The Measures Between Us (25 page)

“Home of the Braves,” Henry said. “That's what they get for beating the Sox.” Atlanta's baseball team had just been in town, sweeping the Red Sox in an interleague series. One of Henry's fellow postdocs was a Georgia native, and he crowed endlessly about the wins. “Did they say how long it's going to be?”

Just past the security checkpoint, at the first gate, a flight was boarding. Scattered around the waiting area were couples on their feet, saying good-bye to each other. Henry got up and walked to the tall windows bordering the runways. Planes were lined up for their takeoff slots, lights flashing on their wings and tails. Others were flying toward him, growing bigger and bigger in the sky. They seemed so huge and unwieldy it was hard to believe they stayed afloat. It seemed more like a miracle than physics. Exhaust from the idling jets warped the air. Semaphore men waited, orange sticks poking from their pockets. They wore headphones so they wouldn't go deaf, but even if they did they already knew a sign language.

Lucinda had one hand on her chin, the other turning the pages of the magazine in her lap. She liked to read during flights or watch the movie, while Henry would stare out the window at the tops of clouds, distant farmland. Through that porthole, the earth was completely different. It didn't resemble a place of homes and the lives within them, more like a planet for scientists to study. There was no indication of people and all the ways they stumble into and out of one another's lives. The ways their fates are intertwined. The ways they are absolved and not. Only buildings and ranches and water were visible. Where we live, but not how.

He checked his watch and realized he was supposed to be at the school board meeting in an hour to speak on Vincent Pareto's behalf. He hadn't told Lucinda he was expected there, because she would have used it as another reason why he shouldn't drive her to the airport. And if her plane was departing at its scheduled time, or even close, there was no reason he couldn't do both. During his lunch hour that day he had jotted some notes on index cards.

He didn't want to leave his wife, but he did not want to disappoint
Vincent, either. The shop teacher had downplayed the meeting's significance and the potential impact of budget cuts, yet Henry knew how serious these financial crunches could be. Twenty years ago his own mother had lost her job as a school librarian during a similar round of budget slashing. She too had minimized the situation, both before and after. She had claimed she was thinking about retiring anyway, and without her job, she said, she would have more time to devote to the hobbies she loved, like gardening and singing in her church chorus. Henry knew that this was a cover even before he had immersed himself in psychology. Many nights around that time he would excuse himself from the dinner table and his parents would remain. When he wandered into the kitchen several hours later, they were still there, a dwindling bottle of red wine and two glasses the only dishes left from supper.

His father tried to comfort her. He railed against economists in the state capital. Moron bean counters, he called them; the superintendent was likewise spineless, a man “who didn't know his ass from his elbow.” But she was inconsolable, not angry so much as flattened. Eventually she emerged from her melancholy and confusion—it had been so many years since she didn't have a job to go to, she wasn't sure how to fill her time—and did seem genuinely happier. There was something about the timing, though, that was needlessly cruel. It would have been more humane to let her choose when her job ended.

If he told Lucinda now about the meeting, she would urge him to leave, and she might well turn sour if he refused. Yet staying in the airport suddenly seemed essential to rescuing their marriage. Surrounded by strangers, all he wanted was for the two of them not to be. He wanted to be like all the couples holding
each other, kissing each other, needing each other. Those others didn't have lies, there was no betrayal. They were afraid of plane crashes, terrorists, things we cannot predict, not truth and pain. Part of him knew that this was a fantasy. He and his wife had no monopoly on hurt, and everyone around them might be hiding a shameful secret, of their own making even, maybe something much worse than his. Yet in the fluorescence of the airport they really did look like innocents.

Back at Lucinda's seat, Henry pointed to a bar and said, “Are you hungry? Thirsty?”

She shook her head. “I'll sit with you, though, if you want something.”

They took a round table, and Henry went to the front to order a drink. He came back with whiskey for himself and club soda and lime for Lucinda.

