The Measures Between Us (37 page)

They left soon after, Mr. Slater showing them out and telling them to drive safely. They thanked him for his time and followed the driveway back onto a main road. There were few other cars out. The farther they traveled from the house and what had just happened, the more Jack calmed down. His pulse was slowing, and he scanned the radio for a song he had heard a hundred times before, because that was always soothing.

“Turn here,” said Cynthia, and Jack nosed the car to the right, past a gas station.

Soon the blacktop gave way to gravel and then to dirt. Jack saw in the rearview a golden cloud of dust churned up by the tires. The homes were spaced farther apart here. A hulking chicken coop, many of its windows punched out, stood next to a darkened farmhouse.

“There's a collapsing barn up here somewhere,” Cynthia said. “I went in when I was here before, and all these birds squawked and flew out. I don't know how it's still standing. It looks like it would fall down if you just sneezed at it.”

A couple minutes later, the headlights caught a massive pile of rusting metal. “Is that a junkyard?” Jack asked.

Cynthia nodded. “Need a washing machine that doesn't work? Or a really mean dog with huge teeth who doesn't know how to stand still?”

“What's he guarding if it's all junk?” Jack asked.

“You know, that's a good question.”

He wished it was daytime so he could explore the mounds of scrap. Car hoods, doorless refrigerators, sinks, tires.

“Up here, after the stop sign, take a left,” Cynthia said. She knew these roads, must have been here several times. “Okay. You can pull over here.”

He put the car in neutral but left the ignition on for the radio. In the distance, through a gap in the trees, he saw a handful of lights. When the wind roiled up they seemed to move, but it was only the tree branches bending and bowing, shifting what he could see.

“Is that …”

Cynthia nodded. “That's where we just were.”

“How do you know?”

“I mapped it all out with a compass and odometer.”

“Why?”

She shrugged. “Not sure. Maybe I was inspired by that lab you took me to.”

“Can I ask you something?”

Cynthia nodded.

“What were you looking for in that house?”

“I don't know exactly. I guess I just wanted to see if it would be a good place for him, make sure they weren't gun nuts or anything.”

Later, after about an hour, she said, “There's one more night of the fair.” They were still parked in view of the Slaters' house.

There would be fireworks on the final evening, exploding flowers in the sky, children and veterans plugging their ears. The
lights drizzling down like burning rain. There would be another concert, the last one. Jack knew the schedule from years past. More dancing, more promises, more cowboy hats and children asleep while their parents stole a moment outside their lives, outside of their obligations and fuck-ups and regrets. A boy had been nagging his mother for a dollar for a hot dog and he is now quiet, not dozing but mesmerized by the sight of his mother and father dancing. He's never seen this before, and he's forgotten his hunger and has to sit on his hands to keep from clapping so he doesn't make any noise and shut this electricity off. The men in the band step forward when they play their solos. He doesn't want this song to end. What is it called when something goes on and on? Infinity? He wants this song to be infinity. His school-teacher said infinity was like the stars in the sky, sand on the beach, the hairs on a horse, things too numerous to count, and so he had thought infinity was always small things, things that could slip through his fingers. Yet this song, his mother and father, is infinity too.

Cynthia's eyes were closed and her left hand was stretched across the parking brake, her hand in his. “We were at the fair, just us two,” she said. He didn't know if she was dreaming or remembering or both.

At the end of the song, the dancers stopped and applauded, and only then did the boy join in the clapping. Because by then it was okay—he wouldn't be interrupting or ruining anything. The musicians bowed, a couple of them more than once. One man, the one who played the massive upright bass, pointed to his instrument, deflecting the attention. But it was not the instrument that had made people sway and be grateful and forget momentarily the things they didn't want to do. The news they
didn't want to hear, the fights they didn't want to have. It was the song he had coaxed from its strings. It was the melody he had found in the belly of its shiny wood.

“We saw the oxen pulls,” she said.

“All that spit hanging off their mouths, like little ropes,” Jack said.

