The Life You Longed For (36 page)

S
he was just finishing putting up the last of the Christmas garlands along the bookcases in the family room when she heard the rumble of the garage door. Stephen and his brother had been out Christmas shopping for the women.

“So?” Grace asked as Stephen came in through the laundry room. “What's the deal with your brother and Mandy?” They hadn't seen Jeff since before Thanksgiving, which he'd spent with Mandy's family.

“He bought her a ring,” Stephen said, taking off his coat and glancing around the room. “It looks great in here, honey.” He stood in front of the fireplace, holding his hands to the flames.

“A ring? As in diamond? Are you kidding me?” Grace climbed down from the stepladder. “What did you—God, she's so young.”

“Yeah, but it sounds like they're both really happy.” He shook his head. “The way he talks about her…hell, the way he talks about himself. I've never heard him sound this upbeat and excited. They want to start having kids right away.”

Grace sat on the couch behind him, warmth from the fire spreading over her legs. Stephen glanced at her over his shoulder. “Actually, there's more.”

“Oh for the love of God, Stephen. You are
not
going to tell me she's…”

“Pregnant? No.” Stephen came over to the couch and sat next to Grace “I wish it was that.” He regarded her with a look in his eyes that she couldn't quite read. Worry mostly, and she felt the muscles in her stomach knot in fear.

“No.” She started to push herself up. “No,” she repeated. “Not again. There's nothing—”

“Wait a minute.” He tugged at her to sit back down. “It's not another accusation.”

“Then what?” Her voice was shrill.

He exhaled a long breath. “Mandy was the one who reported you the first time, Grace, the March before we found out.”

She shrugged his arm from hers.
“What?”

“Apparently it was something
I
said about the hospital being your social life. It was when Jack was in for those two weeks, and I can't remember the context. I imagine I was just trying to joke, play down the seriousness of what was happening to Jack, but shit.” He leaned forward, elbows to knees, raking his hands through his hair. “I guess CPS took the accusation more seriously because she's a social worker.” He looked at her, his eyes bleak. “I don't know what to say.”

“It's not your fault.” She was surprised by how calm she sounded. Or was she numb? “I just—Jeff's marrying her?” Where was the rage she'd been feeling for the past few months every time she thought about this, every time she went on the M.A.M.A. site and read another story of another accused woman?

“He doesn't want to lose us, Grace.” He looked at her. It was a question.

It would have been easier had it been Bartholomew. Doctors against powerless mothers who dared to question them. A tidier plot. Clear-cut good guys and bad guys. But Mandy was an inexperienced girl who had overreacted, as Kate perhaps had. And their intentions hadn't been bad. They thought they were doing their jobs. “He's not going to lose us,” she said slowly. The words felt automatic, without meaning. What was she supposed to say? And yet, what other answer was there? Jeff was his brother. And they'd lost enough.

“I guess she realized at some point that she was off base, and she tried to retract it, but she was so involved with Jeff that everyone just assumed she was backing off because of him. It's why she had Jeff warn us about the accusation. Apparently she even talked to the judge on our behalf.”

Grace stood and walked to the fire, the heat searing. She'd hung Jack's stocking, of course, and she idly reached up and touched its toe. She felt emptied out, the rage gone, leaked out of her like air from a balloon. It was over. There wasn't hate or regret or anything except a dull ache of sadness that a mistake so tiny, a
misunderstanding
, as Bennett had said all along, could have caused this much damage.

“How long has your brother known about this?” Grace asked without turning around to look at him. As soon as she said the words though, she realized it didn't matter. She realized she didn't care. She realized that it was over. Finally.

G
race sat at the kitchen table with a stack of mail and a plate of Christmas cookies. Stephen and Max were shoveling the front porch, and Erin had just come in from making a snowman, her nose bright red. Grace set a cup of hot chocolate in front of her. “Do you want to help me open these?” She gestured to the stack of Christmas cards.”

“Maybe after I get warm.” Her teeth were chattering. “Do you think Daddy can make us a fire when he comes in?”

“I think Daddy would love to make us a fire,” Grace said, as she slid her fingernail beneath the seal of the first envelope.

It was a card with a picture of a child in a manger. “Peace on Earth,” it read in pale blue script. The room went still. How was it possible that people—her
friends—
didn't understand that cards like these with their pictures of infants, even if that infant was supposed to represent Jesus, shredded her to pieces inside? She forced herself to look up, but it was like hearing her name called in a strange place and glancing around to find nothing and no one she recognized. It seemed impossible that this was the same kitchen where a year ago she had stood making salads with Jack while he sat on the counter and helped her rip the lettuce. It was his job to turn the handle on the salad spinner, and she'd pretend the lettuce was inside screaming for him to stop. “We're getting dizzy! Cut it out!” she'd say in a squeaky voice, and Jack would laugh, and turn the handle harder.

She set the Christmas card down. Outside, a gust of wind tore a branch from its tree. What was appropriate when a child had died? she wondered numbly as she regarded the stack of envelopes. Did you still send pictures of your own kids dressed in their matching Christmas outfits? Did you still include the yearly newsletter with its breezy accounts of the family's trials and tribulations of the past twelve months?

