The Life Intended Read Free

mistake.”
    “Ma’am, I’m afraid it’s true,” the younger officer said, reaching out again and catching my other elbow so that I was suspended between the two men. I hadn’t even noticed that I was falling. “Is there someone we can call for you?” he asked gently.
    “Patrick,” I answered irrationally. “Patrick’s my emergency contact.” It had never occurred to me that he could be the emergency. I let them help me inside the apartment, where they placed me gently on the couch. I handed them my cell phone, and somehow, they must have managed to find my sister Susan’s number, because my daze was interrupted some thirty minutes later by her flying through my front door, her hair a mess.
    “I got here as soon as I could,” she said, but all I could do was nod. It wasn’t until I noticed the tears streaked across her face that I realized I hadn’t cried yet. “Mom and Dad are out of town, but Gina’s on her way.”
    “Oh,” I managed.
    “Kate,” she said softly, sitting down beside me on the couch. “Are you okay? What can I do?”
    I just stared at her blankly. It was like she was speaking a different language. I knew that I’d have to call Patrick’s parents, reach his friends, arrange a funeral, and do all those things you’re supposed to do when someone dies. But the thing is, I wasn’t ready to admit he was gone yet. As long as I sat there on the couch, the couch where we’d spent hundreds of hours together, believing in our future, I could convince myself that the world hadn’t ended.
    My best friend, Gina, who’d lost her husband a year earlier in the September eleventh attacks, arrived some time later, and the two of them stayed with me, rubbing my back in silence, until long after the time Patrick should have come home from work. I watched the door for hours, hoping beyond hope that he’d walk through it, that it would all be a crazy mistake.
    But it wasn’t. And as the clock turned to midnight and September nineteenth became the first day of my life that Patrick wasn’t on this earth with me, I finally began to cry.

Two
    Twelve Years Later
    “R aise your hands up high!” I sing brightly, strumming my guitar as I smile at Max, my favorite client.
    “Kick your feet up too,” I continue. “Now twirl ’round and ’round! Bend down and touch your—”
    “—shoe!” Max cries.
    “Good job, Max!” I’m making it up as I go, and Max, who has autism, is giggling madly, but he’s playing along. In the corner of my office, his mother, Joya, laughs as Max straightens up from his toe touch and begins to jump up and down.
    “More, Miss Kate!” Max begs. “More, more!”
    “Okay,” I tell him solemnly. “But this time, you have to sing along. Can you do that?”
    “Yeah!” he exclaims, throwing his hands in the air with joyful abandon.
    “Promise?” I ask.
    “Yeah!” His enthusiasm is contagious, and I find myself laughing again.
    “Okay, Max,” I say slowly. “Sing with me, okay?”
    I’ve been in private practice as a music therapist for five years now, specializing in kids with special needs, and Max was one of my very first clients. Joya first brought him to me on the recommendation of his speech therapist when he was five, because he wasn’t making progress with her and was refusing to speak. Slowly, in our weekly sessions, I managed to coax one-word answers, then sentences, then entire conversations out of him. Now, our sessions are a time to sing, to dance, to be silly together. On the surface, I’m helping him with his verbal and motor skills, but this is about more than that. It’s about helping him to socialize, to trust people, to open up.
    “Okay, Max, fill in the blank,” I begin. I strum the guitar and sing, “My name is Max, and I have—”
    “—brown hair!” Max cries, giggling. “My name is Max and I have brown hair!”
    I laugh. “Good one.” I play another chord and sing, “I’m so handsome that all the girls stare,” I sing,