The Measures Between Us (41 page)

“I talked to my obstetrician and my primary-care doctor,” Lucinda said. “They gave me a full workup. I never told Henry, actually, because I didn't want to scare him.”

“And?”

“And everything's fine. The baby's fine, the numbers are where they're supposed to be. Physically, I'm fine.”

“Panic attacks?” Janet said. “My sister used to get those. A few times she thought she was dying and went to the emergency room. I think she had trouble breathing, too.”

Lucinda shook her head. “I doubt it. I asked my doctor about that and she said it was unlikely they'd set on at this age if I'd had no history before, which I don't.”

They both ate silently for a few minutes. Janet was wearing her painting uniform: worn T-shirt and jeans ripped at the kneecaps. The frayed hems fell over a pair of black work boots, scuffed white around the toe and heel. Her hair was tied in a sloppy ponytail. Lucinda remembered being jealous of the artist girls in college, the way they were always a little messy and still so cute.

“Anyway,” Lucinda said, “I kept waiting to feel better, for everything to just sort of … I don't know … loosen and smooth out. And it did. It got better, I didn't have another serious episode. For about a month I was fine, hardly thought about it. I did all the things you're supposed to do—look at baby books, furniture catalogs, started playing around with names even. I'd sit on the couch with a pad and make lists, see how it felt to write and say each one.

“Then one night Henry came home from work. He yelled from the front door, ‘Hey, Lucy, you upstairs?' I was in the bedroom, and the second I heard his voice I freaked out. I was so scared to go downstairs. I just wanted to be anywhere but that house, anywhere but hearing my husband's voice saying my name. He was saying something else too, something about how he had a gift for me, and then his voice sounded strange and I
couldn't make out the words. I tried to will myself out of the bedroom and down the stairs but I couldn't. All I could do was sit on the edge of my bed and wait for everything to clear. I wished he wasn't there, downstairs.”

Callie had come back in and was under the table hunting for stray crumbs. Lucinda heard the dog's nose snuffling every square inch of floor. Occasionally Callie nudged Lucinda's feet aside, in case there were bits of egg or toast hiding beneath the soles of her shoes.

“What happened?” Janet asked.

“Henry came upstairs. He found me in the bedroom. He knew something was wrong, but he was also proud of this thing that he had to give me. He didn't know what to do: get into why I was mysteriously upset or give me a present.”

“I bet he went for the gift,” Janet said.

“How'd you know?”

“Because that's what men do,” said Janet. “I don't think a lot of them genuinely want to know what's wrong, especially if there's a chance they have something to do with it. A gift is easier, less emotionally complicated than actually getting to the bottom of something.” Janet reached under the table and pulled Callie away from Lucinda's legs. “Sorry,” she said. “She's pushy when it comes to table scraps.”

“It's okay,” Lucinda said.

“What was it, a bracelet?” Janet asked.

“A little necklace. A choker, ironically.”

“Jewelry,” Janet nodded. “Of course. That's the number-one ‘I hope you're feeling better, can we just live happily now' gift. You know, I was so excited when Peter gave me a book or a CD
or something. I felt like those things were more pure, less about him. If they only knew how much money they were wasting.”

Lucinda spooned the last of her eggs into her mouth. Janet's plate was clean. She finished her juice and reached over to take Lucinda's dishes to the sink. Lucinda stopped her. “Don't,” she said. “Let me do them, since you cooked.”

“Okay,” Janet said.

While Lucinda cleared the plates and glasses, she said, “I know it's not much of an explanation, but I hope that gives you some idea. It's about the best I can manage right now.”

“I won't ask again,” Janet said. “But whenever you want to talk about anything, I'm here.” With that she left the kitchen, gathered a can of paint thinner and two new paintbrushes that had arrived in the mail the day before, and went to her studio.

Lucinda started cleaning the dishes and noticed Callie waiting obediently by the sink. She let the dog lick each plate and serving dish before she washed them. The breeze had died down, and the curtains fell limp against the windows. There hadn't been a single cloud in the sky since Lucinda had arrived, and she wondered if there ever were any. Maybe the sun was too hot; it burned the raw materials away before the molecules had time to coalesce and billow into cottony shapes. She wondered what it would be like to live with such strong, unrelenting light all the time, whether it sharpened your mind or made you crave dark all the more.

