The Heart Keeper Read online

  ‘That’s not true,’ I say. I can practically see Noa raising her pierced left eyebrow and looking at me in that X-ray way. ‘I’m just tired,’ I say, but to my horror I begin to cry again.

  ‘Hey,’ she says, suddenly alarmed, ‘hey, I’m sorry. That wasn’t a criticism. Of course you’re tired. What you’ve been through is almost impossible to understand.’

  ‘But it’s over now,’ I say, my mind drifting to the incredible contrast between the ghost-child Kaia used to be, and the sprightly, quick-witted child in the next room, laughing raucously at her cartoon, her strong voice rising above Bugs Bunny’s cackle.

  ‘It isn’t, though,’ says Noa, ‘it isn’t over for you. You haven’t processed what you’ve been through, Iselin. You’ve lived in crisis mode for seven years. You haven’t stopped, even for a moment. You’ve been up all night, comforting, administering medicines, praying, loving her so hard, but not giving yourself even an inch of space or a smidgen of love. The rest of your life begins now, and you can start to think about how you want to live it.’

  *

  Noa’s words echo in my head as I speak with the journalist, Kaia playing on the floor by our feet with an expensive new doll the magazine brought as a gift. I speak of the new life, the strange wonderfulness of parenting a healthy child, of my eternal gratitude to the people who made the biggest sacrifice I can imagine so that my child could live, and these things are true, but still, Noa’s words won’t release their grip on my heart. It’s not over, though. It isn’t over for you. The rest of your life begins now… What are you going to do with it?

  Chapter Nineteen

  Alison

  When I finish speaking, Karen Fritz has tears in her eyes.

  ‘She was gone,’ I say. ‘It was my fault.’

  ‘I feel so much empathy for you, Alison,’ says Karen, even though I’ve essentially just described to her how I killed my own child. I laugh a little at that, and I think she understands that it’s the hollow laugh of disbelief. ‘I’d like us to work toward you being able to feel that same kind of empathy for yourself.’ I laugh again but now it’s the softer kind that quickly becomes inseparable from the crying it tries to disguise.

  ‘It was my fault.’

  ‘It was nobody’s fault. It was an accident. A terrible, incomprehensible accident.’

  ‘It was my fault,’ I say, again. ‘Everybody knows that. If I hadn’t fallen asleep…’

  ‘But you did. That doesn’t make it your fault. It makes it a very tragic accident.’

  ‘My husband blames me.’

  ‘Is that what he says?’

  ‘No. But I can tell. He’s different toward me now. Sometimes, when he looks at me, I can see pure, solid hate.’ Karen listens, inclines her head slightly, face serious.

  ‘It must be difficult to be around someone you believe blames you.’

  ‘Of course he blames me. How could he not? If it were the other way around, I would have held him fully responsible.’

  ‘Or it could be that he empathizes with you in a way you are unable to accept?’

  I shake my head curtly. It’s always the same with these people – instead of just recognizing facts for facts, they have to read between the lines and draw conclusions that aren’t correct. I don’t want to talk to Karen anymore or pretend like this might help. I dig my nails into the sore skin of my palms and try to envision my mind as a calm, blank space.

  ‘You know, every day I wonder if today is the day. The day I can’t take it for another fucking second. Every day I wonder if today is that day.’

  ‘Alison. You know that I am morally and legally obliged to notify your GP if I believe you are at risk of taking your own life. Do I need to put you on suicide watch?’ Karen Fritz speaks softly, her eyes searching mine. I wonder whether she ever thinks about me outside of these sessions, whether she finds it hard to let go of the images I speak of; the compulsive thoughts of death, the solid, terrifying darkness I live inside, the broken husband, the child under water.

  ‘No,’ I say, softly, though perhaps I should have said yes.

  *

  I walk slowly up Frognerveien toward Majorstuen station; I’m the only one walking and the people in buses and trams stare at me as I push forward through onslaughts of rain. Or maybe they don’t, maybe they don’t see me at all, sensing that I’m only half here. My breath is short and painful, but my mouth is shut tight against the rainwater, and several times I have to stop in doorways to recover before I can walk any further.

