The Measures Between Us (20 page)

Some nights, when he was deep in sleep, she would poke him. It was a ritual she had done for years, for she had struggled with insomnia for much of her life and often she didn't think it was fair that he could fall asleep so easily. This game, flicking his back with her fingers and then denying it, was one way to have company during the hard hours.

Other times she marveled at her pregnancy, stared at her taut, ballooning belly in the full-length mirror in the bedroom, speechless, unable to do anything save run her forearm up and down her stomach. Her doctor's words echoed in her head—
coming along nicely
—as did the dark, shadowy printouts of her sonograms, their baffling, near holy mystery. Burglars could have been ransacking the house, the stove could have been leaking gas, a Jehovah's Witness planted on the porch ringing the doorbell again and again; she wouldn't have noticed any of it. She saw herself straight on, then in profile.
Coming along nicely
. Turn around. Now the opposite away. Blink. One more time.
Coming along nicely
. She wanted to say something, she wanted her unborn child to hear only unconflicted love, stubborn, unflagging devotion, not the stormy fear that fevered her with worry.

Occasionally she imagined driving away, across state lines, to places that sounded welcoming because she had never ventured to them before. Friendly, unknown land, innocent names and shapes from atlases and maps. Missouri, Arkansas, South Dakota, Oregon. There, far from Henry and his guilt-inducing patience and goodness, maybe she could amble back to the love and expectation she should feel. The enchantment. The spell. The land and strangers would turn her blood rich with nutrition, feed her baby all the protein and vitamins she needed. Lucinda could feel safe and calm, sitting at the counter of a diner, listening to the
local accents, the evening news flashing on the television overhead. The Formica is chipped, the coffee strong and black. Over the snap and sizzle of the grill, the short-order cook flirts with the girl at the cash register, who is prettier than she realizes. She hides behind bangs and unnecessary makeup. Give her a name: Shannon. A place to live: the apartment above the old movie theater. A bad habit: boys with tempers. Sometimes she hears the dialogue and sound effects seep up from the weekend matinee. Someday a man will tell her she deserves every last thing in the world and she will love him back, love him with abandon. They will have rowdy arguments, then desperate reconciliations. Truckers in gimme caps saw at steaks that flop over the edges of their plates. An older couple tucked into a booth pokes at side dishes of corn and lima beans and talks about the weather, current events, shorthand for fifty years together. Despair and envy and lust—all of it. Devotion and doubt and thanks—those too. They've been around the globe with each other, only they've never left their hometown. Waitresses smile, ask when the baby is due, whether it's a boy or girl. The older woman shouts from the booth, She's carrying high, means it's a female—they're smaller and lighter than the boys, less trouble too. Her husband rolls his eyes. Norman, you hush, she says, you know I know these things.

Or, Lucinda thought, she could just stay in her car, drive until she was nodding off, and then pull into a rest area for a few hours' sleep. Next to the idling semis and shady figures hovering around the restrooms and vending machines, the constant thrum of speeding cars a lullaby. The glowing green signs, the code of interstates and exits. Find an oldies station. Between the songs, the deejay recites dedications phoned in on a 1-800 number.
To
Penelope, from Glenn: the song we danced to at our wedding. To Bob from Linda: Thank you for this life we've led.
Who are these people and why do they have such unconflicted lives? Where are they? Knock on their doors, interrogate them. Sit them down and ask them to explain.

There, in the rest area, Lucinda would close her eyes and she would still see the twining yellow stripes of the asphalt, the dashboard clock, the odometer notching miles, the rise and fall of power lines. While she napped maybe someone would come put her out of her misery. One of the wayward souls lurking by the pay phones with a knife sheathed in his boot, someone with nothing to lose because he's lost it all already, born lost and only grown more so, his whole life a countdown. She never imagined the grisly violence, the sensational
Herald
and
Globe
headlines about the crime. A reward put up by Henry and her family, a news conference when the police nabbed the transient who murdered her. She saw not the pain and blood but conclusion. She saw only the silencing of everything that spiked her heart with fear.

