The Life You Longed For (8 page)

 

Yes, there had been run-ins, she told Bennett.

 

“And this Mandy? Your brother's girlfriend, how long have you known her?”

“Technically a year, but we've only spent time with her—” Grace glanced at Stephen. “What? Two, three, times?”

“She just graduated last June, so she's only been with Child Protective Services a couple of months,” Stephen added. “Apparently she saw Grace's name in the file a few weeks ago, but she was afraid to say anything.”

“But then she spent Christmas with us, and I guess after seeing Jack, maybe she realized that he really was sick.”

“Was anything unusual going on last January or February, right around the time you think the accusation was made? Anything: medical issues, personal issues, work-related issues even?”

The muscles in her arms went limp, and she realized for the first time since Stephen told her of the accusation how tightly she'd been clenching her fingers, how she had literally been holding on. January was when she sent that e-mail:
Noah, is that you?

So was that it? Had someone, one of the nurses or doctors or maybe one of the parents she'd come to know from the hospital, seen her with Noah, found out she wasn't so wonderful, after all, and somehow made the leap to Munchausen's? And
was
it really a leap? Why wouldn't they wonder: If Grace could be so deceptive in one aspect of her life, what was to stop her from being just as deceitful in other aspects?

 

“So no rekindled sparks?” Stephen asked the day she and Max had gone to see Noah. She was undressing for bed, and she'd paused, holding her nightgown in front of her, thinking.

Honestly, no,” she said after a minute. “I mean, I think we were both nervous at first, but it was actually just…
nice
.” She'd meant it. And was glad. They hadn't even hugged goodbye, just shook hands.

“Let me know how the report turns out,” Noah had said to Max before they drove off. And that was it.

She hadn't been able to sleep, though, her mind reeling, not about Noah so much as about stuff from the past. Trying to remember the name of the professor who'd taught the research methodologies class that she'd loved, wondering if he was still teaching and if she really would go back to work one day.
Do you think you'll ever get back to epi demiology
? She tossed and turned, her legs twitchy, probably from all the driving, and too much caffeine.
That's what angers me…how can people be so willing to relinquish something, whatever it is—a bird, a plant, a relationship—before they even bother to learn what the hell it is that they're losing?

Finally, she gave up and went downstairs. She'd check her e-mail, type a quick thank-you to Noah for helping Max. No sooner had she sent the message, though, than she got one from him: Why are you up at two in the morning?

Her heartbeat quickened. Couldn't sleep, she wrote. What about you?

Why couldn't you sleep?

She felt like a girl, talking to her boyfriend on the phone late at night. Why, why, why? she typed. You're worse than my three-year-old.

He didn't respond right away, and she waited, curled in the comfortable desk chair, not moving, not responding to the other e-mails on her screen. It was a beautiful blue-black night, stars like bits of stones and shells washed upon it accidentally. She couldn't stop smiling.

And then his e-mail. “Are you happy, Grace? Or is it pointless to ask when you have a child as sick as Jack? But has your life turned out as you'd wanted it to? God, I have so many questions. Is vanilla still your favorite flavor of ice cream, and do you still prefer rainy days to sunny ones, and since when did you start painting your fingernails—since when did you even
have
fingernails, and what's it like to have a teenage son?”

She exhaled slowly. It felt as if she had glass in her lungs, as if something had broken inside her. She remembered Noah telling the kids he taught all those years ago that the true genius of men like Einstein and Newton lay
not
in the complexity of the questions they asked, but in the simplicity. It was the answers that were catastrophic.

I am happy, she responded. Most days. Which is enough. She paused, then added, But I've never stopped loving you. She didn't send it, just sat back, conscious suddenly that she was sitting in darkness, as if she'd known before she even began typing the danger of revealing too much. Her chest felt too full suddenly.
Not
because of how easily she had written those words, but because they felt so true. And how was that possible? She stood and paced to the sliding glass door across the room, that single sentence glowing on the dark screen like a comet from another time. She'd gone years without so much as thinking of him, hadn't she? But what did
that
mean? That she couldn't love him now? Or that she hadn't allowed herself to
until
now? She stared at the line of pine trees out back, at the dark shape of the swing set against the snow-covered ground, and she thought of the life not lived that everyone must have inside of them. She thought of how bacteria two million years old had been found living in stones buried miles beneath the earth, of how snow that had fallen tens of thousands of years ago was preserved beneath layers of arctic ice, and she thought, why not love? Why shouldn't it, too, survive?

She hugged herself in her thick robe, though she wasn't cold and pictured how Noah had looked that morning—youthful and happy—felt again how his heart had thudded against hers when they hugged, of the spark of electricity that had jumped between their skin when he handed her the binoculars. But so what? she admonished herself. It doesn't mean anything. This is foolish. You love Stephen, you're happy, you have a good life.

