“You think? It’s not every day someone moves to Boston.”
“Thank God, right?”
“At least it’s not you.”
“Why would I move to Boston?” I’d been standing across the room from her, and now I went over and put my hand on her shoulder. “I’m sorry about last week,” I said quietly.
She turned and hugged me. “It’s no biggie. Anyway, I’m sorry, too.”
I thought of what she’d said, how concerned she’d sounded. She had no reason to be sorry.
“So did you go anyway?”
“To the party?”
“Duh.”
A funny smile came over her face, and although I knew exactly where she was going, I had to ask. “And?”
“He passed out on my bed.”
“Drew?”
“Approximately thirty seconds after we lay down. I didn’t know what to do—I was on the verge of going to get his roommates to drag him home. I ended up sleeping on the couch. I mean, it’s one thing sleeping next to someone after you’ve … you know. It’s another to sleep next to a drunk you hardly know.”
I didn’t point out that she wouldn’t have known him much better if they had made love. Fucked. Whatever.
“You’ll never believe what happened the next morning.”
“What?”
“I woke up to the sound of him puking his guts out in the bathroom. The door was open, and when he looked up and saw me standing there he tried to stand up, and he threw his back out!”
We both laughed hard. “That’s priceless, Jamie. I can’t believe you waited a week to tell me this.”
She shrugged. It was I who’d waited a week to ask.
“Come on,” she said. “I got stuff for Bloody Marys. Let’s have one now, before everyone comes.”
“Maybe we should just have Virgin Marys. We don’t want to be trashed when they get here.”
“Why not?” She crossed the old linoleum and yanked open a sticky plywood cabinet. She took out tomato juice, Tabasco, and Worcestershire sauce, then got a bottle of vodka from the freezer. “I’ll make weak ones. They’ll be here soon, anyway.”
I watched her mix the drinks. She was so easy to win back, it made me feel like a monster. “Hey,” I said, “did I ever tell you about the time my mother tried to order a Virgin Mary at brunch at the Edgewater?”
She looked up and smiled. Of course I had, but it was in the tradition of our friendship that stories be told and retold.
“She ordered a Bloody Virgin,” I said, and when she broke into laughter I managed a laugh too, grateful, my face muscles only a little tight.
• • •
Jamie had a typical Miffland dining room, with a pass-through to the kitchen, a bay window looking into the side yard, and a wall of built-ins, in this case a bank of drawers below a pair of glass-fronted cabinets that had been painted so often they no longer closed all the way. Jamie’s parents had contributed an ancient dining room set they’d inherited from Jamie’s grandmother, and once everyone arrived we settled into the heavy dark-wood chairs: Jamie at one end, Rooster at the other, and Bill and Christine opposite me and Stu.
“Stu,” Rooster said over a third helping of eggs. “You’re mine today.”
Stu snorted. “You wish.”
Jamie and I exchanged a glance. Rooster and Stu had a history of competitive eating that could be funny or irritating, depending on your mood. According to everyone but Rooster, it had started at Mike’s ninth-grade birthday celebration, when they’d matched each other slice for slice through one and a half pizzas each. Rooster claimed it had started years earlier, over corn dogs in their grade-school cafeteria.
“I wish?” he said. “You haven’t even finished your first piece of coffee cake. I’ve
got
today, which puts me at a hundred eighty-seven if you count the corn dogs.”
“Wrong,” Stu said. “A, you don’t count the corn dogs, and B,
I’ve
got a hundred eighty-seven
not
counting today. You’re down at a hundred sixty-two, which if you want to look at it logically is really twenty-five nothing, me.” He turned to me. “He’s always padding his stats and it makes me very angry.”
I smiled. I thought of the night before, of Viktor and that guy Kilroy—at least Rooster and Stu liked each other, at least there was that. They ribbed instead of sparred. The one it bugged was Mike: “Those guys aren’t nearly as funny as they think they are,” he was always saying. He probably would have said it again on Memorial Day, on the way back from Clausen’s Reservoir, if he’d driven me home: they’d gone on at some length about how many chips equaled a burger. But he hadn’t driven me home: I’d sat in the back seat of Rooster’s car holding hands with Jamie, none of us saying a word, and now, sitting in Jamie’s dining room almost four weeks later, I realized that it had never occurred to me to wonder who’d gone back for Mike’s car. I knew it was safely in the Mayers’ garage, the old black 280 Z Mr. Mayer’d handed down to Mike, but I couldn’t stop seeing it in the reservoir parking lot, coated with sand and dirt.
