The Heart Keeper Page 6

‘I know what to do if I feel bad! I know which medicines I need and when I need them.’

  ‘Kaia, you’re seven. Planning lots of different medicines at different times is not your responsibility, though I know you know when and how much.’ She ponders this for a moment, chewing on the last spoonful of food.

  ‘Solveig can come here for a sleepover then,’ she says.

  ‘Honey…’

  ‘Why can’t she? She doesn’t have to take any pills at all! She said.’ I don’t want to tell Kaia that the main reason is that I’d be embarrassed to have someone else’s child here, in this tiny, crowded apartment we call home. Before, I had the convenient excuse that we couldn’t have kids visiting due to infection risk, and while that is still true to a certain extent, Kaia is pretty much cured now, and I do want her to be like other children her age – she has missed out on so much.

  ‘We’ll see,’ I say, though I imagine most kids realize that means ‘no’.

  *

  She hasn’t even woken up tonight. It’s me who has jerked awake, maybe just pre-empting when Kaia starts screaming. I walk into her bedroom and watch the rise and fall of her chest shadowed on the wall in the faint light from the streetlights outside. I wish I wasn’t so alone, that I had a partner who could put his arms around me and draw me gently back to bed, whispering, It’s okay, babe.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Alison

  Espen and I sit close together on orange plastic chairs. My husband is heavily sedated in a room further down the corridor. The doctors are going to take him off the meds this evening, and hopefully he can come home tomorrow.

  ‘I’m just glad we’re not at the morgue,’ says Espen, staring into his paper cup. Leftover drops of weak coffee stud its waxy inside. I nod. His right arm is in a sling, and his left hand, holding the empty coffee cup, is shaking badly. Espen has been my husband’s closest friend for almost three decades, since they met in the military aged eighteen. His eyes are red and his bald, smooth head shines in the brilliant sunlight coming in from the window behind us.

  ‘I think he must have thought he was back there,’ says Espen, his eyes clouding over, and I know that he is back there now, too. ‘You know, in combat. It really was as though he was unreachable, that he had lost grasp of reality.’

  ‘Will you tell me everything, from the beginning?’

  Espen nods, then begins to speak. ‘We got to the clearing at around five thirty. It was earlier than we’d hoped, so we just waited. It was still completely dark.’

  ‘Was there anything strange about Sindre on the way there? Or the night before?’

  ‘Well. He’s not himself, of course. Understandably. But he didn’t seem much different from when I saw him last week.’

  ‘Did he talk to you about Amalie?’ Her name catches in my throat like a badly swallowed painkiller.

  Espen shakes his head slowly. ‘No. He’s never been chatty, and now he’s just more withdrawn than usual.’

  ‘So. You waited. For how long?’

  ‘Maybe an hour. No, it must have been longer. It started to get light. It was cold, but we were well dressed.’

  ‘Did you speak in that time?’

  ‘No, we just lay there, waiting. Listening. Sindre in the middle, Victor to his left, and me to his right. It was all agreed ahead of time, of course. It always is. We were there for a huge female; we’d stalked her the entire day before. She had a calf with her, probably around four months old. Sindre would shoot the calf first, that was the plan.’

  ‘Why would you shoot a calf?’

  ‘Because…’ Espen hesitates a long while, looking up at the ceiling as though to find words, but then I realize that he is blinking back tears. ‘Because the mother always comes back.’

  The mother always comes back. I see them: a big, gentle moose mamma and her baby, moving unselfconsciously through the dewy, cool grass of the morning forest. At the clearing, the mother would look around, blinking, trying to detect humans and danger.

  ‘I see,’ I whisper.

  Espen stares miserably at the cup in his hands. I see him gripping the loaded rifle, the alert concentration of framing the shot. ‘I was supposed to shoot the mother when she came back for her baby; we’d have her at a perfect distance. But. It didn’t happen like that. We could just make them out, emerging from the forest and coming slowly toward us. I nodded at Sindre to get ready, and he looked calm and focused. But then… he didn’t do what he was supposed to. He shot at the mother, and the calf immediately bolted. Victor managed to shoot it, but Sindre had stood up by then and moved toward where the mother was in the middle of the clearing, trying to get back up. He walked almost all the way up to her and then he started firing again. Again and again. She was… He shot her to pieces.’

