The Life You Longed For

by Maribeth Fischer

  She picked up the kids’ cereal bowls from the table and carried them to the sink as she listened through a number of hang-ups—Stephen again? But it was her mother’s voice next. “Stephen just phoned. He’s on his way to the cemetery.” Grace jerked her head up. “Your dad’s picking up Max,” her mother continued, “and I’m on my way to get Erin.”

  Grace glanced at her watch, confused. Was Erin sick? But then why was her dad getting Max and why was Stephen—? And then it—Munchausen’s—slammed into her with the force of a punch, and she was across the room, hands shaking as she grabbed her cell phone from the table and scrolled through the list of “received calls.” Stephen, Stephen, Stephen, her mother, Stephen again, Kempley, her mother—all in the last hour. She felt as if the air had been siphoned from the room, her fingers thick and uncoordinated as she punched in Stephen’s cell phone number, trying to remind herself to take deep breaths, to calm down, but even as she was thinking this, tears sprang to her eyes, and her heart felt as if it would break in half. On the second ring, she was switched into Stephen’s voice mail, which meant he was on the phone with someone else. Bennett? “Goddamn it,” she cried out loud, trying her mom’s phone, panicked now, because it had to be Munchausen’s, it had to be. Why else would they be acting like this, pulling the kids out of school, Stephen on his way over?

  The answering machine was still playing and now Kempley was on it, barely coherent, sobbing. “Oh God, Grace, I—I can’t believe this,” and the kitchen was dissolving, the walls turning to liquid, and it didn’t matter that it made no sense that Kempley would know of another accusation before even Grace did. Grace’s cell phone rang then, Stephen phoning her back, and she grabbed it, crying herself now. “What happened?”

  “Turn on the TV,” he said.

  On the drive to her parents’ house, she saw neighbors who were usually at work getting their kids out of the car and ushering them inside. Charlotte McCann was on the driveway, crying and hugging her husband, his car door still flung open.

  Erin stayed in the kitchen with Grace’s mom, while Grace, her father, Stephen, and Max stared numbly at the TV, as they watched those ordinary silver jetliners arc almost gracefully across that perfect blue sky. Again and again, they watched the towers fall. They didn’t implode in a riot of Hollywood special effects; they didn’t topple over or slam dramatically into even more buildings so much as they seemed simply to slip from view. Like a drowning man silently letting go after struggling to stay above water far longer than anyone believed was possible. Again and again. And still, no matter how many times they saw it, it didn’t seem real. None of them cried; Grace could barely feel.

  The news anchors struggled to find something, anything to say—Firemen, typically carrying equipment weighing anywhere from eighty to a hundred pounds, advanced up the stairs of a burning building at the rate of one floor per minute. Steel loses half its strength at 1022 degrees Fahrenheit and melts at 2500— but there were no words, there would never be enough words, to fill the gaping hole in the sky where the towers had been. All afternoon, this desperate listing of facts: The towers contained four hundred thousand tons of structural steel, six acres of marble, 12,000 miles of electrical cable…as if the magnitude of the loss could be measured and quantified. It seemed so utterly beside the point that it verged on ridiculous, and yet Grace understood that this relentless insistence on numbers and measurements—191 miles of heating ducts, enough concrete to build a sidewalk from New York to D.C.— wasn’t so different from her own attention to the technical, quantifiable aspects of Jack’s illness. Both were an attempt to offset all the things for which there were no numbers: the weight of a life or the value of a laugh.

  Max sat on the floor, leaning against the couch where Grace sat with Stephen. On TV, a witness, his business suit covered in dust and ashes, described how just before the impact of the first plane, hundreds of pigeons lifted off at once; seconds later, when the man saw the explosion in the North Tower, he realized the birds must have felt the collision before the sound waves carried. At the mention of the birds, Grace thought of Noah, a dull ache reverberating though her.

  “It was the worst thing I’ve ever seen. They were actually jumping—” a woman was sobbing, “and my little girl kept asking what they were, and what do you say,” the woman wailed, “how do you answer something like that?”

  “What did you say?” the reporter asked.

  “I just kept telling her they were birds.”

