The Measures Between Us (44 page)

Both of them heard a car start, and they glanced toward the parking area. They were too far away to see who was driving.

“It's too bad the Paretos didn't live on River Road,” Jack said.

“Why?” asked Henry.

“Then you could have interviewed her. I'd have a tape of her voice.”

And then what? Henry wondered. What would we want with that reminder? He could rattle off something about unfairness, about Cynthia's troubled heart, her brain that wouldn't still. He could talk to Jack about help and devotion and impatience and rain-slicked roads. About the failure of guardrails, the labyrinth of intent. About trying to figure out what doesn't want to get figured out. None of it, he knew, would make a difference. Not the cemetery's serene pathways, either, nor the granite markers meant to be a period to a sentence that was not supposed to end. Not even the boy who talked nonstop could make a difference. Because Jack was asking for something Henry could not give, no one could, not God or love or other things made of air.

After Jack said good-bye to Dr. Wheeling, he walked vaguely toward the parking area. He didn't want to go home yet, where
his parents would ask him about the funeral, questions he would not know exactly how to answer. They had offered to come but he had said no. More people to navigate, more introductions to make. Instead he veered eastward, up a slight incline that dead-ended at a small algae-ringed pond.

The envelope in his right hand was too light to be so heavy. He had heard all those tales about people and rain and the river, the rise they never thought would reach them. The pond before him must have swelled too, raised all its water striders higher than they'd ever been before. He had listened to strangers recite their reasons for staying. They watched the water cascade down the hillsides, heard the melody of the sky turned inside out. For days this chant lasted and still it was not enough, or it was too magnetic to walk away from. Maybe they thought they had found the center of the world.

Back in high school, when he and Cynthia had first gotten their licenses, they would take long, aimless drives. At gas stations, while Jack filled the tank, she disappeared into the store and emerged minutes later laden with soda and junk food. She emptied it all into the space between the seats—Twizzlers, Hershey bars, Swedish Fish, popcorn dusted with cheese. Every few months he cleaned the car, bagging empty cans and wrappers. A stray piece of candy could bring him back instantly, and the recall was like a drug.

On the way home they traded jobs: Cynthia filled the gas tank while Jack went inside the store, this time for a six-pack with his fake ID. Then they headed home, each with a beer cracked and nestled by the seat. Jack transferred it to empty Coke cans in case they were pulled over, and if there was any soda left it lent the beer a hint of sweetness and made it go down even faster. There
was Binaca and a tin of Altoids in the glove compartment, also for cover. Whenever they passed a police car, Jack's heart raced and he decelerated to well under the speed limit and turned the radio down until he had cleared the cop's sight line. If he didn't speed up again quickly enough, Cynthia would say, “Hey, Grandma, I think we're good.” Sometimes she rested her left hand on his shoulder. “Thank you for doing all the driving,” she'd say, giving him a nearly imperceptible squeeze.

“You're welcome,” Jack would say, eyes steady on the road and the hash marks the car was chewing.

They didn't speak much on the route home. The sugar highs were wearing off, the beer was setting in, or the darkness seemed to demand quiet. They slid country albums into the CD player—Charlie Rich, Waylon Jennings, Kitty Wells—music they loved but that most of their friends did not. Cynthia often sang along quietly, and she used to get embarrassed when she thought he was listening to her, redness crawling up her neck. Later, when he was trying to fall asleep, Jack heard Waylon's voice coupled with Cynthia's.

If there was time on the trips, they liked to stop at a Salvation Army or a Goodwill. Cynthia would sift through the housewares and dishes. She liked glasses that commemorated something, like a firemen's parade, a Rotary Club, a high school graduating class. One showed the head of a lion frozen midroar, underlined with the slogan GO CATS. The top of her dresser turned into a little army of tumblers. She set a cutoff date: nothing from after 1979. When Jack asked the significance of the year, she shrugged. “I like that nine is repeated,” she said.

Several of the drives took them through Bridgton, where there was an old theater, the Magic Lantern, that screened only a
single film at a time. On the way back, if it was close to a show-time, they would stop and see a movie. Cynthia smuggled the rest of the six-pack in under her jacket, smiling away the usher's suspicion if his eyes drifted downward to the beer misshaping her sweatshirt. Probably he wouldn't have cared anyway, had whiled away many an evening exactly the same way, but her grin ensured that he wouldn't say anything. Even the remotest promise of love can buy a lot. Jack opened fresh cans only when the sound of an action sequence provided camouflage.

It was always dark when they got home. At Cynthia's house, he parked under a hissing streetlamp. Months earlier he had shot it out with a BB gun because it shone directly into her bedroom and she said it prevented her from falling asleep. The two of them had climbed onto her roof when her parents weren't home to get a clearer aim. Jack had to twist out over the drainpipe to get a good angle, and Cynthia hugged his planted leg with all her weight. “Careful,” she said, and he stayed outstretched a moment longer than he needed to.

She opened and closed the glove compartment, ran her thumb over the map they had consulted earlier. She tried to fold it back up but couldn't find the original creases. After two or three attempts, she dumped it in Jack's lap and sighed, “Too tired.”

That was her good-bye, and a moment later she opened her door and got out of the car. When she walked around to the driver's side, he rolled down the window and said, “Talk to you soon,” and she nodded. She was looking at him but elsewhere too. Then she turned toward the short stone pathway that led to the house. On the second floor her parents' bedroom light was on. The rest of the windows were dark. Cynthia paused for a few seconds on the porch, digging in her pockets for house keys
while Jack drained the last of the beer pinned between his knees. Then she was gone and he gazed downward at the unruly map and began restoring it to a rectangle.

