C
HAPTER
1
When something terrible happens to someone else, people often use the word “unbearable.” Living through a child’s death, a spouse’s, enduring some other kind of permanent loss—it’s unbearable, it’s too awful to be borne, and the person or people to whom it’s happened take on a kind of horrible glow in your mind, because they are in fact bearing it, or trying to: doing the thing that it’s impossible to do. The glow can be blinding at first—it can be all you see—and although it diminishes as years pass it never goes out entirely, so that late some night when you are wandering the back pathways of your mind you may stop at the sudden sight of someone up ahead, signaling even now with a faint but terrible light.
Mike’s accident happened to Mike, not to me, but for a long time afterward I felt some of that glow, felt I was giving it off, so that even doing the most innocuous errand, filling my car with gas or buying toothpaste, I thought everyone around me must see I was in the middle of a crisis.
Yet I didn’t cry. The first days at the hospital were full of crying—Mike’s parents crying, his brother and sister, and Rooster, maybe Rooster most of all—but I was dry-eyed. My mother and Jamie told me it was because I was numb, and I guess that was part of it, numb and terrified: when I looked at him it was as if years had unwound, and I’d just met him, and I couldn’t stand not knowing what was going to happen. But there was something else, too: everyone was treating me so carefully and solicitously that I felt breakable, and yet I wasn’t broken. Mike was
broken, and I wasn’t broken. He was separate from me, and that was shocking.
He was in a coma. Thanks to the combination of drought and a newly banked-up shoreline, the water in Clausen’s Reservoir had been three feet lower than usual. If he woke up, it would be to learn that he’d broken his neck.
But he didn’t wake up. Days went by, and then it was a week, ten days, and he was still unconscious, lying in Intensive Care in a tiny room crowded with machines, more than I ever would have imagined. He was in traction, his shaven head held by tongs attached to weights, and because he had to be turned onto his stomach every few hours to avoid bedsores, his bed was a two-part contraption that allowed for this: a pair of giant ironing-board-shaped things that could sandwich him and flip him. Visiting hours were three p.m. to eight p.m., ten minutes per hour, two people at a time, but it seemed we’d no sooner get in to see him than the nurses would ask us to leave. It was as if, merely body now, he belonged to them.
Near the nursing station there was a small lounge, and that’s where we mostly were, talking or not talking, looking at each other or not looking. There would be five of us, or ten, or twenty: a core group of family and close friends, plus Mike’s co-workers stopping by after the bank had closed, the Mayers’ neighbors checking in, my mother arriving with bags of sandwiches. There was a rack of ancient magazines by the door, and we offered them to each other now and then, just for something to do. I couldn’t read, but whenever the single, warped issue of
Vogue
came my way I flipped through it, pausing each time at an article about a clothing designer in London. I’m not sure I ever noticed her name, but I can still remember the clothes: a fitted, moss green velvet jacket; a silver dress with long, belled sleeves; a wide, loose sweater in deep purple mohair. I was getting through the evenings by sewing, a pair of cotton shorts or a summer dress every two or three days, and those exotic images from London kept appearing in my mind as I bent over my sewing machine, reminding me at once of the hospital and the world.
The two-week mark came, and when I woke that morning I thought of something one of the doctors had said early on, that each week he was unconscious the prognosis got worse. (“Unresponsive” was the word they used, and whenever I heard it I thought of myself in the car on the way to Clausen’s Reservoir, not answering his questions.) Two weeks was only one day more than thirteen days, but I felt we’d turned a corner that shouldn’t have been turned, and I couldn’t get myself out of bed.
I lay on my side. The bedsheets were gritty and soft with use; I hadn’t changed them since the accident. I reached for my quilt, lying in a tangle down past my feet. I’d made it myself one summer during high school, a patchwork of four-inch squares in no particular order, though I’d limited myself to blues and purples and the overall effect was nice. I’d read somewhere that quiltmakers “signed” their work with a little deviation, so in one corner I’d used a square cut from an old shirt of Mike’s, white with a black windowpane check. I found that square now and arranged the quilt so it was near my face.
