Life Intended (9781476754178)

by Kristin Harmel

  “But, babe, your schedule is already packed,” he says, sounding perplexed after I fill him in on Andrew’s request and the paperwork I filled out and faxed back to him this afternoon. “You sure this is something you want to take on?”

  “I think I can move some things around and volunteer one evening a week.”

  “Kate, I hate to say it, but are you sure you didn’t fall for a recruiting scam or something?” His tone is gentle and concerned, which makes me feel annoyed. “It sounds almost like this St. Anne’s place sends out people like this Andrew guy to sign up volunteers like you.”

  “No, it wasn’t like that at all!” I retort. I hate it when he talks to me like I’m a child, even though I know he means well. “What Andrew was saying made sense. I have a skill that can help these kids.”

  “Okay.” He draws the word out and pauses. “Kate, is there something here I’m not getting?”

  Like my new obsession with my imaginary daughter? I think guiltily. “What do you mean?” I ask instead.

  “Well, you develop an interest in sign language out of the blue,” he says slowly, “and then you make plans to start hanging out with some random social worker guy. I just want to make sure I shouldn’t worry.”

  “Dan, did you seriously just say that?”

  “I know it’s crazy . . .” He lets his voice trail off, and I know I’m supposed to jump in and tell him I understand where he’s coming from, that I would never cheat on him, and that nothing is wrong. But my defenses are already up, and I don’t feel much like soothing him now.

  “I’m just trying to pursue something I think I could love doing,” I say tightly. “I would think you’d be supportive of that, but instead, you’re twisting it. I’m hanging up now.” I push the End Call button and turn to stare out the window. I feel equal parts angry and guilty: angry because he suspects I’m not being entirely honest with him, and guilty because he’s right. My phone rings again two minutes later, but when I see it’s Dan calling back, I let it go to voice mail. I’m not doing anything wrong. I listen to the message he’s left, and some of my anger melts away when I realize it’s a heartfelt apology.

  “Baby, I’m really sorry,” he says. “Sometimes I just worry about losing you. I know it’s stupid; I know you love me. I hope you know much I love you.”

  I consider texting him back, but after a moment, I switch my phone off. I don’t want to think about Dan right now.

  Joan is waiting for me, as usual, outside the train station in her silver Volvo. I climb into the passenger seat and we embrace awkwardly over the center console, then she gives me a quick peck on the cheek before starting the car. “It’s good to see you, sweetheart,” she says. “You’re looking well.”

  “You too,” I say, and I can feel stress melting off my shoulders as she pulls onto Footemill Lane toward her house. The night has turned dusky outside the car window, and streetlights illuminate her silvered hair. After 2002, it quickly turned from Irish ebony to salt and pepper, and now, the black strands that used to remind me of her son are almost completely gone.

  “How’s the wedding planning coming?” she asks, and then, before I can answer, she laughs. “I’m sorry. I used to hate it when I was engaged to Joe a million years ago and people asked me that. You probably haven’t had a moment to breathe since your engagement, have you?”

  “Not really,” I reply, although clearly I’ve had enough time to sign up for a sign language class and commit to volunteering.

  “Well, if you need any help, sweetheart, you just say the word,” she says. “I know your mom isn’t nearby and—” She stops abruptly and sighs. “I’m sorry. This is probably inappropriate, isn’t it? You don’t want your former mother-in-law helping plan your wedding.”

  “Joan, you’re still my mother-in-law,” I say gently. “You always will be. And I’d love your help.”

  We pull up to Joan’s house, the house Patrick grew up in, and Joan suggests I wait on the front porch while she goes inside to grab us some iced tea. “I’ve got dinner in the Crock-Pot for us,” she tells me, “but I thought we could sit outside and catch up for a bit. It’s such a nice evening.”

  “Can I help you with anything?” I ask.

