The Measures Between Us (30 page)

“Her name?”

“Cynthia Pareto.”

The receptionist typed on her keyboard, stared at her computer monitor for several seconds, and then looked up at Mary. “She's in Unit Eight.”

Mary nodded.

“Do you know where that is? Do you need directions?” Her hand was already moving toward a stack of Xeroxed maps. On their first visit, a different receptionist had grabbed one of those same maps and highlighted the route to Cynthia's room.

Mary shook her head. “I've been here several times. I think I remember.”

“Good,” said the receptionist. “If you just show me an ID, I'll sign you in and you can be on your way.”

Mary handed over her driver's license and waited while the receptionist wrote her name on a clipboard. “Thank you,” she said, putting the license back in her wallet.

Cynthia's unit was in another building, behind the reception area, a short walk away. Bulletin boards on the hallway walls
announced various activities and lectures. The flyers were printed on pale colored paper. There was artwork on the walls, too, with small metal plaques mounted beneath that noted who the artist was and who had donated the piece. Mary read, “In memory of Melissa,” and she liked that the families weren't shy about revealing that their kin had been patients here. She decided it was more evidence of what a helpful place it was.

On a wall at the end of the hallway, just before the exit to Cynthia's unit, there was a painting of a man in a three-piece suit. He was probably in his seventies, with thin white hair and glasses. It had the official feel of a presidential portrait. Mary paused by it and searched for an identifying plaque but found none.

“Our founder,” said a voice from behind her. “They moved it recently. I guess they haven't installed the nameplate yet.”

Mary turned around to see who was talking to her. It was a man in a blue oxford shirt and yellow tie. His brown loafers were slightly scuffed at the toe and heel, and he held a folder against his chest pocket. “So that's Dr. Rangely,” she said.

“Fisher,” the man said. “Dr. Leonard Fisher. He named the place Rangely after an area in Maine where he grew up.”

“Oh,” said Mary. “I just assumed …”

“Are you lost?” the man asked. “Do you need help finding one of the units?”

Mary shook her head. “My daughter's a patient here. Unit Eight.” She pointed in the direction of Cynthia's unit so the man would know he didn't have to take her there. She wondered if she should say Cynthia's name.

He smiled. “She'll be happy to see you.”

“I hope so,” said Mary. “It wasn't planned—more of a spontaneous
decision.” The man moved his folder, and Mary noticed he was wearing a name tag with the initials “M.D.”

“All the better,” the doctor nodded. “A nice little surprise.”

Mary brightened. “That was my thinking, too,” she said. “Nothing major, just something unexpected. Do they like that?”

“I'm sure she will,” he said. At that, the doctor gestured good-bye, stuffed his hands into his pockets, and left Mary alone with the portrait.

She wondered if Cynthia had seen the same painting, if she had stood on these same floorboards waiting for some tide to pull her elsewhere. Tom Slater was out by the car, maybe into his second or third cigarette. Maybe he had made another phone call, maybe he was enjoying the quiet. Would he have made the same decision with his own children?

The door to Mary's right opened and a couple appeared, a man and woman roughly ten years younger than she was. The woman's head was pressed against her husband's chest and she was sobbing, crying and coughing at the same time. She was barely walking, her feet dragging over the floor like a doll's. “Shh,” her husband kept saying, “shh.”

Mary was mesmerized. “Shh,” the man repeated. “I can't,” said his wife. “I can't do this anymore. Can't see him like this. I don't want to come anymore. Is that wrong?”

The man acknowledged Mary with a glance, then tightened his arm around his wife. “I know,” he said. “Things'll get better soon. You'll see.”

“I don't believe you.”

They passed the portrait, the doctor with the saintly, optimistic eyes; passed Mary, who turned to gaze at their slumped shoulders. Whatever they had just seen was still with them and
would be for months to come. It was only the three of them in a hallway that suddenly seemed too long, too narrow, too bare and too bright and too honest. “What if things don't get better?” the woman asked. “What then?”

