The Life You Longed For (31 page)

“I don't like it,” Erin said tearfully, pushing her noodles around the plate.

“But it's all stuff you like, honey-bunny,” Grace said. “Noodles and broccoli and pieces of steak. And look—”

“But I don't
like
it,” she cried.

“Well, I do,” Max said.

“I didn't ask you!” she screamed.

“Hey, hey.” Stephen pushed back his chair and pulled Erin onto his lap. “What's going on here?”

Erin cried harder, shoulders heaving. “I just—I just—”

“Just what, lovey?” Grace asked. “Do you want me to make you some macaroni and cheese? Would that make you feel better?”

“Nooooo,” she wailed, nose running, her face streaked with tears and dirt. “You don't understand!” She couldn't stop crying, nearly choking on her tears. “I don't—I don't want”—she hiccupped—“macaroni by
myself
. I want it for—everyone!” She started crying again. “Why can't we just have things like we used to?”

 

Grace closed the refrigerator, then glanced at the mail on the counter, a thick stack of cream-colored envelopes. Sympathy cards. Still. Half of them each day were from people she didn't even know who had heard about Jack through the United Mitochondrial Disease Foundation or M.A.M.A. or the article in the
Philadelphia Inquirer.
“Mother Accused of Munchausen by Proxy Exonerated.” Grace knew the article by heart:
It shouldn't take the death of a child to open the public's eyes to the horrors of child abuse, but neither should it take the death of a child to open the public's eyes to the devastation wrought when children, under the auspices of Child Protective Services, are wrongly taken from their homes…
She glanced quickly through the cards, looking—though she didn't want to be—for Noah's handwriting. Did he even know that Jack had died? But how could he? she wondered. And how could he not?

Except for a letter from her grandfather, she didn't recognize any of the names on the return addresses. She set the envelopes aside, placed her grandfather's letter on the top of the pile—she would read them in the morning—and after turning off the lights and checking to make sure the door was locked, climbed the stairs.

Stephen's half of the bed was covered with library books about grief, as if this too were a subject she could study, the way she had with mitochondrial disease and pediatric heart failure and Munchausen's.
Finding Hope When a Child Dies; When the Bough Breaks; Ended Beginnings
. It was what she had always done, how she had always coped, as if answers always came packaged in words.

Most of the advice seemed disingenuous—all that crap about finding something positive in her child's death. “Am I grieving normally?” one of the books had asked, followed by a questionnaire to be filled out at three months, six months, and again at one year, as if grief were no different from taking a car in for an oil change every three thousand miles.
Have I learned to laugh again? Do I take pride in my personal appearance?
The rest of the books were too clinical, written by some PhD in psychology or some “expert” in thanatology. If it hadn't been written by someone who knew what grief felt like at two in the morning or what it tasted like or the way it made even the air feel thick so that taking a shower or actually walking down the stairs was exhausting, then Grace wasn't interested. All the facts in the world couldn't help her now, and all the ways grief was divvied up into stages and kinds and types—disenfranchised grief and detached grief and anticipatory grief and delayed grief—who did that really help? Not the people who were torn open with loss, not the people who were desperate to learn how to walk or sit or breathe with this gaping hole in the middle of their chests.

 

It didn't matter that Child Protective Services had immediately closed the case following Jack's death or that Kate had written a formal apology, enclosing with it a copy of her resignation letter. CPS would not expunge the accusation from their records. “I don't know if you remember Eliza's Law,” Bennett said.

“I remember,” Grace said. It was the law named after the six-yearold who was beaten to death despite the numerous reports to Child Protective Services.

Bennett looked surprised, or relieved perhaps, that he wouldn't have to explain again. “Then you know that it's also the law that forbids the destruction of abuse records for
any
reason for ten years after the accusation.”

Or until the child turns eighteen
.

It was the first time Grace and Stephen had been in Bennett's office since the previous January. It felt surreal to be here, Grace thought, sitting on the same couch, staring at those same black-and-white photographs of the bridges. If she squinted, made the room blurry, she could almost imagine it was December still, that Jack was still alive. All that bright sunlight outside was really the blinding white of snow.

“I don't understand,” she said now. “Jack is—” She glanced at her hands folded primly in her lap. Every minute of every day she lived with this knowledge in her bones: Jack was dead. And yet, except for the night that she had attended the M.A.M.A. group, she hadn't ever said it out loud.

“After what they did,” Stephen said, “You'd think they would be bending over backwards to clear Grace's name.”

“They've done what they can, Stephen,” Bennett said. “They closed the case; they made a formal apology.”

“Well, it's not enough. It's a joke, in fact.” Stephen stood, hands in his pockets, paced to the oak bookshelves, then turned. “So, what are our choices? Can we sue them?”

