The Life You Longed For (34 page)

G
race 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.”

S
eptember 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.

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: