Never In Another Life novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Visiting Hour
Three years after her funeral, Kira's husband and son walk into her mother's room, and her son puts his hand on the ventilator and recites a line he was taught.
Three years after my funeral, my husband walked into Sunday visiting hour at Harbor Pines and said my name out loud.
"Kira."
I was holding my mother's washbasin with both hands.
Nobody at Harbor Pines had ever heard that name.
The other families in the hall turned to look.
A woman with a casserole dish stopped halfway to her father's door.
I kept my eyes on the water in the basin.
"You have the wrong person," I said.
My voice came out so steady that I almost believed it myself.
"I buried an empty coffin," Declan said. "I know exactly who you are."
He had lost weight.
There was gray at his temples that had not been there when I left.
Beside him stood a small boy in a dinosaur backpack, holding a stuffed rabbit by one ear.
My son was seven now.
He had been four the last time I touched his hair.
I dropped the basin.
Water ran across the floor and over the toes of Declan's shoes, and he did not move.
"Mommy," Sammy said.
My chest went tight, and I hated myself for feeling it.
"Get out," I said.
"Kira, please."
"Get out of here, both of you. I let the whole world think I was dead so you would never find me."
Declan took one step toward me.
I shoved him in the chest with both hands.
He stumbled and caught the wall.
He did not push back and he did not raise his voice.
Down the hall, the security guard started toward us, keys swinging.
Declan turned to face him and held both his palms out flat at shoulder height.
He stood perfectly still until the guard stopped walking.
I did not know what that was.
I did not have time to wonder.
A man by the water fountain had his phone up and was filming us.
"I'm not here to drag you anywhere," Declan said, hands still out. "I only need you to hear me."
"I heard you three years ago. I heard you tell me Margo doesn't lie."
His face went gray.
"Then go back to her," I said. "Go home to Margo."
I was crying by then, and I could not make it stop.
I grabbed my mother's door frame because my knees would not hold.
"You cannot make me go back," I said. "I will fight you in every courtroom in the country."
"I'm not going to take you to court."
"I will scream until every one of these people calls the police."
"Then scream."
He said it quietly.
It stopped me for a second.
Then the tears came faster, and I said what I had said to myself every night for three years.
"I'd rather stay dead than live in that house again."
The hallway went silent.
Even the woman with the casserole stared at the floor.
Declan opened his mouth.
Nothing came out of it.
Sammy let go of his rabbit.
He walked past all of us, into my mother's room, and I went after him with my heart in my throat.
My mother lay as she always lay, propped on her pillows, the machine beside her hissing and clicking.
The tube ran from her throat to the ventilator on the metal stand.
Sammy stopped beside the bed and looked up at it.
Then he reached out and put his small hand flat on top of the machine.
"Sammy," I said. "Honey. Don't touch that."
He looked right at me.
His eyes were exactly my mother's eyes.
"Mommy," he said. "If you don't come home, Grandma's machine stops. Daddy said."
He said it carefully, one word after another.
The monitor above her bed beeped on, steady, indifferent.
I could not breathe.
"Sammy." Declan's voice shook so hard it cracked in the middle. "Take your hand off it. Right now. Please, buddy."
"But you said."
"I never said that."
Declan crossed the room in two strides and stopped, hands open at his sides, an arm's length from the bed.
He did not grab his son.
He looked at me instead, and his face was white.
"Kira, I swear to you. I never told him that. I would never."
I believed him.
That scared me more than the hand on the machine.
I crossed to Sammy, slowly, and wrapped my fingers around his.
They were cold.
I lifted his hand off the ventilator and held it against my chest.
Behind us the guard had reached the door.
Declan held his palms out again, and again he went still.
"It's all right," I told the guard. "He's my husband. We just need the room."
The guard looked at me, then at the man with his hands up, and slowly backed out.
I kept Sammy's hand in mine.
"Ten minutes," I said to Declan. "Then you both leave. You wait in the hall, and you do not come in."
"Ten minutes," he said.
He turned and went out without arguing.
I knelt down in front of my son.
He had lost a front tooth.
I had not been there when it came out.
"Sammy," I said. "Who taught you to say that?"
He glanced at the door, then leaned in close and whispered into my ear.
"Aunt Margo. She said to say it exactly like that. And she said to say Daddy told me."
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