The Life You Longed For

by Maribeth Fischer

  She took a deep breath. “His heart rate goes up, his eyes become dilated.”

  Bennett was writing everything down. “How long has he been on the morphine?”

  “Since the summer.”

  “So this wouldn’t be connected to the accusation.” He made another note, then set the summary on his lap and removed his wire-rimmed glasses. “Your little boy’s been through a lot,” he said quietly. “And you have as well.” He sighed. “Munchausen’s is an insidious accusation. I’m sorry you’re being put through this.” He leaned back, his fingers steepled before his face. He had beautiful eyes, she noticed. Very blue. And very kind, and again she had to steel herself against the rush of tears burning her eyes.

  In 1962, The Journal of the American Medical Association published a landmark paper called “The Battered-child Syndrome.” A Colorado pediatrician, alarmed at the number of abused children he was seeing, had written physicians and district attorneys across the country, asking for their observations. He presented the findings at a conference conducted by the American Academy of Pediatrics: An estimated sixty thousand children were being abused in the United States. Worse, the abusers could be anywhere; and they could be anyone: your next-door neighbor, your lawyer or tax accountant, the head of the PTA. You never knew. No child was safe, not even from his own parents. As if to bear this out, calls reporting more and more cases began pouring in.

  It was an easy cause to triumph: saving children. It was politically safe. Money flowed into social service agencies to set up hotlines, conduct more surveys and symposiums, establish child protection teams, and educate the public. Within five years every state in the nation had passed legislation mandating that physicians and nurses report to Child Protective Services any suspected cases of abuse. To not do so was to risk being prosecuted on both civil and criminal charges. It was the most quickly passed legislation in the history of the United States.

  Child abuse became its own field of study. National and international conferences, academic journals, and a new group of experts became devoted to the subject. The definition of abuse broadened to include sexual abuse, psychological abuse, and abuse by neglect. “Child abuse is so prevalent that it is now an ‘American tradition,’” declared one politician. By 1990, it was considered a national emergency. But as the meaning of the term grew, it became more vague. None of the fifty states regarded spanking an abuse—a concession made to get the legislation passed to begin with. However, in Illinois, rapping a child on the knuckles with a fork constituted abuse while in Florida, it did not—unless bruises persisted for more than three days. Women were reported to Child Protective Services because their homes were in disrepair. A mother who could not afford to buy eyeglasses for her child was accused of neglect. The sixty thousand reported cases in 1962 rose to over three million by 1994, with nearly half a million children taken from their homes and placed into foster care each year.

  Less well known was the fact that 65 percent of the reports alleging abuse were based on erroneous information. In one year, in the state of New York alone, 85,000 of the 456,000 calls to Child Protective Services were determined to be pranks, the majority of which had to be treated as genuine until proven otherwise. It didn’t matter. What politician would dare suggest that funding be cut to Child Protective Services or that maybe every case didn’t need to be investigated? “How dare a family complain about a little inconvenience when a child’s life is at stake,” one politician responded to the criticism that too many of the accusations were false. “I’d rather see a family disrupted than a bunch of dead children.” As if to bear him out, the major newspapers were filled with stories of children who had slipped through the cracks.

  Grace had read “The Battered-child Syndrome” in graduate school. Its main author, Henry Kempe, was regarded as a hero for his studies differentiating intended injuries and accidental ones. Jenn had seen real-life examples of this firsthand during her student rotation in the ER. She had told Grace of the little girl with the grid of a heating grate branded into the soles of her feet; had it been an accident, only one foot would have been burned before the child leaped off the vent. The toddler whose bottom was scalded from being submerged in hot water, the water line across his abdomen as straight as if it had been painted there. It meant he’d been held down so forcefully, he couldn’t move. The burgundy U-shapes across a boy’s back, the imprint of the looped belt recorded on his skin like fast-motion photography.

  Until two nights ago when Stephen walked into their bedroom and told her of the accusation, Grace would have been the first one to say that it didn’t matter how many false accusations there were if even one of these injuries could have been prevented.

  “Can either of you recall any run-ins, however trivial, with any of Jack’s doctors, nurses, even family members who perhaps don’t understand his medical condition?”

  Jack had been sick for over a year before they got a diagnosis, so yes, there had been run-ins with plenty of doctors and nurses and yes, even family members. “You know too much,” one gastroenterolgist had told her. “You’re an epidemiologist, right? You’re probably imagining every horrible disease—we all do it. Welcome to the club.”

  “It’s a phase. So he’s a fussy eater,” another doctor told her. But it was more than fussy. He had been born full-term. He was healthy for the first two months. And then something happened. He was too tired to eat and even when he did, he wasn’t gaining weight. Failure to thrive. Her mother once asked, “Do you think maybe he’s picking up on your tension, honey?”

  They’d done the tests. A sweat test for cystic fibrosis. A whole GI workup. Nothing. At seven months she’d called the doctor in tears when she couldn’t get Jack to eat, and they’d scheduled a swallow test, thinking maybe there was some sort of blockage and of course, the day of the test, he seemed fine and took his bottle perfectly.

  She’d find him asleep in the middle of his toys. His hands and feet were freezing, his nail beds bluish, his heart racing. “It’s not normal,” she kept insisting. “I’m telling you something’s wrong.” They discovered a Grade III diastolic murmur, but “lots of kids have ventricular gallops,” they told her. They sent him home with a Holter monitor. Eventually, the cardiologist stopped returning her calls, made no follow-up appointments. Grace had phoned in tears one afternoon, terrified after a morning of watching him struggle for breath.

  “What exactly do you want Dr. Buford to do?” the receptionist asked her.

  “I want him to care,” Grace said wearily.

  Silence from the other end.

  “Look, I understand that he’s frustrated,” she tried again, but was interrupted.

  “It sounds like you’re the one who is frustrated, Mrs. Connolly; most parents would be thrilled to know that there’s nothing wrong.”Most parents.

  She’d hung up. And that’s when she started writing letters. She’d log onto Medline and HealthWeb and read about Beckwith-Widemann Syndrome or glycogen storage disease of the heart or dilated cardiomyopathy, and she’d write to the doctors who had authored those articles, enclosing a copy of Jack’s medical history. If you have any ideas that might help us find an answer, she wrote. It felt as futile as putting a note in a bottle and tossing it to sea in the hopes that it might reach someone on the other side of the world. But a doctor from the Cleveland Clinic had responded. Another from Johns Hopkins. Anju Mehta from Children’s in Philadelphia. John Bartholomew from the University of California, San Diego. He’d been the first, offering to fly Jack out to his clinic for testing, then abruptly changing his mind. Grace looked up, her neck warm. What was it he said to her? Something accusatory. Something about how eager she seemed to have Jack undergo tests. Sentences from the Munchausen by Proxy Web site flashed into her mind: “Munchausen by Proxy is a career pursued by supposedly wonderful mothers who use their children as sacrifices to win the attention of the powerful doctors whom the mother worships as a god.” Is that what John Bartholomew had thought? She had been so grat
eful when he first called. She couldn’t stop thanking him.

  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 sch
ool 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.”