And yet.

She stood for a long time in front of the computer, staring at those words,
I've never stopped loving you
, until they blurred into a single orange streak, a star slowly dying. And then she hit send and told herself that it didn't change anything, that he had the right to know, that she owed him this much.

In the morning, she was horrified, and the minute Stephen left for work and the kids were off to school, she e-mailed a new message: I'm sorry. I shouldn't have written that. I know better than to EUI—e-mail under the influence. She hadn't been, but she didn't care. She just wanted the words back.

“Bullshit,” he responded. “Did you read the e-mail I sent you?”

She hadn't wanted to.
I've never stopped loving you either
, it said.

“
Anyone
could have made that phone call for
any
reason,” Bennett was saying, “and by law, as I'm sure you know, Child Protective Services
has
to look into it. The fact is, though, that two-thirds of all accusations are never substantiated.” He sighed. “The child protection system is a double-edged sword. On one hand, if two-thirds of the accusations are false, then child abuse is much less prevalent than we think. But as you're unfortunately discovering, a lot of people—a lot of families—get put through hell.”

“And nothing happens to the people who make the claim, even when it's false?” Stephen asked.

“Not if the accusation is made in good faith.” Bennett glanced at Grace. “And I think most are, believe it or not. I truly think most of these accusations are legitimate misunderstandings.”

Misunderstandings
. Please let it be that simple, Grace thought, though it seemed absurd that it could be. Misunderstandings were ordinary, everyday occurrences that eventually got straightened out with rueful apologies—
Oh my God, I can't believe I did that!
or
I am such an idiot. I am so sorry!
Misunderstandings ended with embarrassed laughter and hands clasped to mouths once the mistake was realized. Misunderstandings were the stuff of sitcoms and Hollywood love stories, but not,
not
accusations of child abuse.

Bennett glanced at Grace. “I'm hoping this is what happened in your case.” He smiled and again, Grace was struck by the warmth in his eyes.

“Me too.” She smiled shakily. “But until we know—” I'm afraid to let the kids out of my sight, she wanted to tell him. I'm afraid to take Jack to his therapy appointments. I'm afraid to let Erin and Max go back to school next week. I'm afraid to talk to my friends because I don't know if one of them was the one who reported me. She stared again at the photographs of the four bridges and thought of Stephen's grandfather who had helped repaint one of them during the Great Depression. Part of Roosevelt's WPA project. Strapped in a harness, swaying over traffic, a man so terrified of heights he wouldn't sleep on the second floor of his house. Her father told her once that pilots are often terrified of heights, that they overcome it by learning to love the very thing they feared.

“I know you're afraid,” Bennett said gently. “Understandably. And I don't want to tell you not to be because until I get a copy of the report from Child Protective Services I don't know enough.” He glanced at Stephen. “I don't think it would be a bad idea to keep the kids close for the next few days. I assume they're on holiday break anyway?”

Grace nodded.

“And as a precaution, Stephen, you should accompany Grace to Jack's doctor appointments.” He turned back to Grace. “If Stephen can't go, take your mom or dad, a friend, someone you trust.”

Tears pricked her eyes. She didn't trust anyone anymore.

 

“The fact you were never notified might be a good sign,” Bennett said as they were walking out to their cars. Snow was falling again. The rush hour traffic was bumper to bumper. Horns sounded impatiently as the lights changed. “My hope—and this isn't out of the realm of possibility by any stretch—is that the accusation was so minor, so low on the list of priorities that, quite honestly, whoever was responsible forgot.” They were at their car. Bennett shook Stephen's hand, then Grace's. “I know it's not much consolation,” he told her, “but whoever made that call probably believed that he or she was truly doing what was best for Jack. I doubt it was malicious.”

She nodded, shivering as the snow fell around them like consequences, those tiny fragile truths.

G
race pushed open the door to Jack's room. Immediately, she smelled the ammonialike odor of his urine. Light from the hallway glinted on the metal oxygen canister next to his bed. The CPAP machine that monitored the rate and flow of air whirred softly like a rewinding cassette tape. Grace leaned over Jack's crib, her palm against his back, and felt the dampness of his pajamas. At least the diuretic was working, but like everything connected to this illness it was a double-edged sword. He needed the diuretic to rid his lungs of the fluid that was backing up in them, but if he lost too much, his potassium levels would plummet, which in turn would raise his blood pressure.

She pulled off his soaked clothes, repositioning him away from the damp part of the sheet, which she covered with a cotton baby blanket. She slid one of Erin's old Sesame Street T-shirts over his head, easing it past the tangle of tubes. “No, Mama,” he whimpered, angry at being disturbed.

