The Measures Between Us (5 page)

Henry had strolled the classroom while Vincent spoke, and he'd stopped in one corner, in front of a glass case displaying wooden ducks. Half had necks painted iridescent green—he could never remember whether it was the males or females who had the colored necks. There were six ducks in the case, six different sizes and six slightly different hues, every one painstakingly detailed: the bills, the eye sockets, individual feathers visible on their backs. A name card printed with a date stood tented in front of each.

The library didn't have anything like the shop teacher's mallards, nothing with the same undemanding grace. It was all wires and machines, all gloss and rules and carpeting. He reached
into his jacket pocket and found a pen. Then he adjusted the fine schedule to its decades-old prices.

The library was on the second floor, over the kindergarten classrooms, which was where Henry headed next. Children's drawings papered the walls and windows: round yellow suns, square, triangle-topped houses, winking moons, impossibly sweet, misproportioned bodies. Henry used to draw airplanes. Day after day he sketched them, so many that his teachers took to calling him a future pilot.

“Your own will be here before long. Before you know it, they grow up.”

Henry turned around to see the shop teacher.

“I didn't mean to interrupt you,” said Vincent. “I was on my way out when I remembered that my wife wanted me to pass along her congratulations on your wife's pregnancy, and I saw that you were still here so I figured I'd just tell you now.”

“Thank you,” said Henry. “That's very nice of her. I'll let my wife know.”

“You'll be happy when the baby comes,” said the shop teacher. “It changes your life, but it's an amazing thing. This tiny little being who depends on you for everything.”

“I suspect it'll require a lot of adjustments, for all of us,” Henry said.

“Adjusting,” the shop teacher nodded. “That's a good word. It takes a lot of adapting, more than you can know before they get there. To be honest, I don't recall sleeping for longer than twenty minutes at a clip for the first few years of my daughter's life.” He paused at the memory, his lips sealed in a tight grin. “They're sacrifices you're glad to make, though.”

Henry hadn't anticipated the shop teacher's sentimental memories,
but he enjoyed listening. “I guess I'm a little nervous as well,” he said. “More than a little.”

“Of course you are. Wouldn't be normal if you weren't. I was nervous as hell. I thought I wouldn't know how to hold her, or change her diaper or make her stop crying. But you learn. It's all reflexes. And no one, including your wife, holds it against you if you don't do something exactly right the first time.”

“Was Cynthia a hard baby to take care of?”

“Why? Would that have some bearing on her present condition? So far back?”

“Not necessarily, though it could,” said Henry. “I was just curious.”

“How might it?” Vincent asked.

“There's a lot of thinking nowadays that things that happen early in life—potentially very early—can have an effect later on. Even extremely early, preverbal events.”

“That so?”

Henry nodded.

“Before they can talk and think, even?”

Henry nodded again.

“I don't recall her being any more or less difficult than other babies. All of them can be a pain in the neck sometimes, and I don't think I'm the only parent in the world to say as much. I remember more how happy she made us.” Vincent took a deep breath. “Actually I did want to ask you something further.”

“Absolutely,” Henry said.

“These hospitals, aren't they poor environments, full of people pecking at themselves? People hallucinating and having violent outbursts? That's certainly what it seems like from the movies and television shows I've seen.”

“I don't think most are like that,” Henry said. “Probably some are badly run, but I could help you find a good one. I could make some calls, if that's the decision you make.”

“What if it makes her worse, going in there and being around more damaged patients? There are bound to be people more out of control than her there. They could influence her in a bad direction, nudge her further away.”

“That's a pretty remote possibility,” said Henry. “The important thing is she'll be under constant care and therapy. She'll be safe, and hopefully she'll learn to manage her sadness a little more effectively.”

“Maybe she's the right one, and we're actually the ones who aren't so well,” Vincent said.

“In what way?”

“Maybe it's saner to be sad and sensitive, given how hard the world can be sometimes.”

Henry almost said that it sounded like Cynthia was struggling with something much more than her sensitivity, but he stopped himself. “Do you keep in touch with any of your old students?” he asked.

“Not for the most part. A couple here and there,” Vincent said, staring out the window. “Alan Randall. Do you remember him?”

Henry tried to place the name but couldn't and shook his head.

“He must've been before your time. That boy loved woodworking, absolutely loved it. Came down here whenever he had a free period, while others would be shooting basketballs or practicing for the school play. He was a real gifted woodworker, too. Now he's a cabinetmaker. He makes lovely stuff with cherry, oak—all kinds of wood, real high-end. He does a lot of work with architects.”

“You should be proud.”

The shop teacher turned and faced Henry. “Why?”

“You must have nosed him in the right direction.”

“Nahh,” Vincent said, waving his hand dismissively. “I've always assumed people are born with that sort of thing. Genetics. Some kids are good at math, some excel at football, a few have a knack for woodworking. Kids mostly find their own way.”

The streetlamps outside were marked by fuzzy halos. Occasionally a car drove by, the shadows from its headlights sweeping first the shop teacher's body and then Henry's. On the corner was the same drugstore where he and his friends used to stop for candy and Cokes. Even when they were too young to cause any serious trouble, the ornery cashier stared at them as if they were shoplifters. When they eventually did start pocketing Milky Ways and Pop-Tarts, they blamed their lawlessness on the man's mean spirit. Once they discovered girls they stopped stealing, reserving their bravado for flirting.

Henry looked at his watch. “I should be getting home,” he said.

“Oh, of course, I've taken too much of your time already,” said the shop teacher. “I'm not too good on the phone. Otherwise you wouldn't have had to come in. It would have saved you a trip.”

“I didn't mind,” said Henry. “It was a nice excuse to come back and see the place.”

“Congratulations again on your wife's pregnancy.”

“Thank you.” Henry thought of Lucinda, of the baby growing inside her. He thought of the moment he would murmur a name, sense a tiny heartbeat. He waved good-bye to the shop teacher and left the kindergarten classroom, feeling a happiness that seemed unfair.

Moths freckled the porch screen. It was late for them, Jack thought; they usually disappeared earlier in the summer, just after the longest days of the year. Up close their wings looked like mottled tissue paper, the moon shrouded with clouds. If you flicked on a light, they would swarm there, flying endless, jittery loops around it. Maybe all the recent rain had tricked them into believing it was a different season. Jack decided he would ask one of his internship supervisors whether the floods had an impact on insects.

He stared at them while he sat in his car, listening to a talk-show host rant about the Red Sox. Any losing streak, no matter how minor, sparked intense ire: the manager needed to be fired, the overpriced stars traded. The owners were a target, then the farm system, the third-base coach. No one was safe. Scorch it all and start anew, see what grows from the remains. Across New England, the team was about more than just baseball.

He turned down the radio and thought about where he was headed: to Cynthia's house, where he often went even though he knew she wasn't there. The last time he had seen her was a few weeks earlier, when they had gone to a movie. When he dropped her off at her home, she told him she was going out of town,
though she didn't say where and she'd been vague about when she would come back.

He eased the gas pedal toward the floor and pulled away from his house. He found a classic-rock station on the radio. A Stones song was playing, the one whose opening was like classical music, and he liked it because it showed that things that seem far apart actually aren't. The route to Cynthia's would take him through the modest downtown, down Main Street with its bright new coffeehouses and shabby antique shops side by side with empty furniture stores and restaurants.

It was too early in the night for the dropouts who liked to cruise up the avenue leaning half out their windows. They revved their engines, and Jack liked watching them slap their car doors and call at the girls and sing along too loud to the radio. He and Cynthia sometimes sat on the curb and gazed at them rolling by, all the recklessness on parade. His thigh brushed hers, and it made everything seem noisier and faster and more right.

The tourists would come later, when the hillsides shifted from green to orange, red, yellow in the space of a couple weeks. It happened so fast, as if someone had flipped a switch. They were mostly from Boston and its suburbs, and for a few weeks their shiny SUVs colonized the streets and parking lots, as if the town was an attraction dreamed up by photographers, not somewhere people lived and worked. They were coming for the foliage, but Jack couldn't help wondering if something else was drawing them—if they'd suddenly noticed the trees disappearing from their cities and were hungry to see forest.

