Page 24 of Meet Me in Another Life

She strokes the bird’s feathers carefully with the tip of her little finger. “Urraquita,” she says.

Little magpie. His Spanish nickname for her. He can’t tellher what it means, that it’s already the name of another bird. He should have known she was smart enough to figure him out.

Thora looks at him over her knees. “Is it our fault if she dies?”

Santi takes a breath. “What do you think?”

It takes Thora a long time to answer. When she does, he pretends he doesn’t hear the strain in her voice. “No. We didn’t hurt her. We’re just trying our best to make her better.”

“Right.” Santi hopes it means she’s willing to forgive them, if she’s willing to first forgive herself.

The bird recovers. A few days and it’s hopping, then flying in short bursts around the study, making Thora giggle in a way Santi has never heard before.

“You know, parakeets are good vocal learners,” he says, ducking as wings whir above his head. “You might be able to teach it to say something.”

She darts him a look. “Really?” she says suspiciously.

He nods, glad to have caught her interest. “You have to really work at it. And there are no guarantees.”

She’s barely listening. She’s focused on the bird, her busy mind already thinking of what to teach it. Santi smiles and leaves her alone to work.

He gets used to coming home and finding the study door closed. Sometimes, he hears Thora repeating something over and over, but he can’t make out the words. Until one day, the door hangs open. He pauses, wondering if he should go in.

“Santi,” Thora calls.

It’s so unusual for her to name him, let alone request his presence, that he hesitates. “Yes?”

“Come here,” she says impatiently.

When he enters the study, Thora is sitting on the sofa, the parakeet perched on her finger. Her face is open, nervous, alive. She keeps changing, too fast for him to keep up with all the versions of her. “Hey, Urra,” she says softly. “Did you have something to say?”

“Help,” says the parakeet. “I’m trapped inside this bird.”

Thora looks up with a grin of triumph. For a moment, Santi just stares. Then he laughs, as much joy as surprise, until they are both laughing so hard they can’t breathe.

“I had to say it over and over. But it worked in the end.” She bounces in her seat, startling the bird into flying up to the bookshelves. “I want to teach her something else.”

Santi smiles and sits back, in awe at God’s work: how all his effort is nothing to a wounded bird that fell out of the sky.Thank you, he says wordlessly.Thank you for this gift.

God giveth, and God taketh away. Santi comes home the next evening to find the study empty. Heart pounding with dread, he searches the house. Through Thora’s bedroom window, he sees her in the garden, sitting on the tree stump where he talked to his mother.

He goes to stand beside her. She’s not crying. Somehow, that’s the worst part: the profound sorrow and the absence of tears, like something inside her is broken.

“I took her outside,” she mumbles. “I thought she might want some fresh air.”

“Oh, no.” Santi crouches down to her level. “When?”

“This morning. She still hasn’t come back.” Her voice is tight. “What was the point? If she was just going to fly away?”

This is the test, Santi realizes: not the nurturing, but the lettinggo. To take all the love and effort and detach it from yourself, no matter what vital organs get ripped out in the process. He takes Thora’s hand. “There was always a risk she might. But does that mean it wasn’t worth it?”

Thora snatches her hand away. “Stop it. You’re doing that thing, where you ask me questions and make it seem like I’m making my own decisions, but really you’re just telling me the answers. Go on. Tell me.”

Santi can’t help raising his voice. “You need to be proud of what you did. She wouldn’t be alive if it wasn’t for you.”

“Then I wish I’d let her die.”

He doesn’t tell her she doesn’t mean it. In the heart of her rage, he is sure she does. He looks out into the woods beyond the garden. He imagines the bird flying out from Thora’s hand: a rush of panicked freedom, then a pause on the fence, halfway between somewhere and somewhere else. Santi has always tried to read the world for symbols. But this one—a feral thing fleeing from offered love—he refuses. His daughter is not a bird. She is Thora. And he is not letting her go so easily. “Maybe she’ll come back to visit,” he says.

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