In Short Measures

by Michael Ruhlman

  “How did I fail to see you?” he had asked her.

  “I don’t know what you mean,” she had said.

  “Have you been here long?”

  “No, I just got here. I was going to get a beer.”

  “Have mine,” he said, handing her the bottle. “I just opened it. I’ll get another.”

  “Can we share it?” she asked, and with that, his smile increased a thousand watts. Had he realized she didn’t want to risk his returning to the party and getting waylaid? Already she didn’t want to lose him.

  There by the side of the pool, grinning until both their jaws ached, they learned that each had recently graduated, he with a BA from Brown, she with an MFA from Rhode Island School of Design, that he could talk about Joyce and Hemingway as easily as he could Van Gogh and Ruskin. That he even knew who Ruskin was! None of her non-painter friends knew Ruskin, or cared. He was a writer and had been a starter on Brown’s varsity lacrosse team no less. He had that athlete’s glow of health and strength and strong white teeth and confidence and could match her conversation. By dawn, all who’d remained in the summerhouse slept but for them, and he led her, out of dawn’s gray light, away from the pool and upstairs to a spare room and made love to her. She woke to his face, in clear morning light, staring at her, stroking her hair, in what was not simply a new day but rather a transformed world.

  And there this same boy stood twenty-four years later in the blue light. She wanted to hold him there, to fix him forever in that spot where he’d once been: you are so beautiful, she thought.

  A chill ran through her, and the sweat on her forehead felt cooling though she also felt hot beneath the sheets. Those eyes that had looked into hers as he reached for her hand, fifteen years ago, and said, “Okay, I’m ready. I think.” They hadn’t talked about a baby in weeks but she knew exactly what he meant and her heart seemed to expand to fill her entire chest.

  “I’m sorry it’s taken so long,” he’d said. “It’s the biggest decision, but I know it’s what you want, and so I want it, too.” Those eyes, for which she was so grateful. Those eyes from which she saw tears falling onto her shoulder a year later as she held their son, Nicholas, just moments old. They cried from joy. As they would cry from grief when his father breathed his last in a hospice bed three years ago now. She could comfort her beloved with her tears, because she’d loved his father, too, and she could help him make the slow return to their new old life, one without his cherished dad in the midwestern suburb where Frank had grown up.

  So real were these memories that she could scarcely distinguish what was in her mind from what she saw, the boy Frank she’d fallen in love with on sight twenty-four years ago, the new father, or the fatherless middle-aged man on his steady march through a blessed life. Stay that boy, she thought.

  Karen lifted her head from the pillow, now coming awake, watching him. And he, hearing her stir, slowly, dream-slow, turned to look at her. And as he did, he seemed to Karen to age from twenty-one to an old man, a man fifteen years beyond his forty-five in the time it took him to turn from the window to her. A horrifying sight, one that shocked her into consciousness, where the events of what had happened on this night lived, and a nausea in her womb spread up through her gut and into her throat. Frank, saying nothing, turned back to the snow outside as a plow rumbled down their street like a galloping beast.

  “I had to do it,” she said. “It wasn’t a choice.”

  He turned back to her but said nothing.

  “Hold me,” she said.

  He got back under the sheets. His skin on hers felt cold from the bedroom air. He pushed matted hair off her forehead and he blew on her forehead to cool her.

  He said, “Try to close your eyes, my love.”

  *

  They both had breathed heavily from stress when Officer Williams and Silent Curt arrived, followed by the Emergency Medical Service vehicle, ambulance, and six other squad cars, which lit up their suburban street and the continuing blizzard and drifting snow like the Christmastime that it was, the plan already set in motion.

  She had done it with very little thought, with animal quickness.

  “I was driving.”

  It’s in the police report.

  What isn’t in the report was how she’d blurted it. It came out like a pop, a single multisyllabic word. A gush. Not tentatively, not quietly, but emphatically. Unnecessarily emphatically? she worried.

