The Heart Keeper Page 11
Still laughing. Drive safe, talk later.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Alison
I wake with a start and look around the bedroom feeling disoriented. Home. I’m home. I try to keep my mind blank, refusing even the thinnest thread of a thought. Still, I can’t go back to sleep. Hardly surprising. After I read the message on Sindre’s phone, I went downstairs to the kitchen and worked my way through the bottle of tequila. My mind was spinning with both exhaustion and fury but I refused to act hastily.
He came home carrying several shopping bags, and found me slumped over the breakfast bar, a fresh splash of vomit on the floor. He half walked, half carried me through the living room and up the stairs, and I caught sight of us in the big gilded mirror at the top of the stairs. Sindre bore the grim expression of a man hauling an injured comrade to safety on the battlefield. I tried to tell him what happened, that I can’t do this anymore, not for another second, that my mind runs wild with images and fantasies and impressions, that I just want to be away, away…
This morning, my mind is clear; the heavy muddled haze of the tequila has faded, leaving behind an uncomfortable transparency. I have lost my husband. I don’t want him anyway. At the thought of Sindre fucking someone else, someone named Mia, I feel nothing at all. Nothing. Sindre sleeps heavily beside me – the pills he takes make him drowsy, so since the hunting trip he sleeps most nights. I turn to face him, though his back is turned to me. He has some nerve, returning to our house and lying down beside me. We are mourning our only child, and he has used that time to pursue another woman. I bet he used our child as a sob story, a way of luring this woman into bed. Poor Sindre – poor, poor man. I can fix him in a way his wife never could.
I switch on the lamp on the bedside table and still he doesn’t stir. I watch the mechanical rise and fall of his tanned, strong back and picture him as he would have been in previous incarnations: as a bald, chubby baby flung over his mother’s shoulder, as a young man breathing hot, sandy air and training a weapon on other young men on the other side of the world, as a tired, middle-aged businessman taking his shoes off by the side of the bed, night after night, how that strong back suddenly seems fragile and vulnerable. I could kill him in this moment, plunging a knife into his neck, and he would be defenseless. After watching him a long while, I get up.
I hover a moment on the landing and pick out the usual soft whooshing sound of the house and some canned laughter from television which Sindre must have left on, but there is no sign of Oliver. I open the door to Amalie’s room and I lie for a while on her bed, my head nudging against Dinky Bear, calming my breath. Then I hear the door open a crack, casting a slice of light onto the floor.
It’s Oliver in his flannel pajamas, holding something to his chest, his face twisted, streams of tears running down his checks. I sit up, alarmed; I haven’t seen him this distressed in all the time that has passed since July.
‘I have to show you something,’ he whispers.
He sits down next to me, too close, hiccupping, and pressing the ‘Home’ button on the iPad he’s holding, making the screen light up. Look, he says, finger scrolling fast through what looks like an article. There are several photographs of a little girl and a woman who is presumably her mother. In the main photo the girl sits on a blue-and-white stripy sofa, holding a tattered Eeyore toy, her mother standing behind her, both hands on the little girl’s shoulders. Miracle girl, reads the headline.
‘Oliver, what is this?’ The burning flickers to life inside me.
‘It’s her,’ whispers Oliver. ‘The girl who got Amalie’s heart.’ I stare at him, then at the little girl. A weak-looking child with very white skin, an awkward pointy nose, clear blue eyes and chocolate-brown hair held in two long, uneven braids.
‘How… Why would you think that it’s her? There’s no way to know that.’
‘Ali, they do two, or at most three heart transplants on children in Norway every year. What are the odds that there was another one at the beginning of July?’
I begin to read. After seven years of life-threatening illness, Kaia Berge finally received a new heart at the beginning of July… Since then, she has gone from strength to strength, even starting school alongside other children, for the very first time. Se Her magazine met with brave little Kaia and her mother, Iselin, at their home on the outskirts of Oslo. I wanted this so much, but now I close my eyes and wish I’d never seen her. I wanted this. What was it I’d hoped for? Perhaps I’d thought I’d wanted to know, but I know, now, that I didn’t really.
