The Life You Longed For (5 page)

“Don't make any sudden movements,” Grace whispered to Max. “He might be dangerous.”

Noah looked at her and smiled. “Cute,” he said. And then, “You still hungry, Max? Want to split another bucket of fries?”

“Do you
always
eat like this?” Grace asked.

“Like what?”

Like someone who hadn't eaten in a long time—which was partially true. He wouldn't tell Grace until later that he lost twenty-two pounds in the five weeks since she'd sent the first e-mail, that he'd been living on protein shakes and salad ever since. He told himself he wanted to look good for her, that he'd been meaning to lose the extra weight for a couple of years now, but the truth was that after that first e-mail, he was afraid almost to
let
himself feel full, as if he needed to get used to emptiness again.

“So ‘why should people care about birds?' That's what you're asking?”

“I guess.” Max nodded. “Kind of.”

Noah grinned. “Okay, then. I've already told you about the sanderlings. Eight thousand miles, a bird the size of—” he glanced around, then pushed the small plastic salt shaker toward Max. “Smaller than this. Another bird, the blackpoll warbler, flies nonstop over water from Northern Canada to South America. It takes four days. That's ninety hours, Max,
nonstop
. It's comparable to a man running a four-minute mile for eighty hours straight.” He took a sip of coffee. “Then you've got the arctic tern,
Sterna paradisaea
: twenty-five thousand miles round-trip from the South Pole to the Machias Seal Islands. Or the American golden plover.” He waited for Max to finish writing, then continued. “They fly from Newfoundland to Brazil, two thousand miles, again over open sea the whole way. Or ruby-throated hummingbirds: they weigh less than an eighth of an ounce and fly five hundred miles across the Gulf of Mexico, wings beating fifty times a second.”

Noah let out a breath, drummed his fingers on the table top. “What else?” He and Max were both grinning now. “You've heard of Houdini, right? The great escape artist?”

Max nodded.

“Okay, amazing feats of escape? In the 1950s, scientists took a bird, the manx shearwater, from its nest on an island off the coast of Wales, flew the bird to America, then released it. Twelve and a half days and thirty-one hundred miles later, the bird's back in its nest. Or frigate birds—entire flocks get swept up in hurricane gales and are carried hundreds,
thousands
, of miles, then dumped in some other country, and they fly back to their original destination.”

“How?”
Max asked.

Noah held up his index finger—
wait
—and kept going. It was like watching a performance. A juggler or a knife-thrower, hurling the sharp blades of his facts, a fortune-teller slapping down her cards. “
Vermivora peregrina,
the Tennessee warbler, travels three thousand miles and returns to the same exact tree. And penguins. They can't even fly, and yet when transplanted twenty-four hundred miles from their nesting ground, they swam—
swam—
home. Half a mile an hour. It took ten months.”

His eyes rested on hers, those blue, blue eyes, and Grace felt a tiny click in her brain, like a tape recorder shutting off. She glanced away, feeling flustered and lost and strangely happy all at once. When she looked up again, he was still watching her, a sad, sweet smile on his lips. She noticed the laugh lines at the corners of his eyes.

“How about songs?” Noah shifted his attention back to Max as he beat another drumroll on the wooden table. He was loving this. “The male red-eyed vireo,
Vireo olivaceus
, can sing up to twenty-two thousand songs in a single day.” Their waitress set down the second bucket of fries they'd ordered. Noah nudged it towards Max, then asked, “How long did that just take?” He glanced at his watch. “Fifteen minutes, you figure?” He didn't wait for Max to respond. “Another species just went extinct.” He squirted a dollop of ketchup onto his plate. His hands were chapped and dry, his knuckles nicked and scraped. It was in his hands that he had aged the most, Grace thought.

“You ask why people should care,” he said gently, “and I almost don't know where to begin, Max. Take the whole miracle of flight. Sure, it's a cliché, but for a man to fly, to do what birds do so simply
every day
, his wingspan would have to be a hundred and forty feet long. Or take the fact that birds are our only modern link to dinosaurs or that every great thinker—Aristotle, Plato, da Vinci, Darwin, you name him—mentioned birds, that every important piece of literature we know—and I'm talking the Bible, the Quran, Shakespeare's and Confucius's works—mentions birds. In classical mythology, the entrance to the underworld was marked by a birdless lake. Hell, in other words, was—and still is, if you ask me—a place without birds.”

He picked up a French fry, then set it down. “See, the problem is that when people talk about saving an endangered species, it's too abstract. They talk about biodiversity and ecological systems and the food chain, and there's nothing wrong with any of that, except it's not about the actual birds. You name any single bird, though, and I will tell you something absolutely fascinating and unique about that bird: Asian tailor birds literally sew their nests together. Or
Sturnus vulgaris
—starlings: Did you know that Mozart based the closing variations of one of his best-known compositions, his Piano Concerto in G, on a starling's song? Ostriches on the African plains, the largest birds alive, can outrun a lion. I mean, I can't even imagine. And that's what angers me, or maybe
saddens
is the better word. How can people be so willing to relinquish something, whatever it is—a bird, a plant, a relationship—” His eyes found Grace's. “Before they even bother to learn what the hell it is that they're losing?”

 

Stephen was saying something about Child Protective Services. “Wait—” Her throat felt dry. What did Child Protective Services have to do with Noah? “What did you just say?” He moved from the rocking chair to sit next to her on the bed. Still wearing his coat.

“You knew Mandy worked for Child Protective Services, right?”

Mandy? Jeff's girlfriend. Yes—well, no. She knew Mandy had been in school for social work, but she hadn't known where Mandy worked. Or she'd forgotten. But she nodded.