He had to wake up. He had to. I couldn’t stand to think of what a bitch I’d been at Clausen’s Reservoir—what a bitch all spring. It was like a horrible equation: my bitchiness plus his fear of losing me equaled
Mike in a coma
. I knew as clearly as I knew anything that I’d driven him to dive, to impress me. I squeezed my eyes shut and tried to remember when everything between us had been fine. February? January? Christmas? Maybe not even Christmas: he’d given me plain pearl earrings that were very pretty and exactly what I would have wanted just a year earlier, but I found them stodgy and obvious, and I felt dead inside—not because of the earrings but because of my disappointment in them. “Do you like them?” he said uneasily. “I
love
them,” I lied.
It was June now. I had the day off work, and at last I got up and made coffee, then started laying out the pattern for an off-white linen jacket I’d been planning to make, first ironing the crumpled tissue and then moving the pieces around on the length of fabric until I was satisfied. I pinned them and cut them out with my Fiskars, then went back and did the notches, snip by snip. I chalked the pattern marks onto the fabric, and by late morning I was sitting at my Bernina winding a bobbin, entranced by the fast whir of it, by the knowledge that for hours now I’d be at the machine, my foot on the pedal.
I’d been sewing for eleven years, since my first home ec class in junior high, when I’d made an A-line skirt and fallen in love. It was the inexorability of it that appealed to me, how a length of fabric became a group of cut-out pieces that gradually took on the shape of a garment. I loved everything about it, even the little snipped threads to be gathered and thrown away, the smell of an overheated iron, the scatter of pins at the end of the day. I loved how I got better and better, closer and closer with each thing I made to achieving just what I’d hoped.
When the phone rang at eight-thirty that evening I’d taken a few breaks for iced cranberry juice, but mostly I’d sat there sewing, and the sound woke me from the work. Surprised by how dark it had gotten, I
pushed away from the table and turned on a light, blinking at the jacket parts that lay everywhere, the slips of pattern and the pinked-off edges of seams. I was starving, my back and shoulders knotted and aching.
It was Mrs. Mayer. She asked how I was, told me she’d heard it might rain, and then cleared her throat and said she’d appreciate it if I’d stop by the next day.
The morning sun slanted down the sidewalk, aiming my shadow in the direction of Lake Mendota. My car was already hot to the touch, and I unlocked it and rolled down the windows, then strolled to the end of the block and stood looking across Gorham Street at the water, still almost colorless under the early sky. Mike loved Lake Mendota, the way the city hugged its curves. He liked to pull people into debating the relative merits of it and Lake Monona, Madison’s other big lake: he’d reel off a list of ways that Mendota was superior, as if it were a team he supported.
Mendota and Monona. “Sounds like bad names for twins,” a girl from New York had said to me once, and I’d never been able to forget it. I laughed, but I was a little offended: she spoke so smugly, flipping her brown hair over her shoulder and raising her chin. I hardly knew her—she was in my freshman American history class at the U—but thinking about her five years later, I remembered this: that she’d owned a jacket I’d coveted, pearl-snapped and collarless like something made of cotton fleece, but fashioned from smooth black napa leather, soft as skin.
Across the street two guys sauntered by. They both wore sunglasses with tiny mirrored lenses—one guy’s tinted blue, the other’s green. “No fucking way,” I heard one of them say.
I went back to my car. It had a baked vinyl smell, and the seat scorched my legs. I always took the same route to the Mayers’, an easy six- to eight-minute drive up Gorham to University and then up the hill, but today I headed away from Gorham instead. I crossed the isthmus that divided the lakes, and when I got close to Lake Monona I drove up and down the streets parallel to it, braking occasionally to look at some of my favorite houses: Victorians painted colors you didn’t see in other neighborhoods, fuchsia and teal and deep purple. At a little lakeside park I got out and walked down to the water, where a cloud of gnats swarmed over the grassy green edge. Both lakes could lift my spirits—silvery blue when the sun was low, or vast and frosty in winter—but today they seemed flat and ordinary.
Unable to put it off any longer, I returned to my car. At the hospital
I’d felt Mrs. Mayer watching me and watching me, waiting for me to break down; when the familiar shape of Mike’s house came into view a little later, she was watching again, standing at the living room window with the curtain held aside, as if she’d heard I was on my way but didn’t believe it.
