The Life You Longed For (11 page)

“Okay, you're right.” He grinned. “Not
because
exactly, but you
were
a motivating factor.”

She didn't know what to say. They walked in silence, hands in the pockets of their sweatshirts, the sun only a faint pulse against the womb of autumn sky. An older couple, their pants rolled above their ankles, crouched at the water's edge, searching for shells or sea glass or maybe the flint arrowheads left centuries before by the Lenni Lenape Indians, who had once inhabited the coast. Or, who knew, perhaps they were hunting for Captain Kidd's treasure cache, rumored to have been buried at Cape May Point back in 1699. She smiled sadly. So many people searching for lost artifacts from lives not their own.

As they were almost back to the observatory, she stopped. “You really knew I was here? All these years?”

“It wasn't a mystery, Grace. My parents and your grandparents are in the same church. You could have just as easily found out where I was.”
Except you didn't
. The words stayed unspoken.

She resumed walking, hands still in the pockets of her sweatshirt, following the glint of light on the rusted skeleton of the concrete bunker that was visible only at low tide. “So why didn't you ever try to contact me?”

“You were married, Grace. You had a child.”

“I still do.”

“It's different.”

“Why?”

“Because you found
me
.”

 

She turned off the water, leaving the bread pan to soak, and carried her coffee mug to the table. She pushed her shoulders up and swallowed a gulp of coffee. Why had she sent that e-mail? What had she imagined would happen? She tugged a dried leaf from the poinsettia in the center of the table. It had curled in on itself like a tiny fetus. She thought about what she would say to Noah the next time they spoke and felt a dull ache in her chest at the thought. And yet, there was also a tiny barely perceptible flicker of hope that maybe—and there was that word again,
maybe,
like a splash of red against gray, a cardinal or a robin flitting across a winter sky—
maybe
this would somehow work out okay,
maybe
Noah would be able to move on,
maybe
it had been enough to have had what they'd had these past eleven months.
Maybe
.

T
hey clinked spoons against their glasses of eggnog as Grace helped Jack ceremoniously set the last puzzle piece into place. “I did it,” he laughed. His voice was raspy, his face flushed from the effort, shiny with sweat.

“Of course, you did it,” Grace said. To Max, she asked, “Don't you want to eat something besides pumpkin bread?”

“Why?” He reached for another piece. “Why can't we have this all the time?”

“It wouldn't be special then.”

“Well, this is what I want for Christmas next year. Pumpkin bread every week.”

“No, no, no,” Stephen wailed, lowering his head to the coffee table in defeat. “
Please
tell me you are
not
already thinking about next Christmas.”

And then Erin handed out paper and pens for them to write their resolutions, which Stephen would keep until the following New Year's. Grace wanted to write what she had wanted to write for the past three years: I will keep Jack alive; I will not let him die. Instead, she wrote that she would learn about hockey and make pumpkin bread more often and spend more time with Erin. And she would mail in the Make-A-Wish forms that had been sitting untouched on the kitchen counter since early November because she couldn't bear to actually fill them out. It felt too much like acceptance, a giving in, a giving up. Jack's wish was to see a real rocket, so they would go to Cape Canaveral.

The best part of the night was reading their resolutions from the previous year. Max had resolved to keep his room clean and to be nicer to Erin. They blew their party horns at him, since he'd failed on both counts. Grace had resolved to not lose her temper so much, which sent Max into paroxysms of hysteria, and to be on time, which resulted in all of them blowing their horns at her and laughing. Stephen too had failed. He'd resolved to be home before seven at least three times a week and to lower his cholesterol. Only Erin, who had resolved to learn how to swim, and to ride a bike without training wheels, both of which she'd accomplished, had been successful. She beamed with pleasure, a large crooked smile, both of her front teeth missing. Jack's resolution, which Grace had helped him write, was that he get potty-trained and again, they were all laughing and blowing their horns in his face while he huffed and puffed on his, unsuccessfully trying to blow back and succeeding instead only in spitting on them.

“Gross!” Erin shrieked.

“You are disgusting!” Max laughed, wiping his hand with a napkin.

