She wondered if he really believed this. She thought of Noah telling her how along rural airport runways that were plagued by flocks of birds, loudspeakers played recordings of distress calls made by crows in an effort to ward the birds off. She thought that Stephen’s voice was like that now, as if the sound of his anger alone could push this horrible accusation away.
From the doorway of the walk-in closet, Stephen tossed his shirt onto the pile of dirty clothes by the bathroom door. Grace stared at Stephen’s arms and chest and thought what a beautiful man he was and how she didn’t deserve him. “We’re an open book, Grace,” he said as he yanked a worn T-shirt over his head and flicked off the closet lights. “Let them investigate us all they want.” He climbed into bed, handing her the pint of Häagen-Dazs that he had picked up on the way home. She thought of how in Stephen’s family they always ate ice cream when they were upset, as if to numb themselves from the inside out. They’d eaten it for dinner the July night Stephen’s dad walked out on his wife and sons for a woman young enough to be his daughter; they’d eaten it when their mother announced that she was remarrying a man neither Stephen nor Jeff could stand; and they ate it again when she left that man for another.
Years later, the night Grace and Stephen finally—after how many experts, how many trips to different hospitals—received the diagnosis for Jack, they sat at the kitchen table, wordlessly passing a pint of butter pecan ice cream back and forth to each other. And only yesterday, sitting in the family room after the trip to Baltimore, they’d played the scene out again.
Now tonight. Grace imagined that this was the taste of betrayal: cold and rich and so achingly sweet that for a moment—maybe—you forget how much you are about to lose.
Seven
Grace sat straight against the passenger seat, her shoulders pushed back, her hands in her lap. Knees pressed together beneath her gray skirt. It was like being in Catholic school again: obeying rules that made no sense.
She stared out the window at the city blurring by. How ugly it was here: miles of squat round oil refineries, trash heaps, and high-rise parking garages. And then the airport, planes suturing the sky. The large black letters of the word PREGNANT? glared from a shabby billboard followed by a 1-800 number. Grace dropped her eyes back to her lap. Did it not count for anything that she had wanted each of her children? Stephen reached from the steering wheel and squeezed her hand. “I know,” he said. “It’s not fair.” She nodded, feeling both grateful and guilty. She didn’t deserve him. She squeezed his hand in return. Like a coma patient, she thought, and this was the only way to communicate.
They were on their way to a lawyer’s.
Grace had spent the last two days terrified to let the kids out of her sight. She didn’t go out, didn’t get dressed, didn’t answer the phone. She couldn’t stop crying. She canceled Jack’s therapy appointments. She didn’t trust anyone. She didn’t want him near the hospital. She sat at the computer in her robe and a pair of Stephen’s sweat socks, reading the Munchausen by Proxy Home Page, which had a database of over four hundred articles about the disorder. She’d had no idea the disease was this prevalent, that so many women were capable of devising such horrible ways to hurt their children. The titles of the articles themselves had read like advertisements for horror movies:
“Salvage or Sabotage: Munchausen’s and the Chronically Ill Child.”
“The Bacteriologically Battered Baby: Another Case of Munchausen by Proxy.”
“Supermom or Super Monster.”
Even the names of the journals in which the articles had been published seemed ominous: Archives of Disease in Childhood, Journal of Forensic Sciences, Journal of Child Abuse and Neglect. She couldn’t erase from her mind the description of the four children so severely abused by their mother that they were dwarfed. Locked in closets for weeks and months at a time and slowly starved. A sixteen-year-old boy had the height of an eight-year-old; an eight-year-old girl had a bone age of three years. She pictured bonsai trees, their roots constantly cut beneath the surface of dark soil, abused into minuscule perfection.
None of it made sense.
They were nicknamed “helicopter mothers” because they were always hovering over their distressed child. She thought of how she had never left Jack alone in the hospital. People told her all the time: “I don’t know how you do it, Grace” or “You’re a saint,” or “I’ve never met a parent as devoted as you.”
Supermom or Child Abuser. The words echoed.
