Page 89 of Meet Me in Another Life
Her breath won’t come. She is alive, she made it, but now she is suffocating, staring at him where he floats, frozen and inert. She doesn’t understand. “Peregrine,” she yells, but there is no one here: only the silence of the ship where she is the only living occupant. Only the marks of the fire on the wall. Only the damaged panel beside Santi’s compartment, the melted wires that opened a tiny, fatal window to the stars.
Thora pounds on the wall and screams.
An hour later, she sits in the pilot’s chair of the lander, watching the planet turn beneath her. A vastness of blue and gray, speckled with alien clouds: a new world.
The ship creaks, a minuscule adjustment that hits Thora’s senses like an earthquake. It’s too much, as everything has been since she woke: blisteringly, painfully real, in a way that makes the city seem in retrospect like a shadowed dream.Through a glass darkly, she thinks, and wonders where the thought comes from.
She moves her head slowly, tracking across the mementoes taped to the wall. The photo of Jules smiling, the reality she remembers more incandescent than any version she projected: her own fear, her own insecurity muddying the lens. She keeps turning, past the flags of their many allegiances, Spain and Iceland and the Czech Republic and the EU’s gold stars on blue, a child’s drawing of the immensity she’s seeing through her window. Finally, her eyes come to rest on the empty chair beside her.
It doesn’t matter why. But she still searched like a madwoman, as if finding the reason would enable her to start again, have another chance to get it right. By the time she found the damage from the collision, Peregrine’s clumsy repair that cross-wired her and Santi’s compartments, there was a hole in her too, and it was pulling her apart from the inside.He thought you were me, and I was you.For a crazed, grief-drunk moment, it was true. She hadn’t lost Santi: she had lost herself. She knew, even as she pressed her forehead to the cold metal wall, that it wouldn’t have made any difference: he would have insisted, as she did, and she would have let him, because of who they are.
She let him go, as he wanted. Set him loose among the stars. Now, strapped in the seat of the lander, she thinks of him driftingforever, open-eyed, face-to-face with his God at last. She wonders how she can feel so full of him and so empty at the same time: a paradox, a trick of physics she will never understand. As baffling as how she knew all of him and yet there was an infinity left to discover. She thinks of all the people waiting for him, people she will have to tell if she makes it back alive. Héloïse, his on-again, off-again girlfriend, who they all knew would marry him one day. Jaime, who came to visit when she and Santi were doing their basic training in Cologne, spending a wild evening crawling the bars of the old town. His parents, who came to see him off, his father alight with pride and his mother a wreck of premature grief, as if she already knew what was going to happen. His sister Aurelia, and Estela, his niece, their borrowed daughter. Félicette, who won’t ever understand why he didn’t come home. For some reason, that is the one that breaks her. Sobs take her over, until her body is nothing but a channel for her bursting grief. Finally she’s crying for him, and he can’t see it.
She has to control herself. She holds her breath until the sobbing stops. “Get it together,” she says out loud. Like folding the universe into a box, she pushes her grief down. She has a mission to complete, and she has to do it alone.
She sets up the landing sequence. For as long as she can, she doesn’t think of Santi. She thinks instead of her trajectory, of the thousand variables between her and survival, of what might await her on the surface of the new world. But she can’t keep him out. He seeps through the cracks in her: his smile, his bowed head as he carefully draws in his memory book, the look he gets sometimes like God stooped down and kissed him right between the eyes. The look she loves. It’s too late. Though her hands still work the controls, her thoughts are of nothing but how much she loves him; how he never knew, because while he was open and flowingas a stream, she was dammed up, too cold and guarded to tell him what he meant to her. And now she’ll never see him again. She hunches over, racked by spasms of grief. “How did this happen?” she gasps, and she knows she’s asking him, that she will keep asking him until the day she follows him. But she already knows the answer. She did this, by arguing too well for her own annihilation, and she can’t take it back. Worst of all, even if she could, she can’t imagine any version of her choosing differently.
There’s no wrong choice,Santi says.There’s just what happens.
She sits up, gasping. Like a gift, like a curse, she remembers him, a flood of him coursing through her: laughing in the park with her and Lily, throwing crumbs to the parakeets; playing table tennis with Joost, the engineer who gave Peregrine his face; painting his mural on the wall of the clock tower, brow furrowed in concentration; in the pool during spacewalk training, giving her an underwater thumbs-up. His real and virtual selves collide into something that’s smaller than the truth of him and yet bigger than she can contain. She draws in a shuddering breath, focuses on one image: Santi at a table outside Der Zentaur, raising his glass to her.
I knew what I meant to you.She doesn’t know if it’s exactly what he would say. He always did know how to surprise her. But the feeling behind it, she’s sure of.Now go. See it for both of us.
“I will,” she says, and starts the countdown.
