Page 19 of Meet Me in Another Life

“For you to see me like that. I’m never going to see you in that much pain.”

He smiles, worry still in his eyes. “Not like you to give up before you’ve tried.”

She crushes his hand weakly. Then they bring Estela back to her, and everything is different forever.

Thora never thought of herself as motherly. She worried she wouldn’t be able to love a child the way she’s supposed to. She’s surprised to find the love part comes easily. What’s difficult is everything else: keeping Estela alive and happy; snatching moments of sleep between feeding her and changing her and worrying over every sound she makes.

Things don’t get easier. Hard just becomes normal. Santi’s sister Aurelia comes to visit, and Estela becomes obsessed with her, following her around the flat with earnest cooing sounds. Then, with no time in between, Estela is five, full of tumbled sentences of half-English, half-Spanish, and Thora has never loved anything so much in her life, and then they get a call from the hospital.

It was a routine blood test. They have been thinking abouthaving another child, and so they both went in for a checkup. Now they sit in the hospital waiting room. Santi holds Thora’s hand, as if it’s her results that were the problem. His thumb strokes her knuckle until she can’t bear the repetition. She pulls her hand away.

“Thora,” he starts.

“Don’t,” she says. “I don’t need one of your speeches about accepting God’s plan. I can’t—”

“Santiago López?” calls the nurse.

Thora follows him into the small clinic room. The nurse closes the door behind them.

Afterward, she leaves him in the lobby, pretending she has to go to the toilet.Feel something, she screams at herself as she climbs the endless stairs. But all she feels is justified, her fear finally coming home to roost. She finds a fire escape on the ninth floor and smokes, as she hasn’t done in six years, the symbolic pack of stale cigarettes at the bottom of her handbag. Through a gap in the buildings, under the clock that reads a quarter to eleven forever, she can see her old graffiti on the ruined tower. NO GOING BACK. She broke her rule: she made a choice. Now, here she is, exactly where she didn’t want to be. Santi will die before her, and the one solid thing in her world will be gone. The city will collapse, the towers boil away; a great hole will open in the fabric of everything, pulling her inside.

Unaware, Santi stands below her in the spitting rain, playing with his grandfather’s knife. Damn him, he looks serene. This is what he’s wanted his whole life: a real test of his faith.

When she goes down to join him, he smells the cigarette smoke in her hair. “Oh, cariña,” he says, and folds her in his arms.

Life slows down, decompresses from glimmering fragments to afternoons in the oncology ward that drag forever. One night,she wakes at his bedside with a crick in her neck and a sense of complete dislocation.Estela, she thinks in panic, but no: she’s safe with Santi’s mother.

He’s awake, looking at her with loving exhaustion. “Are you okay?”

She almost laughs in his face.No. I’m falling apart. I want to get up and run out of the hospital, out of the city, out of the world.But there are some things she can’t say to him. Things Estela can say, things his mother can say, things Jaime can say, that from her would be stabs to the heart. It’s part of the unspoken pact they made under the spoken vows, a host of small print Thora didn’t know she was agreeing to. She sits by his bedside and holds his hand, furious at the limitation of it. She doesn’t want to be his wife. She wants to be something else, something elemental and boundless. Another thing she can’t say.

She squeezes his hand. “I’m fine. I love you. Go back to sleep.”

Santi doesn’t respond to the treatment. Thora isn’t surprised. She saw all this coming, the whole sorry trajectory. She wishes she’d walked away as soon as he sat down at her table. She breaks the rules and tells Santi this, and he laughs, and she loves him, and how dare he keep on making it worse?

On Estela’s sixth birthday, he dies.

Thora didn’t realize how much she counted on his unwavering faith until, at the last, it wavers. He clings to her hand, as if he doesn’t want to go where his God is waiting for him. Afterward, she waits for the better part of a year, insanely and sincerely, for him to come back. She doesn’t tell anyone: they’re already watching her. Lily, her parents, Aurelia, who has moved to Cologne to help with Estela. If they knew that every time she hears footstepson the stairs, she thinks it’s Santi coming home, they would move in, frighten his ghost away. So she bites down on her grief and stays silent.

They had ten years. It wasn’t enough. Even if sometimes, it felt like eternities; even if the time expanded as it turned, like the spiral arm of a galaxy.

She thinks about leaving. Once, she even takes Estela to the Hauptbahnhof, standing in the long arcade as trains to elsewhere flash up on the screens. She walks out without buying a ticket. The time to leave was before she met him. Now, she has too much tying her here: her job, Estela’s school, the way Aurelia uprooted her life to come and support her. She doesn’t admit to herself that none of that really matters. What makes her stay is one mad thought: if she leaves, Santi won’t know where to find her.

Estela changes, as if the part of her that was Santi’s daughter died when he did. Gradually, she becomes someone new, not like him and not like Thora either. Someone they made up out of bits of themselves, like mad inventors. It has never seemed more miraculous, or more cruel. Thora tucks her daughter in, kisses her forehead. She wonders when she consented to have a spear driven into her chest, on the understanding that the wound would stay open forever: that through the whole procedure, she would remain impossibly alive.

“Where’s Papa?” Estela asks.

A little more blood lost. “Sweetheart, Papa died,” Thora says.

“I know,” says Estela seriously. “But where is he?”

Thora’s head swims. She wonders if Estela has talked about this with her grandparents. One set would have told her Santi is in heaven. The other would have told her what they told Thoraat the same age, after her uncle died: that he just didn’t exist anymore.

“Where do you think?” she asks.

Estela casts her eyes to the ceiling, covered in glow-in-the-dark stars since before she was born. A memory snags Thora like barbed wire: Santi up a ladder, laying out a universe for his daughter.

“I think he’s somewhere else,” says Estela. “Waiting.”

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