The Life You Longed For (13 page)

For many of Kempley's students these were the most difficult questions they had ever been asked. They were used to seeking answers outside of themselves. It was why they had chosen history to begin with, turning to the past in the same way that young men and women once turned to the convent or the monastery, not as an act of faith or passion but as a retreat from the painful present. Kempley told her students about her children then, about how it wasn't until she acknowledged the truth of what their death would do to her life that it became possible to apprehend what the childrens' illnesses in Salem might have done to their parents' lives.

The best students were those who weren't afraid of such truths or those whose own wounds lay close to the surface: the woman who struggled with seasonal affective disorder and who, sitting at her desk one winter afternoon, had looked outside at the low gray clouds and immediately understood how that unseasonably cold winter of 1692 had contributed to the accusations as well.

Most students didn't like Kempley. She was too exacting, they said. Never satisfied. Their carefully researched papers came back bloodied with red ink:
So what?
she'd write in the margins. Or
Why does this matter?
Or
These are just numbers. This has no heart.
They joked: After a class with her, you might start believing in witches again. She knew they said this, she admitted to Grace, and was stunned at how much it still hurt despite the fact that years—sometimes decades—later, a student she could barely recall would write her a thank-you note, saying that she was the one professor who had actually taught them something of value: to pay attention to everything. Because it all matters, and because that's how lives are lived, how history evolves: a moment, a choice at a time.

It was a truth the entire country would begin to know in the aftermath of September 11. Pausing to make a phone call, get a briefcase, taking this stairwell instead of that one, or taking a later train so you could photograph your child on his first day of school, stopping for gas, smoking a cigarette—these became the only differences between life and death. Choices that small. Everything mattered. Everything. It was an understanding borne out in the
New York Times'
“Portraits of Grief,” those one or two paragraphs describing the individuals who had died in the attacks. Lives were defined by the ordinary details: the girl nicknamed Gap because she always shopped there; the man who dressed up as a dancing bear for his daughter's third birthday; the elevator operator who studied the architecture of lighthouses in Maine; the man whose last e-mail—the one he was in the midst of writing when the plane struck—was a reminder to his friends about getting fitted for tuxes for his upcoming wedding. Ordinary details. The same thing Kempley had sought to understand about those who were executed three hundred years before in Salem. Those people were more than the role history had assigned to them. They were individuals. They had argued and laughed and fallen in love and had favorite foods and favorite colors and habits and idiosyncrasies.

It was a similar understanding that Kempley sought to impart to her children's doctors. History and medicine were alike in this sense.
Explanations
of historical events overshadowed the lives of the very people who were altered by those events, just as in medicine the diagnosis often eclipsed the life of the individual being diagnosed.

 

The three of them, Kempley, Grace, and Anne Marie, ran into Lydia in the hotel lobby when they returned from skating, still laughing at the image of themselves doing the Hokey Pokey. “I wish you'd come with us,” Kempley said. She looked beautiful, cheeks flushed from the cold, strands of dark hair tendriled around her face. But Lydia only glanced at them coldly and walked away. Grace felt her face grow warm, ashamed suddenly of her own laughter. What had she been thinking? Lydia was right. My God, roller-skating while their children were dying.

In their hotel room, Kempley had wordlessly pulled her suitcase from the closet and opened it across the bed. Her jaw was tight though her eyes glittered with tears. “I
hate
that she made me feel like this, that I let her,” she said quietly. She stood, hands on her hips, for a moment. And then, “Shit, I've lost a child. She can judge me when she knows what that feels like.”

Grace watched Kempley roll a pair of socks into a ball, then fold a sweatshirt into the suitcase. “I used to be just like Lydia,” Kempley said softly. “So sure that if I lifted my focus from the girls, from mitochondrial disease, for even a minute, something horrible would happen. It was my way to be in control. As long as
I
was vigilant, I could save them, and God help anyone who tried to tell me differently. People
,
including my husband, were always telling me I should get out more, do something nice for myself. Why didn't I take a walk, they'd ask. Why didn't I go to a movie?” She shook her head. “A
movie
. God. Doug used to tell me all the time: Nothing's going to happen to the girls just because you enjoy myself for a little bit.” She glanced at Grace. “There was this one night when he said that for the hundredth time, and I remember looking at him—we were sitting at the kitchen table, and I can still see exactly what he was wearing, the exact mug he was drinking his coffee from—and I hated his guts, Grace. I literally felt sick looking at him. ‘He really doesn't get it,' I thought. Our girls are dying, and he's so stupid, he actually thinks I can enjoy myself.” She shrugged sadly. “But he was right. Carrie died when I was right there with her. Doing everything I was supposed to be doing.” Kempley set the T-shirt she'd just folded into the suitcase, and gently smoothed the creases from it. Grace imagined she was remembering tucking Carrie into her crib. Rubbing her back.

“Beating ourselves up, refusing to let ourselves feel happiness or joy—” She shook her head, tears leaking from her eyes. “It's not going to save them.”

 

“You've heard of it then?” Grace asked Kempley over the phone.
It. Munchausen's
. Already—in less than a week—the word had become familiar.

“
Heard
of Munchausen's? Of course. But do I believe in it? Hell, no.”

Grace stopped. “What do you mean? How do you not believe in it?”

“You just don't.”

“But women have confessed, Kempley.” Irritated, Grace resumed her pacing, pausing at the foot of the stairs and listening for Jack, then returning to the kitchen where she'd been sitting with coffee. The house was quiet. Stephen was at the Y, Max was out skating, Erin and Jack were taking naps.

