Life Intended (9781476754178)

by Kristin Harmel

  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 he
r. “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.”

  The 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.

  “Sleepwalking isn’t that uncommon,” the doctor adds with a shrug. “I’m certain that’s what happened.”

  “But how could everything be so vivid?” I ask. “How do I know things that I couldn’t possibly know in reality?”

  He shrugs again. “The subconscious works in strange ways, Ms. Waithman. Trying to figure it out will only make it feel more confusing. My suggestion would be to get some rest and forget about this. Dreams can be very powerful, but it’s important to remember that none of it is real.”

  Still, over the next few days, I can’t stop thinking about Hannah. My inability to sign back to her was what yanked me out of the second dream, and I find myself obsessing about how I’ll communicate with her if I wake up in the alternate life again. Would knowing sign language myself help me to stay longer next time, to fit into the dream’s landscape a little better? The thing is, the cut on my finger, still throbbing, doesn’t feel like my subconscious speaking at all.

  On Monday morning, after a weekend of going to bed early and trying in vain to dream, I arrive at the office twenty minutes before my first appointment and spend a few minutes googling American Sign Language. I quickly learn how to say mom, dad, love, daughter, and here. Then, before I have a chance to question what I’m doing, I click on a pop-up ad for an eighteen-week GothamLearn sign language class being offered within walking distance of my office.

  The class began last week, but when I e-mail to ask about enrolling, I get a quick return message from GothamLearn’s online director telling me that it’s not too late to join if I’d like; I should just arrive a few minutes before seven on Wednesday night with a check for my tuition to hand to the instructor, a man named Andrew Henson.

  I’ll be there, I reply before I can talk myself out of it, and as I hit Send, I’m buoyant. I also feel idiotic for doing this; I know intellectually that Hannah can’t be real. But at least taking a class will be more constructive than day drinking and trying to force myself to sleep.

  Dina buzzes to tell me my first client of the day has arrived, and I shut my laptop quickly, as if I’m looking at porn rather than hand signs.

  Leo Goldstein strides in a moment later, the circles under his eyes dark and his jaw set belligerently. “Okay, I’m here,” he announces, throwing himself onto the couch opposite my desk. “What do you want me to do?”

  Leo looks paler today, I think as I move to sit beside him in an armchair, and when I look closely, I see the shadow of a bruise on his right forearm, where he has pushed his sleeve up. The skin around the purpling stain is a soft yellowish green.

  “Leo, what happened to your arm?” I ask.

  He looks down and frowns, tugging his sleeve over the mark. “Nothing,” he says, quickly amending, “Tripped on the basketball court.”

  Leo’s mom started bringing him to me about four months ago, when he began having behavior issues at Tompkins Square Middle School, where he’s currently in seventh grade. He made it clear from the beginning that he hated being here—and hated me as a result—but older kids often resist therapy at the beginning. I knew if I waited him out, chances were he’d come around. And he did.

  Little by little, even though he always complained that singing was for babies and banging drumsticks against bongos was pointless, he had come out of his shell. Now, we’re in a routine that seems to work: he huffs into my office, sulks for a few minutes, tells me nothing is wrong, and then brightens when I pull out my double xylophone.

  Most weeks, we play Beatles songs, which Leo calls “retro-cool.” The Beatles theme to our sessions was his idea; I like to let my clients lead whenever possible, because the more comfortable they are with the music we’re playing, the easier it is for them to open up.

  Getting Leo hooked on playing the music rather than just listening to it was an important step, because it has allowed us to develop a common language. Sometimes it’s hard, for example, to say you’re angry. But pounding an instrument gets the point across without words. Kind of like sign language, I think: meaning without articulation. You just have to know how to communicate.

  “Anyway, I learned ‘You Can’t Do That’ this week,” Leo tells me, his eyes sliding away from mine. “I’ve been practicing on my iPad keyboard app.”

  “From the Hard Day’s Night album.”

  “Yeah. From 1964,” he says with the authority of someone who was around then. “Want to hear it?”

  “Sure.” I shuffle a few papers then grab the xylophone mallets, purposely taking a long time. “So about that bruise: You must have fallen pretty hard, I guess.”

  “No big deal.” His voice is gruff, his eyes shifty. “It didn’t even hurt anyways.”

  “Was Tyler there?”

  He hesitates, and from the way his eyes flick to mine and then dance quickly away again, I know I’ve hit upon the truth. “Maybe,” he mumbles. “Don’t remember.”

  “Did you hit him back?” I ask softly.

  He looks at his hands for a minute. “No,” he says finally. “All his friends were there too.”

  “Bunch of jerks,” I mutter under my breath. Leo is tall and slender, with the kind of shape he’ll grow into when he’s older. But for now, he’s a stick figure, and Tyler Mason, who’s a year older and forty pounds heavier than Leo, teases him mercilessly about the way he looks. His friends join in too, probably relieved not to be on the receiving end of bullying themselves.

  Tyler’s also the kind of kid who can talk himself out of situations, so when Leo began fighting back, it was Leo who was labeled the problem kid. Somehow, the teachers never saw Tyler throwing the first punch or hissing under his breath that Leo was a beanpole. As a result, Tyler’s halo was intact, and Leo was becoming a frequent visitor to the principal’s office.

  His mother had brought him to me on his school guidance counselor’s recommendation; she couldn’t understand why her son had started acting inexplicably violent. It took me three sessions to grasp that Leo wasn’t the aggressor. He was being bullied and didn’t want to admit it. By the time I sat his parents down and explained the situation, they’d already decided to keep sending him to me on a weekly basis, because they were seeing marked improvements in his schoolwork and behavior at home.

  I hand Leo the mallets, and he grins at me—the first real smile since he’s g
otten here—and begins playing the Beatles’ song. He impresses me, as he always does, with his skill. I join in on my guitar after a moment.

  “So what does the song mean to you?” I ask after we’ve finished. It’s one of my ground rules with Leo; he has to tell me why he’s picked a song. It’s another way to open up discussion between us.

  “I don’t know,” he replies, looking down.

  I’m silent, waiting patiently for him to go on.

  “I guess when the singer says ‘leave you flat,’ I was thinking about when Tyler said he’d flatten my face,” Leo finally mumbles. “And then the singer says people would laugh at him, and sometimes that happens to me too.”

  I nod, pleased that we’re at a point where he can say things like this to me. Of course the Beatles song is about a guy telling his girl that he’ll break up with her if he catches her talking to a particular guy again, but Leo has gotten something entirely different out of the lyrics. That’s one of my favorite things about music—that the same words, the same notes, can mean completely different things to different people.

  “Did you talk to your teacher about Tyler?” I ask.

  He shakes his head. “Tattletales get beat up worse.”

  “How about your mom and dad?”

  He doesn’t answer. Instead, he bangs his mallet on the xylophone for a minute before asking abruptly, “You got any kids?” I see him looking at the two framed photos on my desk of me with Dan. “Who’s that guy anyways?” he asks before waiting for an answer.

  “That’s my boyfriend.” I pause and correct myself. “Well, actually, my fiancé. And no, I don’t have any kids.”

  “Why not?” He’s twirling one of his xylophone mallets now. “You seem pretty old. Like older than my mom.”

  It’s common for kids to try to turn the therapy sessions around on me, but the purpose of these visits isn’t so that we can bond and become friends; it’s so that they can find out more about themselves. I try to walk a fine line between answering their questions honestly—because I think adults should always take children’s questions seriously, and I want Leo to feel like I respect his feelings—and deflecting questions that are too personal.