The Measures Between Us (13 page)

He read about all the clues they missed: Autistic babies curl away from you when you pick them up, instead of toward you. They are preternaturally calm or impossible to quiet, nothing in the middle. He didn't remember Brandon being either. Sam leafed through photo albums, running his hands over the protective plastic sleeves, searching for evidence. Brandon crawling in the backyard, Brandon wading into Walden Pond, Brandon struggling to launch a kite. The angle of his body and the camera made it look like he had wings. Yet despite the hours of staring, Sam found nothing.

He plowed through all the back and forth about what caused
the disorder: vaccines tainted with mercury, toxins in tap water, lead paint, contact with cat litter during pregnancy. They didn't have any pets, so at least they were innocent on that count. Later they did get a puppy, thinking it might help Brandon, and themselves, to have something uncomplicated in their newly complicated lives. Early on, the dog had an eye infection. Alice taught Brandon to gently administer the medicinal cream the vet prescribed, and he learned this task so quickly, treating the dog so gently, they thought maybe the worst was over. They cautiously brought out toys they had hidden. Then, a month later, he tore open a four-inch gash on his forearm. That one sent them to the emergency room.

The websites overflowed with posts by parents who sounded like missionaries, consumed and certain. And he didn't give a shit, not even for a second. He didn't care whether the pharmaceutical companies were part of a conspiracy, or if the government was, or both or neither. He didn't care what caused Brandon's condition, he only wanted to know how to deal with it and if one day his son might return. It sounded to him trite to name it nightmare, yet that is what it was.

A few months after the diagnosis, Sam figured out that if he held Brandon tight and massaged his right shoulder during his tantrums, he would calm down more quickly. Brandon fought the intervention at first, and Sam's arms and chest were frequently blotched with bruises. Sometimes he wore long-sleeved pajamas to bed, claiming he was cold, so Alice wouldn't see the sad purple marks and the story both of them were trying to outrun. Come summer he would need a new excuse. Maybe, he thought, he would blast the air conditioner and keep wearing the same uniform. At one checkup, Brandon's doctor confirmed that
others had discovered similar strategies. “Physical contact, some repetitive motion, seems to be helpful,” he told them.

He moved Brandon's bangs aside and looked closely at his skin.

“Yesterday,” Alice said, answering a question the doctor hadn't asked yet. “He banged his head into the car door.”

“Does he do that a lot?”

“No,” Sam jumped in. “Maybe, sometimes.”

The doctor let Brandon's hair fall back and gave his chin a playful squeeze. “If it gets worse, there are options, like helmets.”

“He'd wear one all the time?” Sam asked.

The doctor nodded. “Until and if he doesn't need to anymore.”

One morning Sam woke up at 3 A.M. He began a drowsy report of his dream before reaching behind him and groping the empty space where Alice's body should have been. He found her in the kitchen with a book, drinking tea. “Couldn't sleep,” she said when she noticed him in the doorway. He nodded as he entered the room. She had battled sleeping problems for most of her life, and since Brandon's autism had set on, her insomnia had grown murderous. She felt guilty for relying on pills, so he assured her there were worse things she could be doing to herself. Like what, she wondered. I don't know, he said, heroin? Don't give me any ideas, she said.

“What are you reading?” he asked.

“Nothing, really. I'm not even paying attention. I've been on the same page for an hour.”

“You want company?”

She shrugged.

He had resolved, years before, to not make her speak. It was a hard lesson to learn, since silence and sadness in people you love are hard to abide. Forcing Alice to talk and explain, though, often only deepened whatever it was that wounded her.

She was wearing a holey T-shirt and boxers, both once his, an outfit on her he had always found offhandedly sexy. He went to her back and massaged her neck. Gradually he moved his hands lower and she leaned into him, let her own hands drift to his legs. It was so late, he thought, in the evening and in our life. Or was it early? Who knows, who the fuck knows. Both of them were so emptied out, chafed and brittle. Soon, with no words and few kisses, they were naked, their few clothes strewn on the floor, Alice lying on the table, her legs spread, and him working away. The overhead light was harsh, somehow ugly and right for what they were doing. When they were younger they would have paused to turn it off. Tonight neither of them could find a reason to. There was something thrilling and desperate about their sex and when it was over he slumped on top of her, listened to her heart beat wildly. He had no idea if it was for him, or for Brandon. For what they had lost, or maybe for something they had yet to find and never would.

