Beyond the high windows of the museum, flags of nearly a hundred nations fluttered along the Benjamin Franklin Parkway. The sky was so bright that the trees stretching along the boulevard towards the Art Museum looked more blue than green, as if they had absorbed some of its color. Farther away, though she could not see it from here, was Children’s Hospital. She hadn’t been back yet, but she wanted to say hello to Anju and Rebecca, thank some of the nurses who were with Jack those last two weeks, perhaps donate some of his books to the sixth-floor playroom. Her stomach clenched at the idea. Maybe for his birthday, she told herself. August 8. It was still three weeks away, but the thought of it was like an explosion inside her. Birthday. The word itself, the whole idea of it, hurt. And yet there was no choice but to keep moving towards it.
Did you know that the heart contracts 100,000 times a day, 40 million times a year, two and a half billion times in a lifetime?
Did you know that in an average lifetime a person will breathe about 75 million gallons of air?
“Look at me, Mama!”
She turned to see Erin and Samantha waving gaily from the balcony just off the left atrium. Grace waved as Erin ducked back inside the heart.
In the display case in front of her was an AbioCor, the first self-contained mechanical heart. It looked like a plastic yo-yo. She read the accompanying words without really taking them in. The AbioCor heart weighs about two pounds and consists of a chamber filled with hydraulic fluid in the middle. A battery-operated centrifugal pump…At the next panel, there were headphones and she listened first to Ravel’s Mother Goose Suite, then pushed a button and heard the second movement of Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 4. Did you know that musical scores that approximate the rhythm of a resting heart can actually slow one that is beating too fast?
Erin ran up to her, hugging Grace around the legs.
“Where’s Samantha?” Grace asked.
“She’s with Aunt Jenn over there.” Erin pointed and Grace spotted them at the display where you could listen to the different sounds the heart made. “Aunt Jenn said we had to ask you if we could go through the heart again.”
Grace cupped her hand to Erin’s chin. “Is that what you want to do?”
Erin nodded eagerly, bouncing on her toes. She was a mess, socks falling down, hair all over the place, chocolate milkshake stains on her shirt, but she looked happy, and for a moment, Grace was too. “You having a good time, lovey?” she asked.
“This is my favorite place!” Erin said. “And I’m so glad Max didn’t come!”
“Hey, now,” Grace cautioned, but she was smiling. How did it happen, life pivoting back towards normal, happiness spiraling through the most ordinary moments? She kissed the top of Erin’s head. “Go on, you silly girl, I’ll wave to you again when you get to the top of the heart.” She watched her run off—“Mom says we can go again!”—Jenn turning to meet her eyes over the throng of kids, shaking her head with a familiar, “where-the-hell-do-they-get-their-energy?” look.
Did you know that during the first winter of the Siege of Leningrad in World War II, the city’s radio station remained on the air to reassure people that they were not alone, and when the radio announcers were too weak or too cold to play music or recite news, they turned on a metronome that monotonously clicked back and forth, like a heartbeat, letting it echo through loudspeakers in the streets to reassure people that they were not alone.
“She’s doing great,” Jenn said, coming up beside Grace.
“She is, isn’t she?” Grace nodded to the metronome inside the glass case. “Did you know this?”
“Yeah, I’d heard it somewhere.” They both turned to watch for the girls. “Does all this make you think about Jack?”
“Everything makes me think about Jack,” Grace said. “But it’s okay. I mean, there are still these horrible times—I’m dreading his birthday—but we also have these times when we’re actually happy. The other night Max and I were watching this stupid—and I can’t stress that word enough—Austin Powers movie, and we were just having the best time. To hear him laugh at all…” She sighed. “It’s weird too, though, the whole notion that we really are moving on. Sometimes it feels like I’m losing him all over again.”
Thirty-Six
Grace and Stephen stood in the laundry room, talking over the rattling of the washer as it gyrated through its spin cycle. Grace forgot how or when this had become a habit, coming into this room when they needed to discuss something important.
“So we’re all set then?” Already Stephen’s hand was on the door-knob.
