Page 27 of Meet Me in Another Life

He nods, looking away across the beach. Thora imagines the two of them dying. Here, now, a comet blazing down from the sky, sending each of them where they believe they’re going. She feels a pang of strange loneliness, imagining Santi in some perfect hereafter with his real family, while she... She catches herself. She wouldn’t exist anymore to miss him.

Santi digs in the sand, like he’s trying to uncover somethinghe can’t remember burying. Thora hugs her knees, thinking about the accident, how it traded away her loneliness for Santi’s pain. She has decided a hundred times over that if she could bring back his family by giving him up, she would do it. She decides it again now, closing her eyes and imagining herself alone on the beach, imagining Santi back with his real sister and his mother and father. Thora likes to dwell on things that hurt: the mental equivalent of pinching herself until her fingernails leave a pair of half-moon scars. But Santi won’t let her do that anymore.

“I never told you this,” he says. “But—for a while after they died, I was sure I was meant to be dead too.” He laughs, mocking the child he was. “I thought God had made a mistake. Any second, he was going to realize, and then, he would come to take me.” He stabs the sand in an irregular heartbeat rhythm. “The first few nights I spent in our room, I didn’t sleep. I just lay there, waiting.”

Thora remembers. She didn’t sleep, either. She lay in her familiar bed in her familiar room, staring up at the glowing constellations on her ceiling, wondering how it was that everything had changed: the empty space on the other side suddenly filled with his dark shape, his shallow, tentative breaths.

“It wasn’t hard to imagine what it’d be like. Dying, I mean. It was almost like I remembered it.” A shiver comes on Thora from nowhere, a dizziness that surges and passes. Santi’s voice wavers. “But I just kept thinking about all the things I’d never be. I’d never learn to fly. I’d never get to see the world, let alone the stars.” He’s crying now, and Thora can’t look, and she’s not made for this. She wants to dive into the lake, hide in the blue world where everything is silent and nothing weighs this much.

Santi rubs his hand across his face, leaving a trail of sand. “I wanted to see my family again. So much. But I didn’t want to die. And I—I don’t know if they’ll ever forgive me for that.”

He sobs, his body shaking but his mouth closed, holding everything in. Thora sits paralyzed.Help, she thinks, without knowing who she’s asking: the ghost of Santi’s real sister, maybe, who should be here to comfort him through the grief she caused. What would she do? The answer comes to Thora, not as words or even as an idea, but as possession, opening her arms and drawing Santi into them. She holds him, and he leans into her, clinging as if she can fix what is broken in him. Over his shoulder, the indifferent world goes on: a child building a sandcastle, a man sleeping with a book over his face, a long-haired man in a blue coat running along the edge of the sand. Thora has never been so angry: at Santi’s family for dying, at his God for abandoning him, at the mindless universe for changing him from the person he ought to have been. She doesn’t know where it comes from, her clear picture of the Santi that would have existed if they hadn’t died, a version of him she never met. A version that was calmer, less angry, who laughed more: Santi as he was meant to be. And her without him: lonelier, spikier, less ready to forgive. Maybe they would still both be here on the beach, sitting apart, neither even noticing the sullen girl with the sea-green hair or the laughing boy in his knot of friends. Thora imagines them passing each other underwater, nothing but two vague shapes in the blue.

Santi pulls back from her. He’s calmer now, his breathing easier, and his face is hot with shame. “Sorry,” he says. “Shit, that was embarrassing.”

Thora digs her fingertips into the cool sand. “I won’t tell anyone,” she says.

One moment they are looking at each other, Santi’s eyes red and his grin sheepish, Thora half-relieved and half-triumphant, like she’s passed a test she didn’t know was coming. Then the man in the blue coat is falling to his knees beside them.

“Excuse me. Something’s coming,” he says, looking back and forth between them. “Sorry, I tried—”

Thora is not sure what happens next. She is aware of a rending, tearing noise, and a shaking that lasts an instant and seems to go on forever. Time folds, inverts: she’s six years old, lights blazing off the wet road, and when the collision comes it reverberates through her whole life, from the moment of her birth to the far-off instant of her death, changing everything. She and Santi fall together, his head buried in her shoulder, her arms tight around him, as if that will save them when the world ends.Not yet, is the only thought that escapes her before everything stops.

She opens her eyes. Santi’s grip loosens as she draws back from him. They are on the sand by the Fühlinger See, and children are playing in the shallows, and everything else is the same.

Not everything. Thora hears a sound, over the chatter of the oblivious beachgoers, the splash of the water: a chime, soft but insistent, like a clock striking an endless hour. The man in the blue coat crouches next to them, hands braced against the sand. Thora feels a brightness at the corner of her eye, but when she turns her head, it disappears. She smells smoke on the air. She coughs, trying and failing to catch her breath. Beside her, Santi is hunched over, gasping, but she doesn’t look: she’s hypnotized by the man in the blue coat, his worried face, his stillness.

The chime stops. The smell of smoke vanishes. Thora isn’t completely sure she didn’t imagine it. Still, she feels light-headed, as if she has been underwater for too long. Beside her, Santi takes a breath, his wheezing gradually calming.

The man in the blue coat sits up, looking dazed. “You’re all right,” he says to Santi, touching Thora on the arm. “You’re all right.” He says it like a line from a poem in a foreign language, memorized by heart.

“What about you?” Santi says. “Are you—”

The man’s eyes roll up in his head. He collapses onto the sand.

Santi leans over him. “Hey. What’s wrong?”

Expressions flicker uncannily across the man’s face, joy to anguish to laughter. Thora feels a roll of danger in her belly. “I think he’s having a stroke.”

“Fuck.” Santi stares at her. “Did you bring your phone?”

She shakes her head. She didn’t want to leave it while they were swimming. “Go,” she says. “Find someone to call an ambulance. I’ll stay with him.”

Santi jumps to his feet and pelts away across the sand. Thora will remember it for a long time after: the man’s blue coat spread around him like wings, the paler blue of the sky, the sand flying up from Santi’s heels as he runs.

“Something happened,” the man keeps saying, over and over.

“I know,” Thora says, as if it will help him to know that someone is listening. “What’s your name?” she asks.

The man looks up at her from his twitching, changing face, as if she has the answers, as if she can save him. “Peregrine,” he says.

“Peregrine, we’re getting help,” she says. “Just hold on.”

Part II

Not Enough Sky

The stars are wrong.

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