Alice killed herself because she thought she was responsible for Brandon's autism. In her note she explained that when Brandon was six months old, she had accidentally dropped him and he had banged his head on the floor. “It bounced,” she wrote, “it literally fucking bounced, like a ball. The shriek that came from his mouth was like nothing I had ever heard before. It was like the sound a train makes rounding a corner, except it seemed to last forever, and in it there was blame and fear and pain and
death. I think I told you about it when it happened, but I didn't say how hard his head hit the floor. I didn't go into the details. I couldn't admit it. I could never admit it until now.”

She had to have known there was nothing rational or scientific to back up her suspicion, but that was not enough. “Once we got the diagnosis, I came to feel as if every day was just countdown, to the time when medicine understands that autism is caused by some trauma like this, and then I'd have to tell you—and later Brandon, if he can even make sense of anything by then, if he's not imprisoned in some institution—what happened. I've lived with this for so long, and I just can't anymore. I can't.”

His first impulse was to destroy the letter. He didn't want an explanation, especially this one that seemed so wrong, and he had put off reading it for a few weeks, finally steeling himself late one night in the midst of a relentless rain. Earlier in the evening the ceiling in Brandon's bedroom had begun to leak. They used pots from the kitchen to catch the water, which pinged into the metal as if on a timer. “What do we do when it fills up, Daddy?” Brandon asked.

“We'll get another,” Sam said.

“What if we run out?”

“We can always empty them.”

“I don't want to.”

“Okay.”

“Will you?”

“Yes.”

Sam knew it was useless to call a contractor. All of them were already backed up for weeks because of the rain. They would be lucky, he knew, if all that happened was a minor leak in the roof.
On the news, he and Brandon watched people scurrying from their houses because the brooks had become rivers.

He didn't rip up the letter or burn it. He didn't take it outside and unfold it and lay it on the sidewalk, where the rain would dilute the ink in seconds. Instead he shoved the note into his desk drawer and he would read it again and again. Every time his eyes scanned the words he felt as if they couldn't be saying what they were saying. Maybe the reason he saved it, he thought, was that he was waiting for it to transform into an explanation he could accept. Why couldn't she have sought absolution somewhere else?

Mary Pareto was surprised when her daughter suggested watching the marathon. The three of them had gone when she was a child, piling into the station wagon and driving to a part of the course just outside Kenmore Square, a mile or so from the finish line at the Prudential. Mary remembered how pained the runners looked, their faces tight and severe. Why are you punishing yourself? she thought. What good is all this doing you?

Years after, Cynthia and her friends used the Patriots' Day holiday as permission to stay out late the preceding Sunday night. On Monday morning, Mary would poke her head into her room and ask if she wanted to go to the race, and invariably she she'd choose more sleep. Later she would ask how the race was, and Mary would shrug, Vincent as well. She didn't catch on that they never went without her.

“We haven't been in ages,” Vincent said when Cynthia first brought up the idea.

“I'd love to,” blurted Mary.

They had been at the kitchen table, finishing up their coffee and dessert, and Cynthia had descended from her room. She'd gone straight to the refrigerator, searching for a Diet Coke, and she tossed out the marathon question with her back to them.

“We could have lunch afterward, too,” said Vincent. “Someplace downtown?”

“That would be nice,” Mary agreed. “Back Bay has a lot of good restaurants.”

“I don't know,” Cynthia said. “Won't it be totally mobbed?”

“Well, you can think about it,” Vincent said. “No need to make a plan right away.”

“We'll just keep it at the marathon for now,” said Mary.

