The Heart Keeper Read online

  ‘Ali?’

  ‘Yes. What is it?’ I say, my voice stronger now, too strong, sharp. I sense him shrinking back and force a slight smile onto my face before turning back around.

  ‘I… I was wondering if you could help me with my homework before I go. Uh. Geography.’

  ‘Sure,’ I say, and sit down next to him.

  He pulls out a crumpled piece of paper from his backpack. ‘Use evidence to support or negate the following statement: the weather in Scandinavia is becoming more extreme,’ he reads.

  ‘Right,’ I say, but just then, a fat tear drops from Oliver’s eye onto the paper, blurring the word ‘more’. Another falls, then another and another.

  ‘Hey,’ I say, and turn toward him, but his face is suddenly so like Amalie’s that I drop my eyes back to the table. She’s there in his fuzzy, low eyebrows, in the soulful brown eyes beneath them, in the freckled, thin nose and the dark-blond messy curls. It happens often, that she haunts me for a fleeting moment in the expression or gestures of Sindre or Oliver. ‘Hey,’ I say again, but I’m not only speaking to him now, I’m speaking to her. ‘Come here,’ I whisper and pull him close because I can’t bear to keep looking at him. It’s as though he finally gives himself permission to cry, and he shudders in my arms for a long time before his sobs subdue and he relaxes in my embrace like a small, exhausted child.

  ‘Do you want to come with me to the lake today? Or to see Misty?’ I ask. Misty is Amalie’s pony and several times a week I go and just stand beside her, placing my hands gently on her warm, soft body.

  ‘I… I have to go to school…’

  ‘No, you don’t, sweetheart,’ I say.

  *

  We walk around the lake on the gravel path, stopping occasionally, shielding our eyes from the sun and gazing out at the water. Oliver’s eyes are red and a splotchy rash surrounds them. His lips are firmly clamped shut and they’re red, too, as though he’s bitten down hard on them. Oliver has inherited Sindre’s ability to be comfortable in sustained silence. I focus on my breath, on controlling the burning in my stomach, but still, I have to count. Leaves, trees, steps, days since Amalie was here – no, not that. No. Try again. The stones Oliver hurls into the water, the number of ripples they carve on the water’s surface, the last few scraggly birds heading south. We sit for a while on the pebbled beach.

  ‘My mom says it’s worse for you than for Pappa,’ says Oliver. I tighten my hand around a smooth, small rock. ‘But… But I think maybe it’s even worse for him,’ he says, carefully, looking straight at me with his almond-shaped eyes, his Amalie-eyes, his wavy fringe dropping into his eyelashes. ‘Because he has me he can’t just, like, die. Or run away. But you could. If you wanted to. You could just disappear and never come back to the house where it’s like she’s everywhere. I… I hope you don’t.’ I stare at my stepson: at his knobbly white fingers and his chewed nails, at the spots creeping from the collar of his shirt up his throat to his jaw, at his wan face still clinging to childhood, though he’s thirteen. I nod, and Oliver and I both look out at the steely water, as calm today as though it were covered in ice, and I don’t have any words so I begin to count again; I count the pebbles my hands touch upon, trying not to think about my flaming gut, and keep my eyes on the cool sweep of the lake, but I want to run into the water, leaving the boy on the shore.

  Chapter Two

  Iselin, three months earlier

  It’s the hottest day of the year so far. In many years, they said on the news earlier. Kaia hasn’t spent it outside with her skipping rope, or bouncing on a trampoline, or running through a sprinkler. She’s been on the sofa all day, dozing, holding tattered old Bobby Cat, Dora the Explorer flickering on the screen. I watch her through the open door from where I’m sitting out on the deck by the entrance, drinking a glass of cheap, sweet rosé. Dark clouds are coming in, and I won’t be surprised if it starts to rain within the hour. Kaia has been even more tired than usual, and I haven’t been able to get her to eat anything other than a couple of lemon ice lollies. The heat makes the apartment unbearably hot, even though it’s in the basement of the other family’s home and the walls are made of concrete. In the winter, Kaia and I often wear down jackets inside.

