Dive From Clausen's Pier Read online

  ALSO BY ANN PACKER

  Mendocino and Other Stories

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  Copyright © 2002 by Ann Packer

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.,

  New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Distributed by Random House, Inc., New York.

  www.aaknopf.com

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Packer, Ann, 1959–

  The dive from Clausen’s pier : a novel / by Ann Packer.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-1-4000-4053-7

  1. Young women—Fiction. 2. Accident victims—Fiction. 3. Wisconsin—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3616.A33 D58 2002

  813′.54—dc21 2001042522

  v3.1

  To Jon

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Part One - Intensive Care

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Part Two - A Thousand Miles

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Part Three - Kilroy Was Here

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  A Note About the Author

  For support during the writing of this book, I would like to thank the National Endowment for the Arts, and Literary Arts, Inc. I am grateful to Dr. Edward James for his lucid explanations of medical matters; for additional technical help, my thanks go to Kerstin Hilton, Dr. Mark Krasnow, Dr. Nancy Marks, Patty Schmidt, RN, and Dr. Patti Yanklowitz.

  I am very grateful to my agent, Geri Thoma, and my editor, Jordan Pavlin, for being so kind and encouraging and insightful.

  Many family members and friends read the manuscript at various stages, and I am indebted to them all. Special gratitude goes to the following, who carefully considered draft after draft: Hallie Aaron, Jane Aaron, Amy Bokser, Scott Davidson, Ruth Goldstone, Jon James, Veronica Kornberg, Laurie Mason, Tony Pierce, Heidi Wohlwend, and Diana Young. Thank you.

  Mike always teased me about my memory, about how I could go back years and years to what people were wearing on a given occasion, right down to their jewelry or shoes. He’d laugh and ask what the weather had been, or who’d had a light beer and who a regular one, and I could almost always tell him. That was how I resurrected the past: people in their outfits, or who sat next to whom, and from there on to what we talked about, what we were like at a certain time.

  Every Memorial Day we spent the afternoon at Clausen’s Reservoir, about sixty miles north of Madison. It was only a mile or so across, but it was ringed by tall old maples, and it was far enough away so that going there seemed like an event. Mike came for me at a little after noon that year, the year everything changed, and once we’d loaded my stuff into his car and gotten onto the interstate, he accelerated to seventy-two, his opinion of the perfect speed if you factored in gas mileage, highway patrol risk, and safety. My mind was on the long untangling I felt was coming our way, and I stared out the window at dairy farm after dairy farm, their big, well-kept barns angled toward the highway. “Think it’ll be hot?” he said after a while, and I didn’t look at him, I just shrugged. A little later he said, “I wonder who’ll get there first,” and this time I just reached onto the floor for my purse and got out some Chap Stick. We were in a cold, dark place, we both knew it, but once I’d done my lips I handed him the tube, and he did his and with one hand twisted the balm back down before he handed it back. We’d been together for eight and a half years, we had all the little familiarities down. It was almost as if we were married, although we weren’t, just engaged.

  The parking lot was only half full, and we found a spot in the shade. From behind my seat I unloaded a grocery bag of chips and hamburger buns while he opened the hatch. He wore long madras shorts and a pine-green polo shirt, and as I watched his movements, the quick, effortless way he lifted the beer-laden cooler, I thought about how that easy strength of his had thrilled me once, and how it didn’t anymore.

  “Hey!”

  I looked up and there were Rooster and Stu, striding down the rocky hill that divided the parking lot from the beach.

  “Hey to you,” Mike called back. He cast me a watchful glance, and I put on a smile.

  Coming into the shade, Rooster pulled off his sunglasses and wiped his arm across his forehead. The sun had gotten to him already: his freckled cheeks were pink, his nose a shade or two darker. “It’s perfect,” he said. “Warm, a little breeze, and we got the pier no problem.”

  “Great,” Mike said. He looked over at me, then turned back and said it again: “Great.”

  “Anything else?” Stu asked.

  Mike reached into the car and tossed him a Frisbee.

  “Ah, the all-important Frisbee no one will throw.”

  “I figured maybe you’d surprise us this year.”

  Mike locked the car, and we headed for the hill. It was dusty already—it had been a dry spring—and patches of scruffy grass brushed against my ankles as I climbed. At the top I paused to look down: at Jamie, waving from the pier; at the sweep of dazzling blue behind her.

  I started toward the beach. On the pier Bill and Christine sat side by side, apparently together again: their hips and thighs touching, Bill’s hand resting loosely on Christine’s knee. Following Mike across the sand, I wanted nothing more than to sit like that with him, until I remembered that was what I didn’t want. This mood I was in: I had to remind myself of its rules sometimes.

  Rooster had already started the fire, and soon Jamie and Christine and I were unwrapping the raw burgers and laying them out on a paper plate. Jamie was right beside me, and in a quiet voice she said, “What’s up?”

  I shrugged. “Nothing.”

  She looked at me carefully.

