At lunchtime I took her to meet Mike. I was nervous, although I wasn’t sure which of them I hoped would impress the other. Actually, it wasn’t that: I was nervous over whether there was a single me I could be in the presence of them both.
We borrowed the van and drove to James Madison Park. Lake Mendota glittered in the sun, aquamarine with foamy white peaks on the little wavelets. Sailboats raced along in a light wind. The lake at last, the great blue spill of it. I breathed in deeply, as if I could breathe in the lake, the entire blue sky.
We sat at a picnic table and ate sandwiches I’d made, the same table I’d stood on with Jamie to watch Paddle ’n’ Portage nearly a year ago.
“This is so beautiful,” Lane said.
“Madison at its best,” Mike said. “This exact moment in May.”
Lane smiled. “ ‘Life, London, this moment of June.’ ”
“Huh?” he said with a grin.
“Virginia Woolf. Miss Wolf loved her.”
She’d told him a little about Miss Wolf earlier, and he nodded. “Well, that makes sense,” he said after a while. “Woolf and Wolf.”
I was afraid she’d laugh at him—or worse, not—but she smiled and said, “That’s what I always think.”
We ate our sandwiches. I’d brought a thermos of iced tea and Mike’s special cup, and from his place at the end of the table he leaned over and drank. A guy with blond dreadlocks walked past and gave us the peace sign, and Mike and Lane exchanged an amused look.
“So you grew up in Connecticut?” he said. “Were you a sailing type of girl—summers at the marina and all that?”
Lane shook her head. “My corner of Connecticut is pretty landlocked. Besides which, I’ve always really hated that crap. When I was ten my mother decided I should try to come out of my shell, so she sent me to this sailing camp in Maine where I spent the entire two weeks hiding in my bunk reading Hardy Boys books.”
Mike smiled. “Not Nancy Drew?”
“Nancy made me ill. Or maybe it was her roadster.”
We all laughed. I bit into a carrot stick and chewed happily, the sun hard on my back and the lake in front of me, a feeling of peace at hand.
“Why were you in a shell?” Mike said.
Lane set her sandwich down. “Probably because my father had died a few years earlier.”
“Oh, I’m sorry,” he said. He hesitated a moment and then looked at me. “You know, I always used to sort of hope your father would come back so I’d be able to stand up for you and tell him off.”
I was surprised. “You did?”
“ ’Fraid so,” he said with a self-conscious smile.
Lane leaned forward. “Why did you think Carrie wouldn’t be able to stand up for herself?”
He didn’t respond at first, and for a moment I feared she’d offended him. But then he shrugged and said, “That wasn’t an issue. Standing up for her was what I felt I’d been born to do.”
It was hard for me to swallow, and I took a long drink of my iced tea. I’d always known this, but for so long it had discomfited me. Why? Why did it feel so different now, so good? I wanted to stand up for him, too, to be there for him—every cliché in the book was what I wanted. There was only one way, though: to be there, period.
Lane left two days later, the empty duffel folded into her shoulder bag. We were both a little teary when we hugged goodbye, and as I watched her plane back away from the gate I wondered when I’d ever see her again.
I’d only gotten about halfway through putting away the clothes she’d brought me, and when I got back from the airport I continued, meeting each garment with a sense of reunion, as if it had been years since I’d seen it, and it was an old, good friend.
One thing I hadn’t asked for was the green velvet dress. It was hanging in my closet in the brownstone, and though I knew Lane or Simon would send it to me anytime, I found myself wondering if I even wanted it
anymore. I recalled the December day I went to Bergdorf’s, the eerie quiet as I moved from expensive dress to expensive dress, from dream to dream, imagining myself as someone who would wear such things. Maybe that was it: I’d made a dress for a life that wasn’t right for me. As I put my clothes away, I thought I might just leave the dress where it was, a talisman for some future occupant of the brownstone as she forged a life for herself in New York.
I
had
asked for my silk nightgown and robe, and here they were. After all those months in my bottom drawer, plus the journey in Lane’s duffel, they were crumpled and sad-looking, and I set up my mother’s ironing board and ironed them carefully, the hot, dry scent putting me firmly back in my old apartment. I remembered so clearly how trapped I’d felt then, but I remembered it from the outside: the feeling but not how it felt, not exactly. Was it something I could penetrate? The question scared me, and I thought the answer must be yes.
