The Measures Between Us (26 page)

“Well, again, I'm sorry I didn't make it on time.”

Vincent didn't say anything, and Henry wondered what more he could add. Someone else gripped the shop teacher's shoulder momentarily to say good-bye.

“Art teacher,” Vincent said. “We're in the same boat.”

Henry didn't recognize the man, who must have begun teaching after he'd graduated. “They're talking about eliminating art too?”

Vincent nodded. “Mr. Warren showed some slides of his students' work. Beautiful pieces. Some of those kids are truly gifted. I'd be proud to hang some of their paintings and drawings on the walls of my home.”

“I'm sure,” said Henry.

Lights started turning off, so the two of them walked toward the exit.

“Let me know if there's anything else I can do,” Henry said.

Vincent nodded.

The maintenance man shut off the final lights, and for a moment they were in the dark. Startled, Henry froze, then turned around to look for the stage, some landmark. It wasn't there. He wondered when Lucy's flight would touch down, what he might say to her on the phone. Maybe he'd confess he had missed the meeting, maybe he would just tell her good night.

Light splashed into the auditorium. Vincent was holding the door open. “Are you coming?” he asked.

While Lucinda waited for her small suitcase to tumble down onto the luggage carousel, she fingered a piece of paper in the pocket of her jacket. Scribbled on the folded Post-it were directions to Janet's house, about thirty-five miles outside of El Paso. She was still a little dazed from the long trip, and she hoped the route wasn't tricky.

The flight had taken longer than she had expected. She had tried to sleep but couldn't grab more than a few minutes' rest at a time. She used a scratchy airplane blanket to hide her pregnant belly because she didn't want to deal with the inquiries of strangers. Due dates, the sex of the baby, names, the inevitable saccharine smiles—she wanted to avoid it all. This trip, she thought, is all about forgetting, not reminders. One of the stewardesses, when Lucinda boarded, let her eyes drift downward, but she just nodded politely, didn't ask anything. I'll get her to say something, Lucinda mused, I'll order a Maker's Mark when she comes by with the drink cart, flag her down for a second when I'm finished.

There was a movie during the flight, and periodically the cabin filled with laughter from passengers wearing headphones and following along. It was an odd sight: all those people staring
at the same small screen as if they were being hypnotized. Lucinda realized why the airlines didn't show thrillers or horror movies. Not only did they want to avoid frightening the passengers who were watching, it would be terrifying for everyone else to hear the collective gasps.

When she couldn't sleep, she leafed through the in-flight magazines and gift catalogs filled with things she would never buy: electric shoe shiners, twenty-band weather radios. Who orders this stuff, she wondered, people with stolen credit cards? Who needs a clock that projects the time on the wall? Did a fourteen-year-old boy write this catalog?

She was relieved when the pilot announced the start of the descent toward the airport. A nervous flyer, she liked this part of the journey best because it meant she was only minutes from stepping onto the ground rather than floating thirty thousand feet in the sky, a vague nowhere between birds and planets. She felt no joy in being so high up, no thrill; she had faith neither in the physics nor in the mechanics and air-traffic controllers. Henry, though, was always mesmerized. He could stare at the clouds, at the thread of a river, and not say a word. She gladly surrendered her window seat to him; the less she was reminded of all the space the jet could drop, the better. While the plane taxied to the gate, she would often think, This is one of those moments when we don't share a thing: You are so disappointed and I am nothing but grateful. I want to kiss the pilot, I want to cling to him tight, like a child. As they exited, she half expected the stewardess, sensing her husband's dejection, to pin a pair of wings to his lapel and offer him a glimpse of the cramped cockpit.

* * *

The airport was crowded with men in cowboy hats and tooled leather boots. Lucinda had been expecting a bit of it but not as much as she saw. A lot of the conversations she overheard were in Spanish, and the food stands lining the concourses advertised Mexican dishes she had never heard of. She wanted to try all of them.

After she had retrieved her bag, she took a shuttle bus to the rental-car lot. Surrounded by businessmen with ties and briefcases, she picked up a small white car—they were always white or red or gold—and pieced her way out of the airport. Janet's directions were unfolded on the seat next to her.

