The Heart Keeper Read online

  ‘When did you do that?’

  ‘Last night. And when I was there by the lake, it felt like she was close. So close. Like she was sending me a sign.’

  ‘A sign?’

  ‘Yes, a sign.’ As I say the word ‘sign’, I realize how insane it sounds. I wanted to tell Karen about how I’d felt a flicker of hope when I stood by the lake and the sound of a heart beating appeared out of thin air, getting steadily louder and closer, but then I would have to tell her it was actually just the sound of the train hurtling along its track, though of course that was way too much of a coincidence not to be a sign, but from the way Karen is looking at me, I know she’d never understand. I straighten up in my chair, let my eyes rest on her birds for a moment. ‘What I mean is, she feels close, sometimes.’

  Karen nods, waits for me to continue, but I do not.

  ‘You’ve been coming here for almost four months now,’ she says after a while. ‘I was thinking we might try to incorporate some regression techniques into these sessions.’ I shrug, return to the birds. Twenty-two of them, up high, slicing air, collectively organized into an arrow pointing south; how? Karen Fritz says something.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Will you tell me, just as you remember them, the events of July 6th?’

  No, I think. I can’t. How would I find the words? But I nod. I close my eyes. And then I’m back there.

  *

  I can practically taste the earthy, bitter lake water and feel the rush of muddy sand slithering through eager fingers. I’m sitting on the grass overlooking the lake, watching swarms of children. I grew up near the water, too, and feel moved watching my own child play in the shallows just the way I used to throughout my childhood in California. I watch Amalie where she sits up to her waist in the sun-dappled murky water, clutching a yellow bucket and red spade, splashing and shrieking, droplets shooting from her loose, long hair. Only recently has she shrugged off the last remains of stocky toddlerhood and grown lean and tall for her age. She frequently looks over to where I’m sitting, scanning the throng of people for the familiar sight of me, an easy smile passing between us. I’m vaguely annoyed that Sindre isn’t here with us. He carried the picnic blanket and cooler bag from the car, searching the grass lawn surrounding the beach for a tiny, free spot to sit, and then helped me spread the blanket out. Instead of sitting down next to me, he pulled a pair of running shoes from his sports bag and discarded his flip-flops. He smiled ruefully at me and gave me a quick kiss before darting off onto the forest path that encircles the lake.

  I stand up, and shielding my eyes from the wonderfully warm summer sun, look across the calm, brown water to the far shore for signs of my husband running, thinking I might spot his bright yellow running vest between the birch trees, but I don’t. Sometimes, I feel like I’m always alone. If Sindre isn’t at work, he’s cycling, or running, or skiing, or climbing, or hunting, or playing football with ‘the boys’, who are no longer boys at all, but balding lawyers and businessmen in their late forties. What had started off as a much-encouraged bid to recover the fitness of his military days has exploded into a rather extreme pursuit of ultimate fitness, and every month he brings home increasingly expensive equipment, signing up to marathons, races and various competitions across southern Norway. I’ve begun to miss the slightly tired-looking, normal Sindre I married.

  I return my gaze to Amalie, but she’s no longer sitting in the middle of a small circle of children of a similar age. There are so many kids running, splashing, and swimming that they have become a kind of collective body; one giant being made from shy, white skin, bright scraps of colored bathing suits, blow-up toys, armbands and wet hair. Before I have time to feel really panicked, Amalie stands in front of me, shivering theatrically, pulling her armbands off and flinging them onto the picnic blanket.

  ‘Can I have ice cream now, please?’ I nod and put her cold, wet hand in my own. It takes us several minutes to get to the ice cream kiosk a short distance away, inching forward on the tiny slivers of lawn not occupied by families sunbathing, eating, rubbing sun cream into tender, jutting shoulder blades. On the way back to our blanket, Amalie spots Sindre, sitting down and looking out at the sweet pandemonium in the water, wiping sweat from his forehead. ‘Pappa,’ she shouts and runs toward him, vanilla ice cream dripping off her thin wrist as she goes. He scoops her up and takes a little bite from her ice cream, making Amalie squeal. I smile and lie down next to them, resting my head on Sindre’s knee.