Grace pulled one of Max’s T-shirts from the dryer, the colors faded from the heat, and held it to her face for a moment, inhaling the warmth. I can’t do this, she thought. I can’t. Tomorrow was Jack’s birthday. He would have been four.
“Grace?”
“Please stay here tonight,” she said. “I haven’t asked you for much since…” She shook her head. “Just please , Stephen.” There were no windows in this room, but she could hear rain lashing against the side of the house.
“Come on, Grace, Max and I will be back first thing in the morning.” They were going to a Phillies game. “We’re going to get through this.” The washer shuddered and clanked as it finished the spin cycle, and he waited for it to stop. “I just don’t want to confuse the kids.”
“It’s his birthday,” she pleaded. “The kids will understand that your staying is special.”
“Damn it, Grace, you agreed to this. Weeks ago.” He sighed. “The stadium is ten minutes from my apartment. It doesn’t make sense to drive back here tonight.”
She didn’t answer, only nodded miserably as she pulled a pink T-shirt from the dryer. She folded it and set it on the ironing board, her eyes welling, her nose running. She wiped it on the sleeve of her shirt, an old one of Stephen’s actually, then squatted to pull another tangle of warm clothes from the dryer.
“I should get going,” Stephen said again.
Max was in the family room, watching cartoons and eating Cocoa Puffs straight from the box. The windows were dark with rain that blew in sudden sheets against the glass. He’d been crying, Grace knew. She glanced at Stephen to see if he’d noticed, but he was staring forlornly at the string of birthday cards she had hung from the mantel, and that she would take to his grave tomorrow.
I’m sorry, she wanted to tell Stephen. I wasn’t sure. She’d put the cards up and taken them down half a dozen times last night, rereading each one. They were addressed to her, really: We know this day will be difficult. You will be in our thoughts. There had to be two dozen.
Abruptly, Max pushed himself up from the couch and walked out of the room.
“Sweetie, do you want to talk?” Grace called.
“About what? This stupid birthday for my dead brother?”
Stephen started to follow him. “Watch the tone of voice you use with your—” but Grace put a hand on his arm, stopping him.
“It’s okay. Let him be.”
She followed them out to the porch a few minutes later to wave good-bye. Erin would be home from Brownies any minute. The rain had stopped, though silver needles of water dripped from the trees and porch railings, and the sky remained overcast. The light hurt her eyes. She pulled the cotton cardigan she had grabbed on her way out the door tight across her chest and hugged herself against the unseasonable chill. The Nielsens from next door drove past, the luggage rack of their white station wagon loaded with suitcases for their annual vacation on Long Beach Island. They beeped the horn and waved. Stephen and Grace simultaneously lifted their arms to wave in return, and in the clear ordinariness of that moment Grace imagined her own life was ordinary again, that she was still the woman she had been only a year ago—energized and happy, harried with Jack’s birthday preparations as she followed Stephen out to the porch with last-minute reminders: You have the list, right? Don’t forget the piñata. They’ve got it all ready to go at Party World. And we probably need more Scotch tape. I don’t think I
wrote it down. But she would never be that woman again, she knew. In one of the bereavement magazines at the grief center where Erin was still going, she had read that somewhere in the world a child dies every two seconds, twenty-four hours a day. Every two seconds. Less than the time it took to inhale and exhale a single breath. How was it possible, she wondered, that the world had ever felt ordinary to begin with?
Stephen was halfway to the car when he tossed Max his keys. “I’ll be right there,” he called, trudging back to the porch. His face was contorted with the effort not to cry.
“What is it?” Grace asked.
His shoes squished in the rain-soaked lawn. He didn’t look up until he was standing at the bottom of the porch, and when he did, she was surprised to see how awful he looked, haggard and unshaven, his skin sallow-looking in the anemic light. Rain beaded on his T-shirt, in his hair. He swallowed hard, and she took a step down, the cement cold and damp against her bare feet.
