The Life You Longed For

by Maribeth Fischer

  Of course mother refuses, Grace thought sadly, swallowing hard.

  Twenty

  The phone woke her before dawn. She had been dreaming of Noah and everything she had felt in the fluid landscape of that dream—joy, mostly, but also something quieter, contentment maybe? peace?—rose with her out of sleep.

  In her dream, there had been a flood. She was lying against the prow of a canoe. Noah was wading waist-deep in the water behind her, guiding the narrow boat through the rivered streets of an unfamiliar neighborhood. There was no danger, nobody hurt. He leaned forward, kissing her. Bright sunlight cast diamond patterns on the water.

  The phone wouldn’t stop ringing.

  In the split second between waking and remembering that Jack was in the hospital, disappointment that it was no more than a dream surged through Grace. But a second later—no longer, she promised herself, a half a second maybe—she remembered and grabbed the receiver. Her bedroom was dark. It was too early for a phone call. “What?” she said breathlessly.

  No answer. But in the background, Jack: “Why Mama not home, Daddy?”

  She sat up immediately. “Jack!” she called. “Jack!”

  And then he was on the phone, his tiny little voice. “You home, Mama?” And to Stephen: “She is home, Daddy!”

  Grace laughed, tears filling her eyes. He was okay. Thank God. “What are you doing, Goose?” He was okay, he was okay, he was okay. “Are you all better?”

  “I think so.” His voice grew muffled. “Daddy, I all better?”

  “Tell your mama you’ve been chattering nonstop since five.”

  She collapsed against the pile of pillows, grinning. “Are you being a chatty Cathy?” She swiped the tears from her eyes. He was okay.

  He laughed. “I waked Daddy up!” And then, “Why you aren’t here?”

  “Because Daddy’s with you.”

  “Why Daddy with me?”

  “Good question, Goose. You want me to come and see you?”

  He was okay, he was okay, he was okay.

  She sat on the edge of Erin’s bed, rubbing her back in slow circles. “Guess who just called us?” she whispered.

  Erin opened her eyes. “Jack?”

  Grace nodded. “He’s better. You want Grandma to bring you to see him after school?”

  “When can he come home?”

  “Soon.” Grace kissed Erin’s nose, resting her forehead against her daughter’s. “Umm,” she smiled. “Someone smells like cinnamon toast.” Her mother had given Erin a set of bubble baths for Christmas: root beer float, apple pie, butterscotch sundae, cinnamon toast. “You ready to get up now, Lovey? If you hurry, we could stop at Starbucks on the way to school.” Coffee for Grace, hot chocolate for Erin. A celebration.

  He was okay.

  Stephen, shaved and dressed for work, was dozing in the rocking chair when Grace entered Jack’s room. Jack was sitting up, still on oxygen, but noticeably less swollen. Sesame Street blared from the overhead TV. “What are you doing, silly boy?” Grace whispered in his ear, hugging him close to her as she reached for the remote and lowered the volume before moving around the hospital bed to Stephen. He startled as soon as she touched his shoulder. Grace handed him the latte she’d picked up for him. “You might need to nuke that,” she apologized. He looked exhausted, his eyes bloodshot, a cut over his lip where he’d nicked himself shaving. “Did you sleep at all?”

  He shook his head no, yawning.

  “When did he wake up?”

  “Around five.” Stephen smiled wearily at Jack. “I heard this little bird chirping, ‘Daddy, Daddy, Daddy.’”

  “That wasn’t a birdie, Daddy! That was me!” He started to laugh, but began coughing. “I waked Daddy up, Mama!” he choked.

  She thumped him on the back. “I know you did, silly.” She turned to Stephen. “Has Anju been in yet? She’s not going to believe how good he looks.”

  “Not yet.”

  “Has anyone?”

  He cocked an eyebrow. “Are you kidding? You mean besides the nurses, the blood lady, the chaplain, let’s see, the dietician, Jenn—”

  “Jenn’s here? Is she working?”

  “She left. But she’s back on tonight. She said she’ll stop by.” He sipped the coffee. “Listen, I’ve got to run.” He stood. “You’ll call me?”

