The Life You Longed For (35 page)

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.

S
he 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
.

She picked up one of Jack's Matchbox cars and ran it along the rails of his crib. Did John Bartholomew know that women with children had significantly fewer heart attacks than those who stayed childless or that in every language the word for mother carries an “m” sound, the first consonant babies learn, or that a blindfolded woman can identify her child by smell within minutes of its being born, even if she's delivered her child by cesarean.

She dialed twice before she let the call go through to the hospital. She was transferred to his department, to his assistant, who took her name and asked what her call was in reference to. She explained that Dr. Bartholomew had reviewed her child's records a year and a half before. She gave them Jack's name.

She recognized his voice immediately, his tone was chilly. “I'm not sure what I can do,” he told her brusquely.

She carried the phone with her to the living room and sat in the dark on the couch they rarely used. Light from the kitchen illuminated the pale upholstered chairs and oriental rugs and Waterford vases filled with long-stemmed silk flowers. This wasn't a room they'd used more than a few times since Jack was born—a Christmas dinner maybe, a retirement event for Stephen's former boss. It wasn't a room to be comfortable in, a room for laughter or children. It was a room for show, for appearances. The perfect room, she thought, to talk to the man who had probably accused her of Munchausen's.

When she explained that Jack had died, biting her lip to keep from crying, Bartholomew apologized perfunctorily and, sounding exasperated, asked again what he could do. She told him then that she'd been accused of Munchausen's shortly after her interaction with him, that it had cost her the last ten days of her child's life. “I know that whoever accused me did so in good faith,” she lied. She was shaking, fingers sweaty on the phone receiver. “I thought it might have been you and if it was…” Her voice cracked. “I just need to know.” She squeezed shut her eyes, determined not to weep. “Please, I'm not angry, I understand, I just, I can't move on, I'm so afraid, and my other kids…”

“I'm sorry, but I can't help you,” he interrupted.

“I am begging you.” She was nearly whispering.

“This conversation is inappropriate, Mrs. Connolly.” His voice was hard. “And to continue is to put us both in a position I'm sure neither of us wants to be in. But for the record, no, I did not accuse you.” A hint of something, compassion maybe? crept into his voice. “Please do not phone my office again.”

 

“I thought you'd be pleased that it wasn't him.” Stephen handed her a serving bowl. They were doing the dishes.

“But now I'll never know.” She set the bowl on the counter, and held out her dishcloth for another. “I guess I hoped that if it was him I could put it behind me finally.”