  I can hear the boys who live upstairs playing in their garden on the other side of the house. They’re three boisterous little boys, and Kaia sometimes watches them from the high window overlooking their garden; they’re always moving, playing, running, fighting, jumping – activities Kaia knows little of. At home, she mostly sits and draws, or watches cartoons from the sofa. On a good day she might sit and play with the Sylvanians tree house I managed to get her for her seventh birthday. I take a sip of the wine, my one luxury of the day, and watch an ambulance helicopter fly fast overhead, so close I cover my ears for a moment. Kaia doesn’t stir. It’s the second one I’ve seen this afternoon; earlier, I heard the continuous whirr of rotor blades hovering in the distance. Perhaps something has happened in the city – I wouldn’t have known about it.

  Another sound emerges from the silence the helicopter leaves behind. At first, I think it’s part of the cartoon – it’s that tinny kind of merry sound, music for children, but then I realize it’s the phone. When I finally reach it, it has stopped ringing. Four missed calls from the hospital. I glance at Kaia, whose ashen little face is pressed against a cushion. My heart beats wildly. I pull the cushion away and Kaia slumps gently against the seat of the sofa, still without stirring. She’s wearing a white cotton vest, stained lightly yellow from the ice lollies. Her thick, dark hair is braided tight against her scalp the way she likes it, a couple of stray curls escaping at the temples. I can’t live without you, I whisper. I press the dial button and pick Kaia’s limp hand up, squeezing it hard.

  ‘How soon can you be here?’ asks the voice on the other end.

  In the taxi, I watch as the helicopter, or another helicopter, rises rapidly from somewhere near the side of the big ski jump and flies fast beneath swollen black clouds in the direction we are heading. Could it have to do with…? Kaia lies slumped in my lap, sucking her thumb and lightly twirling Bobby Cat’s worn-out ear. Tears flow from my eyes, so fast I have no chance of stopping them, and they drip onto Kaia, disappearing in her hair. I watch the rise and fall of her back and put my hand over where I think her heart is. I can feel it, tapping steadily against my fingertips. A little cry escapes from my clenched lips and I catch the eye of the taxi driver in the rearview mirror. He smiles uncertainly but I look away. Kaia slowly and laboriously turns around so that she’s looking up at me. Her lips are almost as pale as her skin, with a bluish undertone, and the veins on her forehead stand out against her pasty skin like black swirls in marble.

  ‘Don’t worry, Mamma,’ she whispers. I nod and lean in to kiss the top of her head, drawing in the scent of her, more tears dropping from my eyes, as the taxi pulls up on the curb at Rikshospitalet’s children’s clinic.

  Chapter Three

  Alison

  I’m landing at nine, reads the text message, and I have to scroll up through the messages for a clue as to where he’d gone in the first place. Landed at Charles de Gaulle, one reads, from yesterday morning. Paris, a conference. I remember now. I remember last night, too; how I woke in the middle of the night on the floor beside Amalie’s bed and spent several minutes staring at the ceiling, not daring to turn my head even an inch toward the bed. In those minutes, she was still there, in her Queen Elsa fleece onesie, curled around Dinky Bear, facing the wall, frail bird-like shoulders rising and falling in the safe, soft darkness. Eventually I placed a hand on the empty, cool sheet. Then I went downstairs to the kitchen where I sat drinking vodka and scrolling through Instagram for hours. I woke up there, at the kitchen table, my hair slick with spilled vodka, still holding my phone, daggers of autumn sun stabbing at my eyes.

  It’s almost midday, and my husband is landing at nine. We will be here alone together until Monday, when Oliver comes back. I look around the room for clues as t
o what to do next. I’ll need to leave soon, to go see Karen Fritz. I consider not going; she would sit there calmly waiting, fingers fiddling with the yarn, her eyes on the clock above the door. Would she worry about me, or just breathe a sigh of relief at not having to spend an hour sitting across from the crumbling, sorry mess I have become? I check my phone, glancing through the many unopened messages. A new one from Halvor Bringi, my old boss at Speilet: We are thinking about you so much. Call me when you feel ready. Hugs, Halvor. I press Delete. Another message from Erica, my only other American friend in Norway, though she now feels so distant to me I can’t clearly recall her face. Please call me, honey. Delete.

