The Measures Between Us (39 page)

She had kept these trips a secret from him. He knew Cynthia took drives, but he didn't know Mary chased her. She knew what he would say: Stop.

I can't.

You have to.

I know, but I can't.

What if she told him to hide her keys, what if he siphoned the fuel from her car, flattened the tires? There was a Hertz a few miles away, neighbors she could lie to and borrow cars from. She was stunned that she had actually thought of these contingencies.

The constant rain had turned their yard into marshland. Over the weekend Vincent had ventured out, clad in a poncho, to dig a ditch along the perimeter to drain the runoff. He stacked sandbags in front of the cellar windows. The water wasn't threatening yet, but there were reports from elsewhere of basements flooding, electricity shorting out, fires starting, which seemed almost unimaginable in the middle of so much precipitation. Mary knew there was talk of roads being closed and neighborhoods
being evacuated. That was the last thing they needed, to have to seek temporary shelter elsewhere.

She and Cynthia had watched Vincent work, his big shoulders locked in rhythm, mud flinging every time the shovel rose.

“Is that really going to help?” Cynthia asked.

“Can't hurt, I suppose,” Mary shrugged. “He can't really stand to not work on something.”

“I guess,” said Cynthia. “But it seems like water goes where it wants, no matter what you do.”

Mary smiled to herself. There was no mistaking whose daughter she was. It was exactly the kind of language Vincent would use.

The next day around three o'clock, there was a break in the storm. The sky lightened, though they had learned to mistrust these interruptions because the respites ended up being so temporary. The TV weathermen stood in front of radar maps that told the bigger, worse story: an inch or so of unbothered land, hugged on all sides by ballooning storm systems. They were maddeningly accurate. The sky would invariably grow darker again and the rain would come, slashing, insistent, rain and more rain and water that jumps its banks.

At the first indication of clearing, Cynthia called from the living room that she was heading out for a drive. Hadn't she been paying attention the past week? Maybe she didn't care. But her animals, surely they wouldn't be out grazing the soggy fields, and Mary wondered if she should meet her by the door and remind her of this.
You can't
. Vincent's voice in her head, urging her to stay.

She ignored him—he was cloistered at school and she was
home with Cynthia—and a minute later she was in her car, foot on the pedal feeding it gas, a yellow slicker bunched on the seat next to her for the rain's inevitable return. Just this one last time, she promised herself, turning up the radio to drown out the noisy doubt in her head.
Next time. Next time I will turn in the opposite direction, come surprise you in your classroom and you will take my mind off this. You will show me the decoys in the glass case. Tell me a different story.

Cynthia headed north and ended up in Milford, a river town near the New Hampshire border. The small main street looked abandoned. Huge puddles hid the sewers. The billboard of the church read, PRAY FOR SUN. She tried road after road, farm after farm, but no animals were out. They were cooped up in their barns, listening to the rain pellet off the tin roofs, wondering who had darkened their world. Mary hoped the animals' absence would make Cynthia turn around and lead the two of them back home.

Just as Mary expected, the rain started falling again, and the hour of dry air seemed like a mirage, something that occurred much longer ago than it actually had. The meteorologists on the radio were repeating the same unfunny jokes. One of them said the authorities had issued a missing-persons report for something called the sun. Another reported that the Eastern Seaboard had been renamed Seattle. There was no enthusiasm behind their humor, only fatigue.

The road Cynthia had turned onto suddenly dead-ended in a maze of police barriers. The flashing blue lights of the patrol cars skated along the slick pavement. A state trooper, his hat wrapped in plastic, directed Cynthia to pull over. He walked down a line of cars and motioned for all of them to do the same. When he
got to Mary, she rolled down her window. “Road's closed, ma'am,” he said before she had a chance to ask him anything. “Emergency situation.”

“Can I at least turn around?” she said. She was panicked, certain Cynthia would spot her. There were only a few vehicles separating them, and the rain reduced the visibility but not enough.