  “Oh no, I’ll just be a second.” The screen door swings closed behind her, and I settle into an Adirondack chair and close my eyes. The sound of applause wafts over from the Little League field across the street, then I hear the sharp, tinny ping of an aluminum bat connecting with a baseball. The crowd cheers, and I smile to myself. This was the sound track to my summer evenings here with Patrick; we’d sit on the porch and talk, but inevitably, the sounds of the game across the street would trigger an animated conversation between him and his dad about something that had happened in a Yankees game the previous week.

  I can smell salt in the air from the coast nearby, and I reach instinctively for the silver dollar hanging from my neck as I think about how Patrick and I threw a coin into the ocean just blocks from here after we got married. A thank-you to the universe for the best thing that ever happened to me, Patrick said. I wonder if you’re allowed to ask the universe to refund your coins when life doesn’t turn out the way you planned.

  “Did Patrick ever tell you the whole story of the silver dollars?” Joan asks, reemerging onto the porch with two glasses of iced tea. I open my eyes and see her gaze resting on the coin I’m clutching.

  I shake my head. “Just that his grandpa—your father—had a collection of them and started throwing them out for good luck when he was a kid.”

  She smiles. “That’s right. It’s a tradition my great-grandfather started almost a hundred years ago, after my father was born. He gave my father fifty newly minted silver dollars and explained that each time something really amazing happened to him, he had to return one of the dollars to the universe so that someone else could wish on it.”

  I smile, recalling how Patrick had once told me a story of his grandfather standing on the Brooklyn Bridge in 1936 and throwing a silver dollar into the water after his beloved Yankees won the World Series. They won it for the next three years too, and his grandfather always believed that it was his coins—good luck returned to the universe—that kept their streak alive. “I remember Patrick saying that. He really believed in it.”

  Joan nods. “Me too. My father always used to tell me that if you keep the coins, you throw things out of balance. When I was born, he gave me fifty silver dollars, and when Patrick was born, he did the same. It’s all about passing the luck on and thanking the world for whatever good things have happened to you.”

  “I always loved that story.”

  “Did you know that Patrick threw a coin the morning after he met you?” Joan asks.

  Something inside of me lurches. “No,” I whisper. “I didn’t.”

  “He called me that afternoon to tell me,” she says, her expression far away. “I knew you had to be something special. He didn’t take that sort of thing lightly.”

  “Wow,” I murmur, the most I can manage through the lump in my throat. I reach for the silver dollar around my neck again, and Joan watches me closely.

  “You know,” she says gently, “you’ll have to throw that one back someday.”

  I look up, startled. “But it was the last thing he ever gave me.” I clutch the coin a bit defensively.

  “I know. But I also know he gave it to you because something good had happened. And he wanted to throw the coin back once he’d shared his good news with you.”

  I nod, and for a moment, I can see his face in my mind, his expression as he handed me the coin. I’ll tell you at dinner, he’d said. But he didn’t come home. “I never found out what he was going to tell me.”

  “And maybe it’ll always be a mystery. But the silver dollars aren’t meant to be kept. Not in our family, anyhow.”

  Her words pierce me, partially because I can’t imagine part
ing with the coin that I wear every day, and partially because I know she’s right. “I’m not ready yet,” I finally admit.

  “And that’s okay.” She reaches over to squeeze my hand. “But you’ll need to be. Someday, you’ll need to be.”

  I nod, and for a moment, we sit in comfortable silence. I’m thinking about Patrick and how much stock he put in the magic of the silver dollars. But in the end, all that good luck hadn’t been enough to save him.

  From the baseball field across the street comes another sharp ping, aluminum meeting leather, and the crowd cheers. “Patrick always talked about coaching Little League someday,” Joan says, breaking the quiet between us. “He would have been a great coach. He was always great with kids.”

  I smile faintly. “He’s great with Hannah.” I realize what I’ve said a split second later and resist the urge to clap a hand over my mouth.

  “Who?” Joan looks confused.

  “No one. Sorry,” I say quickly. “What I mean is, I’m really sorry, Joan.”

  “Sorry?” She looks at me blankly. “For what, sweetheart?”