“Did you hear what I said?” Stephen asked.

“I'm sorry, tell me again.”

But even when he repeated it, the words kept spinning away from her. Her first reaction was relief—this wasn't about Noah at all. And then she wanted to laugh because what Stephen was telling her was so utterly preposterous that there wasn't anything else to do
except
laugh. “You've got to be kidding me, Stephen.
Munchausen's?
” It was ridiculous. Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy was that disease where mothers made their children sick on purpose—injected urine into their kids' IVs, gave them ipecac to induce vomiting, smothered them with pillows, then rushed hysterically to the hospital, sobbing for help—all ploys for attention. Like the firefighter who becomes an arsonist so that he can look like a hero. And, according to Jeff's very young, albeit very sweet, girlfriend, someone had accused Grace of this?

She couldn't make the leap. Couldn't jump from the very real, very possible threat that Stephen had somehow found out about Noah to this abstract
theory
based on what? A twenty-something-year-old girl
thinking
she'd seen Grace's name in some file?

She shook her head. “God, Stephen, do you have any idea how much you scared me when you walked in here?” She looked at him, but he wouldn't meet her eyes, wouldn't smile. “Come
on.
This is crazy. I can't believe you punched a wall.”

“Look, I laughed too when Jeff first told me, but—”

“Are we even sure that Mandy saw
my
name? I mean, I like her, I told you that, but she's a child who's in love with a forty-year-old man who's never had a relationship last longer than six months.” She would just keep talking until Stephen realized how silly he was being. “I love your brother, Stephen, but he's not the smartest choice, so you have to question Mandy a little, don't you think?”

“Look,” he sighed. “All I know is that Jeff was really upset about this, I guess because Mandy was—”

“Oh, please. Don't tell me she thinks this is true?” A wave of anger washed over her. “So
that
was the reason for all her questions about Jack the other night? How dare—”

“Wait a minute, Grace. She had the decency to tell Jeff about this, so I doubt she thinks it's true. She's just worried, and I guess she thinks we should be too. Apparently, there was a big Munchausen's case in Philadelphia a couple of years ago that made national news, and ever since then—”

“Wait a minute. Marie Noe? Is that the case?”

Stephen looked up. “You've heard of her?”

Grace nodded. Of course, she'd heard of Marie Noe. Everyone in Philadelphia had heard of Marie Noe, anyone with a sick child had heard of Marie Noe. Marie Noe, now in her seventies, had been charged, arrested, and eventually convicted on eight counts of murder for the deaths of her own children some thirty years before. The week of her arrest, the nurses on the sixth floor of Children's talked of nothing
but
Marie Noe. Grace had asked Rebecca, Jack's favorite nurse, if she'd ever had a patient whose mother was guilty of Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy, and Rebecca had told her that it made her sick to even think about, but she probably had. Only it was impossible to tell, she said, because the Munchausen mothers were often the nicest ones, notorious for becoming friends with the staff and bringing gifts for the nurses. Grace had joked, “Well, remind me not to be nice to you guys anymore,” but now she recalled that even then, two years ago, she had felt a stab of fear.

She wanted to laugh this off too, but her face felt stiff and rubbery. How could anyone think that she—my God, Marie Noe was a monster. All
ten
of her children had died.
Ten
. And Marie Noe had
confessed.

Grace felt as if she were going to throw up. “Did Mandy also tell Jeff that Marie Noe's lawyer tried to prove that the children had a rare metabolic disease?”

“Are you serious? A mitochondrial disease?”

“I don't know.” She couldn't stop shaking. “I can't believe this, though. I can't believe anyone would think—do you have any idea what Munchausen mothers do to their kids? They suffocate them with Saran Wrap. They inject their own menstrual blood into their kids' IV lines. They starve them. I mean, what do they think I'm doing? Do they think I'm putting something into Jack's blood samples, do they think—”

“No, no, Grace, come on, stop. Come here.” He reached to hold her, but she pushed him away.

“I don't want comfort,” she snapped. “I want to know who said this.”

“Obviously someone who doesn't know you very well.”

“But
who
?” Her voice cracked.

“I don't know.” He raked his hand through his hair.

She felt herself crumpling. Stephen reached again to hold her, but she couldn't be held. She moved to the window across the room, as far from him, from that word—
Munchausen
—as possible. Tree branches held their wrists up to the sky. There was no moon. She stared at the Christmas lights from the house across the lake: on, then off; on, then off—and felt her own heart beating in tandem with them. She heard Stephen get up from the bed and cross the room to wrap his arms around her from behind as Noah had three days ago as they stood on the beach. She began to cry. How could she have thought for a minute that losing Noah—or even Stephen finding out about him—was the worst thing that could happen?

“Come on, Grace,” Stephen whispered. He smelled of leather from his coat and homemade bread from Jeff's bakery.

“I just want to know how this could happen,” she whispered.

“I don't know, but the investigation—”

She jerked away from him.
“Investigation?”

“Well, whatever it was. Mandy said it was initiated last March, but obviously no one found anything, and hell, for all we know, the ‘investigation' might have been nothing more than one call to Dr. Mehta and that was the end of it.”

Grace felt herself go cold again. “Anju knew about this?”

“No, I don't know…I was simply—”

“Why wouldn't she have told us?” Grace was crying again. She had trusted Anju. She had—she still did—consider Anju to be a part of their family. She thought of the morning, the second or third that Jack had been in the ICU last year, when she woke after a few restless hours of sleep to find an exhausted-looking Anju standing over Jack's bed. “Is he okay?” Grace asked before she even sat up.