“Stop,” Grace laughed, “He is
not
disgusting, are you, Jack?” She nuzzled his neck, but he squirmed away.

“No, Mama, I
am
'gusting!” he protested.

By ten Erin and Jack had fallen asleep on either end of the couch. Stephen and Max played video games. Grace curled up in the Queen Anne armchair and watched. Her husband. Her giant boy, his hands bigger than his father's. Her daughter. Her baby. She let her gaze rest on Jack, his mouth open in sleep as he struggled for breath.

All autumn, she had prayed, wished, hoped, bargained: Let Jack have a good holiday. Don't let him be in the hospital. Let us have this much together. But as she listened to the wheeze of his breath and the steady hum of the oxygen pump, she felt her own heart seize with regret. Now that her wish had been granted, it terrified her. My God, why hadn't she asked for more?

 

At midnight, they woke Jack and Erin and stood on the front porch. Grace held Jack to her chest, inside her coat. Max and Erin raced around the yard in their PJs and jackets and boots, making snow angels and shouting. Echoes of
Happy New Year!
echoed from across the emptied lake where someone was having a party. Stephen squeezed Grace's hand before letting go to usher Max and Erin inside.

It was 2001.

 

Jack was asleep as she carried him to his room. She didn't turn on the lights, but stood for a minute in the doorway, locating herself in the darkness—the painting of the Cow Jumping Over the Moon on the wall, the shape of her robe on his rocking chair, her coffee mug from morning atop his dresser. Jack didn't wake even when she laid him in the crib. She laid her hand on his back, feeling the rise and fall of his ribs.

Light from the hallway spilled onto the glossy book jacket of
Happy Birthday, Moon
that was lying on the floor where he'd probably tossed it that morning. It was a story about a bear that talks to the moon, believing the echo of his own voice is actually the moon responding to him. “Tomorrow is my birthday!” the bear shouts, and the moon echoes, “Tomorrow is my birthday!” The little bear is delighted and tells the moon, “That means we were born on the same day!” and of course, the moon answers, “That means we were born on the same day!”

Sometimes, when Grace read this story to Jack, she'd lift him to the window and he'd call to the moon and Erin would stand in the hallway and pretend to be the moon, echoing him. Sometimes too they'd hear him talking to the moon himself after they'd tucked him in. “You going sleep, moon?” he'd ask. And then, “Okay, me too.”

Outside, the tree branches tapped a Morse code against the house. She moved to the window for a minute, hugging herself against the chill. Snow shimmered, luminescent beneath the full moon, the stars like ornaments in the tops of the trees. Scientists now believed that the moon had been formed when another planet sideswiped the Earth, dislodging huge chunks of its crust, which flew off into space and became the moon. She thought of Noah, of how in so many ways he was this to her, the part of her life that had broken off—the life not lived. Maybe those unused pieces of your past become their own entity. A moon. Another planet. A place without gravity or sound. A place without wind or rain or weathering or erosion, so that even the smallest surface markings, each one a kind of memory, stayed in place for years. And yet always it was there, the moon—the past—waxing and waning, exerting its force over the tides of the life you lived now.

She sighed wearily and turned to leave, leaning into Jack's crib once more to plant a kiss on his forehead, to inhale his warm baby scent. As she turned to go, she retrieved
Happy Birthday, Moon
from the floor and set it on the crowded bookshelf with his other moon books:
Owl Moon
and
When the Moon Broke Away
and
Cosmo's Moon
and
Papa, Please Get the Moon for Me.
In most stories about the moon, someone was always trying to catch it, to pull it back down to Earth: the man who sees it reflected in the water and tries to pick it up, only to have it slip from his grasp just when he thought he'd had it.

O
utside the St. Louis courtroom, gray ice the same color as the gray sky floats on the Mississippi. On side streets automobiles sit abandoned along curbs, and heaps of dirty snow line the salt-crusted roads. Downtown, exhaust from cars and buses hangs in the frozen air. There have been days without sun, days with the temperature never climbing above freezing. In gas stations and convenience stores, shelves that are usually stocked with antifreeze lie empty. People keep extra bottles in the trunks of their cars.