  Stephen leaned forward and put his hand on Max’s shoulder. “You okay?” he asked. Max shrugged. What did “okay” even mean? Grace smiled sadly at Stephen. “I’m glad you’re here,” she whispered, and he took her hand in his and said, “Me too.”

  And then back to the anchors, grim-faced and disbelieving, the litany of facts: ten thousand gallons of fuel were being carried on the two Boeing 767s. If the energy of the Oklahoma City bomb was converted into fuel, it would equal only fifty-one gallons.

  It took ten seconds to collapse what took eight years to build.

  The explosive energy of the two planes was over nine trillion joules.

  Joules. The same unit measurement used in defibrillators. Fifty joules to recalibrate a man’s heart. Twenty-five for a child’s.

  They had dinner with Grace’s parents, then went back to their house. Max immediately turned CNN on in the family room. Stephen tucked Erin in, then, looking beat, came into the kitchen to make a drink. “It seems strange that it’s still light out,” Grace said. It was still summer, although the newscasters and reporters were already referring to it as autumn: The autumn the world changed, the autumn we’ll never forget, as if even the season had been sabotaged by the terrorists.

  Stephen didn’t say anything, just carried the empty ice tray to the sink to fill it. Grace watched his eyes fall on the bone-colored conch shell she’d set on the windowsill two months ago. That’s what I want to be to you, Grace: whole and intact, even when everything around us is broken. The thought seemed only sad tonight. What was the cost, she wondered, of remaining intact in the midst of so much wreckage? She stared again at the sky, faded to pale blue, the horizon bruised with purple.

  “I keep thinking about what those families are going through,” Stephen said. He leaned against the counter, drink in hand.

  What Grace kept thinking about was Rudy Giuliani, the mayor of New York City, speaking of “unbearable losses” and the news anchors talking about living in a “transfigured world” and about how there was no such thing as normal anymore, and the unimaginable had become imaginable and how it all made perfect sense because this is what she had been feeling since the night Jack died.

  The sky was dark now. From the living room came the murmur of a newscaster. “I thought I’d been accused of Munchausen’s again this morning,” she said now. “All those frantic messages, and my parents going to get the kids.” She wasn’t sure why she was telling him this.

  “Oh, Grace, I didn’t even think of that.” He set his drink on the counter behind him. “God, I’m sorry.”

  She didn’t say anything, just nodded.

  “You want to know what I thought when I saw the news this morning?”

  She waited.

  “I thought, ‘Thank God, I’m finally going to be able to cry.’”

  “Have you yet?”

  “About today?”

  “About any of it. Jack, us…”

  He shook his head. “I think if I ever start, Grace, I won’t be able to stop.”

  After Stephen left, Grace watched TV with Max until nearly midnight. The networks had stopped showing the footage of the second plane and the Towers’ collapse. The focus now was on the families of the victims, holding up the handmade posters and leaflets of the missing, their eyes blazing with grief and determination:

  He’s always been a survivor…

  If anyone can make it, she will.

  I know he’s out there…

  All the things they said about Jack every time he
had a relapse.

  On the way up to bed, Grace took the shell from the kitchen windowsill and set it on her night table. This one intact thing. But even it was so fragile, tossed about in the surf, each five-foot wave exerting over five hundred pounds of pressure against every square inch of shoreline it struck. It made no sense what survived and what didn’t—and tonight, more than ever, she wanted it to.

  She held the phone on her lap for what seemed a long time. The TV was still on, footage of colored emergency lights swirling through the debris of dust and ash of what was already being called Ground Zero.

  “Were you asleep?” she asked when Stephen answered.

  “Is that possible?”

  She heard the clink of ice against a glass. “I don’t know why I called.”

  “I was just thinking of how, when that second plane hit, my first, my only, reaction was to get the kids and to get a hold of you. It was instinctual, gut-level. Get the kids.”

  “Me too.”

  “I know. God, the minute you walked into your mom’s kitchen and just held onto Max, didn’t say anything, didn’t cry, just held him. All day that’s what I wanted to do: hold you.” His voice sounded distant, blurry, from the wind maybe or from the drinks. “I should probably wait until I have less alcohol in me to have this conversation, but there it is, for what it’s worth.”