“Shh,” the man said again. A sound, not even a word. And it was the wisest answer, really.
Shh, shh
. If things don't get better, all we can pray for is a little quiet.

A minute later the couple had disappeared, gone right, left, somewhere to shed the grief of the hospital. They were walking to their car, under the watchful gaze of Tom Slater, where they would buckle their seat belts, switch on the radio, crane their necks, and search the sky for sun, slivers of light between the clouds. The man would take his wife to a restaurant and some wine, the balm of alcohol. Sometimes there is no choice. They could stay until nighttime. The stars would be out for their drive home. An ocean, Mary thought: The sky is like the bottom of the sea—mysterious, dark, and wondrous all at once.

She took one last look at the portrait and walked away. Tomorrow. She would come back tomorrow, with Vincent, and they would do this together. Sit with Cynthia, talk and not talk. Smile and worry.

Cynthia heard commotion in the hall: people rushing, wheeling gurneys, barking into walkie-talkies, the heavy stomps of the orderlies, doors swinging open. She had been trying to fall asleep and had finally given up and picked up a magazine to read instead, hoping one of the articles might lull her eyes shut. She had turned her clock facedown on the bedside table, advice she had learned from a pamphlet on insomnia: Staring at the clock and its irreversible progression isn't good for sleeplessness; it only reminds you of the struggle, makes you anxious about being overtired the next day. The pamphlet also suggested getting out of bed and going into another room if you were having trouble falling asleep. Sadly, leaving her room in the middle of the night wasn't an option she had in the hospital.

She found the strict curfews and sleeping hours strange, since everyone she had ever met with even the slightest mental health problems had regular, punishing bouts of insomnia. Perhaps the hospital wanted to encourage more healthy sleeping patterns, routines that didn't allow for watching infomercials at three o'clock in the morning and ordering rotisserie grills and miracle skin cures. Weeks later, packages of useless, garage-sale-bound goods arrived at your doorstep.

At first she didn't think anything of the parade outside, in the hallway. But the sounds kept coming, different pairs of legs, different weights, more hurried. Soon she tossed off her blankets and went to the door to listen. She couldn't make out any words, just general muffled hubbub. When she didn't hear any footsteps for a couple minutes, she eased open the door, hoping it wouldn't creak. Craning her head through the narrow opening, she peeked into the hallway. No one was there, yet she could hear, in the distance, the urgent, telling chatter of orderlies and nurses.

She crept out and followed the sound, which was emanating from the southern end of the wing. Evan, a patient she was just getting to know, had a room down there. Cynthia had been in the room earlier in the week because Evan had wanted to show her a picture of her boyfriend. “He's cute,” Cynthia had told her, staring at a boy in a red baseball cap. “I know,” Evan said. “Much too cute for me.”

Evan was a recovering cocaine addict who was being treated for both that and depression. Her boyfriend had insisted she check herself into Rangely after he found her naked and drunk in the kitchen of the North End apartment they shared, trailing a butter knife across her wrists. She was blasting Metallica, too, a detail the boyfriend thought crucial but Evan did not. Evan laughed when she talked about it: “It was a fucking
butter
knife. Do you know how hard it would be to kill yourself with a butter knife? It would take hours and you'd probably get so bored you'd give up. You'd probably die faster if you were actually using it for butter.” Cynthia and Evan had been smoking outside when she told the story. “Besides,” Evan continued, “I was coming down, and everyone knows how harsh that is. I mean, I don't think
anything you do when you're coming down should count. Who doesn't want to slash their wrists when they're coming down?”

Cynthia had done cocaine a few times at parties in college. She and her friends would huddle around a glass surface and snort the lines through a rolled-up twenty. She remembered liking it, the instant confidence it gave her. She wanted to dance and she did, to whatever music was playing. She talked too much and somehow it didn't matter. But she also recalled the brutal aftermath. She and her boyfriend at the time sat on the football bleachers with a bottle of red wine because the guy who had supplied the coke had warned them about coming down. “Valium's best,” he said, “but wine's good too.”