“Don’t,” he gulped. “I just, I wanted—” He shook his head and turned to stare down the street. “We’ll come back tonight,” he said. “I’ll—I’ll sleep in Erin’s room.”
Tears sprang to her eyes. “Thank you.”
He shook his head. “The birthday decorations,” he choked. “I’m so glad you did that. And you were right. We should celebrate. I wasn’t sure, but—”
“Me either.” Her voice cracked. “It was worse not to do anything. It seemed so empty.” Her throat closed over the word empty, and now she was the one glancing away to the sky behind Stephen. A chevron of geese moved over the trees as effortlessly as regret.
“You’re not even going to try?” Kempley asked.
“How? The names are blacked out.” She pulled her hair free of its ponytail. “They made the accusations in good faith, remember?” She hated the bitterness in her voice, the sneer in “good faith.”
“And you have no idea who it could have been?”
She turned to lower the stream of water into the tub. “That’s the thing, Kempley. It could have been anyone. There are days when I think maybe it was my mom or my friend Jenn or Stephen’s brother or God, even Noah, though I know that’s ridiculous.” Grace balanced the phone between her ear and shoulder as she slid off her jeans. “When was it over in Salem?” she asked. “I mean, what did people do?” She poured the vanilla body wash into the tub, then shut the door behind her while it filled. Martha had phoned earlier to tell Grace about another woman in the area who had been accused of Munchausen’s. Her daughter had mitochondrial disease.
“When was it over?” Kempley said. “I’m not sure it ever was.”
Grace walked into Jack’s room and leaned her head against the windowpane. Sunday afternoon. Stephen would be back with the kids in an hour. “Come on, it’s not still happening,” she said. “It had to end sometime.”
“Well, the government declared a day of atonement in 1697,” Kempley said. “So I guess you could say that the effects lingered for a good five years.”
“What do you mean, ‘day of atonement?’” Grace closed her eyes against the onslaught of light. “Maybe that helped the accusers, but how did the ones who were accused ever get beyond it? I am so goddamn afraid still, and I don’t want to be one of those awful clingy mothers who suffocate their kids to death.” She panicked if Max was five minutes late, if Erin was at a friend’s house for more than an hour. She’d bought them both cell phones so that she could reach them.
“It’s a good question,” Kempley was saying now. “But truthfully, it wasn’t even until nineteen fifty-seven that the Massachusetts General Court finally proclaimed that ‘more civilized laws had superseded those under which the accused had been tried.’”
“Nineteen fifty-seven,” Grace repeated. “So it wasn’t ever over for the people who lived it.”
In the bathroom, she turned off the water and unbuttoned her cotton shirt. She was more tanned than she’d been since the summer she met Noah, thinner too. Noah. An ache beneath her ribs. She thought of the woman Martha had phoned to tell her about, the one whose little girl had mito. Only a little over three months since Jack had died—182 days—and already, already, it was happening again. She wondered if the same person who had initially accused her had accused this woman too. “I keep wanting to believe that things are different from they were back then,” she had said to Kempley. “But maybe that’s as crazy as believing in witches.”
“Ahh, ‘Let not the reader argue, from any of these evidences of iniquity, that the times of the Puritans were more vicious than our own…’”
“Is that The Crucible? I don’t remember it.”
“Hawthorne, The opening of Endicott and the Red Cross.
Now Grace stared for a moment at her face in the mirror, surprised anew by the gray in her hair, the hollowness in her face. She liked it, though. That she looked different now, that everything, even her hair color, the shape of her face, had been altered. Like a map of a country that no longer exists.
“Hi, honey bunny!” She scooped Erin up in a hug, then held out an arm for Max, even as her eyes focused on Stephen. “Did you guys have a good weekend?” she asked after the kids went inside. His arms were bigger from working out more and he too was more tanned than he’d been since the summer Jack was born, their last in the beach house. It was as if they were both, literally, trying to burn the grief from their lives.
“The weekend wasn’t bad,” he said now. “How about yours?”
“It was okay.”
“Well you look great.”
She smiled. “You too.” And then, quietly, “I can’t believe the summer’s almost over.” Labor Day was a week away.
