The Life Intended (7 page)

I’m too overwhelmed by a rush of gratitude to say anything.

I lie back down and nestle against Patrick as he puts his arm around me. I stroke his hair, noting a solid sprinkling of gray strands that weren’t there before. I marvel at the passage of time, the way the years can change a person.

“I would have loved to see you grow old,” I murmur, running my hand down his still-solid chest. The color-saturated room
flickers a bit, and my heart skips a beat. I remind myself to play along, to do my best to believe I belong here. After all, maybe I do. Why else would it all feel so familiar to me?

Patrick laughs, and I can feel the sound reverberating through his body. “Don’t I look old now?” he asks.

I can’t even joke back, because my breath is caught in my throat. He pulls me closer and kisses me gently, threading his fingers through my hair. His stubble is scratchy and his lips are warm, but it’s not until I feel his tongue against mine that I begin to sob again.

“Kate?” he asks with concern, letting go. “What’s wrong?”

I shake my head, not wanting to pull us out of the moment. So instead, I say, “So, our . . . daughter?” I don’t know how to ask about her without destroying the fabric of this world, so I let the words hang there.

Patrick touches my cheek and gives me a strange look. “Hannah? What about her?”

Something bursts open inside of me. “Hannah,” I murmur. “What a beautiful name.”

Patrick looks at me with concern. “You’re being weird again.”

The room fades a little, and I rush to add, “I was just thinking how lucky we are, that’s all.”

He smiles. “Oh, I’m pretty positive I’m the luckiest man in the world. Now come on, weirdo, let’s get moving.”

He gets out of bed, but for a second, I can’t move. His statement—the idea that he’s lucky—stabs me right through the heart. In fact, he never got to experience any of this: fatherhood, the approach of middle age, the comfort of waking up beside someone you love after years and years together. It all makes me feel profoundly sad.

Patrick is filling the coffeepot at the sink when I finally get out of bed and head into this kitchen. I come up behind him and
press my cheek against his bare back. I breathe in deeply, wishing I could just hit the pause button and stay here forever.

“I’m sorry I’m acting so off,” I say as he turns off the faucet. “I don’t know how to explain what’s going on with me. I just feel like . . . It feels like you’ve been gone a long time.”

He sets the coffeepot on the counter and turns, pulling me into his arms. “I’m always here, honey,” he says. “I’ve always been right here. But you’ve got to stop acting like you don’t belong here or something. You’re scaring me a bit.”

“I’m sorry. I
do
belong here.” As I say the words, I find myself fervently clinging to them, hoping there’s a way they’re true. The room gets a little brighter, comes into focus a little more. I’m struck again by how overly saturated things are here, how everything seems to glow.

“Of course you do.” He looks puzzled again. “Let’s get some breakfast in you, okay? Maybe you’re just hungry. What do you say to crispy bacon and scrambled eggs?”

The knife twists a little deeper in my heart; it’s the same breakfast he cooked for me the morning he died. “Sounds great,” I manage to say, forcing a smile.

“Good.” He turns to grab bacon and a carton of eggs from the fridge and a couple of frying pans from the cabinet while I watch him with tears in my eyes. As he cracks eggs into a bowl and begins to whisk, small pieces of this life begin to drift in from nowhere, and I realize there are things I know with absolute certainty. For example, I know that Patrick left his old financial management job nine years ago, because he wasn’t feeling fulfilled, and I know that I supported him in going back to school the way he once supported me. I know that he works in the strategic policy initiatives department of the mayor’s office now and that in his spare time, he spearheaded the creation of a new community garden a few blocks from our apartment, calling it Little
Butterfly Garden, because Hannah, who was eight at the time, loved butterflies. I know he took a huge pay cut when he left his old job, but I also know he’s a thousand times happier than he used to be and that he feels he’s in a position to make a difference in our city. I feel a sudden surge of pride for my husband.

I close my eyes and try to figure out what I know about Hannah too, but for some reason, my knowledge of her is spottier. I know bits and pieces—that she broke her right leg when she was a toddler when she slipped on the playground; that she spent all of kindergarten firmly believing that she was a fairy who just hadn’t sprouted her wings yet; that she didn’t lose her first tooth until second grade, which was a source of great distress because all her friends had lost teeth earlier—but I can’t bring to mind more than snippets. While Patrick is an open book, Hannah feels like a novel with all the important chapters missing.

