The Measures Between Us (14 page)

“Oh my God,” Mary said, rushing to Lucinda Wheeling. “Are you okay?”

Lucinda nodded. “I'm all right, though it probably doesn't look like it.”

“Are you sure? Maybe I should call an ambulance.”

“No, no. I'll be fine. Really.”

Mary gently wiped Lucinda's hair off her forehead. It was damp with sweat. “What happened?”

“I'm not sure, exactly,” said Lucinda. “I was out here drinking my coffee. I crouched down to look at something, and then I guess I just fainted. I don't remember much.”

“Did you trip over something?”

Lucinda shook her head. “I don't think so.”

Mary looked around for a loose stone, a stray branch, any obstacle that might have caused the stumble. She collected the mug pieces into a small pile. “These are sharp,” she said. “You should be careful.”

Lucinda propped herself up on her elbows, and Mary gripped her forearm. “Slow,” she said. “Take it slow.”

Lucinda nodded. “Would you mind getting me some water?” she asked. “There's a glass on the table and you could just fill it at the hose.”

Mary walked quickly to the hose and poured a cup. She brought it back to Lucinda, who took a tentative sip, followed by another. “Thank you,” she said.

The two women were quiet then. Mary palmed Lucinda's
shoulder; she wanted her to know she was safe, not marooned out there while everyone in the city was off at the marathon. In the corner of the yard was an antique stone birdbath. Lucinda saw her staring at it and said, “It's pretty, isn't it? It came with the house.”

“Do they use it?” Mary asked.

“Never, never even once,” said Lucinda, making both of them laugh.

“Mom?”

Mary turned around to see her daughter coming around the side of the house. Cynthia stopped when she saw Lucinda on the ground. “Oh …” she said. “Sorry … you were taking a little while, so Dad and I were wondering where you were.”

“This is my daughter,” said Mary.

Lucinda squinted to get a better view of Cynthia. “It's nice to meet you,” Lucinda said.

Mary gently urged Lucinda's shoulder back down level and pressed a handkerchief she had retrieved from her purse to her forehead. “This is Lucinda Wheeling, the wife of your father's former student.”

“Should I get Dad?” Cynthia asked. “Maybe he should come back here.”

“No,” said Mary. “It's okay.”

“Are you sure?” Cynthia said.

“Yes.”

Cynthia didn't know what else to say, so she just stood there, a few feet from the patio. There was a black barbecue grill with a wire brush dangling from its side. A half-empty bag of charcoal slumped against the side of the house.

Lucinda shut her eyes again and then opened them. Twice. Then she sat up further, bracing herself with her palms on the patio. “I think I'll be all right now,” she said.

“I don't mind staying longer,” said Mary. “We're not in any rush.”

“No, no. I'll be fine. I just blacked out for a second. Besides, you don't want to miss the race.”

“Lucky my mom's a baker,” Cynthia said.

“What's that?” Lucinda asked.

“I brought a banana bread over,” Mary said. “That's why we stopped by. I was just going to drop it off.”

“Oh, I hadn't even realized,” Lucinda said. “Where are my manners?”

The three of them laughed, not because the joke was very funny but because they were desperate for something light. They were outside, with a wide sky above, yet it felt as if they were in a small room.

“Really,” said Lucinda, now rising, shakily, to her feet. “I'll be okay.”

Mary guided her to a chair. “Cynthia,” she said, holding out an empty cup, “can you refill this?” Cynthia approached the two women warily. She took the glass and disappeared into the kitchen, emerging a moment later with a full cup.

“Thank you,” Lucinda said, before taking a sip. “Go, watch the marathon. Your husband must be wondering where you both are.”

“I suppose he is,” Mary said. “Your dad does tend to worry,” she added, turning to Cynthia. She gave Lucinda the handkerchief as well. “I hope you feel better,” she said. “Is there someone you can call if you have to? Do you want us to call someone?”

Lucinda nodded. “Henry'll be home soon, I'm sure,” she said. “He never stays too long.”

“Good,” Mary said. Then she started walking out of the yard, beckoning Cynthia to follow.

