The Life You Longed For (18 page)

“Grace, would you just stop for a minute?”

“Why? So I'll calm down? I don't want to calm down!” She was crying now and she wanted to hit him, hurt him, though she wasn't sure why. “I feel like I was
raped
, like everything—No! Don't touch me or I swear to God I'll scream—
everything
good about me has been taken. I'm afraid to make a joke, I'm afraid to be friendly, I'm afraid to go into a doctor's office with my child—
my child
, Stephen, and—and—” She sank onto the bed, head in her hands, shoulders heaving. “I don't even know who did this or why,” she sobbed. How could she explain? Her entire life felt expunged.
She
felt expunged. Unsubstantiated. “I don't even know who I am,” she cried.

“Oh, Grace,” Stephen said. “I had no idea.”

She looked at him incredulously. “My
name
is in that file,” she cried. “
My. Name.
It will always be in that file.”

S
he felt as if she had some sort of virus or infection that January.All she wanted to do was sleep, though she never could. She shuffled bleary-eyed through the mornings, feeling almost drugged. Standing in the shower exhausted her. Getting dressed. Making a phone call, trying to summon the energy to talk. She'd lie on the couch watching
Blue's Clues
with Jack, the two of them snuggled under a blanket she'd dragged down from her unmade bed. She hadn't heard from Noah, except for one e-mail: “Are you okay?”

“No,” she wrote back. She wanted to tell him that she missed him, that she loved him, but she was afraid of this too. She'd read on the Mothers Against Munchausen's Accusation Web site of a woman who had had her computer confiscated, her history of searching out medical sites used against her in court.

When Noah responded with “Can I see you?” she wrote “No” again, though she sat at the computer for over an hour, fingers hovering just above the keyboard, wanting to say so much more, wanting to soften the
no
into
not yet
or
not now
or
this is a busy time
or something to diminish the starkness of that no, which, when isolated in the white space of the computer screen, seemed so much darker and bigger than it really was.

The worst days that January were the sunny ones, rectangles of yellow light falling in geometric patterns across the walls and carpets and floors. Lying in bed while Jack took his nap, she'd stare numbly at the wash of sunlight on the white ceiling, and she would feel almost accosted by the brightness, the beauty. It made her feel worse.

She could only take in things slowly. The smallest choices—what to wear, what to make for dinner—suddenly seemed overwhelming. She found herself misreading words: the
insulated
cardboard sleeve on her Starbucks coffee she read as
insulted
. Instead of
sacred
statues on an advertisement for an exhibit at the museum
,
she saw
scared
statues. In a magazine profile of some British celebrity that she read while waiting for Erin at the dentist's—the phrase “she stepped from the
lift”
translated into “she stepped from the
life
,” which was, of course, how Grace felt, as if she had stepped from her own life into emptiness, into air, with nothing to hold her up, nothing to keep her from falling.

She did better on the cold, gray days when trees lacerated the drenched sky, and the wind was howling and furious. It was how she felt. She mentioned this in passing on the phone to Kempley, who teased, “Ahh, the weather of witches—fair is foul and foul is fair. I'm surprised
that's
not in the profile.”

“It probably is,” Grace laughed. The sound of her own merriment took her by surprise. “Warning number thirteen: Mother-perpetrator takes strange delight in inclement weather.”

“Mother-perpetrator owns numerous raincoats,” Kempley added.

They were both laughing now. “Mother-perpetrator refuses to leave umbrella alone.”

“Mother-perpetrator appears overly focused on weather channel!”

“Oh God, mother-perpetrator secretly lusts after—” Grace couldn't finish. “She secretly lusts after the—”

“—weatherman!” Kempley hooted. And then, “Oh sweetie, it's so good to hear you laughing again.”

After she hung up, though, Grace sat on the sofa for a long time, the phone in her lap.
Mother displays inappropriate sense of humor
. The sunlight falling through the sliding glass door held no warmth. The world felt sharp, full of angles: the silver blades of leaves and spears of ice, the serrated edges of the trees. Everything, even laughter, felt dangerous now.

Only when she was with her kids did the murmur of fear just beneath the surface of her life grow quiet. Ordinary moments like perfect seashells, containing the sound of the ocean inside, evidence of the world as it once was: rubbing cherry Vaseline on Jack's perpetually chapped lips, teaching him his ABCs or singing nursery rhymes with him. Sitting at the kitchen table before school, a sleepy Erin standing before her as Grace tried to coax his flyaway hair into a ponytail or barrettes or a god-awful Barbie hairband that, despite Grace's best efforts, made Erin's ears stick straight out. Later, Grace and Jack would wait in the car in front of St. Joan's, competing to see who would spot Erin first. “I see her, I see her!” Jack would yell, and there she was, dashing across the front lawn, disheveled and happy, a clump of papers and art projects in one hand, book bag in the other. Or reheating Max's dinner after an away game and sitting with him while he ate, listening to him talk. “Oh, man, Brian iced this guy so bad…. You should have seen this goalie from Pemberton…. Coach Harper thinks I should try out for the A league.”

 

Grace stood in the hallway adjacent to Noah's kitchen and pried the
Selected Journals and Other Writings
by John James Audubon from the bookshelf. “Is this any good?” She was wearing his robe; they were making breakfast despite the fact that it was already one in the afternoon. She'd hurried down after dropping Erin off at school. Jack was with her mom. She needed to be home in time for his nap

Noah looked up from the sizzle of scrapple in the frying pan to the book she was holding. “Jesus, don't read that unless you want a cure for insomnia.”

