The Measures Between Us (42 page)

The sun, anchored high in the cloudless sky, beat down on the small group of mourners. It was such a gorgeous day it almost
seemed cruel. There was none of the rain that had plagued the previous week, none of the storms that the weathermen were promising for the next days too. In its aftermath the greenery had turned lush and vivid. The mourners stood before a freshly dug grave, mounds of loamy brown soil on the perimeter, the coffin set on metal supports, ready to be lowered into the earth. Henry recognized the youngest mourner, standing with his father. He had seen him several days ago when he'd raced up onto Cynthia's porch and talked as if there wasn't enough time to get everything out. Henry had wondered if the boy had some sort of developmental issue. He recognized another mourner, too, someone Cynthia's age, who had been interning on the climate project.

He imagined the modest headstone that would soon mark the site, the brutal math of the two dates that bracketed Cynthia's life. He hadn't expected many people at the funeral. The shop teacher had warned him of as much. “My wife has a brother and a sister, and I have a few cousins, and that's about it,” he'd said apologetically. “All the grandparents passed some years ago.” With the dearth of relatives, it seemed especially important to Henry that he be there, to show that Cynthia's life was indeed worth remembering.

Lucinda was still in Texas. He had talked to her the night before, told her about Cynthia's death and that he would be going to the funeral. He began crying while he spoke and he was surprised, a little embarrassed, by the tears. She asked how Vincent and his wife were taking it all, and Henry told her he didn't know.

“God,” she said, “what a nightmare. I can't even imagine …”

He had hoped she would offer to get on the next plane out,
arrive in Boston in time to accompany him to the cemetery. Instead she steered the conversation elsewhere, telling him about Janet's paintings, her friendly chocolate lab. “It makes me want a dog,” Lucy said. “Callie's so unequivocally sweet, it's like that's her only reflex.”

When she said she was thinking about visiting Marfa, the former army base converted into an art museum, Henry understood it to mean she wouldn't be coming home soon. “Janet has some work in one of the galleries there,” she said, and he was suddenly jealous of Lucy's old college roommate. Her name had begun to sound like a taunt, someone Lucy actually wanted to spend time with.

The conversation, like each one they had had since Lucy had left, was defined by what they weren't saying. The more they avoided these things, the harder it was to say them.

“I'm sorry again about your teacher's daughter,” Lucy said.

“Cynthia,” Henry said.

“What?”

“Her name. Her name was Cynthia.”

“Oh,” said Lucinda.

Another awful pause. Seconds that seemed like hours. Sometimes the quiet is an alarm. We're strangers, Henry thought. How?

“Janet's calling,” Lucy said finally. “I think dinner's ready. I should go.”

“Bye,” said Henry.

“Bye.”

“Can I ask you something?” Vincent Pareto said.

Henry nodded. “Of course.”

“Do you think it was an accident?” Vincent said.

Henry angled his head toward the sun and squinted. An answer there, behind the blinding surface. If he had a silver protective suit, like the men who clean up chemical spills, he might be able to find it, hold it like a marble in his fat, gloved fingers. “I don't know,” he said. He stuffed his clammy hands into his pockets, squeezing the cloth handkerchief he'd brought in case he started crying at the graveside. “I've thought about it, and honestly I don't know. I'm not sure anyone can know.”

The two of them were walking slowly along one of the cemetery's winding paths. The narrow roadways seemed too idyllic for all the heartbreak, all the broken, deflated people who had meandered among the headstones and footstones. The sun was a lie too, its brightness and warmth mismatched to this bleak day. It was an afternoon for a wedding, a soldier's homecoming, a graduation, not a funeral. Why wasn't the weather complying?

“I'm inclined to think it was not,” Vincent said. “Given the early hour, the fact of it being a single-car accident … The excessive speed and so forth.”

“Was she going fast?” Henry asked.

“The police estimated sixty to seventy.”

