The Measures Between Us (19 page)

“God,” Cynthia sighed again. “I don't know. I don't think it was any single event or one thing they said to me. Not like some unreasonable curfew or a stingy allowance. It just seemed like the natural evolution of things, like I said. I started resenting all their questions. I wanted to have my own life, one I didn't have to share with them. I mean, they didn't tell me everything they did or thought about, so why should I have to share everything with them?”

“Is that what you think they wanted? For you to share everything?”

“Yes. Why else all the questions? Why else insist that we have dinner together every night. Why else ask me where I'm going all the time. Why else stare at me so fucking much?”

“What do you mean, ‘stare at you?' ”

Cynthia was quiet for a moment, trying to locate a memory. “I don't know,” she said. “I used to catch my dad staring at me occasionally, just gazing, like he was about to say, ‘Cynthia, talk, tell me what's going on.' ”

“And that made you uncomfortable?”

“Of course it made me uncomfortable. I mean, I know you have to stare at people as part of your job, but trust me, it makes people uncomfortable.”

“Was he looking at you in a sexual way?”

“No, not at all. It wasn't that kind of staring.”

“Then why did it make you uncomfortable?”

“Because who likes to be stared at? It's creepy.”

“Some people don't mind,” Dr. Eliot said.

“Like who?”

“Actors, for one. They love to be looked at. And models. Presumably others too.”

“Fine, actors and models, and assorted other exhibitionists, and some other people Dr. Eliot could name. But not lots of other people, and not me.” Cynthia scratched a mosquito bite near her wrist. “I don't know if I can explain it, but him staring at me made me feel like I was really strange. It made me feel like he didn't get me—it kept confirming to me that I should be spending lots of time in my room alone, because that's where no one would think I was weird. Sometimes I'd use a tiny little disagreement as an excuse to storm away from the table and go upstairs. That probably made them think I was more hysterical than I am.”

Dr. Eliot nodded. “Did they follow you to your room?”

Cynthia shook her head. “No, that was my place. They never came in.”

“Did you want them to?”

Cynthia opened her mouth for a moment, about to say no, but then closed it before she said anything. She looked out the window, saw in the distance patients strolling and groundskeepers snipping and manicuring, floating their Weedwackers over the ground like metal detectors. She would be out there later, lying down on the soft lawns, smoking and watching her velvety exhalations ribbon toward the sky. She always liked to have a cigarette after a session with Dr. Eliot. It gave her the same sort of satisfaction and peace as smoking after a meal.

“I guess I did,” she admitted. “I guess I actually did want them to come up.”

Aside from her therapy sessions, Cynthia's life in the hospital revolved around little else. There was lunch and dinner—she skipped breakfast because she could never wake up early enough—but the
rest of the day she was free to do whatever she liked. She devoured the magazines and newspapers scattered around the common areas and read romance novels because their fluffy plots were so simple and predictable she didn't have to concentrate fully. Other patients idled away the time with hobbies like knitting, puzzles, or writing in journals. Cynthia didn't take up any of those because it seemed like some admission that you would be there for a long time, the way prison inmates spent hours lifting weights. The challenge, one patient told her upon her arrival, was figuring out how to do nothing. Teenagers, Cynthia thought, would make excellent mental patients, since they love to sit around all day and do little but stare at the television.

The staff tried, and mostly failed, to interest the patients in lectures and occasional special events. Some of the nurses and secretaries doubled as performers: One week a library administrator who was also a folk singer played Arlo Guthrie covers. The sparse clapping after each song was humiliating. Another week, an earnest woman from accounting, with white hair and Birkenstocks, gave a papermaking demonstration. She kept reaching into her fanny pack and taking out dried flowers, dropping them into a rank-smelling mixture of ground-up newspapers and water. They were brave, Cynthia thought, brave or naïve.

Dr. Eliot thought Cynthia should tell her parents about her abortion.

“No fucking way, never,” she said when he first raised the idea. “Why would I do that?”

