The Measures Between Us (4 page)

“Do you agree?” Mary asked. “Do you think she needs to go to a hospital? I mean, that old student of yours could be wrong. He's not the only doctor in the world. He probably doesn't even have much experience. He's young, right?”

“He said we should talk to someone else, too, if we want a second opinion, but I think they'll tell us the same thing.”

“Why?”

Vincent paused. He looked around at the objects in the room, the half-finished boats and plaques, the unvarnished shelves, the bowls marred with mistakes, some huge and irreversible, some minor and noticeable only to him. Outside, the trees and leaves turned hazy, as if a great gust had billowed in and churned everything up.

He shifted his gaze to the cabinet full of decoys. Had he really made those? Had his own hands carved and painted the delicate
feathers, the faithful bills? Had he set and glued the glass eyes he had ordered from taxidermists? He couldn't imagine closing his fingers around the necessary tools now, dipping a paintbrush into an inkwell. They seemed too true to come from his own hands, too innocent and flawless. If he had harmed his daughter, why was he allowed to make fragile, beautiful ducks? Why hadn't he been arrested, leveled by cancer?

“Vincent.”

It was his wife, wanting out of the pressure and chafe of silence.
Mary
. She was somewhere at home waiting for him. Their house, in which he could walk the halls and know exactly where he stood even if he were blind. Here's the kitchen, here's the bathroom. Here's the linen closet, here's the pantry. Here's the bedroom, the bed,
I am so very tired. Lie down here with me. Tell me like it was years ago, before this. Wake me from this.

“Vin,” she tried again. Like “Cyn.” What he used to call his daughter when she was a girl. A short little name for a little girl, a sliver of a name for a sliver of a person.

“I couldn't live with myself if we didn't do anything and then something happened,” Vincent said.

“You mean her swallowing all those pills.”

“Yes,” he said. “I couldn't even bring myself to say it.”

“Did he have a specific hospital in mind? There must be more than one, right? My God—this is a conversation I'd never thought I'd have to have. I mean, it's our daughter.”

“He said he'd get me some names,” Vincent said. “You know, he did say that her kind of problem wasn't precisely his area of expertise, and that he wasn't the most experienced of doctors.”

“Does that mean you think we shouldn't listen to him?”

“No. I'm just repeating what he told me. I'm telling you
everything so you can figure it out along with me. I guess I don't want to be the only one deciding.”

Silence again. Vincent hoped his wife was sitting, because she shouldn't have to stand for such a long, painful conversation. There was a phone in the kitchen and one in their bedroom. Both rooms had chairs. If she was in the bedroom, she might be staring at the snapshots of Cynthia she had framed on the surface of her dresser. The three of them on the peak of a bald stone mountaintop in Vermont. Or Mary and Cynthia by the rim of the Grand Canyon. Or Cynthia alone, paddling a canoe across the Saco River in Maine, where they'd vacationed one August, camping on the river shore beneath the stars and cooking dinner on a propane stove. Cynthia had turned up her nose at the dehydrated food, filling her stomach with chips and toasted marshmallows instead. They let her without even deciding to.

“Dr. Wheeling said that a lot of parents blame themselves when it's not their fault,” Vincent said. “We can try and help her, but ultimately there's only so much we can do, because we can't control her behavior and thoughts. We can try to put her in the right place, put her in contact with good therapists. But that's about all.” He tried to reconstruct Henry's exact words, because they had sounded smart and right coming from his mouth.

“It sounds like you have reservations,” said Mary.

“Of course I have reservations,” Vincent snapped. “We're talking about sending our daughter to an asylum, for God's sake. It'd be strange if I
didn't
have reservations, wouldn't it? And I hope you have them, too.”

All afternoon Vincent had kept his emotions in check. He'd remained calm while he talked with Henry, sensitive to the tone
and volume of his voice. When Henry first mentioned the idea of a hospital, Vincent felt it like a slap, though he didn't show his pain, or at least he tried not to. Now, though, with the familiarity of his wife on the phone line, knowing she'd forgive him an outburst, he was raising his voice. The frustration and anger he had tamped down for a stranger rushed out, and he was sorry and he didn't want to be sharp with her and he hated himself for it yet he couldn't help himself.

