The Measures Between Us (16 page)

He buttered a pan and made french toast or pancakes. For some reason, she wasn't picky the way she was about other meals. Then they sat together at the table, him with a steaming mug of coffee, her digging a fork into her food, letting syrup trickle out the corner of her mouth. Her fingers turned sticky and she wiped her chin with them, making everything a bigger mess. She told him about what she was learning in school, what she was learning in violin lessons. She told him about friends, a constantly shifting orbit, and new toys and dolls she craved—another list he couldn't keep track of. In December, approaching Christmastime, he paid closer attention though he still needed Mary's help. Sometimes Vincent stopped listening to her words and just looked, finding his wife's features in her face, his own features, the new ones the merging of their genes had produced. He was
still amazed that Cynthia was his child; he couldn't quite believe that he had had anything to do with creating a life.

There were, as well, times she annoyed him. Times he returned home from a difficult day at work and wanted nothing but quiet and a beer, an hour to leaf through the
Herald
alone, get revved up about the Sox or the Pats, and Cynthia would be tearing through the house, singing a silly song. The walls amplified her voice, the rugs failed to muffle her footsteps. How can such a little person make so much noise? he wondered. But he was always beguiled by her ability to soften him. Just a questioning look from her, a shy, furtive smile, an outstretched hand, even her uttering, simply, “Daddy,” could shred his anger in a heartbeat.

There was a scare when she was three and a half. She had had a cold for a couple days. It seemed like nothing serious, but then one night she started shrieking from her bedroom. Mary jumped out of bed and Vincent followed, because her scream was like an alarm, far more piercing than what some innocuous ache or cramp might spark.

Standing over her bed, they realized she had vomited. There was a small soupy puddle on the floor. Mary was holding her, wiping the sides of her mouth, and Vincent palmed her forehead. “She's burning up,” he told his wife, and when they took her temperature the mercury shot to 103. They rushed her to the emergency room, where doctors and nurses were soon taking blood and peering into her ears and eyes and making her cry more. They tried to be gentle, but no one is that gentle, especially when they need quick access to things inside of you. Every time she wailed, Vincent shuddered. It is torture, he thought, to listen to your child hurt.

When she finally fell asleep, he and Mary retreated to a waiting room with a television periscoping from the ceiling. Both of them stared at the eleven o'clock news and neither absorbed a thing. They might as well have been speaking French or Russian, and even the weather maps resembled foreign countries, not the familiar outlines of New England. Vincent suddenly couldn't remember what day it was, what month, whether he was expected at work the next morning. He gazed around the room for a calendar, something to ground him, but found only salmon walls and cartoon characters and a poster illustrating the food pyramid. Nurses and janitors went about their work dully, as if they were processing bank loans or recording property deeds, not occupying the same building as sick children. “What do we do now?” Mary asked when the news ended and a late-night talk show came on.

Vincent shrugged. He said, “They don't expect us to just go home, do they?” He checked the room for a doctor and saw none. The talk show host was smiling and delivering his monologue, and Vincent thought, Stop it.

“God, I hope not,” Mary said.

In fact, that was exactly what was expected. Thirty minutes later, a doctor emerged from Cynthia's room and sat down next to Vincent and Mary. He had a clipboard with him, and the top piece of paper was a computer printout. Numbers and abbreviations, with equally unintelligible scrawls laddering down the margins.

“We've gotten the preliminary results of your daughter's blood tests,” he said, tapping the clipboard and its maddening hieroglyphs. “There's nothing conclusive.” The tease of computers, Vincent thought. They are supposed to solve things, lead us somewhere.

“Is her fever down?” he asked.

“Is she still sleeping?” Mary said.

The doctor nodded. “We reduced her fever, and she's sleeping soundly. She's on some very sensitive monitors that will tell us immediately if there's any change.”

“So what now?” Vincent said.

“We want to keep her overnight, in case her fever goes back up, and to do a few more tests.”

“But what's wrong with her?”