She glanced down again, wanting to lay her head on her arms as Erin was doing. Her hands, loosely cupped around the steaming coffee mug, were dry, old-looking. The entire surface of a person's skin was replaced every month. An idle thought, but even this seized her with a grief so sharp that she nearly gasped. This too was gone, she realized, the part of her that literally, physically had held Jack's hand or slapped him five or combed his sweaty hair from his forehead the last time she saw him.

She recognized her grandfather's spidery scrawl on one of the envelopes and pulled his card from the pile. For fifty-nine years, sending the Christmas cards had been Grace's grandmother's job. She kept track of addresses on index cards that she stored in a tin recipe box and that she brought with her when she and Grace's grandfather flew to New Jersey from Michigan for Thanksgiving. Her grandmother had been so proud of how many cards she sent out—nearly four hundred one year; of how she always wrote a personal note on each one. She had died of lung cancer two years ago. After fifty-nine years of marriage.

“We love you, honey, and are glad you and Stephen have worked things out,” her grandfather had written in his loose script. The
we
caught in her throat. She stared at his carefully printed letters, their bottoms flattened by the ruler he used to keep the lines straight. “
We
know our little Jack is watching over you.”

She gripped her coffee mug with both hands, heat searing the tips of her fingers. After Jack died, Grace's grandfather wrote her a letter and told her that he still talked to her grandmother every day. He meant this as comfort, but it seemed only sad. It reminded Grace of the time she and Stephen came home from a party to find a message on their answering machine, a man sobbing, “Please, oh God, please call me, Wendy.” Obviously, the man had dialed the wrong number and was too distraught to know it, and there was no way to let him know that whoever Wendy was, she hadn't gotten his message.

Funny, how that man's voice became a part of her history with Stephen. They wondered about him on and off for years. Out having a drink, one or the other would ask, “Do you think Wendy ever called?” They tried to imagine what had so devastated the man. What had he done to her or she to him? Eventually, mentioning Wendy evolved into a sort of shorthand way to describe being ignored or worse, maybe, made invisible. Stephen once used it to explain the months shortly before his dad left his mother. “It was a total Wendy.” Or if one of them was lost in thought, the other might call out, “Wendy, oh Wendy, are you there?” Grace had said it last winter. “You're a goddamned Wendy,” she sobbed. “I am begging you to listen to me, and you don't have a clue!”

Outside, the world looked swollen with snow, the white edges of the trees disappearing into the white sky. Jenn had told her once about a patient she'd cared for who had damaged his right visual cortex in a bike accident, which meant that he couldn't see the entire left half of the world. He saw trees with branches on only one side of a trunk, arm chairs with one arm, only one half of a person's face. It was how Grace felt with Jack gone from her life: part of the world had disappeared.

She picked up her grandfather's card again, silvery trees etched against a white background. He had been a nightclub singer, dreaming of making it big like Perry Como or Bing Crosby; her grandmother was a dancer, a red-haired Ginger Rogers. Both of them were nineteen years old when they met in a dance hall in Minneapolis on an ordinary Wednesday night in 1940. He'd been filling in for a buddy who had come down with the flu or he wouldn't have been there at all, would never have met Grace's grandmother. A week later they married.
One week.
And they stayed that way, still holding hands in their seventies, going dancing every Thursday night. He still called her “sweetheart,” whistled a catcall when she entered a room “dressed to the nines.” She still blushed: “Oh, Wayne, for goodness sake.” Fifty-nine years. After
one
week. Destiny. Fate. Words she had used about Noah.

Her grandfather quit singing to raise his family. He became a salesman for General Mills. Her grandmother gave up her dancing to become a wife and mother. And not once ever asked, as far as Grace knew, if that had really been enough. Everyone assumed it was, herself included, until Noah returned to her life and she began wondering about her own decisions, and about the shadow life of choices
not
made that trailed behind the life she lived now. Had there really been no resentment in her grandparents' lives, she wondered, no regret, no yearning for the lives and the dreams they had relinquished? Grace held her coffee mug to her chin and blew on it. Tears scalded her eyes. Was it really so simple to pack away the life not led like a wedding dress or a once-worn ball gown, beautiful but so impractical?

Erin, still lying on her arm, was lazily filling in the lines of a coloring book. “You getting tired, lovey?” Grace asked, tugging lightly on one of Erin's braids. Erin nodded without lifting her head. In the bright kitchen light, her dark braids held a reddish cast, as Jack's hair had, inherited from Grace's grandmother. Grace smiled, remembering the two-thousand-page
Mendelian Inheritance in Man
she and her classmates had taken turns lugging to Advanced Genetics. The book listed every known heritable characteristic: the ability to move one's ears; to curl one's tongue. The inability to smell freesia flowers or cyanide. Red hair; blue eyes. And diseases: Klinefelter Syndrome, Gaucher disease, mitochondrial myopathy. It all seemed so random, though, the traits that survived, the ones that didn't. Why red hair? Why mitochondrial disease? And why
not
something like fidelity or perseverance? The ability to stay married for
fifty-nine
years. This, more than anything, was what Grace wanted now.

