The Life You Longed For (33 page)

“—he asked why,” Noah finished.

She nodded, grateful. Even her parents were hesitant to talk about Jack anymore, to say his name. She thought of how
Y
had been Jack's favorite letter, how he used to stand with his feet together and his arms pointed up and out and announce, “Look! I'm a
Y
!” He liked to stick black olives on the ends of his fingers and pretend they were fingernails; he used to call Max “Ax.”

Noah nudged her leg with his foot. “I wish you could see your face when you talk about Jack,” he said. “It's beautiful.”

“Really?” She smiled. “That's what I want,” she said. “I'm always afraid that I'll be sad when I talk about him, which is so opposite of how he was.” She pictured him shrieking and hobbling naked down the hall and away from her after his bath or clomping around in Erin's white snow boots and an old football helmet of Max's and telling them, “I'm an astronut.” Astro-
nut
. Or sitting on her lap as she read to him,
Happy Birthday, Moon
. Memories tumbled forward like bright toys bobbing in the waves. Jack in his crib on his third—

“I could watch you all night.” Noah leaned back in his chair, his arms crossed behind his head. Waves slapped against the docks below. A breeze carried with it the fishy smell of the bay. “What were you just smiling at?”

“Oh, Jack's third birthday.” She leaned back in her own chair, her head against the sliding glass door just behind them, and stared up at the sky. “He had no idea what a birthday was, so all week we'd been telling him that when he was three, he would be a big boy.” She rolled her eyes. “
Huge
mistake. I go into his room that morning, and he's standing in his crib, looking at his legs, and he asks if he's three yet, and before I can say yes, Jack
throws
himself onto the mattress and starts shouting at me, ‘No! Not today! Not today! I can't! I can't!'”

Noah was laughing.

“God, he was mad,” Grace said. “Apparently, he thought his legs were going to just shoot up when he was three, like the beanstalk in
Jack and the Beanstalk
.” She reached for her frozen daiquiri and took a sip. “I think of him all the time,” she said. “It's so stupid, but every day, at three o'clock, I think, ‘Oh good, time to wake Jack up from his nap,' except, of course…” Her voice trailed off and she took another sip of her drink. Moonlight shone on the water below, a sheenless black taffeta, and she thought of the mourning dresses women had once worn to signal their grief to the world. It made so much sense to her. Why had people stopped?

 

“Nah, nah, ha ha! You can't find me!”

“Did you hear something, Mama?” Erin asked.

“It sounded like a goose,” Grace said.

Erin giggled. They could hear Jack's loud breathing in the hall closet, the doorknob rattling as he pulled himself up. “I think he might be in the closet,” she whispered.

They heard rustling and the squeak of coat hangers, and then on the whispered count of three, Grace and Erin yanked open the door.

Jack stumbled out, swatting at coat sleeves, his head thrown back in laughter. “You finded me!”

 

“Hey,” Noah inched his chair closer to hers. “Where'd you go?”

“Up there.” She stared at the quarter moon, only a thin sliver, like a cupped hand, she thought, or a cradle.
Her absence is like the sky
, C. S. Lewis had written after the death of his wife. It was how Grace felt about Jack.

“Did you know that the light the moon shines on Earth is one thousand times greater than the light shone by all the stars put together?”

She smiled sadly. Noah had collected these facts about the moon for her the way someone else might collect beautiful shells or rare coins or stamps from faraway places.
The moon's power over the tides is more than two times stronger than the sun's.

From the street came the squeal of brakes and the raucous shouts of drunken teenagers. After a moment, Grace said, “I read somewhere that researchers studying parent-child attachment have found that what matters most isn't how much the parent loves the baby or how good the parent is, so much as the fact that the parent consistently returns to the child after periods of separation.” She was still staring up. “Apparently, a part of what the child is doing by playing hide-and-seek is making sure that the parent can always find him.” A tear slid down her cheek, and she swiped it away.

“Sometimes I hate the whole idea of heaven,” she continued after a moment. “What if it really exists—” Another tear. She didn't bother trying to wipe it. “What if Jack's up there—” her voice caught. “What if he's up there waiting for me to find him?”

Noah pulled her to him, arms tight around her shoulders, his mouth against her ear. “If heaven's real,” he whispered, “then Jack also knows that you're looking up at him right now.”

 

From the moment she decided to drive to Cape May, Grace had suspected that she and Noah would make love. That was the easy part, though maybe it shouldn't have been. All she knew was that when she thought of Noah, it was the feel of his arms, his mouth, his fingers tracing the arc of her collarbone, the curve of her thigh that she thought of. It was how, whenever she first peeled off her clothes, he'd suck in his breath and say “Goddamnit, Grace. Come here.” Or lying in bed, how he'd tell her, “I haven't paid enough attention to your ankles” or “this part of your back, right here.”

