by Ann Packer
There were no cars out front, and I rang the doorbell nervously, wondering what I’d do if no one answered—if I’d come back again or not. How much did I want to see him, how much catch myself in the act of doing the right thing? I waited what felt like a long time, and then I heard a faint humming and a voice repeating the same two words over and over, though I couldn’t make them out. Finally I opened the door, and there he was.
Sitting in his wheelchair, his knees angular inside loose khakis, his arms on the arms of the chair. His face was slightly pink, and suddenly I understood that he’d been yelling “Come in, come in” because he couldn’t open the front door himself. His face was thinner than before, very pale and bristly at the upper lip with an unfamiliar mustache.
At the sight of me his eyes widened and then narrowed, and his lips pressed into a sidelong crimp. He opened his mouth to speak, then closed it again. A deep flush climbed from his neck to his forehead, and at last he said, “I guess this is what’s called being speechless.”
I took a step inside and hesitated awkwardly, then bent to kiss his cheek, not quite missing the edge of the mustache. “I could have called, but—” I broke off. “Is this too weird?”
He stared at me. “It’s just that I’ve imagined this so many times …” He shook his head. “Never mind, that was stupid. Look, come in or something, let’s not just stand here at the front door.” He gave me a half smile. “Or sit, either.”
He moved a lever that operated the wheelchair. It was motorized, unlike the one he’d had in rehab, at least the one I’d seen. He rolled backward and I closed the door, then followed him through the living room, where the furniture had been rearranged to open a pathway.
In the kitchen he stopped. “You caught me during my mid-morning lull. Breakfast has been accomplished, my eleven o’clock tepid tea break is yet to come, and I’m not on the computer at all today.” He moved forward a last foot or two and came to rest at the table, which looked as it always had except that there were four chairs around it instead of five.
I pulled out a chair opposite him and sat down. “The computer?”
“I’m hooked up to the system at my dad’s office. The exciting world of insurance. We’ve got a nice little racket going where I bang around on the computer here for ten or twelve hours a week, and they pay me fifteen dollars an hour, all so I won’t feel completely useless.”
“Mike.”
“What?”
“Nothing. I’m sorry.”
“You’ve already said that.”
My face burned. The refrigerator began to hum, and I was relieved by just that tiny alteration in the way the room felt.
“Forget it,” he said. “That was uncalled for. How are you—what brings you to Madison, the Athens of the Midwest?”
“I thought it was the Berkeley of the Midwest.”
“We fell from the running when some guy in Ann Arbor started walking around naked.”
We both laughed, harder than was really called for.
“I’d offer you something to drink,” he said, “but you’d have to get it yourself.”
“I don’t mind that,” I said. “Can I get you something?”
He directed me to a special glass with a built-in straw and said he’d have some water. I got myself some, too, and sat down again.
“So?” he said.
“Why am I here?”
He smiled. “Let’s stick with why you’re in Madison.”
I took a deep breath. “Jamie. Lynn got hurt and I came home because of that.”
“Hurt?”
I licked my lips. “Assaulted.”
He’d been leaning over the glass, his mouth around the straw, and now he lifted his head again. “Lynn Fletcher was assaulted?”
I nodded.
“Is she OK?”
“As OK as can be expected.”
“God, that’s terrible.” His arms slid forward a little, and I tried not to look at them—the boniness, the paddlelike flatness of his hands. “When did this happen?”
“Last week—Mrs. Fletcher’s pretty shaken up.”
“I can imagine.” He bent for another sip of water. “So how long are you here for?”
“I’m not really sure.”
He licked his lips, and I didn’t know what to do, where to look. After a moment I stood and went to the window. A squirrel had paused halfway up the trunk of the tree outside, and I watched until it scrabbled upward again. I turned back. “Are you hungry at all? I’m starving, I never really ate breakfast.”
“I’m fine,” he said, “but help yourself. Mom’s at the grocery store right now, but there should be a crumb or two in the usual places.”
