The Heart Keeper Read online

  Far out on the lake the water is rippling, as though someone is turning it from deep within. I pick up a small rock and throw it toward the curling water, and then another and another. I throw thirty-one rocks, and then I force myself to stop counting. I close my eyes and just stand here, focusing on the feel of my feet pressing into the muddy beach that is scattered with sharp stones.

  Karen says direct speech can be a powerful tool in managing grief, so I try, but all the words I speak to her out loud dissolve into dark air. It’s like praying, though I’ve never prayed in all my life – I never felt the need for a God. Why speak to someone who most likely does not exist? I understand it now; I imagine every lost child becomes its mother’s God.

  Amalie never answers and the silence seeps through my skin and chills me from inside. Still I can’t stop because maybe one day it will take me closer to where she is now.

  I open my eyes and glance around. She’s here – my baby is here with me now; I can feel her. I feel her in the earthy, cool breath of the forest, in the dark glint of the lake, her lake. She’s in the quiet air trapped in the shadows of our home. She’s in her pappa’s eyes when he thinks about her. She’s in her brother’s blank expression, in his shaking hands – his poor, chewed hands. She’s in every thought that passes through my muddled mind, in every drop of blood that rushes through my broken heart. I watch the thin contrails of a jet reflected on the black water, like parallel lines of chalk drawn on a blackboard, then I close my eyes.

  I wonder if it is a sign of actual madness, to have come out here, and for a moment I open my eyes, expecting the moment to be gone, to stop feeling her, but it isn’t like that; I am still here, my feet firmly fixed to the ground, and so is she: in the trees, in the smoky, cool air. In the water.

  You’re here, I whisper.

  I stay a while longer, completely still, as though anchored to this spot, just focusing on breathing and feeling. When I speak again, my voice is hollow and flat, like a badly remembered song.

  I can’t breathe without you.

  *

  Peas on Oliver’s plate: sixteen. Rain drops from earlier showers still studding the window: forty-six. Times I reach for my water glass before realizing I left it by the sink: three. Books left on the lounge table: seven. Number of Xanax I took when I got home from the lake: one. And a half.

  ‘Alison?’ I hear Sindre’s voice and, glancing around from him to Oliver, I realize they’re waiting for me to answer a question. ‘You looked far away there,’ he says kindly.

  ‘Sorry,’ I say.

  ‘Is the fish okay?’ Sindre indicates the mess of flaky salmon pieces I’ve pushed around on my plate.

  ‘Yes. Thank you. It’s… it’s really nice. Thank you for… doing this.’ It is the first time we’ve sat down together for a meal in a very long time, and the first time the three of us are here, together at the table, since July. I pointedly put a piece of salmon in my mouth and count as I chew. Eighteen, nineteen.

  ‘Alison?’

  I look up.

  ‘Today at school we learned about transplants in biology.’ Oliver’s face is pale and red along the hairline, and his too-big teeth glint as he speaks.

  ‘Oliver!’ Sindre says, voice sharp.

  ‘No,’ I say, softly. ‘Let him speak.’

  ‘We learned that one person’s organs can save up to eight lives.’

  ‘Oh,’ I say. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight.

  ‘I… I think that’s amazing,’ he says, looking from Sindre to me. ‘Like, she would have wanted that, you know? She…’

  ‘Oliver,’ interrupts Sindre, ‘please. Please, let’s just eat.’

  ‘I want to hear what he has to say, honey,’ I say as kindly as I can manage.

  ‘I don’t.’ Sindre drops his knife so it clatters loudly to the floor. I place a hand on Oliver’s hand, and it twitches but he doesn’t move it away.

  ‘What else did you learn, sweet boy?’

  ‘We read about a woman who was a strict vegetarian her whole life and then she received a heart from someone who had, like, really loved burgers and stuff, and after that she began to eat meat all the time.’ I nod, then realize I should smile at this. I smile.

  ‘Wow.’

  ‘Yeah. It’s called cell memory.’ He pauses a long while, stabs at a couple of peas on his plate, and then he speaks again. ‘Do we know which parts of Amalie were given to other people?’

