Packer

Mendota and Menona. "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 f---g 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, 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 boucle 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 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 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 -- 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.