“No!” Grace gave him a withering look. “My God, Stephen.” She turned to Bennett. “A lawsuit isn't an option.”

Bennett glanced from her to Stephen, then back to her. “I think that's best.” He sighed. “The problem is that too many children are slipping through the cracks still. Obviously, the agencies are loath to make exceptions.”

“Even when they're flat-out wrong?” Stephen pushed. “Even when the child they were
supposedly
protecting is dead?”

“Stop it, Stephen, please,” Grace pleaded. She glanced again at Bennett. “I'm sorry,” she said. “This is just difficult to accept.”

“I'm the one who's sorry,” Bennett said. He rubbed his hand over his forehead, his eyes no longer meeting hers. “CPS can't expunge the file, Grace, not as long as you have other children in your care.”

She nodded, as if she understood. She wouldn't fight, wouldn't argue. The accusation had taken this from her too.

 

She woke up, crying again. The same nightmare: She was trying to get to Jack, but he was on the other side of a busy downtown street, and there was too much traffic and no one would slow down, and every time a bus or a truck obscured her view of him even for a minute, he got farther and farther away until finally she couldn't see him at all. It was incomprehensible, even in her sleep, how easy it should have been to save him, and still she had failed. She woke then, her heart pounding, whimpering, her voice scratchy, as if she really had been screaming his name over the roar of traffic, and before she could even think, it's only a dream, she remembered that it wasn't.

G
race headed home after leaving the diner where she'd gone for breakfast. She had planned to go shopping, maybe even treat herself to a manicure. She used to dream about having time to do things like this, and the kids were with Stephen for the weekend, so she could, but all she really wanted was to go home, get back into bed, and sleep.

She stopped behind a green Volkswagen Beetle waiting to turn left. A bumper sticker on the back:
CAPE MAY BIRD OBSERVATORY
. The words detonated inside her, so that for a moment, all she knew, all she felt, all she could think was
Noah
. She pictured him standing on the beach in an orange windbreaker, arm outstretched towards a chrome-colored sky, telling her how young albatrosses spend their first five years alone over the ocean. Or sitting in the Drift In and Sea Café with her and Max, eating French fries like a starving man, telling them how passenger pigeons all laid their eggs on the exact same day and how nestlings placed their bills in the mother's to be fed, and if the nestling died, the mother became desperate to get rid of the milk, which literally killed her if she didn't.

He had told them that Huron Indians believed the souls of the dead came back as passenger pigeons, and that at one time, over a fourth of all land birds in the United States were passenger pigeons, so many of them that Audubon himself once watched a flock pass overhead, the sky turning black with wings for three straight days.

The Volkswagen turned just as the traffic light changed to red. Something broke loose in her. Waves of longing smashed against the bones of her ribs. She missed him. It had been three months since she had spoken to him. He didn't know that Jack had died. She closed her eyes, the heat blasting through the windshield like a drug.
I would have traded your life for Jack's in an instant,
she told Noah in her mind. She pictured them walking along the nature trail at Higbie's Beach, holding hands. He was telling her how only half of all song-birds that leave the coast ever see it again, 50 percent of them dying; how a pair of Canadian geese lived together for forty-two years. Once, on a rainy afternoon, lying in his bed, he told her how American goldfinches weave nests so tightly that they are waterproof, and that the nestlings often drowned inside if there was a drenching rain and the parents were away.

The kids in the SUV behind her honked, their car pulsing with music. It seemed impossible to lift her foot from the brake and move it to the accelerator. She tried to steer her thoughts back to what she should do—she
would
go shopping, she would splurge—but his hand was on her rib cage and he was telling her that a bird's heart in proportion to a man's was larger and beat three times as fast. His fingers were on her sternum:
Here, this is where your flight muscles would be
. Angry tears blurred her vision as she turned toward her house. It was unconscionable to think about Noah, to miss him in the same breath in which she thought about Jack. There was no comparison. Noah didn't die, and even if he had, the loss of him from her life should have been minor, she told herself, should have been nothing, inconsequential, compared to losing her child, her husband.

Should have been
.

 

“Are you sure about this, Grace?” Over the phone, Grace heard Jenn take a sip of coffee. “I thought you wanted to work things out with Stephen.”

Grace laid her head against the rocking chair, staring at the bars of shadow cast onto the opposite wall by Jack's crib. “I miss him, Jenn.”
Noah.
“I had so much energy when I was with him. I was happy.”
Happy
. The word was like one of those fantastic animals—galloping crocodiles, dinosaurs the size of sparrows—that long ago became extinct. “And I know how that sounds, okay? The idea that I even
could
be happy with Jack so sick.” She paused. “But I was.”