  The burning, again, those snapping flames in my gut, that searing heat behind my closed eyes. The consultant’s sterile, clasped hands, the downcast, unmistakable tilt of his head, his impossible words, I’m so sorry. The sticky silence of a windowless room, the kind, unflinching presence of two nurses, one old and one young, how good it was of them to cry for Amalie in those moments, when we couldn’t yet. Me counting the minutes that had passed since my hands ran through her wet, dense hair, the drum of my heart interfering with the counting I couldn’t stop myself from doing, so I started doing it out loud, spitting those ugly minutes out, until the younger nurse got up and sat by my feet and made me look into her wet red eyes. And later, the papers we had to sign, me counting the words on the page, rather than reading them, words I’d never really considered before those moments, though I must have on some level, because I knew without a doubt that it was the right thing to do.

  ‘Sorry,’ Oliver says, when I don’t, can’t respond.

  ‘For fuck’s sake,’ says Sindre, his gloomy, tense face turned toward the window.

  ‘Sorry,’ says Oliver, again. Which parts of Amalie did we give away? Which parts of Amalie are now embedded in other bodies, parts of other living beings? Cell memory, he said. Cell memory – I roll the words over and over and over in my mind. My hands are hot, suddenly weak. I force my mind to Karen Fritz’s birds and make them fly over me in my mind while I count them, twenty-two. Rubbery, gnarled feet held close to feathered bellies, hard eyes locked on the obsidian line of the horizon, air torn to shreds. I try to come back to my own body, back to Oliver and Sindre staring at me, but my mind is flying free with the impossibility of the words Oliver spoke. I bring him into focus, taking in his drawn, battered expression, his Amalie-eyes, his bloody, chewed fingertips.

  ‘Her heart,’ I whisper, ‘we gave away her heart.’

  Chapter Eight

  Iselin, one month earlier

  My daughter’s heartbeat taps gently against my fingertips. I rub the ointment down the length of her scar and Kaia sits patiently, waiting.

  ‘Dr Harari is going to be pleased to see you.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘She’ll be really impressed with the progress you’ve been making,’ I say, smiling down at her and wiping my hand clean of the sticky ointment on a kitchen towel.

  ‘Yeah. Last time she saw me, I was sick. I’m not sick now.’

  ‘No,’ I say.

  ‘She’s seen the inside of my body,’ says Kaia.

  ‘Yes. Yes, she has.’

  ‘Lots of people have.’

  ‘I guess that’s true, Kaia.’

  ‘Dr Harari said that my old heart was a bit gray and too small. It didn’t take the blood around fast enough.’

  ‘No, it didn’t.’ I feel struck by sadness at the too-small gray heart. What did they do with it? Did they just throw it away, the useless, crumbling heart that once formed in my womb? I remember hearing its rapid scatter during my first ultrasound scan in pregnancy, how I cried at first with despair, but also wonder. I kiss the top of Kaia’s head and help her into the loose cardigan which doesn’t rub against her scar.

  *

  I sit at the kitchen table, looking at myself in the mirror on the opposite wall. I’m wearing a red hooded sweater and gray yoga pants. My hair is scraped up into a high bun, but a few lank strands have come loose. My hair is bleached, but dark brown at the roots, the way I like it. Grungy – Kurt Cobain meets Cara Delevingne. I smile to myself. On my left wrist, three fine tattoos weave in and out of each other like
doodles. I don’t think it would be that easy to tell how old I am; though I am in my mid-twenties, I’m a little overweight in the way teenagers sometimes are, but my face has the kind of weary expression of someone who has lived longer than that. I’m not beautiful, though I have been called that. I’m tired. If I wasn’t tired, if I committed to eating food that didn’t come out of plastic microwave trays, if I made use of the running track at the end of the road, then perhaps I could be beautiful.

  But I’m so tired. In this moment, my eyes are red, and I squint even in the dimmed light from above the kitchen sink. I flick the radio on and smile as The Supremes start to sing. I turn my left wrist over, absentmindedly running a finger across one of the tattoos, the one that Noa and I both have. I stare at the soft white flesh of my palm and then I pick up one of the pens in front of me. I draw a bird’s wing so that it appears to flap when I open and close my hand.

