The Life You Longed For (4 page)

G
race turned to look at Jack, asleep in his car seat, his head lolling sideways. His swollen belly and chest rose and fell with effort. Still dark outside, his face was in shadow but for the headlights of the trucks passing in the opposite direction. She felt Stephen watching her as she watched him, her own heart feeling swollen and too full.

“You okay?” Stephen said.

She shook her head no as she settled back against her seat. After a moment, she said, “How can we
not
do this?” This: taking Jack to Hopkins; meeting with the Cardiac Transplant Team. “To not even try? I don't—” Her throat tightened.

Stephen put his hand on her knee. “Anju's a great doctor, Grace, but she's not his mother. You're doing the right thing.”

The
you're
registered. Not
we're,
though she knew Stephen supported the decision to bring Jack here. When had he started leaving these choices solely up to her, though? She knew he trusted her to understand the medicine better than he, to know what was right for Jack. But she couldn't remember when it had started to feel so lonely.

A green road sign flashed by—
BALTIMORE
57
MILES
—and she felt her stomach clench. They'd be there in an hour. Johns Hopkins. No longer the best hospital in the world as it had been in the first half of the century when it single-handedly changed the way doctors were taught, when the pillars of modern medicine—William Osler, William Henry Welch, William Stewart Halsted, Howard Kelly—had reigned, but still: for the last ten years
U.S. News & World Report
had ranked it the #1 teaching hospital in the country; it was still the first choice medical school for students from all over the world; its doctors were still the recipients of more research grants from the National Institutes of Health than the doctors at any other teaching institute. Still the place where the first “Blue Baby” operation took place, which led to open heart surgery, which led to heart transplants. Grace held onto this knowledge. Ballast against the weight of Anju's question: “Why in God's name would you want to put him through this, Grace?”

The question had stunned her. After Stephen, Anju Mehta, Jack's primary doctor, was the first person Grace had phoned upon receiving news that the transplant team at Hopkins would consider Jack. “We have an appointment. December 26.” Grace was nearly crying. “I feel like it's Christmas already, Anju. Just the fact that they're considering him means that it's not hopeless.”

Silence. And then that question.
Why in God's name…

Grace had felt as if the wind had been knocked out of her. “
Why?
What do you mean,
why
. Because what if it works, Anju? What if it buys him another year, another five years?” He would be eight then.
Eight.
It was a ridiculously small number, an unbearable joke of a number. As if eight—
eight,
for God's sake—could possibly be enough. “My God, Anju, what if they find a cure by then?”
What if
. The words seemed to contract and expand in her throat. She'd had to press the phone hard against her ear, trying to steady her shaking arm. She knew Anju thought she was clutching at straws, but straws were all she had and who knew—who could possibly
ever
know—what might happen in five years? Scientists had already learned how to successfully put a mechanical heart in a person's chest, clone animals—by the following summer experts predicted they would have decoded the human genome. She began to cry. “How—how can you even ask me
why
?”

“I'm sorry, Grace, but I can't support this,” Anju told her. “And frankly, I'm appalled that any doctor would after looking at Jack's records…”

 

Ahead of them, the sun popped over the tree line, and Jack whimpered, the sudden light full-force on his face. Grace turned, positioning her body so as to shield his eyes. “Shush,” she whispered, brushing his hair from his forehead. “Is Mr. Sun trying to wake you up?”

He squinted at her, rubbing his eyes, then began to cry. “I don't want new hospital,” he said.

Why would you want to put him through this, Grace?

“I know, Goose, but what if the doctors at the new hospital can make you all better?”
What if.

“You mean I don't need oxygen anymore and I be just like Max and Erin?”

She nodded, her heart leaden in her chest. It would never be that simple for Jack. Even with a transplant, which would buy him at most five years.

 

She stared at the surgeon's fingers as he spoke, his words coming to her in fragments.
Adrenal failure. Fifteen percent chance of survival. I'm sorry.
His fingers were long. Like a pianist's, she thought.