After the fireworks, the farmers would herd their animals into trailers, gulping tall cups of coffee for the long drive home. The rides were coming down, slat by slat and bolt by bolt. They get stacked onto flatbed trucks and look nothing like what they will become. The funhouse mirrors will go up in a new city, strand new fairgoers in an infuriating maze. Soon the grounds will be empty, the sky quiet and cleared of the sultry, glowing neon. One more night of the fair. Was she saying she wanted to go back?

“Listen,” said Cynthia.

“I don't hear anything.”

She smiled, eyes still closed. “Not yet?”

Jack tried to concentrate harder. Just as he was about to shake his head, he heard something faint, coming closer and growing, filling each second. It was familiar but Jack couldn't place it, and his mind was awash in fear and sadness. She was here but not here. Lights soon accompanied the oncoming noise, too high off the water to be a boat but well below where airplanes flew. They were getting brighter and brighter. He pointed his flashlight but it was too weak to reach the source.

“Do you know what that sound is?” Cynthia asked.

He nodded. They were near the Kingman land, and someone was helicoptering in.

“I always loved that sound.”

She didn't want to follow her daughter, though it wasn't really an issue of want or don't want, more like a reflex. What she wanted instead was to trust that nothing terrible would happen, that the drives Cynthia was taking had the same path as a boomerang—they included a return to the place of origin. She wanted to be patient and believe that Cynthia would eventually feel better, stop seeking something in the wilds beyond their house.

Yet whenever her daughter called to her from the front hall, “Mom, I'm going for a drive, be back in a while,” Mary waited a few minutes, listened for the ignition growl of the Civic, and then walked briskly out the door to the driveway and into her own car. Soon she was turning up and down the streets of the neighborhood until she spotted Cynthia's car. She did a rudimentary surveillance, trailing several cars behind so she wouldn't be noticed, were Cynthia even checking, which she thought unlikely. This was a strategy she had learned from movies and television shows, and there was, she realized, something comical about it.

She didn't always find her. Sometimes Mary drove block to block in an ever widening circumference and never alighted on
the car and its telling rust spots. She passed neighbors, familiar dry cleaners, drugstores, restaurants. She noted houses newly for sale, construction sites and their banners trumpeting architectural renderings and a rich, rosy future. When she failed to locate her daughter, she would return home, deflated, and go to the kitchen. The mug she had abandoned would still be on the table, its coffee cool and bitter. She'd turn the wall clock around, so its face was hidden. She didn't want to see the minutes and how they weren't going fast enough.

Many times, though, she did find her. Whether it was the smallness of their town, a mother's instinct, or a combination of the two she didn't know, nor did she care. Early on she realized Cynthia often stopped for gas or a snack at the Merit station on Northern Drive. Mary idled in a Stop & Shop parking lot across the street, under the big white sign. It reminded her of a joke her father used to tell Cynthia when she was a child: “Stop & Shop will be merging with A&P. And the new supermarket will be called Stop & P!” It sent Cynthia into peals of laughter, which immediately infected whoever else was in the room. Even Mary's mother, saddled with Alzheimer's for many of the final years of her life, joined in. Mary was grateful her father was no longer alive to see what had happened to that little girl cackling over silliness.

After Cynthia filled her tank or emerged from the store with a fountain soda and bagful of junk food, Mary would pull out after her and they'd begin their separate trips. A helicopter would know there was a connection. Cynthia always meandered north or west, or some combination of the two, toward more rural areas, instead of heading to congested Boston or the gray fishing towns massed along the South and North shores. When Mary
was growing up, her parents used to take Sunday drives in the country, though country back then was easier to find. The trappings of suburbia—new houses meant to look old, pools, manicured parks—dropped off much faster.