“Well, I'd confess too if some shrink was telling me that it was the only way to get my child back,” Kempley said. “Confess and you won't hang. It's what women accused of witchcraft were told. Then when they did confess, everyone said, ‘See? It must be real.'”

Grace smiled.
Professor
Trapman, she thought. Except the Munchausen's accusation wasn't some obscure academic subject. It was about her and
her
children, and the truth was that she could care less about similarities to the witch trials or even whether Kempley believed Munchausen's was real. The
accusation
was real. That her kids could be taken from here was real. What else mattered?

“Come on, Grace, you're an epidemiologist,” Kempley said now. “You know better than anyone all the ridiculous things people believed in the name of medicine, and every time,
every
time, it was a way to explain what no one understood. The Witch Trials started that way. A child was sick, and no one could figure it out. People were terrified.”

“I know, Kempley, but this isn't 1600 or whenever it was, and Jack
has
a diagnosis.” Exasperation leaked into her tone. “Besides, there are thousands of sick kids where no one knows what's wrong, and
their
parents haven't been accused. But
I
was.”

“Exactly. So what sets you apart?”

“I don't know. I keep thinking—”
Someone must have found out about Noah
. She squeezed her eyes shut against the thought, one hand on the counter, as if to balance herself. Bennett's question from three days before fell through her like something dropped from a great height, gathering momentum and weight each time she remembered it anew.
Was there anything unusual going on in your life at the time the accusation was made?

“Have you considered that maybe you've been accused because you know more about mitochondrial disease than half of Jack's doctors?” Kempley's voice was gentle.

Grace shook her head wearily. She'd forgotten how dogmatic Kempley could be. It had been helpful at the conference where Kempley was able to elicit answers that others simply couldn't. But the last thing Grace wanted was to turn this into an
Us v. Them
kind of battle. Parents v. doctors. Especially because, with the exception of Dr. Buford, Jack's first cardiologist, and the doctor from San Diego who had responded to Grace's letter about Jack, it contradicted her experience. She liked Jack's doctors, his nurses, his therapists. She trusted them. She respected them.

Mother-perpetrator is unusually friendly with hospital staff.

Or at least, she
had
trusted them.

“Studies show that doctors tend to dislike patients whom they can't help,” Kempley was saying. “Which makes sense, if you think about it. Kids like ours are constant reminders of everything the doctor doesn't know.”

“So you think the doctors accuse the mothers? I don't buy it, Kempley. And not with our doctors. Anju Mehta is like family to us.”

“I'm not saying it's conscious. Maybe the doctors are just more inclined to believe in Munchausen's if they already don't like the parent to begin with. And they probably feel guilty for feeling this way. I mean, how the hell can you dislike a parent whose child is dying?”

Grace thought of Lydia and knew it was easier than most people could imagine. “I don't know, Kempley, it seems—” she swallowed hard. “What if it's not that complicated? What if it's just—” She paced again to the foot of the stairs to listen for Jack or Erin, then to the front window, looking for Stephen's car. The street was empty. She paused in a block of wintry sunlight, but couldn't feel any warmth. “I met someone,” she said quietly. “Actually, I knew him in high school, and—God, this sounds so stupid—”

Kempley was silent. And then she said, “It doesn't sound stupid at all.”

“I'm married, Kempley.”

“Yeah, and you're also human, Grace. You're not the first married woman to have an affair, you aren't even the first married woman with a terminally ill child to have an affair. It doesn't make you a monster.”

“I know.” Her eyes burned. “But it's wrong. Stephen is so good. He's not some insensitive jerk, he's not—” Her voice broke. She sat on the stairs, chest to her knees, as if to hide. “What if I
am
sick somehow? What if I really do need attention?”

“
Everyone
needs attention, Grace.”

“But I've lied to be with him, Kempley. And I keep thinking of how the Munchausen mother seems so wonderful, but she's really a liar and a pretender—”

The acting skills of the mother-perpetrator can match those of a veteran performer…

“You're
not
Munchausen's, Grace.”

She is a master of manipulation and deception…

“But how do you know?” She was crying now.

“I just do.”

“You can't,” she sobbed.

“My God, Grace, don't you see what's happening? You're not perfect, but that doesn't make you capable of harming your child. I can't believe you've been carrying this around by yourself, that you've been thinking this.”

“I'm so afraid.”

“I know, sweetie, but having an affair doesn't make you a bad person or a bad mother. And yes, it's wrong, but Jesus, who the hell has the right to judge
you
? Or anyone? For all you know, having this man in your life makes you a
better
mother right now. Maybe he gives you the energy you need to deal with what's happening with Jack.”

It was true. He did. The realization only made her cry harder. “I could lose my kids,” she whispered.

For a moment Kempley didn't say anything. And then, “This is exactly what happened in Salem, Grace. Exactly. Good, decent, church-going women were accused, and they weren't perfect—maybe they envied a neighbor or they were angry or, maybe, God forbid, they committed adultery, but either way, it shouldn't have mattered. It didn't make them witches. But a part of them believed—just as you do—that maybe, maybe because they'd done those other things that were wrong, a part of them really was evil.” Kempley paused. “You aren't causing Jack's illness any more than I caused Kelly's or Carrie's. But I feel guilty too if for no other reason than because mitochondria are inherited one hundred percent from the mother.
I
gave this to my kids.
I
did.”