“Right,” I murmur. “Life.” I feel guilty and foolish for ruing the things that are merely evidence of a life being lived.
“I’m sorry, Patrick,” I whisper into the silence after he leaves the room.
O
utside, we pile into a cab and I try to memorize the address Patrick gives the driver—
321 Bleecker Street
—so that I can find it later in the real world. It turns out to be a second-floor studio with hardwood floors, big beamed ceilings, and three dozen mismatched folding chairs set up facing a single piano at the front of the room. When we walk through the door, Hannah hugs us both quickly, then she bounds off to where two other teenage girls are deep in conversation. One of them high-fives her, and the other greets her with a friendly smile.
“What is this place?” I whisper. Patrick gives me an odd look and the room fades a little, so I force an innocent smile as I wait for my mind to load all the details I’m somehow already familiar with. And just like that, I suddenly know that this is the studio of a woman named Dolores Kay and that Hannah loves it here. “What I meant is, it’s a beautiful place,” I amend, and the room comes back into focus.
Patrick nods. “Miss Kay has done a great job.”
Just then, a tiny, elfin woman in her sixties with a salt-and-pepper pixie cut and a black shift dress interrupts our conversation by banging a few of the keys on the piano until the room quiets down.
“Welcome, welcome, friends and parents!” she chirps in a British accent. “For those of you who don’t already know me, I’m Dolores Kay, and of course this is our annual summer recital! Now let’s find some seats and we’ll get started!”
She strides purposefully toward the cluster of girls that includes Hannah, and Patrick and I find seats in the second row. “Save that one for my mom,” he says, nodding to the seat beside mine. He checks his watch. “She should be here any minute now.”
“Your mom’s coming?” I ask with a smile. I hadn’t expected to encounter anyone real in this dream world, but seeing Joan will ground this fantasy in at least some degree of reality. I’m surprised by how elated this makes me feel.
“Of course,” Patrick says, and as if on cue, the door in the back of the room swings open, and Joan enters. For a moment, as she walks toward us, all I can do is stare.
“What’s wrong with her?” I whisper to myself just before Joan arrives beside us, leaving Patrick only enough time to look at me in confusion. But before the words are even out of my mouth, I already know. Breast cancer. Stage 2. Diagnosed two
and a half months ago after I insisted she get a mammogram. I run my thumb over the healing cut on my fingertip and worry: If Joan is sick in this dream world, what if she has breast cancer in the real world too?
Her cheekbones jut out, and she looks gaunt and drawn. “Hi, you two!” she says, beaming at us. She pecks me on the cheek first before planting a kiss on Patrick’s forehead. Then she surprises me by pulling her loosely wrapped red scarf down, revealing a fully bare head. “It’s too darned hot for this thing!” she exclaims, fanning herself with an issue of the
New Yorker
she pulls from her purse. “I’ll tell you what, the one good thing about cancer is that I get to feel the cool breeze on my head in the summer.” She winks at me and adds, “Ever the optimist, right?”
I continue to gape until Patrick nudges me, which snaps me out of it. “Joan,” I murmur, and then I can’t continue, so I settle for pulling her into a tight hug. I can feel her bony frame through her baggy shirt. “Are you okay?”
“Oh, I’m feeling fine, Kate,” she says with a sigh. “Today happens to be one of the good days. The chemo’s just a little harder on my body than I thought it would be. But you know that. I must sound like a broken record to you, sweetheart.”
I take a deep breath, trying not to cry. I want to say more, but Miss Kay claps her hands then and brings the recital to order by introducing the first student to perform, a girl named Hira who looks about Hannah’s age. As Hira plays Bach’s Prelude No. 1 in C Major, stumbling over a few notes here and there but staying in rhythm, my mind whirls. I have to call Joan as soon as I wake up. I have to make sure she’s okay. I almost don’t notice the corners of the room going fuzzy.
The audience claps when Hira is done, and her performance is followed by four others. Hannah is the last to go, and Miss Kay tells us she’ll be playing the first movement of Beethoven’s Piano
Sonata No. 32 in C Minor. I know it’s an extremely complicated piece of music, and I’m concerned that Hannah’s being set up for failure. It’s more than a typical child, even a talented one, should be able to master.
