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  Mendota and Monona. “Sounds like bad names for twins,” a girl from New York had said to me once, and I’d never been able to forget it. I laughed, but I was a little offended: she spoke so smugly, flipping her brown hair over her shoulder and raising her chin. I hardly knew her—she was in my freshman American history class at the U—but thinking about her five years later, I remembered this: that she’d owned a jacket I’d coveted, pearl-snapped and collarless like something made of cotton fleece, but fashioned from smooth black napa leather, soft as skin.

  Across the street two guys sauntered by. They both wore sunglasses with tiny mirrored lenses—one guy’s tinted blue, the other’s green. “No fucking way,” I heard one of them say.

  I went back to my car. It had a baked vinyl smell, and the seat scorched my legs. I always took the same route to the Mayers’, an easy six- to eight-minute drive up Gorham to University and then up the hill, but today I headed away from Gorham instead. I crossed the isthmus that divided the lakes, and when I got close to Lake Monona I drove up and down the streets parallel to it, braking occasionally to look at some of my favorite houses: Victorians painted colors you didn’t see in other neighborhoods, fuchsia and teal and deep purple. At a little lakeside park I got out and walked down to the water, where a cloud of gnats swarmed over the grassy green edge. Both lakes could lift my spirits—silvery blue when the sun was low, or vast and frosty in winter—but today they seemed flat and ordinary.

  Unable to put it off any longer, I returned to my car. At the hospital I’d felt Mrs. Mayer watching me and watching me, waiting for me to break down; when the familiar shape of Mike’s house came into view a little later, she was watching again, standing at the living room window with the curtain held aside, as if she’d heard I was on my way but didn’t believe it.

  I got out of my car. The house was big and white, a perfectly symmetrical colonial with black-shuttered windows and an iron eagle on the black front door. I hadn’t been over since the accident, but the yard was as tidy as ever, the lawn so well trimmed I couldn’t help thinking of something Mike liked to say, that his father came outside every morning and greeted each blade of grass by name. I thought of Mr. Mayer mowing, the smell of grass everywhere while he tried not to wonder if Mike would survive, and my stomach tilted with panic.

  Mrs. Mayer opened the door. “Hi,” she said with a smile. “I’m glad you’re here.”

  I tried to smile back. At the hospital it had been hard to look at her wrecked face, but this was almost worse: she was pale and drained, as if she’d finally run out of tears.

  “Let’s go into the kitchen, shall we, dear?”

  I followed her through the large, old rooms: past couches where Mike and I had sat together, tables where I’d casually piled my schoolbooks. It was my house, too, in a way.

  The air conditioning was blowing hard, and when we got to the kitchen Mrs. Mayer said she’d make tea. I sat at the big oak table while she filled her kettle and got tea bags from a glass jar painted with hearts.

  “Mr. Mayer can’t get comfortable this summer,” she said. “I try to keep the house cool, but every evening he comes in and complains it’s stifling. It’s colder than the hospital, don’t you think?” She pulled her sweater close, a bouclé cardigan she was wearing over a flowered shirtwaist dress, its “self-belt” knotted in the front. It was the kind of ageless, styleless dress she always wore, the very kind of thing I’d first liked about her, that she was happy to look like a mom.

  “It is chilly,” I said.

  The kettle whistled and she poured from it, then brought our cups to the table. “Let me get you your lemon.” She crossed to the refrigerator and took one out, then cut it into wedges. She spread them on a flowered saucer and set them before me. “Would you like a bun? We’ve been given so much food I don’t know what to do with it all.”

  “Actually, I’m OK.”

  She pulled out the chair opposite me and sat down. She ran her hand over her hair, and I noticed that her perm had grown out, and gray roots were visible along the part line. She blew on her tea and cleared her throat. “Are you going today?”

  I picked up my cup. I thought about trying to explain about yesterday—about the two-week marker, about how our reaching that point had scared me—but I knew she was aware of it, too; and scared, too; and that she’d gone anyway. I blew on my tea and took a sip, the lemon in it tart and satisfying.

  “Having visitors means a lot to him.”