“He said if it was his daughter, he'd put her in a hospital. He'd do the same thing if it was his own flesh and blood. That's what finally persuaded me.”

“Does he have children?”

“No,” Vincent said. “Wife's expecting.”

“Maybe it was easier for him to say that because it's not a real dilemma he'd be facing. It must be easier when it's someone else's child you're deciding for.”

“He's not deciding for us,” Vincent said, exasperated. “He was suggesting what he thought was the best course of action.”

“Deciding, suggesting … they sound the same to me.”

“You don't believe him?”

“I believe him,” Mary said. “But saying you'd put your hypothetical daughter in a hypothetical hospital is different.”

“Well, I don't think he was lying,” Vincent said. “And I don't think he was taking it lightly.”

“Are you coming home soon?” Mary asked.

“Yes.” He exhaled slowly. “I probably shouldn't have told you all this over the phone, but I thought you should know right away.”

“Don't apologize, just come home.”

“I guess I wanted some help,” said Vincent, his voice growing tiny and quiet. “I suppose I needed some help. I wasn't as prepared as I thought I was.” Help was something he rarely asked for.

“You can't prepare yourself for that. No one can.”

“I anticipated a lot of what he was going to say, but it didn't matter,” Vincent said. “There's a difference between imagining the words and then actually hearing them.”

“I know, just come home.”

He was getting it, too—what he craved, the soothing you don't want to need but do.

“I will. Bye.”

Vincent hung up the phone. He'd been in this room five days a week for more than thirty years, longer than his daughter had been alive. He had come some Saturdays too, during grading periods when work spilled into the weekends. For the first few years he was an assistant teacher to Frederick Chasen, the shop teacher before him. Chasen had taught until cataracts ruined his vision and it was no longer safe for him to handle power tools. A girl in the fifth grade told the principal that every time she went to class she was afraid he'd saw off his finger. She had precise ideas of what would happen, the blood, the orphaned digit on the floor.

One day he just stopped coming in. He didn't give any official notice of his retirement. But everyone knew. His wife later called the principal and told him that Frederick wholeheartedly recommended that Vincent take over his job. She said her husband would have called himself except that he wasn't feeling up to it. Vincent had always admired him for that, for putting in a word even when it seemed he didn't want anything more to do with shop or with the school itself. It showed he had integrity.

Vincent's wife was so proud with the news of his promotion. She bought a bottle of wine they couldn't afford and they lingered over a dinner, Cynthia asleep upstairs. Soon, with his increased salary, they could buy a better car, plan a vacation—Paris, his wife had always wanted to go to Paris.

Supper bled deep into the evening. They shared a second bottle of wine, and when Cynthia started crying upstairs, Mary went to see what was wrong. She returned ten minutes later, Cynthia asleep again. “Where were we?” Mary asked, sitting on Vincent's lap. They kissed, broke, kissed again. She reached for his face and traced his cheek with her fingers. “My shop teacher,” she said, “my Vincent.” The dirty dishes could wait, they would straighten Cynthia's toys later. What we need, he thought, we have right here.

It had been more than two decades since Henry Wheeling had set foot inside his old school. Graduation day was probably the last time, when his parents had insisted on snapping pictures of him with his favorite teachers. Maybe he'd visited once or twice after that, to say hello to a coach or to watch a basketball game, but he wasn't sure.

After he met with the shop teacher, he wandered the building. Passing a row of lockers, he was surprised to suddenly remember the number of his—643—though the combination eluded him.

He went to it nonetheless, on the off chance it was open. He wondered if the boys still taped up pictures of women in bikinis as he and his friends had, ones they razored from the annual
Sports Illustrated
issue; if they hid cigarettes and fireworks and other contraband in hollowed-out textbooks. To ask girls out to Friday-night dances, they shoved folded notes through the narrow vents on the metal doors.

