The Measures Between Us (36 page)

She could tell how much pride her mother took in these meals. To prepare them she orchestrated many pots and pans, gliding from stove burners to oven, then to the countertop to toss a salad and mix dressing. When they all sat down to eat, she would steal looks at her husband and daughter, watched them ladle second and even third portions onto their plates. She drank white wine and didn't say much, content to have supplied something so basic and important.

Cynthia enjoyed the meals too. They were reassuring, and they made her feel that nothing radical had happened while she was away in the hospital. Sometimes her father, when he had had to stay late at school for a meeting, still had bits of sawdust clinging
to his hair or shirt, and this detail, too, jolted her back to her childhood, when he would come home and lift her up high above his head and she would giggle and breathe in his reliable scent of freshly sawed wood. One Father's Day she went to the drugstore with a friend to buy presents. The friend guided her to the shaving and cologne aisle, plucking a bottle of Old Spice off the shelf. When Cynthia didn't follow suit, the friend asked, “What does your dad wear?” He wears wood, Cynthia thought.

The temptation to stop taking her medication was much greater at home. In the hospital, it was all part of the routines: mealtimes, therapy times, med times. The nurses brought the pills by in a small paper cup and stood there while you swallowed them. It was always slightly awkward, the nurses shifting from foot to foot, trying to pretend they weren't cops. They had to, though, because in the past patients would excuse themselves to the bathroom, where they would spit them out or flush them down the toilet.

At home, though, there was no one monitoring her, and she had begun to hate the cardboardy feeling the medicine induced, not to mention the dry mouth. As she had approached her discharge date and complained about the medication, Dr. Eliot warned her that it was dangerous to stop taking the antidepressants, or to skip doses. “When you're ready to come off it, and this is a decision you'll need to make with a doctor, you'll do so gradually,” he said. Otherwise, he explained, there were serious risks, including seizures.

She had challenged him: “Do a lot of people suffer seizures or is that some propaganda you and the drug companies cooked up to keep us on the meds?”

“The incidence isn't high,” he admitted, “but it occurs enough that's it's a genuine possibility. I mean, why risk it?”

Why risk it? Spoken like someone who's never taken medication that makes you feel like Styrofoam.

Once home, she started splitting the pills in half. Why did she need yet another doctor to tell her how to step down? He would probably just instruct her to do the same thing: Begin with half the normal dosage, and soon you'll be ready to stop entirely.

She didn't notice much of a difference at first, and she didn't expect to. The psychopharmacologist at the hospital had explained that antidepressants need time to build up in the bloodstream; it was the same reason she didn't notice a change at the beginning, either. If she could be patient, she thought, the level would come down and she could start to feel more human.

Three weeks after she left Rangely, there was something Cynthia needed Jack's help with. She called him and said, “I know this is a little weird, but do you mind coming with me to these strangers' house?”

“Sure,” he said. “Why?”

“They're the grandparents of this kid I babysit, and I just want to … I don't know, I guess I want to meet them.”

“Okay. But we're just going to show up?”

“This is going to sound strange but I want us to pretend we're doing a survey on the environment. You can use a lot of that stuff from your internship.”

Jack paused, and Cynthia jumped in: “You don't have to,” she said. “Forget I asked.”

“No, no,” he said. “I was just a little surprised is all. I'll just follow your lead. Does this have anything to do with why you were away?”

“No.”

He drove to Cynthia's house and picked her up. When she got in the car, she explained a bit more. The grandparents were trying to win custody of the boy because their daughter—the boy's mother—had killed herself and they didn't trust the father.

“Why not?” Jack asked.

“Who knows,” Cynthia shrugged. “Maybe they think the boy should have two parents, or maybe they think he made his wife kill herself.”

“Did he?”

“Of course not.”

“How do you know?”

“I've met him. He's the sweetest guy. And besides, no one can make you do that.”

“But why are we going there?”

“I just want to see it, in case they win. I don't think they will, but I want to know he'll be okay.”