  I met her glance and then looked away. Nothing meant anything to him, that was the problem, the tragedy—that and the fact that his spinal cord had suffered an injury that could leave him paralyzed for life, quadriplegic. Thinking that way, though, that my visiting would mean nothing, made me feel churlish, a dweller on the bad side.

  “Carrie?”

  She was staring at me, her still-young face lined with concern. Of course I’ll go, I wanted to say. I wanted to take my thumbs and run them over her forehead and cheeks. When I spoke, though, I sounded distant, even to myself. I said, “I have to work, but I’ll go afterward.”

  She nodded, then reached across the table and took hold of my left hand. She touched the tiny diamond on my ring finger. “Michael was so happy the day he bought this, it was like something he’d made at school, he was so proud. Julie made a remark, about how it wasn’t that big or something, and his face just fell. He got that hangdog look on his face and he said to me, ‘Mom, do you think Carrie’ll like it?’ ” She let go of my hand. “ ‘Do you think Carrie’ll like it?’ He loves you very much, dear.”

  I looked away from her. “I know.”

  We drank our tea silently. After a while I told her I wanted to go up to his room, and I climbed the stairs and turned down the hall, going past framed photographs of all three Mayer kids, school pictures mixed in with casual shots, two or three of Mike in hockey gear, his helmet off so you could see his wide grin.

  At his door I hesitated, then went in. There was a musty, unused smell, and I wondered, with the air conditioning going so strong, if his windows had been opened at all since the accident. I crossed to the bed and sat down, running my fingers up and down the ribbed blue bedspread. On his bedside table there was a picture of me from high school graduation, and I picked it up and looked at it. It was a familiar picture, but the girl in it seemed only tenuously connected to who I was now. Her hair was up in a way I never wore my hair anymore, and she wore more eyeliner than I’d had on in ages, but mostly she looked sure of herself, sure she’d stay on Mike’s bedside table for years and years and be happy about it.

  Mike had never left home, and his room bore traces of all the different stages of him I’d known: trophies next to textbooks next to the briefcase he’d begun carrying the year before, when he started working. He had a job in new accounts at a bank near the Capitol, and as I looked around I thought of how he’d been talking lately of finally moving out, saying that since he was making good money he should get an apartment, teach himself domestic life so he wouldn’t sabotage our marriage. Three or four times he’d said it, and I’d never responded. It killed me to think of it now: Mike trolling for something—just Good idea or No, better keep saving your money—and how I gave him nothing. Not even a wedding date: I deflected that question, too. Later, I kept thinking. Next year, the year after. Or I tried not to think about it at all.

  I set the picture back on the bedside table, on the precise spot where it always stood. Then I lifted Mike’s pillow to my face and breathed in his smell, a mixture of Dial and Right Guard and a clothes-and-body smell that was simply him.

  I worked at the university library, where I’d had a work-study job while I was a student; when I graduated they offered me thirty-five hours a week, and so I stayed on. I could take or leave the job, but I liked being on campus: walking to the Union on breaks, heading up State Street to window-shop. My job was in the rare books room, where the only staff member close to my age was a graduate student named Viktor, from Poland. He was at the d
esk when I arrived, and I could tell right away he was in a good mood.

  “Carrie, Carrie, come here.” He motioned me over with a boisterous wave of his arm. Although he was sitting and I was standing, he seemed to loom over me: he was without doubt the biggest person I’d ever known, six-six with broad, beefy shoulders and a thick slab of a torso. When I first told him about Mike’s accident, he grabbed me and hugged me so hard I nearly lost my breath.

  Today he said, “This morning I am telling Ania that we must be more social. In Slavic studies we have parties, but they are too Slavic. You can come for dinner when?”

  I glanced around. Viktor’s library voice conceded nothing to the place, and several people stared at us from the long tables where they sat working, apparently waiting to hear if I’d accept. Dinner at Viktor’s. This was a first, and I wondered how much it had to do with Mike’s being in the hospital, and whether or not, given that Mike was in the hospital, I should go. I was about to make an excuse when a door at the back of the room opened, and the neat, prim head of our boss, Miss Grafton, poked out.