“Don't try to understand why this mother poisoned her child by feeding him from a baby bottle laced with antifreeze,” the prosecutor tells the jury. “The point is that she did it. Only she could have done it. Only she would have done it.”

A seemingly healthy child, a five-month-old boy, died suddenly the summer before. Ethylene glycol, the active ingredient in antifreeze, was found in his blood. A bottle of antifreeze was found in his parents' garage.

“You might not want to believe that a mother could do such a thing,” the prosecutor says, “but there's a name for this: Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy. It has been scientifically proven. It has been researched by some of the best physicians. The findings have been published in the world's top medical journals.” Perhaps the prosecutor slaps some of these journals onto the table before him:
The Lancet, The New England Journal of Medicine, The Journal of Pediatric Psychology
. And then, he looks up and stares hard at the jury. “Don't speculate that this five-month-old child died of natural causes,” he says. “You might as well speculate that some little man from Mars came down and shot him full of a mysterious bacteria.”

Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy
. Does the child's mother feel how those words move across the lower edge of her life like subtitles in a foreign film? Those words that are only an approximation, not even accurate? But if those words are all the jurors have, all her own husband sometimes has—she knows
this—to translate what is unfathomable—their child has died and there seems to be no reason—into that which is comprehensible.
Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy
. Could she have done it, she wonders, could she have put the antifreeze in his bottle, and she simply can't remember?
Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy
. In the absence of other reasons, it becomes easier to believe. And why not? Isn't it less terrifying to believe in a rare disorder afflicting otherwise normal mothers than to believe the truth: A child from one of the richest, most medically advanced countries in the world can die without apparent cause, and there is nothing
, nothing
, any of our science or medicine or money can do?

 

Belief, psychologists now say, like our ability to speak or use tools, is a product of evolution, a biological necessity, crucial to our survival. Without belief in something beyond what we can know, the world becomes emptied of meaning. And so we construct these shimmering nets of words—these stories, these beliefs—and we fill the world with them the way ancient mapmakers once filled the vast terra incognita with angels and monsters. Think of Hartman Schedel's 1493 world map depicting lands inhabited by men whose feet pointed backwards and whose ears were as large as wings. In the accompanying text, Schedel described a country named India, where men had the heads of dogs and spoke by barking; and a place called Libya, inhabited by people who were male on one side of their body, female on the other. Think too of Johans Ruysch's 1507 map locating a pair of islands off the coast of Newfoundland on which evil spirits were said to dwell. The 1652 drawing of Africa that contains intricate diagrams of mountains, rivers, and lakes, none of which existed. Or Peter Apian's sixteenth-century map of the world drawn in the shape of a heart.

What is a map, after all, but a projection of what we both hope for and fear?

And what is a belief but a map of how we want the world to look?

No wonder that to lose one's belief is to lose one's direction.

And no wonder that we believe most fervently when we are most lost, our beliefs, like water, conforming to the shape of whatever absence we struggle to fill. And when a child dies and there seems to be no reason, that absence swells into something so vast and terrifying that we must fill it with something—anything—no matter how illogical or far-fetched. Think of the Salem Witch Trials, which began with the unexplained illness of a child. Think of that courtroom in
St. Louis three hundred years later, of that mother who is being accused of murder because her child has died and there seems to be no cause.

 

It takes the jury only ten hours to find the child's mother guilty of first-degree murder. She will spend her life in prison without parole. The courtroom fills with the sound of her husband's sobbing. His wife is led away. She is pregnant with their second child, though neither she nor her husband is yet aware of this. It is January 31, 1991, the anniversary of the day seventeen years before when the Child Abuse Protection and Treatment Act was passed into law. Perhaps the prosecutor mentioned this in his closing argument.

Beyond the courthouse windows, the Missouri sky is empty.

 

Seven months later, still in prison, the woman gives birth to her second child. Another boy, seemingly healthy. Within months, however, he is diagnosed with a rare genetic disease affecting only one in 48,000 children. Methylamalonic academia: it causes a buildup of dangerous acids in the child's body, one of which could, in a routine lab test, be mistaken for ethylene glycol, the active ingredient in antifreeze.