The Measures Between Us (3 page)

Jack reached below, searching for her belt, and when he found it he unfastened it. Then he unbuttoned her pants and trailed a thumb across the top of her underwear, tracing it all the way to her hipbone before edging it downward. This, he thought, this and nothing else, the two of us, here.

“Give me the keys,” she said, and after Jack fished them from his pocket, she reached through the gap between the front seats to turn on the ignition. Jack didn't realize why she was doing it until she turned the heat on and shoved a CD into the stereo. She didn't bother looking for a specific one, she just wanted a
soundtrack, something beyond all the moaning that was too much and not enough.

She sneaked her hand inside his jeans, then inside his shorts. His hips jutted toward her, and the reflex embarrassed him but her touch felt so good that he couldn't resist and he didn't want to say anything and risk the interruption. After a minute he got back to her and unbuttoned her pants the rest of the way. He tugged them down until they bunched around her ankles and then began massaging her through her underwear. Her moans grew louder, less voluntary, and Jack moved the flimsy fabric aside and put a finger inside wetness.

She tightened her grip on him, stroked up and down, and at one point, teasing her earlobe with his tongue, he caught an earring, and she whispered, “Sorry,” which struck him as absurd, since she was doing nothing wrong, less than nothing. Shorts at his knees, he moved on top of her, and she guided him slowly inside her. It was a relief, and it was overwhelming, those two things at once. He clutched her ass and thrust deep, feeling the seat cushions against the back of his hands. She yelped a little, he heard it over the music, and he paused, until she uttered, “No, don't stop.”

He came quickly. Afterward, he slumped on top of her, his sweat mingling with hers. Her breathing was shallow. She ran her fingers through his hair, and he was suddenly aware that he was still wearing a shirt. He pulled it up, because he wanted to feel her breasts against his chest.

Can we just stay here?

Jack wanted to ask her this, but he also didn't want to say a word. Cynthia was silent.

He thought of what the fairgrounds had looked like only hours ago, filled with people and their hopeful smiles. Now the
place had gone still and misty. The rides were idle, the jabbering clown in the dunk tank quiet.

When Jack opened his eyes, he saw Cynthia's, closed. He glanced further downward, saw all her clothes half on and half off and didn't quite believe she was here, with him. He thought she may have fallen asleep, so it was a surprise when she said, eyes shut, “Do you hear that?”

“What?”

“It sounded like a horse clomping by.”

Out the window, slowly unfogging, the grounds were empty. No lurking security guards, no ride operators getting ready for tomorrow.

“I don't hear anything,” Jack said. But that wasn't exactly true. What he heard was inside the car, her gentle breathing, her heartbeat stuttering back to normal, her report of a dream.

She ran her forefinger over a spot on his shoulder. “What's this?” she asked, eyes still closed.

“Just a minor burn,” Jack said.

“You have two of them,” she said, rubbing the same spot on his other shoulder.

“I always forget,” he said.

“How'd you get them?”

“I bumped into a barbecue.”

The horse again, or at least that's what it sounded like, though maybe she was just remembering the soundtrack of the animal barns. She buried her right hand in his hair and she wanted to tell him where she had been, tell him about those weeks she'd been away. “Jack,” she said, nearly whispering, but nothing else came out and instead she pulled him tighter against her.

The School was empty, save for the two men. There were no children jostling in the halls, huddling in front of bulletin boards, their calls echoing through the corridors. During the weekdays, when the classroom doors opened in unison at the end of a period, the kids spilled out like they had been released from prison.

Vincent Pareto often stood in the doorway of his woodworking classroom and watched the chaos. Other teachers were more focused on the social cliques the boys and girls fell into, and in the faculty lounge they dissected the fickle politics that mapped each grade. Vincent, though, was interested less in the ordering and reordering of athletes and chorus members than he was in noise, its rise and fall, the elusive stories buried in its rhythms. The clothes the students wore, the patches they sewed on their backpacks and jeans, the stairwells they colonized—he couldn't keep track of these things. Instead, daily, sometimes hourly, he listened to the cadences of their voices, the scrape of their jackets against a bank of steel lockers. There was something comforting about its reliable swell. It was the sound of being young.