Janet had suggested arriving at White Sands a few hours before sunset. That way Lucinda could explore the dunes while the sun was still out and also see the sunset, which was supposed to be
miraculous. “It's indescribable, really,” said Janet. “Just go. You'll be grateful.” Lucinda wanted exactly that: to be grateful for something.

As she drove through the entrance gate, past the small information building and guard hut, she didn't see what was so special. On either side of the narrow road, mounds of sand rose up. Yet the heights were modest, the sand studded with tangled shrubs. The bushes curled inward on themselves, like animals who had been abused, hunching away from their tormentors. To get a closer look at the dunes, she parked and walked to the summit of one of the hills. It felt a little like being at the ocean, only there was no water spreading out from the foot of the sand, just more of the rugged Southwestern ground, baked by the throbbing sun.

She got back in her car and drove farther in. Gradually the dunes grew taller. Closer to the park entrance the sand seemed cordoned and unremarkable, but deeper into the park it was more wild. It hugged both sides of the asphalt road and occasionally swirled up in front of Lucinda's windshield. The pamphlet she had been handed when she paid the admission fee warned not to stop in the middle of the momentary blindness. “Maintain a slow speed,” it read, “otherwise you might be rear-ended.” She kept her foot on the gas and soon the air cleared, and it was like waking up from a dream. She drove until the road emptied into a small lot. Several other cars were parked there, most of them with out-of-state plates. A half dozen picnic tables were scattered on the outskirts. Corrugated metal shields grew out of the benches to block the wind and sand. They looked like props from a futuristic wasteland movie.

A sign planted in the sand marked the beginning of a trail. A
clipboard and pen dangled from the top of the stake. PLEASE SIGN IN AND OUT, the top sheet read, BE SURE TO CARRY WATER WITH YOU. SANDSTORMS CAN COME ON WITHOUT WARNING. For a moment Lucinda considered returning to her car, seeing this final burst of scenery through postcards at the gift shop. Being stranded and buried by a sandstorm seemed a particularly cruel, torturous kind of death. Like drowning, she imagined, only more prolonged and worse.

While she was still contemplating whether to proceed, a couple, their cheeks reddened by wind and sun, walked by. “It's incredible,” they said. “Totally unbelievable.” Convinced, Lucinda scribbled her name on the clipboard and started climbing toward the summit of the dune.

It was surprisingly tiring to walk in the sand. She went slowly, taking frequent sips of water. Even with her dark sunglasses, the light coming off the land was nearly blinding. Here all the vegetation had disappeared and it was just sand, acres and acres of soft white sand. She could see other people far off, the distance reducing them to twigs against these glowing mounds. When she crouched down, close to the surface, she saw geometric patterns in the sand, the fingerprints of the wind, as finely drawn as calligraphy.

At the highest point, she stood and gasped. It did indeed look like nowhere else she had ever been. All around her the land was sculpted into slopes and plateaus. It was fluid, yet weighty. The wind gusts were strong, and when she looked down at her shoes, they were covered, and she stepped a couple feet to the left and let the sand start its advance anew.

The sun, descending in the sky, seemed almost superfluous because she felt as if the place where she was standing, this sea of
sand, was just as powerful, had all the same pulse and heat and light. She saw one man rolling down a slope like a log. Another had a large-format camera mounted on a tripod and was snapping picture after picture. Try all you want, she thought, a photograph will never capture this. It is too vast. She opened her hand and put it over her stomach.
Can you see this?
she said,
Let me describe it to you: It is an ocean, we are on the moon. Someday you will come here. You will write your name, sign in and out so no one loses you. You are small and easy to lose track of. That is the genius of you, how small you are yet how amazing. You will hike up to a high point, let your feet disappear into the sand. You will submerge your hand, bring it back up, let the sand pour through your fingers. You will stare and stare and stare, and think, How did they turn my dream real?