Henry inhaled sharply, then let out his breath. A car ramming into the guardrail, its dazzling river of sparks and unshakable destiny visible for a few minutes, for miles. Jerk of the steering wheel, and now we're here.

“They've got all these sophisticated ways of reconstructing accidents, using computers, clay models,” Vincent said. “They tell me they can get a pretty close idea of just what happened, even without actual witnesses or video footage.”

“Really?”

The shop teacher nodded. “I was skeptical too, but apparently
they piece it together from what's left over. How the car parts are twisted, any skid marks, burn marks, and all that. Then they feed all this information into a computer, and the computer gives you an animated scenario. It's used mostly for insurance purposes and hit-and-runs, but the police have offered it if we'd like.”

Henry was surprised by the shop teacher's even tone. He'd expected his voice to be quaking, meek and shot through with sadness.

“My wife, though, she maintains it was a freak accident,” Vincent said. “Pure and simple, no intent involved. It's easier for her to understand that way. She says that Cynthia hit an oil patch, or some glass blew out her tire, or she just lost control for a second for whatever reason on the slick roadway. ‘People have car accidents,' she says. ‘It's just one of the unfortunate facts of life. There's nothing to be done about it.'”

“I guess there's no way to know for certain,” Henry said. Vincent nodded. “That's right. Even the police admitted they can't be one hundred percent sure, no matter what their computers and simulations tell them.”

“Is it important to you?” Henry asked. “One way or the other?”

The shop teacher paused, and Henry stopped walking as well. For a moment he wondered if he had said something wrong. Maybe he should just be supplying answers.

“I suppose not. I don't think I'd sleep any better if I knew definitively. What matters most is she's no longer here.” The shop teacher stared at the ground and began moving again. “But I'd like to know if I … if we were able to help her at all, aid her in feeling better. So I guess in that sense it does make a difference. I'd be able to gauge whether we helped her or not if I knew whether she intended to kill herself.”

Henry glanced back at the grave site. All the mourners had scattered, leaving only the symmetrical wound in the earth. Soon the gravediggers would come to fill in the hole, shovel dirt on top of the coffin. The headstone would be ready in a few weeks. Graves were always saddest when they were fresh, he thought, when the newly turned soil reminded you of how recently the body lying below had been alive. The confetti of autumn leaves, the first snowfall, next spring's slow thaw—all would provide peaceful cover and camouflage the hole, tug the event toward history.

He pictured the regular pilgrimages the shop teacher and his wife would make. They could come by on their daughter's birthday and lay flowers by her headstone and talk to her as though she could still hear them.
We took a drive out to the country to pick apples. You would have liked it, all of us in big warm sweaters sipping hot cider with cinnamon sticks.
Maybe they would wait a few years, until her death was more memory than event.

“I think she knew you were trying to help her,” said Henry.

“You do?”

Henry nodded.

“What makes you say that?” Vincent asked.

Henry paused and the shop teacher stopped walking, too. “A lot of times, people who are in trouble are more sensitive than the rest of us,” he said. “And being more sensitive is often part of what gives them problems, because they're more sensitive to how bad they're feeling, how deeply miserable it feels inside them, and there doesn't seem a way out. Everything feels exaggerated, though often they can't understand that.”

“I don't know,” Vincent said. “Sometimes I think Cynthia understood everything. Too much.”

“The reason she probably knew you were trying to help is that people like her are more sensitive to people around them, and to the efforts of those people—even if they're so depressed they can't articulate any kind of appreciation. So I bet she noticed you and your wife reaching out to her. I'm sure she did.”

“I hope so, God, I hope so. I wouldn't have wanted her to feel like she wasn't loved. That would be just about the most awful thing.” Vincent scratched under his right eye, then lower down, along his jaw. “One thing I was afraid of when we put her in the hospital was that she thought we were sending her away, that we couldn't stand having her in the house anymore because we no longer loved her. I was so worried she would feel deserted, shipped off.”

