“Carrie,” he said. “Jesus. Shit happens.”
“I guess.”
We were silent. He sat there in his nice plaid shirt, which I was sure his mother had ironed. Things seemed tense between him and his mother. As we left the house earlier she called, “When do you think you’ll be back?,” and I heard him growl faintly.
We split a cookie and then left the restaurant and headed toward the van. The afternoon sun felt good on my face, something clean about it, about the air. The sidewalk was empty and I glanced in at shop windows as we went by. In one, a linen slip dress hung from a rack, and I paused. At my side Mike stopped, too. It was a nice grayed purple, some tiny crochet work along the straps.
“That’d look good on you,” he said.
I looked down at him, and when our eyes met a worried look came over his face. “Should I not have said that?”
“No, it’s fine.”
“Are you sure?” I nodded.
A jet sounded high above us. I looked up at the line of white it trailed. I watched it loosen and fade, soon to be absorbed by the deep blue of the sky.
Mike pressed the lever on his wheelchair, and we started off again. “Here we go,” he said. “Mike Mayer takes Monroe Street.”
Kilroy and I talked. Twice a day, every two days, it didn’t matter. Being together required being together, and our conversations became grave and lugubrious. “I love you” was an idea that demanded physical proximity. Back in the fall, telling him about my life in Madison had been like handing him object after precious object to hold for safekeeping. Now I told him about seeing Mike, and it was like taking those objects back, one by one.
He didn’t have much to report. One evening he told me about a mangy dog he’d seen wandering through a road construction site just off West Street, eleven o’clock at night. Three-legged, the dog was. Shuffling along. Then suddenly it keeled over, dead.
I asked if he’d been going to McClanahan’s and he said, “Of course I have.”
I felt split in half. When I was with Mike, I thought of Kilroy. When I was on the phone with Kilroy, I thought of Mike.
His hard time was late afternoon. He was tired by then, and his neck hurt, and he had to spend time in bed, lying on his side to avoid pressure sores from being in the wheelchair for too long. He could transfer himself with a board—incredibly slowly, incrementally, burdening his shoulders as he inched along—but on harder days he let his mother move him. If I happened to be there I watched while she planted her legs and went to work, silent with concentration, her face full of strain.
Late one afternoon he and I sat in his room together, right around the time he usually lay down. I knew he was exhausted: I’d taken him out to lunch and then to the mall for some new shirts. His face was pale under the bit of sun he’d gotten along his cheekbones.
“Tired?” I said.
“What gives you that idea?” He smiled, and I thought of what a sweet smile he had, easy and wide and full of good humor. At lunch earlier he’d been full of smiles, telling me a long story about a joke he and Harvey had played on one of the orderlies, a guy who had somehow earned the nickname of Bags.
“Can I transfer you?” I said. I’d been meaning to ask, though I hadn’t decided on today. “I think I know how.”
“It’s not about thinking,” he said. “Believe me.”
“What isn’t?”
I turned and there was Mrs. Mayer, looking in on us. She did that a lot: poked her head in to ask if he needed anything, stopped in to remind him to have a drink of water. It was like the old days, when she’d invent excuses to make sure we weren’t having sex.
“Transferring me,” Mike said. “Carrie offered to do it.”
“She can’t possibly,” Mrs. Mayer exclaimed. “That’s out of the question.” She faced me with her mouth pressed into a thin line. “It’s quite complicated. If you lose him for a second—”
“She wouldn’t
lose
me,” he said, rolling his eyes. “Obviously she’d be careful.”
“People have to be trained,” she said. “It’s a question of training.”
“Then train her,” he snapped. “Or better yet, why don’t you both just get out of here and I’ll do it myself?”
Mrs. Mayer clasped her hands and brought them to her chest. She held them together in front of her flowered blouse as if she were cupping a tiny, wounded animal. “Oh, Mike,” she said. “Oh, sweetheart.” Her eyes were wide, and I thought she would cry. I couldn’t look at him, but I felt him off to my side, sitting in his chair, rage massed in his useless body.
Then it was over. Mrs. Mayer came into the room and said, “All right, let’s train her. Carrie, this is the best workout, you’ll see.”
It was harder than it looked. It took more strength than I would have guessed I had—I couldn’t fathom how she did it. I stood in front of the wheelchair and wiggled my hands under his arms and around his back, where I locked them together. Bent close, I felt his ear against my face, smelled his soap and shaving cream and the musky, intimate scent of his body. I pulled him up, bit by strained bit, until we were both more or less upright. The burden of his body was enormous. I knew I had to swivel him around, but I was terrified to move, terrified he’d knock me over—my arms were shaking. Finally I just did it, swung us around until the bed was behind him, a dance of dead weight. I lowered him, and behind me Mrs. Mayer sighed extravagantly. I stood there panting, then let his upper body down, our eyes meeting as his head touched the pillow. At last I raised his legs and smoothed out the fabric of his pants so he wouldn’t be lying on any creases.
“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.
C
HAPTER
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 once 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.