  ‘God, it’s crazy here,’ he says. ‘I could hear the kids across the water all the way to the other side.’

  ‘Yeah, we shouldn’t stay that much longer, actually. We need to pack this afternoon and get to bed early, the flight is at six thirty in the morning, remember?’ Sindre grimaces and nods while simultaneously wiping at the sugary river running down the entire length of Amalie’s arm, dripping onto her Queen Elsa bathing suit.

  ‘Okay, let’s leave in half an hour,’ says Sindre. ‘After we’ve packed I, uh, might meet with Espen for a bike ride. Won’t be long. Not like I’ll get to exercise in Italy – I’m going to spend all my time lazing by the pool with my gorgeous wife.’ He squeezes my shoulder and I roll my eyes but he doesn’t notice through my dark sunglasses.

  ‘Mm-hm,’ I say.

  ‘I want to swim more!’ says Amalie.

  ‘Finish your ice cream first, honey,’ I say. ‘You’ve still got half an hour.’

  ‘I’m going to run another fifteen minutes, okay?’ Sindre moves my head from his lap and gently puts my handbag underneath it for support, then jumps to his feet with impressive speed, running off before I have a chance to say anything. I close my eyes and take a few deep breaths, lightly stroking Amalie’s stringy, wet hair.

  *

  I must have fallen asleep for a moment. It can’t have been more than a moment. Sindre is standing over me, saying something. I sit up fast, my head throbbing.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Can you get Amalie? I’ll start getting our stuff together,’ he says, lifting his sunglasses, peering out at the water.

  ‘But… weren’t you going running?’

  ‘I’m back. Where’s Amalie?’

  ‘She… she was just here,’ I say. ‘I’ll get her.’

  ‘I can’t see her.’

  I stand up and walk away from him, scanning the myriad children rushing back and forth, carrying full buckets of water, the toddlers with sandy bare bottoms, the older children further out on the lake, sitting atop inflatable crocodiles and flamingos and giant ducks. I can’t see Amalie anywhere, and begin to feel a dull ache in my stomach, a wild flutter of alarm. I didn’t really fall asleep, I can’t have, I must have just closed my eyes for a moment. And then there she is. She’s standing with her back to us, thirty or so meters away, scooping water from a bucket into another little girl’s bucket carefully. I watch her for a moment – the way her Elsa bathing suit is almost too small, even though we bought it less than a month ago, the way her skin seems to have taken on a slightly darker hue already, the sweet way she holds her arms out from her body, encumbered by the matching Queen Elsa armbands, how all her movements seem joyful.

  ‘Look – there she is,’ I say, turning back toward Sindre, pointing her out.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Over there. With that girl.’

  ‘Where?’

  I take his arm and point it in the direction of the little girls.

  ‘There.’

  ‘Ali, that’s not her.’ His words are blurry, like they’ve been spoken under water. I lift my sunglasses – it is her, it has to be her, of course it’s her. I begin to walk toward them, shouting, ‘Amalie,’ but the girl doesn’t turn around, and Sindre follows behind me, then grabs my arm, his eyes anxious, and in his hand, he’s holding one of Amalie’s discarded armbands.

  ‘Look,’ he shouts, though he’s right in front of me, ‘she isn’t wearing her armbands. That girl is!’ I run up to them, stepping into the water so I can get in front
of them to see their faces. He’s right, it isn’t her. Snub nose, broad forehead, blue eyes, not brown. A strange sound, it must be coming from me. The little girls stare, alarmed. I begin to run. Fast, through ankle-deep water, shouting her name. People come running. Everyone looking for her. Voices, many voices, calling her sweet name. Amalie, they shout; Amalie, Amalie, Amalie.

  But she’s gone.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Iselin

  ‘Mamma,’ screams Kaia.

  ‘I’m here, baby,’ I whisper and she looks at me, lucid and serious.

  ‘I almost drowned,’ she says, crying softly.

  ‘What? No, baby. No… You had a bad dream, my sweet girl. Everything’s going to be okay.’

  ‘No, I almost drowned.’