“Look, I'm worried about you,” Jenn said. “Seeing Noah again is the last thing—”

“It's not over, Jenn. A
bumper sticker
, a stupid bumper sticker and it was like…I just wanted to see him, listen to him talk about birds.”

 

“Here.” He handed her a perfect conch shell, pure salt white, the size of a locket.

“How did you—God!” She swatted him. “I walk this beach for miles and all I find are fragments and you…” She smiled. “Thank you.”

“That's what I want to be to you, Grace, what I want us to be: whole and intact even if everything around us is broken.”

 

“Wait till I get off the phone,” she heard Jenn tell one of the boys in the background, and then to Grace, she said: “Why can't you just e-mail him, Grace? Or call? Why do you have to go there? It's only going to confuse things.”

The sky was dark, without stars, the windows open. Grace often thought of this—opening windows—as the last normal thing she did on the day he died. It was an act that filled her with regret each time she thought about it. Because when she returned to the house the next morning and climbed the stairs to his room, it no longer smelled like him. She had aired his room out too, like a fool, a goddamn fool, never considering—but why would she have—that he would die that very night, that even as she had stood in Max's room with her kids, laughing, saying to Max—
did Erin tell you we bought scones
—Jack had already coded. Later, on the morning of his funeral, she had sat in his rocking chair, crying inconsolably, not even for him, but for his baby smells, which were forever gone. She undersood then why Andy Warhol had once tried to have a “smell museum,” saving the perfumes of everyone he loved.

Grace came into Jack's room often now, sat in this chair, wrapped herself in one of his blankets, read his books. Now on the phone, she told Jenn, “Things are already confused with Stephen. I thought I wanted to work things out with him, but…”

“You're playing with fire,” Jenn said. “Whether you admit it or not.” In the background came the clinking of silverware. Whenever Jenn was upset she cleaned, threw clothes in the washing machine, took apart the stovetop to scrub the burners.

Grace smiled. “Let me guess. Emptying the dishwasher?”

“Let's just say, for the sake of argument,” Jenn continued, “that you
do
feel the same way about Noah as you did a year ago. What happens to wanting Stephen back? And what do you tell Max and Erin? Are you prepared to bring Noah into
their
lives?” She sighed. “I think you need time, Grace.” Her voice softened. “And yes, I'm emptying the stupid dishwasher.”

Grace stood and walked across the room to the window and leaned her forehead against the glass.

“Don't get me wrong: I think Stephen's a jerk for walking out,” Jenn continued, “but you guys have been through the most god-awful thing, and I don't know…I'd hate to see you give up.”

“I'm not the one who gave up.”

A long silence. And then, “What about when you were with Noah?”

Grace sighed. “Okay,” she said. “Fair enough.” She paced back to Jack's bed, which looked the same as it had the last morning she'd taken him from it. Books, stuffed animals, cars. “I'm lonely,” she said quietly. Her voice splintered with shame. “And it sounds pathetic, and I
feel
pathetic, but I—I want to be touched, Jenn, I want—” Her voice cracked. “I want to be held, I want someone to look at me and actually see
me,
not the mother whose child died, not the woman accused of Munchausen's or—or—” She stared at the dark sky, a bright moon darting in and out of the pale clouds.

Look, Jack, Mr. Moon came to see you
.

Scientists said that it was moving away from the Earth an inch and a half a year.

Jenn stayed silent, and Grace could picture her, divvying up the silverware: forks, knives, spoons, and shaking her head in frustration.

“I'm not sure
I
can even see who I am anymore,” Grace said. Jack's death had hardened her, made her unrecognizable even to herself. There were days when she couldn't even stand to be around Erin or Max, days when she was driving and imagined just letting the car veer off the road into a tree, days when she felt so much rage that she wanted to smash something. And just yesterday, waiting for Erin to finish swim lessons at the Y, one of the other mothers started going on about how tragic it was that funding for the National Endowment for the Arts had been cut, and Grace commented that she thought the NEA should be abolished altogether and that what was really tragic was a government that could afford to spend millions of dollars on folk singers and poets no one had ever heard of while a quarter of the nation's children were living in poverty. Of course, no one responded. Who was going to argue with the mother of a child who had just died? Who was going to tell
her
that she was full of shit? Everyone just nodded politely, and averted their eyes, until someone changed the subject. Sometimes Grace felt as if she were barely a person anymore. “I feel like I'm drowning, that if Max and Erin didn't need me, I'd simply float away, and a part of me even resents them for that, for keeping me here.”

“Oh Grace,” Jenn said. “Haven't you lost enough?”

Grace was crying.

“I just hope he's worth it,” Jenn said finally.