  I reach the station and sink down on a dry, warm seat on the 1-line toward home, resting my wet hair against the window glass, watching the blur of buildings slipping past. I contemplate whether what I said to Karen Fritz was true or not, whether I truly pose a risk to myself. I’ve always believed that the human instinct for survival is stronger than any other force. Even in my darkest hours, I have managed to refrain from playing out suicidal thoughts in my head. They would appear, constantly, but I somehow chased them away, directing my entire focus on breathing, drinking water, taking pills, screaming. I must have believed that if I could live through those first days and weeks, it would eventually get easier. But it doesn’t.

  I feel lulled by the rhythmic clunk of the train, reminded of the latest sign from Amalie. I get off at Vettakollen station, though it isn’t the closest to home. Up here, three hundred meters above sea level, the rain has thickened into slushy fat snowflakes. I start walking up the long hill toward the school we had chosen for Amalie; the school she never got to start at. I can already hear the children – it’s almost two o’clock and they will be on their last recess before pick-up time. I pause and glance down at my bare hands, raw from the cold, and try to find some of that empathy for myself Karen Fritz talked about. Are these the hands of a murderer? Are they the hands of a dead woman? I try to imagine Karen’s face if she could see me now – standing silently in the falling snow, partially hidden by a red wooden fence, watching the busy bodies of other people’s children rushing around a schoolyard.

  I watch a little girl sitting alone on a bench, then a little boy lying on his back on a patch of snow, moving his arms and legs. I take in a chubby girl who looks a bit sickly. And another who looks vaguely like Amalie when I squint. Of course, I know that it isn’t one of these children. He or she could be anyone, anywhere. But somewhere, my daughter’s heart is guarded deep inside the body of a stranger. And I want to find it.

  Chapter Twenty

  Alison

  The slushy snow has let up by the time I reach the top of the hill, and our house. I let myself in, push my feet into my slippers, and walk into the kitchen. Music is playing; the Beach Boys, I think, and Sindre stands at the kitchen counter, dicing onions and garlic. His movements are quick and precise, and he looks like any other guy, just going about his normal life. I’m surprised; he’s barely been out of bed since the hunting trip.

  ‘Hi,’ he says, smiling carefully, trying to gauge which version of Alison just walked through the door.

  ‘Hi,’ I say.

  ‘Your face is red. Have you been to see Misty? You okay?’

  ‘No. No, I walked here from Vettakollen.’ He nods, and doesn’t ask me why I would have chosen to do that. I make a mental note to go see Amalie’s pony tomorrow. He stabs at a plastic packet of chicken strips with his knife and tosses its contents into the pan with the garlic and onion.

  ‘I didn’t realize you’d be cooking,’ I say. ‘I already bought dinner. But I guess we can have that tomorrow instead.’

  ‘It’s my turn,’ he says, and I nod, as though it’s completely normal he’s suddenly started keeping tabs on whose turn it is. ‘Oliver will be here by six.’

  ‘I’m glad you’re feeling better,’ I say, but my voice comes out harsh, like I’m accusing him of something, and perhaps I am. He notices and shoots me a sharp glance.

  ‘We need to… to try. To keep moving. Right?’

  ‘Of course,’ I say, softly now, and take the glass of
wine my husband has poured me.

  *

  And now, the three of us carefully and mechanically negotiate the ritual of Friday night tacos. Can you pass the cheese, is there any more cilantro, oh yum, I do love tacos. Sindre doesn’t say a word, he just keeps his eyes on the food, chewing carefully, expression neutral, probably out of fear of saying or doing something that will bring that aching black silence crashing down over us. Oliver looks from his father to me and back constantly, never succeeding in holding onto more than a quick glance from either of us. I feel a sudden stab of empathy for him.

  ‘What’s up, Oliver?’ I say. ‘You look like there’s something on your mind.’ Oliver shakes his head slowly but when my eyes meet his, I can tell there’s something he wants to say.

  Sindre stares at him, and Oliver reverts his gaze to the plate. He’s too hard on him. I don’t think we should stop Oliver from asking questions, or talking about Amalie. I want to talk about her, and I want Oliver to feel that he can still mention her, but it’s as though Sindre wants to pretend she never existed, as though she didn’t change every single second of our lives for almost six years, and always will.