“Patrick?” I murmur, but he just puts a gentle finger on my lips and smiles as Hannah removes her cochlear implant processors and sets them on the bench beside her. As she begins to play, the room goes still. I’m frozen as I watch her fingers move swiftly across the keys, coaxing a complex melody out of the piano. Her tempo is a little slower than I expected, but she stays in perfect rhythm, and I realize after a few moments that I actually
like
the speed at which she’s playing. It’s becoming clear that this is her interpretation of the piece, and that she’s deliberately putting her own touch on it. I’m floored.
When she finishes, the room is so silent and motionless that it seems frozen. For a split second, I wonder if I’m the only one who heard how beautiful her playing was. But then the audience bursts into applause, a few parents even standing and whistling. Patrick squeezes my hand and tears of pride sting my eyes.
When the clapping subsides, Miss Kay steps to the center of the room and gestures to the piano, where Hannah is still sitting, looking self-conscious. “As I mentioned,” Miss Kay says, “that was one of Beethoven’s piano sonatas. In fact, it was the last one he wrote, about five years before his death. By the time he composed it, he was almost entirely deaf.”
I hear a few people mumble words of surprise to each other, and I can feel myself leaning forward to hear what she’ll say next.
“Perhaps then,” Miss Kay continues, “it’s appropriate to tell you now that Hannah, my star pupil, is deaf too. She has cochlear implants, which help her to process speech, but they have a different effect on music, so Hannah removes hers to play. Much like Beethoven himself, whom Hannah says is an inspiration to
her, she played this entire sonata with only a very small fraction of the hearing most of you have.”
The room seems to explode in a cacophony of astonished voices and exclamations, and I feel the warm heat of pride spreading across my face. But do I have the right to feel proud of a girl I have no real recollection of raising, a girl I’ve only just met?
Patrick interrupts my train of thought by squeezing my hand.
“I want to stay,” I blurt out before I can think about it. The room goes instantly dark and blurry, and I regret the words right away.
“What?” Patrick asks from somewhere far away. “Kate, we promised we’d take Hannah and my mom to brunch, honey.”
“Right!” I manage to say into the void. He thinks I’m saying I want to stay in this room—not this life. “Brunch!” The room comes back into focus, and I’m relieved to be here again but sad to know it’s only temporary. There’s no way to make this world mine.
A
fter pierogis at Veselka, the Ukranian restaurant on Second Avenue where Patrick and I used to love having lazy Sunday breakfasts, we put Joan in a cab back to the train station, then Patrick, Hannah, and I decide to walk home because it’s an unusually crisp summer day, at least fifteen degrees cooler than it was yesterday. It occurs to me as we make our way down Second that the real-world forecast hadn’t called for a temperature drop, which is just a further reminder that this dream isn’t real. I take a deep breath and reach for Hannah’s hand on one side and Patrick’s on the other. I’m determined to enjoy every second of this fantasy before it fades away.
On the way home, Hannah keeps up an almost endless stream of chatter, telling us about her friends, her obsession with One
Direction, and her burning desire—as she puts it—to have a new iPhone. I can see Patrick suppressing a smile as she extols the virtues of the phone, and when he and I exchange amused looks, I feel a deep sense of sadness and regret. The simple perfection of this moment is the kind of thing I would almost certainly have taken for granted if this was the life I was really living. Instead, because it’s the life I missed out on, every passing second feels like a miracle.
I look away, pretending to study a billboard, so that neither Patrick nor Hannah can see how close I am to crying.
Back at our apartment later that night, I’m stunned to still be here; it’s the longest I’ve spent in this reality. Might I be able to stay for the night, awaken here tomorrow morning? I think I already know the answer is no, but I want to believe in the possibility.
“Want to tuck Hannah in?” Patrick asks me with a gentle smile as she emerges from the bathroom in a cloud of steam and plods into her bedroom. “I’m going to finish the dishes.”
“Of course.” My heart flutters at the prospect of a few minutes alone to tell her I love her and that I hope she has the sweetest of dreams.
I head down the hall and knock on her door then peek in to make sure she’s dressed. She is, in a long pink nightshirt. “Hannah?” I say loudly, and she turns.