I finished ironing and hung the nightgown on one hanger and the robe on another. I put my arm between them and moved it back and forth, the feel of the fabric as exquisite as I remembered. There would come a day when I would wear them, I was sure of it—a day when I wouldn’t worry about the reaction I’d get. I would wear them happily, proudly. At that future point, would I remember this moment? Would I look back and think:
That was when I knew I was home?
My oldest jeans were at the bottom of the pile. Folded tight, they felt funny, a little stiff, and when I shook them out a thin blue thing fell onto the floor. I bent to pick it up.
Parapraxis and Eurydice. Poems by Lane Driscoll
. It was Lane’s book—her chapbook. She’d never said a word about having brought it. She’d bought wine for my mother, and flowers at a stand one afternoon, but this she’d left behind for me to find once she was gone. I flipped it open and saw that there was something written on the title page, an inscription.
For Carrie
, it said.
Always my friend
.
C
HAPTER
40
At the top of the Mayers’ basement stairs I hesitated. I could hear the dryer pounding, smell detergent and heated cotton. Mike was in his room resting, and I started down, wishing there was something to knock on. This was Mrs. Mayer’s domain.
She was standing at a long table, a huge basket of laundry at her feet. In front of her everything was in neat stacks, socks sorted, shirts folded just so. It was warm and steamy.
“Excuse me,” I said.
She looked up and frowned a little. “Oh, hi.”
I continued down the stairs until I’d reached the concrete floor. “Can I talk to you? About next weekend?”
She pursed her lips. Memorial Day was nearly upon us—Memorial Day itself, the first anniversary of Mike’s accident, but also Memorial Day weekend, which she and Mr. Mayer traditionally spent up in Door County, at an annual conference put on by his office. It had been from Door County that they’d been summoned to the hospital last year, pulled off the golf course and flown down in a twin engine that belonged to one of the other VPs. I was in the emergency room waiting area when they arrived, Mr. Mayer running in ahead of her, holding his glasses to his face so they wouldn’t slip off.
“What about it?” she said. She reached into the basket, laid a pair of plaid boxers on the table, and folded them into a neat square. “It’s already decided—I’m not going.”
“I know,” I said. “But Mike really wants you to.”
She frowned. “You don’t have to tell me what Mike wants. I know John Junior will be here, but that’s not enough. Things can happen.”
“Like what?” I’d asked Mike what was holding her back, and he’d said, “The fact that I might drop my rattle, waah, waah.”
“Well, autonomic dysreflexia,” she snapped. “You probably don’t know about this, but there are a number of things—even just his bladder or bowel getting too full—that can send his blood pressure through the roof really fast. People can die if they don’t get the right treatment
immediately
.” She reached into the basket again, this time picking up a striped dress shirt of Mr. Mayer’s, which she sprayed with a mister and then rolled into a ball and set aside.
“Are there symptoms?” I said. “Of the blood pressure rising?”
She had another pair of boxers in her hand, and she sighed and set them down. “What are you getting at, Carrie?”
“I’d like to stay for the weekend so you can go. I’ll come on Friday and stay till you get back Tuesday morning. You can tell me everything I need to know. I’ll be responsible.”
Her mouth tightened.
“I want to do it,” I said. “You can hate me for the rest of your life, but that doesn’t change the fact that I’m here now, I’m back, and I want to be part of Mike’s life. And I’m going to be.”
“Carrie Bell,” she said. “Well, well.” She smiled a little. “Mr. Mayer does want me to go.”
“Then go,” I said. “Don’t you want to? Spend a weekend away, go antiquing? Have a martini on Saturday night? You always loved going.”
She patted her hair and looked down for a moment, her hand at her chin. “John Junior can do the catheter,” she said.
I went over on the Friday afternoon. I baked a meatloaf Mrs. Mayer had left and put out a salad that was already in the bowl and needed only to be dressed. John had a friend over, and the four of us ate in the kitchen, the little countertop TV tuned to a baseball game on ESPN. John was already deep in training for his senior-year hockey season, and he had three helpings of meatloaf and at least a quart of milk.
“That’s rude,” his friend said when John found a container of cottage cheese in the refrigerator and spooned a large mound onto his plate.
