“Get out at least.”
I got down and went around to help him. All around us there were kids skateboarding, whole Rollerblading families, guys showing off their muscular, oiled bodies to girls wearing bathing suits you could carry in a Band-Aid box.
“Remember Mr. Fenrow?” I said. Fenrow had taught the one class we took together senior year of high school, Family Life.
“Yeah.”
I reached into the van for his hat and settled it on his head so the brim shaded his face—he wasn’t supposed to get sunburned. “Remember what he said to Mimi Baldwin that time?”
He wrinkled his nose. “I’m not sure.”
“There was that camping trip he organized for seniors—come to think of it I don’t think it ever happened our year. But in class one day when he was trying to get people to sign up she asked if we were supposed to bring bathing suits, and he said, ‘That should be easy enough—two Band-Aids and a cork.’ ”
Mike snorted. “Guess
why
it never happened.” He pushed the lever on his chair and began to move forward. “We’ll get a pop,” he said. “Then we can go.”
The refreshment stand was at the far side of the parking lot. By the time we got there Mike was sweating; he looked unwell. Nearby, there were several picnic tables under corrugated plastic shelters, and I got him to go wait at one. I took my place in line and glanced back at him, thinking he looked impossibly vulnerable, spastic legs sprouting awkwardly from his loose shorts.
Two women came to stand behind me, and after a while I realized they were talking about him.
“He looks really hot,” one of them said.
“Poor thing,” said the other.
“It seems like he’d be a lot more comfortable if he’d stayed home.”
I turned around and looked at them, women in their late thirties, in wide-strapped bathing suits topped by sarongs so their legs wouldn’t show. I said, “Don’t you mean
you’d
be more comfortable if he’d stayed home?”
They gave each other horrified looks.
“I’m so sorry,” said the first one.
“Is he with you?” said the second.
“No,
I’m
with
him.”
I felt sweaty and irritable as I carried our sodas to the table. We drank them under the bright shade of the plastic shelter, neither of us saying much. When we were done Mike asked me to get some hotdogs, and I stood in line again, thinking he didn’t want the dogs so much as he wasn’t ready to leave.
Finally we started back toward the van. When we arrived at the path over the hill, Mike stopped. He wheeled around so he could look at me.
“The helicopter landed right there,” I said, pointing at the clear space where the road led into the parking lot. “You were still on the pier, where Rooster’d pulled you up.”
I stared at the space, thinking back. It took twenty-eight minutes from the time the woman at the snack bar placed the call. The helicopter dropped from the sky with a huge racket, its blades ratcheting around and around. Standing there by Mike, I remembered how it had seemed to bounce as it landed. I remembered Rooster running to meet the paramedics, I remembered Jamie’s hand in mine.
“What were you thinking?” Mike said.
“That it was my fault. That if I hadn’t been mad at you I would have kept you from diving.”
“Oh, Carrie,” he said.
“Oh, Mike. Oh, everyone.”
That evening we watched TV. The house was dark but for a single lamp near where we sat, me on the living room couch and Mike just to my side. John was out again, and the Mayers weren’t due back until morning. Mike fell asleep shortly after nine, his head slumped forward. When he woke a little later he was embarrassed.
One thing he couldn’t do was get in and out of his clothes by himself—he could do the top but not the bottom. “Lower extremity dressing,” as they said in occupational therapy. Actually he could, but it took about an hour.
We went into his room and I unbuttoned his shirt. He got it off and transferred onto his bed, where I eased the shorts down, rolling him from side to side to get them off.
“All set?” I said. He slept in his underwear, the catheter tube running down his leg to the collection bag.
“Yeah, I’m fine. I was wondering, though—” He hesitated. “Would you go put your pajamas on and come sit with me? Just—like a proper slumber party? For our last night?”
I went up to Julie’s room, where I was staying. I’d brought a short, flowered nightgown—a giant T-shirt, really—and I got undressed and put it on.
I tapped lightly on the door as I went back into his room. I sat in the armchair near his bed. Outside, a car zoomed by, the sudden radio and then quiet. Teenagers, maybe even John.
“Remember cruising?” he said. “What was the point, anyway? Was it drinking?”
“It was its own point.”
