“She’s known,” Grace said. “But she never said anything, and when I confronted her, she looked at me like I was nuts to even care because it was so ridiculous.”
Jenn shook her head. “And aside from Noah, you have no idea why?”
“There’s this profile that supposedly describes a typical Munchausen mom…”
“Yeah, I’ve seen it.”
“You have?”
“After the Marie Noe case, we had a mandatory in-service on Munchausen’s.”
“Well, apparently, I fit the profile.”
“How?”
“‘Mother is overly friendly to nurses; mother always stays with the child in the hospital; mother has a background in medicine.’” Her voice felt thick.
Jenn simply leaned forward, elbows on the bar, listening as Grace ticked off the reasons. She didn’t say anything. Her face was neutral.
“What?” Grace finally said. “You’re being quiet.”
“I’m just thinking.” Jenn turned her martini glass in small circles on the bar. “I mean, let’s say someone saw you with Noah. How does that translate into Munchausen’s?”
“It’s a pattern of deception.” Grace’s voice broke. “Oh God, Jenn, I could lose my kids.” She started to cry. “I’m so fucking scared and Stephen just keeps insisting that there’s nothing there, that we’re an open book, and we’re not or I’m not.”
“But Jack has a legitimate diagnosis, Grace. It’s not like no one knows what’s wrong with him.”
Grace blotted a cocktail napkin against her eyes. “You know that doesn’t matter.” Presence of actual disease does not rule out the possibility of Munchausen’s.
Jenn shook her head. “There’s got to be something else. The profile isn’t enough, though I have to admit that it did help us identify a Munchausen mom who kept bringing her kid to the ER last year.”
Grace felt her heart drop. She sat back. Let the words sink in. “Wait,” she said. “You’re not telling me that you actually believe this thing?”
“I’ve seen it, Grace,” Jenn said gently.
“You’ve seen a Munchausen’s victim?”
“You’d be amazed at what parents are—”
“I know what parents are capable of,” Grace interrupted. “But you’ve seen it? Proven, bonified cases?”
Jenn sighed. “Look, Grace, you know as well as I do that you can’t prove it half the time because the minute these mothers realize you’re on to them, they drag their kid somewhere else. The percentage of Munchausen mothers who take their kids out of the hospital AMA is huge. Way above normal.”
AMA: Against Medical Advice.
Her entire body was tense, almost brittle. “That’s your proof?” She lowered her voice, trying to hold it steady, trying not to cry. “Has it never occurred to you that maybe the reason for the large number of AMAs is that these mothers have been falsely accused of something absolutely heinous, and they’re scared out of their goddamned minds? I’d do the same damn thing. In fact, I don’t want Jack anywhere near that hospital.”
“But that’s crazy. You haven’t done anything.”
“And what if someone doesn’t believe that?” Her eyes filled. “I don’t understand how you could buy into this.”
“And I don’t understand how you can’t.”
Neither of them said anything, the clatter of voices and silverware and dishes from the lounge area behind them suddenly growing louder. Grace stared at her left hand lying inert on the bar next to her drink. Her fingers no longer seemed connected to her, but to some other woman who had come in here tonight to talk with her best friend. She stared at the bar, at the shine of the wood, at the way the light hit Jenn’s martini glass. “I wish I hadn’t told you,” she said quietly.
“Don’t say that,” Jenn pleaded. “I hate that this has happened to you, Grace. You are the last person who deserves this.”
Grace looked at her bleakly. “Sometimes I think I’m getting exactly what I deserve.” She looked at Jenn. “We should get the check.”
“No, don’t,” Jenn said. “This is ridiculous. We hardly ever see each other, and I want to help. I’ll go to the doctor with you or babysit or—or—I’m going to write you that letter and the kids are safe right now, aren’t they?”
Grace nodded without looking up. She imagined those birds that take off from water—grebes, maybe, and loons—of how sometimes at night after a storm they would mistake the reflection of water on asphalt for a lake and become stranded when they landed and found that there was nothing soft or buoyant from which to lift themselves off again. It was how her own life felt lately: a shallow reflection of everything she had believed it to be.
“Besides,” Jenn continued, “who knows, maybe in some weird way, the accusation could be sort of good, you know?”
Grace felt the room tilt, bottles sliding into one another, the buildings in the mural over the bar toppling on their sides. “Good?” she echoed. Her sweater felt too tight against her throat. She couldn’t breathe. “Good?”
“No, I mean, not the accusation,” Jenn rushed. “Just, maybe it’s good if you’re kind of forced to not focus so much on the medical stuff, you know?” She squeezed Grace’s wrist. “You’ve done so much and the truth is there’s probably not a lot left—” Her face crumpled. “This doesn’t sound right.”