I wondered how long Mrs. Mayer had been gone, when she’d be back. I got an apple from the fridge and then went over to the pantry closet. Inside were row upon row of canned foods, packages of noodles and rice, economy-size boxes of dry cereal. Down at the bottom, several bags of chips were held closed by giant plastic clips. I bit into the apple and reached for some Fritos. “Corn chips?” I said.
“Salt’s bad for me.”
I ate a couple and put the bag back. The last time I’d been here, Julie had been smoking away, asking me whether I was still going to marry Mike. Do you want to?
I looked at him and found him watching me, less sharply than before but also less opaquely. His face had taken on the contours of emotion, the curve of his cheeks and the set of his chin speaking of loss. All at once I was very afraid.
He saw me looking and tightened up. “Come on,” he said after a moment. “I’ll show you my room.”
I finished the apple and tossed the core, then followed him back through the living room. The fear abated, replaced by a sick relief that we were moving.
We came to the den. What had once been a small, dark room with plaid wallpaper was now light and airy and somehow seemed bigger, the walls white and decorated with framed pictures: a big photograph of sailboats on Lake Mendota; a poster of a painting I thought I should recognize but didn’t, a blocky landscape with a mountain in the background.
“Cézanne,” Mike said, seeing where I was looking. “Mom bought it.”
“It’s nice,” I said. It was, too: edgy somehow despite the soft colors. Was Cézanne on Kilroy’s good list?
“So what do you think of my new place?”
In his room upstairs, the walls had been hung with hockey posters, including a giant one of Wayne Gretzky. There’d been shelves of hockey trophies. Here hockey didn’t exist. I recognized his old striped blanket, stretched over a hospital bed. His computer. And the picture of me that had sat on his bedside table, now on a big, swing-arm stand that he could see from the bed. I looked at my smiling face and then looked away. “Great,” I said.
“Pretty different from my old room, isn’t it?” he said with a smile. “I had to get out of that room one way or another.”
There was a silence: we both knew how he should have gotten out of it.
“Hey, check this out,” he said, and he wheeled toward a dark doorway I hadn’t noticed. With the edge of his hand he pressed a panel, and light flooded into a huge, gleaming-tiled bathroom complete with shiny white fixtures for the handicapped. “Took a big bite out of the dining room,” he said, “but what the hey.”
“What the hey,” I said. I couldn’t think of another thing to say, so I said it again: “What the hey.”
CHAPTER 34
I went to Cobra Copy first thing Tuesday morning, then Tuesday afternoon, then Wednesday, then Thursday. Jamie was there but she wouldn’t see me. She fled the front room when I appeared the first few times but then got used to it and just looked past me, as if the space I occupied were completely empty. I felt manipulated but also heartbroken. When I approached her and said her name, she flinched but didn’t react otherwise. She’d adopted a look of stone, and she was masterly at it, sliding it on and off at such perfectly calibrated moments that I began to think it was all a charade, that her refusal to speak to me
had nothing to do with her feelings and everything to do with a simple decision she refused to reverse. Every now and then, though, maybe just twice that whole week, I saw it—a hot look around her eyes—and I knew she was suffering.
I decided to go back to New York. I dropped off a long note to Jamie, at her parents’ house, where she was still staying. In it I apologized again, apologized more: for the last week and also for the last half year, the last year, for every moment since I’d begun to change. I even wrote that: I know it must seem that I’ve changed a lot, since well before Mike’s accident. I wish we could talk about it.
We couldn’t, though. That was the message she was giving me every day, the letter she wasn’t writing back.
I’d charged an open-ended ticket, maxing out my credit card for the first time. Late Thursday I called to see if I could fly back the next day, but the earliest flight they had was at six a.m. Saturday. I booked it.
