The Life You Longed For

by Maribeth Fischer

  Except for Grace and another woman, a young girl with bad skin in ripped jeans and a sweatshirt, the other members already knew one another. The young woman hadn’t been formally accused, she said, but her child’s doctor had been acting hostile and twice had suggested that she was the one needing help, not her son. Grace thought of John Bartholomew suggesting something similar when she wanted to bring Jack to his clinic in San Diego, of Eric Markind’s belief that a child’s family aggravated his pain.

  “You’re right to be concerned,” the man who had dropped his cell phone said. He mentioned something about his own child’s feeding tube, which the young woman’s son also had. The man shook his head. “We hear our son is totally off tube feedings now, which is just more proof to the state that my wife was the one keeping him on it unnecessarily, but ask anyone who saw us try to feed him. It was heartbreaking how much pain he was in. It was at the point where he would just refuse to eat at all.”

  Grace wondered where his wife was now and what had happened to his son. It sounded as if they hadn’t seen him in a long time. As if he’d read her mind, the man looked at her, his eyes unbearably sad, and said, “My wife decided two weeks ago to just admit that she’d been faking Jake’s problems. It was the only way she thought we had a prayer of ever getting him back.”

  For a moment, they were silent, the man staring down and twisting his wedding band. Grace’s shirt felt plastered to her back despite the cool temperatures outside. The room was too crowded for this many people. For a moment, she felt such an overwhelming sense of despair that it seemed she was drowning, her heart bobbing in her chest like an empty life preserver. After a moment, she said to the man, “I would have done the same thing as your wife, if it meant that I could have been with my son.” She glanced at Martha. “This probably isn’t the right thing to be saying, but—”

  The woman with the ace bandages on her knees, who was sitting next to Grace, touched her arm. “Don’t worry about right or wrong. I read your story in the papers, and…after what you’ve been through…it’s unconscionable.”

  A few of the others were nodding, but Grace could barely meet their eyes. She felt shattered inside, the pain unspooling inside her. It had been three weeks since Stephen had left, three weeks since anyone aside from her kids had touched her, three weeks since anyone—including her parents, who were too locked into their own confusion and grief—had spoken to her with such kindness.

  She left Martha’s with a sheaf of papers and brochures. It was cold now, the sun gone. Down the street, where she had parked, an American flag fluttered from the porch of a single-story house that had obviously just been built, the ground around it still dirt, a huge metal Dumpster at the end of the drive. The night was quiet but for the flapping sound of that cloth against the darkened sky. Such a different night from the frigid gray of the one, not even three months ago, when Stephen came home, his fist bruised, and told her of the accusation. It seemed another life, another woman who had been sitting in bed, laughing almost, at the absurdity that anyone would accuse her.

  “What are you working on?” she asked Max. She was still wearing her coat.

  “History.” He didn’t look up.

  “Well, how about a break? I was thinking of having some ice cream.”

  “No thanks.”

  Wearily, she sat on his bed, watching him move a highlighter over his history text. Orange light from the lava lamp on his dresser undulated over the walls. His fourteenth birthday was in two weeks. In the fall, he’d start high school.

  After a while, she joked, “Hey, I’m getting kind of scared by all this studying,” but it wasn’t as much of a joke as she wanted it to be. Ever since Jack had died, this was all he did. And his room was immaculate, his desk was organized, his textbooks neatly lined up in front of him between metal bookends.

  He still didn’t answer.

  “Well. I’ll let you be then.” She stood, reaching to tousle his hair as she left the room. At the door, she glanced down and saw in the overflowing trashcan a crumpled paper with a red A+ and “Great report, Max!” scrawled along the margin. “Sweetie?” she asked. “What’s this?” She stooped to retrieve it. “Can I see?”

  He shrugged. “It’s old,” he said by way of explanation.

  It was the report on mitochondrial disease that he’d done for his biology class in January. Two months ago. Two months ago Jack had still been home, and they’d taken him and Erin to see the Muppets on Ice. “My brother Jack has mitochondrial disease,” she read now. “This means that he has lots of problems in his major organs that require a lot of energy.” Six weeks ago, she had finally sent in the Make-A-Wish Foundation request, her New Year’s resolution, and the whole family sat around the table one night with the kids’ school calendars and Max’s sports schedule and tried to settle on a date for the trip. “But sometimes I think Jack’s biggest problem is that a lot of people don’t even know what mitochondrial disease is. Even some doctors have never heard of it.” Grace looked up, tears stinging her eyes, then returned to the paper. “So what exactly is mitochondrial disease?”

  “This is great, Max,” she said when she finished. “Why did you throw it out?”

  He glanced at her, then grinned. “Because,” he said, “I knew you’d do that.”

  “But these are good tears,” she protested.

  So she still cries at the drop of a hat, huh?

  You mean she was like that way back then too?

  Max rolled his eyes, then returned to his book.

  Downstairs, Grace stood in front of the open refrigerator, which was mostly empty. She shopped daily now, as if she lived in a foreign country, buying just what she needed each morning. She’d been cooking again, not because she was hungry, but because there was something reassuring in following a recipe. In not having to think. In completing simple directions, exact measurements.