  ‘Shhh,’ I whisper, ‘it was just a dream. A bad, bad dream. You’re going to be okay, my darling.’ I bury my face in her neck, wisps of hair tickling my cheek, and cry with relief. She’s awake, she’s alive, and in spite of everything, I am still the luckiest girl in the world.

  Kaia has been up three times already, and it’s not yet 1 a.m. Each time, I sit with her, smoothing her hair down, singing ‘Clementine’ into her ear, tucking the blankets tighter around her until sleep catches her again. I’ve gotten used to these sleepless nights now and almost can’t remember the way it was before, how she’d sleep the coma-like sleep of the heavily medicated. I’ve taken to staying up until around two o’clock and if I manage that, I stand a good chance of getting a few hours sleep toward the morning. Besides, Kaia tends to wake more in the hour just before midnight and the hour after. Sometimes, I even think it’s nice when she wakes up – the nights can be lonesome.

  Since the operation and the two weeks she spent asleep afterwards, there’s a part of me reluctant to let her sleep at all; my instinct is to constantly check that she’s breathing, that she’s fighting, and that her heart is steady and strong.

  Tomorrow a journalist is coming to talk to us. I didn’t want to do it at first, but when Noa was interviewed by Se Her magazine earlier this autumn, she mentioned her heroic little niece and then the magazine called me and convinced me to do a feature about Kaia to raise awareness for childhood heart disease. They’re doing an ‘at home’ piece and I’ve tidied everything, so it’s nice to sit here, on my fold-out sofa bed, looking at the familiar shapes of our few bits of furniture in the near darkness: the stretch of uncluttered, gleaming floor between the living room and the kitchen suddenly seeming vast. The sound of Kaia’s soft breath travels from the next room and occasionally she lets out an odd little sound, like a kitten mewling. I bring my mind back to the summer day when everything changed, the day the journalist will want to hear all about. The day when the phone finally rang and we tumbled stunned into a taxi, Kaia’s little body curled up in my lap, the way her favorite doctor, Dr Harari, stood waiting on the curb when we arrived and carried her into the children’s clinic, the cool, familiar air of the hospital building, the long hours alone in the waiting room, the prayers, watching rain slamming against the windows, washing away the hot summer air.

  *

  I’ve just fallen asleep when Kaia wakes again, or at least that’s how it feels. I let her slip under the covers and glance at my phone screen – it’s just after 2 a.m. and my eyes are heavy and sore.

  ‘Shhh,’ I say, stroking her hair, gently rocking her tiny body back and forth.

  ‘I’m afraid,’ says Kaia.

  ‘What are you afraid of, Kaia?’ I ask, yawning, still holding her tight.

  ‘The things in the night.’

  ‘What things?’

  ‘The stories when I sleep.’

  ‘Dreams.’

  Kaia’s head bobs up and down in the snug space between my shoulder and my neck as she nods.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘What kind of dreams are they?’ She doesn’t answer, just hangs in my arms like a ragdoll. Kaia never used to remember her dreams before the last few months – the medicines she was on before were so strong any dream would be obliterated, and that is why she keeps waking in the nights now, again and again. The recurring nightmares have become less frequent in the last month, thankfully, and my guess is that it could be down to her feeling generally calmer and more settled in at school. ‘Dreams aren’t dangerous, sweetie, even if they can be scary sometimes. They’re your brain’s way of processing different things.’ Still she doesn’t answer and I realize she’s fallen asleep again. I place her gently back on the bed, and she briefly opens her eyes before they roll back and slide shut. I get up and go into the kitchen.

  I turn on the fluorescent tube light above the sink and pull out my notepad from the drawer where I keep our art supplies. I use a soft charcoal pencil to draw a web of crooked lines across the page. They will become the branches of a tree and on them I will place hundreds of birds, so many of them that their round little bodies will sit pressed closely together like an expectant audience at a pop concert. After penciling in just a couple of the birds, who turn out wobbly and ugly, I grow tired of the stupid drawing and crush it in my hand. I smooth another blank sheet down in front of me, but nothing comes to me. It never used to be like this. Before Kaia, I’d think almost entirely in images, and they’d always willingly be transcribed onto the page. I was often told my drawings were wonderful, and for a long while I thought drawing would become my career. But now it’s as though the images in my mind have left me entirely. I guess that’s hardly surprising. I try one more time, placing the pencil on the new sheet, very gently, and when it moves it is as though by itself.

