“What time is Allie getting here in the morning?” Joan asks.
I nod. “Her mom’s dropping her off at ten.” We’ve decided to have Thanksgiving a day early this year so that Allie can join us. She’ll be spending Thursday with her mother, who has indeed stayed sober and clean since getting custody back. Although Allie doesn’t trust her entirely yet, she’s getting there. She has one session a week with me in my office, and she spends a lot of her extra time over at our apartment with Hannah, talking about boys. The purple-haired Jay Cash, apparently, has finally kissed her.
“It’ll be amusing to see the girls figuring out how to get the turkey into the oven,” Joan says with a chuckle. Allie and Hannah have volunteered to cook for us, although it will be their first
time doing so.
That way you can have time to flirt with Andrew,
Allie had signed to me mischievously last week, which of course made my cheeks heat up.
“Can you believe Christmas is only a month away?” Joan adds as I shrug out of my jacket and unwind the scarf from my neck. “Our first Christmas with Hannah. Who would have believed any of this was possible?” She looks off into the distance for a moment before adding, “I wish Patrick could be here to see this.”
“I think he is, in a way,” I tell her.
“I do too.” She yawns. “Well, I should be getting to sleep, or I won’t have any energy at all tomorrow. Stupid cancer.”
“Stupid cancer,” I agree. I hug her good night, and after bringing her a glass of water, I kiss her on the cheek and turn out the light. I make my way down the hall and crack the door to Hannah’s room to make sure she’s sleeping soundly.
Indeed, her chest is rising and falling peacefully. The moonlight spilling through the window illuminates her delicate features, which are as familiar to me now as my own. I tiptoe across her room and pull the covers up around her shoulders, just in case she gets cold during the night. She stirs and smiles in her sleep, and I wonder what she’s dreaming of.
She’s never been able to explain how she knew the words Patrick and I always exchanged, the words I told her myself in my dreams. But as I watch her eyelids flutter and her smile grow broader, I wonder if, like me, she saw a preview of this life before she got here.
On her dresser are the two things that have convinced me beyond a shadow of a doubt that something beyond our comprehension brought us into each other’s lives. The first is a framed sketch of hers, a picture of a little girl and her parents at Disney World. When I first saw it as she was unpacking her things a few weeks ago, I gasped.
“What is that?” I’d asked, staring at it as if I’d seen a ghost. In a way, I had.
She frowned as she turned to look at the sketch too. “I drew it when I was ten, after I had a dream about going to Disney World with people who were my mom and dad in the dream. It was probably the realest dream I ever had.” She leaned in to look more closely at the picture, then she turned to stare at me, a perplexed expression on her face. “Wait, the mom kind of looks like you, doesn’t she?”
“She sure does,” I said through my tears.
The second item that sits on her dresser is a small jar of silver dollars. “I find them all the time,” she said with a shrug when I asked her about them. “It’s weird, actually. Like, I’ll just be walking down the street, and I’ll look down, and there’s a silver dollar. Like they’re falling from the sky or something.”
I look skyward now, to where I imagine Patrick must be. Maybe Hannah’s explanation of the silver dollars isn’t that far off. Maybe they
have
been coming from the sky, wishes from a long-lost father who wanted to help her find her way home. Someday, I’ll tell her the story of the silver dollars and how her family has a long-standing tradition of throwing them back. But for now, knowing that they’re there is enough. She’ll have plenty of time to return her wishes to the world.
I kiss Hannah gently on the cheek, then I shut her bedroom door quietly behind me and make my way back out toward the living room. The lights are out, and I can hear Joan snoring softly already, so I’m careful not to make noise as I put my coat back on, open the apartment door, and slip out into the hallway.
I walk up Third Avenue to Forty-Second Street and grab the 5 train heading uptown from Grand Central Station. I get out at the Fifty-Ninth Street stop and head three blocks west to Fifth Avenue, where I turn left and walk until I’m standing in the
square in front of the Plaza Hotel with the Sherry-Netherland behind me to the right.