  “Really, nothing.”

  After we ate, I took a second beer from the cooler and sat at the end of the pier. The can was icy, almost painful to hold, but I held it anyway, my feet just skimming the water, which I noticed was lower than usual. Wasn’t it supposed to come up to my knees? I thought so, but I didn’t think so very strongly, and I know I didn’t say so.

  Behind me Rooster’s boom box played one of his compilation tapes, and I could hear everyone talking, the rise and fall of their voices, the little silences before someone thought of something else funny to say. Jamie said, “No, Long Island Iced Teas,” and the next thing I knew Mike was standing over me, casting a shadow
onto me and the water. He prodded me once with his big toe and announced, “I’m going swimming.”

  “Mikey!” Rooster hooted.

  I could feel everyone looking at me: Rooster, Stu, Bill, Christine—even Jamie. Looking and thinking, Come on, Carrie, give the guy a break.

  I turned and looked at his strong, hairy legs, then up at his face, which was dark against the bright sun. He’d stripped to his swimming trunks, and as he stood there waiting for me to say something, Rooster came over to stand beside him. “Getting a little spare tire there, buddy?” Rooster said, and he cuffed Mike lightly.

  Mike grinned. “Makes two of us, huh? Maybe we should start a diet club, the Spare Tire Spartans. What do you say?”

  They all laughed—the Spartans had been our high school mascot. That we were a year out of college and still making Spartans jokes seemed to me to be a symptom of whatever it was we all had, whatever disease it was that had us doing the exact same things we’d always done, and with the exact same people.

  “I think I’ll wait till after the holidays,” Rooster said.

  “The holidays are six months away.”

  “Exactly.”

  Now Mike looked at me. “So, what do you think?” he said. “Should I dive?”

  “Why don’t you just jump?” Later, I clung to that as evidence that I’d tried to stop him, but in fact I was just being contrary.

  “Dive,” Rooster said. “Definitely dive.”

  I glanced at Jamie, and she smiled at me. “Hey, girl,” she said, and she scooted toward me with her hand extended low in front of her, palm side up. I reached over and held my palm on hers for a moment.

  “Mayer,” Stu said, “you lout.”

  Mike took off his baseball cap and held it out for me to take.

  “What about your sunglasses?” I said.

  He dropped the cap onto the pier. “They’re coming,” he said. “On a joy ride.” He looked at Rooster and Stu and Bill with an endearing expression of amusement and challenge on his face, and for an intense moment then, watching him with his friends, I longed to feel again what I no longer felt: that he was just what I wanted. “You guys are wimps,” he said. “I’ll think of you when I hit that cool, refreshing water.”

  Everyone laughed again: it was Memorial Day, the water was freezing.

  Then somewhere on the reservoir a motorboat started up, and we were still for a moment as we looked across the water to see if we could see it. I remember the sound so clearly, the sound of the boat and also the feel of the icy-cold beer can in my hand. I wish I’d done something to stop him then—jumped up and said I’d marry him that day, or burst into tears, or held on tight to his leg. Anything. But of course I didn’t. I was already looking away, when from across the water there came the sound of the outboard revving higher. And then Mike dove.

  PART ONE

  INTENSIVE CARE

  CHAPTER 1

  When something terrible happens to someone else, people often use the word “unbearable.” Living through a child’s death, a spouse’s, enduring some other kind of permanent loss—it’s unbearable, it’s too awful to be borne, and the person or people to whom it’s happened take on a kind of horrible glow in your mind, because they are in fact bearing it, or trying to: doing the thing that it’s impossible to do. The glow can be blinding at first—it can be all you see—and although it diminishes as years pass it never goes out entirely, so that late some night when you are wandering the back pathways of your mind you may stop at the sudden sight of someone up ahead, signaling even now with a faint but terrible light.

  Mike’s accident happened to Mike, not to me, but for a long time afterward I felt some of that glow, felt I was giving it off, so that even doing the most innocuous errand, filling my car with gas or buying toothpaste, I thought everyone around me must see I was in the middle of a crisis.

  Yet I didn’t cry. The first days at the hospital were full of crying—Mike’s parents crying, his brother and sister, and Rooster, maybe Rooster most of all—but I was dry-eyed. My mother and Jamie told me it was because I was numb, and I guess that was part of it, numb and terrified: when I looked at him it was as if years had unwound, and I’d just met him, and I couldn’t stand not knowing what was going to happen. But there was something else, too: everyone was treating me so carefully and solicitously that I felt breakable, and yet I wasn’t broken. Mike was broken, and I wasn’t broken. He was separate from me, and that was shocking.

  He was in a coma. Thanks to the combination of drought and a newly banked-up shoreline, the water in Clausen’s Reservoir had been three feet lower than usual. If he woke up, it would be to learn that he’d broken his neck.