  Karen had thrown on her boots and winter coat and rushed outside. She found Frank crouched over the woman trying to shield her from the snow that collected on her face and caught in her red lashes. Her face flashed on and off from the car’s hazard lights, as if communicating with him. As if she were alive and asking for help, while the snow worked to bury her. She looked so unharmed to Karen as to be alive but sinking. Karen recognized the woman but had never met her and did not know her name. Frank and Karen had often seen her walking their street and several other curving streets of this old suburb, lined with handsome, well-maintained colonials and tall sycamores and oaks. The woman was a walker, always very deep in thought. She was easily six feet, lean, with muscled legs and hiking boots in summer, in winter a heavy parka from which her abundant, vividly red hair poured, so red Karen always wondered if it were dyed. Karen had assumed during the fifteen years they’d lived on this street that this was the woman’s form of meditation or relaxation, that had to be the reason, since she was out at all times of day, in all kinds of weather, never looking up at passing dog-walkers or anyone who raised a hand in greeting.

  Frank stood, stepped away from the body and the car.

  Karen, clutching her shoulders, watched him. She said, “You’re swaying.” And then, “Oh my God, you’re drunk.”

  He didn’t respond except to curl his lips inward so that they vanished and to look at her. They locked gazes, one, two, three, and he looked away and then down.

  Headlights appeared at the top of the hill, blue and reds flashing, no siren, coming on fast. Karen and Frank huddled in the plowed apron of their driveway, already blanketing up with fresh snow. Large fluffy flakes blew sideways through the archways cast from streetlights overhead. Everything silence and black-and-white, but for the flashing yellow hazards and now the colorful lights of the squad car.

  Karen felt his arm pull her into him strongly and decisively. He had on the blazer he’d worn to work that day, a warm tweed going a little frayed at the cuffs.

  He would surely be tested on the spot, she knew; therefore, his fate would depend largely on that of the woman lying half under the car, who was, at best, unconscious. He had been drunk and at the wheel. A fact—she knew. Not stupid drunk, not driving-with-one-eye-shut drunk—Frank wasn’t a heavy drinker. But she had to assume, given the office party followed by the annual holiday dinner with the boys, the way he had swayed and not denied it, that he was over the limit for the next hour or so. No matter the blizzard, no matter how unexpected the neighbor’s presence at the edge of the apron of their drive, no matter the icy road. No matter that he may well have hit the woman given the conditions had he been completely sober and actually been able to see her in the darkness. No matter that he’d taken not the four-wheel-drive Jeep, but rather their little, light, harmless-seeming Honda Civic four-door with the not-so-good-in-snow tires.

  This was her fault. She was to have been driving. It had been her responsibility to pick up their son from the party.

  But none of this mattered. She had to presume he was over the limit.

  They both stood in the snow, shivering, holding each other, praying for the woman to be all right, waiting.

  Karen had not even been in the car. She had been cleaning the kitchen and watching The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, at 11:30 p.m., startled by Frank as he hustled fourteen-year-old Nick into the kitchen. She hadn’t seen any headlights roll up the drive and light up the garage, in view from her vantage point at the window above the kitchen sink. And it was quickly clear from his expression, from his jarring mo
vements, all was not right, even before he said, “I’ve hit someone. I’ve called 911.” And ran back out.

  Karen first went to Nick, tall and slim like his father, with shaggy brown hair. She cupped his ears, looked up into his eyes—clearly he was unharmed—blue eyes like his dad’s, unblinking and wide, lost, pleading. She said, “Go to your room and stay there.” Then she’d gotten her coat, slipped on snow boots, and hurried out to find her husband crouched over the woman. “Oh my God,” she said. “When did you call?”

  “When I made the turn into the drive,” he told her, standing. “The car just kept going forward, sort of sideways. I didn’t even see her. It just went thud. I thought it must be a deer. I got out of the car. I called the second I saw her. I just wanted to get Nick inside. I don’t know what to do.”

  That was when Karen said, “You’re swaying.” And “Oh my God, you’re drunk.” And when she saw his facial response, the curled lips, the way he turned his head and looked downward, she said, “Jesus,” looking away herself.

  The squad car slid to a snow-crunching halt in the center of the street, and the officer bolted the car and ran to the unconscious woman, not giving Frank or Karen a glance.