“I try not to think about it.” The muscle in his jaw jumped. “I’m dreading this whole fall. Our anniversary, the holidays.”
“I know.”
He shook his head, still staring off. “Jack attack,” he said softly.
“Astro-nut,” she said.
Stephen smiled. “Some woman was yelling at her son yesterday at the pool and his name was Jack, and I swear I wanted to walk over and kiss the woman, I was so grateful just to hear someone say his name. I didn’t even care that she was browbeating the poor kid.”
“Are you sure we’re doing the right thing, Stephen?”
He looked at her. “I’m not sure of anything anymore, Grace.”
Thirty-Seven
September 11. Exactly seven months from the day Jack died; one-hundred eighty-nine days. Grace sat in the Starbucks at her usual table by the large plate glass window, sunlight throwing into sharp relief the shadows cast by the metal bistro tables on the sidewalk outside. Relief. Later, it would strike her as an odd word to use about anything connected to that day.
She’d left her cell phone at home, not wanting to talk to anyone. She nursed her cappuccino for a while, chin on her palm, staring out the window at the gorgeous autumn morning. There was nothing much to look at—the parking lot stretching to the highway, people coming and going at the gym next door. Conversation drifted around her: something about an airplane crash, and as always, Grace thought of her dad, though he hadn’t piloted in years. Two women hugged at their cars, one comforting the other, and Grace wondered idly what was wrong. Mostly she just thought of Jack, missing him so much more than she had ever thought possible.
Seven months.
Was this why she didn’t notice the unnatural quiet of the now emptied Starbucks? Why she wasn’t cognizant of how absence—of voices and laughter—had already taken hold? Or was it, as she would think later, that she did notice, but for her, especially on that morning—seven months—it felt right that a sense of emptiness permeated everything.
She drove with the windows open on the way to the cemetery, the radio off. An autumn blue sky, the kind of sky that pilots called “severe clear,” her father had once told her, meaning there was infinite visibility. The perfect day for flying. She couldn’t know, of course, that an airplane had already crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade
Center, followed twenty-one minutes later by a second one that crashed into the South Tower. She couldn’t have imagined that people were jumping from the 110-story buildings in an effort to escape, that another airplane was headed for the Pentagon, and another—which wouldn’t make it—to the White House.
In the cemetery, birds wheeled overhead as she sat by Jack’s grave and read Cosmo’s Moon out loud. She knew it by heart: You’ve been following me, said Cosmo. And the moon seemed to blush. Grace imagined she would always know it by heart—I guess never saying good-bye means you never get to say hello, said the moon. And she understood that these sentences were the details of her life that she would remember even when other seemingly more important ones were gone: the frigid feel of Lake Erie even in July; her mother sitting on the kitchen floor in her pajamas, crying because her batch of fudge hadn’t turned out; Noah that first day at the church picnic: Hey you, how about a little help, here? Kissing Stephen in the rain one night after a party; reading the phrase “mitochondrial myopathy” on the Internet for first time on an October afternoon.
When she finished reading, she set the book down and just thought about Jack, which meant the day wasn’t so different from any other day. It was still impossible to go for more than half an hour or so before the realization of Jack’s death was pressed to her face like a chloroform-soaked handkerchief, obliterating everything else. Four months ago, she couldn’t go more than a minute or two.
As she was leaving, she noticed that already some of the leaves in the maple trees had turned yellow. She thought of how the word apoptosis meaning “cell death,” came from the Greek word for “falling leaves.”
The minute Grace entered the kitchen, she heard the beeping of her cell phone, which meant she had messages. The answering machine was blinking as well. She set her purse on the counter, kicked off her sandals, and hit the play button. The first call was from Stephen: “It’s me. I’m at work. Call me as soon as you get this.” The next message was Stephen as well: “I’m in the car now. Call my cell.” She imagined it was about Jack and wondered if he’d changed his mind at the last minute. She had asked him to come with her to the cemetery, but he told her no, he’d go alone after work.
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