  But he didn’t wake up. Days went by, and then it was a week, ten days, and he was still unconscious, lying in Intensive Care in a tiny room crowded with machines, more than I ever would have imagined. He was in traction, his shaven head held by tongs attached to weights, and because he had to be turned onto his stomach every few hours to avoid bedsores, his bed was a two-part contraption that allowed for this: a pair of giant ironing-board-shaped things that could sandwich him and flip him. Visiting hours were three p.m. to eight p.m., ten minutes per hour, two people at a time, but it seemed we’d no sooner get in to see him than the nurses would ask us to leave. It was as if, merely body now, he belonged to them.

  Near the nursing station there was a small lounge, and that’s where we mostly were, talking or not talking, looking at each other or not looking. There would be five of us, or ten, or twenty: a core group of family and close friends, plus Mike’s co-workers stopping by after the bank had closed, the Mayers’ neighbors checking in, my mother arriving with bags of sandwiches. There was a rack of ancient magazines by the door, and we offered them to each other now and then, just for something to do. I couldn’t read, but whenever the single, warped issue of Vogue came my way I flipped through it, pausing each time at an article about a clothing designer in London. I’m not sure I ever noticed her name, but I can still remember the clothes: a fitted, moss green velvet jacket; a silver dress with long, belled sleeves; a wide, loose sweater in deep purple mohair. I was getting through the evenings by sewing, a pair of cotton shorts or a summer dress every two or three days, and those exotic images from London kept appearing in my mind as I bent over my sewing machine, reminding me at once of the hospital and the world.

  The two-week mark came, and when I woke that morning I thought of something one of the doctors had said early on, that each week he was unconscious the prognosis got worse. (“Unresponsive” was the word they used, and whenever I heard it I thought of myself in the car on the way to Clausen’s Reservoir, not answering his questions.) Two weeks was only one day more than thirteen days, but I felt we’d turned a corner that shouldn’t have been turned, and I couldn’t get myself out of bed.

  I lay on my side. The bedsheets were gritty and soft with use; I hadn’t changed them since the accident. I reached for my quilt, lying in a tangle down past my feet. I’d made it myself one summer during high school, a patchwork of four-inch squares in no particular order, though I’d limited myself to blues and purples and the overall effect was nice. I’d read somewhere that quiltmakers “signed” their work with a little deviation, so in one corner I’d used a square cut from an old shirt of Mike’s, white with a black windowpane check. I found that square now and arranged the quilt so it was near my face.

  He had to wake up. He had to. I couldn’t stand to think of what a bitch I’d been at Clausen’s Reservoir—what a bitch all spring. It was like a horrible equation: my bitchiness plus his fear of losing me equaled Mike in a coma. I knew as clearly as I knew anything that I’d driven him to dive, to impress me. I squeezed my eyes shut and tried to remember when everything between us had been fine. February? January? Christmas? Maybe not even Christmas: he’d given me plain pearl earrings that were very pretty and exactly what I would have wanted just a year earlier, but I found them stodgy and obvious, and I felt dead inside—not because
of the earrings but because of my disappointment in them. “Do you like them?” he said uneasily. “I love them,” I lied.

  It was June now. I had the day off work, and at last I got up and made coffee, then started laying out the pattern for an off-white linen jacket I’d been planning to make, first ironing the crumpled tissue and then moving the pieces around on the length of fabric until I was satisfied. I pinned them and cut them out with my Fiskars, then went back and did the notches, snip by snip. I chalked the pattern marks onto the fabric, and by late morning I was sitting at my Bernina winding a bobbin, entranced by the fast whir of it, by the knowledge that for hours now I’d be at the machine, my foot on the pedal.

  I’d been sewing for eleven years, since my first home ec class in junior high, when I’d made an A-line skirt and fallen in love. It was the inexorability of it that appealed to me, how a length of fabric became a group of cut-out pieces that gradually took on the shape of a garment. I loved everything about it, even the little snipped threads to be gathered and thrown away, the smell of an overheated iron, the scatter of pins at the end of the day. I loved how I got better and better, closer and closer with each thing I made to achieving just what I’d hoped.

  When the phone rang at eight-thirty that evening I’d taken a few breaks for iced cranberry juice, but mostly I’d sat there sewing, and the sound woke me from the work. Surprised by how dark it had gotten, I pushed away from the table and turned on a light, blinking at the jacket parts that lay everywhere, the slips of pattern and the pinked-off edges of seams. I was starving, my back and shoulders knotted and aching.

  It was Mrs. Mayer. She asked how I was, told me she’d heard it might rain, and then cleared her throat and said she’d appreciate it if I’d stop by the next day.

  The morning sun slanted down the sidewalk, aiming my shadow in the direction of Lake Mendota. My car was already hot to the touch, and I unlocked it and rolled down the windows, then strolled to the end of the block and stood looking across Gorham Street at the water, still almost colorless under the early sky. Mike loved Lake Mendota, the way the city hugged its curves. He liked to pull people into debating the relative merits of it and Lake Monona, Madison’s other big lake: he’d reel off a list of ways that Mendota was superior, as if it were a team he supported.