The two men continued walking, silently for the next few minutes. The day seemed to be growing hotter, and Henry was tempted to look at his watch but he didn't want to give the impression that he had to turn back. The cemetery had every shape and color and size of headstone, even a few elaborate mausoleums. The grass was trimmed short, the shrubs manicured, and there were signs warning to keep dogs away because of pesticide spraying. The leaves were green, healthy, still many weeks from the autumn chill that would trigger the hillsides into their bright announcement of the fall.

“We don't blame you,” Vincent said.

Henry wasn't sure exactly what the shop teacher was referring to, and his confusion must have registered on his face.

“For urging us to hospitalize her,” Vincent added.

“It's always a tough call,” Henry managed, his voice shaky.

“Really? You seemed pretty sure that was what we should
do—send her away to a hospital. That day you met me at school, you raised the idea pretty quickly, if I remember correctly.”

“I remember that day,” said Henry, quietly. “You told me about the pills.”

“Aspirin. Not sleeping pills or prescription drugs. It was only aspirin.”

Henry nodded.

“And do you remember how I was concerned she might learn something even worse in the hospital, from the shock of being in that setting or from the other patients? Do you remember that?”

Henry nodded again. “Yes.” He hadn't expected to be accused like this. Grief was what he had prepared for.

“You minimized that, as I recall. Thought that wasn't a very valid worry. You sort of brushed it off, as if I didn't know a lot about the process.”

“Whether to hospitalize someone is a decision that's never easy,” Henry said. He hadn't thought he would have to defend himself. “One of my professors in graduate school used to say, ‘It's not like math. There's no single right answer.'”

“That doesn't bother you—never knowing if you're right?”

“You try to consider everything, read all the signs as closely as possible.”

“And this particular situation, with my daughter, do you think you were interpreting everything right?”

Henry's right hand jabbed through the lining of his pants pocket and he felt his cool thigh. He looked away from Vincent. He had no idea what to say.

“Well, I guess that's what you're trained to do, to make those tough calls,” said the shop teacher. “Lord knows, I couldn't do
what you do.” He smiled weakly. “I'll stick to the woodworking. Those aren't real lives you're manipulating—only pretend models. If you screw up, you can start again with a fresh piece of wood, keep at it until you get it right.”

Henry was trying to reconstruct those first conversations. Had he come on that strong? Hadn't he urged Vincent to talk to others as well?

“Mary and I visited her in the hospital, you know,” Vincent said. “We went every week, sometimes a few times a week and spent a good few hours with her each visit.”

Henry began walking again.

“Driving up there,” Vincent said, “you'd never guess it was a mental hospital, more like a college or a retreat or something. Is that intentional, keeping it pretty like that?”

“I'd assume so,” said Henry, steadying his voice. “I can't imagine it'd be very helpful for the patients if the grounds weren't being kept up. That might add to their feelings of neglect.”

“That's true. Probably hard to feel better on the inside if there's mildew everywhere on the outside. Then it really would feel like you'd been abandoned,” Vincent said. “More like you were in prison.”

“Was she happy to see you when you came?” Henry asked.

The shop teacher shrugged. “Who knows?” He adjusted his glasses. “Who the hell knows?” he repeated. “I certainly thought she was at the time. She smiled a lot and always had a big appetite when Mary brought a picnic lunch, but now, now I'm not so sure. I expected her to be real angry with us for putting her there but she wasn't. I thought she would really lay into us, scream and say she never wanted to see or talk to us again and that we were
the worst people on the face of the earth. I thought she'd call us ugly names, refuse to see us. Maybe she was relieved that someone had made a decision for her.”

“That might be true,” Henry said. “She may have felt so confused and down that she couldn't see her way through to any decision, and unconsciously she was depending on you to make one.”

“What's that thing people say—she couldn't see that there was light at the end of the tunnel.”

Henry nodded.

“Maybe I should be the psychologist,” the shop teacher said.

Henry turned his wrist and looked at his watch.