The Measures Between Us (33 page)

“A little,” she said, looking at him again. “I mean, I knew it wasn't … you know … I knew it wasn't anything permanent. But I didn't know you were going to end it today. I didn't get that at all from your note.”

“I had to. Before … before it got to be too much.”

“I guess it's just that I was having fun.” Samantha smiled shyly. “I liked our times together. I guess that goes without saying.”

Everything he wanted to say sounded all wrong. He wanted to tell her she'd be fine, but that would come out patronizing—why wouldn't she be fine? Because he wouldn't have sex with her anymore? That was absurd. He wanted to say he hoped she would remember him fondly, but that was too needy, too ridiculous. He wanted to invite her in, strip off her clothes, and kiss her, kiss her breasts, hold her one last time, feel the jolt of power when a sexy girl gives herself to you.

“I liked our times together, too,” he said. “This is hard for me.”

She opened her mouth but didn't say anything. All that beauty and youth and confidence couldn't do a thing in the face of an ending. She would get through this, probably very quickly, yet for a moment she was just as vulnerable and human as anyone else, old or young, stunning or ugly.

“Nice car,” Henry said.

Samantha stared at it, relieved to have somewhere else to look.
“It's embarrassing. I park three lots over at school, at the broadcasting and communications building, so people won't see me getting out of it. I drive these ridiculous routes home that take me twice as long, just to avoid other students.”

“Why?”

“I don't know. I feel stupid. They're driving beaters, or taking the T.”

“Yeah, well, fuck 'em,” Henry said. “Let them think whatever they want to think.”

Samantha laughed. “They've probably seen it anyway.” Warmth was returning to her face. He was climbing out of it, inch by inch, but this was hardly the person he needed forgiveness from.

“Was it a present from him?” Henry said.

She stared hard at Henry as if to say, I can't believe you even need to ask. “No,” she said. “I bought it with my grad-school stipend.”

Henry nodded, smiled at her sarcasm. He deserved a jab, and more, anyway.

“I guess you should take this,” she said, handing him the empty envelope. “It's got your name on it and all.”

Henry tucked it under his arm. “So it does,” he said. “I'm going to go inside now. Thanks for coming by.”

Samantha already had her keys out of her purse. “Bye,” she said, turning and walking toward her car.

“Good-bye, Samantha,” Henry said. “I'll see you in seminar.”

Then he went into the house and poured himself another drink, taller than the first one. While the ice cubes cracked against the warm liquid, he stood over the garbage pail in the kitchen and ripped the manila envelope, shredding it and his name one skinny ribbon at a time.

She was coming home, and the house needed to be cleaned: furniture polished, floors mopped, rugs shaken out on the back porch and vacuumed. Beds made and blinds dusted and countertops sponged. It would take much of a day, Mary thought, and she was low on Murphy Oil Soap, which she needed for the front hall and the staircases.

She was all the more intent on tidying up since visiting Cynthia and seeing how spotless they kept the hospital. Rarely, though, did she witness anyone cleaning—unlike all the busy groundskeepers snipping and mowing—and yet the place was immaculate. It was good they put such effort into a seemingly small thing, she thought. “Never underestimate the power of an orderly house,” Mary's mother had told her decades ago. “Your father has always appreciated what a clean home I keep.” This had constituted the bulk of her mother's counsel on maintaining a happy marriage.

Her mother was right, however. Mary had seen firsthand how Vincent, returning from a long, tiring day at work, smiled when he stepped into the house. She had always thought it especially important that she keep the house picked up for him because he worked around tools and grease and glue and wood chips all day.
She had seen the band saws spray sawdust everywhere, the drills spit chunks of wood every which way. No one wanted to come home to another mess.

She wouldn't ask him for help. Not because she thought it woman's work, but because she preferred doing it alone. Pinning up her hair and rolling up her sleeves and sliding her hands into rubber gloves and scrubbing, scrubbing, scrubbing. It was satisfying in a simple way. You watched stains lift, floorboards glisten, the fibers of a rug stand tall and colorful. And by the time you finished you were a little tired, more proof that you'd accomplished something, no matter how basic.