  The kiss from her dream and the sensation of floating stayed with her all day. As did the shard of sadness she had felt upon wakening and realizing none of it was true. Noah was gone. She hadn’t spoken to him in nearly a month, though she thought of him often, saw reminders everywhere: an article in the paper about a group of scientists searching the swamps in Louisiana for a bird thought to have become extinct half a century earlier. A schoolmate of Erin’s with bright red hair. A man in line at Starbucks arranging airline tickets on his cell phone. He kept saying “flight,” the word gusting through her, soft-winged against the sky of memories. Your name is my flight song. What is trust but a long-distance flight over water? And yet, more and more, Noah’s absence was beginning to feel permanent. Is this what the dream was about, some part of her refusing to let go? But what did absence really mean? He’d been absent from her life for twenty years. She thought of how the body’s cells are almost 90 percent empty space—90 percent absence; still, they comprised two-thirds of the body’s weight.

  Jack slept, propped at a thirty-degree angle to keep the fluid from accumulating in his lungs. One arm was curled around a battered rocket ship. His eyes moved beneath his lids and she thought of Noah telling her that only fledgling birds dream, silently rehearsing in their sleep the songs they need to survive. She thought of how people typically assume that dreams result from what they’ve done or thought about on any given day, the unconscious piecing together random bits of memory and information. But maybe we dream our lives first, Grace thought, and then we live them. Infants dream more than adults, after all; premature babies dream more than those born full-term. Fetuses dream constantly.

  She thought too of how dreams increase a person’s heart rate, and of how in the midst of dreams, good and bad, some hearts simply stop beating, and it occurred to her that maybe the heart, and not the mind, was the place from where most dreams truly began. She eyed the phone on the table next to Jack’s bed, desperate suddenly to phone Noah, to tell him that she loved him still. The urge felt automatic, almost instinctual—the way you reach out to grab hold of something when you are falling. What if something had happened to him? What if he was hurt, and the dream was his way of telling her?

  Do you remember Bell’s Theorem?

  She let herself think of him. She hadn’t in so long. Like being on a diet, and finally giving in and eating everything rich and decadent that you’d been denied. I miss you, she thought, and wondered if he knew.

  Grace retrieved Kempley’s second book, A New England Sorrow, from her overnight bag and opened it to where she had left off three days ago. It felt like three weeks. She and Jack had gone grocery shopping; they were laughing; she kept pretending the cart—with him in it—was getting away from her. Back home, she started dinner while listening to NPR on the radio, Jack and Erin playing in the family room. And then Erin was screaming, “Something’s wrong with Jack, Mama!” Erin was on her knees, rubbing his cheek, his skin ashen, hands already clammy, heart seemingly thrashing around in his chest. “I didn’t mean anything,” Erin sobbed. “We were just playing cars.”

  “Move, Erin, just move!” Grace yelled. “Get Max, call 911.”

  Even now, her heart raced, remembering.

  She read a few paragraphs of Kempley’s book. Nothing is more psychically devastating than losing a child. Nothing renders us more desperate and determined to locate in a suddenly meaningless world some illusion of order. How, then—and why —in even the most thorough accounts of the Salem Witch Trials is there no mention of this unbearable grief? That of Cotton Mather’s fifteen children, only two survived him…

  Grace held the book in her lap and looked at Jack. To
have your child die was to have the future fall away. Which was what Noah was really about, she knew: her own desperation to grab onto a time when there existed so many different lives she might have chosen instead of the one she had. If she had picked a different college, not gone to the party where she met Stephen, returned even one of Noah’s phone calls, Jack would not be dying. Something so simple and she might have been a completely different person with a whole other history: Someone whose child didn’t have mitochondrial disease.

  It was the specters of their own unlived lives, the choices unmade, over which the townspeople of Salem were so desperate to control.