  *

  The night had not been routine. Normally, a Friday was like any weeknight for them, except for the fact that now they were often either alone, or Nick would have a friend downstairs playing video games and spending the night, leaving them to dine à deux, watch the news as they cleaned up, then watch a movie or some saved-up episodes of Mad Men. Frank loved that show and she had wondered why.

  “It’s just that it’s not normally the case,” she said. “Real doctors cringe at shows like Grey’s Anatomy. Lawyers can’t stand law procedurals, too many completely unlikely things happen for them to suspend belief past the opening credits.”

  “I don’t know,” Frank said. “It’s basically true. And it’s far back enough in time that what isn’t factually accurate is accurate to the era it evokes, my dad’s era. Maybe that’s it. When there was so much promise in advertising, so much creativity, and so much hope in that creativity, a kind of naiveté about the creative process, about writing.”

  She’d then give him a kiss and he’d reached for the remote. Soon it would be time for bed, and Saturday would be the day to get the errands done. She did groceries, laundry, cleaned the house and drove Nick to his guitar lesson, to a friend’s, while Frank went to the hardware store for a new radiator release valve, picked up dry cleaning, paid bills, and did office work, timing radio spots, working on headlines. Et cetera.

  But this Friday, the day before Christmas Eve, was not routine. Frank had had that office party he needed to stay for, then his annual pre-Christmas dinner with the boys, his old pals from high school, all of whom Karen liked. And there was the party Nick was attending.

  The private girls’ school where Karen taught art had had a half-day to begin the two-week break, concluding with a “multicultural” holiday celebration, a spurious conceit, she felt, as it was still filled with “Good King Wenceslas” and “Away in a Manger” sung by the choir, and really—who were they trying to kid? It’s Christmas, she thought, it’s a Christian holiday, and no amount of Hanukkah and Kwanzaa was going to hide this, any more than changing “before Christ” to “before the common era” in the history texts changed the fact that it was still Christ who marked the before and after. Her own conflicted beliefs aside, the hypocrisy of the directors of the school never ceased to astonish her, but at least it gave her something to occupy her mind during the mediocre but earnest pageant.

  And she was as relieved as even the most beleaguered student to have this lovely long break from school that was strangely exhausting, given that all she did was paint and draw along with her students for six of the nine periods in a normal day. She guessed it was a result of the pressure of all that female adolescence in one building, like an actual atmospheric pounds-per-square-inch increase when she walked into a classroom filled with thirteen-year-old girls. When she was at last in her Grand Jeep Cherokee pulling out of the school parking lot to pick up Nick at his school nearby, she felt that same kind of exhilarated relief and fatigue of having crawled out of the ocean and onto the dive boat after an extended dive. She and Frank hadn’t been diving in years, not since before she’d had Nick, but the feeling of being on the boat remained familiar. They should plan a vacation around diving, she thought, get Nick certified, renew their own certifications.

  Late in the day, while Nick showered and prepared for the party, Karen had had some leftover spaghetti with meat sauce, a juice glass half full of red wine, standing at the kitchen island and leafing through a Restoration Hardware catalogue. On a normal Friday, she’d have been cooking something for either the two of them or the three of them, on the table at seven, the house redolent of beef stew or a roasting chicken. But on this Friday, she’d had a small bite early and set both the bowl and glass in the otherwise clean sink. She had thoughtlessly splashed some water in the bowl when Nick had appeared ready to leave for the party, a fifteen-minute car ride away. Later she would wonder whether, if she had rinsed the bowl and fork and glass and put them into the dishwasher, would that have been enough to change what was to come?

  She’d gotten back from dropping Nick to see Frank’s car in the drive. She looked at her watch, frowned—he was supposed to be at the restaurant.

  Frank swallowed a long drink of tap water and set his glass in the sink next to Karen’s dishes, just as Karen’s keys went clink on the granite kitchen island. “I got out of the party early. I wanted a quick shower before going out, now I’m late,” he explained. Then he stared at her bowl long enough so that she would see him staring at it—or so it seemed to her (and she knew him, knew all his tics)—before filling it to the brim with water, stopping the water slowly so that every bit of interior touched water, which bulged higher than the rim. Some tomato sauce, a few fragments of pasta, and some broiled-on cheese were now dried to the bowl’s sides.

