Page 23 of Meet Me in Another Life

There is nothing Santi hates more than hopelessness. “Time,” he says. “That’s what she needs.”

He calls his mother. He sits on the tree stump at the end of the garden, because Thora doesn’t like hearing him talk in Spanish.

“Why?” he asked her the first time she got upset.

“You could be talking about me and I wouldn’t even know.”

He rolled his eyes. “Thora, I’m not constantly discussing you.”

Now, the summer dark is heavy. A night bird he can’t identify makes soft sounds in the trees.

“Bring her here,” says his mother. “Why don’t you bring her? I want to meet my granddaughter.”

Santi rubs his forehead. He hasn’t been back home since he moved to Cologne. Instead, he’s waited for his family to come to him. There’s always too much happening here: Héloïse, his job, now Thora. “We’ll come, when the little magpie is more settled.” The nickname is only for these phone calls. Nothing would feed Thora’s paranoia more than conversations sprinkled with her name in a language she doesn’t understand.

His mother doesn’t tell him what she’s thinking, but he hears it anyway. That his little magpie will never settle. That she will batter herself bloody against the bars of the cage he has built to keep her safe.

Later that week, he comes home from Der Zentaur and sets his keys down on the kitchen table. Félicette jumps up and rubs against his hand. “Thora?” he calls up the stairs.

The house vibrates with unnatural quiet. He goes to knock on the door of her room. “I’m coming in,” he says, and pushes it open. Her usual mess: the panpipe of water glasses on the windowsill, the crochet square abandoned on her bed. He checks the bathroom—empty—and finally his and Héloïse’s room, although he doesn’t seriously expect to find her there. Santi reads what the world tells him, and right now it is spelling out disaster. He decides to call the police.

Then he hears something shuffle in the ceiling.

He opens the attic door. She’s pulled the ladder up after herself, an outlaw making safe her den. He pulls it down and hurries up the creaking treads, terrified that she has hurt herself, that he’s failed at the only important thing he’s ever tried to do.

She’s not hurt. She’s sitting cross-legged next to the crib Héloïse couldn’t bear to throw out or give away. Her fingers slip between the bars, like she’s playing with a baby’s ghost.

“You wanted your own children.” The words he hoped she’d never say. They curl from her mouth like tangling vines.

He’s supposed to say,You are our child. We never wanted anyone but you.But he knows her better now: knows when the approved phrases will hit their mark, and when she will deflect them with deadly force at his heart.

“We tried, yes,” he says. “But it wasn’t meant to be.”

“Meant to be?” The phrase contorts Thora’s mouth. “My parents weremeantto look after me. I wasmeantto do well at school and go to uni and learn physics and biology and be an astronaut.” Santi flinches; Thora doesn’t see her blow land. “But that didn’t happen. And you and Héloïse didn’t get your own children, you got me.” She shakes her head in fury, pulling her sleeves down over her wrists. “None of us got to choose. The only difference is you want to make it mean something. Like this was what God wanted all along. When it’s just what we got stuck with.”

Santi has run out of bullet points, of reasonable discussions in a calm voice. He can’t confess how close her words have cut to his secret fear: that he is the worst kind of liar, taking whatever he’s not too lazy to accomplish and calling it fate.

A thud against the attic window. Santi jumps in holy terror: God’s fist on the glass. Thora is already at the window, carefully delineating the ghost of wings.

“Oh.” A quiet exhalation. She has become another person in the time it took for a bird to die. She pushes past Santi, sliding down the ladder so fast it must hurt her hands.

He follows her down and out into the garden. “Did you findit?” he asks, approaching her as if she is the bird: fallen, half -dead and half-alive.

Thora opens her hands. The bird is a bright, startling green: one of the feral parakeets that have colonized the city. It lies perfect as a simulacrum, wings folded, eyes closed.

“What a shame,” Santi says.

“She’s not dead,” Thora says forcefully. She blows gently on the bird, ruffling its feathers. It twitches, eyes opening and closing.

Santi feels a surge of hope, intoxicating as wine. “Bring it inside. We need to keep it warm.”

They set up a padded box in Héloïse’s study, close the door to keep Félicette out. Santi shows Thora how to feed the bird water using a pipette. He watches her stroke its feathers with fingers he’s rarely seen outside of sleeves or fists. He’s never known her so quiet, so absorbed.

Days pass, and the bird doesn’t die. Santi stops looking for Thora in her room. When he gets home, he comes straight to the study where she will inevitably be, hunched over the box, feeding the bird or watching it sleep. Sometimes she’s so enthralled that he catches an instant of how she is when he is not observing her. He hoards them, those impressions of a soft, wondering girl, like jewels. It awes him, how someone as angry and self-contained as his daughter can look after this helpless thing with such tenderness. He is watching her look after herself, in the way that he and Héloïse, with their distance and their good intentions, never can.

“I’ve decided what her name is,” she announces.

“Oh?”

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