  I stare at my hands for a minute. “For not having a child with him.”

  “Kate—” Joan begins, but I cut her off.

  “I thought we were too young.” It’s a conversation I’ve had a thousand times with myself, but never aloud. “Patrick was ready, but I was still in grad school, so I told him I wanted to wait a few years, and he agreed. I thought we had all the time in the world.”

  “Of course you did, Kate,” she soothes. “You were absolutely right at the time. How could you have known what would happen? A grandchild would have been wonderful, but that wasn’t in God’s plans. You can’t blame yourself for that.”

  We sit quietly for a moment, lost in our own thoughts, then Joan breaks the silence, asking, “Do you think you and Dan will have children?”

  It takes me a few seconds to muster an answer. “I can’t have a baby,” I say softly. “I just found out a couple weeks ago.”

  “Oh, sweetheart, I’m so sorry to hear that. How are you feeling about it?”

  “I don’t know,” I admit.

  “In vitro isn’t an option?”

  I shake my head.

  “Surrogacy?”

  “Not with one of my eggs.”

  “Well, what about adoption?” she asks, brightening. “You’d give a child such a wonderful home.”

  “Maybe. I’m not sure how Dan feels.”

  “How do you feel?”

  I think about it for a minute. For years, I’ve been forgetting to ask myself that. “I think I want to be a mom, Joan,” I say softly. “I just don’t know if it’s too late.”

  Eleven

  A tidal wave of gratitude washes over me as I open my eyes the next morning and realize I’m back in my old apartment, lying beside Patrick.

  “Thank you,” I murmur, and my words wake Patrick up.

  He rolls over, blinks a few times, sleepily, and reaches for me. “Did you say something, honey?” he asks.

  “No. I mean yes, I did, but not to you.” I hesitate. “I’m just talking to God, I think.”

  “Oh, well, that’s okay, then,” Patrick says, pulling me toward him. “I make an exception for the big guy upstairs.”

  He kisses me, long and deep, and I can feel a tingle of happiness spreading all over my body, but it’s interrupted by a sob that bubbles up from the middle of my chest.

  “Kate?” Patrick asks, pulling back and gazing at me with concern. “Are you okay?”

  “Yes,” I manage. “Fine.”

  “But you’re crying.”

  “I just—I just miss you so much,” I tell him. The world flickers and dims, alarming me.

  Oblivious, Patrick strokes my hair. “I’m right here, Katielee.”

  I force a smile. “Yes. You are. Of course you are.” The room springs back into focus, the colors sharpening into their familiar near-blinding hues, and I breathe a sigh of relief.

  He dries my tears gently, his thumb coarse against my cheek. I’m about to say something else, to ask more, but Patrick rolls over, looks at the clock and exclaims, “Shoot! We’re running late. We’ve got to get Hannah ready to go.”

  I blink a few times. “Go where?”

  “To day camp.” He looks at me with renewed concern. “Pete’s mom is picking her up. Remember?”

  He gets out of bed without waiting for a reply, and I watch, my breath caught in my throat, as he slides a gray T-shirt over his bare chest.

  “You coming?” he asks, smiling at me.

  “Sure,” I whisper. I should be enjoying every second of this, real or not. I clear my throat. “How about I make us pancakes for breakfast? Do we have time for that?” I hesitate and add, “Wait, does Hannah like pancakes?”

  The moment the words are out of my mouth, I know the answer is a resounding yes. I also know immediately that her favorite pancakes are peanut butter blueberry, a combination we stumbled upon when she was in first grade, and that she likes them with honey instead of syrup.

  “Is the sky blue?” Patrick asks with a chuckle, saving me from having to explain.

  “Just kidding,” I reply weakly as he strides out of the room. I hurry to throw on a plush blue robe I don’t recognize but that I know I love.

  I can hear the sink running in the bathroom, and someone rummaging through the hall closet. “My family,” I murmur aloud, and all at once, I know I have to stop wondering whether I belong here. If I keep acting as if I might lose my place in this world at any moment, I will.

