“All right, pal,” he said at last, standing. He had a thatch of gray hair, and he wore a spotless white T-shirt and blue gym shorts over low white socks and brand-new Nikes. His calves were as ropy as his muscular forearms. So many times I’d watched Mike at hockey practice, Coach yelling,
Come on, you guys—you couldn’t beat your sisters skating like that
. Mike all padded up, helmet on, stick taped and ready. Hockey players are all but indistinguishable once they’re on the ice, but even without a numbered jersey I knew him, his hips and the shape of his butt and the way he tucked his head.
He watched Coach from the bed, purplish marks under his eyes, his atrophied legs bent spastically. “Thanks for coming,” he said.
Coach looked at the floor. He hesitated a moment, then went over and patted the bed, a foot or so away from where Mike’s feet were. “You’ve always been a fighter,” he said. “With this girl’s help you’re going to do OK.”
He gave Mike a wave and then headed for the door, resting a hand on my shoulder as he passed but carefully avoiding my eyes.
“That was nice,” I said when he was gone.
“Coach?” Mike said. “Yeah.”
He closed his eyes, and I pulled a chair close and settled into it.
With this girl’s help
. Mrs. Fletcher drifted into my mind, still a girl at forty-seven. And Ania, already so surely a woman. She and Viktor seemed to have passed a milestone my friends and I hadn’t encountered yet, and not
just because they were older and married, either. Maybe it was being away from their home, from their younger selves—we might work at banks and libraries and car dealerships, but somehow the trappings of adulthood were merely that for us, merely trappings: the truth about us seemed to lie in the fact that we were still closest to the people we’d known since childhood. It would always be too easy to remember Saturday nights driving up and down Campus Drive six or seven to a car, passing around contraband bottles of wine and listening to the driver obsess about how important it was not to spill because his parents would definitely be able to smell it when they used the car to go to church the next morning.
“What are you thinking about?” Mike said.
He was watching me closely, and I realized I’d zoned out, that he’d said something a moment earlier that I hadn’t even heard. “Coach calling me a girl.”
“Is that so bad? He’s known you since you were a girl—he probably feels fatherly toward you.”
“Well, they do say nature abhors a vacuum.”
Mike hesitated and then laughed uncertainly: it wasn’t like me to allude to my father, let alone flippantly.
“What about you?” I said. “Do you think of me as a girl or a woman?”
He moved his shoulder. “I think of you as Carrie. Actually, I don’t even really think of you as Carrie. I think of you as ‘her.’ Or I just think of you.”
I reached for his arm and ran my palm up and down it, then took his limp hand in mine.
“How do you think of me?” he said.
“You mean as a boy or a man?” I smiled. “A
guy
or a man?”
“I mean
how.”
“As you. Sometimes Mike, but mostly I just sort of have a picture of you and that’s thinking of you.”
He bit his lip. “Where am I in the picture?”
“Front and center.”
“Look at me, Carrie.”
I looked into his face, his worried eyes. The frame of the halo cast a faint gray shadow onto his cheek.
“Am I here?” he said. “Am I paralyzed?”
“No,” I lied. Then I looked away. “Well, sometimes. I guess sometimes you are.”
He closed his eyes for a moment, and when he opened them again
he was on the verge of tears. “I’d give anything for this not to have happened.”
“I would, too.”
Again he closed his eyes, and now tears seeped out, a single trail moving down each cheek. I set his hand down and began stroking his forearm again. I wish I could say I felt selfless then, unaware of myself. That I was thinking only of him, or that I wasn’t even thinking. But I was:
This is me doing the right thing. This is me being brave and strong for Mike
.
C
HAPTER
11
The silk was like nothing I’d ever worked with before, slippery and so fluid it was almost as if it were alive, slithering from my table onto the floor, sliding off the deck of my sewing machine if I was careless when I pulled the needle out, if I didn’t have my hands right there to coax it to stay.
I wasn’t careless much. I’d never been so cautious, in fact, not even as a beginner—so slow with pinning, so careful with knots at the beginning and end of each seam. And the care felt good, as if the fabric itself were teaching me how to sew all over again, the right way this time.