“He’s growing,” Mike said, and he gave me a big grin from across the table.
After dinner John and his friend went out. I cleaned up and then
joined Mike in the living room. “What’ll we do?” he said. “Rent a video? I’m wiped, but you could go get one.”
I opened my mouth to protest that I didn’t want to leave him, and he gave me a look. “Just go.”
I drove as fast as I could, grabbed something I couldn’t have said the title of two minutes later, and hurried back. It wasn’t until I’d parked that I could get myself to slow down. I didn’t want to be like Mrs. Mayer.
Saturday morning after breakfast we sat in the kitchen waiting for the doorbell. Mike’s attendant was due to arrive at nine, to help him shower and go to the bathroom—“administer his BP,” as Mrs. Mayer said, his bowel program. It involved rubber gloves, lubricating jelly—Mike wouldn’t let anyone in his family do it.
I sat on the deck while they were busy. Finally he wheeled outside, his hair still wet, a sheepish smile on his lips. “Remember when BP stood for Beautiful People?” he said. “The times, they have changed.”
We got into the van and drove over to the State Capitol. The Farmers’ Market at the end of May: there were tender lettuces, spears of rhubarb, tiny carrots and potatoes. We joined the crowd circling the stands. I bought some potted herbs and a jar of honey for my mother. A farmwife with worn-out fingers sold us a massive bear claw, and I tore off little bits and fed them to Mike, then licked the almondy crumbs from my fingertips. Green apples, big purple bulbs of garlic. It was still too early for sour cherries.
Back at home Mike was exhausted. A simple excursion could do him in. He took a nap while I worked on dinner, chicken stew with dumplings from Mrs. Mayer’s recipe box. We ate early and then went for a walk. The sky was hazy, colorless. We passed people working in their gardens. They might not actually know each other, but they understood who each other was. Turning back toward the Mayers’, we came upon a man playing catch with a little girl. On his back there was a baby in a backpack who laughed a toothless little laugh every time he caught the ball.
When we got back we could hear the shower running upstairs, John’s voice hitting the high notes of the Sears jingle from TV. He came downstairs a little later with his hair blown dry.
“Hot date?” I said. He looked so much like Mike at seventeen, rangy but broad-shouldered, the same thin face.
“Yeah, where are you going?” Mike said.
John grinned.
“I think John might be a lady-killer,” Mike told me.
“It’s all in the Z,” John said. He meant the 280 Z, the car Mr. Mayer had handed down to Mike. John drove it now.
“Don’t sell yourself short,” Mike said. “That cologne you’re wearing counts, too.”
I suppressed a smile. John smelled a little like a drugstore.
“Hey, that’s my personal musk,” John said.
Mike rolled back a few feet. “The hell it is.”
Sunday we went over to Rooster and Joan’s. She called him Doug, which no one had called him in all the years I’d known him. “Doug, hon, would you put some Doritos in a bowl and bring them out?” Rooster liked it: being called Doug, being called hon, putting Doritos in a bowl. Before we left he led us into the second bedroom and showed us a little wooden cradle he’d already made, painted white with a bunny decal at one end.
Monday was Memorial Day. We hadn’t made plans, and I woke early, impelled to come up with some activity—shopping, a park, a movie, something to get us past the middle of the day.
Mike had other ideas. After his attendant left he rolled into the kitchen where I was cleaning up and said, casually as you please, that he wanted to drive up to Clausen’s Reservoir.
He watched me nonchalantly, waiting for my response. My heart pounded. How could he go and not come back a little more broken? How could I? He sat there in his chair, face still pink from his shower, his mustache newly trimmed. He’d been waiting for this, I understood. For a long time.
There was a lot of traffic. We drove past farms and small clusters of houses, interchanges where narrow roads ran to rural towns. There was a holiday countdown on the radio, but with a new spin. “Out of Order,” it was called, with the songs played out of order. “How dumb is that?” Mike said.
The parking lot at the reservoir was crowded. Lots of jeeps and motorcycles—fool’s wheels, as Mike and Rooster had always said. I pulled into a handicapped spot and cut the engine. Out the window I looked at the hill that hid the water from view, grassy and choked with Queen Anne’s lace. “What do you want to do?” I said. The path up the hill was narrow and rocky; it was not accessible.