  I open the French doors to the front garden and sit down on the stone steps, though it has clouded over and the hairs on my arms stand up in the chilly breeze. I imagine my husband at the conference, his tired, blank face turned toward a figure speaking at the front of a huge auditorium, not listening, drifting on the muddled currents in his mind. Later, the evening spent at the deserted hotel bar, drinking one scotch after another, watching the flickering lights of Paris in the distance. A sparse hotel room with pink and lime green cushions, medicated sleep. We are like each other now, and yet further apart than we have ever been.

  A couple of weeks ago, I went to see Dr Bauer again about my frequent spells of confusion and disorientation. I’ve known him for many years, and he was the one who first recommended Karen Fritz. He listened seriously as I tried to explain the terror of suddenly not knowing where you are, or what you are doing. Early onset dementia, perhaps, I said, my voice trembling at the idea of losing my mind, patch by patch. Or Creutzfeldt-Jakob, even. It happens to some people, after all. Or a brain tumor – perhaps the dull headaches and the tingling sensation I feel in my fingers, together with the forgetfulness and bewilderment, are symptoms of something sinister growing deep in my brain? I go upstairs, I said, and can’t remember why, over and over. The other day I put my MacBook in the dishwasher, as if it were a plate. I hear my husband’s voice and I can’t decipher his words.

  The doctor waited until I finished speaking. Does your heart race? Do you suffer flashbacks? Do you sleep?

  All the time. Yes. Not much. He handed me a folded blue pamphlet that read Overcoming Bereavement. He wrote more prescriptions.

  A sound, tinny and insistent. By the time I realize it is the phone, it has stopped ringing. Two messages tick in.

  Do you want anything from Paris, baby?

  Then – On my way to the airport.

  There was a time I would have wanted many things from Paris. A soft leather handbag, vintage champagne, hand-poured ecological essential oil candles from Merci, pencil sketches of Pont Alexandre III, bought straight from the artist. I laugh softly to myself, that such things even exist. That I cared. Expensive quick fixes that once worked but will never work again. I turn my face toward the sun, which has briefly appeared between two large, somber patches of swirling clouds. No, honey, thank you. Hurry home, I reply eventually, but I don’t mean it; I don’t want my husband to hurry home, I don’t want us to move around each other like polite strangers in this house.

  *

  When I arrive, late, Karen is holding the door open to me and I slip past her into the sparse, small room. I sit down in a deep white armchair and wait for her to ask how I am, but she doesn’t. She begins to knit and waits for me to speak.

  ‘I dream of her,’ I say, my eyes on Karen Fritz’s fast hands, winding the thread up and around itself, over and over.

  ‘How does that make you feel?’

  ‘I dreamed that she asked me what I would do if I didn’t have her anymore. She really did that once.’

  ‘That sounds very distressing, Alison.’ I don’t answer, and Karen doesn’t push me to continue. She just knits and waits. We could sit out the whole session like this, in complete silence, and we have, on a couple of occasions.

  ‘I went back to the lake.’ Needles paused, no comment. ‘Aren’t you going to ask me why, or tell me not to, or something?’

  ‘Is that what you want me to do?’

  ‘No… I don’t know what I want. Or that I want anything at all.’

  ‘Do you think that’s bad?’ There was a time when I found therapy as useful and necessary as breathing air or drinking water, like most American professionals I knew back then. I’d spend countless hours on various sofas, unloading my tangled thoughts onto strangers, then walk away feeling as though I had gained some clarity. I found it useful in processing all the stories I heard, because it just isn’t possible to spend any length of time traveling the world as a features journalist without gathering material for future therapy. But now, the irony of it is inescapable, a Band-Aid for a gunshot wound. I look at Karen Fritz, and try to count the rows of fuzzy ochre wool spilling from underneath her ever-moving hands. Twenty, twenty-one.

  ‘My husband has a gun,’ I say, enjoying the alarmed look on her face.

  *

  By eight, it’s long dark, and I go to bed. I haven’t taken anything, or had anything to drink. I consider getting up and taking Temazepam; my limbs would go mercifully leaden, I could get some real sleep, but I don’t like taking it when I am here alone – the thought of Sindre arriving home and observing me in heavily medicated sleep unsettles me, as though he might scrutinize my uncensored face and be repulsed.