She couldn’t sleep, couldn’t eat. In cases of Munchausen by Proxy, termination of parental rights is the only absolute way of ensuring the victim’s safety. Erin and Jack watched videos, one after the other, though normally the rule was no more than one hour of TV a day. She imagined that years from now she would remember little of this time except for the odd lines of high-pitched Disney dialogue: I have come to seek the hand of the Princess Jasmine…. Take my advice, kid…Hakuna Matata.
“Please don’t argue with me,” she had begged Max this morning, after reneging on her promise to let him go to the hockey rink with a bunch of kids from his team. “I wouldn’t ask you to stay home if it wasn’t important.”
“You said I could go, Mom.”
“Please, Max.” She was sitting on the stairs in her bathrobe. She was exhausted, and she needed a shower and the house was a mess. Uno cards lay scattered on the hallway floor. A puzzle piece. One of Jack’s socks. Already she felt defeated. “I can’t explain it to you right now, but—”
“It’s not fair!” Max exploded. “You always do this! Why’d you even buy me new skates if I can’t use them?”
Stephen had intervened from the kitchen. “Max, you yell at your mother one more time and you can forget the rink altogether.” He strode into the hallway, a dishtowel over his shoulder, and told Max to go empty the dishwasher, swatting him with the towel as Max stomped off. Stephen squatted in front of Grace then. He hadn’t shaved in two days, and she knew he was exhausted too. He’d been doing everything—all of Jack’s medications, the cooking, laundry. “We can’t keep him in all week,” he said gently.
“I’m just so afraid,” she sobbed.
She could feel Stephen watching her as he drove, though her eyes were closed. “What?” she asked without opening them.
“You look beautiful,” he said.
She clenched her jaw against the irritation she felt. “I thought the whole point of this suit was to not look beautiful.” Tears pricked her eyes. “I feel ridiculous.” She wished she could have laughed at herself—trying on and discarding clothes for nearly an hour this morning, as if to prove to the lawyer that—what? Being a good mother was a matter of wearing the right costume? It was ludicrous.
But nothing Grace had tried on was right: her good clothes—high-necked sleeveless sweaters and long slim-fitting skirts; an impossibly small LBD, Little Black Dress, that Stephen bought her a few years ago—were too formal, too sexy. And you couldn’t be sexy if you were accused of harming your children, could you? And no bright colors. Nothing that would attract attention. Munchausen mothers were desperate for this, after all. She had needed neutral shades: grays, off-white, beige. Pastels, she thought bitterly; a flower-print Sunday school dress. Below the knee, of course. She thought of how the nuns used to make the girls genuflect before leaving home-room to confirm that their hems touched the floor.
She’d borrowed the gray suit from her mother. Nothing of her own was right. She wasn’t right.
“Jack’s blood pressure was still high when we left,” Grace said as they passed the exit for South Street, the exit she usually took to Children’s.
Stephen glanced at her. “I know, but we didn’t give him the cloni-dine until almost one-thirty.”
She shook her head. “I’m not taking him to the hospital until we get this straightened out, Stephen.” Her voice rose. “I can’t.”
“Let’s just see what the lawyer says.”
They crossed the Schuylkill River, the pale yellow do
me of the art museum off to the right along with the boathouses framed in white Christmas lights. The gray sky and gray river and gray trees reminded Grace of a faded photograph, of a time before color.
“Hey.” Stephen reached for her hand and she gave it to him. “We’re in this together, Grace. I mean that.”
She turned to look at him—the high cheekbones that Max had inherited, the long-lashed eyes that Jack had. She loved that Stephen was handsome, that he was one of those men who grew better-looking with age, although except for the gray in his hair and the lines fanning out from his eyes, he didn’t look all that different than he had fifteen years ago. The same short haircut and clothes: khakis, loafers, button-down oxfords, sleeves rolled casually a quarter of the way up his arm. Polo shirts in the spring and summer. A blue blazer on a hanger in the back of his car, “just in case.” She smiled. He was wearing the Eeyore tie the kids had given him for Christmas. “Thank you,” she said quietly.
