Page 55 of Meet Me in Another Life

The husband accompanies Thora through the years, grayer and more stooped until he drops out of frame. Santi lingers on the last picture: Thora in her seventies, still tall and strong, hair hanging iron-gray to her shoulders. It took illness to reduce her to what he saw in the hospital.

Nothing so far to hint at her life being any more than ordinary. He remembers her words to him in their last life.Catch me again when I have less to lose.But she had a lot to lose this time too: a husband, a daughter, a house bigger than this version of Santi has ever been inside, let alone dreamt of owning. He turns away from her picture and continues exploring upstairs.

Fragments of the Thoras he has known lie strewn through this stranger’s house like shrapnel from an explosion. A diploma from a physics course she took as a mature student, framed above the piano; her collection of vintage sci-fi, shoved like a guilty secret behind a trailing plant. Parts of her constant self she couldn’t repress. He feels it like a victory every time he uncovers another.See, Thora? You’re still who you are. You could be born on an alien planet and still be yourself. You can’t hide from that, not in the biggest house in Cologne.The idea recasts what he’s doing, turns it into a macabre game of hide-and-seek. Thora’s body is in the ground, but by searching through what she left behind, perhaps he can recover her ghost.

The thought finds him at a locked door on the second floor. He’s lost count of how many rooms he’s explored: this is the first one that wasn’t left open. Behind this door is what she values. He jiggles the lock, considers using his knife: but no. He senses that this room is meant for him. Thora would have left the key somewhere he would know to find it.

He steps back, clicking off the flashlight. When they lived together, in their apartment in the Belgian Quarter, they kept the spare key outside the front door, under a boot scraper shaped like a cat.

Santi peers through the warped glass of the front door, checking for passing lights before he cautiously opens it. There, on the step: the same boot scraper, or its near-identical twin. “Hi, Félicette,” he breathes, missing the cat he never had in this world. He lifts it gingerly and finds the key underneath.

The secret room opens. Feeling like Bluebeard’s wife, Santi pushes the door inward, meeting resistance. He gropes his way past bulky shapes to the window and pulls down the blind before clicking on the flashlight.

A smile spreads across his face. This is Thora’s house, all right. The chintzy order of the public rooms gives way to a chaos he remembers. His flashlight flits over childhood toys, some he recognizes; books that didn’t make it onto the overflowing shelves; a perplexing collection of china shards, as if one day Thora destroyed all her crockery in a fit of rage. A skull sits propped on a dressmaker’s dummy, a memento mori to which he gives a respectful nod. Around the dummy’s neck, tied in a careful knot, is a familiar mustard-yellow scarf.

A desk in a blocked-off fireplace draws his eye. Propped against it is a corkboard covered in scraps of paper and string. Santi remembers a hostel room, the map of his madness pinnedon the wall. A map Thora never saw. Still, she has unconsciously copied it here, in the life where she tried to distance herself from him the most. Santi thinks of the neatly arranged rooms of her sprawling house, of this room lurking inside, a container for his ghost. He can’t help the smile that breaks across his face. A part of her couldn’t resist trying to solve their mystery, no matter what she had to lose.

The collection spills off the edge of the corkboard, colonizing the wall. He follows threads like he’s following Thora’s thoughts, ending in knots of memory. She’s not an artist, like him. Instead of drawings, he finds snippets of different-again handwriting, like fungus growing over her respectable old-lady wallpaper. He wants to gulp her thoughts like water, but this version of him has never been a strong reader, and Thora’s latest Gothic scrawl doesn’t help.We are who we are, he makes out.We’d be completely different people. Jules, underlined.Cologne, she writes inside a circle, as if she intended to start a mind-map, but nothing connects. Then:Why do we both want the same thing, and why do we never get it?Finally, stuck to the wall like an afterthought:I’m trapped inside this bird. Santi picks up her pen and sketches a quick cartoon of a parakeet, a speech bubble containing the words.

The trail ends at the bookshelves. Santi casts his eyes over the volumes, recognizing some of his own recommendations. On the shelf below is a collection of books on memory, past lives, reincarnation. He picks up one of the more New Age volumes and opens it to the title page.Bullshit, Thora has written, underlining it three times.

There’s something else: he feels it, tingling at the tips of his fingers. He goes back to the wall where a star map is pinned, half-obscured by scribbled notes. He slides his hand up behind it anddraws out an envelope addressed to him in large, self-conscious letters. He unfolds the letter inside with shaking hands.

It wasn’t written by the woman he talked to in the hospital. The paper is old, for one thing, folded and unfolded until the creases start to become tears. But even if it had been pristine, he would have known from reading it that it was the work of someone much younger.

Dear Santi,

I once asked my father if it was possible to remember someone you’d never met. He, of course, turned it into a philosophical treatise about the nature of memory: how remembering is an act of reconstruction, increasingly distant from the experience that formed it. But that wasn’t what I meant. I meant you. You, my brother, my friend, my partner in so many ways, all your selves scattered across my memory like the fragments of light cast by a prism.

I thought I’d know better who I was without you. But in trying to hide from you, to kill any part of me that you might recognize, I’ve only ended up hiding from myself. It’s too late for me to make a different choice. This is my life now. Until the next one.

I wanted to live every life, to be every possible version of myself. But losing Jules and Oskar taught me that you were right. We can’t live in pieces. Now, I wish I could forget. Part of me thinks that if I can make it through one life without meeting you, then the cycle will end, and I’ll be free. Maybe we both will.

But part of me still imagines it. Maybe one day you’ll walk up to me, with that impossibly remembered smile, and say it’s all part of the plan. I can’t say I’ll be pleased to see you. Itwould mean you knew how to find me, even when I couldn’t find myself. It would mean there really is no escaping you. But it would be a relief to stop missing someone I’ve never met.

Day by day this world feels more shallow to me, more full of holes. Perhaps one day, I’ll fall through one of them. Perhaps I’ll see you there.

Þ

Santi traces the thorn of her signature and realizes he’s crying.

He reads the letter again, imagining the words spoken by the woman he saw in the photographs. He gets the feeling he would have liked this version of Thora. The ease of her life has given her space to blossom, pushing back the tendency to bitterness that grows so readily in her. Maybe she was right, in a way she didn’t recognize: maybe she is a better version of herself without him.

Absorbed, he doesn’t notice the flashing blue light through the edges of the blind until the police are already banging on the door.

He swears. He wasn’t careful enough: the neighbor must have seen him. He shoves Thora’s letter into his pocket and pelts down the stairs. He hears the door splinter, heavy footsteps behind him. For the second time, he closes his eyes and prays for a miracle. This time, God doesn’t answer. One of the officers grabs him and slams him to the floor. In the dazzle of the flashlight, Santi sees the echo of another light—a flame, speechlessly bright—before it swings away.

The trial is brief: neither Santi nor his lawyer put much effort into his defense. The mostly local jury are not inclined to be lenient toa dark young man with a foreign accent caught breaking into the house of a dead old lady. The sentence comes down: three years in prison. His mother cries and promises to move to Cologne to be near him; his sister Aurelia is angry. He tries to comfort them, but it makes no sense to him to grieve for something inevitable. From the instant he remembered Thora, no other path existed.

He writes to her from prison. He knows the letter has nowhere to go but her grave, but he imagines it piercing the veil, going on somehow to the place they will meet next.

Dear Thora,

The last time I met you for the first time, you were in a hospital bed. You were older than I’ve ever seen you. But I knew you, just the same.

This life hasn’t been good to me. I miss the one where we were happy. You know the one.

(How likely is it that we’re thinking of different worlds?)

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