  In the kitchen, I grab a skillet from the cabinet just to the left of the stove, turn the burner on, and slice a few pats of butter into the pan. This is real, I tell myself. I mix flour, sugar, baking powder, vegetable oil, salt, milk, and an egg together in a bowl, then I stir in a half cup of peanut butter. I’m really here. I ladle spoonfuls of batter onto the skillet, and finally, I dot frozen blueberries onto each of the pancakes as they begin to sizzle and bubble.

  I belong in this life, I tell myself as the scent of butter and frying pancakes fills the kitchen. I have to.

  Hannah pads into the kitchen wearing a cute floral dress and purple Converse sneakers just as I’m sliding the first batch of pancakes onto a baking sheet to warm in the oven. “Morning,” she says, and as I turn to greet her, my heart fluttering with happiness, I notice for the first time that there’s a small, oblong node on the side of her head, just behind her right ear, mostly hidden by her hair. It’s where her bun was the last time I saw her, which explains why I didn’t see it. She looks away for a moment, and I see an identical headpiece on her left side.

  “Cochlear implants,” I say softly, and although Hannah gives me a weird look, the room doesn’t fade, and suddenly, the details flood in. Teaching her sign language when she was a toddler and encouraging her to read lips and to try to verbalize. Deciding with Patrick just before Hannah was two and a half that cochlear implantation was the best thing for her. The maternal panic I felt when she went in for surgery; the relief I felt in the weeks afterward when I knew my daughter was beginning to hear. The knowledge that because she learned to sign before she learned to speak, and the fact that we encouraged her to keep up ASL so she’d always have a tie to the Deaf community, she often switches back and forth between the two forms of language when she’s talking to Patrick and me.

  “Mom?” she asks aloud, and I notice she’s peering at me with concern, probably because I’m standing there, spatula in hand, staring at her.

  I gather myself, smile at her, and sign, Good morning, one of the phrases I taught myself online.

  She looks relieved, and she signs back, You are acting weird again, but she’s smiling. I’m struck by how well I can understand her here, which reminds me that this can’t possibly be real. But then again, calling it a dream seems crazy too, because it’
s obviously so much more than that.

  I try to remember the signs Andrew taught me for the phrase, I’m sorry I’ve been a little bit weird. I point to myself, rub my right hand over my heart with a closed fist, point to myself again, flick my thumb against my index finger two times, and then position my hand like a claw and move it right to left while wiggling my middle finger, my ring finger and my index finger in front of my face.

  Hannah looks at me for a moment, and I’m afraid I’ve said something wrong. But then she says aloud, “You’re always weird, Mom,” and laughs. Then she signs, Are the pancakes ready?

  “Just a few more minutes,” I tell her. I melt a bit more butter in the pan, spoon five dollops of batter in, and add blueberries. I turn to find Hannah pulling three plates out of the cabinet and three forks out of the silverware drawer.

  She catches me watching her again and rolls her eyes. “What now, Mom?” she asks aloud.

  I shake my head quickly and look away. “Nothing,” I say, then I add in sign language, I love you.

  She rolls her eyes again. “I love you too, dork,” she says aloud. “You don’t have to keep signing, you know. I promise, I’m keeping up with practicing ASL, okay?”

  Duh, I sign back with a weak smile, using Andrew’s pun, and she makes a face at me, but she’s smiling.

  As I slide another round of pancakes into the oven and prepare the frying pan for a third batch, Hannah sidles up beside me and begins a rapid conversation about someone named Meggie. I know in a flash that Meggie is Hannah’s best friend at school and that I’ve always liked her. Then she transitions right into a long, signed monologue about a girl named Jessica who she sat with yesterday at day camp. Jessica met One Direction last year! she signs excitedly, her eyes wide. So cool!

  I make sure Hannah’s looking at me, then I ask, “So you’ll hang out with Jessica at camp today?”

  She shakes her head. Only if Meggie doesn’t come, she signs. Meggie doesn’t like Jessica.