The Life You Longed For (3 page)

And Kempley, of everyone in Grace's life, in whom she imagined confiding about Noah. Kempley, who maybe wouldn't approve, but who wouldn't judge her, wouldn't think she was a bad mother, a bad person. In Grace's mind, they were the same thing.

Of course, there was no message from Noah tonight. He was in Ann Arbor by now. He wouldn't have access to his e-mail, refused to travel with a computer. It was one of the first things she'd learned when she found him last January.

Found.

As if he'd been lost.

 

Actually, finding Noah had been Max's doing. He had been writing a report for school on John James Audubon and ended up on the Web site for the Cape May Bird Observatory. Grace was helping him. And there was Noah's name under “Director.” A prickly feeling in her throat. “Wait, Max, I think I know this guy.”

Her first e-mail had been brief: “Noah, is that you?”

She had wondered if he was married, if his hair was still long, if he'd remained loyal to the Tigers. He was still twenty-two in her mind, writing secret messages on acid-free paper with lemon juice, showing ten-year-olds how to make sandwich-baggie bombs, trying to explain to her why a baseball stadium was more necessary to a community than a church, especially in Detroit.

“You'll never believe who I found.” She had paced into the kitchen where Stephen was finishing the dishes. She didn't wait for him to ask. “Noah McIntyre.”

“Who?”

“Noah, from my grandparents' church. The guy who went to Princeton. I taught science with him that one summer. The Tigers' fan?”

“The guy whose heart you broke?”

“Yeah, him.”

 

The first two days after she contacted him, Grace found herself checking her e-mail constantly. First thing in the morning, coffee-deprived and groggy; or rushing in from one of Jack's therapy appointments at the hospital, still in her coat and shoes, purse tossed wherever, telling Jack, “Wait just one minute, Goose, Mama has to check something.” She drove to and from the hospital on automatic pilot, imagining the conversations she and Noah would have, trying to explain why she'd treated him so badly twenty years before, asking questions, answering his, telling him about her kids, her life. Already, she was different in those conversations—easier, lighter, more animated. She gestured to the windshield, to the empty passenger seat next to her. Sitting in traffic one morning, shaking her head and waving her hand in chagrin at something she imagined Noah saying, she found a group of teenagers in the next car pointing to her in unison, then rotating their index fingers in a circular motion at their foreheads:
You're crazy
. She laughed and threw her hands up in a “What can I say” gesture. They were right.

After three days without a reply, she was irritated. And disappointed, though she couldn't say why, exactly. Maybe it wasn't her Noah, she told herself, but she didn't believe it. And then she got mad. Was he holding a grudge after all this time?
Grow up,
she thought.

The next day she found his response. One question. Capital letters. “WHERE ARE YOU?”

Later he would explain that he didn't respond immediately because he'd been away at a conference, that he never took a laptop when he traveled, that he had panicked when he saw her e-mail (at two in the morning) and realized that five days had passed since she'd sent it. He laughed. “Never mind the twenty years that had gone by.” She heard something in his voice, like when a button pops loose of whatever holds it in place.

 

Stephen paused in the entrance to the family room, his arms loaded with firewood, breathing heavily.

“You okay?” she asked.

“God, it's cold out there.” He set the logs in the wrought iron basket on the hearth behind her, then stood, brushing wood chips from his sweater. “This is obscene,” he laughed after a minute as he stared at the Christmas tree.

And it was obscene. Presents crammed up under the branches and spilling along the back wall and halfway into the room. It didn't take a psychologist to figure it out. This might be Jack's last Christmas, and Grace wanted him to have every possible thing he could ever want. Since October, she had been telling herself to just stop, she had enough presents for him, but then she'd see something that he'd like—a LEGO space station that Max could help him put together, sneakers that flashed colored lights whenever he moved—and it seemed so utterly stupid
not
to get it. So what if she was going overboard, so what if she was spending a fortune? It might be her last chance.

She leaned back in her chair. “We overdid it a little, huh?”

“We?”