  ‘Do you remember how Amalie’s idea of the perfect taco was basically a tortilla with a couple of pieces of cucumber on it?’ I say, smiling slightly at that memory, but the burning immediately flares up inside me and I have to focus on maintaining a little smile, on allowing myself one moment untouched by grief. Oliver lights up and nods.

  ‘Yeah, and how she’d always say “extra hot sauce please”, meaning ketchup?’

  ‘Yes,’ I continue, ‘and that time she insisted on putting strawberry jam on top of her chicken and cucumber and I made her eat the whole thing, and she pretended like it was the best thing she’d ever had? The stubbornest kid I’ve met in my entire life.’ We laugh a little. Sindre gets up, slowly.

  ‘Running,’ he says.

  When he’s gone, and we’ve gathered the plates, my stepson and I sit listening to the drum of rain on the windowpanes. He used to call me Mamma Alison. I look at him and in this moment I don’t know what he means to me – he could be anybody; a random teenager with a hoodie and unreadable eyes you might cross the road to avoid.

  ‘I think I’ll go for a walk,’ I say. I just have to get out of this house.

  ‘But it’s dark,’ says Oliver. ‘It might rain again.’

  ‘I don’t mind,’ I say softly, smiling at him with affection I’m not sure I feel.

  ‘Can I come?’ says Oliver.

  ‘No, sweetie. I… I just need to think a little.’

  *

  The conference hotel further down the road toward Voksenkollen is practically empty, and the receptionist looks at me with slight disdain as I walk in from the wet night, water pooling at my feet.

  ‘Um, is the bar open?’ I ask, and the receptionist, a young girl with hair dyed a silvery blonde turns around, as if a colleague would suddenly materialize behind her.

  ‘Yes…’ she says. ‘We don’t normally get walk-in guests, but… I’ll see if someone can serve you.’

  I settle into a wide, cushy leather chair and after a long while, a tall, boyish man with a thin goatee appears.

  ‘What would you like to drink, madam?’

  ‘A double vodka tonic,’ I say, smiling disarmingly to hopefully distract from the fact that I am a soaking wet deranged woman who walked in from a forest in the middle of a rainstorm. When he returns with my drink, I notice how kind the young man’s eyes are. I look away, and stare at the ice floating in my glass.

  ‘Is everything okay, madam?’ he asks. ‘We just had two hundred Danish doctors here all week, but they left this afternoon, so I’m all yours if you need an ear.’ I shake my head slowly, but smile at him. As he walks away I take my phone from my pocket and google ‘heart transplant cellular memory’ again. I want more stories, more hope. I finish my drink and order another and for a long while I just sit scrolling through articles and interviews, drinking in the words I long to hear. Stories of a mother meeting her daughter’s donor recipient and recognizing traits of her lost child. Stories of close friendships forged between the families of donors and recipients, from Scotland to France to the States. It’s real, and not just something I dreamed up. One woman even says she feels like she and her donor merged into one person after receiving a new heart.

  I feel the bartender’s eyes on me as the tears begin to fall from my eyes, onto the touch screen of my phone. I smile because these aren’t sad tears; they are the happiest tears in the world, tears of hope. I feel the sudden need to be at home, to run my hands along the little plastic animals Amalie collected and lined up on the windowsill, to hold my stepson tight and show him that I do love him and want him around me. I want to tell him that it felt good to talk about Amalie with him at dinner, and that most of the time I can’t feel anything other than the burning, but I did then. I place three hundred kroner on the table and walk back out into the night.

  *

  The house is quiet. Sindre’s running shoes, caked in mud, are on the doormat. I hope he’s gone to bed. Upstairs, I listen at Oliver’s door before knocking softly. He opens the door immediately, as though he’s been standing behind it, waiting for someone to come. I’m not sure what I’m doing here, but right now it feels as though Oliver is the only person I can speak to in this family. I was cold toward him earlier, and I want to make amends.