  Now, she pulled a container of Thai noodles and beef from the top shelf and picked out a chunk of beef with her fingers. She’d made it the night before. Stephen had come for dinner.

  “This looks fantastic,” he said, spooning some onto his plate. He didn’t look at her. He never did. “But you don’t have to go to all this trouble.”

  “I don’t like it,” Erin said tearfully, pushing her noodles around the plate.

  “But it’s all stuff you like, honey-bunny,” Grace said. “Noodles and broccoli and pieces of steak. And look—”

  “But I don’t like it,” she cried.

  “Well, I do,” Max said.

  “I didn’t ask you!” she screamed.

  “Hey, hey.” Stephen pushed back his chair and pulled Erin onto his lap. “What’s going on here?”

  Erin cried harder, shoulders heaving. “I just—I just—”

  “Just what, lovey?” Grace asked. “Do you want me to make you some macaroni and cheese? Would that make you feel better?”

  “Nooooo,” she wailed, nose running, her face streaked with tears and dirt. “You don’t understand!” She couldn’t stop crying, nearly choking on her tears. “I don’t—I don’t want”—she hiccupped—“macaroni by myself. I want it for—everyone!” She started crying again. “Why can’t we just have things like we used to?”

  Grace closed the refrigerator, then glanced at the mail on the counter, a thick stack of cream-colored envelopes. Sympathy cards. Still. Half of them each day were from people she didn’t even know who had heard about Jack through the United Mitochondrial Disease Foundation or M.A.M.A. or the article in the Philadelphia Inquirer. “Mother Accused of Munchausen by Proxy Exonerated.” Grace knew the article by heart: It shouldn’t take the death of a child to open the public’s eyes to the horrors of child abuse, but neither should it take the death of a child to open the public’s eyes to the devastation wrought when children, under the auspices of Child Protective Services, are wrongly taken from their homes…She glanced quickly through the cards, looking—though she didn’t want to be—for Noah’s handwriting. Did he even know tha
t Jack had died? But how could he? she wondered. And how could he not?

  Except for a letter from her grandfather, she didn’t recognize any of the names on the return addresses. She set the envelopes aside, placed her grandfather’s letter on the top of the pile—she would read them in the morning—and after turning off the lights and checking to make sure the door was locked, climbed the stairs.

  Stephen’s half of the bed was covered with library books about grief, as if this too were a subject she could study, the way she had with mitochondrial disease and pediatric heart failure and Munchausen’s. Finding Hope When a Child Dies; When the Bough Breaks; Ended Beginnings. It was what she had always done, how she had always coped, as if answers always came packaged in words.

  Most of the advice seemed disingenuous—all that crap about finding something positive in her child’s death. “Am I grieving normally?” one of the books had asked, followed by a questionnaire to be filled out at three months, six months, and again at one year, as if grief were no different from taking a car in for an oil change every three thousand miles. Have I learned to laugh again? Do I take pride in my personal appearance? The rest of the books were too clinical, written by some PhD in psychology or some “expert” in thanatology. If it hadn’t been written by someone who knew what grief felt like at two in the morning or what it tasted like or the way it made even the air feel thick so that taking a shower or actually walking down the stairs was exhausting, then Grace wasn’t interested. All the facts in the world couldn’t help her now, and all the ways grief was divvied up into stages and kinds and types—disenfranchised grief and detached grief and anticipatory grief and delayed grief—who did that really help? Not the people who were torn open with loss, not the people who were desperate to learn how to walk or sit or breathe with this gaping hole in the middle of their chests.

  It didn’t matter that Child Protective Services had immediately closed the case following Jack’s death or that Kate had written a formal apology, enclosing with it a copy of her resignation letter. CPS would not expunge the accusation from their records. “I don’t know if you remember Eliza’s Law,” Bennett said.

  “I remember,” Grace said. It was the law named after the six-yearold who was beaten to death despite the numerous reports to Child Protective Services.

  Bennett looked surprised, or relieved perhaps, that he wouldn’t have to explain again. “Then you know that it’s also the law that forbids the destruction of abuse records for any reason for ten years after the accusation.”

  Or until the child turns eighteen.

  It was the first time Grace and Stephen had been in Bennett’s office since the previous January. It felt surreal to be here, Grace thought, sitting on the same couch, staring at those same black-and-white photographs of the bridges. If she squinted, made the room blurry, she could almost imagine it was December still, that Jack was still alive. All that bright sunlight outside was really the blinding white of snow.

  “I don’t understand,” she said now. “Jack is—” She glanced at her hands folded primly in her lap. Every minute of every day she lived with this knowledge in her bones: Jack was dead. And yet, except for the night that she had attended the M.A.M.A. group, she hadn’t ever said it out loud.

  “After what they did,” Stephen said, “You’d think they would be bending over backwards to clear Grace’s name.”

  “They’ve done what they can, Stephen,” Bennett said. “They closed the case; they made a formal apology.”