  “Oops,” I said quietly, but Viktor put on a big smile and waved genially at her, and after a moment her head withdrew and she closed the door.

  “She loves me,” he said matter-of-factly, his voice only a little lower now. “I am tall, strong, good-looking. She sees me and thinks of the agony of her dry, sexless life, but she is happy for a moment because I remind her of when it wasn’t so.”

  “Viktor,” I said.

  “You don’t think this is true?”

  “It’s just you’re so modest.”

  He ran a hand over his bristly jaw. “I am shaving every two days now for my new look.” He took my hand and made me feel his chin. “Yes, I think you like it.”

  I laughed. Mike loved my Viktor stories, and I thought of how funny he’d think this one was, then remembered I couldn’t tell him. A feeling of something heavy moved through me, like sand falling through water. I looked away.

  “Let’s say a week from Saturday,” he said. “We are cooking Tex-Mex. Ania is a fabulous cook, you know.”

  “I don’t know, I—”

  “Not ‘I don’t know,’ ” he said. “Yes. Yes!”

  “OK, yes.”

  He smiled triumphantly, deep lines appearing in his stubbly cheeks. He was twenty-eight but looked older.

  I moved away, ready to get to work, and he called my name.

  “Viktor,” I said, turning back wearily. “Miss Grafton’s going to—”

  “You have to relax a little, Carrie.” He lifted both hands and shook his head mournfully. “We talk and we do our work, and it is not a problem.”

  I rolled my eyes.

  “Anyway, I am just giving you a message.”

  He handed me a piece of paper, and I walked a few paces away and slipped between a pair of tall bookcases. In his big, blocky capitals it said, JAMIE. 10:30. CAN TAKE LUNCH ANY TIME BETWEEN 12 AND 3 IF YOU CALL BY 11:45. PLEASE CALL. SAYS HI. Sighing, I folded the note and put it in my pocket. Jamie worked in a copy shop three blocks away, and we sometimes met for lunch if our hours were right. The past few months I’d mostly been telling her they weren’t, that I’d been given a late lunch or none at all, but recently, since the accident, she’d been pushing it, leaving messages like this one, calling at work just to say “Hi, are you OK?” I knew she was worried about me, and I felt grateful for that, or if not grateful, at least touched. I looked at my watch: 11:35. At the very least I should call to say no, but it would be so much easier not to call, to pretend I hadn’t gotten the message in time. I touched my pocket and felt the note in there, the faint outline of it. Then I went and found a cart of books to shelve. Since the accident I could get away with more, which scared me.

  The hospital was like a city, with distinct neighborhoods and commercial areas, and corridors inside like long, long streets. When I arrived that evening I sat in one of the lobbies for a few minutes, trying to get myself ready to go up. A farm family stood conferring near me, the men in poly-blend short-sleeved shirts that showed their brown arms and their creased, dark-red necks. Across the way, a very old woman in a wheelchair had been left by herself near a drinking fountain, a crocheted shawl over her hospital-issue gown. Mike and I had passed through this very lobby a couple years ago, when his grandfather was dying of lung cancer: his uncle Dick was too jumpy to sit for a meal, so we were searching for a box of Whoppers for him, the one thing he felt like eating. We finally found them in a gift shop just down the hall, and Mike opened them on the way back so we could each have one. Sitting there two years later, I could almost conjure up the taste of the malt on my tongue, how it burned a little next to the sweet, artificial chocolate.

  I wondered: Would he look any different after a day away? Would it be any easier to see how he did look, beached on that strange bed? I hoped he’d be on his back. Seeing him on his stomach, his face framed by a cushioned oval and directed at the floor, was the hardest thing.

  I happened to glance at the revolving doors just then, and there was Rooster, coming in, still in his suit. I stood up immediately. He was like Mrs. Mayer, full of hope, and I knew he’d disapprove of my just sitting there, of anything that smelled of pessimism. He put in his hours at the hospital as if they could accumulate to some good, to Mike’s recovery.

