The Measures Between Us (35 page)

In the hours before the previous flood, she took each of our things and hiked straight upward with them. Made a million trips up and down, and she's not the youngest person in the world. But she re-created our house under a lean-to that the rocks and trees form. Dishes, TV, microwave, I carried the heavier stuff. That's where we rode it out, in our makeshift second home, with a tarp strung across the branches and the precious things wrapped in double trash bags and no electricity. We watched the water climb toward the foundation of our actual house, then surge onto the porch, finally inside. We wandered down a few times but not too close.

DR. WHEELING:     That didn't scare you?

G. PHILLIPS:     Scare us?

DR. WHEELING:     The memory of watching the water go into your house—that didn't make you want to leave this time?

G. PHILLIPS:     A foot of mud was all that happened. Which we shoveled out once the river receded and then made the million trips downhill with our stuff and reinstalled everything according to where our memory told us everything went. We lost a few books, too, but not the photo albums which my wife had stored in the car parked higher up.

DR. WHEELING:     Mud was the only aftermath?

G. PHILLIPS:     Right, mud, a lot of mud. Nothing structural happened.

DR. WHEELING:     Did your wife regret staying, getting scared?

G. PHILLIPS:     I don't think she was scared. And besides, in those days after, we didn't spend much time on regret. Once we cleared out the dirt, we just walked along the shoreline, seeing what the flood did. You know what we realized?

DR. WHEELING:     What?

G. PHILLIPS:     That water tells the story of where it's been. Days after the river goes down, the grass is bent southward, and a line of leaves and stones marks where the river got to. The other thing is that there were huge chunks of God knows what on the shoreline—vinyl siding, RV parts, canvas from tents. None of it was useful, of course, but I guess it was once. My wife liked to collect the bricks with faded stamps of their maker and their city—the higher waters always deposited a few of those.

DR. WHEELING:     That didn't make her worry for your house, that its bricks could float away too?

G. PHILLIPS:     I guess not. She didn't connect the two. There was where we lived, and there was where other people lived and left, unrelated save for them both having to do with home. Her mind works different than other people's.

DR. WHEELING:     How so?

G. PHILLIPS:     For one, she's a sleepwalker. Two, three, four in the morning sometimes, she'd wander out and go all the way to the bridge, cross onto the middle and pause and stare at the bonfires at the campground. I never woke her because you're not supposed to, just followed from a short distance behind in case she fell but she never did. She knows that route better than anyone, where the inclines are, where the drop-offs are. She could walk it in her sleep—oh, I guess she does.

DR. WHEELING:     [
laughs
]

G. PHILLIPS:     Sometimes she wouldn't even stop in the middle of the bridge but walk all the way across to where the road turned paved and led out to the highway, Ninety-seven. She'd walk on the shoulder and the cars and semis came too close and the two of us must've looked like ghosts—maybe that's why no one stopped, though once or twice someone did in fact pull over and ask if everything was all right and I nodded and they drove off and I was fortunate not to have to explain.

Eventually she'd turn around and I'd turn around too and we undid the route we just took. Sometimes I had a flashlight and sometimes the moon was so bright I didn't need one.

DR. WHEELING:     Did she ever remember in the morning?

G. PHILLIPS:     Never that I can recall. Maybe she thought it was all a dream. What a dream … I'd pay for dreams like that. The experts could probably explain it better than I can.

DR. WHEELING:     Back to the flood, though. What would make you leave? How big a threat?

G. PHILLIPS:     Honestly I don't know. I suppose if I was genuinely worried for her safety, and sometimes I can't tell how much is stubbornness and how much is her being … you know … touched a little.

I just hope it doesn't ever come to that. Maybe next time the sky opens up we'll do it all again, stay out all night, watch those bonfires burn and listen to them snap and sizzle and watch the sparks swooping up. Maybe we'll move all our stuff again, trudge uphill, see the river climb all over again. Now at least we have practice on our side. We'll be even faster at it.