The policeman rested one hand on the base of his nightstick and muttered something into the walkie-talkie clipped to his shoulder, then listened to the crackly response. “You're gonna have to wait. Everyone's gonna have to wait. We're sealing off the whole area.”

“But—” The policeman had already walked away, so she didn't bother finishing.

Four more cars were lined up behind her. Beyond them, no one. The state troopers must have set up another roadblock, preventing anyone else from turning onto the street. Mary tuned station after station on the radio. News, music, financial advice, sports arguing. She settled on nothing because she didn't know what she was looking for. She was angry at Cynthia's impulsiveness, which had led them here, to what now seemed an inescapable unveiling of her shameful pursuit. Mary could, she supposed, plead with the officer, feigning some crisis elsewhere that required her presence. But what if that just created more commotion and drew Cynthia and the others out of their cars to see what was happening? Not to mention Mary didn't want to invent an emergency, especially in such close proximity to a genuine one. She thought of Vincent, of Tom Slater, trying to imagine how they would handle the situation. It was no help. Neither man would be stuck here in the first place. They would not be chasing their child.

At least Cynthia hadn't gotten out of her car yet. Behind Mary a man stepped out of his SUV and started walking toward the front of the line, to the group of state troopers standing around their cruisers. His hands were thrust in the pockets of a windbreaker and he was wearing a baseball cap the rain had dyed darker than its original shade. He stopped when he arrived at the first sawhorse, leaned on it, and shouted something to the police. A couple of them approached and the three of them began a conversation.

Tired of waiting and encouraged by this man, others began emerging from their vehicles and gathering at the front. Cynthia was among the last, though she too joined everyone else. Strangers wandered into and out of Mary's vision. She could lie down across the backseat, beneath the windows, yet that seemed absurd. If she had delayed herself only a few seconds more, she would have ended up behind the SUV, safe because it was so tall. But fate had gotten in the way. If Cynthia turned around now, she would see her mother.

Mary grabbed her raincoat from the empty seat and put it on. She still had no idea what she would say, yet she knew one thing: She didn't want to make Cynthia trudge through the mud and have to ask why she was there. Nor did she want her daughter to stand and stare and not come over, grow even more baffled.

The same trooper who had ordered her to pull over walked by again swiftly as she headed toward Cynthia. “Any more information?” Mary asked.

“None at the moment,” he said without pausing his stride. She caught enough of his face to see how young he was, barely out of college.

As she approached the strangers and troopers and police and county vehicles, she saw the reason they were all there. A hundred yards away or so, a one-lane bridge stretched across the river, and the water had risen so high that it was threatening to overtake the pilings and swarm over the roadway. It had only inches to go. There were more troopers on either end of the structure. The two groups resembled opposing armies locked in a stalemate. They didn't seem as if they were on the same team.

Mary edged closer. Cynthia's sneakers were soaked, as were her jeans. At least she had remembered a coat. She had even pulled on the hood, cinched it tight around her head, something she had always refused to do when she was younger no matter how ruthless the rain. She told her mother it made her look like a nerd, and on a few of her jackets she took scissors to the extra fabric. It was nice to see that you can outgrow such concerns.

Cynthia's back was to Mary, so Mary had to tap her on the shoulder to get her attention. “Mom …” she said when she turned around. “What are you doing here?”

Mary had decided she wasn't going to lie, yet she hadn't settled on exactly what she would say. No excuse sounded plausible. She pointed to the line of cars pulled over and then vaguely at a trooper in the distance. “They made everyone stop,” she said. “I don't know why, I guess it has something to do with the bridge.”

“No,” said Cynthia. “I mean why are you here to begin with.”

A stranger to Mary's left turned to them and said, “They're afraid the bridge is going to collapse. Plus there's something going on on the other side.” He pointed across the river at a group congregated by the shore, intermittently splashed by water bouncing off a nearby boulder. “Someone's injured.”

“Oh?” said Mary. “Is it serious?”

“It's a woman,” added another stranger. “They don't know how serious yet.”