I feel nothing for her. Nothing. She is a stranger, and looking at her face does not make me feel connected to my baby. How could I have thought finding this child would console me?
I hand the iPad to Oliver, feeling his expectant gaze on my back as I leave the room.
I go downstairs and sit by the kitchen window, looking out over the city again. I’m calm now, calmer than I have been in a long time. I feel a sudden stark clarity, as clear as the pinprick stars in the sky. Everyone else’s lives have moved on, but mine has ground to a halt. Everything has fallen apart, my life lies scattered on the ground like shreds of snow from a black sky. I think about Karen Fritz and know I will never go back there. I will never watch her hands spool the yarn again. I will never trust my husband again, nor can I hold him close knowing there’s this secret between us. I will never again see my child, nor will I have another. I will never go to find that girl – why would I? There is nothing of her that is anything like Amalie. How could I have believed such a thing?
A heavy rain has started to fall, and the water running down the window distorts the twinkling lights of Oslo far below in the valley, making them flicker like they are about to go out. I get up.
*
Though it’s unseasonably warm for January, it still can’t be more than two or three degrees, and as I step outside, the heavy rain feels like blisters spreading across my face. I get out and sit on the bonnet of the car, listening to the crackling sound of the rain falling on the bare, wintry forest, and feeling the unpredictable thuds and lurches of my own heartbeat. I open the car door and switch on the fog lights, and in their misty beams I can make out the obsidian lake in between the trees. Where else but here?
I lift Sindre’s heavy sailing lantern from the boot and walk away from the car without locking it, my feet sinking into squelching moss as I move toward the lake. A sheet of thin ice has formed along the lake’s shore, but further out, the water ripples in the heavy downpour. I shine the beam of light far out onto the surface and watch the rushing rain, like flickering static on an old television.
I step onto a patch of ice. It crunches beneath my rain boots before the icy water surges over the tops, filling them. Can this really be the same lake that was filled with laughing children and their languidly happy parents, including me, sitting just over there, watching my little girl sifting muddy sand through her sieve? The difference between July and January by this lake is not just summer and winter, light and darkness, but life and death. I don’t know what I’m doing here. I don’t know where else I could go. I want to unsee that girl’s face. I want to unknow everything I now know. Why did I think that finding her would help me?
I’ve tried so hard every day to look ahead but the fact remains – everything is broken and nothing can be put back together. For a short while, I felt as though I had a sliver of hope, an imagined link to my lost girl, but I was wrong, I know that now.
I clear my throat and hug myself hard against the wet wind. Hey, Mills, I whisper, but immediately I feel stupid. Maybe I’ve forgotten how to speak to her. I bend down and touch the skin of ice on the lake’s surface that holds black water still beneath.
This is her lake, but it could be mine, too. We could be together.
I shove both of my hands through a small crack in the ice, tearing it open wide, and it hurts more than I’d dared hope it would, shards slicing at my wrists. I let the icy water rush up into my sleeves, and further still
, until I’m forcing my hands down into the dense, hardened lakebed as though it could swallow me.
We could be together, my girl and me… It could be me and her again: the Juul girls. I could be where she is. I don’t have to live like this, trying to find something, anything, to hold onto. I could be with Amalie, forever.
Give me a sign, baby bear, any sign. I need a sign to carry on.
There is nothing, nothing but the night and me.
My next movement follows naturally – I don’t have to move more than an inch. As I fall, the lantern drops from my hand and strikes the rocky ground, and the sudden absence of its light is the last thing I see before I crash through the surface.
PART II
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Alison, four days later
I could open my eyes if I wanted to, but I don’t.
I’m back there, with them.
