The Measures Between Us (38 page)

“Hit something,” Vincent said.

“Are you okay?” Mary asked. “Is the car okay?”

“I think so. I'm going to check.”

Mary noticed some fluid spattering the windshield, something she didn't immediately recognize. She mirrored the streaks with her hand and said, “Is that …”

Vincent put his finger to his lips and nodded.

“What's happening?” said Cynthia from the backseat, now fully awake. “We're not home are we it doesn't look like home where's our house where's our trash cans?” She was at the age when there are no spaces between words. The world enters your brain in a flood, and you spit it out much the same way.

“No, sweetie, we're not home yet.” Mary said. “Daddy just has to check something on the car.”

“Can I go too?”

“No, this is a daddy job.” This was the vocabulary they had settled on to teach her not to touch any of the dangerous tools in Vincent's basement workshop. There were mommy jobs that were off-limits as well—chopping vegetables, cooking at the stove, slicing bread. In each space, the kitchen and basement, they had set up small-scale mock versions for Cynthia to play with. She cooked a fake dinner while Mary assembled the real one, dissected a fake garage-door opener while Vincent soldered the actual one.

Vincent was outside, crouching in front of the car and inspecting the grill. He flicked something out, but Mary couldn't see what it was. His eyes were narrowed, and the lamplight from the brights caught the silver in his hair.

“Where
are
we?”

“We're on our way home, sweetie.”

“Are we in Vermont? Where are the colored trees?”

“Not anymore. We're in Massachusetts now.”

“Mommy I know exactly where we are.”

“You do?” said Mary, genuinely surprised. At the inn where they had stayed, another guest who had a son close to Cynthia's age had told a story one night at dinner about her boy. Recently the mother had been walking with her son and the boy had turned to her and said, “Mom, I know what ‘fuck you' means.” Her curiosity got in the way of an immediate admonishment not to curse, and she said to him, “Oh yeah? What does it mean?”

“It means you don't believe in God,” announced the boy. And the mother just nodded, didn't know what to say because she thought her son was right in a way. The whole table had laughed, and everyone with children agreed that they might have reacted the same way.

Cynthia's claim of knowing where they were left Mary similarly dumbfounded, and she said, “Okay, where are we?” For a second she imagined her daughter was some sort of cartographic genius, endowed with a supernatural ability to know where she was at all times. This would have come from her father, since Mary had a terrible sense of direction. Her car was stuffed with maps and road atlases, and she was always asking gas attendants how to get to places, even if she was only five minutes away.

“We're in the nighttime,” Cynthia answered, and then dissolved into laughter. Not sure why this was so funny, Mary simply joined in, turning around in her seat to look at her daughter face to face. Commit this moment to memory, she told herself, before realizing there was no need for the instruction.

Vincent had disappeared from the front of the car. Through the back window Mary saw him, dragging a crippled deer across the asphalt by its hind legs. Its eyes were open, round with shock.
The animal was writhing, and Vincent kept losing his grip. Gathering his breath for a second, he met his wife's gaze, then went back to struggling with the legs and feet. He inched along the pavement.

“Mommy can I take off my seat belt? We're toll-booth-stopped.”

Mary's hand torpedoed over the buckle to keep her from releasing it and turning around. “Not now. Daddy'll be back in a minute and then we'll be on our way home again. Do you want to play a game?”

“Where is he? Is he peeing? Is he peeing with his penis?” She had recently learned the word and thought it amusing to use it as often as possible. A couple times at the inn she had made her parents blush, saying it loudly in front of strangers.

“Daddy's fixing the car.”

Vincent opened the trunk and took something out. Seconds later he appeared at Mary's window and she rolled it down. Sweat matted his hair to his forehead.

“Daddy! Daddy's wet!”

“Hey munchkin,” he said. “Do you want to sing along with Patsy?”

“Yes, sing along with Patsy sing along with Patsy!” Cynthia loved Patsy Cline, and they kept a tape in the car. Country music and red licorice were the only reliable antidotes to her occasionally feisty bad moods. They were a good barometer too: If neither worked, something was seriously wrong.