  “Well, it’s not enough. It’s a joke, in fact.” Stephen stood, hands in his pockets, paced to the oak bookshelves, then turned. “So, what are our choices? Can we sue them?”

  “No!” Grace gave him a withering look. “My God, Stephen.” She turned to Bennett. “A lawsuit isn’t an option.”

  Bennett glanced from her to Stephen, then back to her. “I think that’s best.” He sighed. “The problem is that too many children are slipping through the cracks still. Obviously, the agencies are loath to make exceptions.”

  “Even when they’re flat-out wrong?” Stephen pushed. “Even when the child they were supposedly protecting is dead?”

  “Stop it, Stephen, please,” Grace pleaded. She glanced again at Bennett. “I’m sorry,” she said. “This is just difficult to accept.”

  “I’m the one who’s sorry,” Bennett said. He rubbed his hand over his forehead, his eyes no longer meeting hers. “CPS can’t expunge the file, Grace, not as long as you have other children in your care.”

  She nodded, as if she understood. She wouldn’t fight, wouldn’t argue. The accusation had taken this from her too.

  She woke up, crying again. The same nightmare: She was trying to get to Jack, but he was on the other side of a busy downtown street, and there was too much traffic and no one would slow down, and every time a bus or a truck obscured her view of him even for a minute, he got farther and farther away until finally she couldn’t see him at all. It was incomprehensible, even in her sleep, how easy it should have been to save him, and still she had failed. She woke then, her heart pounding, whimpering, her voice scratchy, as if she really had been screaming his name over the roar of traffic, and before she could even think, it’s only a dream, she remembered that it wasn’t.

  Thirty-Three

  Grace headed home after leaving the diner where she’d gone for breakfast. She had planned to go shopping, maybe even treat herself to a manicure. She used to dream about having time to do things like this, and the kids were with Stephen for the weekend, so she could, but all she really wanted was to go home, get back into bed, and sleep.

  She stopped behind a green Volkswagen Beetle waiting to turn left. A bumper sticker on the back: CAPE MAY BIRD OBSERVATORY. The words detonated inside her, so that for a moment, all she knew, all she felt, all she could think was Noah. She pictured him standing on the beach in an orange windbreaker, arm outstretched towards a chrome-colored sky, telling her how young albatrosses spend their first five years alone over the ocean. Or sitting in the Drift In and Sea Café with her and Max, eating French fries like a starving man, telling them how passenger pigeons all laid their eggs on the exact same day and how nestlings placed their bills in the mother’s to be fed, and if the nestling died, the mother became desperate to get rid of the milk, which literally killed her if she didn’t.

  He had told them that Huron Indians believed the souls of the dead came back as passenger pigeons, and that at one time, over a fourth of all land birds in the United States were passenger pigeons, so many of them that Audubon himself once watched a flock pass overhead, the sky turning black with wings for three straight days.

  The Volkswagen turned just as the traffic light changed to red. Something broke loose in her. Waves of longing smashed against the bones of her ribs. She missed him. It had been three months since she had spoken to him. He didn’t know that Jack had died. She closed her eyes, the heat blasting through the windshield like a drug. I would have traded your life for Jack’s in an instant, she told Noah in her mind. She pictured them walking along the nature trail at Higbie’s Beach, holding hands. He was telling her how only half of all song-birds that leave the coast ever see it again, 50 percent of them dying; how a pair of Canadian geese lived together for forty-two years. Once, on a rainy afternoon, lying in his bed, he told her how American goldfinches weave nests so tightly that they are waterproof, and that the nestlings often drowned inside if there was a drenching rain and the parents were away.

  The kids in the SUV behind her honked, their car pulsing with music. It seemed impossible to lift her foot from the brake and move it to the accelerator. She tried to steer her thoughts back to what she should do—she would go shopping, she would splurge—but his hand was on her rib cage and he was telling her that a bird’s heart in proportion to a man’s was larger and beat three times as fast. His fingers were on her sternum: Here, this is where your flight muscles would be. Angry tears blurred her vision as she turned toward her house. It was unconscionable to thin
k about Noah, to miss him in the same breath in which she thought about Jack. There was no comparison. Noah didn’t die, and even if he had, the loss of him from her life should have been minor, she told herself, should have been nothing, inconsequential, compared to losing her child, her husband.

  Should have been.

  “Are you sure about this, Grace?” Over the phone, Grace heard Jenn take a sip of coffee. “I thought you wanted to work things out with Stephen.”

  Grace laid her head against the rocking chair, staring at the bars of shadow cast onto the opposite wall by Jack’s crib. “I miss him, Jenn.” Noah. “I had so much energy when I was with him. I was happy.” Happy. The word was like one of those fantastic animals—galloping crocodiles, dinosaurs the size of sparrows—that long ago became extinct. “And I know how that sounds, okay? The idea that I even could be happy with Jack so sick.” She paused. “But I was.”

  “Look, I’m worried about you,” Jenn said. “Seeing Noah again is the last thing—”