  He didn’t see me, and I watched as he caught a glimpse of himself in a mirror and paused to make an adjustment to his tie. I couldn’t help smiling: it was still funny to see him in a suit, maybe because he took the image so seriously himself. “The customers want you to look better than they do,” he told me once. “It’s a psychological thing.” For a year he’d been working on the sales floor of a Honda dealership down on the Beltline. He referred to cars as units now, even to those of us who could remember when he’d thought of them as wheels.

  I crossed the lobby and met him near the information desk. He looked at me oddly for just a moment after we’d said hi, and I wondered if he knew about my absence the day before, if Mrs. Mayer had told him.

  We rode the elevator up to Intensive Care, where it was always quiet and a little dim. Several nurses sat inside the central workstation, speaking in low voices or going over charts. Surrounding them were the patient rooms, a circle of cubicles with open doors flanked by big plate-glass windows, so the nurses could see inside no matter where in the unit they happened to be. I could hear the even beeps of heart monitors, the deep whooshing sounds of ventilators. Opposite Mike’s room a cubicle sat empty, and I tried to remember who’d occupied it two days earlier. An old lady, I thought. Had she stabilized and moved on? Or died and been moved out?

  Rooster stopped to talk to one of the nurses, and I stopped with him. She was twenty-nine or thirty, blond, beautiful in an icy, Nordic way. Impossible, in other words, which was just his type. I stood behind him, smiling a little whenever she looked my way. The nurses knew who each of us was. Rooster was the best friend. I was the fiancée. They’d all made a point of asking to see my ring.

  Mike was on his back, and I relaxed a little at the sight of him. It wasn’t any harder to see than it had been two days ago, a completely familiar body now ministered to by machines. The only thing covering him was a small cloth draped over his crotch, and the rest of him looked pale and doughy.

  “Hi, Mike,” Rooster said. “It’s me, bud. I’m here with Carrie.” He looked at me and waited, then lifted his chin a bit to urge me to speak. The nurses and doctors had encouraged us to talk to Mike, but it made me feel uncomfortable, as if I were speaking into a tape recorder. I stayed silent.

  “It’s June 14th,” Rooster continued after a moment. “Seven-twenty p.m. I came straight from work to see you, bud.” He took a piece of paper from his pocket. “Sold a Civic to a guy with a doozer of a name today. OK. This guy’s a dentist, right? Moler. Dr. Richard Moler. I said to myself, That’s one for the collection. That’s one I gotta remember to tell Mikey.”

  For as long as I’d known them, Mike and Rooster
had had a theory about names. Larry Speakes, the former White House spokesman. A chiropractor in the phonebook, Dr. Clinch. Driving through Menominee on their way back from a camping trip one summer, they saw a plaque on a building: Dr. Bonebrake, Orthopedist. Coincidence? Absolutely not, was their attitude. Their favorite was Rooster’s freshman advisor at Madison Area Technical College, Mr. Tittman, who Rooster was willing to swear wore a bra.

  Rooster folded up the piece of paper and put it back in his pocket. “You never know,” he said with a shrug.

  I took a few steps closer. With Rooster out of my vision, it was possible to imagine Mike and I were alone. I didn’t want to speak out loud, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t talk to him. I looked at his face, at the shallow cleft of his chin and at his thin, pale lips. I covered his hand with mine and told him not to worry. I’m here, I told him. I’m here, I’m here.

  At the elevators we ran into Mike’s family, making their nightly trip back in to tell him goodnight. Mrs. Mayer was plainly relieved to see me, and even Mr. Mayer looked at me for an extra moment and nodded, as if tucking away for future analysis the knowledge that I was here now but hadn’t been last night.

  Rooster said he had to go, but I felt I should stay. I headed back to the lounge with them and waited while two by two they visited Mike’s room. Then the five of us were all in the lounge together, and although there was no reason to stay, none of us made a move to leave. It was nearly eight, the end of a long day, and the smell of burned coffee drifted from the back corner of the room. I knew just what I’d see if I went over there: dirty coffeemaker surrounded by spilled grounds, empty blue and pink sweetener envelopes lying everywhere, carton of milk souring nearby.