Dive From Clausen's Pier (3 page)

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 desk 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.

“Have you seen the doctors today?”

I looked up and found Julie watching me. She was nineteen and just home from her first year of college; she wore a long print skirt and dangling silver earrings, and she smelled faintly of patchouli. I shook my head.

“I mean it, Mom,” she said. “We can’t just sit around on our asses and expect them to keep us completely up-to-date. We have to be active participants.”

Mrs. Mayer cast me a sad smile.

“Jesus,” Julie cried, and she got up and ran from the lounge.

“Oh, dear,” Mrs. Mayer said.

“I’ll go,” Mr. Mayer said, but he didn’t move.

I glanced at John Junior. He was sixteen and heartbreaking, with wavy brown hair and gray eyes—Mike’s hair and eyes—and the exact body Mike had had six years earlier, muscular but still narrow-waisted. I saw John and his friends at the Union sometimes, asking people with IDs to buy them beer at the Rat.

“How are you, John?” I said now.

“Fine.” His voice was husky—I thought he was trying not to cry.

“How’s the job?”

“OK. Stop by sometime, I’ll scoop you a free one.”

“Maybe I will.”

The weekend before the accident he’d been hired at an ice cream parlor on State Street. I was at the Mayers’ when he came in with the news, and quick as anything Mike said, “Perfect, bring me home a pint of butter pecan every night or I’ll have your ass.” Without missing a beat John said, “If you eat a pint of butter pecan every night
no one
’ll have
your
ass,” and Mike loved that—he told everyone about it for days afterward.

I looked at Mr. Mayer: at his tanned, balding head, at his hazel eyes filmy behind thick glasses. He’d left his coat and tie at home, but he still wore his pressed white shirt, his navy trousers, and his shiny black lace-ups. The orange couch he sat on was too low for him, and as he shifted, swinging his knees from left to right and bringing his arms closer to his body, I was suddenly certain he was about to make a pronouncement.

I stood up. He’d become ministerial in his speech since the accident, one day delivering sermons about hope and patience and the next lecturing us on the spinal cord and its function. I liked him, but I couldn’t listen—it made me too jittery.

“I guess I better go,” I said.

The three of them said goodbye, and I felt them watch me as I left the lounge. I wondered how long they’d sit there before they went home.

At the elevators I found Julie, her arms crossed over her chest: her cheeks were flushed, her eyes brimming with tears. She pushed her hair away from her face. “I don’t want to hear it, Carrie, OK?”

I was taken aback. “I wasn’t going to say anything.”

“My mother’s an idiot. I can’t believe I never figured that out until I was nineteen.”