Life Intended (9781476754178)

by Kristin Harmel

  She takes my income tax returns from the last several years, makes copies of my birth certificate and social security card, and requests medical records from my physician. She also asks me what feels like a thousand questions each week about everything from where a child would be housed (in the guest bedroom) to how I’d provide child care while I’m working (I’ve already found an after-school program) and whether I’m involved in any romantic relationships (the answer to which is a resounding no). And she examines every nook and cranny of my apartment with pursed lips, jotting notes on a clipboard.

  At Andrew’s request, I don’t say anything to Allie about my foster parenting training. “We don’t want her to get her hopes up, because this isn’t a sure thing,” he reminds me. “And we don’t want to get in the way of her bonding with her mom.” So instead, I keep visiting her each Thursday, as usual, and I’m relieved to find her opening up and sharing stories about school and her best friend, Bella, whom she always calls BFF in sign language—her middle and index fingers crossed while she mouths the letters. I’m happy to see her friendship flourishing and grateful that she’s found in Bella someone who can identify with both her hearing difficulties and her foster situation. I laugh when she begins telling me the ways she and Bella are plotting to get the purple-haired Jay Cash to ask Allie out.

  “I’ve never even kissed a boy,” Allie confides one day. “Bella says it’s kind of gross, all tongues and everything, but I don’t think she’s kissed anyone either, even though she won’t admit it, so I don’t really believe her.”

  My heart swells with affection and love for Allie with each new stride forward she makes, and I’m relieved when she doesn’t bring up her mother again, although it’s probably my responsibility to be poking at the subject to see if she wants to talk. But I’d rather envision a life where I’ll make everything okay for Allie, where I’ll take away the pain of all the times she’s been hurt before.

  So I keep my head down and go through the motions of my life. I go to the MAPP class for prospective foster parents every Tuesday and Friday, to Andrew’s ASL class every Wednesday, and out to Queens every Thursday, where I work with Allie, Riajah, and a young boy named Tarek, who has 90 percent hearing loss and who just entered the foster system a few weeks ago. At work, I joke around with Max, help Leo with his situation at school, and make music with two dozen other kids with various challenges that need addressing.

  Life is slowly getting back to normal, a new normal, without Dan. But the glimpses into the world I share with Patrick and Hannah are gone now, and I miss them terribly. Each night, I wait to wake up in a life where I still have Patrick, and where Hannah exists. Each morning, I awake crushed and missing them anew. I try Joan a few times, but we seem to be playing phone tag; I keep getting her voice mail, and when she calls back, she keeps getting mine.

  Four weeks after the breakup, Dan finally agrees to meet me for lunch, and after he lets me go on for a full five minutes, apologizing for hurting him, he tells me that he’s pretty sure he never loved me in the first place. The words sting more than I would have thought.

  “You can’t mean that,” I say. “We were together for almost two years.”

  “Well, it was easy enough for you to walk away,” he says, his eyes hard. “That doesn’t say a whole lot about your love for me, does it?”

  “Dan, I did love you,” I say. “I still do. But that doesn’t make us right for each other.”

  He rolls his eyes. “Spare me the psychobabble. You haven’t dealt with your own shit. You brought a whole load of baggage into our relationship, and that’s not my fault. It’s yours. One hundred percent your fault. I deserved better.”

  “I know,” I say softly.

  “So you can’t just sit here and say you love me and expect me to smile and say, ‘Well, then, I forgive you for treating me like I’m disposable.’ ”

  “But I didn’t mean to hurt you,” I protest. “You have to know that.”

  He looks away, but not before I notice the pain in his eyes, which wounds me just as much as anything else. “Kate, I really don’t give a shit what you meant.” He gets up to leave before the waiter even arrives to take our order.

  A few weeks later, I finish the MAPP training, so all that’s left to do is wait for official certification as a foster parent. I’ve been told this is the part that can take the longest, because of bureaucratic red tape. I try to hang in there and believe it will all work out.

  August gives way to September, the air turns cooler, and the numbers on the calendar begin to tick down to the anniversary of Patrick’s death. The day before the anniversary is a Wednesday, and Andrew corners me after sign language class to tell me—in sign language, which I’m beginning to truly understand after all these weeks—that I don’t need to come by St. Anne’s tomorrow.

  Why? I sign back carefully.

  Because it’s September eighteenth, he signs.

  I stare at him for a minute. “You remembered,” I say aloud.

  “That it’s the anniversary of you losing your husband? Of course I did. I don’t want you to worry about us tomorrow. Just take care of yourself.”

  “Thanks,” I reply, but I’m a bit sad that I won’t get to see Andrew, Riajah, Tarek, or Allie. It’ll mean a day alone with my thoughts and my sadness.

  “Are you okay, Kate?” Andrew asks aloud as I turn to go. “Is tomorrow going to be hard for you?” Before I can answer, he shakes his head and says, “What am I saying? Of course it’ll be hard. That was like the dumbest question I could have asked you.”

  I smile. “It’s really nice of you to be concerned. And yeah, it’s always hard. But every year, it gets a little easier to bear, you know? I’ll be okay.”