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘Well, it was pretty obvious he was totally out of control. I made my way along the back of the clearing toward him, in between the trees. Sindre noticed me, then, standing just a few feet away from him, holding my palms up toward him. Back the fuck off, he screamed. Back off, he screamed, over and over.’ Espen won’t look at me. I won’t look at him, either. I open my hand and stare at the faint lifeline in my palm.

  ‘We… We didn’t know what to do. When I tried to approach him, he waved the rifle at me and then he turned it toward himself.’

  ‘Jesus Christ. He could have shot you.’

  ‘He didn’t though.’

  ‘What happened next?’

  ‘I threw myself at him and wrenched the rifle from his hand. He was covered in blood spray, screaming.’

  ‘Jesus,’ I say again. Espen nods. His face is stricken, disbelieving, as though he’s watching the scene unfolding in this moment. We fall silent but images of my husband going amok with a rifle in the deep forests of Buskerud repeatedly flash through my mind.

  *

  ‘Here,’ I say, into the quiet, dim room, and sit down on the edge of the bed next to Sindre, placing the steaming coffee on the low table by his head. He’s awake – I can see the glint of an open eye. He has only been home for three days and already he wants to go back to work. The doctor says it’s out of the question until after New Year, at least, after what happened.

  ‘Thank you,’ says Sindre and turns toward me with a tired smile. ‘How are you doing?’

  I nod. Sindre sits up and sips from the mug, closing his eyes. I glance at the time – another hour until he has to take his meds.

  ‘I was thinking that… that maybe we should go away for Christmas. With Oliver,’ he says, staring seriously into the mug. My mind darts to suitcases stacked on a trolley, to long, blue flights, to the brazen sun beating down on a remote beach, to Dinky Bear left on the pillow, to the browning mounds of rotting leaves in the garden, to the empty black lake covered by a lid of ice…

  ‘Yes,’ I whisper. ‘Yes, let’s.’ Our eyes meet, pleading with each other, turning this possibility over and over.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Um, maybe… maybe Mexico?’

  ‘Mexico,’ repeats Sindre, as though he’s never heard of such a place.

  ‘Yeah, or…’ I’m trying to think of other places, places where we’ll be known to no one, where we will look complete: a man, a woman, a lanky, sweet teenage boy. ‘Uh, Tenerife. Sarasota? Maybe…’

  ‘Mexico,’ says Sindre again, staring at me through the drifts of steam rising from his coffee. I nod and am about to get up, but happen to glance at his pink, full fingers clutching the mug, and an uncomfortable vision of those same hands firing the rifle uncontrollably appears in my mind. I see Sindre’s blank, focused face as he kept shooting, over and over. I see him turning the gun from the moose to Espen, to himself. My husband might have been a murderer, but then I remembered that he already is, though they don’t call it that. Neutralizer. He was unreachable, said Espen, later. Wild. What if… What if it happens again? What if I wake in the dead of the night and he’s pointing that gun in my face?

  ‘What is it?’ says Sindre,
dark brows scrunched close together.

  ‘Nothing,’ I say, ‘Nothing, babe. Just… It’s almost time for your meds. I’ll be back up in an hour.’

  ‘Okay.’

  *

  I lie down on Amalie’s bed.

  Daddy is getting better. He came home. He had to go away for a while so he could get better. He’s not back at work yet; he’s napping in our room, so I’m here, just resting and listening for your presence. It’s eleven o’clock in the morning but gloomy outside. It makes me smile to remember how you never noticed the weather much, and if I ever complained about a particularly dreary day, you’d laugh and look around as though it hadn’t registered with you that icy cold rain was crashing down all around us. You were such a happy person.

  I’m trying to get better, I’m trying so hard. Sometimes, like now, lying on your bed, I feel so close to you that it’s almost okay you can’t come all the way here to be with me. I know now that something of you remains.