  Grace closed her eyes and leaned back against the rocking chair. She was in the canoe again. Sunlight. The afternoons in bed with Noah had carried the same sensation of floating, of moving in slow motion through liquid, the two of them drenched with sweat afterwards, as exhausted as swimmers. She couldn’t shake the notion, though, that the dream—the whole affair?—wasn’t about Noah so much as it was about a longing for her life to be different. The realization fell over her like a dark cloth. She had simply assumed that Noah came into her life as a counterbalance to all she was about to lose, that he was her reward for enduring what no mother should ever have to. But what if the whole affair, her insistence that she’d never stopped loving Noah, wasn’t about Noah at all but about her own desperate attempt to save what couldn’t possibly survive?

  She sat up abruptly, feeling a tightness in the back of her neck, as if she’d been reading in dim light. No, she thought, it wasn’t that simple. She loved Noah. Why else had she been so sad upon waking this morning? Why else was she constantly thinking of him? She loved him. She glanced again at Kempley’s book, the black-and-white photo of a New England meetinghouse on the cover, and felt her heart sink. Kempley was right: belief in religion or witches or aliens, even in the perfect love—they were all about the same illusion, weren’t they? The possibility of a life beyond the one you were living.

  Grace looked up from reading Happy Birthday, Moon to Jack and smiled at Dr. Mehta. “Can you believe our little miracle man?”

  Anju entered the room, high heels clicking on the tile floor. She stopped when she saw Jack. “You are good as new!” She held out her hand for him to shake, then pretended to wince as he squeezed her fingers. Grace watched her face for the worry lines that appeared between her brows whenever she wasn’t pleased. The handshake was part of her assessment of Jack, Grace knew. She was noting the color and temperature of his fingers and nail beds, gauging his strength, observing what happened when he laughed, whether he coughed or wheezed or his lips took on that dusky bluish tinge. No worry lines, but tonight, something else in Anju’s expression: Irritation, maybe, or anger.

  “What is it?” Grace asked

  “Let me shut the door first,” Anju said over her shoulder in her clipped British accent. As always she wore her glossy hair in an elegant knot, a silk dress beneath her white lab coat. It looked almost blue beneath the overhead florescent lights.

  Wordlessly, Grace flicked on the TV, then handed the remote control to Jack. Anju closed their door and turned, hands in the pockets of her coat. “I just rang off the phone with Dr. Markind from psychiatry.” Anju cocked an eyebrow at Grace. “He asked if I’d ever considered your role in Jack’s V-Fibs.”

  Grace stared at Anju incredulously. “What?” She shook her head as if she’d heard wrong. “He’s never met me. How—” She stopped, crossed her arms over her chest to stop them from trembling. “Why is he involved? Who the hell asked for a psych consult?”

  “I did, Grace. Jack’s close call the other day coupled with his prognosis, which is not hopeful—you know this, right?”

  “Of course, I do, Anju, but what does that have—”

  “I had hoped that Dr. Markind might have some insights in terms of how—”

  Grace shook her head. “This is about the DNR, isn’t it?”

  “That is a part of my concern, yes, but it is not—”

  “Yes it is.” Grace clamped her mouth shut, trying to stay calm, but though she spoke quietly, her words lifted away into something frantic and uncontained. “Look at him! He has quality of life, Anju, he’s happy, damn it! What more do you—” She shook her head. “When did Dr. Markind even see Jack?”

  “He stopped by last evening, while Stephen was present.”

  Grace stared at Anju helplessly. “I can’t believe this is happening again.” Her legs felt rubbery. “What exactly did he say?”

  “He finds it suspicious that Jack recovered so quickly.” She sighed. “When you were not present.”

  Wordlessly, Grace moved the few feet from where she was standing to the back of the room, squatted before her overnight bag, and began packing. Jack was watching all of this, but she didn’t have the energy to distract him right now. “I want him discharged, Anju.” Her voice shook. “I don’t trust this.” Her tongue felt thick. She reached onto the window ledge where she’d set some of her things: a blow-dryer, a bottle of moisturizer.

  “Grace,” Anju said. “It is not even twenty-four hours that Jack has been—”

  “Fine, we’ll go AMA.” Against Medical Advice. She didn’t care. She wasn’t going to just sit here. She glanced up at the ledge to see what else she needed and grabbed Kempley’s book, her copy of The Crucible. Lightning branched across the night, an angiogram of the sky. She hadn’t realized it was raining.

