Am I a terrible person for following a stranger out of a coffee shop because she looked like my dead daughter?
I (38F) lost my daughter Becca three years ago. She was nineteen. Car accident on I-90, February, black ice, a semi that couldn’t stop in time. I have a grief counselor, I have a support group, I have a husband named Doug (41M) who has been patient with me in ways I don’t think I deserve. I am not, as far as I know, having a breakdown. I was doing okay.
That was before last Tuesday.
I was at the Starbucks on Mercer, waiting for my order, not thinking about anything in particular. And then the door opened and a girl walked in.
She was maybe twenty, twenty-one. Dark hair in that same low ponytail Becca always wore. Same way of pulling her sleeves down over her hands. She was looking at her phone and she had this little almost-frown that Becca used to get when she was reading something she didn’t agree with but wasn’t going to say anything about.
My drink sat on the counter getting cold.
I know it wasn’t her. I KNOW THAT. I’m not psychotic. I’m not confused about whether my daughter is alive. But something in my body just – stopped. And then started doing something else entirely.
She ordered a flat white and sat down by the window and I sat two tables away and I watched her for twenty minutes.
She laughed at something on her phone and it was wrong – Becca’s laugh was different – and that should have been the thing that snapped me out of it. It wasn’t.
When she packed up her bag and left, I left too.
I followed her for almost a full block before she stopped and turned around.
She said, “Can I help you?”
And I just stood there on the sidewalk with my cold coffee and my whole face doing something I couldn’t control and I said, “I’m so sorry. You look like someone I lost.”
She looked at me for a second. Then she said, “What was her name?”
I told her. And her face did something I can’t explain.
She said, “I think you should sit down.” Then she said, “My name is Petra. And there’s something I need to tell you about why I’m in Seattle.”
What She Said Next
There was a Thai place three doors down. Petra held the door open for me like I was the one who needed steadying, which, honestly, I was.
We got a table near the back. She set her bag down carefully, both hands, like she was stalling. She ordered a water and then changed it to a Thai iced tea and I watched her do this small ordinary thing and my chest was doing something complicated.
She said, “How did Becca die?”
I told her. The I-90, the February, the ice. The part where they called Doug at 2 a.m. and he came and got me from my sister’s house and I knew from his face before he said a word.
Petra listened with her hands flat on the table. When I finished she nodded once, slow.
“I was in an accident on I-90,” she said. “March, two years ago. I was in a coma for eleven days.”
I looked at her.
“I don’t remember the accident,” she said. “I remember before it and I remember waking up and that’s it. But when I was under, I had these – I don’t know what to call them. Not dreams exactly.” She looked at her hands. “There was a girl. She talked to me. She told me her name.”
I put my coffee down.
“She said her name was Becca.”
The Part I Can’t Explain Away
I want to be clear about something. I am not a mystical person. I was raised Methodist but I haven’t been to church since Becca’s funeral and even that felt like going through a pantomime for my mother’s sake. I believe in therapy. I believe in brain chemistry. I believe that grief does strange things to pattern-recognition and that the human mind will reach for meaning in places where there isn’t any, because the alternative is too much to hold.
I believe all of that.
And I sat in that Thai restaurant and I listened to Petra describe a girl she’d never met.
Dark hair. Always pulling her sleeves down. The almost-frown when she was reading.
Petra said, “She used to sit with me and just talk. About nothing. Music she liked. A road trip she wanted to take to see the coast. She said she’d never actually seen the Pacific.” She paused. “She said her mom would have taken her eventually. That her mom kept meaning to.”
I couldn’t breathe right.
We had planned that trip. The summer after Becca’s freshman year. We were going to drive the coast highway all the way down to Cannon Beach. Becca had a whole playlist ready. She showed it to me once, scrolling through on her phone, and I remember thinking we had time, we’d do it when things slowed down, when Doug’s work project wrapped up, when I finished the thing at my job.
We didn’t do it.
Petra said, “She talked about her mom a lot.”
I put both hands around my coffee cup. It was still cold.
What Petra Was Actually Doing in Seattle
She’s from Spokane. She’d driven over that morning for a job interview, second round, a graphic design firm in Capitol Hill. She wasn’t supposed to stop at that particular Starbucks. She’d been looking for parking and ended up on Mercer by accident and thought, fine, coffee, and pulled over.