  I come to her room almost every day now. At first, I couldn’t bear it; I would literally be itching and clawing at my own skin at the impossible truth of her absence from her own room. It was easier with the door shut – I could almost make myself believe she was in there. But Karen said that I’d be more likely to feel close to Amalie in the space she’d lived her whole life than in the space she left us from, and she was right. But could there be a way to feel even closer?

  I shut the door softly and step back outside into that other world. She’s sitting at her desk, I tell myself. She’s making those beautiful swirly patterns she’s so good at with her glitter gel markers, and she’s smiling to herself, humming the songs she always makes up.

  But she isn’t.

  I let go of the door handle and stumble toward the stairs. Seventeen steps done in five, through the double doors in the hallway, outside, fast across the soggy lawn, rain stabbing at me, into the hushed clutch of the trees, onto my knees, hands digging into squelchy earth, breath short, hiccupy, gasping. I’m trying to get better, I’ve been trying so hard and I’m trying even harder now because Sindre and I can’t both fall to pieces at the same time. I’m on my fucking knees, I want to shout out loud, but not a sound will come, and in the end there’s nothing to do but get back up and stand staring at our house through the gaps in the trees.

  Downstairs in the kitchen, I scrub my nails clean with a wire brush until my skin breaks and bleeds. Will I be like those other wives, the wives of men who fire at a group of innocents, who turn guns on strangers, whose faces are all over the newspapers in my country? Will it be me next, weeping, saying, ‘I didn’t see it coming, how could he do something like this?’

  The mother always comes back, said Espen. Always.

  *

  It’s late, and Sindre is passed out on the sofa, an almost-empty bottle of scotch on the floor beside him. I stand there watching him, thinking about what has become of us. I almost say it out loud: Goodbye.

  Goodbye.

  In the garage, I find what I’m looking for easily enough. The gun is even heavier in my hand than I’d imagined it would be, and I hold it for a moment, then place it back in the box. I remove a few other things, things I know could be dangerous. A coil of blue rope. A glinting hunting knife. A bottle of sulphuric acid. I place the rope and the knife in the box with the gun, then I remain in the dark, musty room for a while – what a strange and difficult situation I find myself in. But I know with every fiber of my being, that I have to do this; there is no other way. I carry the box carefully around the side of the house down the narrow passageway, as though danger were a live thing. I return for the acid. In the car, I place the box and the bottle on the floor of the passenger seat, and then I sit in the driver’s seat, clutching the ice-cold wheel, breathing frosty clouds into the still air. It’s past midnight, and time to go.

  I drive into the forest along a narrow dirt track and choose a quiet spot on the north side of the lake. I’m doing this to save us. I know that I can’t trust myself around the dangerous objects any more than I could trust my husband, and walking into the forest, I finger the frayed coil of blue rope with numb fingers, imagining looping it over a bare branch and then around my neck. By the water, I tie the rope to a chunky rock and fling it out into the darkness. I pour the acid out at my feet and it makes a hissing hole in the ice. Next, the long, curved knife Sindre has had since his teens – it gives me the chills every time I look at its glinting blade. Then, the gun and the cartridges. It takes me an age to fling all the objects into the lake, one after the other, listening to the sharp cracks as they smash the surface layer of ice and disappear into the blackness beneath.

  Now, afterward, I regret throwing those unpleasant objects into the lake – it’s her lake, and it will forever hold something of her within its waters. I drop to my knees on the brown frozen beach, clutching at a stabbing pain in my stomach, my sobs leaping out across the surface of the lake like skipping stones, before being sucked into a shrill wind tearing at the trees. The fragile hope I have felt in the last few weeks melted away at the sight of the lake and the inescapable reality of what it has taken from me. I need a sign to get up, to keep moving, to take even one more breath.

  A sign, baby bear. Can you give me another sign?