This afternoon there was no such noise. The only voices belonged to him and Henry Wheeling, a student he hadn't seen in
more than twenty years. Vincent had summoned him to the school to ask whether he should put his daughter in a mental hospital.

The answer was yes, said Henry Wheeling, now a psychologist. Two decades and he had merely gone from one school to the next, collecting degrees and knowledge.

Vincent had charted out Cynthia's history for him, how she had struggled to stay in college and then dropped out, moved to California with a boy she hardly knew but was certain she loved. He had gone back further, telling the psychologist of the ups and downs of her teen years—broken curfews, whiffs of marijuana smoke, the mysteriously low levels of some of the bottles in the liquor cabinet. We didn't think it was anything too major, Vincent said, nothing a million other kids weren't doing to test the limits. He came full circle, describing Cynthia's recent move back home, into the attic bedroom. My wife and I barely see her, he said. It's more like having a tenant than a daughter.

Still, the answer wasn't yes, yet. Henry didn't immediately say: Send her away. The response was, “It sounds like she's had a rough time.”

“True,” said Vincent. “Rougher than she deserves. It's hard to watch.”

“Does she see a therapist?” Henry asked.

“No, at least not that we know of. She has in the past but none of them really helped and she stopped going. The last one gave her medication.”

“How did that go?”

Vincent shook his head. “Not well.”

“I could get you the names of some good people,” Henry said.

“Thank you, but I don't think she'll go at this point. She
mentioned once that she was sick of it, having to start all over with a different person.”

What turned Henry's concern into full alarm was aspirin, specifically the twelve bottles of aspirin Vincent's wife had found squirreled in Cynthia's medicine cabinet. Twelve bottles, fifty tablets each. Six hundred. What brand and strength it was didn't matter, even though Vincent had come to school armed with these details. The math, to Henry Wheeling, was inarguable. “Yes,” he said, inhaling sharply. “She should probably be in a hospital.”

“Even though it's only aspirin?” Vincent asked. “A few minutes ago you were offering to suggest a psychiatrist's name.”

“That was before I knew about this part,” Henry said. “Twelve bottles of anything is too much. And combined with her depression, it makes sense to be overcareful.”

“So you think she's depressed?”

“From what you described, yes.”

“Are there specific signs?”

“The sleeping, for one.”

“Could it be she's just tired?”

“Maybe. Does she eat regularly?”

“No.”

“Does she have supper with you?”

“From time to time. Seems hard for her to sit still for very long.”

“What about a job, does she work?”

“Nothing regular. She babysits a neighbor's son.”

“Friends? Does she spend a lot of time with friends?”

“Not many. She's reconnected with a boy she knew in high school, they seem very attached.”

The sun had set an hour earlier. The trees and bushes outside the window had dissolved into silhouettes. The woodworking shop sat on the first floor of the school, and across the street stood three apartment buildings that blacked out much of the sky. Vincent's gaze settled on one of them, and he was jealous of the strangers there, talking about anything but this.

Hospitalize
. It was a long word but it didn't encompass all that it meant. The word, Vincent thought, should be a paragraph, a chapter, a book. Even then it wouldn't be long enough.

He eased himself into a creaky chair and rubbed his eyes. A phone was bolted to one corner of his gunmetal-gray desk. It was the only object on the desktop aside from a blotter stained with coffee rings and a few stray Mongol pencils.

“I'm going to call my wife now,” he said, his right hand landing on the phone.

“I hope …” said Henry. “I hope … this has been … helpful.”

“Well, it certainly wasn't what I'd longed to hear,” said the shop teacher. “But it's useful to get the opinion of a psychiatrist. I had a hunch you might say what you did anyway.”

Psychologist, Henry almost corrected, but stopped himself. It was a common mistake. “You should consult with someone else, too,” he said, “if it would help provide reassurance.”