“At this point we don't know,” said the doctor. “I would say most likely it's something viral, perhaps an infection, but we'll know a lot more in the morning. After we get more test results.”

Vincent looked at his wife. He knew what she was going to ask before she opened her mouth: “Can we stay here with her?”

The doctor sighed. He was Indian; DR. SINGH was embroidered on his white coat. “I'm afraid we're not really set up for that. You can return first thing in the morning.”

“When is first thing in the morning?” Mary asked.

“You'll have to check with the nurses,” said Dr. Singh, gesturing to a woman sitting behind a desk.

Vincent didn't sleep that night. He didn't even try, never even ventured out of the kitchen, where he had headed when they arrived at the house. He sat at the table while his wife lay in bed upstairs. As she slept he opened the refrigerator and took out the bacon. He wasn't hungry, but he peeled off several strips and dropped them in a frying pan. He wanted the sizzle and smell to take him to another time—Cynthia holding up her plate with both hands for more (“Crispier this time, Daddy”). He wanted her there, in this kitchen on Buckingham Road, sitting at the
table, her mouth racing, her feet swinging under her chair, jittery and never still and asking and wanting and giving, anywhere but the hospital. All those spotless hallways and clean walls, all that paint and soap to mask the undercurrent of sickness.

Mary joined him at four thirty in the morning. “Were you able to sleep?” he asked.

“A little bit. A couple hours, I think,” she said, opening a tin of coffee. “I don't want to have any more children.”

Vincent nodded, jolted by what she said but too dazed by everything else to react.

She measured the grounds and dumped them into the coffeemaker. “I mean it. I don't want to go through this again,” she said. “I don't even want there to be that possibility of going through it again. It's too much. It's too fucking much.”

“What if it's nothing? There's a good probability it's nothing. You were there when the doctor said that.”

“Doesn't matter,” she said. “My insides feel like they're exposed. Like there's no flesh between my nerves and the outside. Everything stings.”

They had discussed having another child in the past. Vincent had no siblings, while Mary had a brother and a sister, neither of whom she was close to. One lived in California, the other in Argentina. She saw them once a year, if that, the relationships shrunk to the odd phone call or impersonal holiday card.

Vincent wasn't one of those only children who had grown up dreaming of a brother or sister. Although there were times he thought it would have been nice, he was more or less content being alone. His parents spoiled him, showered him with attention, and he saw in his friends' families—those with multiple children—how everything had to be divided. There was a whole industry
and math to the rationing. And there were often fights about who got the bigger slice of cake, the better toy at Christmas, the later bedtime. He supposed there was some important lesson to be learned in such transactions, principles of tolerance and generosity, but mostly he was relieved to not be forced into those struggles.

Still, it was a surprise to hear Mary voice it so definitively, especially on this awful night. He didn't like the insinuation behind the statement, the idea that Cynthia might be facing some interminable battle.

He realized that Mary had spent the past hours rooted in the present, the frightening unknown of their daughter lying alone in the hospital amid chirps and beeps that meant who the hell knows what. Doctors and X-ray men were there waiting for numbers to reveal something, something with a name and an explanation in a fat medical textbook. Something with a solution. Vincent, though, had carved away the hours by looking back, at times Cynthia was in the house, eating food he had cooked, thanking him with a gesture as plain and automatic as raising a glass of juice to her lips. She didn't even know she was thanking him, which amplified her gratitude all the more.

He thought, too, that there was something weak in his wife's declaration, as if she was already giving up. What if Cynthia
did
have some serious disease? Did that mean he alone would have to take care of her, because his wife couldn't face it? He would do it, too, without regret or complaint, but a small part of him would burn with resentment.

“I don't think this is the best time to talk about that stuff, or make any decisions,” Vincent said. “We're both tired. We're not operating at full tilt.”

Mary nodded. “You've told me before that you didn't mind if
Cynthia was our only one,” she said. “You said that even before last night.”

“I know, and I still think all that. I just don't want to make any final decisions now. It's not the right time.”