She almost told Henry. The unburdening would calm her down, she reasoned, be good for both herself and the baby.
Counting sheep? Yes, their woolly backs are all knotted. They never stop chewing grass. I hate my baby. What do I do?
She leafed through his psychology journals and textbooks, made him tell her tales of obscure phenomena. She thought the stories might distract her, the sad comedy of neurological disorders. Maybe among the deficiencies of others she could find a way to explain.

But she knew he could never understand. You don't even know how to be genuinely cruel, she once told him, it's like the notion isn't even in your vocabulary, you don't have the words
and gestures to hate anyone. Which was why she loved him so much. He was so safe, so decent, and despite a world full of evidence otherwise, he somehow believed in the essential goodness of people. Even when he wanted to be mean, he couldn't, not for any lengthy time, anyway. It just wasn't in him.

If she told him her secret—late at night when the lights were out, in a whisper, because she was ashamed—he would always remember, and when he looked at her even years later, when they watched their son or daughter run around the yard or chase a garter snake or take the first tentative steps into a lake to learn to swim, he would remember what she had said. Word for word and pause for pause, memorized like a verse from the Bible. Because some things are impossible to erase.
Sometimes I hate my baby, sometimes I hate this thing growing inside of me. I can't help it
.
Help.
No matter the degrees he had earned, his understanding of psychology, his encyclopedic knowledge of the human brain and all the conflicted emotions wired in it. Once she told him, he would forever know her as a woman who couldn't stand her own child, before the baby had wailed or kept her up all night even once, before the baby had done anything worthy of impatience and loathing. When he needed a reason to leave her, he wouldn't even have to search for one. She would have already given it to him.

Elsewhere, at work, she feared something far less damaging: the baby shower. From the earliest days when she began telling coworkers she was pregnant, she linked the news with “Please don't throw me a baby shower.” She made a point of saying it at least once a week, and she told anyone newly hired as well, in case word hadn't reached them yet. Whenever she saw cake and
soda in the small kitchen, she took her friend Sharon aside and asked, frantically, “It's not for me, is it? I said no baby shower.” Sharon assured her the treats were just for someone's birthday or going-away.

She spent her lunch hours alone, retreating to a nearby café with the newspaper. Over soup or a salad she read the front section, skipping the international articles to get to the domestic news. The stories with datelines in faraway states sparked more escape scenarios. She could give birth in an anonymous delivery room in Virginia Beach, put the baby up for adoption. She glances at her powder-blue gown, stamped with the name of a hospital she's never heard of. As in a dream, the landscape is familiar but blurry. The nurse asks her, Do you want to hold him? and she shakes her head.

She could give the baby away in Kansas, find a couple living on the plains who dreamed of children but couldn't conceive, a mother who deserved a baby far more than she did. Then, childless, Lucinda could drive to Nevada, all the way to California even, start a new life piece by piece. A new name, a new job, a new history to replace the other, flawed one. The one that's criminal to everyone but the law. Be a bank teller, a blackjack dealer, a guidance counselor. When she drank too much wine she would consider calling Henry. I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry. The phone, the words, her voice—all were shockingly insufficient. No two words were a salve, no three sentences justified her desertion. She knew because she practiced. I know you can't forgive me, but can you?
I drove down the Pacific Coast Highway
. You know, the winding road from all those Hitchcock movies. I felt like I should have been in a little cherry-red convertible. I felt like I should have had big black sunglasses on, like
Jackie O., and a kerchief wrapped around my head; I just wanted to be careless and beautiful and in the 1960s.
At night the stars are diamonds. God has a great big hand to sweep them up, but they're still there.
I wanted the world to level off and give you every little thing you want. I wanted to feel nothing but the caress of the wind.
The ocean's right there, right below the road
, pawing the shore, and you feel like if you just jerk the steering wheel you'd plunge to the most picturesque, spectacular death. How soft and giving the floor of the ocean is.