In my room I put the Kenmore away. I had my mother’s car, and I drove to the grocery store and bought some chicken. Over dinner we talked about the possibility of her visiting New York in the summer, when her client load would be lighter. On the phone a month or so earlier I’d told her about finally getting a room in the brownstone, and now she said she’d like to see it, see New York, see my life there. And meet Kilroy? I wondered. I was sure she’d want to meet him, but would she like to meet him? Maybe the reason I hadn’t mentioned him was that I didn’t know how to describe him beyond the bare-bone eccentric facts. They weren’t him any more than the information he’d withheld was. Sitting there opposite her, a thousand miles from New York, I felt a sense of knowing him, of knowing him deeply in all the important ways. I knew the exact smile he’d give me when he saw me in two days’ time. I knew how his lips would feel on my eyelids, my cheeks, my mouth. How the hair on his chest would tickle my breasts, prickly and yet also somehow pleasant. Kilroy. I longed for him, couldn’t stand that I had to wait two days to see him again.
My mother and I were cleaning up when the phone rang. It was Rooster, asking if I wanted to go to lunch with him and Mike the next day.
In the morning I saw him back his old red Honda from the Nilssons’ driveway, but when he arrived at noon to pick me up he was driving a brand-new blue one, and as I got in I said, “What’s going on here? Where’s your car?”
“I traded it in,” he said with a bored shrug. “We’re going to need a four-door for the baby.”
I felt my mouth fall open. “The baby?”
He grinned. “Hey, there’s a lot you don’t know.”
We drove to the Mayers’, where Mike was already waiting for us, at the top of a new ramp outside the back door. On Monday I’d left before Mrs. Mayer’s return, and now I looked at the house, wondering if she could see us. I knew she was in there, because the white van I’d seen in the driveway Sunday was there again, and I’d learned from Rooster that she’d traded her Oldsmobile for it, a vehicle that could accommodate a wheelchair.
Rooster had his own set of keys. Mike wheeled down the ramp; Rooster lowered the van’s lift and got him and the chair strapped in; and then we were off.
Brenda’s was a greasy little hole-in-the-wall that I’d never really liked—it was the place Mike had gone with the guys. Brenda herself flipped the burgers, a round-faced woman in a flowered smock top and stretch pants. When we walked in, she waved and slapped four patties on the grill.
“Make it five today, Bren,” Rooster called as he cleared space between the tightly packed tables so Mike could wheel his way to a clean one by the window.
“How do you know Carrie doesn’t want two?” Mike said.
“One’ll be fine,” I said. “I may have to wear a bathing suit sometime in the next decade.”
“Right,” he said with a little snort. “Like that’s your problem.”
There was an awkward moment, none of us looking at each other, and then we all sat down. Or Rooster and I sat—Mike wheeled in. I wondered why I was there, whose idea it had been to invite me.
Rooster got up when the food was ready and brought it to the table. Mike ate more easily than I would have expected, with a clamping device Rooster helped strap to his forearm. When a little ketchup fell onto his lap Rooster clearly saw it and just as clearly ignored it. They had their ways.
We talked about Joan’s pregnancy: morning sickness was a myth, Joan felt sick all day; Rooster had heard the baby’s heartbeat just yesterday, and it was amazing. After a while the conversation turned to New York, and I told them about Parsons, how there might be a career in it for me some day.
“And it’s something you like to do,” Mike said.
“Yeah,” Rooster said, “that makes a big difference.”
There was a gloomy little silence. I glanced back and forth between them. “What?”
Mike frowned. “Nothing.”
I looked at Rooster, who shrugged. “Nothing it is,” I said.
Mike bent for a sip of his Coke. “It’s that job I was telling you about. That computer job. I hate it.”
I turned to Rooster again, hoping for some kind of clarification, but before I could say anything Mike was shouting at me, his face dark red. “What’s your problem? Why are you looking at him? I’m the one talking, aren’t I?”
“I’m so sorry,” I exclaimed, horrified.
He stared at me for a long moment and then heaved a huge sigh. “No, I am,” he said. “I am.”