  She closed her eyes. She didn’t want to get her hopes up.

  “We clung to each other as if we ourselves were falling,” wrote John Updike in The New Yorker.

  “We’re living through an eclipse of normality, a twilight landscape. The sun isn’t quite right. It’s a little darker than it should be when you look at it,” author Edward Linenthal would say in Time.

  “It was like watching the moon fall,” actor Robert DeNiro would say in Esquire.

  She leaned over the counter, scanning the newspaper, waiting for her coffee to heat up in the microwave. She read that from the space station two-hundred forty miles above earth, astronauts had seen the dark plume of smoke and ash that day. “Tears flow differently in space,” she read, and thought of Jack, somewhere far away from her.

  On October 11, the nation marked the one-month anniversary of the attacks. They were fighting a war now in Afghanistan. Reagan National Airport remained closed. The newspapers reported huge increases in the sales of American flags, crosses, Bibles, and engagement rings; in dating services, and pregnancies. The National Infertility Association had a fifty percent jump in their Web site traffic. Emptiness was intolerable.

  Sitting in a Starbucks after dropping Erin off at school, Grace often found herself reading the Philadelphia Inquirer someone had left on a table, phrases coming into focus, then falling away through the scrim of tears that was constant. “Mechanics of Failure,” she read. “Archeology of Grief.” The towers had fallen in ten seconds, each floor collapsing onto the floor below, then slamming into the next floor, then the next, the cumulative weight and speed catastrophic. An entire floor compacted into six inches. Grace couldn’t comprehend it. Sixty feet of building compressed into three. A geologic stratum of loss. It was how her life had felt in the weeks before Jack died, she thought, staring blankly out the window, coffee mug clutched in her hands. The weight of the Munchausen’s accusation had slammed through her, buckling one support after the other from her life, building its own tragic momentum. Now, without Jack, and with Noah gone from her life, her world too felt pulverized, compressed into something unrecognizable and otherworldly.

  She would sip her coffee, the bitter liquid churning in her stomach, the grinding of the espresso machine momentarily drowning the sound of conversations. That a four-hundred-thousand-pound airplane could crash into a building at over five hundred miles an hour, releasing the equivalent of seventeen hundred tons’ worth of TNT, and people in their offices would go about returning phone calls, checking files, e-mailing coworkers and friends seemed incomprehensible. Why didn’t they run the minute they felt the building’s tremor, smelled the smoke, saw the bits of paper fluttering past their windows? How could they have waited? And yet how could they have possibly known what was happening?

  On Halloween, Erin dressed up as an angel. Max didn’t trick or treat this year. The papers were full of pictures, little kids dressed as firefighters and policemen. “Terror has a whole new meaning,” the papers declared, and “Horror is no longer the stuff of haunted houses or scary costumes.” On November 11, the nation marked the two-month anniversary of the attacks, and Grace marked the nine-month anniversary of Jack’s death. Nine months. The amount of time she had carried him inside her.

  Every day now there were more stories: about the little boy who used to fall asleep by counting the windows of the Twin Towers—his stars, which he used to be able to see from his bed. Now he couldn’t sleep; there was nothing left to count. Or the florist whose shop was located near Ground Zero. In the aftermath of the attacks, she had been forced to stock different kinds of flowers, hardier ones that could survive without the shade once cast by the towers’ shadow. And calla lilies, whose strong smell helped diffuse the acrid stench that had become a part of the sky itself.

  And then Thanksgiving. “Everyone is a pilgrim now,” Grace read in Time, “stripped down to bare essentials….” Stephen and Grace and the kids went to Grace’s parents as they always had. Jenn and Diane and their three boys came, so the house was loud and crowded, and there were pale slivers of time when Jack’s absence didn’t cut through her. Just after dinner, though, when everyone was crowded in the kitchen helping with dishes, Stephen found her alone in the den, hugging herself and staring out at the lake. He came up behind her, hands on her shoulders, chin on her neck. “Why don’t I come home?” he said quietly.

  Thirty-Eight

  She heard Erin’s door creak open, and then she was standing in the doorway, crying.

  “Honey-bunny, what’s wrong?” Grace set down her book and held out her arms. “Did you have a bad dream?”