In the hall Mrs. Mayer’s grandfather clock struck ten. I looked at Mike, lying there with the head of his bed elevated, his arms half-bent. He turned his head so he could see me. “If I asked you to do something would you do it?”
“What?”
He looked embarrassed. “I wish you’d take your nightgown off. I want to see something.”
I felt unsteady for a moment, blood rushing to my face. I wanted to look away but didn’t. He stared into my eyes. “Nothing you haven’t seen before,” I said, but he didn’t smile.
“Please?”
I stood up. He watched soberly from the bed, a little furrow in his forehead. I reached for the hem of my nightgown. It wasn’t cold, but my arms were covered with goosebumps, and I hesitated, not wanting to go on. At last I pulled the nightgown over my head and dropped it on the chair behind me.
I was in my underwear. I crossed my arms over my breasts and then let them fall again. My nipples puckered. I didn’t know what to do with my hands, how to hold them—I clasped them together in front of me, then wiped them against my thighs to dry them. Mike stared—just stared, absolutely nothing visible on his face but the subtlest tightening of his chin.
“I feel a little weird,” I said at last, and he sighed and looked away.
“It’s OK,” he said. “I’m sorry, you can get dressed again. I felt nothing. That’s what I wanted to know, and I felt nothing.”
I pulled the nightgown back over my head. Nothing. To have your sexual self frozen, locked away: it was almost easier to imagine my limbs without motion. Arousal was so involuntary. You couldn’t force it on yourself, it just arrived—crept up or burst in. And then one day it didn’t. I thought of nights in my apartment, Mike slipping between my thighs, the little moan he made when he came.
He was staring at the wall. After a while he lowered the head of his bed until he was flat on his back. “There,” he said.
I went over to the side of the bed. He met my eyes with his, then looked away. It was a narrow bed, perhaps a little wider than a regulation twin. “Can I sit here for a minute?” I said.
“Yeah.”
I sat down. The blanket scratched the backs of my legs, and I shifted my weight and pulled my nightgown further under me. The overhead
was blazing. My back was to him, and I twisted partway around so that my thigh lay parallel to his body and I could look back and see his face. Across the room, the poster of Lake Mendota hung in its silvery frame. It had been photographed from somewhere near the Union, Picnic Point curving in from the left. I closed my eyes and tried to remember our little place there, the room made by trees where we’d first made love.
He coughed.
“Are you comfortable?” I said. “Should I go upstairs now?”
“No, stay,” he said. “Stay with me a little longer.”
I nodded. The night was so quiet I could hear the faint thum of a moth lighting on the window screen. “There,” Mike said, and he lay there, and I sat.
C
HAPTER
41
My mother’s house was quiet, sliced into sections of dark and light by the afternoon sun. I’d turned down Mrs. Mayer’s offer of a lift home, and I was sweating lightly from the walk, my shoulder sore from where the strap of my bag had pressed into it.
A large cardboard box sat under the oak desk where my mother kept mail and things. Tossing my bag toward the bottom of the stairs, I knelt by the box and saw my name in big Magic Marker letters. The return address was in a ballpoint scrawl, 188W18NYNY10019. All on one line, like code for something. Kilroy.
I got a knife from the kitchen and pulled the box out from under the desk. I cut it open, and there was my Bernina.
My Bernina, sent to me by Kilroy.
He’d packed it carefully, with foam blocks in the corners to hold it tight, not an inch of give for movement, breakage. There was no note, just the machine and, wrapped in bubble wrap and wedged in tightly, my photograph of the Parisian rooftops.
I sat next to the open box and put my face in my hands. It was terrible to think of him approaching the task, how he’d probably thought of it and then put it out of his mind and then thought of it again, hoping all the while that I’d come back before he could actually follow through. His expression as he bought the box, carried it home, cut the foam to size. In my imagination I reached for him and he turned away, his mind made up to
do
this thing.
I hauled the machine upstairs and set it on my desk. I found a rag and dusted the outside, then took off the free-arm cover and cleaned the feed-dogs and the underside of the stitch plate. I cleaned the hook race and oiled it, then sat down with a scrap of fabric and sewed a wavy burgundy line with the thread I’d used for Kilroy’s corduroy shirt, still on the second pin where I’d left it. The machine ran beautifully.