She shrugged. “Okay,
I
.” She glanced again at her e-mail. Stephen stood behind her and massaged her shoulders, his hands cold through her sweater.

Without turning around she said, “Anne Marie, from Seattle, the one whose daughter also has dilated cardiomyopathy, was at Hopkins last week, and I was wondering if she'd heard anything.”

“Do you realize it's already Christmas?” He leaned forward and kissed the back of her neck. His face was as cold as his hands.

She glanced at the clock in the corner of the computer screen. Just past midnight. Outside it was still snowing. She thought of that man in Vermont who had photographed thousands of different snowflakes against black velvet in the instant before they dissolved. Sometimes she felt that this was what they were doing with Jack—trying to hold onto something fragile and transitory before it disappeared forever from their lives.

“Jack looked good tonight, didn't he?” she said softly, still staring at the snow.

“He really did. I can't remember the last time he looked this great.”

“It sounds stupid, but I keep thinking that there must be a mistake.”

“I know.” He squeezed her shoulder. “No one who sees him can believe he's as sick as he is.”

She nodded, suddenly exhausted and sadder than she could bear to feel right now. She glanced once more at the computer screen, ready to call it a night. But “We're on the list!” she saw in the subject heading next to Anne Marie's name. The list. UNOS: United Network for Organ Sharing. She felt something tilt inside of her.

“They accepted Anne Marie's little girl,” she said. It meant the team at Hopkins had deemed Bryn a suitable candidate for a heart. Grace's voice felt detached from her body. “I should congratulate them.” But her hands were in her lap. There was no way to process this. Anne Marie's little girl would get a chance, and Jack—Jack probably wouldn't. It was a long shot at best. She knew this.

Stephen knelt down and gathered Grace against his chest. He smelled of firewood. “Oh Grace, I'm sorry, baby,” he whispered.

“No—” She lifted her head, pulling away from him. “God, Stephen, don't be sorry; it's good, it's—I'm happy for them, really, it's just—” Her face crumpled. “I don't know how I'll ever live without him.”

G
race sat on the couch, her feet tucked up under her, a book open-faced in her lap. The tree lights were turned off, the kids' opened presents stacked now in neat piles—Max's on one side of the tree, Erin's another, Jack's near his toy box. From upstairs she could hear Stephen moving back and forth from Jack's room to the bathroom, changing him and giving him his eleven p.m. medications. She stared at the book in her lap.
An ice game known as
Kolven
was popular in Holland in the seventeenth century.
Max's Christmas present to her:
Hockey for Dummies
. She was trying to understand this game her son was so passionate about.
Later on, the game really took hold in England
. It was a struggle to concentrate, though. Sentences slid out from under her like wet leaves.

She closed the book, set it on the coffee table, and stood. A rectangle of yellow light fell into the hallway from the stairwell. She paused at the foot of the stairs, listening to make sure everything was all right, then walked into what used to be Stephen's office. The antique rolltop desk his mother had given him for his college graduation was covered with boxes of plastic tubing and nasal canulae, latex gloves, disposable syringes. Stacks of xeroxed medical articles were piled on the leather armchair and ottoman. Grace stood in front of the bookshelves, head tilted sideways, scanning the titles in the light from the hallway. She found the book she was looking for, pulled it from the shelf, and, still in the near-darkness, turned to the chapter on heart transplants.

 

“So what did you think of Mandy?” Stephen said from the doorway.

Grace looked up from the book in her lap. “I think your brother's smitten.” Mandy was his older brother Jeff's girlfriend. “It's been what, almost a year now? Isn't that a record for him?”

“I guess. I just wish he'd find someone his own age. Twenty-three. It's embarrassing.” Stephan sank onto the sofa next to Grace, handing her his glass of eggnog.

“At least she's not like the last one. God, all those metal studs in her tongue and nose and eyebrows, and I don't even want to think about where else.” She took a sip, then handed it back to him. “Mandy was actually very sweet. Asking a lot about Jack. And Erin loved her.”

“Well, they're practically the same age.”