  “Karen why don’t you simply fill the bowl up to the top with water to make it easier to clean?”

  “How about a ‘Hello, I love you, dear’?”

  This was the first conversation they’d had today, as she’d had an early meeting on this last day of school before the holidays, and he and Nick had risen as usual at seven as she was heading out the door. She’d changed out of her school attire and wore a loose cotton sweater and old jeans, weekend clothes. She leaned on the island to remove her brown leather boots. They had a two-inch heel and she left them where they lay, which she knew would annoy Frank. Reduced now to her five feet six inches, she stared at him stone-faced. Her hair was a camouflage of bright blond and brown-blond now, already streaking with gray, but it remained abundant, and fell in long, loose curls every which way, past her shoulders, bangs swooping over light brown eyebrows and deep brown eyes.

  He continued to stare at the bowl, shook his head, then turned to her. “Hello, dear. I do. Love you.” He went to her, held her slim waist, and leaned down to kiss her. “Why do I have to be such a nitpicker? How can you stand me?”

  “Because you’re aware of it, maybe.”

  “You know what I’m also aware of? How wonderful you are. I didn’t mean to be an ass. Thank you for doing the driving tonight.”

  She stood on her toes to kiss him and said, “You’re welcome.”

  She lifted her boots from the side of the island to put them away. Frank went back to the dish and scrubbed at it as she removed her long down coat and hung it on a hook by the back door. When the cheese wouldn’t come off, he said, “I mean, does it even cross your mind that a soaked dish is a breeze to clean, takes seconds, whereas this will take—”

  “So let it soak. Jesus.”

  “That’s not the point,” he said, following her as she tried to leave the kitchen. “It’s the thinking about it.”

  “Do you really want to get into this now? Really? Do you hear me bugging you to at least have the courtesy to che
ck your pockets before you put them in the laundry basket? No. I still have to check to make sure we don’t get melted ChapStick all over everything.”

  “You’re right!” he’d said, abruptly and loudly. “I’m anal about the kitchen. And thank you for the driving tonight, I am truly grateful. I don’t know what’s wrong with me today.”

  He went back to her, held her again and gave her another kiss, which she grudgingly accepted.

  How petty it had all been. Had their lives become so routine and innocuous that the only matters that aroused emotion were housework? Did it even matter anymore? No, except she would always wonder if even something as little as failing to clean her bowl might have contributed to the tragic timing of tonight. Had the sink been cleaned, he’d have gone out a minute earlier, everything might have happened a minute earlier, and he’d have pulled into the drive before the woman with the red hair passed their driveway.

  The question was moot, but she couldn’t stop herself from dwelling on such matters in the days ahead.

  *

  “You haven’t left,” he said.

  “Just getting on my coat,” she said.

  She had one arm through one sleeve of her winter coat, her cell phone in the other pressed to her ear. It was 10:35. She was leaving early to pick Nick up due to the snow.

  “I’m leaving the restaurant now,” Frank said. “I can pick Nick up.”

  “Really?” Her heart lifted. She was so warm and secure in the house, and the predicted blizzard had been on schedule. When she sighed and went for her coat, she had wanted nothing more than to make a cup of chamomile tea and watch television while it snowed outside.

  “Yep,” said Frank.

  “Are you sure?” she said. She meant it but she also wanted him to sense how much she would love it if she didn’t have to go out in this weather. Nick was at a holiday open house four miles away at his friend Oliver’s, son of their friends Len and Melissa Thompson. They’d been invited to this party as well but didn’t plan to go. Frank had his annual dinner with his high school pals, and while Karen did enjoy these parties, she didn’t like to go without Frank. They told the Thompsons they’d stop by if they could. When they’d been planning their week the previous Sunday, she’d offered to do the driving on this night. This way he wouldn’t feel obligated to leave his friends if they hadn’t finished dinner by the time Nick needed to be picked up. This seemed obvious—she had no plans of her own, and who could predict how long the dinner would go on? And, of course, news of the coming blizzard—which yesterday had closed O’Hare for several hours, and was now no doubt making traffic at Cleveland’s airport dreadful—had been days away and not yet news.