Dive From Clausen's Pier by Ann Packer

Author:Ann Packer [Packer, Ann]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Contemporary, Romance, Adult
ISBN: 9781400040537
Publisher: Random House Digital, Inc.
Published: 2002-04-01T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 22

I knew Kilroy was right, that what I needed was time, but I wanted to be done with it, to be wherever I was going. At the same time, I wanted Mike to be where he was going, too, and to be OK with my not being there with him, which I knew was impossible.

Fall was so cold in Madison, wind blowing off the lakes and penetrating everything. I thought of the long, wide windows of the physical therapy room and what Mike must see through them, trees bare of leaves, skeletal against the gray sky. We’d always made a point of going to Picnic Point in October, taking the long walk out through the turning trees. It was almost November now. I thought of him more and more, until thinking of him became not an act but a presence in me, a dull ache in the center of my chest. Yet I didn’t call again. What more could I say, beyond I’m sorry? I couldn’t think of a thing.

It started raining, a thin, cold rain that turned the entire city dreary. Being outside was unpleasant, but so was being inside, trapped, the idea of all the other people in the city feeling pent up, too. I was too restless to read books, so I bought a stack of fashion magazines and read them as carefully as texts I’d been assigned for a class.

One afternoon I sat in my chilly alcove flipping through Vogue by the feeble light of my lamp. The sheer spring dresses made me shiver, but I kept paging along. What was it about fashion? Since arriving in New York I’d been nurturing this fascination, this compulsion to look at clothes. It was less about beauty than about transformation. Who would I be in a turquoise paisley slip dress and beaded sandals?

By five it was completely dark out—the early, weighty dark of a November afternoon, a long night still to come. I heard footsteps, and Lane appeared at the top of the stairs carrying a collapsed umbrella that was still dripping. She did a double-take when she saw me huddled under Simon’s scratchy blanket. “Carrie,” she said, “you look like you’re freezing.”

I shrugged. “Just the hand I’m turning the pages with.”

“Come into my room,” she said. “Seriously. I’ll make us some tea—Miss Wolf had me reading to her all afternoon and my throat could use it.”

Her room was warm, pans of water under the radiators so it wouldn’t feel so dry. She pointed me to the armchair and plugged in an electric kettle, then held out a tin cracker box full of assorted tea bags. I picked orange pekoe and she took lemon mint for herself, then got cups from a shelf and arranged the tea bags in them. When the kettle whistled she unplugged it and poured the steaming water.

“You know, you can hang out in my room when I’m not here,” she said. “It’s way too cold out there.”

“Thanks.”

The tea was fragrant. I sipped

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