DR. WHEELING:     What if the officials were more insistent? What if the sheriff and FEMA said it was mandatory?

G. PHILLIPS:     I doubt that would make much of a difference, to be honest. I mean, it's not like they're the most trustworthy people, either. Remember that nutjob pyro who impersonated a FEMA man and torched the gas station?

DR. WHEELING:     First flood, right?

G. PHILLIPS:     That's right. Like we needed that on top of everything else. Anyway … my wife says it's in her, the river and such. She's turned it into something sacred, and maybe it was, maybe it is. Who knows? Maybe those storms will torture another place from now on, and you'll move on to other people and ask why they didn't leave.

Cynthia left the hospital to a chorus of optimistic smiles. The nurses, the normally stoic orderlies, the intake administrator, the receptionist, and Dr. Eliot all gazed at her warmly. “Keep in touch,” Eleanor said, lightly brushing her wrist. Even a couple of the patients managed grins, though theirs were tight, wary, as if something they knew was rationing their hope.

She also departed with a squat bottle of medication. Since entering, she had taken antidepressants daily. Hers was the mildest dosage. “We start with the minimum and keep going up until it works,” Dr. Eliot said. The pills blunted her depressive urges, but they blunted everything else as well, left her feeling fuzzy, imprecise. You get used to it, other patients had told her, you just sort of accept the muddiness as the cost of not being down all the time. And she had, sort of. The hospital was such a strange, unreal place anyway that she didn't mind the fog in her mind. There was so little stimulation that she didn't feel like she was missing much.

Her mother had put fresh flowers in her room, irises and daisies, and they filled the air with a scent that was innocent and summery. Next to the vase was a miniature duck her father had
made. It sat on a card, a simple white rectangle that read, “We're so glad you're home.” She held the duck close to her eyes, examined closely all the intricate and precise wood carving. On the bottom he had written the date and the first three letters of her name, all that would fit on the small surface. She hadn't expected either gesture, and she was so touched she nearly cried.

On the drive home the three of them had been silent. No one knew what to say. It seemed wrong to dwell on the last six weeks and equally wrong to ignore them, to just launch into some subject like the weather or the opening of a nearby restaurant. Though the silence was awkward and loaded, it was, finally, the least painful choice. “Can you turn the radio on?” Cynthia asked at one point.

“Any particular station?” her mother said.

“Doesn't matter,” she said. “I got sort of addicted while I was … away.”

Her mother settled on an oldies station. They were spotlighting a single year, 1963, and between the songs the deejay rattled off major corresponding historical events. Soon her father was humming along with the songs he recognized.

Occasionally he even sang a verse, and Cynthia liked hearing him join in. When he visited her at the hospital, he never sounded like himself. There was always a stiffness in his voice and in his posture that Cynthia took as a hatred of the place, a desire to get out as quickly as possible before he was infected or trapped there himself. She had noticed it the day she was admitted, and she had always hoped it would disappear, that he could be more natural with her there, despite the strangeness.

She never expected the same of her mother, because her mother rarely seemed comfortable, rarely at ease with herself,
even at home. She didn't doubt that her mother loved her, but she never knew what it was that so contained her. During one of their sessions, Dr. Eliot mentioned that most of Cynthia's memories involved her father—from taking her to baseball games at Fenway Park to stretching a Band-Aid over a skinned knee. Until that moment, she hadn't noticed her mother's absence.

She had asked the psychiatrist what it meant, and he gave her the same vague, noncommittal answer he often did: “It might not mean anything.”

Then they began the kind of exchange that had become familiar and frustrating. “It must mean something if you're pointing it out,” said Cynthia. “If you just tell me what it is, then we won't have to play the idiotic quiz game. We'll save a lot of time and anger.”

Dr. Eliot didn't respond. By that point she had learned to read a few of his facial expressions, and this one, eyes steady and lips sealed, she knew, meant he wasn't going to say anything. He was going to let her circle in alone.

“Does it mean she didn't like me?” Cynthia asked. “Didn't like having a child?”