  “Look, come by St. Anne’s if you want,” he says. “I didn’t mean you shouldn’t come. I just didn’t want to make you work. But if you’re feeling down and you want to talk, I’ll be there all day and most of the evening.” He stops short and adds, “I mean, not that you don’t have other people to talk to. That’s not what I meant.”

  “I know.”

  “I just meant, you know, if you need another friend, I’m here. Or there, I mean. At St. Anne’s.”

  “It’s a really nice offer,” I tell him. “And it’s really nice to know you care.”

  “Of course I care,” he says. “I don’t say this enough, Kate, but I appreciate all the work you’ve been doing with us. Sometimes, I feel like I kind of roped you into it. You just showed up to take a sign language class, and before you knew it, I had you committed to volunteering with us every week. I feel like kind of a jerk.”

  “Andrew, stop. I love it. It makes me really happy to work with the kids. I’m grateful that you asked me to help out.”

  “Well,” Andrew says, “I owe you. So if you’re ever looking for something to do at night, and you’re not out with your sister and your friend, let me know. I’ll take you out to another fabulous and educational dinner sometime. To say thanks for helping me with the kids.”

  I stare at him. Is he asking me out? I quickly dismiss the thought, because after all, I’ve seen his girlfriend, and she looks like she belongs on the cover of a magazine. He must be asking me as one professional to another, even if he looks almost like he’s blushing. “Sure, that sounds good,” I say, because regardless of his motivation, spending a little more time with him seems like a nice idea. I hadn’t realized quite how lonely I would feel without Dan or the dreams around. Sometimes, the nights seem to stretch on forever.

  “Cool,” Andrew says. He gives me an awkward hug good-bye and reminds me to call him tomorrow if I need anything.

  Thank you, I sign back. See you next week.

  He grins. “Well, look at you, Miss Fluent-in-Sign-Language. I’ll see you next week too.”

  I take the next day off, as I have each year on the anniversary of losing Patrick. Even though I’m trying hard to put
the past behind me, there’s just something about coasting through life normally on the day Patrick died that feels wrong to me.

  I lie in bed that morning, wondering how twelve whole years could have possibly passed since the day it happened. In some ways, it feels like it was just a year or two ago. In another way, I feel sometimes like it’s been decades since Patrick died.

  I’ve just sunken into the first stages of feeling sorry for myself when my phone dings with a text. I’m surprised to see it’s from Allie.

  U ok? she writes.

  Yes, thanks, I write back, not sure whether Allie’s asking me a general question or whether she remembers about Patrick. I told her the date of his death the night she ran away.

  I just thought u might be sad about ur husband, she texts back a minute later, and I feel overwhelmingly grateful.

  I am, I text back. Very sad. But it really helps to know you’re worried about me.

  Well, I really like u, Allie texts back after a pause. U R really nice to me.

  I really like you too, I text back. You’re a wonderful person, Allie.

  Allie doesn’t reply at first, and I wonder for a moment if somehow I’ve said the wrong thing. But then she writes, Come by my house if u r sad later. I can cheer u up.

  I smile. Thanks, Allie, I write back.

  My mom’s hearing is today, she writes after a minute, and my heart stops beating for a minute. Why didn’t Andrew tell me? My social worker says she doesn’t know what’s gonna happen, she adds a moment later.

  I swallow hard. Maybe Andrew didn’t say anything because he didn’t want me to get my hopes up. But then again, maybe it’s because he doesn’t want my heart broken yet again on the worst day of the year. Good luck, I settle for texting back.

  Thx, Allie writes back. Gotta go to class.

  After the conversation is over, I turn my phone off, lie back down, and stare at the ceiling, feeling very much alone. But today’s about Patrick, not Allie and her mother, and I won’t let myself get sidetracked by yet another thing I can’t control.

  A little after eight, I roll over and look at the digital clock on my nightstand. I watch the minutes tick by, and I think about how twelve years ago, at this very time, life for both Patrick and me was blissful, virtually worry-free. We had no idea that in just a matter of minutes, everything would change.

  I’m still watching when the clock turns to 8:36, a minute before it happened. I know I’m torturing myself, but I’m somehow unable to stop.

  The clock turns to 8:37, and my heart sinks, just like it does every year. This is the moment, twelve years ago, that Gennifer Barwin—her blood alcohol level more than twice the legal limit—changed the course of my life forever. I was just trying to show my baby Times Square, that’s all, she’d told the police later as an ambulance took her away. She’d merely broken her arm, and her daughter, safely strapped in her car seat, literally didn’t have a scratch on her.

  I lie there until 8:52, the moment Patrick breathed his last breath in a cage of twisted metal, then I get out of bed, shuffle to the kitchen, and go through the motions of making myself a pot of coffee, although I don’t actually want to drink it. At 11:00, I finally pick up my cell phone again and return missed calls from Susan, my mom, and Gina. Susan and my mom want to make sure I’m okay and let me know they’re thinking of me. The conversation with Gina is, as it always is, cathartic. We cry together for a few minutes and then we remind each other of some of our favorite funny stories about Patrick and Bill.