“Mama's just going to check your blood pressure, Jack,” Grace whispered, maneuvering the cuff over his arm. He began to cry, and she shushed him, stroking his damp hair. “It's okay. Mama's almost done.” Across the room, the red numbers on his pulse oximeter flashed his heartrate and oxygen intake. His blood pressure was borderline. She'd check it again in a little bit. “I love you,” she whispered. Jack stopped sucking on his pacifier to mumble, “Wuv too, Mama,” and she understood again the sheer impossibility that she could ever harm him. Tears burned her eyes as she felt her lips shape the word, and then the phrase,
Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy.
The sound was like the snow falling outside, melting as soon as it touched anything substantial. It meant nothing next to her love for this child. Nothing.

Downstairs, the house felt chilly. She pulled the sash of her robe tight as if to somehow hold her fear inside.

Grace sat at the computer, waiting for it to connect to the internet. Her desk was covered with unread medical articles, one of Jack's Matchbox cars, a half-naked Barbie, a leatherbound edition of
Gray's Anatomy of the Human Body,
one of the few books she had read, beginning to end, purely for pleasure.

Even as a child, she had never liked stories as much as facts, regardless of how odd or fantastic those facts were.
The longest distance ever walked by hand: 870 miles. From Vienna to Paris; 1900. It took fifty-five days of ten-hour stints. The smallest church: located in Málaga, Spain, and measuring 2.1 square feet. On special occasions when Mass is held, there is room for only one person to pray in it at a time
. Her favorite book had been
Wonders of Nature: A Child's First Book About Our Wonderful World,
as if a part of her had always understood, even when she couldn't have been more than five or six, that nothing in her life would ever be as certain as those simple statements printed in bold ink:
The sun is 93 million miles from the earth. Sunlight takes eight minutes and twenty seconds to reach us. Snowflakes have six sides. A raindrop is shaped more like a doughnut than a pear
.

In high school, she excelled in science, but brought home Cs in English and history. It was her father who gave her the leather-bound edition of
Gray's Anatomy
for her sixteenth birthday. She was fascinated by it, the human body like a vast and foreign landscape with its intercoastal veins, Haversian Canal and Capsule of Tenon. Hensen's stripe, Cartilage of Wrisberg, Jacob's membrane.

Now, Grace tucked her feet onto the rung of the ladder-back chair and began typing. Munchausen's would be no different from any other disease, she told herself. There had to be causes and symptoms and treatments. Case studies and research. Etiology. Prevalence.

Facts, as unbreakable as stone.

She moved the cursor down the screen, the clicking of the mouse the only occasional sound. She scanned the sites: an investigator specializing in Munchausen by Proxy cases, the International Munchausen by Proxy Network, National Center for the Prosecution of Child Abusers, the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Goosebumps rose on her arm. She hadn't seen this one before.

The site contained a “profile” of the typical Munchausen mother. Grace read it quickly, then again, slowly.
“Mother-perpetrator ‘doctor shops' until given attention she is desperate to receive; consequently, child-victim has often been to numerous care-givers…”

She heard again Anju's words:
Why, in God's name, would you want to put him through that, Grace?
And Jenn's:
Oh, Grace, are you sure?
And her own, shouted amid sobs to Stephen the night they returned from Hopkins:
I don't care about
quality
of life! I want
quantity
, Goddamnit! I want him to live!

Mother-perpetrator.

Child-victim.

It took a moment for the phrases to register. Was this how she and Jack had been described in that Child Protective Services report that Mandy had supposedly seen?
Mother-perpetrator
.
Child-victim
. The words were like thieves, stealing into her life without her knowing it, taking everything of value.

“Mother-perpetrator is willing to have child undergo numerous procedures and tests that often come back normal.”

Oh, Grace are you sure?

Why in God's name would you even consider…

“Mother-perpetrator is medically knowledgeable and typically has a background in medicine.”

You're so wrapped up in the medical stuff.

“Mother-perpetrator is unusually friendly with hospital staff and other parents of sick children.”

“Father is typically absent during the child-victim's hospitalizations.”

“Child-victim's disease is often described as rare and multisymptomed.”

She sat back, holding her palm over her mouth. She fit the profile. She tried to let that thought settle. It was like trying to balance a bowling ball on a pin. She fit the profile. But it didn't make sense. Because Jack's disease was rare? Because she,
not
Stephen, stayed with Jack in the hospital? Because she had a medical background? Had “doctor-shopped,” when there wasn't a diagnosis? She thought again of all those letters she had sent to various experts, asking for help.

“What was I supposed to do?” Her voice sounded scratchy and out of place in the silence. She heard the furnace kick in, the rush of warm air from the heating vents fluttering the Christmas cards pinned to the bulletin board above her computer. Light caught in the metallic red letters of the “Season's Greetings” on one card. She glanced at it, her fingers stilled on the keyboard. She thought of robins, of red-winged blackbirds, of Noah.