Jack pulled away, turned the stereo up. The Sox were in the midst of one of their annual late-season collapses, and the radio was tuned to the game, against the Twins. “Who's winning?” Cynthia asked.

“Tied,” Jack said. “Do you mind if we listen to it?”

“No. Not at all.”

His grandfather used to listen to ballgames on the radio. Even when they were on television, he preferred the radio. “Better for the imagination,” he once said when Jack quizzed him why, though later Jack realized it had as much to do with clinging to tradition as it did with vivifying the pictures in his head.

Outside Lowell, they hit a traffic jam. The Sox had just gone down a run on a wild pitch.

“What's going on?” Cynthia said. “Accident?”

Jack periscoped his head out the window to get a better look. “Can't tell,” he said. The flashing lights of emergency vehicles ricocheted off the trees and guardrails lining the road. As the car
inched forward, they came to an electronic sign: DRUNK DRIVING CHECKPOINT AHEAD.

These DUI roadblocks had cropped up in the past few months in response to community pressure after a few deadly accidents. “Please,” read one letter to the editor, “how many wooden crosses and flower bouquets by the roadside will it take for you to realize there's a problem?” Cynthia's own father had been snared at one as the three of them were driving home from a dinner out. The cop smelled wine on his breath and ordered him to blow into a Breathalyzer. “He was so mortified,” Cynthia had told Jack. “I don't know why. I thought it was kind of exciting. I thought we might have to go bail him out or something. He never does anything wrong, maybe that was why I was so excited.”

Jack was nervous as the car approached the orange pylons and police cruisers. There didn't seem to be any logic by which they stopped people, no consistent make or style of vehicle. The drivers spanned all ages and ethnicities. The cops would wave several cars through, then pull over three or four people in a row.

A black Chrysler ahead of them cleared the checkpoint, and now it was their turn. A tall state trooper tapped on the window and Jack rolled it down. He shined a flashlight onto Jack, shifted it to Cynthia, and then swept its eye slowly across the backseat. There was little there aside from an empty Coke bottle.

“You kids okay tonight?”

Jack nodded. “What's the score?” the cop said.

Jack was confused, but Cynthia jumped in. “Down one. El Guapo just came on.”

“Great,” said the trooper. “If that fat fuck lets one more guy
go yard, I'll drive down there myself and take the mound.” Then he switched off his flashlight. “Have a good night. Be careful.”

A couple miles later, Jack said, “I didn't even realize you were paying attention to the game.”

“Me either,” said Cynthia. “Reflexes.”

“You know who El Guapo is?” He had been surprised to hear the pitcher's name come out of her mouth. The middle reliever was a regular target of sportswriters, talk-show hosts, and fans alike.

“No idea,” Cynthia said. “All I know is he's one of the players my dad rants about sometimes—and now I know he must be overweight.”

“He's more than a little overweight.”

“And he can still play?”

“Pitchers, especially spot relievers, don't have to be in as good shape as the other players,” Jack said.

“What is it with you guys? You take this baseball stuff so personally.”

“The Sox are much bigger than baseball.”

Cynthia rolled her eyes. “Beats the hell out of me,” she shrugged. “If everyone didn't invest so much hope in them, then it wouldn't feel like the world was ending every season and people wouldn't be so miserable. Everyone should stop believing the Red Sox can save us.”

“But they can.”

“Shut up.”

“I'm serious,” Jack said. “No, you're not.”

“Okay, fine, I'm not. But I am, a little.”

He was enjoying talking about the Sox. It was a birthright of anyone born in New England to get overly wrapped up in the
team's wild turns: the tease of their winter trades, their early-season triumphs, the inevitable collapse come autumn.

When Jack began paying closer attention to sports, his grandfather would give him money to buy baseball cards from the pharmacy on the corner. There was a stick of pink gum in each pack, dusted white with sugar. It lost its flavor in under a minute. At school, during recess, he and his friends traded cards. There was always someone whose father had bought him an entire set at the beginning of the season, and in addition to a price tag that sounded astronomical at the time—$44.75—it seemed like cheating. Also, part of the ritual was opening a new pack and hungrily flipping through the cards to see if you'd gotten any Red Sox.