Evan was so beautiful that Cynthia was shocked to hear her say that her boyfriend was too handsome for her. She had close-cropped black hair and eyes so green they didn't look real. “You're crazy,” Cynthia responded when she made the too-cute crack, to which Evan had rolled her eyes, pointed to the walls around them, and said, “Yeah, well, duh …” They both burst into laughter at that, and it felt good, easy and light, like they were carefree teenagers.

“Besides,” Evan said, “all his past girlfriends looked like you.”

Cynthia didn't resemble Evan in the slightest. She had blonde hair and was a good six inches taller than the pixie-ish Evan. Where Evan's complexion was dark, Cynthia's was pale. While they changed into hiking outfits once, Cynthia noticed a skin graft on her right thigh. When Cynthia asked about the scar, Evan murmured something about a car accident and changed the subject.

Cynthia had always been jealous of girls like Evan. She thought
her own looks were ordinary and unremarkable, stubbornly and unalterably American no matter how many different haircuts or hair colors she tried. There's nothing special about me, she often thought, pick any cheerleading squad and you'll see someone who could pass for my sister. Blonde and blue-eyed and destined for a minivan and the suburbs. She never had trouble finding boyfriends, so she knew she was attractive; she just didn't feel unique. She craved the kind of features and coloring of Evan, a character from French movies.

Girls like Evan reminded her of Europe—France, or Italy—even though Evan was in fact from Vermont. They seemed sophisticated and just a little exotic, as if they had distant relatives in Paris or Nice, sipping coffee at outdoor cafés all day. Or nestled along the Mediterranean, tucked away in farmhouses and countrysides. Put me in a landscape like that, Cynthia thought, and people will peg me as a tourist from miles away.

The voices grew louder as she neared Evan's room. Cynthia had expected to run into other patients creeping along the hallway, drawn out of bed the way she had been. Yet either they were far more compliant than she was or somehow they had managed to fall asleep. There was a rumor earlier in the week that someone had managed to smuggle in a bottle of Ambien, so maybe that was why. Or they were so focused on fighting their own battles they had neither the time nor the energy to investigate any commotion outside of the commotion in their own minds.

Approaching the room, she froze. Maybe, she thought, this is something I don't want to see, don't need to see. I could just remember her giggling, reminding me that we're all nuts. I could just remember the little gap between her front teeth, how self-conscious
she was about it, so she tried to keep her mouth closed all the time. When she had to open it to speak, she passed her hand in front. At first it seemed accidental, nonchalant, until you realized she had practiced for years and it had become a reflex. Talk: Hide behind hand. Bring your arm up, then open your mouth. Or she could remember her by the nickname she had given her therapist: Dr. Snot.

“Why do you call him that?” Cynthia asked.

“Because he's the kind of guy who picks his nose, really digs up in there. I wouldn't be surprised if he uses two fingers.”

“That's so gross. Does he do that during your sessions?”

“No, I can just tell,” said Evan. “Some guys are nose pickers, usually the ones who are kind of fat and wear big parkas that don't fit very well. They fall somewhere between their hips and their knees. Aside from that, I like him fine. He says I'm making real ‘progress.' ” And again they'd burst into laughter, prompting a scolding stare from one of the more laconic patients.

The sounds were indeed coming from Evan's room, and Cynthia soon saw that there was blood everywhere. Splattered on the walls, the floors, the sheets and pillows and bedside table and the dresser and the door to the bathroom. Even the lamp shade. The beige cone was freckled red, and the light bulb underneath was on, which turned the blood into delicate crimson stars.

The overhead light, which seemed excessively bright, especially for two in the morning, was on too, and there were seven or eight people milling around. Some Cynthia recognized—two nurses and an orderly—but the rest were new. Where were they from, another wing? Were they some sort of crisis team, sequestered until there was an emergency, beckoned by panic buttons and intercoms?

Evan was slumped against the bathroom door, both her hands wrapped in so many layers of white gauze they looked like clubs, totally mismatched to her tiny arms. Her eyes were open but they were lifeless, and her head kept dropping, tilting down into her neck, not a movement a human body should voluntarily make. She looked even smaller than she actually was.