The Life You Longed For Read Online Free Page B

from Noah tonight. He was in Ann Arbor by now. He wouldn’t have access to his e-mail, refused to travel with a computer. It was one of the first things she’d learned when she found him last January.
    Found.
    As if he’d been lost.
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    Actually, finding Noah had been Max’s doing. He had been writing a report for school on John James Audubon and ended up on the Web site for the Cape May Bird Observatory. Grace was helping him. And there was Noah’s name under “Director.” A prickly feeling in her throat. “Wait, Max, I think I know this guy.”
    Her first e-mail had been brief: “Noah, is that you?”
    She had wondered if he was married, if his hair was still long, if he’d remained loyal to the Tigers. He was still twenty-two in her mind, writing secret messages on acid-free paper with lemon juice, showing ten-year-olds how to make sandwich-baggie bombs, trying to explain to her why a baseball stadium was more necessary to a community than a church, especially in Detroit.
    â€œYou’ll never believe who I found.” She had paced into the kitchen where Stephen was finishing the dishes. She didn’t wait for him to ask. “Noah McIntyre.”
    â€œWho?”
    â€œNoah, from my grandparents’ church. The guy who went to Princeton. I taught science with him that one summer. The Tigers’ fan?”
    â€œThe guy whose heart you broke?”
    â€œYeah, him.”
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    The first two days after she contacted him, Grace found herself checking her e-mail constantly. First thing in the morning, coffee-deprived and groggy; or rushing in from one of Jack’s therapy appointments at the hospital, still in her coat and shoes, purse tossed wherever, telling Jack, “Wait just one minute, Goose, Mama has to check something.” She drove to and from the hospital on automatic pilot, imagining the conversations she and Noah would have, trying to explain why she’d treated him so badly twenty years before, asking questions, answering his, telling him about her kids, her life. Already, she was different in those conversations—easier, lighter, more animated. She gestured to the windshield, to the empty passenger seat next to her. Sitting in traffic one morning, shaking her head and waving her hand in chagrin at something she imagined Noah saying, she found a group of teenagers in the next car pointing to her in unison, then rotating their index fingers in a circular motion at their foreheads: You’re crazy . She laughed and threw her hands up in a “What can I say” gesture. They were right.
    After three days without a reply, she was irritated. And disappointed, though she couldn’t say why, exactly. Maybe it wasn’t her Noah, she told herself, but she didn’t believe it. And then she got mad. Was he holding a grudge after all this time? Grow up, she thought.
    The next day she found his response. One question. Capital letters. “WHERE ARE YOU?”
    Later he would explain that he didn’t respond immediately because he’d been away at a conference, that he never took a laptop when he traveled, that he had panicked when he saw her e-mail (at two in the morning) and realized that five days had passed since she’d sent it. He laughed. “Never mind the twenty years that had gone by.” She heard something in his voice, like when a button pops loose of whatever holds it in place.
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    Stephen paused in the entrance to the family room, his arms loaded with firewood, breathing heavily.
    â€œYou okay?” she asked.
    â€œGod, it’s cold out there.” He set the logs in the wrought iron basket on the hearth behind her, then stood, brushing wood chips from his sweater. “This is obscene,” he laughed after a minute as he stared at the Christmas tree.
    And it was obscene. Presents crammed up under the branches and spilling along the back wall and halfway into the room. It didn’t take a