hill to watch the last competitors row on Lake Monona. Simon toed the grass with his shoe, a snazzy black fisherman’s sandal with a tire-tread sole. Finally, I couldn’t stand it anymore.
“I should get going.”
“Are you on foot?” He hesitated, the look on his face saying he didn’t want to intrude. “We could walk together.”
“OK,” I said, though I didn’t know where we’d go, or what we’d say, or why I was agreeing. I thought for a moment and then tipped my head in the direction of Mansion Hill. We started off, walking side by side, both of us silent. At North Pinckney we turned and headed up the hill. The mansions were mostly pretty shabby, huge brick or stucco structures cut into student apartments, but then we turned again and came upon the beautifully maintained one that was Madison’s swankiest small hotel—the place where Mike had always said we’d spend our wedding night, then get on a plane the next morning and fly to the Caribbean. Walking past, I thought of how nice it used to feel to hear him talk like that, and then about how he was probably watching the clock from his hospital bed, waiting for me to arrive.
We wound up walking down Langdon, past the Deltas and the
Epsilons—Greek row. I couldn’t count the number of parties I’d been to there, the number of times I’d stood in one of those frats holding a plastic cup of beer, no way to move because there were so many people so close.
“So where’d you go to college?” I said.
He looked embarrassed. “Yale.”
“Excuse me.”
“At least I didn’t say ‘a little school in Connecticut,’ as certain of my acquaintances have been known to do.”
“At least there’s that.”
We both smiled, and he tipped his head toward the building we were passing. “You went here?”
“Alas.”
“Were you in a sorority?”
“Please—I would’ve had to have dyed my hair blond and had half my brain cells surgically removed. Actually, Mike rushed, but then at the last minute he pulled out. His dad was really into it, but Mike realized he’d be living with a bunch of guys out of
Animal House
and he decided no way. He lived at home all four years.”
“I’m always doing that,” Simon said. “Rushing around and then changing my mind about all kinds of guys.”
I studied him, his face still and serious. “Are you gay?”
He nodded.
“Are you out?”
“You mean with my parents?” He grinned. “I broke the news last summer, right after graduation. ‘Thanks for flying all the way out here, Mom and Dad. Oh, by the way—I’m gay.’ Actually it doesn’t seem to bother them much. I’m the youngest of six and I think they’re just glad to be done paying college tuition. They’re very mellow these days. My father says to me this morning, ‘Well, Simon, are you enjoying your social life?’ Which is about the closest he’s ever come to asking any of us if we were getting any.”
I smiled. “It sounds like you get along OK with them. Did you ever think of moving back here?”
He stopped walking. “Look at this.” He held his arms aloft and twitched them back and forth, shaking his head violently. “That’s me shuddering at the thought.”
We found a shady table on the Union terrace, and we sat and talked—through two cups of coffee each, and then sandwiches, and then ice cream cones. I found myself telling him more than I’d told anyone else:
about my slow cooling toward Mike before the accident, my horrible numbness afterward, the despair I felt now.
“What are you going to do?” Simon said.
“What do you mean?” I asked, though I knew: Was I going to be strong and good? And devote myself to Mike? Or wasn’t I? A feeling of tightness in my chest that it was even a question. Of course it wasn’t a question! But it
was
. I thought of Rooster again, all the looks he’d given me: at the hospital, at Jamie’s, earlier today. He knew it was a question. I remembered the day the Mayers explained the accident to Mike and I went in afterward.
Don’t worry
, I’d told him. What had I promised? The tightness in my chest increased, and I exhaled hard to try to get rid of it.
“I don’t know,” I told Simon.
He shook his head. “I can’t even imagine. You must be in such pain.”
I nodded and tears stung at my eyes, but rather than look away he continued to look at me, his face full of compassion. We’d been at the same school for four years, but he was a stranger. So many people I hadn’t known, hadn’t bothered with. I’d gone through high school never thinking about other possibilities, other choices.
“I hope you won’t think this is weird,” he said, “but I’m really glad I ran into you today.”
“I am, too.”
We’d been sitting for hours and it was obviously time to leave. We pushed back from our table and strolled through the Union, then said goodbye out front. I felt open and elevated—more like the person I wanted to be than I’d felt in months.
I watched him cross the street, then called his name.
He turned and smiled, the sun glinting off his glasses.
“I like your shirt!” I yelled.
It was after three, past time for me to go to the hospital. I started toward home. I walked back up Langdon, back down Mansion Hill. James Madison Park looked trampled after the morning’s activity.
The sun had moved behind the highest branches of the sycamore outside my living room window, and my apartment was fairly cool. I drank a glass of ice water and then took off my shoes and settled on the couch. My feet were striped with dirt from the straps of my sandals, but I didn’t get up to wash them. On the coffee table a thick issue of
Vogue
sat waiting, and after a while I picked it up and opened it. I’d never really read the articles before, except the ones about movie stars, but now I turned to the beginning and decided to read instead of just looking at the
pictures. There was an article about two women designing sportswear out of a loft in New York, another about a textile factory in Italy. I could read, take a shower, eat the watermelon I’d bought the day before. Sit outside when my porch fell into shade. The day would go by whether I went to the hospital or not.