“Oh, stop. Your brother's happy.” She leaned against Stephen's shoulder. “He's…I don't know, different with her. More gentle or something. It's nice to see.”

“I suppose.” He handed her the eggnog again and nodded at the
Hockey for Dummies
sitting on the coffee table. “What? You give up already?”

“
Excuse
me?” Grace grinned and began reciting from memory: “The word
hockey
comes from a French term meaning ‘bent stick'; there are five face-off zones in a hockey rink, one in each—”

“Never mind.” Stephen laughed. “I should know better.” He nudged her shoulder, trying to get a glimpse of the book in her lap. “So, what are you reading now?”

She turned the book so that he could see the title.
Parents' Guide to Heart Disease in Children.

He looked at her. “Worried about tomorrow?” They were leaving at five in the morning to drive to Hopkins. Max and Erin were spending the night at Grace's parents.

“Can I read you just one thing?” Grace asked.

“Go ahead.” Stephen leaned his head against the couch back and closed his eyes.

“Children who have been bedridden for years with severe cardiac failure often become asymptomatic, returning to normal activities within days of successful cardiac transplantation.”
She glanced at Stephen. “
Survival rates are over 90 percent if the child was reasonably well at the time of the transplant,”
she continued
.
“
Results were poor, however, when the child was in the ICU directly prior to the procedure.”
She closed the book, though she kept her finger on the page, holding her place.

“So you think because Jack's doing better than he was in—when was it? October?—the team at Hopkins is going to having a different assessment?”

“I'm not sure. It's just ‘
kids that are bedridden for years'
you know? And he's still so active, Stephen. I mean, look at how he was today.” She glanced at the stockings that hung from the mantel. It was crowded with photos of the kids, a disproportionate number of Jack. Jack in denim overalls toddling blurrily towards the camera, holding a football. Jack on Santa's lap. Jack sitting between Erin's legs at the top of the bright yellow slide. The ache Grace had felt all day in the center of her chest spread to her stomach. “He's doing better than he was in November, I know that much. And his troponin levels are—”

“Hey—” Stephen laid his hand on her knee. “You don't have to convince anyone, Grace.”

“I feel like I do, though.” She turned sideways to face him, her long wool skirt twisting uncomfortably. She lifted herself for a moment, then settled again. “I keep thinking that Anne Marie's little girl was
much
sicker than Jack and now—” She stopped. “I'm just so afraid of forgetting something that might help them decide. If he dies”—her voice cracked—“and there was something I didn't think of, some question I could have asked—”

“But you have, Grace. Over and over.” He reached for her hand and pressed it against his chest. He was wearing a faded red Lambda Chi Alpha T-shirt that had shrunk so that it fit tight across his shoulders. It was the same T-shirt he'd worn the night she met him sixteen years before at a party in grad school. Stephen had been in charge of the blender and because Grace didn't know anyone, she feigned interest in observing him as he emptied a bottle of dark rum into the pitcher filled with ice. He was good-looking, she thought, but she'd already dismissed him because of the T-shirt. A fraternity boy.

Once—and only once—after one of those parties, Grace had gone back to her apartment and sat Indian-style on her narrow bed, the phone cradled in her lap and she'd dialed information for Princeton, New Jersey, for McIntyre, Noah. She was a little drunk. It had been over four years since they had spoken, though she looked for him at her grandparents' church every time she visited them in Ann Arbor. But there was no listing for a “McIntyre, Noah” in the Princeton area, the operator told her. Grace wondered if maybe he hadn't gone to Princeton, if maybe he had stayed in the Midwest, and if, maybe, it had anything to do with her, with all those autumn afternoons after their one summer together when he'd phone her in New Jersey, and she'd tell him breathlessly, “I've got to go; I'll call you tomorrow”—and never did.

Of course, she dismissed the idea almost as quickly as she had dismissed Stephen the first time she met him. She and Noah had been a high school romance. Puppy love; infatuation. She'd been seventeen, he barely twenty. They had been too young to comprehend what love was, what it meant. It was silly to think that it would have altered his life in any significant way. Silly to imagine that it would ever alter hers.