She told me this like she needed me to understand the randomness of it. Like she was also trying to explain it away and not quite getting there.
She’d never told anyone the full version of what she remembered from the coma. She’d told her mother fragments and her mother had cried and asked her to stop, so she stopped. She’d told her boyfriend at the time and he’d nodded in a way that meant he was filing it under medication side effects, so she let him file it there.
“I Googled her,” Petra said. “After I woke up. Rebecca. I-90. February.” She looked at me. “I found the obituary.”
She’d found Becca’s face.
She said she’d sat with that for two years and hadn’t known what to do with it. Hadn’t known if there was anything to do. What was she supposed to do, call us? Show up?
“And then you followed me out of a coffee shop,” she said.
It was almost funny. The way she said it wasn’t unkind.
What I Did When I Got Home
I didn’t tell Doug right away. I drove home and I sat in the driveway for a while and I looked at the garage door and I thought about how Becca used to back the car in and I always told her she didn’t need to, the driveway was long enough, and she always did it anyway because she said it was faster to leave in the morning.
I went inside and Doug was making dinner and he looked at my face and said, “What happened?”
So I told him.
He stood at the stove holding a spatula and he listened to the whole thing without interrupting, which is one of the things about Doug that I don’t give him enough credit for. He let me finish.
Then he said, “Do you believe her?”
And I said, “I don’t know what I believe. But she knew about the trip.”
He turned the burner off. He put the spatula down.
“The coast,” he said.
“The coast.”
He sat down at the kitchen table. I sat across from him. We didn’t say anything for a while and it wasn’t a bad silence, just a full one.
Finally he said, “What was she like? The girl.”
And I realized I’d been waiting for someone to ask me that. Not what I thought about it, not whether I was okay, not whether I needed to call my grief counselor. Just: what was she like.
“She was kind,” I said. “She held the door for me. She ordered a Thai iced tea.”
Doug nodded.
“She’s interviewing for a job here,” I said. “She might be moving to Seattle.”
He looked at me for a second. “How do you feel about that?”
I didn’t answer right away. Becca’s laugh was different from Petra’s laugh. Petra’s hands are different, her voice is different, she’s a different person from a different place who has her own mother and her own life and her own plans that have nothing to do with me.
But she sat with my daughter in the dark. If I believe that. If that’s a thing that happened.
“I gave her my number,” I said.
Where This Leaves Me
She texted yesterday. She got the job.
It was a short text, just that, and then a second one that said: I thought you’d want to know.
I stared at it for a long time before I wrote back. I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t want to say too much or ask too much or put anything on her that she didn’t sign up for. She’s twenty-two years old and she has her own grief from her own accident and she doesn’t owe me anything.
I typed and deleted four different responses.
I finally sent: Congratulations. Becca would have liked knowing someone was looking out for her.
She sent back a single heart.
Not a red one. The small white one, the outline. I don’t know why that felt right but it did.
I have an appointment with my grief counselor Thursday. I’m going to tell her all of this and I’m prepared for her to offer me a lot of thoughtful, measured perspectives about how grief affects perception and how much we want to find meaning and how the mind constructs narrative from coincidence. I’m going to sit there and I’m going to nod and I’m going to agree with most of it.
And I’m also going to know what I know.
Becca wanted to see the Pacific. She never got there. And somewhere in whatever happened on I-90 in March two years ago, she sat with a girl named Petra and talked, and Petra came back and I didn’t, and last Tuesday Petra walked into a coffee shop on Mercer and I followed her out and she turned around.
She turned around.
I don’t need it to be more than that. I don’t need an explanation that holds up. I just needed to tell someone, so I’m telling you.
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If this one got to you, pass it on to someone who might need it.
Speaking of unexpected encounters, you might find solace in these stories about She Sent Me That Message in Writing. So I Read It Out Loud at the PTA Meeting., My Booth of Bikers Went Dead Silent When a Little Boy Asked Us Something No Child Should Know to Ask, or even when I Let 12 Strangers Into My Café During a Flood. I Didn’t Know Who One of Them Was..