It’s early morning and I’m reading with Oliver by the fire, his tiny face eerie and transfixed in the flickering orange glow. He helps me turn the pages. Amalie sleeps like a starfish on a sheepskin rug on the sofa. On her feet are faded yellow wool socks once knitted by Sindre’s mother for Oliver. Her belly is like the rounded back of a whale and I want to press my lips to its soft, warm skin and blow raspberries.
It’s the weekend, and after lunch we ski together in a long line; me at the front, a pioneer heading into the wilderness within the city borders of a capital. Behind me follows little Oliver, then Sindre, and all the way at the back – Amalie in her sleigh, silently watching towering firs rush past, tiny snowflakes churning on white air, a slit of milky sky high above.
The day becomes evening early, and Sindre and I have become used to watching movies in bed, stroking each other lightly and laughing in the same places.
It’s daytime again and Amalie and I walk alongside the forest to Lake Øvreseter where we park the stroller by the barbecue spot and totter down to the ice-covered lake, then across it, Amalie smiling with delight at the sudden slide of her stubby little legs.
But then, in a split second, she’s gone. There, not there. I charge toward the dark gash in the ice but it’s expanding fast across the lake until every patch of milky ice has disappeared. I scream her name out loud, my voice spreading out across the surface and rising up the hillsides.
I throw myself into the ice-cold water and dive down below the surface and open my eyes in the blackness. I am at the bottom of the lake and run my hands across some large, slick rocks, feeling around for my child, then sifting through empty water. I resurface for air but in the moment my eyes rest on the glassy surface of the lake, the water ripples and rises into a silhouette and out comes a girl – that girl. The girl in the picture.
Kaia.
The heart keeper.
She looks at me and says Mamma.
Mamma. Again and again. I need you, Mamma.
I pull her out of the water and she clings to me like a castaway to a raft, like a baby koala bear to its mother, so close I feel the thud of her heart against my chest. I stare into her eyes. And it’s all different now. The world, me, the child, the familiar glint in her eye. It’s Amalie, looking at me through the eyes of a stranger. My child is inside this girl, held beneath her skin.
I open my eyes.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Iselin
I guess life is rather samey for a lot of people: get up, sort the kids out, go to work, come home, make dinner, sit around watching something, go to bed. Sometimes I feel like I am just waiting for something to happen, that my life is the dragged-out opening to a movie, that boring bit before the action begins. My drawings are selling – not as many as just around Christmas, but that’s probably to be expected. Kaia is thriving. Noa is coming back this week. It’s all good. And yet, there’s this itch to make something happen.
I check on Kaia, spreading out on the sofa octopus-style.
‘Hey, sweetie, do you want to go somewhere?’
‘No.’
It’s Saturday and a beautiful, clear day outside and I can’t help but feel as though we ought to be out somewhere.
‘We could go into town. We could go to the harbor front at Aker Brygge and get a blue slushie or something.’
‘No. I want to be at home.’
‘We could head to the Henie Onstad Center? I think there’s a children’s art exhibit on at the moment.’
‘Mamma,’ says Kaia, looking sternly at me. ‘Can’t we just be at home and do nothing?’
‘Yes, but I just want you to be happy and have a fun day.’
‘I am happy. The happiest!’ She gives me the biggest smile she can muster, tiny face cracked in halves, and I hop onto the sofa next to her, tickling her until she squeals.
*
It is evening when a message ticks in from Noa.
Remember I told you about that studio space in Majorstuen? My friend’s mother says you can have it for free until June if you water her plants twice a week! N X
Chapter Thirty
Alison
I woke in hospital. I was alone. Weak January light was seeping through the slat blinds. I felt thankful, then, for the crawl of the clock hand on the opposite wall, for more time, for being there, even if I was broken where I lay. Cracked open. But open to light, and to truth, as it came to me before I opened my eyes. I was thankful for my life, and for Kaia Berge’s. And I was filled with a hope so pure and strong I’d never felt anything like it before.