“Thanks,” she said, dunking the lime quarter with the end of her straw. “I'm always afraid I'm going to see a pilot in one of these bars, boozing it up before the flight.”

Henry picked at the corner of his coaster. “I'm sure they have their own lounges where they get trashed, away from passengers.”

“Great. Now I feel reassured.”

Henry smiled and held his glass aloft for a toast. “To your trip,” he said when their glasses clinked.

“And Elvis,” she said.

She had been doing this ever since college, adding Elvis's name to virtually every toast. It had started on one of their first dates, when he toasted her and she had said nothing. You have to say something, he told her, otherwise it's bad luck. “Kentucky Rain” was on the jukebox, so she had said, “To Elvis. Long live
the King.” He was so grateful she had remembered to do it now, amid the jets rising and falling, coming and leaving.

There was, finally, a time listed for the flight. El Paso. His wife was going so far away the city's name wasn't even in English. What did it mean? “Peace”? No, life isn't that neat. One woman in the waiting area was telling her children to collect the toys they had strewn around the carpet: stuffed animals, miniature trucks, coloring books. There was a girl and a boy, and they brought her the toys one by one, then lingered while their mother packed them, very concerned they were going in the right place. Apparently they each had a logical, non-negotiable place in the carry-on bag. Patience, Henry thought. Most of parenting is about patience.

Back in the bar, he told Lucinda her flight was listed.

“Good thing,” she said. “I was about to steal more of your drink.”

She stood, and they both drained their glasses. Henry grabbed one last handful of nuts from the dish on the table and then followed her back to the waiting area.

All the toys had disappeared, and the boy and girl were sitting calmly on either side of their mother. Henry wondered what the bribe had been, or if the excitement of the impending flight was enough to quiet them. They each wore a backpack, the straps bright with cartoon characters. Soon, Henry realized, he would have to learn who they were. He would have to become fluent in the unpredictable and random passions of children. TV shows, toys, books. The maddeningly few foods they liked. In many ways, he was eager for this new phase of his life to begin, because it would make it easier to forget the noise and muddle that
dominated his days now. An old friend of his, soon after becoming a father for the first time, told him, “Kids take you away from yourself.” That was exactly what he craved.

“Do you still want to go? I can take you home.” He was surprised he actually uttered the question. He had been thinking the words since they had first turned onto Memorial Drive an hour before. Maybe the whiskey loosened them.

Lucinda opened her purse and rummaged there again, as if she didn't want to face him. “Yes,” she said, still looking down. “Janet's expecting me.”

He tried to take her hand, but she was holding her boarding pass. Out the window he saw the ground crew loading baggage into the belly of the plane. Higher, on top of a platform on an accordion lift, a man was handing cases of food and drink to a flight attendant who was hidden except for a pair of arms. At other gates the same thing was happening. The suitcases of a thousand strangers, soon to mushroom to faraway cities and towns. When he was a boy he collected maps, most of them pearled inside the issues of
National Geographic
that arrived in the mail every month. He unfolded them and spread them across the floor, then wheeled his toy cars across their surface. When he hit ocean he switched to his boats, tossed and occasionally capsized by roiling waves. He wasted whole afternoons on these expeditions, his bony knees punching holes in the paper. The hardwood floor peeked through and became mountain range, undiscovered islands, a rain forest loud with orangutans and birds. He struggled with the names of strange cities and foreign nations. Sometimes they came back to him even now, the towns and the stories he made up for his kingdoms. Bank robberies and haunted mansions and factories that churned out ribbons of caramel and chocolate.
An island where monkeys had learned to talk. Lucinda was still clutching the slip of paper with the name of a city he had never been to. He had journeyed to so many places, but not to this one.

“You'll have to take pictures,” he said.

“Oh,” she said, patting the side of her purse. “I forgot my camera.”

“Maybe you can borrow Janet's.”

“I'll ask.”