“I need to go,” Grace said. “I’m not mad, I’m just—” Tears spilled from her eyes, and she kept dabbing them with a napkin, but it didn’t help. “I just—I know I’m defensive, but I can’t do this right now.” She didn’t know what else to say. Good? The night felt broken, a pane of dark glass suddenly cracked across the center. She thought of how in the seventeenth century, one of the common symptoms of depression was something called the “glass delusion,” whereby depressed people literally came to believe that they were made of glass, that to sit on a hard surface might shatter them, that to embrace another person would be dangerous.
“Look,” Jenn said. “I’m not saying things right, but you know I would do anything for you—”
“Remember Dr. Stemple’s class?” Grace interrupted. It was where she’d learned of the “glass delusion.” Mythology and Medicine. Mondays and Wednesdays, 5:30 to 6:45.
“Stemple’s Temple of the Mind.” Jenn nodded. “I loved that class.”
“What about all those diseases we studied that were supposedly so prevalent once—that nerve disorder found in slaves, remember?”
“Drapetomania.” Jenn smiled. “The single symptom was the desire to escape slavery.” She squinted at Grace. “Is that what you think Munchausen’s is?”
“I don’t know.” And sometimes she truly didn’t. “I know there are some awful people out there and I know that kids get abused all the time. But I think of all those mythological illnesses—hysteria and neurasthenia and masturbation—remember that? And God, homo-sexuality, Jenn.” She glanced at her friend. “Every one of those diseases is about making certain types of people submissive or trying to shut them up or making them go away, and I know, I know it’s farfetched, but isn’t it possible that Munchausen’s is similar, a way to get rid of demanding mothers who really are intelligent and maybe do know something about medicine and, therefore, aren’t afraid to ask questions or complain or find another doctor if they aren’t happy?”
“Of course, it’s possible,” Jenn conceded. “But can I ask you something?”
Grace smiled sadly. “You will anyway.”
“Why does it matter so much whether I believe Munchausen by Proxy exists if I know without a doubt—and I do—that you aren’t guilty?”
“But how do you know without a doubt ? I fit the profile.”
“But I know you. I know what kind of a mother you are. I know that if you could trade your life for Jack’s you would.”
Grace shook her head. “Women like me are master manipulators, remember?” Her theatrical skills are worthy of an Oscar. Her tall-tales rival those told by the Baron Munchausen himself. “How do you
know I haven’t deceived you too? Look at how long I lied to you about Noah.” His name a sharpness in her chest.
“I know you,” Jenn’s insisted. “Why can’t that be enough?”
“Because if someone like you who is smart and knows medicine and knows all the bullshit things people have believed in the name of medicine can believe this whole Munchausen’s thing, then anyone can. It terrifies me. Stephen gets mad when I compare this to the Salem witch trials, because it sounds hysterical, and he’s right, it does, but it’s not that different. Maybe those trials started with a bunch of hysterical girls, but they never would have continued if intelligent, respected people like you, people that everyone else trusted, hadn’t believed those girls. And what were they saying? Exactly what they are now, that normal good women were purposely making children sick.”
She drove home without the radio on and with the windows down despite the freezing temperatures. She needed the cold, needed it to somehow brace her against the fluidlike sensation that she was dissolving. It was a beautiful dark night, the city gold and black beneath the bright moon. Christmas lights were still strung along the span of the Ben Franklin, the bridge struts pulsed rhythmically beneath the wheels of her car.
“What’s wrong?” Stephen asked when she walked into the bedroom, her coat still on. She was shivering with cold, her mouth and fingers numb. “What happened?” He immediately set his laptop on the night table and got out of bed, but she waved him away.
“No—don’t. I—don’t touch me.” Her words were like individual cubes of ice.
His face blanched. “Jesus, Grace, what the hell happened?”
Her voice was flat. “I told her,” she said. “She thinks maybe it’s good that I was accused.” Good. This was not a word that would ever freeze, she knew; this was not a word that would eventually melt away into nothing. This word was like barbed wire, impossible to climb over, go around, escape. “My best friend,” she said, dropping her coat on the bed. She sat stiffly, then, and began tugging at her boots. Her hair fell in front of her face, and her nose was running. Stephen sat next to her, and gently put a hand on her arm, but she jumped up, one boot off, the other still on, nearly tripping over the end of her coat. “Don’t touch me,” she said icily. “I mean it.”
“Honey, please. I don’t know what happened, but Jenn would do anything for you.” But it was like an avalanche breaking away from the face of whatever was solid in her life. She whirled to face him. “Don’t you get it, Stephen? It doesn’t matter! It doesn’t help. Nothing does because our kids can still be taken, and there’s nothing I can do to fix it or make it better and nothing our lawyer can do, which means that we just have to live like this, afraid of everything, and my best friend thinks maybe this is good?”
“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.”
Seventeen
She 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.
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