“I thought you loved Audubon.”

“Not that much, I don't.”

She slid the book back into the shelf. “Okay, then, what should I read? Recommend something. I want to understand what you do.”

 

He had been right about the journals, she thought now, her eyes heavy as she glanced up from the yellowed page.

Thursday, Dec. 28, 1820: Saw some mockingbirds and was assured that they remained during the winter here…

Monday, January 29 1821: Drawing all day the brown pelican, collecting my earnings, purchased a crate of Queensware for my Beloved wife.

It was already after two a.m., and she was bleary-eyed with exhaustion. Which was why, on a whim, she had borrowed the
Selected Journals and Other Writings
from the library. A cure for insomnia.

The pages smelled of cigarette smoke from whoever had borrowed the book before her. Someone else desperate for sleep, maybe? She read, sitting in bed, the book propped against her knees. Stephen lay asleep beside her, a pillow over his face because of the light. Sometimes she took the book with her into the bathtub, hoping the heat of the hot water would help her to sleep. The pages swelled with moisture. She tried to picture Audubon, thirty-five years old, leaving his wife and sons for months at a time in his efforts to study and sketch every known and unknown species of bird in North America. Mostly, she thought of Noah, walking the trails at Higbie's Beach before the sun had fully risen, binoculars around his neck, searching for a species he might never find. His breath white in the frigid air. The sun a faint heartbeat beneath the smudged ribs of sky.

None of it worked. No matter how drowsy she became, no matter how many times she dozed off only to be woken by the sudden weight of the book on her chest, as soon as she turned off the light, she was wide awake again, her thoughts swooping through her mind like dark birds.
Why had she been accused?
And,
What if it happened again?
And always, always,
Who?

 

She stopped e-mailing the women in the mitochondrial support group, afraid to seem “overly focused” on Jack's disease.
Child's illness becomes mother-perpetrator's claim to fame
. But she also didn't have the heart, the energy. To continue researching new procedures or protocols, to continue fighting for Jack, was to maybe only put him further at risk:
mother-perpetrator is extremely willing to put child through endless tests, procedures, and protocols
. She heard from Kempley that Anne Marie and Bryn were still waiting for a heart at Hopkins; Lydia's son had died; Marta was pregnant again even though both of her boys already had mitochondrial disease. “You have to wonder about someone like that,” Kempley commented. “How anyone can choose to bring a child into the world, knowing it's got a twenty-five percent chance of having a potentially fatal illness. I mean, you want to talk about abuse.”

Grace didn't respond. It was unfathomable to imagine never having had Jack in her life, mitochondrial disease or not.

 

“Even Mr. Godfrey never heard of it,” Max said between mouthfuls of pasta. He was talking about mitochondrial disease. His science class had just begun studying the structure of the cells. “I'm doing a report on it.”

Grace felt her smile turn rubbery. “Was that your idea?”

Max nodded without looking up from his plate. He was hunched low, chin to the table's edge, shoveling his food right into his mouth rather than actually taking the time to lift the fork.

“Sit up and take a breath, would you, Max?” Stephen said. “Your mother asked you a question.”

Max rolled his eyes and set down his fork. “Well,
duh
,” he said, “since I just told you that Mr. Godfrey didn't have a clue, it had to be my idea.”

“I'd like to read the report before you turn it in, if that's okay,” Grace interrupted.

Stephen glanced at her, eyebrows raised.

“What?” Grace snapped.

“Nothing,” Stephen sighed.

“No, not nothing.” She pushed her plate away and sat back, “Why do you not get this, Stephen? I don't want just anyone having access—”

“Nobody even cares,” Max said.

“
I
care.” She glared at Stephen. “And I am so sick of you not taking this seriously.” She stood and carried her dishes to the sink, then headed upstairs.

“Why you going, Mama?” Jack called after her.

Grace was already halfway up the stairs. “I'm taking a bath,” she called.

“Oh, for crying out loud,” Stephen said.

“Jeez, what's wrong with her?” she heard Max ask.

Sunday, February 25, 1821: Killed some green-backed white-bellied swallows,
Hirondo veridis
—extremely fat, the gizzards completely filled with the remains of winged insects—could not perceive any outward difference between the sexes.

She glanced up from the book, exhausted. Four a.m.

 

Grace eyed the clock over the aquarium, then resolutely returned to the magazine she was paging through. Jack sat on Stephen's lap on a yellow beanbag chair staring at the
Teletubbies
on TV, his mouth open as he breathed heavily, his astronaut backpack with the oxygen canister on the floor next to him. Anju was already thirty minutes late. In the back of Grace's mind, a tiny spasm of fear.

She stared at the glossy pages of the magazine.
Self
. She'd had to force herself to read this instead of the
American Journal of Cardiology
that sat on the coffee table.
Mother-perpetrator overly focused on medical/technical aspects of child's disease.

“Pamper yourself!” she read now in elegant red script.

“Scatter evergreens across your table for a festive postholiday centerpiece.”

“Pull on your coziest sweater and sip hot cider in front of a fire.”

“Make oatmeal brûlée: sprinkle sugar over oatmeal and broil until brown!”

She looked up, her face warm, anger seeping into her throat. Is
this
what she was supposed to do? Go shopping? Create centerpieces?
This
was how she was supposed to act, what she was supposed to care about? “Buy a killer pair of calf-length boots…”

Defeated, she turned the page.