They were only a few feet from the X-ray machines, beyond which nonpassengers weren't allowed. Henry palmed the small of her back, and she turned and kissed him. “I'll call you,” she said when they broke.

“Okay,” he said. “Have a safe trip.”

She nodded, then showed her boarding pass to a security guard and stepped through the metal detector. In a few seconds she was gone.

He could wait until the airplane took off. From the bar he could watch it taxi to the runway. He could talk baseball with the bartender, convince himself he was not alone. He could down whiskey after whiskey, speed up the forgetting. But he was enough of a drinker to know that along with the amnesia comes an often crushing sadness.

The school board meeting was at a YMCA. When Henry arrived at the parking lot, he recognized the building as the same one where he had taken swimming lessons as a kid. Every Wednesday, along with a half dozen other boys, he had jumped into the overchlorinated pool, goggles strapped tight around his head. They learned the crawl and how to tread water, though what he
really wanted to know was how to emulate the sleek flip turns of Olympic swimmers. When the lessons were over, he watched high schoolers play water polo while he waited for his mother to pick him up.

Several cars were pulling out as he was driving in. The sting of Lucinda leaving was beginning to fade. It seemed as if he had dropped her off days ago, not an hour and a half earlier, yet he didn't trust this reprieve and expected the pain to return, probably when he went home and her absence grew so alarming it was impossible to ignore.

The auditorium was emptying, with a steady stream of people heading up the narrow aisles toward the doors. On the stage Henry saw a table with tented name cards, but not the men and women they identified. A man in a maintenance uniform dismantled a microphone stand planted in the audience and coiled its cord around his forearm. He fit the microphone into a plastic case bedded with foam.

Henry spotted Vincent near the front of the room, chatting with several men and women. He was wearing a coat and tie, clothes Henry had never seen him in before. Vincent noticed him as he approached and excused himself from the group. Free of the others, he stuck out his hand for Henry to shake.

“I'm so sorry I'm late,” said Henry.

“Did you have trouble finding the place? You didn't go to the school, did you?”

“No, I knew it was here,” Henry said. “I was … something came up at the last minute.”

Vincent buried his hands in his pockets, stood silently.

“I really wanted to be here,” Henry added. “I thought the meeting would still be going.” He reached for the index cards he
had scribbled on earlier in the day and awkwardly showed them. “I'd made some notes and everything.”

Vincent stared briefly at the cards in Henry's hand and then into his eyes. “It's okay,” he said. “The meeting went fairly smoothly.”

Embarrassed he had retrieved them, Henry slipped the cards back into his pocket. “Good turnout,” he said, widening his gaze to encompass the people crowding the aisles.

“More than I expected,” said Vincent. “Some parents said some real nice things on my behalf. You hope you're doing well by people, but it's nice to hear them say so explicitly.”

“It was just a forum, though, wasn't it?” Henry asked. “I mean, no final decision was made tonight, right?”

“They're calling it an exploratory hearing. My understanding is that they'll now digest what they heard this evening, combine it with their own studies, and then come to a decision.”

Henry nodded. “Any indication which way things are leaning?”

“Hard to know, behind all the jargon. Listen to enough of it and you don't know what to believe. They get you turned every which way. Everyone has a different agenda.”

The maintenance man had moved to the stage, where he unplugged several extension cords. He grabbed the name tags and a half-empty water pitcher and took them backstage. A proper-looking woman with short hair walked by and said something quietly to Vincent, giving his shoulder a little squeeze. When she was out of earshot, Henry asked if she was his wife.

“No, vice principal. My wife's at home,” Vincent said. “I don't want to bother her with all this stuff. She's got enough to worry about these days.”

Henry fingered the index cards in his pocket. He wanted to take them out again, let the shop teacher read and linger over the
words. He wanted to prove his intention to be at the meeting and support him, argue that men like this were hard to find—you don't go firing them over money. He wanted to usher Vincent outside, find an airplane floating across the sky, and say, That is where I was. That is where she is.