The morning of the race, Mary heard the jackhammering beep of Cynthia's alarm clock from the kitchen. She was next to the stove, wrapping a banana bread in tin foil. A spool of red ribbon was on the counter next to her. Normally the first alarm was followed by several more, all spaced evenly apart. Her daughter seemed to sleep as much now as she had when she was a teenager, though back then they blamed the slumber on growth spurts.

“You're not packing a lunch, are you?” Cynthia asked a little while later when she had come down from her room. One year they had picnicked on the bank of the Muddy River after the marathon. Cynthia had combed the bushes for jewelweed to pop, venturing deep into the tangled greenery, her ankles later braceleted with red scratches.

“Oh, no,” said Mary. “I just baked something to drop off for one of your father's former students.”

“Just a thank-you,” Vincent added quickly, appearing in the kitchen doorway with a windbreaker in hand.

“For what?” Cynthia asked.

“Not much,” Vincent said. “He did me a small favor recently. Minor thing, really.”

Cynthia inhaled deeply, vocally. “Smells good,” she said.

“I'll make another soon, for us,” said Mary.

“We'll leave it at their house on the way,” said Vincent. “I'm sure he's at the marathon himself, so we'll just drop it on the porch. No need to stick around and chat.”

On the drive to Henry Wheeling's house, Mary sneaked a few glances at her daughter in the rearview. Each time she checked, Cynthia was gazing toward her lap, at the fashion magazine she had brought along. Years ago, her mother would have reminded her not to read in the car—it'll make you sick to your stomach. These days, though, she feared saying much of anything, since even the most benign questions or observations sometimes elicited a hard stare. It was an unreadable look, anger, sadness, and fear all mixed up in a single face. Mary had no idea what her daughter was trying to say, what she was asking for or wanted or needed, so she mostly kept quiet. It was painful to restrain herself, but it felt like the safest course.

The entire morning, and the previous evening, she had been certain Cynthia would change her mind. She thought her daughter might not even say anything, not offer any excuse, just remain up in her room, feigning sleep while her mother worked up the courage to call up the stairs and remind her that the marathon would begin soon. She was so sure of this scenario, in fact, that she had baked the banana bread for Henry and Lucinda Wheeling the night before. That way, she reasoned, she would have an errand to do when Cynthia canceled their trip, and she could get out of the house rather than be inside, tortured by another way she or her husband had failed their daughter.

While Vincent pulled to the curb in front of the Wheelings', Mary looked again at the backseat. Her daughter's eyes were
closed. “I'll just jot a note and drop it on the porch,” Mary whispered to her husband, not wanting to wake Cynthia.

Vincent turned down the radio and nodded.

“I'm not asleep,” Cynthia said.

“Oh, no matter,” Mary said, fumbling with the seat belt release. “I was just telling your father that I'll be right back.”

“Where are we?” Cynthia asked, opening her eyes and looking at the unfamiliar street.

Mary turned to her husband, who said, “It's the home of one of my old students. Your mother just wanted to drop off her bread.” He nodded, slightly, to Mary, who stepped out of the car, relieved to not have to answer any more of Cynthia's questions.

The door to the house was ajar. Mary knocked, softly, and no one answered. She knocked again, louder, inching the door open wider, and still no one appeared or said anything. “Hello?” she called out hesitantly. Nothing.

She knocked once more and then, met with silence, went inside. To her left was the living room, which was empty. “Hello?” she called again. One wall of the living room was nothing but bookcases, the books lined up in descending order of height. Could the psychiatrist and his wife possibly have read all those? Mary wondered. It seemed like it wouldn't leave time for anything else.

She headed toward the back of the house. When she arrived at the kitchen, she noticed that the sliding door was open as well. As she approached it, she said again, “Mrs. Wheeling? Mr. Wheeling? Hello?”

“I'm out here,” someone answered. “In the yard.”

Mary followed the direction of the weak voice. What she saw when she stepped outside was a woman lying on a stone patio,
motionless. Shards of a coffee mug were scattered around her. The woman's eyes were open, and she wasn't moaning in pain or bleeding anywhere.