  ‘I wondered about something,’ I say. ‘You know a while back, when we talked about the… the donations?’ Oliver nods, his tired eyes blinking several times. ‘Well, I’ve been wondering about it. About whose lives were saved. And also, whether… God, it sounds so crazy… Just… I guess I wonder whether anything of her, even the tiniest thing, might have passed into whoever received her organs, you know?’

  Oliver nods again, and he pulls me over to the little chair by the window. I sit, and he sits across from me on his messy unmade bed, our knees touching.

  ‘I’ve been thinking about this stuff a lot.’ He looks both relieved and sheepish.

  ‘I thought so.’

  ‘I’ve googled a lot.’

  ‘Me too,’ I say.

  ‘I want to believe it,’ says Oliver. ‘But also, I kind of… don’t.’

  ‘I know what you mean. I also wanted to say that you can talk to me about it, and about Amalie, whenever you want, even if Pappa finds it very difficult.’

  ‘Yeah,’ he says finally, fiddling with the edge of the duvet cover. ‘Do you remember how much she loved strawberries? Like, strawberries everything – strawberry ice cream, strawberry prints, strawberry coulis, strawberries in a salad. Imagine if the kid who got her heart or whatever suddenly started liking them? Or something else she loved, like bears, or ponies, or the color green, or cheeseburgers with extra onion rings, or those funny little farm animals…’

  ‘Sylvanians,’ I say, and we both smile. Amalie used to sleep with lots of Sylvanians in her bed, and when she rolled over at night, they’d leave imprints on her face, so she’d wake with vivid red bunny ears on her forehead, or a bear’s tiny hand on her chin.

  ‘What was that joke she was always telling?’ asks Oliver.

  ‘Oh, God,’ I say, and start to laugh before I even fully remember it. ‘Oh, what was it? Oh! Why can’t you give Queen Elsa a balloon?’

  Oliver’s face cracks into a wide smile, and he releases a muffled bark of a laugh. ‘Because she’ll let it go!’

  We both laugh so hard we’re crying, but for once these tears are okay, the laughter doesn’t turn into howling, and when we eventually settle down, we’re wiping at running eyes but smiling. It’s a long while before either of us breaks the silence.

  ‘Can we find out who received her heart and stuff?’ asks Oliver.

  ‘I don’t know… I don’t think so. I’d imagine it would be anonymous.’

  ‘Maybe I wouldn’t want to know,’ says Oliver. ‘It might make it even worse, that another kid is alive because Amalie isn’t.’


  ‘But it isn’t like that, honey. She wouldn’t be here now even if we hadn’t donated her organs. And the other child might be dead, too. At least this way, one child is still alive.’

  ‘I wish that child was Amalie,’ says Oliver. ‘I love having a sister.’

  His use of the present tense takes my breath away. I wonder if he sees her in his mind the way I do, chasing him around the house in her diaper as a toddler, laughing hysterically behind her pacifier, arms flailing, fat little legs pumping. Falling asleep in his lap at the cabin after a long day skiing, the way he’d just sit there, cradling her and smiling.

  ‘Let’s try to find her,’ he whispers.

  I shake my head because we can’t, we mustn’t, of course we can’t. I’m going to speak to Karen Fritz about this, and she’ll tell me exactly how insane all of this surely is, but still, inside my heart is racing and insisting – yes, yes, yes.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Iselin

  It’s Christmas in a week, and I have less than three thousand kroner in my account. Every month I have a meeting with the social workers at NAV, where I have to discuss my efforts to find a job or prove why I can’t work. I’m hoping they will be understanding today – though Kaia is better now and I could technically start working, it’s taking us a while to get settled in this new life. I push the door open and step into a crowded, overheated waiting room. Avoiding the eyes of the other people, I flick through a dog-eared copy of Se Her from September, and practice what I’m going to say in my head. Surely there must be some extra support for single parents of sick children in the run-up to Christmas?

  ‘Iselin Berge?’ It’s the same lady I met with last month, a sour-faced woman in her fifties who reminds me of my mother. Her name badge reads ‘Else’. She shows me into a cramped office with a glass wall looking into another similar office, empty. I’m surprised to see a little star tattoo emerge from her sleeve as she shuffles my case papers around on the desk. For a terrible moment, I imagine ending up as her – an angry, faded woman in a boring job.