The Life Intended (22 page)

We wind up at a narrow, hole-in-the-wall Jamaican place ten blocks from Allie’s house. There are only a dozen tables in the restaurant, and the walls are painted black, green, and yellow.

“It doesn’t look like much,” Andrew says, reading my mind, “but I promise, the food here is incredible. Trust me?”

“I trust you.” I smile, because the words are surprisingly nice to say.

“Good,” he says, nudging me, “because I know my food, woman.”

Andrew orders ackee and saltfish—which he tells me is Jamaica’s national dish—as well as breadfruit and fried plantains.

“Breadfruit?” I ask when our waitress walks away to get us a couple of Red Stripes.

“It’s a fruit,” he says with a smile, “that feels and tastes like bread. In Jamaica, they traditionally roast the whole fruit and then slice it up. It’s a pretty common accompaniment to ackee and saltfish.”

“I’m almost afraid to ask what ackee is.”

He grins. “Ackee is this wacky fruit that looks kind of like yellow stone-crab claws when it grows. But when you boil it, it winds up looking just like scrambled eggs. The Jamaican tradition is to serve it with salt-packed cod and a bunch of vegetables and spices. It’s different, but it’s definitely an experience.”

“Fruit that tastes like bread,” I repeat slowly, “and fruit that looks like eggs. Sure, that all sounds normal.”

He laughs. “I thought you said you trust me.”

Our waitress returns with our Red Stripes, and by the time the food comes, we’re talking and laughing like old friends. There’s something about being with Andrew that reminds me of being with Patrick, but the two men aren’t the same at all. In fact, they don’t have a lot in common. It’s just that I have the weird sense that I can be myself entirely with Andrew. If I say something stupid, I have the feeling he’d say something equally ridiculous in return, just to put me at ease.

Our food arrives, and just like Andrew promised, the main dish looks just like scrambled eggs with tomatoes, peppers, and onions mixed in. I take a bite and scrunch my nose up as the flavors assault my taste buds. It’s salty and very fishy.

“You hate it,” Andrew says, his face falling.

“No.” I take another bite. “Actually, it tastes nothing like what I was expecting, but it’s pretty good.”

He looks relieved. “And the breadfruit?”

I try it and nod as I chew. “Definitely tastes like bread. But really good bread.”

“So I have your seal of approval?”

“You’re two for two, Henson.”

He pumps his fists in the air. “Victory!” he says dramatically, which makes me laugh. “So,” he says, after taking a bite of his meal, “would that fiancé of yours like this too?”

I laugh. “He’d hate it. He won’t eat anything with high sodium content, as I’m guessing this has.”

“He has high blood pressure?” he guesses.

“Nope. Just an obsession with eating healthy.”

Andrew looks confused. “But you said he would have loved that burger we had a few weeks ago. Which, by the way, is probably on the top ten list of the unhealthiest foods in the New York metro area.”

I look down at my plate, my appetite gone. “No. I said my husband would have liked it.”

“Your husband?” Andrew still looks perplexed, but there’s something in his eyes that tells me he knows exactly what I’m going to say. He’s lost someone too, and sometimes, you can just tell.

“His name was Patrick,” I say.

“Oh,” Andrew says softly.

“He died twelve years ago,” I go on numbly. “Or it’ll be twelve years on September eighteenth. And Patrick would have loved this place. And that burger.”

Andrew looks at me for a minute, and I wait for his pat words of sympathy, a variation on the same theme I get each time I tell someone I’m a widow. But instead, he reaches out and squeezes my hand. “So when you told me you understand how it feels to lose someone, you meant it.”

“Yes,” I say.

He’s silent for another minute. “He’s the one who gave you the advice? About following your dreams?”

I smile. “He’s the one.”

Andrew nods. “So he has great taste in food. And he gives awesome advice. What else? Tell me about this guy.”

“Really?” I’m surprised. People just want to say they’re sorry for my loss and move on before the conversation gets awkward. But Andrew seems to genuinely want to know.

“Like was he a Mets fan or a Yankees fan?” Andrew asks, nudging me.

“Yankees,” I say softly.

“Well, that’s a relief. What else?”

