Page 59 of Meet Me in Another Life

“He likes you!” Maria exclaims. “How strange. Usually he’s very fussy about who holds him.”

Thora looks into his face, lets him hold on to her finger with his tiny, strong hand. “I’m honored.”

It’s easy to fall into being Maria’s friend. Thora goes from attending the crochet circle to dropping by for coffee to offering to watch the kids once a week. In this world, Santi’s father died of a heart attack, and Maria is drowning. Thora tells herself she is a good person for reaching out to save her, even as she knows it is the most purely selfish thing she has ever done. She is almost sure Santi will forgive her once he’s old enough. Right now, though, he can’t even say his own name. She watches him crawl across the floor in pursuit of a ball he can barely grasp and feels helpless, like she is what he is trying to hold on to.

She remembers from other lives how it feels to know someone as a child, then meet them again full-grown: the shock of seeing a person emerge from such chaotic potential. Now, for the first time, she sees it from the other side. She has known so many Santis: herfather, frazzled but trying his best; her intense, philosophical student; her absent-minded police partner. Now there is just this ball of curious sensation that she has to periodically prevent from destroying itself. Inside are the seeds of all the Santis that could exist. Or not quite all: the trajectory of this life, his parents moving to Cologne, his father’s death, have already set him on a path away from some of the people he might have been. Uneasily, she adds herself to the list. What might it do to him, spending so much time with someone who has such a clear notion of who he should be? How might her responses, to something as simple as him pressing a pointed star into her palm, push him off one path and onto another? A dozen times, she decides to remove herself from his life, come back when he’s older. But Maria has come to rely on her, and even Aurelia is thawing, coming to sit with her, braiding her hair while she tells her about her stuffed animals and their adventures. And even if Santi isn’t Santi yet, even if he can barely say her name, she is not strong enough to willfully detach her fingers from the only ledge between her and an endless fall.

And it seems the feeling is mutual. Each time she leaves for the hospital, he clings to her, wailing his distress.

Maria rescues her. “Thora has to go make people better, mi hijo,” she says, clawing him off Thora’s leg. “I’m sorry.”

“Fora,” Santi says insistently. The terror in his eyes isn’t natural. It’s the same as when he sat by her hospital bed, as when he held her broken body in the gutter.

“I’ll come back,” she tells him, a bitter promise he doesn’t yet understand. “I always come back.”

She teaches him how to write her name. He’s five now, a restless, inquisitive boy: getting him to sit still and focus is a challenge.But he will do it for Thora. She shows him the thorn, then gets him to copy it. He concentrates, tongue sticking out of the corner of his mouth.

“You won’t have to use this one in any other words,” she explains. “It’s a special letter, just for my name.”

“I know,” he says irritably. “I remember.”

She freezes. Maria is across the room, brushing Aurelia’s hair.

“You remember?” Thora says.

“Yes.” He goes over the lines of the thorn like he’s carving it. “You showed me. When we were up on top of the tower.”

Thora looks up at Maria, but she’s laughing. “Santi, you do love to make up stories.”

His brows knit together. “It’s not a story,” he insists.

“You’re right,” Thora says. She looks Santi in the eye. “It was real. It happened.”

From then on, he watches her with a new kind of attention. Thora relives the loneliness of remembering, no one less than a world away who could understand. Whatever effect she might be having on Santi, at least he gets to grow up with the one person who can tell him he’s not crazy.

She tries to learn from the gaps in how he once raised her. Where he was stern, she is gentle; where he tried to give her space to find her own answers, she tells him frankly what she thinks and lets him decide whether or not he agrees. Even as his memories fill out, she longs to hurry him, fill him with truths he’s not ready for. He’s only eight, talking about going to Australia one day, when she snaps.

“No, you won’t,” she says. “We can’t go anywhere. This is it, for you and me.”

He looks up at her, lip trembling. “Why?”

She knows she should soothe him, tell him she was only joking.But she’s furious, and for an instant all her fury is directed at him.Grow up, she wants to scream.Grow up and help me find a way out.

“That’s a really good question, Santi,” she says instead. “You know what I think? I think it’s because we’re being punished.”

His brow furrows. “What did we do?”

“Who knows?” Thora says brightly. “But it must have been something really, really bad.”

Santi’s eyes go wide and frightened. “I’m not bad. You’re lying.” He flees to his room and doesn’t talk to her for the rest of the day.

When Maria comes home, she’s puzzled. “What did you say to him?”

That his dreams are dust and ashes.Thora shrugs helplessly. “He’s sensitive. You know what he’s like.”

He’s quieter after that. Thora feels guilty, but she can’t feel sorry. Better he knows the reality of their situation before he grows up. And grow up he does. She thought her impatience would make it endless, but in what seems like a year he is twelve, then fifteen, then going to university. And he is Santi, familiar and all new, youth burnishing him while she feels herself dulling into middle age.

When his mother dies during his first year at uni, he goes to pieces. It’s not Aurelia he runs to: it’s Thora. At three in the morning, he shows up on her doorstep drunk and sobbing. She lets him in and holds him until his crying is done.

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