“I think it'll help you move on,” he said.

“I have moved on,” she said. “It was years ago—I'm not even in touch with the guy anymore. It feels like a different lifetime.”

“Fair enough, but if you tell them I think you'll be relieved to not be holding on to such a secret.”

“What if I'm not? What if I don't feel relieved and I've just made them like me even less? You don't know my mom and dad. They'd never get it. They're really old-fashioned. And besides, I don't even think about it all that much.”

“Are you scared of what they'll say?” Dr. Eliot asked. “Do you have some scenario of how they'll react, and that's what's scaring you?”

“It's not a scenario. I'm pretty sure I know what would happen,” Cynthia said. “I'd tell them and they'd be hurt and so, so disappointed. They'd try to act like it wasn't a big deal, especially if I tell them while I'm still here, at the hospital, but then they'll go home and feel like failures because they raised a daughter who was so stupid and careless and selfish that she had to have an abortion. I already feel like a failure, so I don't need them thinking it too. I don't need anyone else beating me up over it. They don't have to know everything and it'll just confirm their fears that I don't know how to live my life.”

Dr. Eliot nodded. “They might surprise you. Often what you anticipate, particularly about delivering difficult news, is far worse than the reality. I've seen it happen a lot.”

“Trust me, I know,” said Cynthia. “I don't want to tell them. And I don't want you to tell them, you have to promise me that. Besides, it's not that big a deal, it's just not part of my life anymore. I'm hardly the first girl in the world to have had an abortion. It's not the end of the world. Throw a dart in here and you'll probably hit at least a couple girls who've had them.”

“I won't tell them,” Dr. Eliot said. “But I think you should think seriously about doing it yourself. We could do it in a session,
with all of us, if that would be easier for you. That might feel safer.”

“No. Absolutely not. It's not just the abortion, it's the fact that they wired me the money because I told them I needed it for a bus ticket home from California. I don't want to keep reliving that lie.”

Dr. Eliot was always so annoyingly calm behind his desk, Cynthia thought. He had a close-trimmed beard, black hair salted with bits of gray. Sometimes, when she didn't want to talk, she tried to imagine his life outside the hospital. Did he ever get irritated? Did he ever yell at anyone? She couldn't picture him raising his voice, yelling, giving another driver the finger. And yet he must, he wasn't a robot, no one was a robot, even people who had been to school for so long.

When she was quiet, he asked her more direct questions, which she often answered in monosyllables. She could hear herself reverting to a petulant teenager and she got a perverse, mischievous thrill, her own version of time travel.

“Are you still having thoughts of hurting yourself?” he asked after they had moved on from the abortion discussion.

“Yes.”

“Do you have these thoughts frequently?”

“No.”

“Ten percent of the time? Fifty percent? More than fifty percent?”

“I don't know. I don't count. People who think that stuff don't keep track. I wish I had never told you about that.” It was true: She regretted revealing that she'd had these thoughts. Dr. Eliot had asked early on and his straightforwardness and even tone were disarming.

“Can you try to put a number to it?”

“No.”

“Really?”

“No.”

“Can you try?”

“No.”

He sometimes jotted notes on a yellow pad. At the end of their sessions he would tear off the sheets he had just scribbled on and stuff them into a folder, then file it in his desk. Other patients at the hospital had told Cynthia they were desperate to read their folders, but she had no desire to. I don't want to read back all the stupid things I've said, and I don't give a shit what the shrink thinks of me, she thought. He probably thinks I'm a pain in the ass, though he's not allowed to say that. I might think I was a pain in the ass, too.

Their sessions always ended exactly the same way. Dr. Eliot put his hands together in a triangle and said, “Well, that about does it for today. So I'll see you the day after tomorrow?”

Cynthia nodded and stood up from her chair. “You know damn well when I'll see you,” she once said. “You don't have to say it like it's a question.”

