The Measures Between Us (43 page)

“You have to go?” Vincent asked. “We can start back toward the cars if you like. I certainly don't want to keep you.”

“No, it's okay.” He hadn't meant for the shop teacher to see him check the time.

“I believe I mentioned I was concerned about Cynthia being in the hospital during our second visit too, at your office at the university,” Vincent said.

“Did you? I don't remember that specifically,” Henry said.

“I did.” Vincent stooped to brush away a leaf clinging to his suit pants. “I came in right after a young lady had just left.”

Henry nodded.

“Was that your wife? She was very pretty, though she wasn't really showing at all.”

“It was a student,” said Henry. “A graduate student.”

“A student of yours? Really? I wouldn't have guessed that. The two of you seemed so friendly.”

“Yes,” said Henry. “Just a student.”

“If you say so,” Vincent said. “Maybe that's why you don't remember my questions about the hospital, since you had a lot
on your mind. Maybe you were too distracted to consider all the factors enough, make the best recommendation.”

Henry stopped. His stomach had cramped up, each new sentence from the shop teacher tightening it. Where are the clouds? Henry thought, where is the nighttime? Where is shelter? The rain. Come back, flood this motherfucking place into oblivion.

The two men veered left, edging closer to where they had set off from.

“Did you get a chance to meet Dr. Eliot back at the service?” Vincent asked.

“Who's that?”

“He was one of Cynthia's psychiatrists at Rangely. The main one, I think.”

“Oh,” said Henry. “No, I didn't have a chance to speak to him.”

“Nice man,” Vincent said. “I was a little surprised he wanted to come. He told me Cynthia had stopped by just last week, dropped off a gift for him.”

“That was sweet of her,” Henry said. “She must have been fond of him.”

“She gave him one of my ducks, the one I had made for her as a welcome-home present.”

Brandon, toys clanging from his hands, and his father appeared in front of them. Vincent Pareto crouched down to the boy's height and cupped his cheek affectionately. “Cynthia was Brandon's babysitter occasionally,” Brandon's father said to Henry. “Sam,” he added, offering his hand to shake.

“But that's not why we're here,” Brandon interrupted quickly. “We come here anyway, this is an important place to come, we're here now.”

Vincent stood back up. He leaned into Brandon's father, and said, voice lowered, “We appreciate it. We really do.”

“Of course,” he said. “We were touched you invited us.”

Brandon started tugging at his father's arm. “Gotta follow the boss,” he said, smiling, and they forked down one of the trails.

A few hundred yards later, Brandon pointed to an ornate mausoleum and said, “What's that?”

“It's a place where people are remembered,” Sam said. He thought he had probably explained this before.

Brandon stopped and let his hand, still clutching his airplane, fall to his side. He wasn't satisfied with the answer.

“Do you remember the Lincoln Memorial?” his father asked. Brandon's grandparents had taken them to Washington, D.C., recently. They were always trying to distract with monuments and museums.

“Yes,” Brandon said.

“Well, it's like that.”

“Is there a president in there?”

“Not really.”

He shrugged and continued walking. There was charity in him.

“Now?” Brandon asked.

The mausoleum had disappeared behind a hill. They were in a section of the cemetery with fewer gravestones.

Sam nodded and handed Brandon the toys. He crouched to the ground and set them up and reset them in a pattern only he understood.

“This time will I get there?” he asked.

His father didn't know what to say.

“How deep do I have to go?”

It's hard to tell a child, “Never, you'll never get there.” Instead his father joined him, on his knees, and plunged his hands into the earth. Brandon would understand this gesture better than any sentence he could assemble.

“You're making the hole much bigger,” Brandon said.

He nodded.

“More, Daddy, more. We have to make a tunnel.”

The dirt felt cool and good on his skin. Before long the moon would rise in the darkening sky, silver and innocent as a dime. Then it would be too late to be there and yet they couldn't leave. They both flung clumps of grass and soil over their shoulders. The caretakers and gravediggers would leave them alone.

