Page 21 of Meet Me in Another Life

Once, back in Spain, Santi’s sister Aurelia brought home a street cat with a torn ear. For the first few weeks, it barely left the upstairs room where she kept it, afraid to encounter the unfamiliar giants who roamed the halls. Thora, too, keeps to her starry room, emerging only for meals, which she eats in silence. Santi tries to bring her out, cracking bad jokes and showing her silly doodles, but she barely responds. Only Héloïse is favored with her rare smiles.

“What happened to her?” Santi asks Héloïse after Thora slinks upstairs. “That funny girl? That girl who loved her room so much she yelled?”

“She’s not here to entertain us,” Héloïse points out as she clears the plates. “She hasn’t even decided if she likes us or not.”

“She likesyou,” Santi says. “It’s only me she has a problem with.”

Héloïse shrugs. “That’s because I’m better than you.”

She’s trying to make him laugh. It almost works. But it still hurts that Thora’s indifference has a focus, and it is him.

Santi sighs and wraps his arms around his wife. He moves her braids aside to kiss the back of her neck.

Héloïse twists around in his arms, strokes his face. “Patience,” she says. “We have to give her meaning before she can give it back to us.”

Santi stays in the kitchen after she leaves, pondering her words. He thought they were adopting Thora to provide her with the stability she needs. But maybe it’s not really about what she needs. Maybe this troubled girl is nothing but a distraction, a consolation prize for his own discarded dreams.

That night, he dreams of drowning in a hospital bed. He wakes, heart pounding, staring at his blank ceiling as if someone has taken the universe away. On his way back from the bathroom, he’s passing Thora’s room when he hears her voice.

He goes closer. “Thora? Did you say something?”

After a pause, she pulls the door open with her foot. She’s lying on the bed, Félicette purring beside her. Thora stares up at her ceiling, fingers braced on her wrist. “The stars,” she says. “They match the ones in the sky.”

Santi feels a glow of approval: his daughter is a scientist. “Yes! I wanted them to make real constellations.”

She tilts her head. “Do they look like that from space?”

“No. No, they would look completely different. Someone from a different planet probably wouldn’t even put the same stars in constellations with each other.”

Thora frowns. “Don’t they belong together?”

“Not really. Ancient people just thought they did because they made pictures.” He shrugs. “That’s what humans do, I guess. Look up at the sky and see reflections of themselves.”

“Themselves?” she says with a snort. “You mean ourselves? Or are you saying you’re not human?”

“Blorgle fnarg,” he replies.

Thora laughs, too loud to suppress. Santi feels a brief, intense high.

“It’s like us,” she says.

“What?” he asks with a smile.

“You and me and Héloïse. From far away we look like a family, but really we have nothing to do with each other.”

The high crashes. Santi thinks of the three of them, he and Héloïse tightly bound binary stars, Thora drifting somewhere light-years away.

“The truth is, perspective is everything,” he says finally. “We choose how we want to look at things.” He taps the doorframe and leaves before she can see him crying.

The season changes. The bonsai tree Héloïse has been trying to train overspills its pot, growing out of control and wild. It brings a matching change in Thora. Or the change happens, the tree grows, and neither of these has anything to do with the other. Santi has always scanned the world this way, reading it for symbols. It means he is not surprised the day he comes home to findhis mother’s crochet blanket on the living-room floor, a black hole burned in its center.

Héloïse isn’t home yet; two trams collided today in the old town, and the emergency-room staff are working overtime. Santi picks up the blanket and walks slowly up the stairs.Calm, he says to himself, remembering what the social worker told him.Always try and deal with her calmly.His thoughts wander away from the script.She’s the sea; she needs a rock to crash against.

He knocks on Thora’s door. She doesn’t tell him to come in. She just nudges the door with her foot, watches him push it all the way open.

Santi sits down at her desk chair, holding the blanket between his hands. He thinks about his mother patiently making it, the love in every centimeter. Rage rises up, but he controls it. “My mother made this,” he says.

Thora doesn’t meet his eyes. “I know,” she says. “That’s why I did it.”

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