“Natural ability will always win over sheer bravado,” Rooster said as he reached for more bacon. “Right, Carrie?”
Everyone was looking at me, and I shook the image of Mike’s car away and managed a lame smile. “You’re both pretty impressive,” I said.
“Which is a fancy word for fat,” Bill added. “In case you guys were wondering.”
Everyone laughed, and Bill smiled self-consciously and then reached over and put a hand on Christine’s shoulder. They’d broken up and gotten back together so many times even they’d lost count, but now that she was leaving he seemed really sad. Spotting them coming up the walk earlier, Jamie had said, “The Beav looks grieved.” He was good-looking—dark and lanky with a sexy silver stud in one earlobe—but he had buck teeth.
Rooster pushed back from the table. He stretched his legs to the side and patted his stomach. “The Spare Tire Spartans,” he said. “Just like Mike said. I’ll go on a diet when he wakes up.”
Everyone was silent. From the living room I could hear the ticking of Jamie’s cuckoo clock, a ridiculous Tyrolean thing for which she harbored a not-very-secret secret affection. Finally Stu said, “So, Boston, huh? You know they talk funny out there. ‘Pack your cah in the Hahvid yad’—like that.”
We all looked down for a moment, all of us but Rooster, who in the angry way he was looking at me when I looked up again told me what I already knew, that we were failing Mike by not talking about him.
“More strawberries?” Jamie said.
And Christine said, “I’ll be packing my cah in the Tufts yad—until I’m so broke I have to sell it.”
There was a little silence, and then Rooster relented. He smiled and said, “Just don’t park illegally—they’ve got The Boot in Boston. Run out of time on your meter and they’ll come along and immobilize your rear end.”
“Ouch,” Jamie said, giving her ass a pat.
“Actually,” Stu said, “there’s a paramilitary siege going on out there. Snipers on rooftops, tanks rolling down the streets. You’d be much safer right here in Wisconsin, dear, you really would.”
“You guys,” Christine said. “I’m really going to miss you.”
Rooster shook his head. “Nah, you’ll have a ball.”
Bill winced. “That’s what worries me.”
It was almost three-thirty, and we’d been sitting for a long time. Jamie stood up and began to clear, and I stretched my arms over my head and yawned, then rose to help her. Carrying plates away from the table, I thought that with Christine gone, Bill would probably fade from the picture: he was already the most peripheral member of the group—last to
join, via his relationship with Christine, but also somewhat retiring, more observer than participant. Whenever I ran into him alone I felt awkward, nothing much to say without the group’s chatter to oil my tongue.
“Let’s do something,” I said to Jamie in the kitchen. “All of us. Go rent sailboards or play volleyball or something.”
“Make like a beer commercial? I could get into that.”
We started back out to where the others were, but the phone rang just as we reached the doorway. “Go ahead,” Jamie said. “I’ll be right there. I vote sailboards.”
I found them sitting in silence, all looking stupefied except Rooster, who’d gotten a second wind and was busy with the remains of the coffee cake.
“Perk up, guys,” I said. “The day is young. What do you say to a little sailboarding?”
“We could,” Christine said, and then Jamie was gripping my arm.
“It’s for you,” she said. “The phone. Mrs. Mayer.”
C
HAPTER
6
Mike had woken up, and now I cried freely. I cried when I hung up the phone, I cried when I felt Jamie’s arms around me, and I cried as everyone came into the kitchen and hugged me, Rooster tightest of all. After Mike dove, the circles on the reservoir had widened exactly in time with my growing sense that something was terribly wrong. The relief I felt now was explosive, like the sudden surfacing of someone from under water, sprays shooting everywhere.
Rooster drove me to the hospital and I kept crying, leaning against the window and looking out at the quiet day. “It’s OK,” Mrs. Mayer said when we’d arrived at the Intensive Care lounge and I’d flung myself into her arms—so glad he’d woken, so glad I was glad. “It’s OK.”
Dr. Spelman came in a little later. He was the neurosurgeon, and his cool detachment had us all cowed, even Mr. Mayer. He stood in the lounge doorway, his name in black script above the breast pocket of his white coat, and he talked about caution, about how much we still didn’t know. “We need to watch him very closely,” he said.
I sat beside Mrs. Mayer, listening as intently as I could when all I really wanted was to leave them where they were and run to Mike’s room. I wanted his eyes on mine, just the sight of his open eyes again, but the Mayers had been in with him for nearly an hour and now we had to wait.