In the middle of the plaza sits the Pulitzer Fountain, the fountain Patrick and I were supposed to throw a silver dollar into on the night of September eighteenth, 2002. I know now that he’d given me the coin that morning because he’d just learned about Hannah. It was meant to be a celebration of the daughter he’d hoped we’d soon bring home.
The bronze sculpture on top of the fountain is of Pomona, the Roman goddess of abundance, and I wonder if that’s why Patrick wanted to throw the coin here, because suddenly and unexpectedly our lives were about to become so abundantly full. Pomona has been sculpted holding a basket of fruit, which reminds me a bit of a Thanksgiving cornucopia, making it quite apropos that I’m here the night before our family Thanksgiving. Never could I have imagined that I’d one day have so much to be thankful for.
Then again, there were always things in life to be grateful for, even after I lost Patrick. I just let my grief obscure the moments of hope. Maybe there were silver dollars falling from the sky everywhere, like there were for Hannah, if I’d just opened my eyes and looked for them.
I reach now for the silver dollar around my neck, which has served as a comfort to me for a long time now. But the metal circle has also been an anchor. As I pull it over my head and examine it, I’m almost surprised to realize it’s just a coin, no different from the ones in Hannah’s jar. I’ve spent a dozen years thinking that it was Patrick’s final gift to me, but now I know I’m wrong. He’s given me Hannah, and that’s a gift that will never end.
But more than that, he gave me a foundation for a good life, which is something I should have recognized long ago. He encouraged me to follow my dreams, and that’s why today, I’m able to make a difference in other people’s lives. He loved
me deeply, which taught me—even if I forgot the lesson for a while—that everyone deserves to love and be loved that way. He taught me to look for the good in the world, and to be profoundly grateful when wonderful things happen. And by dying, he gave me one more gift: he reminded me just how valuable life itself is.
“I won’t waste another second,” I promise him aloud as I look down at the silver dollar in my hand. Slowly, I unclasp the chain and slide the coin off. It’s cool and shiny, but it’s not magic. It’s not a piece of Patrick. Patrick is in my heart and in my daughter and in every moment of my life, and now that I know that, I know it’s time to let go.
You have to pass the good luck on,
Patrick always used to say.
That way, someone else gets to make a wish.
I can almost hear his deep, reassuring voice in my ear as I squeeze the coin in my palm. I look up at Pomona and at the five basins of water spilling into the large pool at the bottom. I read once that the sculptor, Karl Bitter, had been killed in a car accident before he could complete the fountain and that someone else had to finish it for him. It makes me think of Patrick, because in a way, I know that for the rest of my life, I’ll be finishing the beautiful things that he started, the things he never had the chance to see through. It’s a privilege, I realize, to sculpt a life in his honor. But now I have to put my touch on it too.
I look at the coin one last time, kiss it for good luck, and close my eyes. I take a deep breath and throw it toward the fountain, smiling as I hear the tiny pinging sound it makes as it splashes into the water. I turn away without looking, because I don’t want to know where the coin has landed. It belongs to someone else now, another person who needs its luck.
As I walk home, I’m eight grams lighter without the silver dollar. But there’s been a weight lifted from my shoulders too, and for the first time in a dozen years, I’m not looking back to
the past. I’m looking forward to the future. And I know it’s going to be beautiful.
B
ack at home, as I slip under the covers, I find myself thinking about Hannah. Although she’s just like she was in my dreams, and although so much of my early knowledge of her came from that, I’m savoring every new detail too. The musical sound of her laughter. The fact that she likes to paint her thumbnails different colors than the rest of her fingers. The crush she’s recently developed on a boy named Eddie Colton at her school. The fact that she hates mushrooms but loves peas. The way she has a dimple in her right cheek when she smiles wide, just like I do. She even loves blueberry–peanut butter pancakes with honey. “My favorite!” she exclaimed the first time I made them. “How on earth did you know?”
The things I love about her are infinite, just like Patrick always used to tell me. And I’ve only just begun to know her. I drift off to sleep with a smile on my face.
When I awaken, I know right away that I’m back in the lemony morning light of the dream. Patrick is beside me, sleeping soundly, and for a moment, I just watch him.