“You've got a happy little boy here,” the surgeon was saying, and she turned to look at Jack, lying on his side on the carpet, obliviously playing with his Matchbox cars. “And as long we manage his pain, he's got pretty good quality of life…”

Quality.
She bit the inside of her lip to keep from crying. Did anyone really believe that
quality
could compensate for
quantity
when you were talking about a child's life? She'd trade quality for quantity in a heartbeat. Give Jack another year and she'd give up the hours of cuddling with him on the sofa after the kids were in school; give him two years and she'd stop standing over his crib at night, smelling the back of his neck, touching his hand curled loosely in sleep, whispering, “I love you, Goose.” Give him five years and hell, she'd hire a nanny to watch him, she'd go back to work full-time. She'd said this once to her mother, and her mother had said something motherly and appropriate like, “Oh, but you wouldn't really would you?” And Grace had wanted to hit her.
Oh course, I would
.
If he could live? Of course!
How could anyone think that quality was more important than quantity?

It rained on the ride home. A downpour, at times, so that it seemed they were on a ship, plowing through heavy water, the world blurry, swollen looking. Rain smashed sideways into the windshield, the wind howling and abusive, pummeling the sky. Stephen leaned forward, face grim, straining to see in the oddly bright light. Her own eyes ached, as if she'd stared into the sun too long, dared to look up at an eclipse. A sick, punched-in-the-gut feeling in her stomach.
Quality of life
. As opposed to
quantity.
She wanted to sob like a little girl, throw a tantrum. She didn't want
quality.
Not at this cost. And what mother did? Anju's words spun through her mind.
Why in God's name would you want to put him through this?
And Jenn:
Oh, Grace, are you sure?

“No, I'm not sure!” she had exploded. “But it's all I goddamn have, Jenn.” They'd been on the phone. She had wanted to weep. “I don't get to be sure,” she added furiously. “I don't have that luxury.”

Now, she leaned back against the seat, the pounding rain relentless, tears seeping from beneath her closed eyes. You don't realize how much hope you have until it's gone, she thought, remembering the title of a book she'd seen on Noah's dresser.
Hope Is the Thing with Feathers: A Personal Chronicle of Vanished Birds
. The title had come from a poem by Emily Dickinson, he'd told her. Outside the car, rain pinged on the roof and windshield. She couldn't remember the words of the poem, but she knew, as maybe she never had before, that hope is not light and feathery and birdlike at all. She thought of that doctor who'd done all those experiments weighing the body before and after the moment of death in an effort to prove that the soul had weight, that the body was significantly lighter after the soul departed, and she knew that if someone weighed her right now, she too would have lost pounds since the morning. Hope.

 

By the time they got home, the storm had stopped. The world seemed wounded, lifting itself slowly. Midafternoon, and Max was at hockey practice still, Erin was at Grace's mom's. At home, she helped Stephen get Jack into his crib. “Why are you so sleepy today?” she asked him. Another symptom of heart failure and she thought of the term “easy death,” which the surgeon had used today, and she knew that nothing about her child's death would ever, in the slightest way, be easy.

In their bedroom Stephen was sitting on the edge of the bed, elbows on his knees, rubbing his eyes with the heels of his hands. A flicker of Stephen twenty years ago, sitting on the edge of the bed in the beach house, hung over, skinny, rubbing his eyes just like this. Grace kicked off her shoes, climbed up on the bed behind him, put her arms around his shoulders, and pressed her face to the back of his neck. “I'm so sorry I got your hopes up,” she whispered into his skin.