I take a deep breath and begin to talk. I tell Andrew about how much Patrick liked to cook, how he loved woodworking, and how he was so good at his job because he really cared about helping his clients build better futures. I tell him about how Patrick’s stomach rumbled loudly sometimes in the middle of the night, how he secretly loved Rollerblading but was afraid it was girly, and how he sometimes left little notes under my pillow telling me he loved me. I even tell him about the silver dollars.

In return, he tells me about his brother, and by the time we pay our bill and leave, we’ve spent over an hour trading stories, and I feel like a weight’s been lifted. I haven’t laughed about Patrick in a long time. Every conversation I have about him is cloaked in sadness and loss. It was nice to simply tell a new friend about a man who used to be such a big part of my life.

“Do you ever dream about your brother?” I ask Andrew as we walk toward the subway together.

I feel foolish for asking the question until he replies, “No, but I wish I did. He died when we were both so young, and he’s been gone from my life for a while now. Sometimes I worry that my memory of him is fading.” He pauses and asks, “Do you dream about Patrick?”

“Yeah,” I say. “Recently, anyway. Really realistic dreams.”

He nods. “Do you think your subconscious is trying to tell you something?”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know. I feel like the only time I dream vividly is when I’m trying to figure something out.” He looks at me. “Is there something you need to figure out?”

“Maybe,” I say in a small voice.

We walk in silence for a moment. “You know, I like to think that part of honoring my brother is acknowledging that losing him made me who I am today,” Andrew says.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, a tragedy changes you, doesn’t it? Like, I can’t imagine I would be here tonight, walking with you, working with hard-of-hearing kids, if it wasn’t for Kevin. When he was killed, there was a void in my life, and I think anytime there’s a void, it gets filled by something that makes you different than you were before. It changes the course of your life.”

I nod in agreement. “Loss colors everything.”

“But I’m a better man because of what I lost and what I learned, you know?” He pauses. “Do you think losing Patrick changed you?”

“Yeah, I guess it did.” I look up at the sky and add, “I’m just not sure I’m done changing yet.”

It’s not until we’ve hugged good-bye and I’m on a subway bound for Manhattan that I realize neither of us said a word about the kids of St. Anne’s.

Nineteen

“S
o tell me about these dreams.” My mother leans forward eagerly the next evening and reaches for my hand. “Quick, before Dan gets back.”

We’re eating oysters and drinking champagne at Noemi & Jean, a French bistro my mother read about in
New York
magazine. It’s the Fourth of July, but Dan hates fireworks and my mother hates crowds, so we’ve retreated to someplace quiet and decidedly unpatriotic. We’re the only ones here. Dan has just excused himself to the bathroom, and my mother’s eyes are bright with curiosity.

“There’s not much to tell,” I say weakly, the words a lie. The truth is, I feel fiercely protective of the world in which Patrick and Hannah live, because I’m afraid that telling someone skeptical the personal details will invite derision and destroy the illusion for me.

“Oh, but there must be, sweetheart,” she insists. She pauses to swish an oyster with a dollop of horseradish down her throat. “Susan told me how much they’ve been bothering you.” She takes a sip of champagne and leans back in her seat.

I glance toward the bathroom. Dan will be returning at any
moment. “It’s silly,” I say quickly. “I’m just kind of seeing the life I would have had if Patrick hadn’t died.”

“Are you happy? In this dream?”

“Very happy.” I consider my next words carefully before saying them. “It feels like the life I was supposed to have, if everything hadn’t gotten all screwed up. What if Patrick had grabbed a different cab that morning, or what if his client had canceled the meeting? What if he’d stayed home sick that day? What if I’d asked him to fix the stupid leaky faucet before he left for work, so that he was running five minutes later? There are so many little ways it all could have been so different, and only one way it turned out like this. How can that be right?”

“Because it’s simply the way it is,” she says softly. “What’s done is done. You have Dan. You have a nice life together. You’re happy enough, right?”

I nod, struck by her choice of words. “Happy
enough
?”

“Isn’t that what most people have?”

“What if I want more?” I ask. But the words get lost as Dan returns to the table and we abruptly stop talking.

“I hope I’m not interrupting, ladies,” Dan says, smiling as he sits down.

“Not at all,” my mother replies, batting her eyes at him. She’s had a soft spot for him since the day I took him to Florida to meet her for the first time, and when my mom likes someone, she turns into a flirt. Of course it’s harmless, but with my own confusion clouding things, her simpering smile and fluttering lashes just annoy me.