  “Remember the time we were all going to the movies, and Bill’s jacket got caught in the revolving door?” Gina asks with a ragged laugh. “Patrick was the only one who noticed, and he and Bill were yelling at the people behind us and trying to get them to stop the door, and you and I thought they’d gone nuts.”

  “Or the time that little girl came up to the four of us at dinner and was convinced that for some reason that Patrick was actually—what’s the name of that guy who played Mark Darcy?”

  Gina laughs. “Right! Colin Firth, right? Because she’d just seen some movie with him in it, and she thought Patrick looked just like him?”

  “He kept trying to tell her that he was just a normal guy. But that just made it worse, because the little girl kept saying, ‘That’s exactly what Colin Firth would say.’ ”

  “God, Patrick held that over your head for months, didn’t he?” Gina asks, then deepens her voice for an imitation of Patrick trying to talk with a British accent: “ ‘I’m Colin Firth, so you have to do what I say. I’m very famous, you know.’ ”

  I laugh at the memory, but after a moment, my laughter dies down, and so does hers.

  “I really miss them,” Gina says softly.

  “Yeah. Me too.”

  We hang up after making plans to see each other for dinner one day next week, then I take a deep breath and dial Joan’s number.

  “How you doing, sweetheart?” she asks when she answers.

  “About the same as every September eighteenth,” I tell her.

  “It never really gets easier, does it?” she asks. “Every year, we think we’re a little further along the path to being okay again, and every year, it turns out we’re wrong.”

  “Exactly,” I say. I knew Joan would understand. “How are you?”

  We talk for a few minutes about Patrick. Then, thinking about my dreams, I ask Joan, “Hey, did you ever go get that mammogram we talked about?”

  “Oh yes, I’ve been meaning to tell you!” she exclaims. “I did go in. The mammogram person—what are they called, a radiologist?—said everything looked okay, but they were just worried about one little spot, so they did a small biopsy. Everyone was very upbeat, and I’m supposed to get the results back any day now. I’m sure everything’s fine, but thanks for urging me to go in. I’ll feel a lot better when I know for sure that things are okay.”

  “Good,” I say, but her mention of a biopsy bothers me. I can’t shake the image of her bald and weakened by chemotherapy. “Just let me know as soon as you get word from the doctor, okay?”

  “Of course, sweetheart,” she promises.

  After we hang up, I sit down in my kitchen and stare at my now-cold cup of coffee. The pain of missing Patrick is visceral today, and no amount of reminiscing about him or crying about his absence can make it feel any better. “Patrick, if you can hear me,” I say aloud, “I love you. I’ve never stopped loving you. I miss you every day.” I pause for a minute before adding softly, “I knew before I met you—”

  But the only response is silence.

  Then my phone rings, startling me, and I see Unknown Caller on the caller ID. Usually, I’d let it go to voice mail, but today I’m lonely and sad, and so I pick the phone up and say hello.

  “Is this Kate Waithman?” The female voice on the other end sounds vaguely familiar, but I can’t place it.

  “Yes . . .”

  “Excellent. It’s Karen Davidson.”

  My heart is immediately in my throat. “Karen, of course.”

  “Well, I’m calling today with some wonderful news, Kate. You’ve been approved to be a foster parent. Your certification is official.”

  I can hardly believe it, so I ask her to repeat the words, and she does.

  “We think you’ll be a wonderful foster mother, Kate,” she adds. “Congratulations. We’re very happy to have you on board.”

  My heart is thudding double time. “I get to be a foster mom?” I whisper in disbelief.

  “You sure do,” Karen says.

  “Do you think there’s a chance I’ll get to foster the girl I’ve been working with?” I ask. “Allie Valcher?”

  I can hear Karen’s smile through the phone as she says, “I don’t see why not, if she needs a home; you have the specialized skill set to be able to work with her.”

  I blink back tears and look skyward. Thi
s must be Patrick’s doing somehow. I was right. The dreams were leading me here. On September eighteenth of all days. “Karen, I don’t even know how to thank you.”

  “No need,” she says warmly. “We’re grateful to you for opening your heart and your home to a child. We’ll get everything officially rolling later this week, if you have time to come by my office.”

  We agree to meet tomorrow at noon, and after she gives me her address, we say good-bye, and I hang up.

  Elated, I walk into the guest room and close my eyes. This will be Allie’s room if everything goes right. I’ll go out today and buy a bed, a comforter a preteen would like, maybe even a nice electric piano and a Mac with recording software. My life is about to change, and the fact that it’s all happening today is, at the very least, poetic and beautiful.

  “Thank you, Patrick,” I whisper, feeling my husband’s presence. If I close my eyes and imagine hard enough, I can almost feel his strong arms wrapped around me, his warm breath on my neck, his body pressed against mine. “I know you did this. Thank you for Allie.”

  Twenty-Nine

  I’m at the Macy’s in Herald Square early that afternoon, trying to choose between a teak trundle bed and an oak full-sized bed with storage drawers underneath, when my phone rings. Andrew’s name shows up on the caller ID.

  “How are you doing?” he asks when I answer. “Since today’s the, um, anniversary and all?”

  I smile, grateful for his concern. “I’m actually doing okay.”