When I open my eyes again, it’s as if my train of thought has summoned Hannah herself, for she’s padding down the hall toward the kitchen, wearing pajama pants and a Mickey Mouse T-shirt, her thick, dark hair piled into two messy pigtail buns. “Morning,” she says, smiling at Patrick and me, and I notice for the first time that there’s something unusual about the way she speaks, although I can’t put a finger on exactly what it is. Even in the single word, her vowels are longer and her consonants rounder than they should be. I wonder vaguely if she has a minor speech disorder like some of my clients. Something tickles at the edges of my memory, something I
should
know, but I can’t quite hold on to it.

“Good morning,” I say, returning her smile. The girl standing in front of me is everything I’ve wished for so many times over the last twelve years: a piece of Patrick, a way for him to live on. I blink back tears, and before either of them can see me crying, I get up quickly and pretend to be absorbed in getting
ready for breakfast. With shaking hands, I reach up and pull three plates down from the cabinet. They clatter loudly onto the counter, because I can’t keep my grip steady.

“Kate—?” Patrick begins, but I cut him off.

“No, I’m fine. I’ll just set the table.” But when I reach into the silverware drawer, which is exactly where I knew it would be, I’m trembling and paying so little attention to what I’m actually doing that when I reach for a butter knife, I grasp a paring knife instead. It slips through my shaky fingers, slicing the tip of my pinkie. “Ow!” I exclaim as a ribbon of crimson opens up and begins to pour down my palm.

Patrick steps forward and takes my hand. “Well, that looks like it hurts. Hannah, can you go get Mom a Band-Aid, please?”

Hannah nods and hurries away, and Patrick turns back to me. But I’m no longer looking at him. I’m staring at my bloodied hand. “I cut myself,” I say in awe.

“I know, sweetheart.” Patrick grabs a paper towel and gently presses it to my sliced finger. “Hold that there for a minute, okay? Does it hurt?”

But all I can do is look at the blood in awe. “I cut myself,” I repeat.
If this were just a dream, cutting myself would have woken me up, right? The way that pinching yourself is supposed to?

Hannah returns to the kitchen and hands a Band-Aid to Patrick, who opens it quickly and wraps it around my finger. “There you go,” he says. “Good as new.”

“Good as new,” I echo, still staring at my hand in disbelief.

Patrick squeezes my shoulder then turns to Hannah and smiles. “All right, kiddo,” he says, grabbing a spatula from the counter and waving it around dramatically. “French toast, or bacon and eggs? Your old man’s taking orders.”

Hannah laughs, a beautiful sound, and tilts her head to the side.

Then she does something that catches me off guard. She replies to Patrick in sign language.

And what shocks me even more is that I understand it.
Eggs, please,
she signs. Then she glances at me and signs,
What’s wrong? You’re looking at me funny.

My jaw falls. “She’s deaf,” I murmur, more to myself than to Patrick, but he looks concerned, and a shadow crosses Hannah’s face. I raise my hands to sign back, intending to say,
Nothing’s wrong, Hannah. I’m sorry.
But I realize suddenly that although I can understand Hannah in the dream, I have no idea how to use sign language.

I look to Patrick for help, a panicky feeling rising inside of me, but he’s already fading, as is the whole kitchen around us. “No!” I cry. “I’m not ready yet!”

“Kate?” Patrick takes a step toward me, but the light flooding in through the windows is erasing the room.

“I love you, Patrick! Tell Hannah I love her too!” I manage to say before there’s a blinding flash, and everything fades to black.

Seven

I
wake up with my head spinning and my finger throbbing. It takes a few seconds before the details—Patrick’s kiss, my cut finger, Hannah’s sign language—come pouring back in. I sit up and gasp, which awakens Dan.

“What’s wrong?” he asks groggily, sitting up too. He blinks at me and his eyes widen. “Kate! What did you do to your finger?”

I look down, and my breath catches in my throat as I realize that the tip of my right pinkie, the one I cut in the dream, is sliced open and bleeding. “Oh my God,” is all I can manage.

“Let me get you a Band-Aid!” Dan is already out of bed, heading for the bathroom. “How deep is the cut? Do I need to take you to get that stitched up? How on earth did you cut yourself sleeping?”