He squeezed her arm. “Don't ever be sorry for that.” His voice was raspy. “It just feels so real all of a sudden. Jesus Christ.” He punched the bed next to him with his free hand. “Jesus fucking Christ, Grace. I mean what the hell are we supposed to do now. Just wait? Just wait for him to—”

She turned his head to hers and pressed her mouth over his before he could finish, and suddenly he was tearing furiously at her blouse and yanking off his shirt without lifting his mouth from hers, and she was moaning, clutching at him as she hadn't in years and years and years, she thought. He let go only to push her backwards onto the bed, to help ease her pants from her legs as he undid his own. And then he was in her, and his mouth was on hers again, kissing her so hard that her lips felt bruised. Grief sex, she thought. Not so much a coming together as a tearing apart. She wanted Stephen to hurt her, wanted him to yank her to the edge of the bed—as he did, then slam into her over and over and over.

Afterward, they lay side by side across the bed, wide awake, panting like exhausted swimmers. “I'm sorry,” he said after a minute. He reached for her hand. “This isn't how I want us to make love. I don't want—”

“Why?” she asked gently. “I mean, why not if it helps?”

She thought of how in times of stress, colonies of bacteria will begin to mutate wildly so as to increase the chances that a few cells, a few mutations, would somehow have whatever was needed to survive the disaster of the new conditions, and she imagined this “grief sex” was similar—a frantic fight against all they were about to lose.

S
tephen walked into their bedroom the night after their trip to Hopkins, still wearing his leather jacket, his shoes leaving wet tracks in the pale carpet. Grace opened her mouth to say something, but stopped. She noticed his face first, then his cut hand, his bruised swollen knuckles. My God, what had happened? Her eyes flew back to his face. Something damaged in his expression. He wouldn't look at her. She felt the blood drain from her face. Oh God, she thought. He knows about Noah.

She became aware that the heating pad against her back was too hot, that she should get some ice for Stephen's hand. She pushed back the blankets and swung her legs over the side of the bed. “I'll get ice,” she said in a calm voice. Her hands were shaking.

“No,” he said. “Wait a minute.” He didn't sound angry. Tired, maybe. Or numb. He sat in the rocking chair by the window. Still wearing his coat. Still refusing to look at her. From one of the houses across the lake, red Christmas lights blinked intermittently, on, then off. On again. Off. The night was like the inside of a heart, she thought, filling with blood, then emptying.

Don't let him have found out about Noah
, she was thinking.
Please
.

But he must have. This was why his brother had phoned earlier, asking Stephen to stop by the bakery Jeff owned. It was important, Jeff had said; he couldn't get into it over the phone.
It
. What else could
it
be
?
Grace massaged her fingers to her temples, head bowed, as if she had a pounding headache. How had Noah's presence in her life become so normal that she'd forgotten to be afraid? she wondered helplessly. But it was
because
their affair had somehow become normal that it had continued at all. What else was survival but this? Adapting even to what makes no sense? And it didn't. Make sense—
despite
her rationalizations. How,
how
, could she have been so stupid? It didn't matter who Noah was or what he'd once meant to her or how happy he made her now or—any of it. So what if she was in love with him? It didn't matter. Why had she thought it did?

She stared at her hands, trying to calm herself, trying to stop shaking. I don't want to lose you, Stephen, she thought desperately. She couldn't imagine her life without him. She didn't
have
a life without him. The kids, the house, everything—even the pile of laundry in the clothes basket by the door. How,
how
, had this happened?

 

The first time she saw Noah again Max was with her. They had driven to Cape May so Max could interview Noah for his report on endangered birds. Grace saw the Tigers bumper sticker on the battered Volvo station wagon as soon as they pulled into the parking lot. “That's his car,” she told Max. “He was a Detroit Tigers nut.” She told Max about the games they'd gone to, Noah's face painted orange and white.

“You? At a baseball game?” He grinned. “That must have been rich.”

She laughed. “I didn't say I understood any of it.”

“Is that why he dumped you?”

“Excuse me? Who says
he
dumped
me?
”

“So you dumped him?”

“I'm not sure anyone
dumped
anyone,” she said. “The summer ended—I told you this, that I met him at your grandfather's church—I had to go back to New Jersey.” She shook her head. “God, that was a long time ago.”

He looked at her uncertainly. “But did you love him?”

