Page 25 of Meet Me in Another Life

Thora shakes her head violently. “She won’t come back. Even if she did, she won’t remember me. It’ll be like I never existed.”

“But you’ll remember her.” He wonders why the words feel so heavy, as if they are talking of things as vast as galaxies.

“That just makes it worse.” She looks up at him, eyes wide and tearless. “I never want to see her again.”

Santi is developing an intuition for Thora, like a plant’s blind awareness of the sun. He needs to let her deal with this alone. He squeezes her shoulder and starts back toward the house.

His intuition is wrong. The argument isn’t over. “Why do you always think you know better than me?”

Santi stops, turns. All the answers—because I’m your parent,because I’m older—seem as empty as lies. “I don’t,” he says. “Right now, it’s just my job to pretend to.” That’s unexpected enough to silence her. He sighs. He’s so tired: too tired to repress the question he’s not allowed to ask. “Why are you so angry with me?”

Her face stays still. He knows her well enough now to be aware of the emotions underneath, emotions he suspects even she doesn’t understand.

He steps off known ground, following his explorer’s instinct that there is something out there in the wild worth finding. “Thora, I’m not the one who left you.”

She stares at him, something uncanny in her eyes. “But you will.”

He crouches in front of her, takes her unwilling hand. “I’ll never leave you.”

He shouldn’t lie to her. He needs to be reliable, predictable, not making impossible promises. But in the moment he says it, he believes it. As he looks at Thora, he sees her believe it too.

“Liar,” she spits. She pushes his hand away and runs into the house, slamming the door behind her.

Santi rubs his tired eyes. He looks up, where the stars he copied onto her ceiling are obscured by clouds. An old desire takes hold of him: to be up there, to see all this from an angle that could make sense of it.

It’s too late; that path is closed to him now. He’ll have to make do with this limited, fumbling perspective: hope that someone who sees further is guiding his steps. He sets his shoulders and follows his daughter inside.

Meant to Be

Thora is weightless.

She floats underwater, ears humming with pressure, the sea-green tips of her hair drifting over her eyes. Ahead of her stretches the hazy gray-blue expanse of the lake: an infinite world for her to explore. Echoes come through the water: the throbbing of a motorboat, the shouts of children playing close to the shore. Thora can hold her breath for a long time. She sculls with her hands, turning, and dives, aiming for the line of buoys that marks the edge of the swimming area. A few seconds and she will be close enough to swim under, make her escape to the wild freedom of the open water.

Something grabs her heel. She kicks, spasming to free herself, but the grip follows her, clamping around her ankle. A tug-of-war, a miniature battle she loses. Before she can get free, she is being pulled upside down to the surface. Water goes up her nose and she chokes, drowning.

She breaks through into the air. “You’re such a dick,” she gasps at her brother, who is treading water and laughing.

Santi grins, the sun off the water making him squint. “Youwere going to swim under the barrier,” he says, flicking water at her. “Think I didn’t see you?”

Thora splashes him back. “So what?”

“What’s wrong with the water on this side?”

She wrinkles her nose. “Apart from like a thousand people having peed in it?”

Santi tilts his head with an exaggeratedly relaxed expression. “A thousand and one.”

“Ugh! You’re disgusting.” Thora kicks out, swimming away as fast as she can. As he surges into motion behind her, she switches to crawl, easily beating him back to shore. She climbs out, dripping and sinking into the sand. On this summer’s day, the shore of the Fühlinger See is crowded with families escaping the city heat. Thora stamps her way up the beach, toward where the skyline of Cologne shows through the trees. She finds their towels, her copy ofThe Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxylying facedown. She picks it up as Santi drops onto the towel next to her and lies back, closing his eyes. Thora tries to read, but the beach is everything underwater wasn’t: loud, and safe, and full of familiar human noise. She looks over the book at her brother, as still as a corpse and about as entertaining.

“I think I’m going to get a tattoo,” she says.

“Mm,” he grunts.

Thora sighs. Half the time she wishes she could launch her brother into space. The other half, she wishes he wasn’t so distant. It’s strange to think how little would have had to change for him not to be here at all: two seconds on a wet road eight years ago, the crash that killed Santi’s birth family and the version of Thora that was an only child. She remembers what she used to be like: lonely, yes, but self-sufficient, good at being on her own. Now she’s dependent on this uncommunicative lump for entertainment.

“This isboring,” she complains.

“Boredom is the sign of a tiny mind,” Santi says without opening his eyes.

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