We polish off the last of the oysters and champagne and order our entrées and more wine. As the conversation turns to wedding plans, color schemes, and invitation fonts, I feel myself drifting. I turn to look out the window again. I can just catch the glow in the sky from the fireworks dozens of blocks away, and it makes
me sad to feel like I’m on the outside of something, looking in without really seeing it at all.

I close my eyes for a minute, just to clear my head, while Dan launches into a long story I’ve already heard a half-dozen times about how he picked out my engagement ring. His voice and the clatter of the restaurant fade away as I breathe deeply in and out, trying not to think about how different this perfect dinner feels from the wonderfully imperfect one I had last night at a Jamaican dive.

And then, just as I’ve succeeded in tuning everything out, an image flashes across my mind, clear as a photograph. It’s a frozen moment: Patrick, Hannah, and me smiling up at fireworks with the city sparkling behind us.

I gasp, and as my eyes fly open, I automatically reach for the table to brace myself, and I instead wind up knocking a glass of water over on Dan’s lap. He jumps up to grab napkins, and I turn to look guiltily at my mother.

“What just happened?” she whispers.

“Nothing,” I say, but my heart is still thudding, because I’ve never had a fragment from the dream appear while I was going about my real life. And with the Fourth of July celebrations in the background, it’s clear that the image I was seeing is supposed to be taking place right now, almost as if there’s an alternate version of my life playing out across town without me.

“Did it have something to do with the dreams?” she asks suspiciously.

I only have time to nod miserably before Dan returns, blotting the water from his pants as he sits down. “Geez, babe, you scared me,” he says, rubbing my arm.

“Sorry about the water,” I say.

“No problem. As long as you’re okay,” he replies before resuming his conversation with my mom, who’s now giving me worried glances each time Dan looks away.

Neither seems to hear when I mumble, “Actually, I’m not sure I’m okay at all.”

I
pick my mom up in a cab the next morning at the Ritz-Carlton to take her back to the airport. She’s quiet on the way there, and although she comments a few times about the weather, how nice it was to see my sister and me, and how she’s looking forward to coming back to visit us again soon, she waits until we’re almost at JFK for the heavy words.

“What was that last night, Kate?” she asks. “At the restaurant? Has that been happening to you?”

“No. That was a first. I closed my eyes and saw Patrick and Hannah. It just startled me.”

“Hannah’s the daughter?”

I nod and look away.

“Honey,” she says gently, “you’ve always had the tendency to obsess about things. Remember that crush you had on Jon Bon Jovi in the seventh grade? When you were so sure you were going to marry him?”

“I was twelve, Mom!”

She shrugs. “I’m just wondering if that’s what you’re doing now—obsessing about these dreams because you need something to hold on to.”

“Mom, I’m not obsessing. And these dreams have nothing to do with my childhood crush.”

“Well, I think you need to figure out what it is you want,” she says as we pull into her terminal. “I think these dreams are confusing you, Kate. If you don’t figure out how you really feel, I’m afraid you’re going to lose what you’ve built for yourself.”

“Dan, you mean?” I ask, trying not to sound bitter. “You’re afraid I’ll lose Dan?”

“No, honey. I’m afraid you’ll lose
you.
I’m afraid you’ll lose everything.”

She hugs me good-bye, and as I climb slowly back into the cab and ask the driver to take me back to Manhattan, I find myself wondering whether you can really suffer a loss if you have nothing left to lose.

But maybe I
do
have something to lose. What if the dreams are trying to give me some sort of a message, and I’m ignoring it? What if I’m meant to be following the clues the dreams are laying out for me? I know it sounds nuts, but there’s nothing about this that’s normal.

“Bleecker and Grove,” I hear myself tell the cabdriver as we plunge into the darkness of the Queens-Midtown Tunnel. “Please,” I say a little more strongly, “take me to Bleecker and Grove.”

It’s the spot where I saw Hannah’s piano recital in my dreams. I have to find out if Dolores Kay is real, if she really holds piano recitals on the second floor of 321 Bleecker. If she’s out there somewhere, then maybe the dreams aren’t just a cruelly beautiful trick of my imagination. If she exists, maybe there’s hope that Hannah does too.