by Alex Dahl
‘That… that thing you said,’ I whisper, ‘the thing about hugging on both sides… Did she not do that… before?’
‘No.’
‘That’s just so fascinating.’
‘There are other things, too…’ Iselin looks at me intently, as if judging whether I can handle it if she continues. Her hand is resting gingerly on top of mine, though she has finished wrapping a second bandage around it. ‘Like, now she keeps wanting sparkling drinks. She hated them before. “I love how it pops in my throat,” she says.’ Iselin pauses and it occurs to me that we hear what we want to hear – Amalie never cared for sparkling drinks, so I’m not interested in this piece of information. ‘Also,’ continues Iselin, ‘her drawings are different…’
‘Different how?’
‘When she was little she used to draw, I don’t know, Disney stuff. Princesses and witches and that kind of thing. And then she got progressively really good at drawing, and used to copy a lot of the stuff I draw. Especially birds. Kaia loves birds. But lately she keeps drawing these bears… Funny little bears. They’re very good, actually. I just find it a little odd, this sudden focus on them.’
What was I playing at? Why did I ask her to come here? I can’t think of a worse form of self-torture. I was wrong to think I could handle this – I cannot. I pull my hand out from underneath Iselin’s, and, mindful of every movement and the tone of my voice, I clear my throat and speak.
‘Iselin, thank you so much for coming here, and for helping me. I’m sorry about the mess. I think I should lie down now. I’ll call you a taxi.’ Iselin looks startled and mortified at my sudden change in tone, as though she has just said something extremely offensive.
‘But… I can’t just leave you here, like this.’ We both glance at the pool of red wine and blood, sprinkled with tiny shards of sparkling crystal on the floor, and at the sticky, darkening blood stains on the coffee table.
‘It’s fine,’ I say, standing up, moving toward the kitchen to look for my phone so I can call her a taxi.
‘Alison… Alison, is everything okay here? You know, at home? I… I know we don’t know each other, I just… I just feel like maybe something is wrong.’
‘Iselin. It’s fine,’ I say, steering her back toward the hallway, opening the Oslo Taxi app with my unbandaged left hand. She needs to go, right now. I feel faint and hot, and my right hand is throbbing hard.
‘Sometimes it helps to talk to a stranger,’ she says, smiling sympathetically.
‘Yes,’ I say. ‘But I just need to go to bed now. A taxi is on its way,’ I turn the screen to show her the taxi on the map, inching its way up toward us, at the very top of the city.
‘A taxi will be hundreds of kroner… I live in Østerås… I can’t…’
‘It’s prepaid,’ I say, smiling and handing her the bulky navy jacket, making a plume of feathers emerge from a rip on the underside of the sleeve. She looks embarrassed and upset, and I have to use all my control to stop myself from just shoving her out the door. The lights from the taxi finally sweep across the driveway outside and I open the door before Iselin has had a chance to put her shoes on. She looks on the verge of tears as she gets into the car, and I try my best to give her a reassuring smile, but, like her little daughter, I have the uncomfortable feeling that she can see straight through me.
Inside, I walk fast back into the living room. It looks like a murder scene, and this actually makes me laugh out loud. It is a laugh that becomes coughing, then sobs, unleashing my horror and shock at Iselin’s words. I go into the kitchen and a grunting, wild sound hollers around the room as I open the low cupboard where we kept Amalie’s cups and special plates, the little pink plates with bear faces, because she loved them. Dinky Bear, Gruffalo, Goldilocks… I fling them to the floor, one after the other, until all that remains are shards.
I sit down on the floor in the kitchen among the pink shards, and stare into the living room through the wide archway, at the glass, the blood, the wine. I grab my phone and call Sindre. I want to tell him about the hugs on both sides. About the bears. It rings for a long time but then he picks up, voice groggy. I open my mouth to speak, but realize I can’t, because how would I tell my husband that I sat around drinking wine with the mother of the girl with Amalie’s heart, that I believe her to hold something of Amalie within her because she suddenly likes to hug her mother a certain way?
‘Honey?’ asks Sindre, no doubt hearing my short, heavy breathing.