“I’m fine,” I murmur, holding my hand up and watching the blood flow down my palm. “Aren’t I?” I add to myself.

Dan eventually stops panicking after he has applied Neosporin and a Band-Aid and has assured himself that the wound isn’t actually all that bad. I mumble an excuse about going to get a glass of water in the middle of the night and slicing it on the edge
of a knife when I reached into the dishwasher, and he seems to buy it.

After he heads out to go with his friend Stephen to a ball game, I text Gina and ask if she can meet me at the emergency room at Bellevue.

Oh my God, what’s wrong?
she texts back immediately.

I hesitate before answerng.
Something weird is happening to me.

She texts back a series of question marks, but when I don’t reply, she writes back,
On way. U ok?

I don’t know,
I reply.

I
’m waiting to see a doctor a half hour later when Gina rushes in. “Kate, what the hell?” she demands. “How could you just send me a text like that without explaining? What’s the matter? Is Susan here?”

I shake my head. “Susan wouldn’t understand.”

“Understand
what
? Kate, you’ve got to tell me what’s going on. You’re scaring me!”

I hesitate. “I’ve been having these dreams about Patrick. Or at least I think they’re dreams. What else could they be, right? But I know things in them that should be impossible for me to know, things that turn out to be true in real life. And they’re so vivid, Gina. I don’t know what’s happening to me.”

“Oh.” I see sadness and concern in her eyes as she sinks into the seat beside me. “Why don’t you begin at the beginning?”

And so I do. I explain about waking up with Patrick the day after the engagement party. I tell her how strange and beautiful it was to see him in so much detail, right down to his salt-and-pepper hair, his laugh lines, and his broader belly. I explain how real he felt: his touch, the familiar scent of him, the steady beating of his heart.

I go on to tell her about last night too, but I don’t tell her about Hannah, because her presence somehow makes everything seem less authentic. Patrick once existed, so it seems like there’s some sort of possibility he could be crossing the thin line between heaven and earth, as unlikely as that sounds. But how do I explain Hannah, a girl who can’t possibly be our child but who calls me “Mom”?

Gina listens intently, and I’m relieved not to see judgment on her face. When I’m done, she looks at her hands for a moment, and when she glances up again, there’s sadness written across her features. “I used to dream about Bill sometimes too,” she says. “Not quite as vividly as you’re describing. But seeing him once in a while, even if the dreams were sort of vague, always threw me into a tailspin for a few days.” She pauses and adds, “It’s never going to go away, is it? The way we feel right now?”

I shake my head, and some of the stress melts out of my shoulders. Having lost a husband is a bit like belonging to a club. It’s a club no one would ever want membership in, but it’s comforting all the same to know that you’re not alone.

“But the dreams, Kate, they sound more or less normal. Don’t you think?”

“Then how did my finger wind up sliced open?” I ask, holding up my bandaged pinkie.

“What?” Gina stares at my hand.

“In the dream, I cut my finger,” I tell her. “And when I woke up, I was bleeding on the sheets. How is that possible?”

She gapes at me. “Well . . . It’s not. Maybe you sleepwalked in the middle of the night and cut it on something.”

“Wouldn’t that have woken me up?”

“I—I don’t know.” She pauses. “But you’re not saying that you think these dreams are actually real, are you?”

I avoid her gaze. “I know it sounds nuts. But how could I be dreaming things I don’t actually know, like the fact that Robert got a job offer in San Diego eleven years ago?”

“Maybe it’s a coincidence, or maybe you overheard something Susan or your mom said at some point,” Gina says slowly. “As for the rest of it, maybe your brain just has to wrap itself around the reality that you’re about to start a new life.”

I take a deep breath. “But what if seeing Patrick is reminding me just how much I want my old life back?”

“But you can’t have it, Kate,” she says softly. “Those chapters are closed. It took me a long time to realize that—to
really
realize it—but when I did, everything felt a little better. Maybe you’re just not there yet.”

T
he cranial CT scan, neurological exam, and blood tests all come back clean, and the doctors assure me I don’t have a brain tumor or anything else physiological going on. After sending me to get two stitches in my pinkie, they refer to me to psychiatry, and after a brief meeting with a doctor, I’m sent on my way with a prescription for sleeping pills, an antidepressant I know I’ll never take, and a reassurance that what I’m describing sounds perfectly normal, save for the sliced finger.