Cutting out had been terrifying, each stroke of my scissors a pathway to disaster, but once I began sewing I got into a nice, slow rhythm, and I grew to love the way the fabric felt, all the different textures it had: grainy to the tips of my fingers, satiny to the backs of my hands, heavy at the beginning of a seam, light at the very end. I didn’t tell anyone what I was doing, and at night, home from the hospital, I often stayed up until one or two in the morning, a sea of light gold around me, coming together piece by piece.
I made the nightgown first. It was basically two bias-cut panels, A-shaped but just barely, joined along the sides. Simple but not easy—in fact, the word “simplicity” had never seemed so loaded, though it was a Butterick pattern. Hand-stitching the rolled edge at the neck took forever, and then the straps nearly finished me off, strips so thin that when it came
time to turn them right side out I had to use a turkey skewer. The first time I tried it the skewer poked through the fabric and made a jagged tear, so I started over with a new piece and this time wrapped the tip of the skewer with just the tiniest bit of cotton from a cotton ball, a trick that actually worked, to my surprise.
I was tempted to save the hem until I’d done the robe, but that seemed wrong somehow, a cheat—I should finish the gown and then do the robe, keep to some kind of order. I had a scary moment trying the gown on, thinking it was going to be too tight, but it wasn’t: it was tight, but not too tight, tight the way a well-fitting bias-cut garment is always tight, the fabric smooth and close, hugging me just to the tops of my thighs, where it gradually loosened until at the bottom it was wide enough to twirl when I turned. I finished the hem late one night and then hung the gown on a hanger and put it in my closet, where it would be the first thing I saw when I woke the next morning.
During those days of sewing I felt distracted a lot. At work I’d suddenly come to myself, a book in hand, a wall of shelves before me, and I’d actually have to shake my head to get myself clear of whatever stage of the sewing I’d been at when I’d stopped the night before. Viktor shot me his usual looks of concern, and I gave him sad smiles, let him think it was all just too hard, having Mike in the hospital—that that was my problem.
Of course, that was my problem. I knew that every minute, sewing or not sewing, with Mike or not. And he got lower and lower, sometimes barely registered my presence, other times spent whole evenings complaining about little things—why no one had brought a new radio, how tired he was of the pictures we’d put on his dresser—because the big things were too big to complain about, just too big.
Part of rehab was psychological, and one evening his parents told me that he was refusing to see his therapist, alone or in the group meetings on Tuesday afternoons. They were worried. They’d even gone to see the therapist, and although he’d told them that Mike’s rejection of him was normal, they weren’t comforted.
Visiting hours were over, and I was sitting with them in the main lobby, talking. Mr. Mayer seemed especially distressed. He appeared to regard the whole rehab process as something akin to an assembly line: muscle tone, mind tone; physical therapy, occupational therapy, psychotherapy; one step after another leading to wellness, or at least to Mike’s going home.
“It’s a stumbling block, is how I see it,” he said. “He’s got to get beyond this so he can move on.”
Mrs. Mayer frowned. “Imagine someone coming around and trying to get you to talk about your feelings. You wouldn’t like it, either.”
“I don’t need it.”
“What makes you so sure Mike does?”
Mr. Mayer shook his head emphatically. “Lord, you’d think he’d just broken his leg, that attitude! It’s part of the treatment.”
Mrs. Mayer turned to me. “Do you think he’s depressed, dear?”
I nodded, and suddenly I remembered a day with him early in the previous spring—a beautiful day, cloudless, almost soft. It was a Saturday, and after a late breakfast we left my apartment and went to James Madison Park, where we gravitated toward the little playground there, full of children. We sat side by side on a bench and watched, and I let myself slip into a reverie of separateness, of welcome solitude, where I was alone in a place I’d never been before and happy about it. I’d been having such dreams for a while and had mastered the art of slipping away without so much as a flicker to alert him to my desertion. But this time he seemed to know. He glanced at me once or twice, then put a hand on my knee, removing it when I looked at him. “What?” I said, and he shook his head. He stared at the children. “I guess I’m kind of depressed,” he said at last, and then we sat there without speaking: I sat there without speaking. Later that same day we went to a movie, and sitting in the dark I actually fought the urge to reach for his hand, as if my body still needed to be trained in the new habits of my mind.