An hour later she took the sunset tour. It met at the foot of a nearby dune and was led by a park ranger. There were six people plus Lucinda, and they followed the guide a half mile up a modest incline. Once they reached the top, the ranger started explaining that the physics of light, along with the meteorological conditions in the park—the humidity and the temperature and the barometric pressure—made the sunsets especially vivid and distinct. He said all of this with the group facing east, so they couldn't see anything yet. They knew the day was dimming, but they couldn't see the spread of sunlight across the sky. He took several questions and then looked at his watch. “Okay,” he announced. “Why don't you all turn around?”

The sky was aflame. Bands of red, orange, pink. The land that started where the dunes ended, coarse and brown only hours before, had been transformed, and now it bled upward, the beginnings of the fiery wax that painted the horizon. Lucinda had
seen dazzling sunsets before, in Mexico, for one, but this was something completely different. This was violent, the sky melting and changing. Next to the white of the sand, it was elemental, a beginning and an end.

Everyone was speechless. “Does anyone have any more questions?” the guide said, but no one did. What was there to ask except “How?” The guide could reel off the cold science behind this phenomenon, talk about hydrometers and math and satellite readings. But it wouldn't change what they were looking at. They might not even hear him, because this was one of those moments when all the words in the world can't tell us a thing.

East, in the other side of the sky, the moon was rising. Nothing stood in its way. No clouds yet, no faint dot of an airplane, humble, soon to disappear. No clumps of stars. They would wait for the sun to disappear before coming out. Then they would gather into constellations, patterns we ascribe with intent. Lucinda shut her eyes, turned back to the west, opened them. She gazed again at all those colors, the furious meld. Night after night this must happen. How? What is left after this?
Henry, an arsonist has torched the New Mexico sky. It is livid and frightening. It will burn out, but I don't know how or when. Where will they get all the water to douse this blaze? I have no alibi. Please. Please. I love you more than I will ever know how to say.

Only a dozen or so people stood around the grave. Vincent watched his wife, stoic through most of the blessings and prayers, bite at her lip to try to stop crying. He reached out with his left hand and roped it around her shoulders. He could feel bones, her shoulder blades, all the weight she had lost over the past few months. Some people binge when they're upset. Mary starved herself. She was wearing sunglasses because she didn't want everyone to see her sobbing, and she leaned into her husband's side and was grateful he felt so solid.

Several of the men had removed their suit jackets and loosened their ties. Mary wanted to assure them, It won't be much longer, just a few more blessings and then you'll be able to go back to your cool houses, back to lives without funerals. She didn't want them to suffer, because Cynthia wasn't their daughter.

The strangers would disperse to their cars. They would drive away, resume the hundreds of details that constituted their days. Details without pain, details that pointed nowhere, or to places and people still whole and standing. But where would she go? she wondered. Home, to receive visitors with their casseroles and condolence cards. Awkward conversations in which people wouldn't know whether they were supposed to talk about Cynthia
or everything but her, if they should share a specific memory or if they should just nudge the conversation somewhere else in the hopes of distracting you. Those with strong religious faith, Mary knew, would be easier. They would tell her that her daughter is in heaven now, that God is looking after her, that she's gazing down, thankful for everything her mother and father did. They'd grip her elbow, speak with the confidence of those untouched by terror. How can you be so sure? she wanted to challenge. What if there's no heaven, no God, what if she's simply gone? Take me out to the backyard and point to where you think she is.

Then the well-wishers would leave, the dining room table crowded with their offerings. Food and flowers and notes to dull the hurt. She could grab opposite corners of the tablecloth and make a pouch, then drop the load, crockery and all, into the trash outside. She could stay up all night, listen for the garbage men dumping it into the massive jaws of their truck, the crunch when they pulled the lever for the mouth to close.

And when she closed the door after the last friend exited, it would be just the two of them, just her and Vincent. She could clean up, load the teacups and saucers into the dishwasher. She could straighten the coffee table, sweep and dust the front hall, where strangers had tracked through. Vincent could switch on the television, see if there was a ballgame to watch. Let the announcers speak for them, let nine innings take up two more hours of this blinding day. Then what? What happens when baseball season ends?