  “I understand that you are panicked.”

  “Do you?” Grace asked, pressing her palms to her eyes. “I can’t believe this,” she said. “What did you tell him?”

  “Dr. Markind? That he is completely off the track. I am confident that I have diffused this, Grace.”

  As if it were a bomb.

  “I am not worried. I am telling you only because I promised I would if there were any further incidents.”

  Grace nodded, still squatting on the floor, energy draining through her. She swiped at her eyes, not wanting Jack to see her cry.

  “If this little man remains stable—” Anju nodded at Jack, “We’ll get you both out of here first thing tomorrow. A home-care nurse can take care of the IV antibiotics.”

  Please don’t get sick. Please don’t get sick. A whispered mantra. The same tempo as a heartbeat.

  She watched the drops of water ticking against their sixth-floor window. Halos of light formed around the streetlights below. The neon Emergency sign cast a red sheen on the rain-soaked asphalt. She’d phoned Stephen as soon as Anju left. The call left her feeling more alone than ever. He’d asked if she wanted him to stay with Jack tonight. “Oh, right,” she said. “That’ll work. Look what your staying here one night did.”

  “Are you blaming me?”

  “No, I just—what did you say to him, Stephen? What did he say to you? There must have been something.” Jenn’s words to her. It was too impossible to believe that such an accusation could happen without a reason.

  “I told you, he asked how Jack was and how you and I were holding up and if Jack was in pain. He seemed like a decent guy. He wasn’t here more than three minutes.”

  “I shouldn’t have left.” She closed her eyes. “Everything was fine, and God, if I’d just stayed—maybe they would have accused you.” She meant it as a joke, but it wasn’t.

  After Jack fell asleep, Grace retrieved Kempley’s copy of The Crucible from her bag. She and Stephen had rented the video of the movie version a few years ago—Winona Ryder, Daniel Day-Lewis—and she remembered liking it, though it had seemed impossible to believe it had really happened, so many women accused, lives ruined for no good reason: If a woman had kept a doll, a poppet, she might be accused. If she missed church one Sunday or read books, she might be accused. If she healed someone—accused. If she couldn’t heal someone—accused. If her neighbor’s cow didn’t give milk, if a neighbor’s butter didn’t churn—accused. If she had too much pride or anger or didn’t believe in witches—accused.

  If she’d had an affair.

>   She opened the book and read: Is the accuser always holy now?

  She stared at the yellowed pages of the text, the faint penciled notes in the margin, and forced herself to keep reading, trying to stay calm, despite the surge of panic spiraling through her. John Proctor was questioning the Reverend upon hearing that Rebecca Nurse had been accused and arrested. It made no sense. How may such a woman murder children? Proctor demanded. He then proceeded to organize the townspeople to sign a petition attesting to Rebecca Nurse’s good character, her unwavering faith in God, her piety. But to no avail. There is a misty plot afoot so subtle we should be criminal to cling to old respects and ancient friendships, the Reverend warns.

  Grace lowered the book and held it unopened as she rocked, not having the heart to read further. She understood for the first time that maybe the accuser was holy, if for no other reason than that he alone offered an answer, which was all people ever really wanted. Without the accuser, the illnesses of the children in Salem, the failure of the crops, Jack’s confusing and often perplexing disease, seemed to make no sense.

  Her throat tightened and she stood wearily, tucking the book back into her knapsack on the floor by her cot. Outside it was still raining. She tracked a raindrop down the window pane, watched it disappear. She wanted to believe Munchausen’s was different from the witch trials, but more and more, she wasn’t sure: If a mother owned too many medical textbooks, knew too much about her child’s illness, called her child’s nurses by first name, became too friendly with the other parents of sick children, she was suspect. If she was overprotective, “tuned into her child’s indirect emotional signals,” she was suspect. But if she wasn’t tuned in, had a “flat effect,” did not cry, break down, shatter like a teacup when the doctors gave her bad news, surely, this too meant she was suspect, that she was secretly enjoying the drama.