 

“Do you honestly believe Jack's better than he was two months ago?” Stephen asked, and she felt her shoulders slump in defeat. No, Jack wasn't that much better, a little, maybe but…She shook her head. It's just that she had been so wrong about such important things in her life—both Stephen and Noah. It terrified her now to think that she might just as easily dismiss something crucial about Jack's illness.

She pulled her finger from the page she had been marking and set the
Parents' Guide to Heart Disease in Children
on the coffee table next to
Hockey for Dummies.
“You're right. I don't know why I'm doing this,” she admitted. Stephen lifted his arm around her shoulders and she snuggled into his side. Jack hadn't even been able to wear the elastic-waist pants she'd bought him for church today, his belly so swollen with fluid that his weakened heart couldn't rid his body of, despite increased doses of his diuretics. And he was self-protecting, unconsciously tensing his stomach muscles whenever she picked him up. His fingers and feet were icy from poor circulation, and he'd been coughing more—just a cold, she hoped, though this too was another symptom of heart failure.

“So did he go right to sleep?” she asked after a minute.

“Out like a light.”

She smiled. “He
was
something today, wasn't he?”

“I didn't tell you, but he's sleeping with his new race cars.”

Grace laughed. “And Max liked his skates, huh?”

“
Like?
Did you see his face when he thought he'd opened all his presents and he hadn't gotten them?”

“Oh, he knew. He had to.” She paused. “Did you know he was getting me
Hockey for Dummies
?”

“Yeah.”

“He accused me of not caring about him as much as I cared about Jack.”

“He's just at that age.”

“I do focus too much on Jack, though.” She shook her head. “And poor Erin.”

“Erin's fine, Grace. Come on. You're being too hard on yourself.” He pulled her closer and she lay her head against his chest and closed her eyes, tired suddenly. After a few minutes he said quietly, “We're doing okay, aren't we?”

“With the kids?”

“With each other.”

“Yes, of course.” She sat up to look at him. “Come on, Stephen. I've been running like crazy trying to get ready for the holiday and—”

“Hey, I know. That wasn't an accusation. I just miss you, okay?”

She nodded, unable to tell him that she missed him too.

He grazed her cheek with the back of her hand. “You really did get one hell of a windburn the other day didn't you?”

She forced a smile. “I told you that mall parking lot was brutal. Like crossing the great tundra—”

“And all for Max's skates?” He shook his head. “See, if only he knew the lengths you go to for him.”

She couldn't meet his eyes and so stared at his shirt, the fabric faded to a dusky pink. She remembered another time she had watched him in that shirt, making drinks for their friends at the beach house in Rehoboth. Everyone crowded into the kitchen, getting ice, slicing tomatoes for a salad, carrying dishes to the picnic table out back. A Cuban CD was playing. There was no air conditioning in the house. Grace was sitting in the dining room nursing Max, trying to stay cool. Ciera sauntered into the kitchen in a bikini top and a bright Mexican wrap tied in a knot at her waist. Sweat glistened on her collar bones. She lifted her hair atop her head and someone whistled a cat call. The kitchen smelled of fresh mint from the
mojitos
they were making. Rum and dark brown sugar and lime juice and mint. Lots of mint. Grace couldn't drink because she was nursing. She was angry and uncomfortable, and she felt fat, and she had looked at Stephen in that fraternity T-shirt and for a horrible minute she thought, what in God's name am I doing with
him
? With these people? But in the next instant, Stephen had looked up and winked at her—just that—and Ciera turned and smiled at Max with such love in her pretty dark face, and the moment was like a wave that curled in on itself. Grace had looked at her husband and felt suffused with happiness that Stephen loved her, that
this
—these friends and this house and her child at her breast—was her life.
Hers
.

“I can't believe it's over,” Stephen said.

He meant the holiday, but for a second, it was almost as if he could read her mind and was referring to them, to the life they'd once had.