I hang up. I put the phone on the floor and wait for him to call back, but he doesn’t. I go into the kitchen and begin to clear up the mess, using only my left hand, exhaustion seeping into my limbs. When I finish, I wrap another gauze layer around my right hand – blood is still seeping through. Then I go upstairs and stand a while at the door to Amalie’s room before entering. In her desk drawer, I find what I’m looking for. A thick stack of drawings, page after page of bears. Bears riding bicycles, bears dining in restaurants – meticulously penciled food on the table in front of them, bears flying planes, bears playing volleyball on the beach.
Chapter Thirty-Six
Iselin
I’m covered in blood. I only realized it in the taxi. My fingernails are encrusted with it, as though I’d fought Alison off; it’s all over my shirt, and smudged on my face, even. I unlock the door as silently as I can and cross the corridor to the bathroom without switching the lights on, but even so, Noa has heard me and knocks on the door before I’ve finished washing the blood off. I don’t open it until it’s all gone, and the hand towel lies soaked and rust-colored beneath my scrunched-up shirt on the floor. I switch off the light as I pull the door open, trying my best to keep my expression neutral, but Noa stares suspiciously at me – she knows me too well.
‘Ummm, what is going on?’ she asks, taking in my upper body – bare except for my bra, my scrubbed, pink skin, goosebumps rising with her gaze.
‘I, uh, walked home from the station and got really warm so I decided to have a little rinse. That’s all.’
‘Before even saying hi?’
‘I thought you’d be asleep.’
‘Come on.’ Noa is a night owl and we both know that I know that. The problem with being around my sister is that there just isn’t any room for pretense.
‘How’s Kaia?’ I ask, walking into the living room, where Noa has already prepared the sofa bed for the night.
‘Fine. Now will you tell me what’s going on?’ I stare at her tired, pinched face. Her fingernails look painfully chewed-down, and the skin on her neck is blotchy and red where her headphones have chafed against it. I burst into tears. I’m as surprised as Noa, but the tears come suddenly and feel unstoppable. Like I knew she would, she pulls me close. I stay there, closing my eyes and breathing in the scent of her – detergent, a simple, floral perfume, and something sweet like cookies or cake, perhaps she and Kaia baked. I try not to think of the strange and disturbing scenes at Alison’s house, but I can’t protect myself from the image of her sitting completely still on the floor, covered in blood and glass, just staring emptily out in front of her.
‘Nothing,’ I say. ‘Just… I feel really tired. Overwhelmed, I guess.’
‘What did that lady think of the drawings?’
‘I think she really liked them. Just… She’s a little, I don’t know…’ Noa raises an eyebrow, and I want to continue, but I don’t know what to say.
‘A little what?’
‘I can’t really explain it. She just seems a little dazed. I mean, she clearly has this amazing life – you should have seen her house. Views across the city, all modern and sleek. I’ve never been to a house like it before.’
‘Why would you think she has an amazing life just because her house is all perfect?’ This is typical Noa – always trying to second-guess what I’m saying, trying to catch me out as this shallow, twisted person. I exhale and sit down in the green chair, kicking my slippers off and undoing my hair.
‘Never mind,’ I say. ‘I’m gettin
g in the shower.’
‘I’m off to bed. My flight’s at ten in the morning.’
*
I scrub the skin on my arms and legs hard with the wiry side of a sponge, and let new tears run with the rushing water. It felt nice to talk to Alison about the changes in Kaia; sometimes it really does help to speak with a stranger. But there is something about her that unsettles me. She mentioned that she used to write features from all over the world, maybe she misses that kind of life. There is something fascinating about her, too; she’s so intense, and clearly someone who would have a lot of stories to tell. I’d like to hear them, and could see us being friends, but can’t imagine she’d find me very interesting, though she did seem interested in hearing about Kaia – maybe she was just being polite.
I think about Kaia sleeping in the next room, her new heart lumbering on, beneath all the scars. Again, I wonder what they did with the other heart, the one she was born with, the broken one. Most likely they incinerate the hearts and lungs and livers and kidneys that don’t work anymore. It makes me sad to think of all biological trace of it being gone, but what would I have done with it? Buried it? Could it be that something of Kaia has gone with it? Could it really be that cells hold something that can be transferred to others? That memories and feelings are held not only in the brain, but also in the heart?