His question caught her off guard. “Well, I guess I thought I did.” She reached to tousle his hair, but he ducked away from her. An old habit of hers that only in the last year he had stopped appreciating. “Sorry, I keep forgetting.” She looked at him a moment, brow furrowed. “You aren't worried about him, are you?” She bit her lip to keep from smiling, trying to remember how serious it had all seemed to
her
at thirteen.

“Nah, I'm just wondering. Why didn't you marry him?”

“Oh, gosh, Max, I wasn't even in college yet.”

“So?”

“
So
, I was way too young, thank God. If I'd married him I never would have met your dad.”

 

She had rehearsed half-a-dozen things she would say when she first saw him, practiced making her voice casual. “I can't believe it's you!” or “Noah McIntyre with short hair!” or “You look so different without long hair!” Except he didn't. When he stepped from the office onto the gravel drive, she stopped short. He wore a flannel shirt and jeans, a down vest, hiking boots. She shook her head in disbelief. “You still look like you,” she said.

“Liar.” He smiled. “
You
look fantastic. I can't believe this is your
son
.” He offered his hand to Max. “Hey, Max, I'm Noah.”

“Wait—” Grace laughed. “This is too strange. My high school boyfriend meeting my son.” Her chest felt tight with something she couldn't name, and her eyes welled with tears.

“Oh, no you don't—” Noah wagged his finger at her. “Don't you dare.” To Max he said, “So she still cries at the drop of a hat, huh?”

Max grinned. “She was like that way back then too?”

“Way back then?” Noah laughed again and opened his arms to Grace. “He thinks we're
really
old,” he whispered. He was trembling. She could feel his heart hammering against the walls of his chest. Later he would tell her, “I thought I was going to pass out. You looked so goddamn gorgeous. I felt like a kid, and you seemed so calm.”

“Are you kidding me? I was a wreck.”

 

How had this happened?

 

Stephen was staring past her at the framed print of David Hockney's “The Swimmer.” A rectangle of pale blue water was stippled with white and intersected by a lemon-yellow diving board. A line of purple shadow and beyond that, another rectangle of blurred green trees. Every day before work Stephen swam at the Y, a mile and a quarter: forty laps. On weekends when Grace took Erin and Jack to the baby pool, she would sit on the warm tiles and dangle Jack between her legs and watch Stephen through the glass partition. All shoulders and arms. His eyes were uncomprehending behind goggles. He couldn't imagine not being able to swim, he once told her. That feeling of weightlessness, of inhabiting another world. He even breathed differently, concentrating on each breath, timing it perfectly. Like playing a complicated piano toccata, she thought, every note held, then released just so.

She wished there were some way to explain how being with Noah—talking to him on the phone, getting his e-mails, lying in his bed in the middle of the afternoon, walking with him along the wrack line of the ocean, watching cormorants dive into the slate-colored water—was
her
way of becoming weightless, of escaping to another landscape where, for a little while, what mattered most seemed as simple and as primal as breathing.

She closed her eyes. You don't compare swimming laps to cheating on your husband. Like it's just some hobby. She sighed. She heard how it sounded to even try to explain.

 

They had walked to the beach that first meeting. It was low tide. Fist-sized birds the color of wet sand scurried after retreating waves, then scampered back up the beach as the next one rolled in.

“What are they?” Max asked politely.

“
Calidris alba
. Common name, sanderlings.” Noah lifted his binoculars over his head and handed them to Max. “Go ahead. Tell me what you see.” Sunlight flashed on the water, glinted on the wet sand. Everything was silver and gold but the sky—a bright turquoise blue.

After a few seconds, Max lowered the binoculars. “Was I supposed to like, notice something specific or…I mean, they look pretty normal.”

“Exactly. Sanderlings are found on almost every beach in the world. Or at least they used to be.”

Noah took the binoculars from Max and handed them to Grace. “They're searching for food, by the way, which is why they're chasing the surf.” He pointed. “You ever hunt for sand crabs, wait for a wave to retreat, then dig real fast where a tiny airhole appears? That's basically what the birds are doing.”