He passed by the science classroom and the slate countertops where he had executed rudimentary experiments with mazes of glass piping and Bunsen burners. On hot June days, near the end of the school year, they would cool their faces by pressing them against the stone. Several years ago, the chemistry teacher had
been accused of molesting a student and the local paper carried an article on the front page. Angry parents demanded his immediate dismissal. Correspondents on the six o'clock news filed reports from the street in front of his home, a darkened ranch house with all the shades pulled. Finally the teacher was fired and he moved out of state, across the country to Idaho.

At one end of a long hallway was the principal's office. Henry remembered the room well. He and two friends had been caught smoking in a corner of the recess yard and been sent there, and on a couch in Dr. Mann's office the three of them sat while the principal tortured them with silence. He moved some papers around his desk, jotted notes on a yellow legal pad. The boys were squeezed together, no space between their six shaking knees. When the phone rang and Dr. Mann had a hushed conversation, the boys were certain it was the police on the other end of the line, and that the cops were on the way to handcuff them and take them to prison. One of them, Billy, burst into tears and asked for his mother.

Instead the sentence was a one-day suspension, along with stern lectures. They were shown gruesome photos of people suffering from lung cancer, too. When the boys returned to school after the day off, they were surprised at their newfound celebrity, especially the heightened attention from girls.

Two weeks earlier, Henry had come home from his office and checked his voicemail. “Umm, hello,” the message began. He recognized the voice instantly but couldn't put a name to it. “I don't mean to catch you off guard,” the caller continued, “it's just that, well, let's see, it's my daughter. I read your name in the newspaper a few months ago, and I was wondering … if you
had any time … if you might be able to answer some questions for me and my wife. Only if you have some extra time, of course. I wouldn't want to impose on you if you're too busy with other work.” There was a second message, too: “I guess I forgot to leave my name. This is Vincent Pareto, from Lincoln School.” He recited his number, which Henry wrote down on a scrap of paper but didn't dial immediately. Amazed at how familiar the shop teacher's voice sounded, he remembered the man well, walking from bench to bench, straightening a crooked nail, toweling off runaway glue, staring down the mast of a sailboat.

Over dinner Henry had asked his wife if she'd heard the two messages. Lucinda shook her head. “Your old shop teacher called you?” she asked, holding a plate of broccoli in midair. “Do you know what he wants?”

“Not really.”

“Maybe you forgot to take your birdhouse home.”

“Very funny,” Henry said, finishing off the last of his rice. “He said he wants to talk to me about his daughter.”

“You know his daughter? Is she a psych major?”

“No. I didn't even know he had children. He said he saw my name in the newspaper, in that article from a few months ago.”

Henry recalled the day vividly because it was the same day Lucinda's doctor confirmed her pregnancy. They had been trying for only a couple of months, certain it would take much longer; their expectations had been shaped by the stories of friends, most of whom had spent a year or more attempting to conceive. Yet somehow they were lucky, and just that afternoon the two of them had been at the obstetrician's office, gazing at the diplomas and bad art on the wall while the doctor went to retrieve test results.

Down the hallway from the principal's office was the library.
The high-ceilinged room had been transformed, the warm oak card catalogs replaced by rows of sleek computers. There were posted warnings about inappropriate websites, a schedule of fines for overdue books that bore little resemblance to the nickels and dimes Henry remembered. Gone too were the posters that were supposed to encourage a love of books—READING IS FUN-DAMENTAL, Henry recalled one saying. In their place were slick ads, just as unconvincing, featuring rock stars and athletes, heads buried in the classics.

Henry much preferred the woodworking classroom, how it had seemed so perfectly, even defiantly, preserved. There was the fine spray of sawdust everywhere, napkin holders and lacquered bowls scattered on the benchtops, all in various stages of completion. Stout flags rose up next to each one, identifying whose work it was and which homeroom the student belonged to. There were racks of bulky safety goggles and powder-blue dust masks, boxes spitting latex gloves. Table saws, scroll saws, jigs, the lathe; cabinets lined with rows of hammers and drills and countless lengths and thicknesses of nails and screws.