She was happy to be so far from Boston. Up until the moment the plane lifted off, she wasn't certain she would go through with the trip. She had had visions of walking to her gate, checking in even, and then turning around and heading for the exit. Call Henry's name, stop him before he got too far. He wouldn't force her to explain; he would just be relieved she had never left, was still carrying his baby, was still his wife. That would be his thank-you for her canceling the trip. Sometimes the charity comes in not asking.

Yet she hadn't turned back, hadn't even been tempted to, and now she was driving sun-baked Texas highways she had never been on before. There was something thrilling and mildly frightening about it all. If it feels like you're going toward Mexico, you're headed in the right direction, Janet had said. It did indeed seem to Lucinda that she would soon arrive at the border, like the United States was about to end, she thought, but which direction wouldn't feel like that? Up?

The countryside outside El Paso quickly turned hard and uninviting. The strip malls vanished and the fast-food restaurants
dropped away too, as did the boot makers and squat, melancholy motels. Aside from an occasional gas station and billboards advertising debt relief, fireworks, or car loans, very little interrupted the landscape. For a few miles she paralleled a vast ranch dotted with elk and bison. She pulled over for a minute to take a closer look and snapped a few pictures with a camera she had bought in the airport newsstand. The animals were grazing so far away they would likely show up as nothing more than sticks, dots, but she would know what the shapes signified, the time of her life they indicated, the distress and sudden freedom. She could show Henry, or their child, teach the baby about cowboys and the West, visit the zoo to show her the animals up close. Encourage her to approach them, touch their hides.

When the odometer hits 30, start paying close attention, Janet had said, and Lucinda complied. She came to a traffic light three and a half miles later, at which she turned right. This was San Elizario, Janet's hometown, and the traffic light marked, more or less, downtown—“or as downtown as it gets,” Janet had said. A few turns later and Lucinda was at Janet's address, a white shotgun house with a scraggly front yard and a boisterous chocolate lab immune to the throbbing sun.

Janet appeared on the porch wearing jeans and a T-shirt, and aside from a line or two around her eyes and a tan that was probably permanent by now, she looked identical to the girl Lucinda remembered from college. Lucinda got out of the car and waited while Janet quieted the dog and opened a small gate. The two of them hugged briefly, stiffly, with Janet avoiding touching Lucinda's belly. It's okay, Lucinda wanted to say, I'm pregnant but I won't break.

“Sorry about Callie,” Janet said, ending their embrace. “She's
a sweetheart once she gets to know you.” The dog, now leashed to a stake in the ground, had started barking again, this time out of eagerness to be included.

“I was going to get a yellow one,” Janet said, “but I didn't want her to feel self-conscious about not looking like everything else.”

Lucinda shielded her eyes with her hand and took in the surrounding hillsides. With the time difference, the sun was still out. They were richly brown, thumbed with pockets of tight, hard brush. High above, hawks patrolled the sky in lone sorties.

“Do you have a lot of stuff?” Janet asked. “Can I help you carry anything inside?”

Lucinda shook her head. She pointed to the trunk of the car and walked over to it. “I just brought one bag,” she said. “It's light. I'll get it.”

Janet showed her into the house and led her to the spare bedroom. “Sorry, it's sort of spartan. But the bed's incredibly comfortable. I sleep in here myself sometimes, when I'm restless.” The room was small and nearly empty, furnished with only a bed, a bedside table, and a Mexican rug patterned like a backgammon board. “It'll be perfect,” said Lucinda, setting her suitcase on the mattress.

“You can put your clothes in here,” Janet said, opening the closet door. “Take your time. I'll just be in the kitchen.”

Lucinda unpacked a few things and then wandered to the room's single window. It faced another of those foothills. Down its opposite side she imagined a river, then the start of Mexico, though she had no idea whether she was staring north, south, east, or west. She thought of Henry: If he had been there with her, they would have hiked up to the top and looked over the dirty chaos of Juárez, land bullied by factories, the sky dyed with
exhaust. He would have drawn her close, and they could have located the beauty in all the ugliness.

She joined Janet in the kitchen.

“Tea?” Janet offered when she saw Lucinda.

“No, thanks.”

“Are you hungry?” Janet asked. “I thought we could go get some dinner.”