Confusion, Mary thought, breeds a kind of camaraderie. Everyone is in the uncomfortable position of not knowing anything, so people surrender information right as they get it. There is no value in withholding.

“Folks,” barked a trooper, “you're all gonna have to step back a few feet.”

The group did as it was told. Two policemen disassembled one of the blue barriers, and half a minute later an ambulance sped in, its tires spattering dirt. The red lights and wailing siren were harsh counterpoint to the sheets of gray rain, knife edges within the hazy focus. Two paramedics stepped out and went to the back and unlocked the doors. One of them hopped inside.

“What's happening now?” said Mary.

Someone pointed to the far bank of the river, where a boat with rubber pontoons was knocking against the shore. Several men were gathered there, loading a woman strapped onto a stretcher into the boat. Two men in waders stood waist-deep in the water, trying to steady the boat and keep it from being punctured by the rocks. Ropes around their waists attached them to the trees on the bank. The river was famous for trout, though it was hard to picture that now.

As the boat motored slowly across the swelling river, the two paramedics who had just arrived descended the riverbank. One of them carried a hard plastic case. A few firefighters and policemen were at the edge of the water, waiting for them.

“Is that woman okay?” asked someone in the crowd. “Does anyone know what happened?”

Several of the troopers had binoculars trained on the scene below. The boat was nearly docked, and Mary could see that the woman's leg was wrapped with gauze. There was a man sitting next to her, holding her hand. His free hand was shielding her face from the rain. They both had white hair.

“She was shot,” said a trooper, the same one who had ordered them to step back a minute earlier.

Everyone was staring at the boat and the careful debarking. The man who had been holding the woman's hand stood off to the side and let the younger firefighters hoist her out.

“That lady was shot by her husband,” said the trooper. “They're a couple of old-timers who live down a dirt road on the other side of the river. The wife gets it in her mind that she's not leaving the house even though there's a mandatory evacuation. The FEMA trucks drive by with their loudspeakers ordering everyone out. She says she's not going anywhere.”

“Jesus,” said someone in the crowd.

The paramedics were listening to her chest, shining lights into her eyes. Her husband reached over and slid her hair off her forehead. The rain would undo his work before long.

“Apparently she just about dares her husband to do it,” continued the trooper. “She says the only way you'll get me out of here is to shoot me and carry me out along with the insurance papers and jewelry. So he packs up his truck, ropes in all their belongings, and waits for her to come to her senses. He gave her a couple hours.”

“And he did it?” asked someone in the crowd. “He actually did it?”

The trooper nodded soberly. “She's standing on the porch, telling him he can leave without her, sleep on one of those sagging
cots in the school if he wants. She says, ‘I could care less what FEMA and the weathermen are saying.'

“He goes back to his truck and gets the gun off the rack and says, ‘Last chance.' She just shakes her head. Doesn't say a word more.”

A half dozen men carried the stretcher up the slope. They walked methodically, planting their feet and taking one slow step after another. One of the firemen trailed a few feet behind, guiding the old man up. He looked barely strong enough to hold a gun, much less fire it at his wife.

“Is she going to be all right?”

The trooper nodded again. “Hopefully he aimed right, caught mostly flesh and not bone.”

That wasn't the right question, Mary thought. The one with the deeper injury was the man with no bullet hole in his leg. Her wound will scar over. Him, though, he will have to live with what he did. Raising the rifle to his eyes, sighting his wife in the scope.

The police began tearing down their barriers after the woman was snug inside the ambulance. They left a few standing by the mouth of the bridge. It wouldn't be safe to cross until the river fell. Then the engineers would examine the underside of the bridge, attach their sensors and study the results, to make sure it wouldn't fail.

The ambulance sirened away and the crowd began to disperse. Mary wondered what the couple was saying on their way to the hospital. What kind of conversation could they have? A gunshot is like a period: Nothing should come after. Strangers returned to their cars. The headlights and wipers came to life along with
the engines. “It's amazing,” Mary said to Cynthia, holding out her hand to cup the rainwater. “Do you think it'll ever stop? What if it just keeps raining?”