Dear Jack,

I've started this letter about 10 times, maybe more. I wanted to tell you where I was going before now, before I actually went, but I couldn't figure out how. It wasn't that I was embarrassed, exactly, just, I don't know, unsure of how to say it. I kept imagining saying it and seeing the look in your eyes and me not knowing what it meant and maybe I just couldn't handle that uncertainty on top of everything else?

I'm at Rangely Psychiatric Institution—wow, it sounds so official and important when I write out the full name—for a few weeks. My parents were worried about me and I guess in a way I was worried too, so I decided not to fight their suggestion. That would have been a big production, something I honestly didn't have the energy for. And it's not like they were sending me to prison or boot camp or anything.

It's not as weird as I thought it would be. I like some of the doctors and nurses and even a couple patients, though you know me, I like to spend a lot of time by myself. The most unbelievable part is all the other patients' histories. You'd be fascinated—not by all the terrible things they've gone through but just the fact of so many stories, so many new parts of the world. And most of them aren't shy about sharing! That's how I get through it sometimes: I just figure I'm watching a movie with all these characters. I wonder what they make of my own character.

Anyway, I come home soon, only a couple weeks from
now. Then can we go watch the helicopters again, like we always do? Or can you take me back to that lab with the river in the basement? Show me all those charts and numbers and the shallow water. Maybe it's all added up to something by now. I'd like that. I'm sorry again I couldn't tell you before I left.

More later …

She was right. He would have liked hearing all those stories. And he could have told her the investigators were no closer to answers about the flood than they had been weeks and months before. The river was still in the basement, still waiting for her father's decoys.

The headstone Henry finally decided on read BECKER. The man had been eighty-two years old, and there was a quotation from the Bible chiseled into the marble. He crouched behind the slab, hidden from his wife and Vincent and everyone else, and cocked his arm. Then he punched the stone. He did it a second time, and a third, a fourth, because he wanted to be certain: Knuckles don't splinter like other bones. Often there's just a collapse, an implosion, rather than a single clean snap, and the adrenaline can mask the break. When he looked down, though, he knew, from the blood dripping and pooling, and the shooting pain, that he had succeeded in shattering them.

He stood and walked calmly to the car, cradling his right hand in his left. Blood seeped through, staining the good, unbroken fingers. Maybe he should turn back, crush those too. Why not, why the fuck not. The car was a few hundred yards away, and Lucy was now standing. Everyone else had left.

When he arrived, she looked at his wrecked hand and gasped.

“It's okay,” he said, “but would you mind driving?”

She nodded.

He settled into the passenger seat and struggled with the seat belt. She buckled it for him, reddening her forearm when she brushed his hand. Then she drove toward the exit. He closed his eyes, tried to remain as motionless as possible. The pain radiating from his fingers was nearly intolerable, and he was afraid he might black out, vomit, maybe both.

“I think we better stop at a hospital,” he said softly.

“Should I call an ambulance?”

“No, the Deaconness isn't far.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

Lucinda touched his thigh with her free hand. “Okay,” she said. “Hold on.”

His eyes were still closed. “Could you put some music on, not too loud?” he asked.

She switched on the CD player. He knew it was Hank Williams but he couldn't tell which song because the pain was too intense. They were all pretty much the same anyway. Stories of hope and heartache, charity and vice, fear and shame. Lucy seemed to be driving too slowly, and it was taking too long to get out of the cemetery and reach a main road.

“It looks bad,” she said, finally making a right turn onto Huron Ave.

He thought she meant his hand, yet she could just as well have been talking about the clouds massing again. Though his eyes were shut he could see the sky vividly. It was the same gray light that had shadowed them for weeks. Soon the rain would come,
and along with it the thunder that sounds like everything and nothing. This was the way the days and months unfolded now, the storms that would not quit. The mourners would be safe at home while he and Lucy were in the emergency room, shuttled to a bed behind a flimsy curtain, waiting for the painkillers to fail. He hoped there was a window there, one turned to liquid glass by the downpour. Behind it, the world warped, impossible to contain.
Talk to me, Lucy, tell me about Texas
. They might be there for hours.

But none of that would matter. Not the waiting, not the strangers, not the flashing numbers on all those finely calibrated monitors. Because he wanted to lose himself, anywhere, listen to the steady rain and find in its rhythm exactly the things Cynthia had. The watery answers to terrible questions. What she heard was the faint, faraway sound of clarity, what it costs to stay, here, amid all the noise of longing.

I would like to thank my mother and late father for their tremendous kindness and patience. I'd also like to thank the MacDowell Colony and the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council for residencies during which portions of this novel were written. I'm indebted to Cathy Hankla, my earliest champion, and Michael Parker, teacher, friend, and writer extraordinaire. My thanks as well to everyone at Bloomsbury, dream of a publishing house: Rachel Mannheimer, Patti Ratchford, Nikki Baldauf, and Carrie Majer in New York; Helen Garnons-Williams, Oliver Holden-Rea, Elizabeth Woabank, Emma Daley, and Steve Leard in London. At Markson Thoma, Julia Kenny helped out in key ways behind the scenes. Finally, two people deserve special mention. Anton Mueller, my unfailingly brilliant editor, has a touch as deft as it is necessary. He knows exactly when to step in and when to let me find my own way. And Eleanor Jackson: What can I say? Grateful doesn't even begin to describe it.

Ethan Hauser received his M.F.A. from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. His fiction has been published in
Esquire
,
Playboy
,
New Stories from the South: The Year's Best
, and elsewhere. He has held residencies at Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony and was a finalist for the
Chicago Tribune
's Nelson Algren Short Story Award. Hauser lives in New York and is an editor at the
New York Times
, where his journalism also appears.

Copyright © 2013 by Ethan Hauser

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You may not copy, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (including without limitation electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, printing, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

Published by Bloomsbury USA, New York

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