When they were out of earshot, Cynthia said, “What happened?”

“I was on the porch and noticed that the door was open,” Mary said. “I kept calling out ‘hello' and no one answered, so I went inside and found her back there. I guess she fainted.”

“That's scary,” Cynthia said.

“I know, especially with those hard stones.” They emerged at the front of the house. “She's pregnant, too,” Mary added.

“Yeah, I noticed,” said Cynthia.

“Really? She's not that far along.”

Cynthia shrugged. “I could tell.”

They walked down the porch steps toward the car. Vincent was still sitting behind the steering wheel, just as they had left him. Mary heard bits of song coming through the open windows. He must have grown weary of news reports, the loud chop of helicopters and their traffic surveillance, the lather churned up over nothing, really.

At night, once Jack had finished the extra work for his internship, he would drive into the farmland that rimmed town, sometimes with Cynthia but more often alone. Darkness dissolved the barns and silos into flat, haunting silhouettes. Bats rocketed from the eaves. A whole spectrum of black emerged, shades that were undetectable in the daytime. Occasionally a floodlight hinged to a grain elevator or lightning rod lit up an entire field, whiskered with snow in the late fall and early spring, dewy and fractal when the hours pushed up against morning. Come warmer temperatures and the dawn, it would be wet, too delicate to last. There were usually no animals out. They had been gathered inside by a tired farmhand, by an eager border collie, to bed down in their stalls on pungent mattresses of hay. The dogs that had guided them in were dozing too.

The roads were mostly empty, and Jack cruised them fast, nosing the speedometer up past sixty, seventy, eighty. There was no risk since the cops didn't care about these routes. He let the car veer over the faded lane divider, if there even was one. It was like driving drunk, only the intoxicant wasn't alcohol but land and sky, wind and solitude. Occasionally he tripped the motion-sensor light on a house, yet he was gone long before the owners
parted the curtain to check if it was a deer, a bear, or a genuine intruder. When the moon was full and there were no clouds, he turned off the headlights. It was that luminous.

When he slowed, he heard owls, their spooky question mark of a voice. He heard dogs, their barks sailing across the open fields until a stand of trees dampened the sounds. The wind chimed in, turned loose screen doors into complaints. Early in the evening, when it was nearly dark and there was still work to do, the barns were lit from within.

Jack knew how backbreaking farming life was. His mother grew up on a small dairy farm in northeastern Pennsylvania, and one summer he stayed there; his grandparents had passed it on to an uncle who still worked it. There was a movie theater with a single screen in town, one grocery store, a lone gas station where pickups with mud-spattered tires crowded the pumps. The days started early, before dawn, and there was little letup. The adults drank coffee to snap awake, ate huge breakfasts. Jack had never before seen someone eat steak first thing in the morning, but here his uncle and older cousins routinely sawed through a London broil as the sky brightened into blue. Much later, by the time dinner finished, Jack was so tired he could barely speak. The men capped each day with a six-pack, and it was hard to know how they'd reserved enough energy even to join mouth to bottle. He fell asleep to the din of their voices, and his aunt gently woke him and took him upstairs to wash up and go to bed.

Maybe all the work wasn't for milk or money or land or independence, Jack thought, but for solace. Away from the grid of downtown streets, away from the concrete and snarling jumble of power lines and parking meters, there was a kind of modesty. It was there in a chipmunk scurrying across the road, and
it was there in the simple choreography of a cow's tail shooing away flies.

When he passed children eking out the final moments of daylight at dusk, he projected onto them peace and kindness, though in reality they may have possessed neither. In their bodies swinging on a jungle gym or tearing across a field, Jack read contentment, no struggles save for not wanting to take a bath or brush their teeth before bedtime or trudge off to school in the morning with eyes halfway open. They board a yellow Bluebird bus, cram its aluminum shell and vinyl seats with boasts and wonder.

The sky was wide in the country. Hills rose gradually, then eddied down with the same quiet strides, their architecture mimicked in silos and the soft curves of dairy barns. When a deer lay dead by the side of the road, dark blood reddening its fur and the pavement, it seemed not so much sad or tragic but just the way things were.