  I sit holding myself tight against the cold, trying to regain control of my breath. And then, unmistakably, unbelievably, a sound separates itself from the whoosh of the wind – it is the rapid beat of a heart and I stand up, turning my head away from the wind to hear more clearly. I’m not imagining it. It’s getting louder and louder, slicing through all the other sounds of the night, this delicious, rhythmic thump, and even when I spot the T-bane train’s lights at the far end of the lake, slithering through a gap in the bare trees, it’s still a sign.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Iselin

  ‘What are you doing?’ I ask, taking in the sight of her, caught red-handed, pen held against the skirting board in the kitchen. I grab the pen out of her hand and squat down next to her, spraying her with my wet hair from the shower, bringing my face close to the wall. She’s drawn a long line of little bears along the skirting board. In permanent black marker pen. ‘Kaia…’ Kaia won’t look at me, and stares at her hand instead, still held in a half grip as though she were holding the pen. ‘Hey, look at me! Why would you draw this… this stuff on the walls in this house?’

  ‘Don’t be angry,’ she says.

  ‘Kaia, how could I not be angry when you go and do stuff like this?’

  ‘Stop it! Stop shouting! You always shout at me! Other moms don’t shout.’ The other moms don’t have to put up with being an unemployed single mother to a kid who has never had a healthy day in her life, who requires constant attention, who doesn’t sleep at night, who answers back and who thinks it’s okay to draw eleven fucking bears on the walls of our rented home, I want to say, but I manage to keep my mouth shut and instead I just walk away from her and slam the door to the corridor shut behind me.

  I lean back against the door and imagine having the kind of life lived by the moms in this neighborhood. They go home to nice, successful husbands, they go to delis or fancy supermarkets like Meny to buy food without having to add up the cost of everything in the basket on the way to the checkout, they buy clothes without looking at the price tags, their kids get their hair cut at the parlor in CC West, not at home with a pair of old nail scissors, bending backward over the wash basin. I bet those moms don’t lie awake at night, stricken by worry and fear and regret. I want to be like them, not like me. I’m tired, poor and alone. When I was younger, I was so driven, so hell-bent on escaping my drab childhood in that place I never bother to think about, and what kills me is that I came so damned close. I actually made it to where I wanted to be – Paris and art school. And then I went and got myself pregnant and ruined everything.

  Still, I have something none of the other moms have: Kaia. I take a few deep breaths and manage to push the tears that sprung to my eyes back in their duct
s. I go into the kitchen, where Kaia is rubbing at a bear with a wet dish cloth.

  ‘Hey,’ I say, taking the cloth from her, and gently stroking her cheek. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to raise my voice at you. I just don’t understand why you would draw on the walls, Kaia. I worry we’ll get into trouble.’

  ‘They’re cute,’ she whispers and she’s right, they are cute and meticulously drawn – they could be from a professional cartoon.

  ‘It’s just… You have got to understand that we can’t draw stuff on the walls in this house. It isn’t ours, Kaia.’

  ‘Yes, it is. We live here.’

  ‘Yes, but that doesn’t make it ours. Other people own it. When they find out that we draw on the walls, they’ll get really angry.’

  ‘But they’re cute,’ she whispers. I nod and pull her close, kissing the top of her head. I think of that woman upstairs, at how she watches me and judges. She’d be lucky to get some bears drawn on her walls. I take a pen from Kaia’s box and begin to add to her mural. Two birds flying overhead, a bear in a boat, a duck dragging a cart full of tiny bear children. In the end we can’t stop laughing, and then we collapse on the sofa watching Dora and eating strawberry ice cream straight from the tub.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Alison

  ‘Alison,’ says Karen.

  ‘Yes,’ I say, dragging my eyes from the birds to Karen’s mild face.

  ‘I want to say that I’m sorry you felt like you couldn’t stay last time. My job is to listen to what it is you’re saying, and to make you feel held. I’m not sure I managed to do that.’

  ‘No… No, it wasn’t your fault. At all. It was a bad day. An especially bad day,’ I add. Karen nods and looks at me for a while, perhaps waiting for me to start talking. I don’t.

  ‘Is your breathing better?’

  ‘No. Maybe a little. It seems to come and go.’ Karen nods. When she doesn’t speak, I continue. ‘I threw my husband’s gun into the lake.’ A shadow of alarm moves across her professionally calm face.