 

In the morning , she found Noah at the table, reading
The New Yorker
and eating a slice of peach pie.

“Now there's a healthy breakfast.” She sat down opposite him, already dressed in the clothes she'd worn yesterday, and reached for his arm.

He pushed his plate away, the pie half-eaten. “I don't know why I'm eating this. I'm not even hungry.” He glanced at her hand on his arm. “Do you realize that you always put your fingers right on my pulse?”

“I like listening to your heart.”

He didn't say anything, just gently extricated himself from her. “You need coffee.” He stood to pour her a mug, and she glanced around his kitchen with its clean countertops and magnet-free refrigerator, so unlike her own. A pile of magazines was stacked on one side of the table:
Smithsonian, Wilson Quarterly, Audubon, The New Yorker
. She pictured him eating here alone each night, reading while he ate.

Wordlessly, he set the steaming mug in front of her, then stood at the window, his back to her. The sky was the color of driftwood, swirls of gray cloud moving across it like the waves on a sonogram. She took a sip of her coffee, turning the mug to read the quote on its side: Leonardo da Vinci.
Once you have flown, you will walk the earth / with your eyes turned skyward / for there you have been / there you long to return.

“I was just reading about these ornithologists from Cornell…” Noah turned and nodded at the opened magazine on the table. “They're in Louisiana searching for the long-lost Ivory-Billed,
Compephilus principalis,
which has been extinct for over fifty years. It was a beautiful bird, apparently, two feet long, bill to tail. The ‘Lord God bird,' people called it.” He rubbed his face with both hands, as if still struggling to wake up. “Anyway, a couple of experienced ornithologists, on separate occasions, say they've sighted it, but no one can find it. A ghost bird. There and not there all at once.” He glanced at her over his shoulder, his eyes bereft, then continued. “It hit me that that's what I've been doing, Grace. Searching for something that probably doesn't even exist, and maybe hasn't for a long time.” She couldn't see his face. “It's ironic, I guess. My
entire
life: trying to understand a species that's always leaving.”

She set down her mug, stood up and went around the table to stand behind him, arms around his chest, her face pressed to his back. “If I was seventeen again or twenty or twenty-three, I'd do so much differently,” she whispered thickly. “I'd fight for you. I wouldn't let twenty years go by.”

“I know.” He turned in her arms to face her. And then quietly, holding her gaze, he said, “I don't want to hear from you after this. I need you out of my life for good.” His voice was gentle, and she thought of how it's not the heart that is the strongest muscle in the body, but the tongue, as if words mattered more than blood, the struggle to shape and form them, then let them go.

She nodded, feeling stunned, though she knew he was right. She focused on a small square in his plaid flannel shirt, studying each thread and struggling not to cry, to just breathe. Behind him, the gray sky was as enormous as loss. A line of birds moved like dark type across the blank pages of cloud. Indecipherable. A sentence trailing off into pale ellipses like an unfinished thought.

The farther two quarks move away from each other the more fiercely they are pulled back together.

At the door he gave her a hug. Not the usual bear hug, though, but something gentle, quiet almost, a hug like a crocheted shawl full of space and air.

 

“You got a lot of sun.” Stephen took the plate she handed him and carried it across the kitchen to the table.

“It was a gorgeous weekend.” Grace turned to fill another plate.

“Were you at the beach?”

She froze for a moment, her heart racing, then resumed filling the plate with the store-bought chicken salad she'd picked up on the way home that morning. “Would it matter?” she asked. She handed him another plate.

He dropped his eyes. “I'm sorry. I had no right…” He set the plates down on the counter behind him.

“I needed to clean things up, Stephen.” She met his eyes. “So, yes I did go to the beach. And it is finished.”

He looked away, hands in his khaki pockets, jingling change, something he did when he was anxious. “Look, Grace,” he said. “I—I went on a date last week.”

Her stomach dropped. “A date?”

“Sort of. A friend of Sheila's. We just had dinner. Her daughter died of leukemia a year ago, and I guess Sheila thought…”

She turned back to the counter, holding onto the edge of it, tears burning her eyes. “How convenient,” she said. Her voice caught, and she paused, took a sharp breath before continuing. “You can share stories of your dead children.” Despite herself, she started to weep.

“Grace—”

“No,” she sobbed, turning to look at him. “Do you have any idea how much
I've
needed to talk to you about him? Goddamn you, Stephen. You are the only person in this whole world who has a clue about how I feel, and you're talking to some—”

“I am not! Listen to me!” He put his hands on her shoulders, the first time he'd touched her in months, which only made her cry harder. “Come on, Grace.” He blew out a ragged breath. “I'm not talking to anyone about Jack. I can't. I just—Here.” He reached across the counter for a tissue, and handed it to her.

She pressed it to her eyes and turned back to the chicken salad, still sniffling. “Do you think you'll ever be able to talk with me about him?” she said sadly.