“That sounds great. I'm starving, actually. Who eats airplane food?”

“The very fat or the very desperate, or people without taste buds,” said Janet. “This place is just a short walk.”

Lucinda waited for Janet to leave the kitchen, and then she followed. The two of them were still awkward around each other, not sure exactly where to stand, what to say. They hadn't spent time together since college, and, except for an intense flurry of phone calls several years ago, hadn't really spoken. Lucinda's Texas plans had come up out of the blue, and Janet had said yes partly because she didn't think Lucinda would actually follow through. After all, she was pregnant and had only a couple weeks before she wasn't supposed to fly.

Yet here she was in Janet's little house, not saying much but saying tons just by being there. The awkwardness would dissolve, they both knew. All they needed was a bit of time.

As they walked to the restaurant, Janet said, “It's a Mexican place. Or there's a sushi bar, if you'd prefer that.”

“A sushi bar? Here?”

“I was kidding,” Janet deadpanned.

Lucinda laughed. She hadn't remembered how funny Janet was. With guys she didn't like she could be ruthless. The two of
them used to stay up late in their dorm room, fueled by red wine and cigarettes, trying to figure out boys and parents who never did the right things, much less said them. God bless them for being so disappointing. Otherwise Lucinda and Janet wouldn't have found each other. Janet often delivered deadly accurate impressions of their most reviled professors, nailing the stentorian intonations, the way they paced in front of the blackboard, oblivious to the chalk dust on their jacket sleeves. She drew a black line at the base of her forehead to approximate the unibrow of one. When the RA knocked on their door and told them to keep it down because people were trying to sleep, Janet shot back, “It's college, for chrissakes. If you're not going to stay up all night now, then when are you?” Sunday nights they would blast a Cult record, the one with “Edie” on it, and dance around the room swinging their long hair. They sang along, jumped on the floor and bounced on their beds.

Even back then, Janet had already been a gifted artist. She was a painter, in love with the abstract expressionists, and her canvases were giant, monolithic color fields. Everyone sensed she was great, but her talent was confirmed when a famous sculptor visited campus to give a lecture, saw her work, and within the day was on the phone to his gallery in New York, demanding they set up a show for her.

After college she went to graduate school at Yale, leaving one semester short of her master's degree to follow her college boyfriend to Texas. He was a computer programmer who landed a job with a software maker, and Lucinda always liked the dichotomy of the two of them—Janet throwing paint around, dancing in her studio to Public Enemy and N.W.A, and her boyfriend
hunched in front of a computer monitor, staring for hours, turning numbers into commands. He listened to nothing but jazz composed after 1980.

He worshiped her. He was always coming by their dorm room with treats for her: miniature Reese's peanut butter cups, mix tapes with all the wrong songs, issues of
Vogue
. When the three of them were out, Lucinda sometimes saw him staring at Janet, and she was amazed so much devotion could be jammed into a single gaze. Lucinda had always expected Janet to outgrow him, maybe get seduced by an older, established New York artist, but she didn't. “I'll never leave him,” Janet had said late one night, when both were in bed and neither could sleep. “Wanna know why?”

“Why?” Lucinda asked, the word hanging out there in the blackness of the room.

“Because when he first came to my studio and saw my paintings, he was silent. I thought maybe he hated them. When I asked him why he was being so quiet, he said he didn't know what to say. He stared at the floor and said, ‘They're so beautiful and smart, I just want to let them be. They say things that most people take whole books to say.' ” Okay, Lucinda had thought, now I have a crush on him, too. Find me a shy computer programmer hiding all that love.

A year after they moved to El Paso, he left her. He woke up and drove to work one morning, even kissed her good-bye, and then never came home. He phoned three days later from the side of a road in Tennessee and told her he had fallen out of love. He didn't know when, but he had. Semis roared past. A steady rain pelleted off the hood of his car. He had driven through Dollywood, Graceland. He rode tour buses in endless loops. He told
her he had to leave before he did something to hurt her, before he met someone else. It would have been a flimsy excuse anyway, he said, and you don't deserve that. She said, “Just come home,” and he said he couldn't. Please, she begged, and he said, “I want to but I can't. I'm sorry, I can't.”