The Life You Longed For by Maribeth Fischer

that, quite honestly, whoever was responsible forgot.” They were at their car. Bennett shook Stephen’s hand, then Grace’s. “I know it’s not much consolation,” he told her, “but whoever made that call probably believed that he or she was truly doing what was best for Jack. I doubt it was malicious.”
    She nodded, shivering as the snow fell around them like consequences, those tiny fragile truths.

Nine
    G race pushed open the door to Jack’s room. Immediately, she smelled the ammonialike odor of his urine. Light from the hallway glinted on the metal oxygen canister next to his bed. The CPAP machine that monitored the rate and flow of air whirred softly like a rewinding cassette tape. Grace leaned over Jack’s crib, her palm against his back, and felt the dampness of his pajamas. At least the diuretic was working, but like everything connected to this illness it was a double-edged sword. He needed the diuretic to rid his lungs of the fluid that was backing up in them, but if he lost too much, his potassium levels would plummet, which in turn would raise his blood pressure.
    She pulled off his soaked clothes, repositioning him away from the damp part of the sheet, which she covered with a cotton baby blanket. She slid one of Erin’s old Sesame Street T-shirts over his head, easing it past the tangle of tubes. “No, Mama,” he whimpered, angry at being disturbed.
    â€œMama’s just going to check your blood pressure, Jack,” Grace whispered, maneuvering the cuff over his arm. He began to cry, and she shushed him, stroking his damp hair. “It’s okay. Mama’s almost done.” Across the room, the red numbers on his pulse oximeter flashed his heartrate and oxygen intake. His blood pressure was borderline. She’d check it again in a little bit. “I love you,” she whispered. Jack stopped sucking on his pacifier to mumble, “Wuv too, Mama,” and she understood again the sheer impossibility that she could ever harm him. Tears burned her eyes as she felt her lips shape the word, and then the phrase, Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy. The sound was like the snow falling outside, melting as soon as it touched anything substantial. It meant nothing next to her love for this child. Nothing.

    Downstairs, the house felt chilly. She pulled the sash of her robe tight as if to somehow hold her fear inside.
    Grace sat at the computer, waiting for it to connect to the internet. Her desk was covered with unread medical articles, one of Jack’s Matchbox cars, a half-naked Barbie, a leatherbound edition of Gray’s Anatomy of the Human Body, one of the few books she had read, beginning to end, purely for pleasure.
    Even as a child, she had never liked stories as much as facts, regardless of how odd or fantastic those facts were. The longest distance ever walked by hand: 870 miles. From Vienna to Paris; 1900. It took fifty-five days of ten-hour stints. The smallest church: located in Málaga, Spain, and measuring 2.1 square feet. On special occasions when Mass is held, there is room for only one person to pray in it at a time . Her favorite book had been Wonders of Nature: A Child’s First Book About Our Wonderful World, as if a part of her had always understood, even when she couldn’t have been more than five or six, that nothing in her life would ever be as certain as those simple statements printed in bold ink: The sun is 93 million miles from the earth. Sunlight takes eight minutes and twenty seconds to reach us. Snowflakes have six sides. A raindrop is shaped more like a doughnut than a pear .
    In high school, she excelled in science, but brought home Cs in English and history. It was her father who gave her the leather-bound edition of Gray’s Anatomy for her sixteenth birthday. She was fascinated by it, the human body like a vast and foreign landscape with its intercoastal veins, Haversian Canal and Capsule of Tenon.