“Cool.”

“They're like toddlers playing keep-away,” Grace commented.

“The amazing thing about sanderlings is that every year they fly nearly eight thousand miles to get to their wintering ground. Eight thousand miles. When they arrive in the Artic—that's where they go—they're nothing but hollow bones and feathers. Most of their body weight is taken up by their hearts.”

Like Jack,
Grace thought, but didn't say it.

 

“So what happened after Princeton?” They were still walking, Max between them with the binoculars. Noah had taken off his shoes and rolled up the cuffs of his jeans, damp now with surf. Their shadows stretched in front of them as they walked.

“I went to London. A fellowship at Oxford. But it's my turn now. Tell me about you. Epidemiology, huh?”

“I loved it. I was always interested in medicine—”

“I remember.”

“You do?” She turned to look at him, not sure why this surprised her.

“I figured you'd end up in pediatrics, though. You were great with those kids.”

“Yeah, but dealing one on one with children in pain—too hard. My best friend in graduate school—Jenn—was a nurse and she'd tell these stories about the kids she saw in the ER.” Grace shook her head. “Anyway, epidemiology let me have my cake and eat it too. I got to deal with the scientific aspect of medicine, which always fascinated me, and I didn't have to get too close to the actual individuals in pain.” She felt Noah's eyes on her. “Cowardice, I guess.” It surprised her to admit it—she'd never even told Stephen this. Or Jenn. And if Max hadn't been here, she thought, she would have told Noah more, how every time she gave this spiel—and that's what it had become over the years, about having no stomach for the pain or blood—a part of her knew it was all a lie, that what she really had no stomach for was the intimacy, that sometimes she thought she'd never been truly intimate with anyone again after the summer with Noah twenty years before, never really been herself as she'd been that summer, unconcerned about appearances or pretenses; happy, goofy; unafraid. Maybe everyone was this way at seventeen, but after she came home and stopped taking Noah's calls, something in her just shut down.

“So you think you'll ever go back to epidemiology?” Noah was asking.

After Jack
, she thought, but she wouldn't think about that. Not now. “That's your second question,” she teased instead. “It's my turn. Tell me about London.”

“What are those?” Max interrupted, lowering the binoculars. He nodded towards the tiny birds scampering madly just above the wrack line.

“I thought they were sanderlings,” Grace said.

“No, Max is right. How can you tell, Max?”

“The beaks are shorter?”

“Nice observation. Anything else?”

“The legs are orange.”

Noah grinned, then held out his hand for Max to slap five. “Okay, that's a semipalmated—which means its toes are partially webbed—plover, or
Charadrius semipalmatus
. Notice how they stay a little higher up the beach”—he pointed—“than the sanderlings?”

 

They went to the Drift In and Sea Café for lunch and so that Max could interview Noah. There were wooden booths, large laminated menus, and fishing nets strung with white lights drooping from the ceiling. An assortment of faded beach chairs hung from pegs on the back wall. French fries came served in paper-lined plastic beach toys.

Max had a list of questions: “So, like, what exactly do ornithologists do?” and “How did you get interested in ornithology?” and “What ornithologists inspired you?”

He liked Noah, Grace could tell. It shouldn't have surprised her. Noah had always been great with kids—of any age.

“Our teacher told us that, like, ninety-nine percent of all the species that ever lived are extinct now,” Max said, “so isn't extinction just, you know, like, a part of things?”

“Sure, it is. But not at the rate it's happening today.” Noah stabbed the last of his French fries into a puddle of ketchup. “An estimated million species will be lost in the next twenty-five years. That's eighty species a day. Thirty thousand a year.”

“But, like”—Max glanced at his notebook—“four hundred thousand people die every day of starvation and malnutrition, so, I mean, isn't that more important than birds?”

“Why should people care, you're asking?” Noah pushed his empty plate aside, his eyes solemn, almost angry.