“I hope so.”

She nodded, then handed him another plate. He was still standing there, jiggling the change in his pocket. “What?”

“We need to try to move on.”

“No,
you
need to, Stephen, or you
think
you do, but we, Max and Erin and me, we need you
here
.” Her eyes filled again. “Have you seen Max's room?” He'd taken down all the Flyers posters from his walls. “Has he told you that he's not playing hockey this fall?”

“What?” He rubbed his hand across his face, massaging his temples. “Look, I'll talk with him.”

“You think it's that easy, you'll just talk to him. He needs you
here
, Stephen,
I
need you—”

“Don't push me, Grace. I'm glad you cleared things up for yourself, but nothing's changed for me.”

“
W
hy can't you at least try it?” Grace asked.
It
: Counseling. “What are you so afraid of?” They'd been on the phone for over an hour. Arguing. Again.

“We're going in circles, Grace. I know how you feel; you know how I feel, and there's really nothing else—”

“
Why
are you doing this?”

“Doing
what
?” he shouted. “Disagreeing with you, God forbid? You don't get everything just because you want it!”

“You think I don't know that?” she asked incredulously. “My child is dead, Stephen.
Our
child. I can write a goddamned book on not getting what I want.”

“This
isn't
about Jack. You're using him, Grace, and it makes me sick.”

“Everything is about Jack, Stephen. Every detail of my life is about him.”

“Really? Because it didn't seem that way last Christmas Eve.”

“Why—” She squeezed her eyes shut.

“Look, I'm hanging up,” he told her.

“No, please don't,” she cried. “Please, we can—”

But he did.

 

She couldn't find the car keys. They weren't in her purse or in the metal bowl on the kitchen counter where she usually kept them.

“Max, check the car and stop arguing with Erin,” Grace said as she hurried upstairs to look in her bedroom. They were going to the Aquarium, Max already complaining, but she was worried about him. All he did lately was lie on his bed, staring at the empty ceiling.

Ever since Jack died she kept losing things: keys, earrings, her cell phone, street names, dates. She would read a couple pages of a book and a half hour later forget what she'd read; when she picked up the book again, she was confused by what had taken place. Or she drove to the grocery store for something specific and came home with everything but the one item she had absolutely needed. She left the house again and again some mornings, forgetting: her purse, keys, coffee, money.

People in mourning did this, she'd read. The searching mimics the feeling of grief itself. Like phantom pain, a part of them would always return to what is gone. Grace had thought then of people who collected things—Japanese tin toys from their childhood or sea shells or life lists of birds—and wondered if collecting too was simply another way to grieve, to hold on.

 

“So do you ever find the ones you've banded?” she asked as Noah handed her his Styrofoam coffee cup and gently pulled the struggling bird from the mist net.

“We find
maybe
two a year, but that's out of the four or five thousand we collect and band.” Noah flicked on the meager battery-operated light and slid the harrier into an empty Pringles can, air holes punched into the end, the bird's legs protruding from the other. “Of the million birds banded in the country every year only about sixty thousand are ever found again, half of them dead.”

She watched him fasten the aluminum alloy band over the bird's right leg, measure its beak and talons, set him on the balance scale, then record the numbers in the logbook. “So is it worth it then, all this?”

“Are you kidding?” He looked at her. “When one comes back it is.”

She watched as he carried the bird back outside and set it free, the hawk's white underwings flashing against the dark sky, a thin trail of moonlight glinting on the metal band attached permanently now to the bird's leg.

She walked through her bedroom for the third time, lifting up books and towels and checking the night table drawers—
again
.

“The keys aren't in the car, Mom!” Max yelled up the stairs.

“You probably didn't even look that good,” Erin taunted.

“You probably didn't even look that good,” Max mimicked.

“If you two do not stop—” Grace started to yell from the top of the stairs.

“We won't go?” Max said hopefully.

The keys were in Jack's room. On the floor by the rocking chair.

 

“It amazes me how little this place has changed,” Jenn commented as they wandered from one dusty exhibit to the next. They were at the Franklin Institute with Erin and her friend, Samantha.

Faded signs directed kids to use the old-fashioned pulleys, levers, and cranks to build friction between two arcs of metal or generate enough electricity to power a light bulb. At another display, they used Mohs' scale of hardness to determine which minerals were stronger than others. Kids scratched pennies against glass or glass against quartz. At yet another table, they created static electricity by rubbing silk on various materials. Grace thought of Noah, of the blue sparks that had seemed to jump from his skin to hers the first time she'd touched him.

The rooms were chaotic as children darted from one experiment to the next, shouting,
Look at this!
or
Let me try!
or
You already had a turn!
They pushed and shoved, parents hurrying after them, the children's names rising up like helium balloons:
Zachary, you have to wait! Jenna, stay with Aubrey! Come on, Abby! No, Jack, this way
.