The landscape was more interesting to Jack at night, when the contours were subtler. Daytime was for industry and animals, men and tractors and haying and what little conversation each required. The dark hours belonged to owls, voles, or just the wind soughing through the trees, creeping through the barns and nudging open the eyes of horses and cows. Farmers say they have no need for meteorologists; their herds, more prescient than computers, tell them all they need to know. Each flood did not convince them to reconsider the weathermen. Instead they replayed the history leading up to the rains, what their animals were trying to say.

Jack had never paid much attention to astronomy lessons—he could never get past how far away the stars were, and it was hard to care about something so tiny and so impossible to reach, despite
their blaze. The myths that surrounded the constellations seemed equally remote, the hybrid beasts and beneficent gods. It was difficult to keep each one straight. Yet here, out in the country, it looked as if there was some brilliant white light just beyond the cloak of sky, and the stars were pinholes, what was left after something had pierced the thick velvet. Control of the tides rested up there, and this divide fascinated him: The heart of the ocean was here, on the ground, but its brain was millions of miles away. How could they possibly work in concert?

On a cold Thursday afternoon, when Jack had pulled to the side of the road to snap a photo of a line of cows lumbering toward a barn, a boy he would later learn was Brandon Newell asked, “What are you taking a picture of?”

The boy had approached from behind, and his high-pitched voice was a surprise.

“The cattle,” Jack said.

“Come again?” he asked.

“The cows.”

“Why? They're just cows. They don't do anything, except mostly smell, especially when there's no breeze enough to carry it far away. Then it stinks, it stinks.”

“They don't do tricks,” the boy added. His hands were jammed into the pockets of a jacket with a Boy Scout patch sewn onto the sleeve. On the opposite sleeve, a couple inches of duct tape covered a rip. “Molly does, though. She's one of the dogs. She can jump fifteen feet in the air and catch a tennis ball in her mouth. Wanna see? It's really cool. Now that's something worth taking a picture of. I want to get her on one of those shows on ESPN.”

Jack slipped his camera and its telephoto lens into a case, unsure whether he had captured the cows. “Not today,” he said. “Maybe some other time.”

“Why's that lens so long? Is it two lenses glued together?” Brandon asked. “Got to go somewhere?”

“Home.”

“Where's that?”

“Near Manchester.”

“Oh,” said Brandon, kicking a stone. “We go to the mall there sometimes. They have a video-game store. You ever been in there? They have Golden Tee. Know where I live?”

Jack shook his head.

Brandon jerked his chin at a weathered white farmhouse. Two red barns forming half a plus sign stood nearby; there were no neighboring homes within sight. He pointed toward the second floor and said, “That's my room. For now, though, just for now. It's my grandparents' house actually but I stay sometimes. Dad drops me off, picks me up in the morning, the next morning. He honks the horn when he gets here.”

Brandon was eight, Jack would learn later, and among the things he learned from the boy was the location of a nearby creek. “Garter Creek it's called, on account of all the snakes in the banks,” he said. “Don't worry, they're not dangerous, the ones with the triangle heads are the dangerous ones but the poisonous ones don't really live in this part of the country—more like Arizona and Texas. Best part, though, is the train tracks. A freight train comes along every few days—there's no schedule—and if you catch it at night it lights up the water and hidden caves along the creek bed. I don't know what lives there, though.”

“Caves?”

“Yeah. Just small ones, like for animals, no people live in there.”

When Jack asked which direction the creek was, Brandon shrugged and said, “Don't know. Over there somewhere. I know how to get there but I don't really know how to say where it is. I found an ax handle on the shore once.”

Jack liked listening to him, and not just because he told stories about creeks and snakes but because he ricocheted from subject to subject. Was it the way all kids' brains worked? It was hypnotizing.

Garter Creek was at the end of a rutted dirt road. NO HUNTING OR CAMPING signs were tacked to the trees, many of them faded and shredded past legibility. The names of the property owners had worn away as well. Rusted beer cans littered the ground. Jack didn't see any snakes, but he did find the tracks, which ringed the northern side of the creek.