 

It wasn't until March that they made love for the first time. She was a wreck the entire drive there, her turtleneck drenched with sweat beneath her sweater, her legs trembling. She must have applied her lipstick a dozen times in the rearview mirror. And then she was knocking on the door of his condo, and he was there, enveloping her in his arms, whispering into her hair, “Oh, thank God. I was afraid you would change your mind.”

His mouth was on hers then, and her hands were in his hair and he was holding the back of her head, then lifting her off her feet, kicking the door closed behind him, carrying her inside. His hands were on her shoulders then, her hip bones, and it felt as if he were touching every part of her simultaneously, her nerve endings ringing, her entire body like a bell vibrating beneath his touch.

In his bedroom doorway, he lifted her sweater and turtleneck over her head and let them fall to the floor, as he led her to the bed. They didn't speak, didn't stop looking at each other. She lay down, still wearing her jeans and socks, and he knelt next to her, pinning her arms over her head, the sunlight falling across her like a crocheted blanket. He brushed his free hand down her arm, trailed his fingers over and around her breasts. And then, still pinning her arms, refusing to let her touch him—“Not yet,” he whispered—he leaned over her, kissed her forehead as gently as she kissed her children's. And then her mouth and her chin and the place where her heart pulsed at her throat. With his tongue, he drew a slow line down her middle, cut her open, until he reached the hollow between her hip bones, just above the top of her low-rise jeans. “I want to taste every inch of you,” he said, looking up. And then he rolled over next to her, pulling her with him so that she was lying on him now, her hair in his eyes and his mouth, his fingers brushing it away as he told her, “You are so beautiful, Grace. I had no idea you were this beautiful.”

Later, after she came again and again, her entire body trembling with the force of it so that it felt almost as if she were sobbing, he'd rocked her in his arms and blown tiny breaths against her neck and her throat, cooling her off. And then she
was
sobbing for real, and when he asked what was wrong, she said, “Oh Noah, I haven't been this happy in so long.”

 

Oh Noah
, she thought now, but there was no thought after that. He was so far away. He had no idea what was happening in her life.

The acronym M.A.M.A. appeared now on the computer screen:
Mothers Against Munchausen Allegations
. The house felt cold again, and she held her robe closed at her chest with one hand as she clicked the computer mouse onto the site with her other.

A color photograph filled the screen. A blond woman was laughing and nuzzling her nose into her child's chubby face. The baby was laughing as well, a huge toothless grin.
[…] died a horrifying death…a false Munchausen by Proxy diagnosis…

Grace scrolled down to the next page, to the Sears-type portrait of a brown-haired woman and her three preschool-age children, dressed in matching pale blue polo shirts and khakis. They looked happy. Normal.
Kelsey, Davis, and Bethany, confiscated from home by Broward County, Florida, Child Protective Services, July 13, 2000; 166 days.

Her hands were shaking. Another photo of a young couple holding a blond girl with long braids. “Samantha Nicole, never forget that we love you. We are fighting every day to get you home.”
Taken by Lancaster County, California, Department of Child and Family Services, March 10, 2000; 287 days
.

She kept looking. Names, locations, and the number of days since they'd been taken. Not weeks or months. A refusal, Grace understood, to package the number into something smaller, less horrific, more manageable. Or maybe an inability.

Ryan Michael, taken by Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, Department of Social Services, January 21, 2000; 339 days.

Natasha, taken by Kenosha County, Wisconsin, Child Protective Services; 38 days.

Ashley and Megan, abducted by Jacksonville, Florida, Department of Child Protective Services; 104 days.

Alexander, Bucks County, Pennsylvania; 19 days.

Trevor, Henrico County, Virginia; 43 days
.

Tucker, Jason, Anna. Ohio, New Jersey, Texas. Taken. Confiscated. Abducted.

My God, what had happened to Marie Noe?
That
was Munchausen's. Ten children in one family dying mysteriously. But this? These were normal families. Families with kids who were sick, maybe; families with mothers who were overprotective maybe; but not,
not
families who deserved to have their children taken, confiscated,
abducted.

Grace flicked off the screen. A horrible panicked cry was coming from her mouth. And then she was standing, moving through the darkened kitchen, bumping her hip on the edge of the table, racing up the stairs.

She shook Stephen awake. She couldn't stop the horrible jerking sounds coming from her mouth. Stephen woke immediately. “What?” Then he was out of bed, racing into Jack's room before she could explain that Jack was okay. For some reason, this made her cry harder, painful sobs that felt as if they were being wrenched from deep inside her. She lay on her side, face in the pillow, rocking herself back and forth. How,
how,
could this have happened? How could she have let it? She would lose her children.