She'd choose a man who resembled Henry, or she'd settle down with no one. Stay alone because she didn't want to ruin another person, didn't want to expose anyone else. Live in a studio apartment and stay up too late and smoke too many cigarettes, make her body impossible to impregnate again. Rip an ulcerous hole in her stomach, tar her lungs and poison her liver.
Henry, I'm in Spokane. It's gorgeous, it's right near the mountains and Idaho. You'd like it, you'd plan all these hikes for us to take, pack me a lunch and a chocolate bar. I think about you and about the child we almost raised together. I don't like the idea of someone on the East Coast detesting me.
I am more comfortable here, on top of a fault line.
I don't like picturing you at home in Newton, with all the photos gone from the walls, just you and empty rooms and nothing to distract you from not forgiving me. You haven't burned the pictures, have you? Or razored me out? Was that what those sharp pains in my side were from? I never believed in voodoo but now I do. Sometimes I want you to come out here, but you'd have to promise not to remind me of what happened.
You'd have to promise me that there are some things you don't need to know.

She had worse, closer fantasies too, which didn't require trips to faraway states. Making herself miscarry by drinking too much,
tripping down the stairs. Her awkward, fragile body banging the hard lip of each step. Or she wouldn't have to fall, she could just use the bottom of a cast-iron pan to punch herself in the stomach again and again.

She told no one of her discontent, neither her friends who were childless nor those who were mothers. There was a chance they had felt the same thing, stabs of panic and uncertainty, even pockets of hate, yet what if they hadn't? What if they were better than her? All she could imagine was sitting down over a cup of tea and unwrapping her secret, and her friend, whichever one it was, not saying a thing, just listening, sipping from her mug politely, retreating with each sentence, her face blank and scared. At the end of Lucinda's monologue, the friend would try to say something soothing but her policing eyes would betray her condemnation; then she'd excuse herself and walk briskly out the door. Who could blame her.

With time, Lucinda hoped, her uneasiness would fade. The morning sickness had subsided, so it seemed fair to expect her doubts would disappear as well. At bookstores she pored over guides for mothers-to-be for some hint, some counsel. Littered with diaper tricks and feeding charts and ideal-weight graphs, the books only made her feel worse, more alone and crazier than ever. There were tips on how to handle colic, earaches, the pain of teeth growing in. Strategies on how to introduce the baby to pets and strangers.
Gradually
.
Many new parents choose to have their cats declawed.
But nothing about how to love.

At the park she watched young mothers and their children, studying the gazes they exchanged, their unspoken language. The mothers and the nannies would smile conspiratorially at
Lucinda, which lifted her spirits. At least they can't tell, she thought, understanding their grins as an invitation into their congregation. Tempted as she was to confess to these strangers, priests glowing under the noontime sun, she remained silent, gazing at the sandbox strewn with plastic pails and shovels and dinosaurs. She would bring her daughter to this park, watch her draw in a sketch pad. She would latch her son into one of the swings and push him as high as he wanted to go.
My daredevil
, he has wings, his eyes are gemstones. The bones in his legs are strong as steel. He thinks he's indestructible, and he is.
Look, Mama, I'm up in the sky, I'm where airplanes go, I'm where the clouds sit, I'm close to heaven
. Even when they're on the ground, children are near heaven. He has wax wings, he is Icarus who won't crash to earth.

Lucinda wanted to ask her own mother about the anxiety, and once, on the phone, she alluded to it. During your pregnancy, she said, were there times you ever felt a little … off? Like you maybe weren't prepared to raise a child. Oh, yes, her mother said. Of course I was nervous, that's completely natural; if you aren't it wouldn't be right. But Lucinda wasn't nervous, at least not in the way her mother assumed. Her father, listening on another phone extension, chimed in: You'll be a wonderful mother, Lucy, no doubt. You'll love that baby like it's nobody's business. I wouldn't be concerned, her mother added, you'll find that most of it comes naturally. You need to relax and make sure you eat enough and get enough sleep. Those are the two most important things.