“That’s number one,” Dr. Spelman said. “Number two is this, and I know it’ll sound obvious, but you’d be surprised how hard a thing it is to
keep in sight. You’ve been waiting and worrying for four weeks, and now that he appears to be resuming consciousness, you’re understandably thrilled. The last thing
he
knew, he was having fun with his friends. You can’t expect him to be happy or relieved or grateful to find himself alive.”
“He’s waking up to bad news,” Mr. Mayer said. “Even though his waking up is good news.”
“Well put,” the doctor said.
Mrs. Mayer nodded eagerly. “Thank you so much, doctor. We can’t tell you how grateful we are.”
Dr. Spelman smiled. “Don’t thank me,” he said. “I didn’t have a thing to do with it.”
When he was gone Mrs. Mayer took my hand and held it, the fingers of her free hand busy stroking my knuckles. “I had this feeling last night, after we left,” she said. “I think even yesterday he was starting to come out of it. Did you notice? I thought he seemed a little lighter.”
I shook my head as another sob made its way up through my chest. I felt sick from all the crying, but calmer, too, convinced I’d been under something heavy myself, a spell of numbness, even apathy. Now everything was different. It was over. He was going to make it. I put my face in my hands and wept.
When we were allowed back in, the Mayers told me I could go alone if I wanted, or with Rooster, but I wanted Mrs. Mayer with me.
Mike lay on his back, no change apparent from my previous visit. The ventilator whooshed and sighed, whooshed and sighed. His arms and legs were heavy and pale, and his eyes—his eyes were closed.
“He’s sleeping,” Mrs. Mayer whispered. “Really sleeping. It’s normal.”
I nodded.
“We’re going to turn the den into a bedroom for him,” she said. “Because of the stairs.”
I felt new tears stream down my face, and without looking at me she took my hand. “There’s the TV already in there, and we’ll hook up his stereo, too. Maybe we’ll have to build a new bathroom. His dad thinks we should wait and see, but we have to be ready
before
Michael is.”
“That’s true,” I said.
“Mike,” she said. “Michael.”
At first I thought I was imagining it, but his eyelids fluttered a little and then opened. He looked straight at me, his gray eyes surprisingly clear. Could he see me? See anything? His eyes closed again, and he slept.
• • •
For the next several days I went to the hospital whenever I could—before work, after work, sometimes, almost guiltlessly, during work, explaining to Miss Grafton that I’d be right back and then vanishing for an hour. Sometimes he never opened his eyes while I was there, but on others he seemed quite alert, seemed to recognize me, and I began to talk to him—just “Mike, it’s me,” and “I love you,” and “Everything’s going to be OK.”
The doctors tested him. They searched for sensation and motion, for reflexes, but below the chest it was as if he were dead. “At least the injury happened at the lower part of the cervical spine,” one doctor said. “At least he’ll be able to breathe on his own.”
And it was true. Although I felt there was some faulty logic in being glad about any of it, the word “quadriplegic” encompassed situations that were far worse than Mike’s. “Think of it this way,” said another doctor. “With an injury at the C5–6 level he’s technically a quadriplegic, but he’ll function like a paraplegic without hands.” I understood what he meant—that Mike would be able to use his shoulders and upper arms, that with mechanical devices strapped to his forearms he’d be able to manipulate things—but I couldn’t banish the gruesome image: Mike with his hands chopped off, blood pouring from the stumps.
“You hurt yourself,” we told him. “Remember the reservoir? You dove and hit your head.” It was terrible to see the anguish on his face, terrible not to know how much he understood. The breathing tube prevented him from speaking, so even once he was more alert he couldn’t ask questions. One doctor told him she’d pinch the tube closed for a moment so he could speak around it, but when the time came the noise he made was unintelligible, a whispered note of misery, a cry for help without words.
Finally the Mayers decided he had to hear it all, a full description of the accident and what it had done to him. We agreed that I would wait in the lounge, then go in afterward. Visiting hours hadn’t officially started yet, and I had the place to myself. Out in the corridor, nurses in white passed by, orderlies in blue. Finally Dr. Spelman strode past, heading for Mike’s room, and I understood that at that moment Mike knew: the Mayers had asked the doctor to let them tell Mike what he’d lost, but they wanted him to explain how Mike might be able to get a little of it back—surgery to fuse his cervical spine, and then months and months of inhospital rehab.