  I wonder what Noa’s doing. I haven’t heard from her in several days, but it’s not like my sister has to check in with me. She’s probably playing sets tonight – being a super-successful DJ is nothing if not busy.

  In the next room, my daughter is asleep. Every night, she wakes numerous times, sometimes every hour. She wakes whimpering, or sometimes screaming. This is new. It’s eaten away at my nerves so badly I can barely sleep at all. I should be in bed right now, but I find the hours ticking by with my thoughts racing so disturbing I prefer to sit here until I can’t keep my eyes open.

  Kate Bush is playing now, and I turn the page in my drawing pad, smoothing the blank new page with my hand. I am about to start drawing with a blunt charcoal pencil, sketching the way I just observed myself in the mirror, or perhaps just the palm of my hand holding the delicate bird’s wing, when I hear a sound from the other room. I say room, but really it’s just a windowless alcove, sectioned off from the living room. I get up and stand watching my daughter’s slight frame. She’s moving about, her head turning from side to side, her feet jerking. Her face is twisted in an anxious expression and her brow is moist with sweat. I know what will happen next. She will flail around more and more until her nightmares force her eyes to open and her voice will ring out into the cramped space of our apartment.

  I sit down next to her to try to calm her down before it escalates even further. I place one hand on her shoulder and another on her forehead but her entire body is trembling now, and I’m not sure what to do. Nobody has ever told me what to do if this happens. Maybe it’s medical and I’m supposed to make it stop but I don’t know how, so I just sit there, tears flowing from my eyes at the sight of her. After several minutes, Kaia releases a guttural kind of roar and sits up in the bed, heaving for breath.

  ‘No!’ she screams, over and over, and doesn’t react when I pull her close, smoothing her long, limp hair down.

  ‘I’m here, honey,’ I say. ‘Mamma’s here.’

  ‘No! No!’ wheezes Kaia, scrambling in my arms like a bird caught in a bush, and we stay like that for a long while, me holding her tight until the strength seeps from her and she collapses back onto the mattress. I lie down next to her and imagine myself seen from above. Immobile, as if I’d been dropped onto my back from a thousand feet, exhausted, my expression matching Kaia’s; a mix of anguished and blank.

  Chapter Nine

  Alison

  After dinner Oliver went upstairs to his room. Sindre didn’t return from his run. Long into the evening I sat in the living room with the lights off. Sindre only came back after several hours, and I imagine he knew I was in there, but he headed straight upstairs without turning on the lights. I waited until I was sure he’d be asleep, and then I went up. Now it’s 2.48 in the morning and I’ve been sitting in the armchair by the window for thirty-seven minutes. My husband’s face is serious and concentrated in sleep, as though he were solving puzzles in his dreams. Outside, a brisk wind sweeps up from the valley, launching itself hard against these houses at the very top of the hill.

  Eight lives, Oliver said. I try to imagine eight people, strangers, powered by my daughter’s organs. Other children alive because she is not. If what Oliver talked about has any truth to it, my daughter’s cells could be altering the bodies of the recipients, growing into them. What does this mean? What could it mean? My daughter was a part of me long before she was born. She was made from every cell in my body, nourished by every drop of blood. She was my heart incarnated, a carrier of all that I am and all I ever could be. She’s part of me still, held in every cell, forever, but she’s dead and that means that, inside, so am I.

  I envision her heart beating in this moment, sutured in place in a little stranger’s chest. I see fresh, clean blood pumped out and around a young body, carrying minuscule particles of my own child. I stand up and press my face to the window. Out there, somewhere, her heart is beating.

  Chapter Ten

  Iselin

  ‘I don’t want to go,’ says Kaia. I knew this would happen. I squat down next to her and take both of her gloved hands in my own.

  ‘Hey,’ I say. ‘It’s totally normal to be nervous. But you’re going to have a great time, I know it.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You will. Remember how nice your teacher is? She is so excited you’re coming. And the other kids? It’s a small class, honey, and they all looked really lovely.’

  ‘What if they laugh at me?’

  ‘Why would they laugh at you?’

  ‘Because I don’t know the things they know.’

