I remember the thought I had on the day—it now seems very long ago—when Missy, Mitch, and I went shoe shopping. The thought that I would give anything in the world for Missy to be real, and to be mine.
Anything, Kitty? You would truly give up anything for her?
My fingers tremble as I brush a lock of hair from Missy’s forehead. I lean toward her ear and whisper tenderly, “I love you.”
She smiles. “I love you, too, Mama.”
Downstairs, I wait while Lars finishes with the boys. It’s quiet in the living room, and I pick up the Denver Post from the coffee table. A headline on the right-hand side of the front page cries out, “Air Crash Kills Three Opry Stars.”
My hands tremble as I pick up the paper and look at the date: Wednesday, March 6, 1963.
Quickly, I scan the story. The crash occurred last night—Tuesday, at around six o’clock in the evening. Those killed included country music singers Cowboy Copas, Hawkshaw Hawkins . . . and Patsy Cline.
“No,” I whisper to the silent room. “Oh, no. Please, no.”
They were in a small airplane. Randy Hughes, Patsy’s manager, was flying the plane.
There was bad weather, a storm. Everyone on board was killed.
I feel hot tears in the back of my eyes. It’s so unfair, I think. Good people, people with so much to live for—they should not die that way.
“Patsy, I’ll miss you,” I say aloud in the silent living room. I make a mental note to keep an eye on Patsy Cline’s performance schedule when I get back to the real world. Perhaps, I think, I will get an opportunity to see her in concert before she dies.
And then I shake my head, feeling a slight fondness for my own silly imagination. You’re making this up, I remind myself. It would make perfect sense for you to invent a plane-crash death for one of your favorite singers. It’s merely a way, I tell myself sternly, to mentally sort out those same false circumstances for your parents. That doesn’t mean it’s actually going to happen, Kitty.
Lars comes down the stairs and quietly joins me on the sofa. I show him the paper. “Patsy Cline died,” I say, my hands trembling.
He nods. “I know. We talked about it before dinner tonight. Don’t you remember?”
I shake my head. “I have no memory of that whatsoever. All I know is, this paper says that one of my all-time favorite singers is dead.”
Lars nods again. “I’m so sorry, love. I know how much you adored her.”
“But I’m making it up, anyway,” I say, brightening. “She’s not going to die. None of this is happening, so it’s of no consequence, really.”
He sighs. “Katharyn . . .”
I squeeze his hand. “You know, in some ways, I wish this was real,” I admit. “There are parts of this world that I wish desperately were real. But other parts . . .” I shake my head, tapping the paper. And thinking of my parents.
He takes my face in his hands and turns it toward his. “How can I help you, Katharyn? How can I convince you that this is real life?”
I break away from him and shake my head. “You can’t. Not any more than Frieda can convince me of the same thing back there.” I am thoughtful for a moment. “Tell me,” I say. “What am I like here most of the time? You say we talked about Patsy earlier this evening; I don’t remember that. But I can’t be like this all the time, can I? Not remembering? Thinking I have another life?”
“You’re not like this all the time,” Lars confirms. “Generally, you do the things you’ve always done. Take care of the children, manage the household. You don’t . . .” He bites his lip. “You rarely mention your parents, Katharyn. When their names come up, you usually change the subject. The kids have asked me about it, and I just say . . .” He shrugs. “I just say that Mama needs some time.”
I nod. I have no memories of that whatsoever. I try to picture myself—Katharyn, that is—coping in this life. Going about her day, caring for her children. Running into her neighbors at the shopping center and knowing their names. Going to the grocery store without having to be reminded of how to get there. It is hard to envision.
And yet a part of me longs for it. A part of me is desperate to know what that feels like. What it feels like to truly be me—the me who resides all the time in this world.
“And have I . . . how long have I been . . . acting this way?” I ask.
He furrows his brow. “A few weeks,” he says. “You seemed fine for a while after . . . it happened . . . We had the kids’ birthday, Thanksgiving, Christmas . . . Looking back now, I thought you were fine, but maybe you were just going through the motions, just doing whatever you could to cope, to get through those events. It wasn’t until a couple of weeks after New Year’s that you . . .” He trails off.
I nod. This makes sense to me. I’d have needed every bit of emotional strength I had to get through the children’s birthday and the holidays without my parents. I would have put myself into whatever robotic state it took. Only when those days were over, when I was faced with a brand-new year and nothing on the horizon to look forward to, would I have allowed myself to confront my despair.
It was then, I realized, that my imagination would have taken over.
Next, I ask Lars, “Can you tell when I’m . . . when I have gone into my other world?”
“Usually I can tell,” Lars says. “It often happens just before you drift off to sleep at night, or else early in the morning—I sense that you’re awake, but you’re not really conscious, not really present in the moment. Sometimes it happens during the daytime hours. Your eyes get sort of dreamy and lost . . . usually it’s only for a few moments, and then you pop out of it and return to your normal self.”
I laugh. “Those few moments here can mean days have passed, in my other life.”
Lars doesn’t respond to this. Instead, what he asks takes me completely by surprise. “What’s it like there—in your other life?”
And so I tell him. I tell him about my apartment, my cozy home that I share only with Aslan. I explain about Greg Hansen, how when we started he could barely work out even simple sentences on a page. I speak of the progress Greg has made since then, and how much I enjoy working one-on-one with him. I mention how much fun I have writing books for Greg. Books about baseball, about Willie Mays and the San Francisco Giants.
Lars nods. “Well, you are an expert on that topic.”
I give a hoot of laughter. But Lars’s face is serious. “You’re joking, right?” I ask him. “I know nothing about baseball, except what I’ve learned since I began writing for Greg.”
“Katharyn.” Lars is smiling good-naturedly. “You know everything about baseball. You became interested in baseball because I’m interested in it. And so are the children. We all followed the World Series last fall as if our entire future depended on it.” He looks at me in astonishment. “You really don’t remember that?”
I shrug. “I really don’t remember that.”