Later, in her room, she read from a novel, skipping randomly from chapter to chapter. She wrote the beginnings of letters and postcards she would never mail. She tried to keep her hands busy, her mind racing, because the moment she paused she would walk to the window and start to cry.

Her tears weren't simply for all the places she wasn't allowed to go, the world beyond the grounds of the hospital. She did indeed hate being confined, loathed the pastel-toned walls, the colors soft and soothing; who decided pink was comforting and
navy blue wasn't? She didn't much care for the other patients, either, and though she acquiesced to the odd Ping-Pong tournament or game of eight ball, she mostly kept to herself. The others were constantly sharing—tales of their drug abuse, alcoholism, suicide attempts—but she didn't like the pressure to open up, to give parts of herself to people she didn't know, much less trust. She found no comfort in the act of telling, and she didn't understand why so many strangers were willing to wear their secrets like badges. Some of them seemed to love nothing more.

One of the nurses urged her to be friendlier, more social. “They're not monsters, you know,” she said. “It wouldn't kill you to talk to some of the others on your wing.”

Cynthia nodded, forced a smile. “Okay,” she said, knowing she would remain quiet.

She was certain her silence wouldn't get her discharged any sooner, but she nonetheless clung to it. It was one thing she was allowed to own here, among the strict rules: no razors, no aspirin unless you requested it at the nurse's station and swallowed it in front of them. She was required to eat at least two meals a day in the dining hall, and she had to have individual therapy along with group sessions, where they sat horseshoed around a psychologist and tried to pretend they were all friends and it wasn't awkward. From time to time the psychologist wrote words in Magic Marker on butcher paper, words like
you
,
me
,
self
,
reality
. A few of the therapists urged the patients to hug at the end of sessions.

The meals were hard at first because that was where much of the talking took place. Emboldened by the presence of others who had suffered similarly, they told their tales of destruction and self-loathing, dropping sentence after unbelievable sentence.
No subject was taboo, and in the space of a couple weeks Cynthia heard stories of heroin addiction, wrist slashing, attempted murder, rape. The first few nights she sat transfixed, amazed at the catalog of injustices. Then, quickly, she grew numb to it. She had to—it was the only defense against the onslaught.

She was tempted at the beginning to invent some sordid history for herself: a past life as a prostitute, perhaps, or as an Oxy-Contin addict who used to rob drugstores to feed her habit. She could pretend she was from Cleveland, Milwaukee, New Orleans, the green hills of West Virginia. She could unspool a story that grew and grew and tangled back in on itself, sketch a whole new person she'd never have the chance to be. A mobile home, a brother in jail, a mother who was an agoraphobe who collected sticks. Their yard was filled with twigs bundled into crude approximations of farm animals.

In the end, though, she just kept quiet, forcing down the bland meals and listening to the tales of others. She thought that in some ways, despite their damage, they were healthier than she was. They had an abiding faith in the goodness of strangers, enough that they were willing to strip themselves bare and risk getting smacked again. Why do you believe in innocence? she wanted to know. How can you still believe in a future that won't inflict more pain?

Five and a half months pregnant, Lucinda Wheeling thought she might hate her baby. She didn't think this all the time, or even most of the time, but she thought it frequently enough to alarm herself. The sense bubbled up at random moments—flipping through
People
magazine while waiting in the supermarket checkout line, cooking dinner, lying awake in bed staring at the ceiling and trying to fall asleep.

Counting sheep? Henry asked drowsily when he glimpsed her open eyes. How many do you see? Tell me about them. What are they doing?

Eating grass, Lucinda thought. What else do they do?

If only she were counting sheep. She shut her eyes and tried to conjure a vision of squat animals grazing and bleating, noses nuzzling the ground. Farmhands, peeling-paint barns, velvety meadows. She wanted to lose herself in the calm choreography of the natural world, far from the violence in her head. When the feeling came on, she shuddered. She didn't dare ask Henry whether other expectant mothers sometimes felt the same way for fear that she was aberrant, that the question alone would reveal her dark soul. She didn't want him to abandon her, especially now.