“I think we'll probably do that, no harm in getting another opinion,” said Vincent. “I'd like to make the call in private, if you don't mind.”

“Of course.” Henry threaded his arms through his jacket and patted his pockets for his wallet and car keys. “Please let me know if there's anything more I can do.”

“I will,” Vincent said. “Thank you.”

Henry thought he should shake the shop teacher's hand before
he left. But it seemed so immovable, anchored to the phone, as if it had been soldered there. He thought it might take some huge effort to free it, so he simply left the woodworking classroom and shut the door behind him.

How, Vincent wondered, had it come to this? How had Cynthia grown into a twenty-two-year-old hoarding pills when he could still vividly remember her as a little girl afraid of a storm? She trudged down the hallway into their bedroom, trailing a blanket, its edge collecting dust. She climbed on top of their bed and said, “Daddy, it's right over the roof. It's about to crash through and hurt me. It's getting closer. It's coming in.” Thunder's just a sound, he assured her, it can't hurt you. It's loud but it's a part of nature. No, she objected, it
can
hurt me, why does the sky want to hurt me?

Vincent could feel, in the small space of that single late afternoon with the psychiatrist, Cynthia's past evaporating. She would no longer be the daughter he'd bought a globe for and taught geography to.
The Mississippi runs through the Midwest even though it's called the Mississippi; the capital of South Dakota is Pierre. The Great Lakes are too big to freeze over. That'd be like the ocean freezing over, and that only happens in Antarctica. The polar bears and penguins waddle across. Remember? We saw them on TV
. The daughter he'd practiced driving with, in the empty Sunday parking lots of supermarkets before the blue laws had been repealed. She used to knock her head against the steering wheel in frustration when she stalled. She'd say, “I'm never going to learn.” And Vincent thought, That's the biggest thing between being an adult and being a child—past a certain age, you understand what
“never” truly means. The weight of that word, how you should reserve it.

Eventually she stopped stalling the car and passed the test, flashing a huge grin in her driver's license photo. She added an inch to her height, and tried to get her eye color listed as hazel. “Miss, we only do blue, green, or brown,” said the weary DMV clerk.

Henry Wheeling had told Vincent, “These problems are often deep inside. It's likely a chemical imbalance that may have been triggered by an external event. Or it could have simply flared up naturally. It's hard to know.” But Vincent feared Henry had said that only to make him feel less guilty, so he wouldn't lock himself in the woodworking shop and pace the floor, searching for blame as if it were a single bent nail among the thousands of true ones. If it was just something inside, something “chemical,” why hadn't there been signs since her early childhood? Why hadn't Vincent and his wife noticed symptoms before?

On the phone, Vincent's wife said, “I was so afraid he'd tell us to put her in a hospital. Did he suggest that right away?”

“No. Before I mentioned the pills, in fact, he talked more about therapists.”

“Even though it's aspirin? Everyone takes aspirin. Your doctor told you to start taking one a day, to prevent heart problems. There are hundreds of worse drugs she doesn't have up there.”

“I know. I pushed him along those same lines.” Vincent flicked some stray pencil lead from his blotter. “This thing … it's for her, not us,” he added. “We want her to feel better, and not to try and harm herself. That's what he kept emphasizing. He said
she should be in a place where she can be safe and get good help.”
Safe
. It seemed so basic, something you shouldn't even have to say out loud. All his life he had tried to make his house a safe place and now it wasn't. His daughter had smuggled a weapon in.

“I had an awful choice—telling you about the pills or keeping it a secret,” Mary said. “I decided I had to tell you because I had no idea what to do with the information myself. I didn't know what to do.”

What if they'd had other children? Vincent wondered. Would this be any easier? Maybe it would be worse, having the example of kids who were happy and stable right next to Cynthia's indelible sadness. Maybe, though, if she had brothers and sisters she'd be happier. They could have supplied her with something her mother and father obviously lacked.