Without realizing or remarking on it, Henry and Vincent had made a circle and were approaching the parking area. Henry could see his car but they were still too far away to pick out individual people. The sunlight hadn't weakened and the sky was still bold and free of clouds. If anything the day felt hotter, even more relentless. How different it would look when the furious rain returned.

The funeral service already seemed much further away than the mere hour or so that had passed. Had the shop teacher or Henry looked to the right, they would have seen the newly turned dirt of Cynthia's grave, one of the few remaining signs of the day's purpose. That and their own dark suits. But neither man gazed in that direction. There was no point in seeking more punishment. It was everywhere and abundant.

“Your wife must be close, isn't she?” Vincent said. “Is that why she couldn't make it?”

Henry nodded but didn't look at the shop teacher. “Doctor says six weeks, though he warns it might be late.”

“Firstborns,” Vincent nodded. “They don't like to come out when they're due. They're already disobedient. First mark of independence.”

Henry smiled tightly.

“You'd think they couldn't wait to get out after being shut in all those months,” Vincent said. “Guess they don't want to leave the womb yet.”

“I think Lucy will be relieved when the day finally comes,” Henry said. “She said she wants wine and coffee and a cigarette, all at the same time, right there in the delivery room, no matter what time it is. I told her I'm not sure the doctor would look too kindly on that.”

“Mary wanted champagne,” Vincent said. “I sneaked one of those miniature bottles into the hospital after the delivery, and back in her room we had a toast. I think she got one sip down, then she fell asleep.” The shop teacher paused, unlocking himself from memory. “I hope you'll let us know when the baby's born.”

“Lucy wanted to come today,” Henry said, “but we both thought it was probably better she stay at home, with it being so hot and all.”

The shop teacher looked away. Beyond the small parking lot stood more gravestones. Henry stared at their formation, wondering how many were young women, young daughters, exiting the world sooner than they should have. Plane crashes, boat accidents, murders and earthquakes and tornadoes—everything you can neither account nor atone for. Seismographs and statistics, numbers and jagged lines that can't even begin to sketch how huge voids are. A few figures moved across the still landscape.
There to lay flowers, to murmur good-bye, good-bye once a year.

Next to him the shop teacher stopped walking, taking a handkerchief from his pocket and wiping away the sweat on his forehead. Henry did the same, using the back of his hand.

“Do you have a name?” the shop teacher asked.

“What's that?” Henry said.

“For the baby.”

“Oh. Nothing final. Lucy thinks it's bad luck to decide on it before the birth.”

The shop teacher stuffed the damp handkerchief back in his pocket. “Cynthia was named after her grandmother,” he said. “My mother.”

Something made Henry look at the parking lot.

He shielded his eyes with his hand and there she was, Lucinda, behind the windshield of their car. She was wearing sunglasses and her hair was pulled back into a ponytail. She probably couldn't see him because of the distance and the glare. Mary Pareto was leaning by the window, talking to her in a way that seemed as if they had met before. The shop teacher saw him shudder with the recognition and said, “Everything okay?” Henry realized Vincent had never met Lucinda, so he didn't have to explain.

“I'm fine,” Henry lied.

“I should get back to my wife,” Vincent said. “You should too.” Then he started walking toward the cars. Henry turned in the opposite direction, heading for a cluster of graves.

He wanted to say something to the shop teacher, to Lucy, to the boy tugging at his father, anything, the right thing, the single right thing.
How did we get to here?
He wanted to say sorry and I
love you and I can't believe what happened. It would all be insubstantial. He wanted to say how unfair and maddening the world could be, he wanted to know if there was a way backward in time.
I don't deserve you, I don't deserve a healthy daughter
. Texas, maybe they should all move there, leave this sodden state behind. But no words came, and for a moment his sadness transformed into a kind of loathing. The pain hit his stomach, his feet and arms. He hated himself, and all he wanted to do was run away from the shop teacher, out of sight of his wife and the priest and everyone else, and lie down in the shade of an oak tree.