I switch off the shower and stand a while in the steamy cubicle, a hand placed around my breast, over my heart. I imagine the thick veins and arteries anchoring it in my chest, the intricate chambers cleansing pool after pool of blood. I imagine it crumbling, cut open and torn apart, rotting and dried out. I’ll be up tonight, alone with these thoughts, with my baby girl and Noa sleeping next door, with the images of Alison drenched in her own blood, with the new drawing I’m going to start on.
I sit at the kitchen table in the near-dark. Two scented candles burn on the kitchen counter, sending flickering shadows up the walls. I begin to draw, and it comes easily to me tonight. Hearts again; I sketch the outline of two halves of an anatomical heart, in cross-section, leaving a space open in the middle. I google images of hearts for a while on my phone, making sure I get all the details right in the drawing; the soft curves of the semi-lunar valves, the pulmonary veins and arteries breaking off into thin air like snapped twigs, the thick bend of the aortic arch like the neck of a swan. When I’ve finished, I sit a while studying the sketch. I get up and look through the cupboards. I feel like another glass of wine, and am sure I’ve got a bottle left over from Christmas somewhere.
I pour the deep-red Malbec slowly, my hand steadying the wine glass as though it may suddenly shatter in my fingers.
*
I must have fallen asleep. When I wake, Kaia is sitting across from me, watching me.
‘Hey honey,’ I say, sitting up, disoriented. I can’t have been asleep long; the candles are still burning, the sky is pitch-black. ‘How long have you been sitting there?’
‘A long time. Four minutes, maybe.’ I smile at her and take her hand across the table.
‘Where were you last night?’
‘I went to see a friend.’
Kaia nods thoughtfully. ‘Can I draw with you?’
‘Honey, it’s two o’clock in the morning…’ I can’t even think which day tomorrow is, then remember it’s Wednesday and Kaia will need to get up for school. ‘Let’s go to bed, sweetie.’
‘Just one drawing.’ She gazes intently at me, and I have to look away – the flickering candlelight is making her look eerie and dangerously gaunt. I swallow hard, and again I think about the strange changes in Kaia since her surgery in July, and my conversation with Alison.
‘Okay,’ I say, sliding a thick piece of sketching paper across the table to her. ‘Just one.’ We sit in silence a long while; the only sound in the room that of the crayons sweeping across the paper.
‘Was it that lady who came to the studio?’ asks Kaia, her voice startling me.
‘Uh, yes, actually. It was.’
‘Alison,’ she says.
‘Yes. Alison.’
‘I loved her.’
‘You loved her? You mean liked, probably.’
‘No, I mean loved. I loved her. You said if you like someone very, very much then that’s love.’ Kaia has stopped drawing and is looking at me with something unfamiliar – defiance, or annoyance.
‘Well,’ I say, laughing dismissively, ‘she is a really nice lady. What… What did you like the most about her?’
‘Her eyes,’ says Kaia. ‘She had old eyes.’
‘Old eyes?’
‘Yeah.’
‘What does that mean?’
Kaia shrugs, then theatrically stretches her arms toward the ceiling. A thin crack runs from the top of the window to the center of the ceiling where it disappears into the plastic fitting of the overhead lamp. I blink a couple of times, I am so tired I can barely keep my eyes open, but inside, I feel a growing disquiet. Kaia stands up slowly. ‘I want to go to bed.’
I nod and pull her toward me.
She pulls back slightly and looks at me. ‘I missed you.’
‘When?’
‘When you went to see Alison.’
‘But you were asleep.’
‘I still missed you.’
‘But I bet you had fun with Noa.’
Kaia doesn’t react to this, just keeps looking at me. ‘Can you take me with you next time you see her?’
‘I don’t know that there will be a next time, sweetie. We don’t know each other well.’
‘Oh.’ She scrunches her eyebrows together, as though this is a surprise.
‘What did you mean about Alison having old eyes, Kaia?’
Her expression remains intense and serious, and though she is looking at me, she seems far away. ‘Nothing, maybe.’