“Well,” said Dr. Eliot, “that's a pretty extreme conclusion to make, don't you think?”

Cynthia looked into her lap, then back at the doctor. “No,” she said. “Actually I don't. Why don't you give me another plausible explanation. Like that her hands were surgically sealed to her body—that's why she couldn't touch me.”

“Did she not touch you?”

“You're the one who said that.”

“No, I didn't. I was just pointing out that you talk about your dad a lot, with these early memories,” said Dr. Eliot.

“How about that she liked to defer to your dad,” Dr. Eliot said. “Maybe your mother saw how easy it was for him to express his affection, and she was a little intimidated by it, maybe even jealous, and this caused her to step back. Oftentimes people avoid doing things they perceive they're not good at.”

“I don't see how that's really different from her not liking me.”

“I'm suggesting it might have been more about some dynamic between your mother and father than it was about you. It could have even been an act of generosity on her part—maybe she knew how important it was for your dad that the two of you were close.”

“Oh,” said Cynthia, “I get it.” But she still didn't understand the difference. The consequences were the same even if the reasons behind them were not.

Before her discharge, Cynthia had been required to make a rough schedule: when she would start looking for a job, when she aimed to be in her own apartment, and so forth. A nurse helped her, and the plan they wrote up gave Cynthia a month before her first deadline, on which she would begin searching for work, highlighting the Sunday classifieds and logging on to help-wanted sites. The schedule was intended to allow time to get reacclimated to the world, a life without the structure and care of the hospital. And while she looked, she would return to her part-time job babysitting their neighbor's son, Brandon. The only problem, she soon realized, was that she wasn't sure how to fill her other days. She didn't want to sit around the house, since it reminded her of being back at Rangely, doing little but reading and watching TV and avoiding the other patients.

The solution she found was her car. She took long drives, getting on the Mass Pike and exiting at random towns she had never visited. Occasionally she crossed into New Hampshire and poked around its hamlets as well. Once off the highway, she made herself get lost, drifting from highways and onto country roads dotted with farmhouses and factories. She drove by horse stables, cattle barns, vast industrial complexes. On one such drive she pulled off the road next to a dairy farm to watch a dog herding cows back to the barn. He ran maniacally up and down the pack, nipping and barking, coaxing the lumbering animals back into their shelter. He was a fraction of their size, but they responded to him as if he were giant.

She liked these drives. There was no struggle. She was just absorbing new, peaceable bits of the world. Animals and their unswerving tasks; factories and the predictable regularity of a shift change; the lonely fire at the top of a smokestack. She snacked on Twizzlers and Diet Coke, and the floor of the car was soon littered with cellophane wrappers and empty cans.

More than once she turned around and began a route toward Boston, and Jack. She could surprise him at his internship—they could marvel at the model of the river again. She hadn't seen him much since her discharge, and she knew it wasn't fair to keep not telling him about Rangely. During her stay she had written him a letter, though she never mailed it. It seemed better to tell him in person, when she could read his expression and answer his questions immediately. Or try. She would never be able to answer the most basic one: Why? He would want to know why because he liked to get to the truth of things. Why was it raining so much? Why were there people who didn't leave their flooded
homes? She loved him for this, and yet she also didn't want to be the person who finally told him that some things, a lot of things, don't have a reason.

She never made it to the lab. Until she could figure out how to explain the vagaries of her disappearance, it was easier to see him less often, and always at night, when she felt less exposed. He was patient, too, much more patient than her, so she hoped he would wait.

She usually returned home in the early evening, in time to have dinner with her parents. The meals were a welcome change from the bland food she'd endured at the hospital. There, she and the other patients sprinkled salt and pepper liberally on everything. The result was that everything tasted the same, but at least it tasted like something. Her mother had always been a talented cook. There was rich soup, tender lemon chicken, pillowy gnocchi, fresh asparagus drizzled with olive oil and red pepper flakes. Other nights the three of them cut into steaks, or salmon spiked with garlic and dill.