Erin had fallen asleep, her crayon slipping from her hand. Grace pushed back her chair and squatted next to her daughter. “Come on, lovey.” She stroked Erin's arm. “Let's go up, baby.” Erin groaned and turned her face away. Grace tried again, managing to tug her child into her arms so that she could lift her. She carried Erin to the couch, and tucked a wool blanket around her shoulders and feet.

She turned on the tree for when Erin awoke, then sat in the rocking chair by the sliding glass door that faced the lake. Her parents' house was just across it on the opposite side. The snow drifted lazily down. She imagined the sight of it would always bring her back to Jack, to the three Christmases they'd had together, stark against all the others she would have without him.

The smoke rising from someone's chimney looked like a double helix. She smiled. She could practically hear Max groaning and telling her, “You are
such
a geek, Mom.” Max from last year, maybe. This Max didn't laugh much. This Max took everything so seriously. And how could he not? The world as he knew it kept ending, over and over, and he blamed himself.

It was
his
bird report that brought Noah into her life, he apparently thought, which made it
his
fault that Jack died,
his
fault that his dad had left. And yes, it helped that Stephen was back, but they were still so wary, so aware of how fragile everything was. She wasn't sure when any of them would truly feel safe, when little things like Stephen being late to pick Erin up from Brownies or Grace taking one of them to the doctor for something utterly ordinary wouldn't throw them into a tailspin.

 

Grace hadn't realized that Max knew Noah was connected to the accusation until right before Thanksgiving when, cleaning out his desk, he found his report on Audubon. Grace was in bed reading and looked up to see him in the doorway, sobbing so violently his entire body was shuddering. “Oh, honey, what?” she had asked, and he handed her the report, something broken and horrible in his eyes. She had thought of the night Stephen had first walked into their bedroom after learning of the accusation from his brother, and she felt the same sense of foreboding and fear. She opened her arms to Max and he came to her as he hadn't since he was a little boy. “If it wasn't for me, none of this would have happened,” he choked, and then over and over, “I'm sorry, Mom, I'm sorry, I'm sorry,” even though she never stopped telling him, “No, sweetie, no, you have nothing to be sorry for,
nothing
.” He cried until his voice grew hoarse and he drifted off to sleep, and even then, in the midst of whatever dream he was in, he'd begin to whimper, tears leaking from his eyes. She lay awake for hours, stroking his hair, watching him, and whispering, “It's not your fault, Max. None of this is your fault.”

She herself had lain awake half the night, filled with loathing for herself, for what she'd done to her family, in the name of
destiny, fate.
The words
she'd
wanted to use. Grace had stared at her son, this giant boy, his eyelashes wet with tears, and knew that her affair with Noah hadn't been about destiny at all, but about desperation and a smallness of spirit and a bone-deep selfishness.

What kind of woman, what kind of
mother
, leaves her children—her dying child—on Christmas Eve?

On the couch, Erin stirred, kicking her blanket to the side. Grace leaned forward and tucked it back around her feet. She heard Max and Stephen in the garage, stomping the snow from their boots. She swallowed hard. There were so many ways to make mistakes, she had wanted Max to understand, and there were so many choices and in one of them was some minuscule, barely perceptible detail that would end up forever altering your life. She'd learned in graduate school the ways tragedy arrives in such ridiculously small occur- rences. African sleeping sickness, caused by a single bite from a tsetse fly, which is attracted to bright hues so that something as innocuous as your choice of wardrobe—the color of your shirt—could be the difference between sickness and health.

Or a shift of temperature somewhere far below the equator and ocean currents were affected halfway around the world, causing the southwestern United States to endure a warmer, rainier spring. The piñon trees in that area consequently produce a bumper crop of nuts, and this, in turn, led to an explosion in the population of deer mice, and more deer mice equaled more contact with humans—which often equaled a greater chance that a rare and deadly form of the hanta virus would be spread. Or somewhere in Seattle, hamburgers cooked not quite long enough, a few seconds maybe, and four children die. This was what was truly horrific, Grace knew. It wasn't only the tragedy itself but how preventable it all could have been. An airline flying into a building: if the weather had only been less perfect, the sky not quite so blue, the sun not as bright. The very beauty of the morning contributing to all the horror that followed.

The list was endless: The 1976 outbreak of Legionnaires' disease in the Philadelphia Bellevue Stratford, where the bacterium was carried through the hotel's air conditioning system so that those who congregated in the lobby, where there were more ducts, were more likely to become infected. And why had they congregated there? Perhaps they were more gregarious. Or perhaps they didn't know the city well and so lingered in the lobby, reading brochures and talking to the bellhops. Maybe they were lonely. Maybe they didn't want to return to their room. Something that simple. Or people sleep together once and a deadly virus is passed on. Every encounter, every breath, every choice, is enough to alter your life.