Mrs. Mayer was waiting for me to say something. A pair of doctors walked by, and one of them happened to look right at me just then—a kind-looking older man with thick white hair. Feeling his eyes on me, I thought for a moment that he understood what we were going through, and I felt touched, even comforted. Then I realized: we were just another case to him, the periphery of some illness or accident. His understanding was a given, even a barrier. We were alone—alone together and also alone within ourselves, each of the three of us, just as Mike and I had been that day at the park.
And yet, Mike was doing well physically—all the rehab people said so. He was sitting up for hours at a time, had even managed twice to wheel himself all the way from his room to the physical therapy hall. A few evenings after my talk with Mr. and Mrs. Mayer, I arrived for my visit
and found him not lying on his bed but sitting in his wheelchair, a first for after dinner, a heavy strap holding his torso in place.
“Wow, you’re up,” I said. “I can’t believe it.”
He gave me a look.
“What?”
“Isn’t it ironic? I’m a
low
quad, and yet I’m
up.”
A week ago he’d reported that he’d heard one of the physical therapy assistants use the phrase “low quad” in reference to another patient with a relatively low cervical-spine injury. The way it irritated him, I was glad he hadn’t heard anyone say “good quad,” an oxymoron I’d heard back when we were waiting for him to awaken.
I looked around the room. All the Mayers were there: Mr. and Mrs. in chairs opposite the foot of Mike’s bed, Julie and John Junior on the floor to the side.
“Hard day?” I said.
“Just the usual.”
“You seem tired.”
“I am.”
Mr. and Mrs. Mayer exchanged a glance, and I moved closer to Mike. “Are there too many people here?” I whispered. “Do you want me to go?”
“If you want.”
“What do you want?”
“Nothing I’m going to get, that’s for sure.”
I edged over to the bed and half sat on the foot of it. Sitting against the wall, Julie looked sallow, as if she’d spent the summer in a cave—dressed all in black, her skin the color of ivory. She was twisting a thick silver ring around her finger, twisting and twisting. The last few times I’d seen her she’d smelled of cigarette smoke, a sudden, dirty smell when I’d gotten close. Next to her John Junior wore cutoff sweatpants and a T-shirt and looked so much the picture of health, his face still slightly flushed from whatever exercise he’d been doing, that I wondered if it wasn’t his appearance that was bothering Mike, making him think of all he’d lost.
“I’m practicing,” Mike said.
I turned and saw that his face had softened, as if he’d decided to try. I felt a huge sympathy for him, just for the work of being visited. Why should he be cheerful? Why anything? The doctors had asked us to report any oddities in his personality, indications of some lingering effects of the head injury, but how could we call moodiness an aftereffect when he could hardly be anything else?
“Practicing?” I said.
“Spending more time in the chair.”
“Is that good?”
“It’s tiring.” He gave me a one-cornered smile. “How screwed up is it to find sitting tiring?”
“Pretty screwed up.”
It was almost eight, and the Mayers began glancing at each other. Leaving was harder when you were in a group, the bunch of you walking out the door without him.
Julie and John were quarreling about something, I could tell. They spoke softly, but there was something in how little they were moving their mouths that told me there was a disagreement going on.
Mike seemed to sense it, too. He reached for the wheels of his chair and slowly rotated himself until he could see them. “What are you guys talking about?”
Julie and John exchanged a glance, and a look of warning came over Mrs. Mayer’s face. She stood up and planted her hands on her hips, fingers splayed over the fabric of her navy blue wrap skirt.
“Forget it, Mom,” Julie said abruptly. “I’m not lying.” She stood up and faced Mike, her long brown hair hanging in sheets by her face. “We’re going out for dinner,” she said to him, “the four of us, I’m sorry. And John wants to go to that disgusting German Inn, but they have nothing I can eat.”
Mike gave John an appraising look. “So?”
“So I like their pork chops,” John said, coloring a little. “They have salad.”
Julie frowned. “Yeah, an entire head of iceberg with, like, one measly cherry tomato. Yum.”