“Oh good,” said Vincent. “Remember to sing loud and pretty.” Mary's finger was poised at the edge of the cassette, about to pop it into the player. She stared at her husband, and he nodded. “Your mom'll sing too, I want to hear both your voices plus
Patsy's.” Mary pushed the tape in and then leaned out the window to see what he was holding out of their vision. A tire iron. “Remember,” he said, “big and proud. I want to hear my girls.”

The music began, and Cynthia started singing. She knew the words so well, she sometimes sang to herself lying in bed, without music. They would hear the a cappella songs drift down the stairs and into the living room, where they were sitting. Mary, shaken and tentative from what she had just seen, sang too, and Vincent nodded again. “Keep it going,” he whispered before vanishing.

They had made it almost to the end of “Back in Baby's Arms” when Vincent shut the trunk. Moments later he was back in the driver's seat, easing the car off the shoulder and onto the road. He turned the stereo down.

“Not all the way off, Daddy, did you fix the car? Don't turn off Patsy.”

“I did fix it.” He activated the windshield wash and the wipers cleared the glass.

“What was wrong with it?” Cynthia asked.

“Oh, just a little carburetor thing.”

Mary noticed blood on his right hand gripping the steering wheel, and she motioned to the same place on her own hand, the way you warn someone he has food in his teeth. Vincent rubbed it on his jeans.

“What's a carb … a carbur …” Mary always thought they should teach her a foreign language, so hungry was she for new words.

“It's part of the engine.”

“What part?”

Mary hoped they weren't about to get trapped in one of the tangled linguistic knots Cynthia liked to descend into.

Not tonight, though. Mercifully, her body remembered it had been sleeping and the interrogation ceased. They were grateful and they drove the final forty-five minutes without talking. Vincent left the Patsy Cline tape in, and when it ended he turned the radio off, not even switching back to the ballgame.

Later, after they were safely home and had tucked Cynthia in, Vincent took a long shower. Mary waited for him under the covers and he came to bed silently, his body still warm from the water and steam. He had toweled his hair dry, and in the morning it would be jutting out wildly.

In the darkness he explained that he had used the tire iron to crush the deer's skull. He held the metal with both hands, like a baseball bat. He didn't want to, but there was no way it was going to live. Its breathing was shallow and half its ribcage had collapsed from the impact with the car. Some of its insides were spilling out. There was green paint from the hood dotting its hide. “I could hear the two of you singing when I brought the metal down,” he said. “I thought it might yelp in pain or something, and I didn't want Cynthia to hear it. I don't know what a deer sounds like when it's attacked but I didn't imagine it was anything she needed to hear.” The angles of the blow caused one of its legs to jolt upward, like the animal was reaching out, and Vincent had jumped back. “I'm sorry,” he said. “I'm so, so sorry.”

Now Mary wanted to confess this story to her daughter. Tell her that Patsy Cline was a ruse, that people you trust not to get into accidents sometimes do. It is the way of the world, and there is
nothing you can do about it, no matter how desperately you want it not to be. She had held her husband that night, held him like he was the child. Often it was hard for him to fall asleep in her arms—he had to find his own side of the bed before sleep would set in—but not that night. He barely moved. At the end of the week, when she was doing laundry, she had discovered his bloody shirt and jeans, balled up in the hamper like he wanted to make them as small and insignificant as possible. Pouring detergent onto the stains, she was sad all over again, for what he had had to do, for the blow and memory that would be nearly impossible to shake.

Today, while they fed the horse, she could take her daughter back to that time, years marred by altogether different struggles. All Mary wanted back then was to break free of this act of violence. She didn't want that kind of pollution in her head. Yet now she realized there was nothing wrong with what her husband had done. He'd had no other choice. To leave the deer half dead and moaning and wheezing by the side of the road would have been even crueler, and Vincent was no sadist. He wasn't a murderer, not even a hunter. In that moment he was more like a nurse, and he hadn't retreated from what he had needed to do.