  I think about Sindre on the plane, his broad feet planted on the carpeted floor, his big knees pressing against the seat in front of him, cradling a drink in his hand. He’ll be leaning against the window, watching the tiny lights below, like golden beads sewn into black cloth, as the plane heads north. After a while, when the lights become scattered, his mind will clear – and the everyday noise of bills, transportation, relationships, cooking, parenting, and long-established routines will feel far away. The plane will settle into a smooth, quiet purr at cruising altitude, cabin lights dimmed, and Sindre will press his face to the plastic window, the stars almost as clear and close as high up in the mountains. I imagine that flying soothes him, that it helps him to let his mind run blank, life stripped back to the bare bones. But the truth is, I don’t know what soothes him, nor what my husband thinks or feels about anything anymore.

  Hours pass before I hear his key in the lock downstairs. Hours spent counting and whispering to Amalie. I counted time as it passed, two hundred and nine minutes, and the number of sleeping pills I have taken so far this week – nine – and the unexplained sounds from outside that traveled through the open window into the bedroom: eleven. I counted the number of times I’ve been to see Amalie’s beloved little pony, Misty, in the last month: twice. I counted the number of birthday cakes I have baked for my daughter – five – and summoned each of them to mind. I counted the number of times my phone bleeped – two – and then how many times I flew on a plane with Amalie: at least thirty-two. She loved it and would purse her mouth into a tight little ‘o’ as the plane rose above the clouds.

  I begin to count the seconds between the key in the lock and Sindre’s footsteps on the stairs, but reach four hundred and still he has not come. What is he doing down there? I wait in the dark, wide awake, though I will pretend to sleep when he lies down beside me. He doesn’t come. I get out of bed and walk quietly across the room, listening at the door. I hear a muffled voice from downstairs; my husband must be on the sofa, watching TV, or dozing in front of its flickering light. There will be an empty bottle of wine at his feet, maybe two. I cross the landing and stand at the top of the stairs, looking directly across at the wall where the huge canvas photograph of Amalie used to hang. It has left a slightly darker, dusty rectangle on the wall, a ghost-frame. I glance at the door to Oliver’s room, wide open but empty, and at Amalie’s, tightly shut, also empty. I listen, and realize it’s Sindre’s voice I hear, not TV voices.

  I take the stairs slowly, careful not to step in the middle of the fourth from the bottom as it creaks. I stand still in the hallway downstairs, and the voice is indeed Sindre’s, coming from his offic
e. He’s shut the door, but a soft sliver of light spreads from underneath it onto the tiles. His voice is low, and though I can’t identify the words, I can make out occasional laughter. My hand hurts and I realize I have dug my nails into my flesh, so hard I’ve left deep half-moon grooves in the pale skin. I turn around and go back upstairs. In the bathroom I swallow a Temazepam dry. I avoid my gaze in the mirror and go back to bed, flexing and unflexing my throbbing hand in the dark until my limbs lose their painful tension and my eyelids grow so heavy I can’t peel them apart and

  Pappa sat by my feet in the muddy sand, clutching his ears against the shouting and my sobbing and the deafening roar of the helicopter descending rapidly toward us, whipping the lake water up into brown ridges. It wasn’t until we were in the helicopter that our eyes met. Come on, come on, come on – I said to the jagged line, the lifeline, the line that decided if you would stay or go. I couldn’t look at you, though I held your hand. Did you feel it? Did you know that I was there? I could only look at the line. Come on, come on, come on, baby bear, I said. Then the line began to settle from spiky lurches to gentle rolls and I thought this must be good – surely everybody wants the lifeline to become calm and predictable but it kept dropping from the gentle rolls to a flattened line with the smallest of spikes and I was screaming at it, come on come on come on, but it kept evening out until it was nothing but the cruelest unbroken line, a constant, bone-chilling tone cutting through the chop of the rotor blades.

  Chapter Four

  Iselin, three months earlier

  ‘Please,’ I whisper, again and again. Please, please. It isn’t the first time I’ve been here, on this chair, in this same room. It isn’t the first time I’ve prayed for her. I prayed for her life long before I knew I’d have to. I stare at the polished floor, then at some plastic lilies on the table, then at my hands, fingernails all chewed except for the thumbs.