“Then what do you want to talk about, Vincent?” Her voice had an edge, anger and sadness rubbed raw by sleeplessness. She only used his name at extreme moments, when she either loved or hated him.

“Anything,” Vincent said. “I'm happy to talk about anything.”

“Well, not anything, because you said we couldn't talk about whether we wanted to have another child. You tell me what we should talk about. Give me a subject.”

“Anything but that.”

The coffeemaker slurped one final time. Mary poured herself a cup and didn't offer Vincent a mug. She sat down at the table, across from him, and he slid the sugar bowl to her. It was from their wedding china, interlocking pale pink roses circling the rim.

“So what do you want to talk about? Woodworking, do you want to talk about woodworking? Or the weather. How about let's discuss the weather—rain and snow and sunshine and sleet. How about nor'easters. Or enlighten me about current events, Vincent, tell me about politics or the economy or how the stock market's been performing. Is there a movie you'd like to talk about? A concert you'd like to go to? Let's look at the listings.” Between each sentence, she dumped a heaping spoonful of sugar into her coffee, turning it muddy and undrinkable. Vincent kept watching the rhythmic sweep of her arm from mug to sugar bowl, and every time he thought she would quit she didn't. Finally he grabbed her wrist, gripped it so unexpectedly and so hard that the sugar splashed on to the table.

“Or maybe let's talk about our daughter, Cynthia,” she said. “The one whose name you haven't said all fucking night. Maybe I don't want to have any more kids, but you haven't uttered her name the entire fucking night, not once since we left the hospital.” By now there were tears streaming down her cheeks. “Do you even remember it? Or have you said your good-byes already? Is that why you want another, to replace her? Do you think they're all interchangeable? That we can just trade one in? Cynthia, Charlotte, Grace, choose a name, see if I care, maybe we still have that list somewhere. See if I fucking care.”

He let go of his wife's wrist and she used her hands to wipe away the crying.

“Is she already dead to you?” Mary asked. “Is that it?”

“No,” said Vincent.

“Bullshit. I saw it in your face hours ago, when I told you I was going to bed and you looked at me like, ‘How dare you go to sleep at a time like this?' When in fact it was you who already assumed our daughter was going to die. It was you who was being the coward, who was picturing that phone call in the middle of the night and you'd answer it and the hospital would tell us they had done all they could but it didn't matter. They'd say sorry and not even mean it. How could some stranger mean it? Why even say it, why go through the pretense? The only thing they're sorry about is having to make an awkward phone call.” She wiped her eyes again, then wrapped her hands around the coffee cup. “Were you already thinking about a wake, too, and where we'd bury her, which cemetery you like best, what kind of headstone? Mount Auburn's nice, right? But I hear it's expensive. All those rich Cambridge people snatched up the plots. Maybe one of them would take pity on us and sell us theirs, since
Cynthia was so young. You could call in a favor from one of your wealthy students' families.”

Vincent had never seen his wife hysterical before. She was always steady, hinged, and that was something he treasured most about her, because he knew how much effort it took to maintain such a calm. And yet now, as she spewed accusations and invective at him, swore at him and possibly hated him, he found himself loving her all the more for her willingness to break down in front of him. He thought that behind all her anger, all her frustration and sadness, there was trust, desperation. Honesty. She trusted him enough to empty her fright, dump it like all those sugar grains forming anthills on the table, and he thought, simply, I love you, I really do. He saw, suddenly, that all the work of their marriage, all the arguments and all the moments of distance and fear and regret and closeness, were all in the service of this single moment, when it was still dark and unremarkable outside, still quiet, when the streets were free of commuters and the stores were closed and the buses were asleep and most people didn't even have their eyes open.

He tried to speak but no words came out. He reached across the table for her arm again and this time he took her right hand and placed it palm to palm with his. Her fingers hit three quarters of the way up his, and she pressed them in a little, at the uppermost knuckle, so his fingers gave a little, sheltering her own. She couldn't look at him, just stared downward at her lap, her coffee steaming, the final, lonely tears leaking from her eyes and lurching down her cheeks.