Before she got to the memory of the deer, she and Cynthia could remember the happier parts of their trip: walking down the main street of Brattleboro and stopping for hot chocolate, the dog at the inn whose vision was blurry with cataracts. “Mommy, the dog has clouds in his eyes,” Cynthia had said upon first meeting the pet on the porch. “How did they put the sky in his face?”

“The dog looks like that because he's very old,” Mary explained.

“When I'm old can I have the clouds? Will there be any left?”

Cynthia might not see the deer story as Mary did. It was possible she would interpret what her father had done as barbaric, not necessary and humane, and the last thing Mary wanted to do was give her more evidence of the harshness of the world. What if she understood the story as further proof that no one, not even a father she relied on for protection and love, was the person he appeared to be? What if the doctors at Rangely had trained her to look for blame in everything her parents had done, and wounding an innocent animal and then ending its life was more proof they had harmed Cynthia herself? Those doctors weren't the same kind of man as Vincent. They wouldn't have killed a deer to save it.

From her vantage point up ahead, Mary watched Cynthia zip her jacket and show the animals her empty hands. She had balded a patch of ground around her feet, and maybe someone wandering by later would puzzle over the shorn grass on the outside of the fence rather than on the inside. Long necks, they might conclude, or simply the randomness of nature.

The route home was as haphazard as the one hours before. It was more difficult to track Cynthia in the dark, but the nighttime also provided additional camouflage, so Mary felt confident staying a little closer. Guilt set in as they approached the familiar roads closer to their house. Guilt over not trusting Cynthia, guilt over not feeding the animals with her.

Mary assured herself that this was temporary. Once Cynthia seemed comfortable with being back at home, she wouldn't chase her; when her daughter announced she was going for a drive, Mary would learn that meant she was not only leaving but returning. Vincent had been the worrier back when she was in high school, chafing at her curfews. Mary fell asleep while he
waited up for her. Sometimes he watched a late-night talk show, hoping the jokes and pretty actresses might divert his attention. He didn't close his eyes until he heard the crank of her parking brake, her key in the dead bolt, her footsteps in the front hall. Back then he was her guardian and now it was Mary's turn, and she feared he had done it so much more elegantly. He had never been an intruder.

A month or so after they'd hit the deer, she had asked her husband if they should tell Cynthia what happened.

“Why would we do that?” he said.

“The books all stress to be as honest as possible, to not hide things.” Mary, concerned that she and her daughter weren't close enough, had been consulting parenting manuals, reading magazine articles by experts.

“We don't need to tell her,” Vincent said adamantly.

“Why?”

“The books are books,” he said. “They are not someone flattening a deer's skull.”

She had decided he was right. There are some things a child does not need to know.

It had been raining for nearly a week. Day after day was gray, and it was getting hard to remember what a blue sky looked like. The rain came in waves—downpour, drizzle, sideways, or fine mist. The wind was manic too. Sometimes it swirled leaves and litter, other times it was eerily quiet, as if storing energy for another assault. The only advantage of the gloomy weather was that it caused Cynthia to stay at home more, take fewer drives. Often she was on the couch in the living room, legs tucked under herself, updating her résumé on her laptop. She had asked Mary to save the classifieds from the newspaper, and Mary cut them out each night, arranging them in a pile on the foot of the stairs. She told her husband, and they both agreed it was a promising sign, her beginning to think about a job.

Mary was relieved for another, selfish reason. When Cynthia found steady work, she would no longer have time for her aimless drives, and Mary, in turn, would not have to struggle with whether to follow her. There was no winning. When she raced to her own car for surveillance she felt incredibly guilty, and while she was driving she kept telling herself she would turn around at the next convenient opportunity, and then never did. The guilt was so strong it made her skin sensitive to the touch. It
swelled in her lungs. The alternative was no better. When she resisted the urge to follow, she spent the next several hours in another kind of purgatory, waiting for Cynthia's return. She wandered from room to room, turned the radio on, and the television, hungry for breaking news but scared of what it might be. The voices and commercials and treacly talk shows echoed through the house for only a few minutes before she turned everything off, afraid of what she was turning into. Had Vincent come home and asked what she was doing, she wouldn't have been able to say.