I felt tense and ashamed. There were photographs all over the restaurant walls, and I focused on them, years’ and years’ worth of football and hockey Badgers lined up in red and white uniforms. I’d heard somewhere along the line that Brenda had sent five sons through the U with not a little help from the athletic department.
“It’s boring,” Mike said.
I looked back, and his eyes were sad—the gray of a winter sky at dusk. “Boring?” I said.
“Incredibly. And it gives me a headache. And it’s totally pointless. I mean, there’s so much talk about being productive, leading an independent life. I’m a fucking quadriplegic.”
Rooster reached over and gave Mike’s shoulder a pat. “You’re not a fucking quadriplegic,” he said quietly.
Mike rolled his eyes and smiled a little. “Yeah, there’s that, too.”
After we dropped him off, Rooster and I got back into his new car and he drove me to my mother’s, the two of us silent all the way. Out in front he put the car in park but left the engine running. I looked out the window. A giant root had pushed up the sidewalk in front of the house, and I remembered flying over the bump on roller skates, alone or with Jamie. There was that moment when you were airborne, the fear and the thrill indistinguishable.
Next to me Rooster shifted. I looked at him: he was staring out the window at some phantom spot on the road, hands tight around the steering wheel. After a while he reached down and cut the engine.
“I thought you didn’t want to talk about him.”
“I don’t.”
“Let’s anyway.”
He turned the key back far enough to get the radio. It was tuned to something terrible, and he hit the scanner button through half a dozen stations, watching intently as the numbers flashed by. Finally he turned the key back home. “It’s what it looks like,” he said. “Believe it or not, it was a lot worse.” He paused, then said, “Listen, Carrie, I don’t want to—”
“Please.”
He pulled the keys from the ignition and dropped them in the change well behind the parking brake. “OK, here goes. My theory is that in the fall there were a lot of things happening. There was rehab and getting the halo off and being discharged from the hospital and the wedding—”
“And I was supposed to come home.”
“—and you were supposed to come home, but you didn’t, and then January came, and it was fucking cold, and Mikey—” Rooster broke off, shaking his head. He rested his forehead on the steering wheel for a moment, his shoulders rounded, upper arms straining against the fabric
of his suitcoat. He looked up again. “Mike felt pretty hopeless, Carrie. Pretty stuck. Like, Well, this is it. Welcome to life as a quad. Harvey—did you hear about him, Mike’s roommate from rehab?—he got very low around then, and Mike just didn’t have much to feel up about. I mean, how much chess can a person play, how much TV can a person watch, how many books can a person read? And then there are all these little things you wouldn’t think of, like in restaurants and stores and stuff people talk to the person who’s with him instead of him. ‘And what would he like to drink?’ Can you believe that? That’s why he said that thing to you today, about looking at me when he was the one talking. You get sensitive.”
“That was so stupid,” I said. “I feel awful about that.”
Rooster gave me a funny look, and I laughed harshly: if I felt awful about that …
“Plus Stu basically bailed,” he went on. “Even last summer, I don’t know if you noticed, but he hardly ever visited, and when he did it was always with someone else. He’d talk to the other person more than to Mike.”
I thought back. I hardly remembered Stu at the hospital, which I figured proved Rooster’s point.
“After Mike moved home Stu went with us to Brenda’s a few times, but he was incredibly fucking tense. Then once when we were both at the Mayers’ Mike had a little accident with his leg bag, and that was the last we saw of Stu.”
I sighed and shook my head.
“Anyway, Mike started talking about wanting to die.”
“What?” I was confused. “You mean he—”
Rooster said, “I mean he wanted to die,” and as I stared at him I felt a great sorrow invade me. It spread through me like a terrible drug, my heart pumping it to the farthest reaches of my fingers and toes. I buried my face in my hands. I kept thinking of Monday, the way Mike had looked for just a moment while the two of us were alone together—his pale face and his bristly mustache, and how his composure suddenly dropped away.