The routes Cynthia took would have driven Vincent insane. There was no logic, no pragmatism or efficiency, no attention to traffic patterns or shortcuts. Often she would turn at the last second, as if the shape of a road, or something she glimpsed through a corner of the windshield, looked inviting. A bird darting low over a farm, twin grain silos and their blunt roofs. Initially Mary was baffled by the aimlessness of these drives. Surely, she thought, Cynthia must be going to visit someone she had met from Rangely. A boy, she assumed, their kinship stoked into something more in the unreality of the hospital. Suspicious, she was nevertheless happy for her that she had found someone to confide in outside of the army of doctors and counselors. It had seemed like such a lonely place. But Cynthia never stopped at anyone's house, or even at a bar or restaurant where she might meet her friend. In darker moments, Mary wondered if Cynthia was going to meet Vincent, if the two of them were stealing time alone, away from her.

Occasionally Cynthia would pull over, parallel to a field, and Mary would have to keep driving and pass her in these instances, stopping her own car once she was a safe distance ahead. What caused Cynthia to stop were grazing animals. Cows, horses, sheep. No questions came from their mouths, or at least none that could be translated. On some farms there was a barn in sight, and other times just a flat expanse of pasture, making the wandering animals look humble and small. Cynthia would stand next to the fences that separated the herds from the road and
stick her hands through the gaps. Mary watched the animals' heads bob up and down, and she realized her daughter was feeding them with clumps of grass she tore each time she bent toward the ground. Sometimes it was just her and a single horse, its great, regal head swooping down to meet her hands and take what she offered. Other times it was a whole group, usually cattle or sheep, fanned out from her like crooked spokes, jostling each other for food.

There were moments she was tempted to U-turn and pull onto the same patch of shoulder. Cynthia would be surprised when she emerged, and the animals would divide their attention as well, freeze their perpetually busy jaws. Maybe the two of them could just stand there, grass dirtying their palms, the descending sun turning a ridge golden. Tree stands became velvet, and the birds were still. Listen, and you will hear the sounds of wind soughing through the leaves. Maybe they could stay long past dusk, until it was dark and the only illumination came from a bulb hinged to a dairy barn or the occasional passing car and its sweep of headlights. In the blackness the eyes of the cows began to glow. They are so large they can't be anything but sad and asking. Their tongues are weighty and the surface feels like sandpaper.

When Cynthia was a child, they hit a deer. It was late at night and they were driving home from a long weekend in Vermont, where they had hiked amid foliage that looked painted. Vincent was at the wheel, and he was always a flawless driver. Accidents happened to other, careless people. Their car was a safe haven. Cynthia was seat-belted in the back, asleep. She had closed her eyes soon after they crossed the state line, and she didn't even wake up when they slowed for tollbooths, though she usually insisted on being the one to toss change into the basket.

Mary herself was dozing as well. She drifted in and out of sleep, jerking awake whenever she felt herself descending too deeply. She didn't want her husband to have to drive alone, though he certainly wouldn't have minded. There was a baseball game on the radio. It was the era of Luis Tiant and his handlebar mustache. His pitching windup had him turning almost 180 degrees and looking at the center field fence before rocketing the ball past the batter. When the reporters interviewed him after wins, often it was hard to understand him through his exuberance and thick Cuban accent. Vincent had tried to get Cynthia interested in the Red Sox, but she had said, “It's boring. And why do you like it if it just makes you so sad? The games make you talk to the TV.” They took her to Fenway a couple times a year, plying her with hot dogs and peanuts so she would endure at least six innings. Strangers in neighboring seats, husbands and fathers themselves, exchanged sympathetic glances with Vincent. If the game was close, Mary and Cynthia would go home and leave Vincent at the stadium to watch the end. She always wondered if he wasn't relieved when they were gone, because then he could focus fully on the game.

There was a thud, and the car wrenched out of its lane. The brakes screeched. Mary snapped awake. “What … what happened?” she asked.

He was nosing the car to the side of the road. Gravel crunched under the tires. Moths swooped in and out of the headlights. In the rearview mirror, Cynthia was opening and closing her eyes, the slow blinks children wake up with. Catch a child in this state and you will understand what
unguarded
means. You will see time in its purest form, second to second.