He needed to find a headstone, it wasn't important whose, and kneel down and memorize the words incised on its surface. Prayer for the dying, hymn for those who remain. There was a body beneath, hidden from all the savageness and sorrow of the world. The name of a stranger, someone who knew more than he did, a sinner or a saint or both,
God, let it be both
. The sun would set. Night would finally come, the time of undoing. He could find the body, lie right down next to it, and stop this day from ever happening.

“Dr. Wheeling.”

Henry had thought he was by himself, finally free of insinuating conversation, so the voice surprised him. It was familiar but he couldn't quite place it.

“Dr. Wheeling.”

It wasn't Vincent, that much he knew immediately. Those cadences would linger with him a while, long after today was done. This was someone younger. The boy's father, perhaps, whom they'd run into earlier, back with the boy so eager to talk and play with his airplanes. But they wouldn't know his name unless they had asked Vincent and why would they have? Besides,
if it was them, the boy would be chattering too, that endless stream of questions and declarations.

“It's Jack,” said the voice. “I've been interning on the environmental and psychology project.”

“Oh, right,” said Henry, turning to see his face. “Do you work on the interviews or the coding?”

“The transcribing, the people with their river stories. Grad students do most of the coding.”

“You've dropped them by my office before, right?”

Jack nodded and looked away. He shifted from one foot to the other. His tie was knotted crookedly. He seemed stiff in his formal clothes, like he didn't wear them often. “How did you know Cynthia?” he asked.

“I know her father,” Henry said. “He was my shop teacher, ages ago.”

“Really? I didn't realize you were from here. You kept up with him all these years?”

“A bit,” Henry said. “Here and there.”

Jack was holding an envelope, and when he noticed Henry staring at it he said, “Mr. Pareto gave me this. He told me they found it with Cynthia's things, it's a letter to me she wrote a few weeks ago and they thought I should have it.”

“Is it …”

Jack shook his head vigorously. “No, not that,” he said. “I haven't read it yet, but they said it wasn't that.”

“Were the two of you close?”

“We met in high school. We lost touch while I was in college in Virginia, then we got close again this year. It was nice getting to know her again after a while. I suppose I hadn't realized how much I missed her.”

“I'm sorry,” said Henry.

“Me too,” Jack said.
Sorry
. That wasn't right, though.

Mr. Pareto had called to tell him what happened. None of it seemed real. Just a couple of weeks ago they'd been at the fair, and just days ago they had watched the helicopter float across the sky. After he had dropped her off that night, on his drive home, he had remembered their night at the fairgrounds. He had thought she had come back to him then. He forgave her distance, began to accept that it was an indelible part of her. She would veer in and out and he would learn how to wait for her. Like he had that night, in Lucas's trailer and then in the backseat of the car, the two of them tangled and clear-eyed, not a fear for miles or days.

Except she wasn't coming back this time. Even in his shock Jack knew that. After the call with Mr. Pareto ended, his mother said, “Are you okay?” And he said, “No,” and he said nothing more because he was not okay and he didn't want to pretend.

Henry wondered how long he would have to wait before his wife came to find him, or whether, tired from her flight, she might just drive home herself. They would get to Texas, eventually, her trip, what she had found in those dry, wide skies. Maybe she could teach him some Spanish, a few random harmless phrases. Maybe she could unspool a story to make him forget. Now, though, he wanted to be alone, but he didn't think he should walk away from the boy. Not that he thought he was offering any sort of comfort. Maybe, in fact, Jack was providing him with something.

“It hasn't really sunk in,” Jack said. “The reality of it all.”

“It's hard to process these things so quickly, maybe impossible,” Henry said. “You should allow yourself some time, some breathing room.”

“I wonder if I should have known.”

“About accidents? How could you?”

“I don't know.” Jack looked off into the distance again, squinting at the sun. It would go down soon, one last flurry of long, warping shadows, then the gravestones would revert to their rightful gray. “I mean, I've listened to all those tapes of all those people who stay during the floods, I hit pause and play and rewind so many times. So, I don't know, I guess people do leave sometimes—maybe not the ones you expect to, but other ones, ones you know.”