My throat ached. I wanted to cry but didn’t want to have the sound of crying in my voice when we talked. What was I going to say? It was past time for this conversation.
At five o’clock I went into my mother’s bedroom to use the phone. It was six New York time, and he answered on the first ring.
I said, “I thought, I was going to, I would’ve …”
And he said, “I figured you’d want it.”
Then neither of us spoke for hours, weeks. I held the phone loosely but my palm grew slick anyway, and I had to pass the receiver from hand to hand. “I feel terrible,” I said at last.
“For whom?”
“Kilroy,” I said. I hesitated a moment, then said, “For me, for you. For us.”
“So you’ve destroyed me,” he said.
“No.”
“Maybe you have.”
His voice was flat—flat on
So you’ve destroyed me
and flat on
Maybe you have
. My chest ached, as if I’d taken a huge breath but couldn’t let it out.
“The thing is,” he said, “you really don’t know. You’ll never know.”
“Kilroy,” I said. “Please don’t do this.”
“Do what?”
I was silent. I knew this was a front, that he was terribly hurt. But to say so would hurt him more. I said, “You know, I really meant it when I said you could come here.”
“And I really meant it when I said I couldn’t.”
Another silence, and I felt myself move toward crying. I pulled back. It wouldn’t be right to cry, it wouldn’t be fair: it would suggest I thought I was feeling more than he was, when I knew I wasn’t.
“It sort of reminds me of lemmings,” he said.
“What?”
“The idea of my going to Madison.”
I thought of lemmings, those little rodents that committed mass suicide in Norway or somewhere, running headlong off cliffs because all the other ones were. Madison as the edge of the world, because he liked
the traffic noise in New York. Yet I knew why he really couldn’t leave: the avenues of New York were his arteries, the streets his veins.
“Actually, it turns out lemmings aren’t trying to die,” he said. “Did you know this? They’re blind or something, they just don’t know what’s up ahead.”
I felt impatient—only Kilroy could turn a breakup conversation into a disquisition on suicidal rodents.
“I once knew someone who thought lemmings were people,” he went on. “It was like he’d missed the part about them being two inches long or whatever and only tuned in on the big run off the cliff. ‘That’s terrible!’ he said. ‘Why doesn’t someone try to stop them?’ ”
He laughed, and I joined in, a little halfheartedly. “Who was that?” I asked idly, not caring, certainly not expecting an answer.
“My brother.”
“What?” I felt queasy. “I didn’t know you had a brother.” Dread gathered along the edges of my body, ready to invade.
“I don’t anymore,” he said. “My brother—he dead. That’s from
Heart of Darkness
, you know: ‘Mistah Kurtz—he dead.’ You’ve read
Heart of Darkness
, haven’t you?”
I lowered myself onto my mother’s bed and began to tremble, sick with confusion, disbelief, rage. “Kilroy.” I felt as if the bed were moving, and I put a hand out to steady myself. “You’re telling me this now?”
“What a coincidence.”
I dropped the receiver onto the bed. I picked it up again. “Kilroy, my God. When? How old was he? How old were you?”
“He was twenty-one, I was twenty-six. It happened fourteen years ago.”
On March 20th. That weekend, meeting his parents—they’d wanted him to stop by because of the anniversary. Was that why we’d gone to Montauk? To avoid the cream-colored card with its sad, muted plea?
Won’t you come by and have a drink with us? It would mean so much to your father
.
“He had leukemia,” Kilroy said. “He’d had it on and off since he was ten.”
I shook my head, as if he could see me, as if I could see him. How carefully he’d made sure I couldn’t see him! “Your parents,” I said. “That day we—”
He broke in sharply. “I don’t want to talk about my parents.”
I felt chastened. “Kilroy,” I said after a while. “I’m so sorry to hear about this—I wish you’d told me before.”
He snorted.
“What was his name?”
“What difference does it make?” he snapped. Then he softened: “You wouldn’t believe me, anyway.”
“What do you mean?”
“His name was Mike.” He laughed. “Seriously. Isn’t it all so crystal clear now? Isn’t it just too perfect? Two people, each on the run from a tragedy named Mike. Cry or puke, take your pick.”