“Hey, Mom,” she says, smiling back. Then she signs,
I am going to brush my teeth,
before disappearing out the door.
I stand still in her room, breathing in and out, while I wait for her to return. Her walls, I notice, are plastered with One Direction posters, a poster from the first
Hunger Games
movie, and a few dozen snapshots of her and her friends, taped crookedly on the walls by her bed. I see a list on notebook paper, written in pink and purple marker, that says
Hannah’s Best Qualities,
signed
by Meggie. I lean closer and smile as I read items such as,
Hannah always makes time for her friends
and
Hannah snorts when she laughs really hard.
I smile sadly at the list, memorizing Meggie’s list of Hannah’s attributes. It feels desperately unfair that I haven’t had a chance to make a list of my own.
But then again, I have, somehow. All the things written in Meggie’s girlie hand, with hearts over the
i
’s, are the things I already somehow know and love about Hannah too. Still, I can’t help but feel deprived of the opportunity to discover them myself instead of being implanted with memories that aren’t really mine.
I push the sadness away and turn to study her walls, which are also covered with pencil sketches. I smile when I notice that they’re each signed by Hannah—and they’re good. The sketches are of all sorts of things: people’s faces, animals, seascapes, street corners. I lean in closer to examine the sketch that hangs just to the right of her bed. It’s clearly Patrick and me, each of us holding one of a younger Hannah’s hands. In the picture, she looks about nine or ten, and she’s beaming. A Mickey Mouse balloon floats aloft, tied to her wrist. Behind us, Cinderella Castle rises behind Disney World’s Main Street U.S.A. I wait for the rush of memories to fill my brain—and suddenly I remember walking toward the castle; I remember eating chocolate-covered Mickey Mouse ice cream bars; I remember watching Hannah’s eyes widen as she looked out over the deck of a pirate ship at the fictional London below us on the Peter Pan ride. I feel my eyes fill with tears; the memories seem so real, but I can’t understand how.
Hannah bustles back into the room then, hair still damp and face freshly scrubbed. I slowly sign to her,
You are very good.
Then aloud, I add, “You’re really talented, Hannah. Your drawings, they’re amazing.”
She rolls her eyes.
You are being weird again,
she signs.
You have seen them a million times.
But I can tell she’s hiding a smile; the compliment means something to her.
This one?
I sign, my face a question mark as I point to the sketch of our family of three at Disney World.
Hannah’s face softens.
My favorite,
she signs back. “It was the best day,” she says aloud. “The first time you and Dad took me to Disney World.”
“Oh,” I say, my heart aching. “Maybe we can go again someday. I’d really like that.”
Hannah climbs into bed and smiles at me.
Good night, Mom,
she signs, followed by a big yawn.
Good night,
I sign back.
I love you
. I repeat the words aloud, if for no other reason than to hear them for myself.
“Love you too,” Hannah says. She takes off her headpieces, sets them on her nightstand, and rolls over, pulling her covers up to her chin. I sit by her bedside and watch her until she drifts off to sleep.
I find Patrick waiting for me in the living room. “You got her to sleep?” he asks as I join him on the sofa.
I nod. “We took her to Disney World,” I say, thinking of the picture, of the smiles on our faces, of the way Hannah so expertly captured a moment I would have loved to see.
Patrick looks at me oddly. “Of course we did.”
And then I remember a conversation we’d had early on, just a few months after we began dating. Patrick has asked me what my happiest childhood memory was, and I’d told him it was the time my parents took Susan and me to Disney World, in the late ’80s.
One day, when we have a child, we’ll go to Disney World too,
Patrick had promised. “We did all the things we talked about doing, didn’t we?” I whisper, at once profoundly sad.
His brow furrows as the room grows a little dimmer. “Of course, Kate.”
As he looks at me with concern, I think about Joan. “Patrick, your mother . . . ?” I let my voice trail off. “Is there anything I can do?”
“You’ve already done so much, sweetheart. And she’s doing better,” he says. “I think I might take a few days off next week to take her to her doctor’s appointments.” He yawns and pulls me close. “You ready for bed, hon?”
I listen to the pounding of his heart for a moment with my eyes closed. “I don’t want to go to sleep yet,” I murmur.