She would go floor by floor, beginning with the first: the living room, den, dining room, and kitchen. They hadn't eaten in the dining room since Cynthia had been at Rangely. Its table was too large for just the two of them, and the extra surface area was too much of a reminder. Then up to the second floor: their bedroom and bathroom, and the guest bedroom, which had belonged to Cynthia until she went to college. They hadn't converted it immediately because they wanted her to know she always had a place in the house. And, finally, the third floor, Cynthia's room now. Mary hadn't been up there since Cynthia had gone to the hospital, and she imagined that the dust had settled in, colonizing the corners of the windowsills and walls. The TV screen, too, would need a wipe.

It was possible that Vincent had been up there at some point. He hadn't said anything if he had, and Mary couldn't remember ever hearing his footsteps in the room. She hoped, though, that he had, maybe when she was out shopping. She didn't want to be the first one, the one who would have to open up the medicine cabinet and deal with all those aspirin bottles, lined up and endless.

She hadn't been snooping when she discovered them. She had just had a headache and couldn't find any in her own bathroom. Cynthia had been out of the house, so she walked up to her bathroom, opened the medicine cabinet, and gasped. She brought her hand to her mouth. Twelve bottles, standing side by side just like on the drugstore shelf. Maybe they're empty, she thought, maybe Cynthia likes the labels for some reason. She couldn't always keep track of her daughter's unpredictable enthusiasms. But then she lifted and uncapped each one, and they were all full. She checked the rest of the room and found, under the bed, more bottles. These were prescriptions, drugs with names she couldn't pronounce, and it was too many. She retreated downstairs to the kitchen and sat down at the table and wondered what she should do, hardly realizing she'd grabbed the orange bottles. She could just pour them out, she thought, flush the pills down the toilet or dump them in the trash. But what should she say to Cynthia? What would Cynthia say to her? What should she say to Vincent?

She didn't tell either of them of her discovery for a week. She was waiting for a plan to emerge, some course of action that felt immediately, unequivocally right. One that would cause the least amount of hurt and shame. She made sure she carried a pen and scrap of paper wherever she went because she had no idea when this plan would reveal itself, but when it did she needed to write it down, whether she was in the middle of traffic outside the mall or pushing a grocery cart through the cereal aisle of Stop & Shop. Amid the bright yellow boxes of Cheerios it would come to her, with strangers steering their carts around her, all those people unaware of how critical her scribbling was and how it had nothing to do with a grocery list.

She waited until she couldn't wait anymore, until the waiting became a kind of torture, balled up hard inside her. She waited until, drifting off to sleep one night, she had a vision of Cynthia's cold, lifeless body being carted out of the house by the police and medical people, with Vincent telling a policeman, “We had no idea. We had absolutely no idea. There weren't any signs.”

That night she told him. Rousing him from sleep, she said, “I have something to tell you and I'm afraid, so I'm just going to blurt it out. Hold my hand.”

He did, gripped it tight, waited for her to open her mouth. When she did, she told him about the aspirin but not the other drugs. She didn't know why she left that part out—panic, probably, and some urge to shield him. She knew how close they were and she didn't want him to think he had failed her.

Neither of them went back to sleep. They lay on their backs, covers half off, and stared at the ceiling, the floor where their daughter was sleeping. No lights were on, and there were stretches of silence between them, long, sad spreads of fear.

“It could be nothing,” said Mary, piercing the quiet.

“Could be,” Vincent said.

He didn't believe that, though. Mary could tell without even looking at him. There are ways you come to know a man after being with him for thirty-four years—sharing a house, sleeping with him, having his child. There are ways he can't lie to you even if he wants to, even if he is trying to protect you and he believes the lie is easier to stomach than the truth. His body betrays him, his voice, his breathing. Something tiny like the movement of a finger. She didn't need a polygraph, didn't need to palm his chest to check whether his heart was racing. She knew: It could be nothing, but it wasn't.