  Erin only cried louder. “I—I don’t want to—to go to the doctor’s,” she sobbed. She had her annual checkup with Dr. Morris in the morning. He had been all of the kids’ pediatrician.

  “Hey, what’s up, sweet pea?” Stephen had lowered the paper. “I thought you liked Dr. Morris.”

  “But what if—what if—he takes me away?”

  “Well, I just won’t let him,” Stephen said. “How about that?”

  “No!” she wailed. “You can’t! You couldn’t with Jack and they—they—”

  “Oh God,” Grace said under her breath. “I didn’t even think.” She was across the room, arms around her daughter, whose nightgown was soaked.

  Erin was sobbing so hard, it sounded as if she were choking. “I—I—I wet the bed.”

  “Oh honey-bunny.” Grace took Erin’s hand. “Let’s go get you some clean jammies, okay? And then if you want, you can come sleep with Daddy and me. How would that be?”

  “But I still don’t want to go to-tomorrow,” she hiccupped.

  “Shush, baby, you don’t have to. I’ll call Dr. Morris and tell him you’re as good as new.” Which she wasn’t at all, Grace thought as she turned on the small ballerina lamp in Erin’s room.

  “I dreamed that they took me and I couldn’t see you anymore and then I died.” She spoke in jerks, shoulders still heaving.

  Grace tugged the soaked nightie over Erin’s upraised arms. Sadness looped itself through her. “I will never let that happen,” she whispered as she sat back on her heels and pulled a fresh T-shirt over Erin’s head. But she knew even as she said it that Erin didn’t believe her. And how could she?

  Grace stared at Erin, asleep between them, snoring loudly. “I thought about the accusation, of course, but it just never occurred to me that she would be making those associations.” She stroked her daughter’s hair. “I feel like an idiot.”

  “You can’t know everything, Grace.” Stephen said. The TV was on mute, bluish light flickering over them. “That she doesn’t believe that her
parents can protect her, though. Jesus.”

  When she searched Google for his name, over a hundred and twenty references came up. Dr. John Bartholomew. He was on the board of numerous medical and charitable foundations. He’d authored dozens of articles, had had dozens more written about him. Profiles. Interviews. And he was involved in a number of accusations of Munchausen’s, Had John Bartholomew been the one, then, to accuse her? Apparently he had accused a number of women he’d never met, women like Grace, who had written to and e-mailed doctors, randomly at times, and desperately perhaps, because they didn’t know what else to do or where else to go because their own doctors kept insisting it was nothing, that the mothers were overreacting, they were making things worse, they were making mountains out of molehills, they needed to just relax and stop thinking so much. “Diagnosis by Immaculate Perception,” the mothers on the M.A.M.A. site called it.

  She kept thinking it had to be him and if she could know this for sure, she could stop being so afraid. What did she have to lose? Her name had been cleared publicly, CPS had written a formal letter of apology. And Jack was gone.

  It took her over an hour to get up the nerve. If it had been him, would he accuse her again? She stood in Jack’s room for a long time, holding onto his crib, thnking, wondering. She wondered if John Bartholomew had children and if any of them had ever been as sick as Jack, though she knew the answer, knew that if he’d had a sick child of his own, he never could have accused as many mothers as the women on the M.A.M.A. site said he had. She knew that if he had a sick child, he would have understood that when your child is ill, it is impossible—ridiculous even—to talk or think or write about anything else, impossible to care, and because of that, yes, you might seem—and maybe you even are—self-righteous because you can’t imagine, you simply can’t, that anything else matters. MSBP mothers are notorious for documenting, in diary form, the course of the child’s illness, the experts wrote, and The MSBP mother never has enough time to tell her story, the experts said, but if any of these experts—if John Bartholomew—had a child with a terminal illness, they would have known this too: that these mothers wrote because they were terrified of forgetting something important, something someone said, some clue, some small detail that might help. They wrote out of panic, struggling to give coherence to a story that made no sense; they wrote for the same reason that Scheherazade told her stories, a thousand and one of them, in Tales of the Arabian Nights: they wrote to forestall the time when there was no story left to tell—when their child was gone .