  ‘Oh, sweetie. You’ve learned so much, Kaia. We’ve already finished the third grade’s reading book, remember? You might know more than most of them, even.’

  ‘But they’ve been in school for more than a year already.’

  ‘Yes, but we’ve done a lot of schoolwork at home. You’re right on track.’

  ‘My heart hurts.’

  ‘Hurts?’

  ‘It’s going too fast. Like chug-a-chug-a-chug.’

  I pull my girl onto my lap and hold her close for a long moment. ‘Kaia, that’s just nerves. Come on. We have to go now.’

  *

  At the school gates, it’s as though Kaia toughens up at the sight of the other children. Some are milling around the playground, some are jumping in huge leaf-covered puddles, some are standing quietly beside their mothers. A little girl who I vaguely remember from our visitation day comes running over, smiling widely.

  ‘Kaia,’ she says, and Kaia smiles back at her. ‘Come!’

  Kaia lets go of my hand and takes the girl’s hand. ‘Bye, Mamma,’ she says, face excited and flushed a healthy red in the sharp autumn air. As I give her a quick hug, she pulls back and says, ‘Both sides, Mamma. We have to hug on the other side too.’ She presses her left cheek to mine, and then she walks off as fast as she’s able, still holding the hand of her new friend.

  ‘Bye,’ I whisper.

  Chapter Eleven

  Alison

  ‘Bye,’ I say, tenderly because I can see he’s upset. It seems he doesn’t want to go on the hunting trip to Norefjell by the way he holds me, his arms locking behind my back, his stubbled cheek nestled in the crook of my neck.

  ‘Are you sure it’s okay?’ he says, his eyes searching mine, and I look away, because they are her eyes, too. I slide the gear shift from park back into drive, move my hand from my husband’s to the handbrake, and glance at the door and the train station beyond it.

  ‘Just go, babe,’ I say, forcing a smile.

  ‘I’m worried that…’

  ‘Don’t be,’ I say, keeping my voice steady and reassuring. ‘Sindre. Look. We have to… keep moving. You know?’

  ‘Could Erica come and stay with you or something? Or you could come with us? I told you, the guys wouldn’t mind at all if you came. Seriously.’

  ‘Go, honey,’ I say, and he does go now, slowly dragging himself from the car. I watch him in the rearview mirror, standing on the curb, his back to Skøyen station’s old, yellow building, his big backpack slouching off one shoulder, his ri
fle bag held in his hand, letting the onslaught of torrential rain run off his scalp.

  *

  At home, I am finally alone. Oliver has gone to his mother’s, Sindre is away until Sunday and I am expected nowhere and by no one. I stand a while in the hallway. Heavy rain shimmies down the tall windows in the stairwell, and the sound of it drumming on the roof echoes around the house. I go into the kitchen and find my MacBook in a drawer. It won’t start up – its charging cable has been put away somewhere. Sometimes, in the last few months, I have missed the mindless surfing on the internet I used to devote a lot of time to. I’d let myself drift from a restaurant review to a travel article to a book review and on and on, but these days, I steer clear of the internet. I can’t face any of my social media channels – the instant-chat windows popping up if I log on to Facebook, the deluge of sympathy alongside banal reminders of other people’s lives moving on. I’ve also feared where an unplanned browsing session might take me. Until now. But I know what I’m looking for, and feel a deep trepidation in my gut, not unlike the burning. I push the door to Sindre’s office open, and am immediately struck by how long it’s been since I came in here. It looks different, though I can’t quite put my finger on how.

  There was a time when the door to Sindre’s office was always open, and after putting Amalie to bed around seven I’d signal the beginning of the evening by bringing him a glass of red wine. I’d perch on the edge of his desk, we’d clink our glasses softly together and talk about the day. I might show him an article I’d been working on, and I loved how he’d always take his time reading it, face serious and concentrated. I’d watch him, his strong profile and full lips pressed together, the way his T-shirt would strain at his biceps, and I’d think I was lucky. Or I might tell him something funny Amalie had said on her way home from nursery that day. I’d laugh at the memory of her giggling hysterically at her own jokes in the back seat of the car, and Sindre would chuckle too, at this strange little creature we’d made.