He frowned. “For what?”
“Just being here.” Her voice cracked. “For loving me.”
“I hope you don’t really think that’s something to thank me—” A white Lexus cut in front of them, and he slammed his foot to the brakes. “Asshole,” he muttered. “Didn’t even look, never even saw me.”
She rested her head against the seat back.
He glanced at her. “Did you see that thing on the news last night about driving?”
“Every two miles the average driver makes something like four hundred observations, forty decisions, and one mistake, which might or might not lead to an accident.” She glanced at him. “Every two miles. Can you imagine?”
“Jesus, how do you remember this stuff?”
“Why do I remember it?” She turned back to the window, wondering how many decisions that equaled in a day, a week, a life? And how many mistakes? And how could you ever possibly know all the things you’d done wrong? She closed her eyes, her chest weighted with fear again. What had she done to make someone think she would harm Jack? And who would think this? The word echoed. Who, who, who, like the character of Mr. Owl in one of Jack’s picture books.
She had been through everyone—Jack’s doctors, his nurses, Noah, Jenn, even someone from the mito group. She was so honest with them. Had she said something that was misconstrued? The time Jack had the nasogastric tube in his nose, and she joked that he looked like a little elephant man. The jokes about him being an alcoholic because of the broken capillaries—spider telangiectasias— in his cheeks, caused by his malfunctioning liver. Or that time she and Andrea, one of his night nurses, were watching him sleep, up on his knees and elbows, which he did to protect his swollen stomach, and Andrea commented that he looked uncomfortable, and Grace laughed and said that at least if she needed to give him a suppository in the middle of the night for his blood pressure, he was in a good position. Andrea had laughed. She squeezed Grace’s arm and whispered, “Isn’t it awful? You really do start thinking like that after a while, don’t you?”
She wondered if her mother might have said something, without meaning to. That Grace seemed consumed with Jack’s illness or that she was overprotective. Grace had questioned Stephen even, and found herself watching him watching her and wondering what he was thinking.
“What are you doing?” She grabbed Jack from Stephen’s back where he’d been clinging like a little barnacle. Stephen was pinning Max to the floor, and Erin was trying to tickle Stephen enough that he’d release Max. They were all laughing, trying to pull each others’ socks off, the goal of the wrestling match.
Jack started howling the minute Grace pulled him away. “Do you not get it?” Grace said furiously to Stephen. “Are you trying to kill him?”
Erin started to explain: “We were just—”
“I’m talking to your father,” Grace snapped. “Here—” She put Jack down. “Take Jack. Go do something, all of you.”
They waited until the kids were out of the room.
“Trying to kill him, Grace?” Stephen was livid.
“Oh, please. You know I didn’t mean that, but my God, he’s in heart failure, Stephen.”
“He was laughing!” Stephen yelled. “He was having fun, for crying out loud. Or have you forgotten what that’s like?”
“Go to hell,” she said. “You think I like being this way? You think I don’t want my child to be happy?”
He didn’t say anything. They were standing in the middle of the living room, facing off like boxers, both of them breathing heavily. Couch pillows were strewn on the floor, toys were everywhere. “I mean it,” she pressed. “Is that what you think?”
He stared at her coldly “You’re so wrapped up in the medical stuff—”
“I have to be,” she said. “I have to be because you won’t, Stephen.”
“Won’t, Grace?”
“Fine, can’t. Whatever. You were still wrestling with a child in end-stage heart disease. I mean, how stupid—”
“Stupid? Jack was laughing. Laughing.” His voice cracked. “God damn you,” he said, and walked away from her to the fireplace, where he spread his arms like someone under arrest and bowed his head, shoulders heaving.
When he turned to look at her, he was crying. “Jack having fun like any other child,” he said, “that’s what I’m going to have to hold onto, and how dare you, how dare you try—” but he was sobbing then, and there was nothing to do but go to him and promise that it would be okay. She resented it, though; she resented a lot, she had realized these past few days, and she couldn’t help but wonder how deeply he resented her too.