Vincent had come up with Henry Wheeling's name the next morning when he and Mary were at the kitchen table trying to shed their grogginess with strong cups of coffee. “Old student of mine,” Vincent said. “Saw his name in the paper a few months ago. Teaches psychology at BU now.”

Mary's face brightened for a moment. “Do you think he'll talk to you?”

“I don't see why not. Wasn't a particularly difficult student or anything.”

“Oh, good,” Mary said. “Henry Wheeling.”

She was happy to at least have a name, someone who might share this burden. “Should I call upstairs and see if Cynthia wants any breakfast?” she asked from the refrigerator, where she was grabbing the eggs.

“Let's let her sleep,” Vincent said.

It was exacting, precise work, and it required a steady hand, untremored by nerves or fear. Any sudden jerk and you might as well junk the whole thing, start over, chalk up all the previous hours to practice and the wood to worthless. Some mistakes were fixable, most were not. A bill, for example: Carve the upturn too deep and the result would be something caricatured and comical, like Donald Duck, rather than something delicate and faithful. The body was one area where you had a little leeway. You could always make slight adjustments to the bulk; there was a range, a small one, of acceptable proportions. Feathers were another stage that called for meticulous detail work.

He hadn't carved a decoy in many years. There was no specific reason that he could remember; he had just let the hobby wane. The last one he did was during the time Cynthia was
getting ready to leave for college. He hadn't been sleeping well, and instead of lying in bed frustrated, he would descend to the basement and put in a few hours, hoping to empty out whatever it was inside him that wouldn't let him shut his eyes. He turned on the radio and took a stool and set about to work. He adjusted the volume low so the music wouldn't leak through the ceiling and wake his wife.

On more than a few occasions those years ago, he had heard footsteps. Cynthia was breaking her curfew, but he didn't care. For several weeks she had spent nearly all her time with friends, all of them cramming in as much time together as possible before they dispersed for different colleges. Her mother kept reminding her she needed to pack, and Cynthia kept avoiding it. “Mom, I will,” she always said, in that indignant tone all teenagers learn. Sometimes it sounds like everything they say is a line in the sand.

Vincent stayed out of those petty battles. In fact, he had carefully avoided saying much beyond what was absolutely necessary to his daughter for most of that month. He didn't even like being in the same room with her, because there was something heartbreaking about her leaving for college, something he couldn't face. She would be only three hours away, at UMass in Amherst, but Vincent knew that her departure was a turning point. There would be phone calls, visits, letters, care packages. Yet nothing to replicate the day-to-day and hour-to-hour living under the same roof. He would never again be the first person there to help her.

Sometimes he wondered if it would have been easier if they had had another child, if there was a younger boy or girl running around, ready and eager to fill the void that Cynthia would
leave. Someone to distract from this abandonment, to give them something they'd never known they would need.

Vincent had wanted more children, but Mary had been adamant ever since the night they had rushed Cynthia to the emergency room. He understood why, too: That night had been terrifying, and the easiest, surest way to guarantee that it never happened again was to not have any additional children. It wasn't a decision he resented Mary for. Cynthia, until then, had been enough. She filled him with love and gratitude, and to have even one person in the world who could do that was substantial, unbelievable luck.

This decoy to mark Cynthia's homecoming would be a miniature. It had been so many years since he had carved one that he didn't fully trust himself with a life-size model. Leafing through one of his woodworking magazines, he had seen a page of miniatures, and he liked them. They were quiet, undemanding, regal in their small scale. They didn't look like ducklings, more like adult birds shrunk down.

It would be a gift for Cynthia, a welcome-home present. One of the doctors at the hospital, a discharge specialist, told them they shouldn't make a big deal of her returning home. “Sometimes what happens is that you set the expectations too high,” the doctor had warned. “It becomes impossible for the patient, or you for that matter, to live up to those heightened hopes.” As a result, the doctor explained, Cynthia could end up feeling even worse, and then they'd be back where they started, if not even further behind. Undoing all the therapy and help she had gotten at Rangely. Back to the stockpiling of aspirin or worse, and the shadowy movements in and out of the house. “This is a very critical period, these next couple months,” the doctor cautioned.