And now, as of yesterday, I’m home again. Just like that. Everything was the same, but it was also entirely different. Last night, Sindre and I sat across from each other at the kitchen table for a while, talking. We discussed whether we should spend Easter at our cabin at Norefjell; reminiscing about past times spent leisurely relaxing in the sun after a morning of skiing, peeling oranges and sharing a bar of chocolate between us. We talked about how the couple next door, Berit and Jan Olav, are most likely breaking the law by cutting down two large spruce trees at the end of their property, though we’re glad they did as we can now glimpse a teal slit of frozen fjord in the gap they left behind. We spoke about how, perhaps at the end of the year, we’ll give in to Oliver’s relentless pleas for a dog. An older rescue, I said, and in spite of everything I gave in to an impulse to reach across to stroke the graying, fuzzy hair on Sindre’s jaw.
It was nice, to sit there together like that. It was nice, because we both instinctively understood the new rules; we need to talk the way other husbands and wives do, about holidays and the little grievances caused by neighbors and the things we may or may not do with the kids. Perhaps that was the way we spoke before, I can’t remember, but I know that is how we will need to speak in the future. There can’t be any more conversations about lakes holding little girls or cells holding memories or what the hell is going to keep us alive. And still, my thoughts belong to me alone. My mind and heart are filled entirely by hope, making all of these little exchanges possible. I have something now; something bigger than me and my own life, or life itself, even. Bigger than death.
*
Sindre takes the task of looking after me very seriously, but we are both aware of how little time has passed since the tables were turned; since it was Sindre who was drugged and disoriented. Before I came back from the hospital, he sat Oliver down and explained to him that what happened to me at the lake was not a suicide attempt. Desperate and impulsive, but not born out of a real wish to be dead. I want to learn to live again and I wanted Sindre to tell Oliver that. I’m not sure Oliver believed it, and he followed me around the house all afternoon, constantly trying to keep me busy. I watched TV with him until I was so tired my eyes stung. I took the medication I am supposed to take, then I went to bed and blacked out.
Tonight, Oliver has gone to Monica’s, and Sindre is next door in his home office on a call to Washington or somewhere. At least that’s what he said. I can’t find it in my heart to care. I have something more important to focus on now. So I’ll pretend. I’ll pretend like it�
�s all better now. That I am going to take steps toward learning to live without my daughter. I need to pretend so I can focus on finding Kaia Berge to know whether something of my child really remains inside her.
I drink red wine and watch the last half of a show about people who meet for the first time at the altar. Occasionally I hear Sindre laugh through the wall and wonder what he could be laughing about – corporate security always seemed like a pretty dry profession to me. I want to be in bed pretending to sleep by the time he gets upstairs. But first: what I have been waiting for. I take the stairs two at a time but stop for a moment when I catch my reflection in the mirror at the top of the landing. It reminds me of that night, that darkest of nights, when the burning drove me into the frozen lake. The ice splintered easily into shards, and it felt good to push my hands through it, tearing my skin to shreds.
My hands still ache, and I hold them up to the mirror, examining them in the soft light; the swelling has gone down, the bruises have faded from red and purple to green-yellow, and the four shattered bones on my left hand are strapped into place by a strip of skin-colored tape. My hands don’t look as shocking as they did when I came to at Rikshospitalet, but they clearly belong to someone who has fought off death.
I rest my right palm against the cool, speckled surface of the mirror and hold my own gaze. I feel like a stranger to myself. Sometimes I felt the same when looking at Amalie. I’d watch her sleep, wondering where she’d come from and how I could uncover the essence of what made her her. I’d watch her play, running, jumping, dancing, fluttering, falling, and consider how utterly strange it was that she had come from me, out of me, and yet was so entirely separate. Sometimes I’d look into her eyes expecting to find the most intense connection but wouldn’t feel it. And other times, that connection would suddenly spring forth in an unexpected moment, so powerful it could have floored me. I imagine looking into Kaia’s eyes. Would she have the same effect on me in real life?