Eight
Grace stared at the row of black-and-white photographs of the four main bridges connecting Philadelphia to New Jersey that hung on the wall to her right. Bennett Marsh, the lawyer, sat across from them in a leather wing chair, a tall floor lamp just behind him.
Stephen filled Bennett in on what they knew: someone had called Child Protective Services last spring accusing Grace of making Jack sick—Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy. No one had informed Grace or Stephen of this. They had only discovered the accusation two days ago. Stephen’s brother’s girlfriend was a social worker who had happened upon the file with Grace’s name.
The only sound in the dimly lit office was the scratch of Bennett’s fountain pen across the legal pad. He asked basic questions: what they did for a living, where they worked, the names and ages of their kids, the name of Jack’s illness, in what hospital he was being treated. “Have you ever had problems with Child Protective Services before?”
Grace glanced up. Never.
“Any arrests?”
She shook her head. Of course not. Her throat ached. She knew he had to ask. He was simply doing his job. Stephen squeezed her hand. Actually, he’d had a DUI when he was nineteen, he said. But that was twenty years ago.
“You’d be surprised what comes up in these files,” Bennett said.
Noah grinned. “With my luck, I’ll have some bumbling Matlock-type lawyer.”
“And he’ll wear those seersucker suits in the courtroom.” Grace was laughing. “What? Don’t give me that look. Doesn’t Matlock wear seersucker?”
“You actually watch that show?”
They were sitting on the beach talking about the Philadelphia lawyer who had been missing for months; the judge she’d been having an affair with was now being investigated. Noah had joked that if either of them ever met an unforseen death, the other would automatically be suspect.
“Neither of us would have alibis, of course.” Grace reached for a pretzel from the bag he held. “You’d have been out on your own trying to save a bird—or so you’d say.”
“You’d insist you were driving to the hospital and got stuck in traffic. They’d search your car, though, and find beach sand beneath the floor mats.”
“And in my hair.” She laughed. “And my shoes. And under my fingernails.” She folded her arms over her upraised knees and rested her head on them, watching him. His eyelashes were gold in the sunlight. �
��So what would the prosecution say my motivation was?”
“Oh, the usual. You discovered I was in love with another woman and became insanely jealous.” He grinned to show he was joking, but the words had sharp edges.
“Is that what you want?” she asked quietly. “For me to be jealous?”
He squinted at her as if he wasn’t sure. “Yeah, sometimes,” he said.
“Are you?”
“Jealous of you and Stephen?”
She nodded.
“All the time.” He was staring towards the surf when he said this. She could no longer see his face.
Bennett looked up from the typed summary of Jack’s medical record that Grace had handed him. “He’s on all these medications? Every day?”
There were eleven: ACE inhibitors, calcium channel blockers, diuretics, dioxin, thyroid hormone, potassium tablets, coenzyme Q10, prednisone. And morphine.
“I see the morphine is as needed. Which means what? How often?”
“Every day.” Her voice cracked, though she’d joked about this too. My little druggie, our little addict. She swallowed hard. It’s not that she thought it funny, that she didn’t take it seriously. She joked because it was too devastating to face what Jack’s dependence on morphine really meant.
“How do you determine ‘as needed’?”
“Jack isn’t ever without morphine anymore. We’d have to gradually wean him at this point to cut back. If he’s in pain, though, I’ll up the dose.”
“And Jack can articulate when he’s in pain?”
Grace glanced at Bennett helplessly. “He tells me his heart hurts.” Her voice quavered. “And there are signs. He gets irritable. He becomes cyanotic—blue—around the mouth. He self-protects, holds himself stiffly when I pick him up.” She spoke slowly, deliberately. She would not cry. She would not. Even though this man was looking at her and maybe wondering if she was capable of drugging her child with a narcotic. If he were a good lawyer, and he was, then he had to wonder, didn’t he? She imagined Bennett knew already that there had to be reasons for this accusation, that nobody was as uncomplicated as they appeared. She imagined that he would somehow understand, forgive her for whatever she had done wrong, as if he were a priest, not a lawyer, as if it were in his power to absolve her.
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