He stored them in an old Nike shoebox, sorted by team. At the end of the season, he labeled the box with the year and put it on a shelf in his closet. Now they were probably in the attic somewhere, along with all the other toys he had outgrown.

“Left here,” Cynthia said. She had the directions in her lap, though she barely consulted them. She seemed to have already memorized the route.

The Twins had scored three runs in the top of the ninth, so the Sox were behind by four.

“You can put on music,” he said. “But it's not over.”

“Yes, it is.”

“Okay, but aren't you going to feel like an idiot when they stage a huge comeback and you'll have missed it?”

“The regret will be overshadowed by the joy of their winning. That's the key to being a Red Sox fan—it's all about managing emotions and expectations, keeping each as low as possible.”

Cynthia smiled and slid a CD into the stereo and turned it up loud.

The house was aglow. There were too many lights on for just two people. Yet maybe they liked it this way, the warm yellow beacon their home became. Cynthia handed Jack a clipboard, and the two of them walked toward the house. It looked familiar to Jack and he wondered if he had passed it on one of his drives to gather river data.

He still didn't completely understand why they were there. Cynthia had returned just as abruptly as she'd left, five weeks earlier. A few nights ago, she had called and said, “I'm back, let's go to the fair,” and he said nothing but yes, so grateful was he that she wasn't phoning from across the country or halfway around the world. He had hoped that once they were there, amid the strangely peaceful chaos of the midway and the rides, she would explain where she had been. They had been looking forward to going to the fair since earlier in the summer, and it was as if she just wanted to erase the weeks in between, pretend she hadn't been away somewhere that was going unnamed. He let her, too, because right after they had handed over their ten-dollar bills and extended their wrists for the admission bracelets, she took his hand in hers and kept it there, rubbing the side of his forefinger with her thumb while they rode rides and won useless trinkets. She was so much more affectionate that night than she normally was, and that turned out to be explanation enough.

It took a minute for someone to answer the door. Before they did, a porch light came on overhead. It startled Cynthia and she flinched. “Sorry,” she whispered. “I'm fine.”

Tom Slater opened the door. “Can I help you?” He looked over their shoulders at the unfamiliar car in his driveway.

Cynthia spoke. “Good evening, sir,” she said. “My name is Melissa, and this is John. We're students at Lowell Tech, and we're doing a project that involves surveying county residents on their attitudes about the environment.” It was strange to hear her speaking so formally.

Mr. Slater nodded. Jack flexed his hand, stretched his toes inside his shoes. He was suddenly afraid that he wouldn't be able to move when they were invited inside. “Would you mind if we asked you and your wife some questions?” said Cynthia. “It shouldn't take longer than twenty or twenty-five minutes.”

“Of course not,” said Tom Slater, opening the door wider and stepping aside to let them in.

“Thank you,” Jack said as he walked by, looking at the floor while he spoke.

Cynthia started her fake survey, and she and Jack dutifully recorded the answers, or at least Jack pretended to, trailing a pen across paper, because it was all so strange and he couldn't quite believe he was sitting there with Cynthia. When he looked at the notes later, he read words followed by unwords—shapes, scratches, almost-words.

Question twelve was about how the Japanese have very stringent recycling laws, down to things like lipstick containers and battery packaging. “Do you think Americans could adopt a similar set of guidelines?” Cynthia asked. Jack's mind was wandering, but he didn't want to do anything to jeopardize Cynthia's ruse.

Question seventeen was about shrinking glaciers, and question eighteen was about the spike in incidences of local flooding over
the last twenty-five years. Jack said, “Whereas in other places, such as parts of Texas, the drought seasons are getting longer and harsher.” There were only twenty questions, so he knew it wouldn't be much longer. One of the few times he let his gaze shift from his clipboard, he glimpsed a photograph on the mantel, a woman who must have been the Slaters' deceased daughter. He wondered if Cynthia had noticed it, too.