  I don’t know where I’ve picked up all the details from – perhaps from the endless images and diagrams and illustrations the doctors have presented me with over the years, but apparently, I know how to draw an anatomical heart. When I have finished I draw the outline of a girl around the heart, not much bigger than the organ that powers her.

  When they first told me Kaia’s heart was failing, I thought they would be able to fix it. That it could heal and grow strong. The thing that plays so painfully on my mind, the thing that keeps me up so often at night, is the fact that I never wanted her. That I couldn’t love her until I almost lost her. When they placed her on my chest after almost thirty hours of hell, I turned away. I didn’t want to know the little being who had taken over my body and my life, who had already cost me so much. It wasn’t until I found her, limp and blue, in her cot on the ninth morning of her life, that I realized that everything would be nothing without her.

  That the meningitis didn’t kill her was nothing short of a miracle. A nurse stood all night by Kaia’s incubator as she fought for her life, nudging her hard every few seconds as her heart rate dropped. There was a disabled toilet in the neonatal intensive care unit where I curled up on the floor, dug my nails into my palms and prayed, probably for the first time in my life. Later, I looked up from where I was sitting by her cot and into the eyes of the hospital priest. It’s time to give her a name, he said, before she goes home to God. I stood up very slowly and said, Her name is Kaia. And she’s not going anywhere.

  I get up from the kitchen table and sit on the edge of the sofa bed, watching Kaia sleep. She’s not entirely like before. I always thought my daughter was calm and somewhat dreamy by nature, not just because she’s spent most of her life poorly, but now I wonder if I was wrong. Since the end of July when she finally came home from hospital after the operation, there’s been something slightly restless about Kaia. It’s like she runs on a different gear from before. She’s no longer content to spend a whole day indoors the way she used to. Now, instead of watching rain fall, she wants to splash about in it. It’s what I always wanted for her, ever since the day when she got sick and I knew that my life would never be good unless she was in it, but still, I find this new jittery energy unsettling. Like I don’t know her the way I used to.

  The doctors prepared me for this. Children as young as Kaia who have been sick their whole lives sometimes show remarkable overnight improvemen
t after receiving a new organ. The lucky ones, that is. The ones whose bodies don’t reject the new organs, losing the second chance. I will spend the rest of my life grateful that Kaia got this chance, and I will also spend every day monitoring her for signs of rejection. Transplant patients, especially children, don’t always live long lives, but I will make sure that Kaia lives a good life.

  I run my finger very lightly down the bridge of her nose, and try to see something of myself in my child. Or something of him. I don’t see either; she is so entirely her own person that I’ve sometimes thought I might as well have picked her up from a basket by the roadside. Noa says that Kaia is like a little animal – a strange and wonderful species that has never previously been observed. That always makes Kaia laugh. Noa is good at making her laugh; better than me. I’m good at making Kaia talk, and think; those were the things I could always develop in her, even during the years she spent in the hospital, or the months spent immobile in bed, so weak I had to carry her to the bathroom and bring the straw to her mouth so she could sip blackcurrant juice, her favorite.

  I wish Noa was here now. I miss her.

  I lie down beside Kaia. I picture her heart beating inside her, easily sluicing the blood around its chambers, working like clockwork, the way a heart is supposed to. Then I begin to cry, I just can’t stop myself, and there’s no one here to comfort me.

  *

  I wake to the sound of my phone vibrating loudly on the floor: Noa.

  ‘Kaia called me,’ she says casually, sounding exhausted. She was probably DJing well into the morning hours. I feel a stab of jealousy picturing her in this moment; lounging on the bed she shares with her handsome boyfriend, Enzo, holding a cup of black coffee, looking out at rows of Parisian rooftops outside, a deep blue autumn sky above. I clutch the phone to my ear and glance over at Kaia watching a cartoon in her bedroom; I need to get her bathed and ready for the journalist. She’s tried to braid her own hair the way Noa does it, but it doesn’t look right, and I’ll have to re-braid it before the journalist and her photographer get here. ‘She said she woke in the night because you were crying.’