This makes me smile – Kaia has been saying ‘Nothing, maybe’ since she was tiny. I pick her up – she is still as short and slight as a five-year-old – and carry her over to the sofa bed. She falls asleep immediately, mouth dropping open, eyes chasing dreams beneath her eyelids, clenched fists falling open. I go back into the kitchen to double check that I blew out both candles. On my way back to bed I glance at the kitchen table, at my drawing, and then at Kaia’s. She’s drawn bears again, in school this time, five of them sitting on little desks in front of a big teacher bear in the front. I find the bears with their round black eyes unnerving, and without thinking I grab both Kaia’s drawing and my own and crush them into a tight ball in my hand.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Alison
I couldn’t sleep. This is hardly a new thing, but even after I took Temazepam I kept jerking into an alert, raw kind of consciousness, interspersed with periods of fitful rest. I finally fell asleep when the night sky was weakening into a pale gray. My first thought when I woke again just after ten this morning, was how strangely I behaved toward Iselin. She’s just a kid, and she came all the way here when I asked her to, even though it might have struck her as odd. I should have unwrapped both of the drawings, calmly admired them, and shown her where they would hang. I should have had a glass of wine with her and told her some of the old stories from when I was traipsing around Thailand instead of encouraging a dangerous conversation about cellular memory and heart transplants. It must have been a crazy turn, to strike up contact with Iselin and Kaia in the first place, and now I need to stay away. But I’m not sure I can. Because more than I need to stay away, I need to stay close to that which remains of my daughter, held inside Kaia.
My second thought is how badly my hand hurts – could I have severed something important? I hold my bandaged hand up to the shaft of light coming in through the gap in the curtains; it’s soaked through with blood and, sitting up, I realize that the bed, too, is covered in long, brown streaks of dried blood.
I go downstairs, and in the daylight, it’s obvious I missed more than a few places when cleaning up last night. There are splatters of blood or wine alongside the base of the sofa, and tiny
shards of glass I’ve missed catch the sunlight, twinkling like stones in a river. I stand by the sink and unwind the red-brown gauze bandage. My uncovered right hand is swollen and blue all over, and the gash in the center of my palm produces fresh, black beads of blood when I gently flex my fingers. I soak a cotton wool pad in iodine and place it over the wound, closing my eyes against the pain, then leave the cotton wool there before winding a new, long stream of gauze firmly around my hand. Then I get down on my hands and knees and run several moist pads over the floor.
I stand up and look out the window. An eerie mist is drifting out from the forest, lending the weak February sun a milky glow. I want to be out there, walking slowly into the forest without a plan, without going anywhere in particular. I open the door and take a couple of breaths of cold air. I feel sharp today, like I should do something other than sit at home. My phone vibrates in my back pocket: a text message from Sindre.
Hi honey, I tried to call you back last night but you didn’t pick up. My dinner ran late. You okay? Looks like it would be really useful to stay another day – okay if I change my flight to tomorrow afternoon?
I take another couple of deep breaths, unsettled by how relieved I feel. I decide to go for a walk in the forest. But first, a phone call. It has just occurred to me how I might get Iselin to forgive me for my strange behavior.
‘Hello?’ Iselin picks up on the first ring. This isn’t a thought-through conversation and at the sound of her voice I realize that I need to tread carefully here.
‘Uh, hi,’ I say, softly. ‘Yeah. This is Alison. I wanted to apologize for last night.’
‘No need,’ says Iselin, though she sounds a little weary. ‘Are you okay?’
‘Yes, absolutely. It wasn’t half as bad as it looked. Just a cut. Anyway, listen. I was thinking about what you said, about wanting to work more. You’re so talented – I just hung the drawings up this morning, and they really are just something else.’ I glance over at the cylinder still holding the drawings, and take a deep breath before continuing. ‘I used to work for Dagbladet, when I first came to Norway. And I’ve freelanced for pretty much everyone from Aftenposten to VG to KK. For the past three years, I’ve been features editor at Speilet. I’m… I’m taking some time out at the moment, to… to write a book. Maybe. Hopefully. But I… uh, I know a lot of people in the industry and good illustrators are always in demand. Would it be helpful if I, say, sent a couple of emails to some editors I know with a link to your work?’