He drove by the school where he had first met Cynthia, its hallways and classrooms still fresh in his mind. It sat midway up a hill, an impressive redbrick building with a Latin frieze inscribed
atop its face. He used to know what it translated to, but not anymore. There were budget problems every few years, hectoring editorials in the newspaper, letters to the editor from irate mothers, apologies from beleaguered educators. The superintendent said, “There is nothing we can do, short of printing money ourselves. We are not Fort Knox.” He became a fixture on the evening news, a man who looked like he wanted to hide. Dark shadows circling his eyes, stooped shoulders. Jack's parents would watch him and shake their heads. “He's a disgrace,” his father said, and his mother nodded so vigorously it looked like an act.

Several miles later Jack passed by the shiny new Shell station on the outskirts of town. The modest box of the attached convenience store glowed, lit fluorescent white. Bunting announcing its grand opening ribboned off the roof, and its yellow logo was almost blindingly bright, although it wasn't the first time a gas station had stood on the site.

Twelve years ago it had been a Citgo. Everyone called it Buddy's, after the mechanic who used to run the long-defunct garage; his chocolate lab was named Buddy 2. One July afternoon a twenty-five-year-old man from Somerville, dressed in a FEMA windbreaker, walked up to the pumps. His name, Clark, was embroidered over the left breast. The lone gas station employee was inside manning the cash register. The pumps were self-service, so the cashier had no reason to go outside, except in the rare case of a customer not being able to figure out how to turn a pump on.

This was during the aftermath of the first fifty-year flood, when a week of steady rain had pushed the rivers over their banks and washed away buildings. Nightly, the news showed dramatic footage of yet another collapsed house floating away, its
owners dazed and despondent. The FEMA officials had come in the weeks after, a small army in trucks and helicopters, to survey the damage, write relief checks. They were seen as saviors, generous, helpful souls, so it didn't seem strange that one of them might even help out at a gas station.

Clark guided cars to the pumps. He asked the drivers how much gas they wanted and what grade and whether they'd be paying by cash or credit card, and then he shoved the nozzles into the tanks of their cars. He was polite, several would recall later, called them ma'am and sir and promised to squeegee the windshield and even offered to check the oil. Only he wasn't from FEMA; he had not come to ease the aftermath of the flood. He was an impostor, and instead of filling the tanks he sprayed the car bodies with fuel, splashing the roofs, the bumpers, the windows, the tires and hubcaps. One of the cars, an Impala, had its hood up, and he soaked the engine as well. A man rushed out from behind his steering wheel. “What the hell?” he yelled. “Are you crazy? What the fuck's your problem?” Clark responded by turning the nozzle toward him and drenching him with gasoline. “Jesus,” said the man, backing up a few steps, his palms turned up in surrender. “What are you doing?” Then Clark lit a match and flung it at him. He lit more matches, books of them, and tossed them at the cars and onto the wet asphalt. A single match would have been sufficient, but he didn't stop.

The man who had confronted him did exactly what he was supposed to do: stop, drop, and roll, a mantra drummed into the heads of schoolchildren everywhere. And it might have prevented him from burning up had there been even a single square foot of pavement that wasn't already on fire. Because after Clark had lit everything, and with the flames blazing around him, he
went back to one of the pumps to retrieve another fuel gun. He put one thumb over its mouth while he squeezed the trigger, spraying gas into the fire.

The driver who had gotten out of his car burned to death. “His face,” a witness later said, “as long as I lived, I never thought I'd see that. It turned to liquid. I didn't know that could even happen outside of a horror movie.” Fire trucks barreled in. The firefighters contained the blaze before the underground storage tanks exploded, and they carried the other drivers, huddling inside their cars, paralyzed with fear, to safety. One woman fought them off, and later the newspaper quoted a psychologist who explained that when people panic they sometimes do the opposite of what they should. In the photos in the next morning's papers, each driver looked like a doll, tiny and helpless in the arms of the firemen. “It reminded me of war,” one of the firefighters told a reporter. In the background a dark blanket covered a body. A paramedic with gloved hands stood over him. The dead man lived in Maine and had been traveling through on business.