Page 20 of Meet Me in Another Life

Thora’s breath catches. It’s so strange, hearing her own inexplicable conviction from her daughter’s mouth, that she’s afraid to ask her what she means. “Waiting for what?” she finally says.

But Estela doesn’t answer. She rolls over, and Thora is left to pour herself a glass of wine and sit on the sofa with Félicette, old now and almost blind, her rattling purr a bare threnody of mourning.

Thora goes on, out of spite and habit and love for her daughter. Estela grows up, all her quirks and silliness transmuted into the best person Thora knows: an alchemy she will never understand. Thora stays in the top-floor flat in the Belgian Quarter, not listening when Estela tells her it’s too many stairs, not caring when she becomes a shuffling old woman who takes fifteen minutes to climb them. Lily, when she comes around, tells her she feels time speeding up, that the moments slip through her hands too fast. Thora disagrees. For her, time stretches like the universe is being poured into a funnel, leaving great vacancies behind.

Lily gives her a knowing smile. “You think you’re going to see him again.”

“No!” It comes out automatically: she is a skeptic, has been since before she knew the word to describe it. She is an accident of atoms, and when life is done with her, she will disperse. But Lily is right. Deeper than thought, deeper than her deepest principles,is that irritating conviction, like his faith is a virus that has been incubating silently inside her. It is unthinkable that she won’t see him again.

Her lip curls, not with sadness but with anger. How dare he do this to her? She could have been different without him: a whole person, as she was meant to be, not pathetically waiting for a dead man to return. All it would have taken was one choice. “I could have walked away,” she says, defiant.

Lily squeezes her shoulder and goes to make more tea.

When it comes, finally—pneumonia, racking her lungs until each cough shakes her apart—it feels like it’s happened before. She assumes it’s her brain shutting down, déjà vu as an epiphenomenon of dying consciousness. She wishes Santi were here so she could argue with him about it.

Estela is there, in the blurred region where her awareness fades. She’s crying, and her sorrow hurts, tears salting the wound that still hasn’t killed her. With the last of her strength, Thora squeezes her daughter’s hand.

“I made the wrong choice,” she tells her. “I take it back. I want to start again.”

Love Is War

Santi meets his daughter for the first time when she is eleven. She’s tall for her age, with straight eyebrows and lank hair scraped into a high ponytail. Her long sleeves hide her hands.

“This is Thora,” says the social worker. “Thora, this is Mr. and Mrs. López.”

“Santi,” he says, holding out his hand. She takes it without meeting his eyes.

“Héloïse,” says his wife. She’s dressed for the social worker rather than for Thora, patterned dress swapped for a gray suit, braids bound back in a bun. It makes her look stiff, nervous, nothing like herself. Then she smiles, and her warmth shines through. Instead of shaking hands, she waves. Thora, surprised, looks up with a smile that’s almost a laugh.

They sit down at a table outside the Kinderheim. It’s not much of a garden: dying grass, a shallow pond, straggling trees ineptly screening the main road that leads back to the city center. Thora sits with her hands between her knees, answering their questions without making eye contact. Santi doesn’t have much experience with kids; he can’t help reading her as if she is a client visiting his office, rather than his prospective child. Smart, withdrawn,deeply hurt in a way that she pushes outward. A sense of humor that bites.

“What’s your favorite thing to do here?” Héloïse leans forward, trying to get under Thora’s guard.

Thora meets her eyes. “Watching the grass grow,” she says, deadpan. “That’s pretty fun.”

Santi’s laugh jumps out of him. An answering smile quirks the edge of Thora’s mouth before it disappears.

After the visit, the social worker escorts them back to their car. They watch through the windshield as a boy chips away at the balustrade of the Kinderheim with a rusty nail.

“What do you think?” Héloïse asks.

Santi looks across at her. “She’s ours,” he says simply.

Héloïse nods, tears shining in her eyes. “Yeah,” she says in a whisper. “Yeah, I thought so too.”

They fill out a hundred forms, attend a dozen interviews. They answer questions about their marriage, their daily routine, how long they have lived in Cologne. They bear it all, if not with patience, then with determination. Finally, they get their prize: a file containing Thora’s history, laid out year by year with accompanying photos. A baby with her eyes, blue and desperate, as if the sullen girl they met is trapped in there. Santi turns the page to meet her parents: a mother who left when she was two, a father who lost his position at the university after funding cuts and slowly succumbed to alcoholism, until social services battered down the door to find a trail of empty bottles and Thora screaming with a toddler’s rage. He reads of her being passed on to a neglectful uncle—a picture of her in a sweater knitted for a much smaller child, with a design of a badger who looks almost as angry as she does—then to a string of foster families until she wound up at the Kinderheim.Where she would have stayed, labeled a lost cause, had Santi and Héloïse not shown up with their empty nursery and their long-dried tears.

Santi’s crying by the time he finishes reading. He passes the tablet to Héloïse. “You’re going to need a drink.” He goes to make her one, leaving her with their daughter’s life story.

They repaint the room they’ve already started calling Thora’s from light green to purple. Santi buys glow-in-the-dark paint and brushes careful stars onto the ceiling in patterns that mimic real constellations.

It’s late spring by the time they’re allowed to bring her home. When Santi unlocks the door, Félicette startles into flight. Thora pauses on the threshold, uncertain.

“Your room’s upstairs,” says Héloïse. “The door’s open. Want to go and look?”

Thora nods and creaks warily up the stairs. The two of them follow, expectant and afraid.

“Noway!” Thora yells in delight. “Stars!”

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