Jack.

The name slammed into her. Her eyes met Jenn's.

 

In the Heart Room, the forty-five-year-old two-story papier-mâché heart dominated the exhibit, kids scrambling through the corridors of the right atrium where they heard the recorded thump of blood entering the heart, then descending the stairs into the left ventricle, the hallway a narrow constricted artery that they had to squeeze through. A woman ducked backwards out of the entrance with a screaming toddler and Grace remembered the time she and Stephen took Max here when he was about that age, two or three maybe. He too had howled in fear as if it were a haunted house they'd entered. For a year or so after that, he thought hearts were scary dark places, full of frightening things. Now it occurred to Grace that maybe he had been right.

While Erin and Samantha stood in line, holding hands, to go through the heart, Grace moved around the room, reading the various information panels:

Did you know that the heart is 5,000 times more electromagnetically powerful than the brain?

Did you know that if the blood vessels in the human body were laid end to end, they would stretch for more than 60,000 miles, enough to circle the earth at least twice?

Beyond the high windows of the museum, flags of nearly a hundred nations fluttered along the Benjamin Franklin Parkway. The sky was so bright that the trees stretching along the boulevard towards the Art Museum looked more blue than green, as if they had absorbed some of its color. Farther away, though she could not see it from here, was Children's Hospital. She hadn't been back yet, but she wanted to say hello to Anju and Rebecca, thank some of the nurses who were with Jack those last two weeks, perhaps donate some of his books to the sixth-floor playroom. Her stomach clenched at the idea. Maybe for his birthday, she told herself. August 8. It was still three weeks away, but the thought of it was like an explosion inside her.
Birthday
. The word itself, the whole idea of it, hurt. And yet there was no choice but to keep moving towards it.

Did you know that the heart contracts 100,000 times a day, 40 million times a year, two and a half billion times in a lifetime?

Did you know that in an average lifetime a person will breathe about 75 million gallons of air?

“Look at me, Mama!”

She turned to see Erin and Samantha waving gaily from the balcony just off the left atrium. Grace waved as Erin ducked back inside the heart.

In the display case in front of her was an AbioCor, the first self-contained mechanical heart. It looked like a plastic yo-yo. She read the accompanying words without really taking them in.
The AbioCor heart weighs about two pounds and consists of a chamber filled with hydraulic fluid in the middle. A battery-operated centrifugal pump…
At the next panel, there were headphones and she listened first to Ravel's
Mother Goose Suite
, then pushed a button and heard the second movement of Bach's Brandenburg Concerto No. 4.
Did you know that musical scores that approximate the rhythm of a resting heart can actually slow one that is beating too fast?

Erin ran up to her, hugging Grace around the legs.

“Where's Samantha?” Grace asked.

“She's with Aunt Jenn over there.” Erin pointed and Grace spotted them at the display where you could listen to the different sounds the heart made. “Aunt Jenn said we had to ask you if we could go through the heart again.”

Grace cupped her hand to Erin's chin. “Is that what you want to do?”

Erin nodded eagerly, bouncing on her toes. She was a mess, socks falling down, hair all over the place, chocolate milkshake stains on her shirt, but she looked happy, and for a moment, Grace was too. “You having a good time, lovey?” she asked.

“This is my favorite place!” Erin said. “And I'm so glad Max didn't come!”

“Hey, now,” Grace cautioned, but she was smiling. How did it happen, life pivoting back towards normal, happiness spiraling through the most ordinary moments? She kissed the top of Erin's head. “Go on, you silly girl, I'll wave to you again when you get to the top of the heart.” She watched her run off—“Mom says we can go again!”—Jenn turning to meet her eyes over the throng of kids, shaking her head with a familiar, “where-the-hell-do-they-get-their-energy?” look.

Did you know that during the first winter of the Siege of Leningrad in World War II, the city's radio station remained on the air to reassure people that they were not alone, and when the radio announcers were too weak or too cold to play music or recite news, they turned on a metronome that monotonously clicked back and forth, like a heartbeat, letting it echo through loudspeakers in the streets to reassure people that they were not alone.

“She's doing great,” Jenn said, coming up beside Grace.

“She is, isn't she?” Grace nodded to the metronome inside the glass case. “Did you know this?”

“Yeah, I'd heard it somewhere.” They both turned to watch for the girls. “Does all this make you think about Jack?”

“Everything makes me think about Jack,” Grace said. “But it's okay. I mean, there are still these horrible times—I'm
dreading
his birthday—but we also have these times when we're actually happy. The other night Max and I were watching this stupid—and I can't stress that word enough—Austin Powers movie, and we were just having the best time. To hear him laugh at all…” She sighed. “It's weird too, though, the whole notion that we really are moving on. Sometimes it feels like I'm losing him all over again.”