The dream is hazier this time, and I have the feeling it’s because my ability to see this world, whatever it is, is almost gone. Maybe it was only visible to me when I needed it. Maybe Patrick had something to do with showing me the way to Hannah, or maybe it was God himself. Either way, I know I don’t need this life anymore. What I had with Patrick can never be duplicated, and there will always be a hole in my life where he used to be, but I have Hannah now, and Andrew too. And I know I have to keep moving forward and becoming a better version of me. I owe that to my husband, who never made it out of his twenties.
I wrap my arms around him, breathing in his familiar scent for what likely will be the last time. I begin to cry, and he stirs and rolls over, his body pressed against me, his eyes just inches from mine.
“Katielee?” he asks with concern. “Are you okay?”
“Yes,” I tell him, because finally, I am. “Are you really here?” I ask a moment later, reaching out to touch his face, knowing that the question will begin to take me out of the dream. As the room grows a little dimmer, I can feel the stubble of his jaw, the warmth of his body. I ache to stay here forever with him, but the ache isn’t as strong as it usually is, and that brings me comfort.
“I’m always here, Kate,” he says, and I wonder if that’s true. Maybe once someone is in your heart, they never really leave. “Where else would I be?”
“In heaven, maybe,” I say softly as the room’s edges grow fuzzy. “Or maybe living happily in a world that might have been, somewhere on the other side of the sky.”
“What are you talking about?” He pulls me closer and dries my tears, but he’s already beginning to fade, and I can barely feel his touch on my skin.
“I just want you to know that no matter what, I’ll always love you,” I tell him. “And I’ll love Hannah with every fiber of my being. I’ll take care of her always.”
“Of course you will,” he says, stroking my cheek. “You’re her mom.”
This makes me start crying again. “Yeah. I am.”
“I’ll always love you too, Katielee,” he says after a moment. “I knew before I met you—”
Tears stream down my face. “—that I was meant to be yours,” I reply.
He pulls me to him, and I close my eyes, feeling his warmth around me, hearing the steady beating of his heart, knowing that this is what could have been.
But it wasn’t. It never will be. I know that now.
“Thank you, Patrick,” I whisper. I hold on tightly one last time. After tonight, it will be time to let Patrick go, to move forward into the future, to begin living the rest of my life.
It’s not the life I planned, but somehow, it’s the life I was intended to have. And now, finally, I’m ready to embrace it.
Author’s Note
W
hen I first set out to write
The Life Intended
, I knew very little about the topics that would become integral to the book. I’d had little exposure to the foster system (except for an inspiring magazine article I worked on with
Orlando Sentinel
columnist George Diaz and his wife a few years ago), I didn’t know much about music therapy (although it had always fascinated me), and I only knew a handful of people who were hard of hearing. It would be an understatement to say that researching this book was a huge educational experience for me.
At its heart,
The Life Intended
is the story of Kate Waithman finding her way back to the life she was supposed to have all along. But because the book includes many details about foster care, cochlear implants, deafness and music therapy, I want to mention a few things:
First of all, music therapy is a very, very broad field. I was fortunate enough to speak with Kristen O’Grady, MA, LCAT, MT-BC, a music therapist in New York State who, like Kate in the book, was educated at NYU. She made the excellent point that the definition of music therapy is widely contested, even among those in the music therapy community.
In the book, Kate explains this to Andrew, and I tried my best to make Kate’s interactions with her clients as authentic as possible, but it’s important to remember that not all music therapy is the same. And of course Kate herself isn’t perfect. For instance, she overshares details of her own life with Allie as she lets her professional objectivity slip at times. This book is in no way suggesting that music therapy is meant to be practiced that way.
As for the scenes related to foster care, I was lucky to have the guidance of Arlene Goldsmith, LCSW, PhD, who has been the director of New York–based New Alternatives for Children (NAC) since its inception in 1982. Like the fictional St. Anne’s Services where Kate volunteers in the book, NAC is an organization that works with the state system to provide high quality services in support of birth, foster, and adoptive families caring primarily for medically fragile children, including those with physical, emotional, and behavioral challenges as well as developmental disabilities. St. Anne’s isn’t directly based on NAC, but it was inspired by it, and I’m grateful to Arlene for the information she provided.