I got out of my car. The house was big and white, a perfectly symmetrical colonial with black-shuttered windows and an iron eagle on the black front door. I hadn’t been over since the accident, but the yard was as tidy as ever, the lawn so well trimmed I couldn’t help thinking of something Mike liked to say, that his father came outside every morning and greeted each blade of grass by name. I thought of Mr. Mayer mowing, the smell of grass everywhere while he tried not to wonder if Mike would survive, and my stomach tilted with panic.
Mrs. Mayer opened the door. “Hi,” she said with a smile. “I’m glad you’re here.”
I tried to smile back. At the hospital it had been hard to look at her wrecked face, but this was almost worse: she was pale and drained, as if she’d finally run out of tears.
“Let’s go into the kitchen, shall we, dear?”
I followed her through the large, old rooms: past couches where Mike and I had sat together, tables where I’d casually piled my schoolbooks. It was my house, too, in a way.
The air conditioning was blowing hard, and when we got to the kitchen Mrs. Mayer said she’d make tea. I sat at the big oak table while she filled her kettle and got tea bags from a glass jar painted with hearts.
“Mr. Mayer can’t get comfortable this summer,” she said. “I try to keep the house cool, but every evening he comes in and complains it’s stifling. It’s colder than the hospital, don’t you think?” She pulled her sweater close, a bouclé cardigan she was wearing over a flowered shirtwaist dress, its “self-belt” knotted in the front. It was the kind of ageless, styleless dress she always wore, the very kind of thing I’d first liked about her, that she was happy to look like a mom.
“It is chilly,” I said.
The kettle whistled and she poured from it, then brought our cups to the table. “Let me get you your lemon.” She crossed to the refrigerator and took one out, then cut it into wedges. She spread them on a flowered saucer and set them before me. “Would you like a bun? We’ve been given so much food I don’t know what to do with it all.”
“Actually, I’m OK.”
She pulled out the chair opposite me and sat down. She ran her hand
over her hair, and I noticed that her perm had grown out, and gray roots were visible along the part line. She blew on her tea and cleared her throat. “Are you going today?”
I picked up my cup. I thought about trying to explain about yesterday—about the two-week marker, about how our reaching that point had scared me—but I knew she was aware of it, too; and scared, too; and that she’d gone anyway. I blew on my tea and took a sip, the lemon in it tart and satisfying.
“Having visitors means a lot to him.”
I met her glance and then looked away. Nothing meant anything to him, that was the problem, the tragedy—that and the fact that his spinal cord had suffered an injury that could leave him paralyzed for life, quadriplegic. Thinking that way, though, that my visiting would mean nothing, made me feel churlish, a dweller on the bad side.
“Carrie?”
She was staring at me, her still-young face lined with concern.
Of course I’ll go
, I wanted to say. I wanted to take my thumbs and run them over her forehead and cheeks. When I spoke, though, I sounded distant, even to myself. I said, “I have to work, but I’ll go afterward.”
She nodded, then reached across the table and took hold of my left hand. She touched the tiny diamond on my ring finger. “Michael was so happy the day he bought this, it was like something he’d made at school, he was so proud. Julie made a remark, about how it wasn’t that big or something, and his face just fell. He got that hangdog look on his face and he said to me, ‘Mom, do you think Carrie’ll like it?’ ” She let go of my hand. “ ‘Do you think Carrie’ll like it?’ He loves you very much, dear.”
I looked away from her. “I know.”
We drank our tea silently. After a while I told her I wanted to go up to his room, and I climbed the stairs and turned down the hall, going past framed photographs of all three Mayer kids, school pictures mixed in with casual shots, two or three of Mike in hockey gear, his helmet off so you could see his wide grin.
At his door I hesitated, then went in. There was a musty, unused smell, and I wondered, with the air conditioning going so strong, if his windows had been opened at all since the accident. I crossed to the bed and sat down, running my fingers up and down the ribbed blue bedspread. On his bedside table there was a picture of me from high school graduation, and I picked it up and looked at it. It was a familiar picture, but the girl in it seemed only tenuously connected to who I was now. Her
hair was up in a way I never wore my hair anymore, and she wore more eyeliner than I’d had on in ages, but mostly she looked sure of herself, sure she’d stay on Mike’s bedside table for years and years and be happy about it.