The sun began to lower in the sky, people reached for jackets and Gabby brought out a mohair rug for Monty’s lap. He momentarily looked as though he might wave her away, but then she gave him the stern eye and he nodded and allowed her to lay it across him, tucking it around his ribs. The chargrilled feast had been devoured, along with the entire island of pavlova. The six kids had disappeared inside – Summer still wasn’t here – their activities carrying them to different parts of the house.
The oldest boys were holed up in Charlie’s room doing whatever it was their generation did on their phones. Not that Gabby was too concerned; Charlie’s best mates were also studious and level-headed. They were different from other kids Gabby saw at the school, not loud and pushy like so many of the footballers, or foulmouthed and jittery like the basketballers who sat on the brick wall at the school gates. She kept thinking that girls would pop up on his radar at any moment, but thankfully not yet. He was self-possessed – her illness had forced him to grow up quickly – and she needed to trust him.
In the middle of the outdoor table was a huge vase filled with the most gorgeous, exquisitely fragrant white lilies. They were a gift from Monty, who’d signed the card from Mum and Dad, which had made Gabby cry with longing for her mother. The scent moved around them, coming and going like a silk scarf dancing on the breeze. Gabby had all but given up alcohol after her surgery in an effort to keep her new heart healthy, but today she held a rare glass of bubbles and sipped slowly, savouring the taste, silently identifying the flavours of woods and berries.
Thank you.
She’d lost count of how many times she’d said it today.
Thank you to my donor, thank you to my donor’s family, thank you to science, thank you to the doctors and nurses, thank you to the incredible luck of the draw that granted me more years here with my beautiful family.
Thank you to him. She’d always felt her donor was a man.
She’d written to her donor’s family almost two years ago, as each recipient was encouraged to do. She’d been extra lucky in that she’d been permitted out of hospital just two weeks after the operation. Another member of her transplant support group had been in hospital for three months, with several serious bouts of rejection, and kidney failure too. She said the setbacks had affected her mental health so badly, with no fresh air or sunshine, endless noise, no privacy or independence of any kind, that if she’d known how awful it would be she wouldn’t have gone ahead with the surgery at all. She would have chosen to die. But Gabby’s surgery had gone well and all indications were that her body had accepted this foreign entity as its own, with not a single episode of rejection. She’d got off lightly indeed.
Her surgeon was George Thanos, a man she had been relieved to observe had woolly tufts above his ears that were decidedly greying, indicating a lot of experience under his belt. She didn’t think she could have been so optimistic if the surgeon had been younger than she was. George was shorter than Gabby and wore glasses, the one thing that made her slightly nervous about him – could he see everything properly? Not that she had much choice, of course; it was either George or die. She chose George.
George had seen her soon after the surgery, maybe even the next day, though the early days in ICU were a little hazy. But he’d stood next to her and smiled. She remembered that because it was a big, confident, winning smile, one that told her they’d done well.
‘It’s a great-looking heart you’ve got yourself in there,’ he said, raising his eyebrows and grinning with glee as if they’d got away with something akin to a casino heist. ‘Very good. It went in nicely. If I was a betting man, I’d wager my house that you and that heart will have a long and happy life together.’
‘How do you know?’ she’d croaked, her voice still raspy from the breathing tube that had been down her throat while she was under the anaesthetic.
He’d opened his mouth as if to speak with well-worn authority, then paused. ‘Do you garden?’ he asked.
‘What?’ She was highly medicated and rather confused.
‘Have you ever gardened? Roses? Vegetables?’
‘Oh.’ She’d had to pull her mind back to the days before the virus, back to when she’d been able to breathe properly and been active. ‘Yes, a bit. Flowers and herbs mostly.’
He nodded. ‘Then you know that feeling you get when you’re planting a seedling and it goes in just right? It’s like the roots have taken before you’ve even finished covering it with soil. It looks strong and vital and you know when you go out to water it the next day it will probably have grown a new shoot overnight. Do you know what I mean?’
‘Yes, I do.’ She’d had that experience and she’d had the opposite too, when a seedling just didn’t come out of the container cleanly, she’d felt the roots break away and seen the little plant droop almost immediately, and no matter how carefully she built it up with soil and watered it she’d known it had simply lost the will to live and wouldn’t make it.
George’s eyes glinted behind his glasses. ‘They don’t call it a transplant for nothing.’ He patted her arm. ‘You’re going to be just fine.’
Writing the letter to her donor’s family had been incredibly difficult. Nothing sounded good enough. She couldn’t possibly express the depth of her gratitude or the sadness she felt for their own loss, or the empathy for how emotional a decision it must have been for them.
She felt guilty in so many ways: for living when their loved one was dead, for not being able to make the words on the page say what she wanted them to say, for eating a chocolate muffin (was that really taking care of her heart as she’d mentally promised them?), and most of all for truly not knowing whether, if the situation had been reversed, if it had been her child lying in that bed on life support, with no chance of recovery, that she could have made the same choice to donate.
Somehow, after dozens of attempts, and consultation with Pippa and her parents, she’d got something down on the page. Less was more, they all agreed.
‘Keep it simple,’ Pippa kept saying, slashing through words with a glittery green pen.
‘Tell them about your children,’ her father had advised from the corner of the lounge room, the financial pages of the paper open in front of him.
‘I can’t,’ Gabby said. ‘No personal details are allowed.’
Monty had flicked his paper to the side to gaze over his reading glasses at her. ‘Not even that you are a mother?’
‘Nope,’ Gabby sighed.
‘That’s ridiculous. What family wouldn’t want to know that their donation had saved a mother’s life for her three young children?’ he grumped.
‘But what if the donor had been a young woman too?’ Pippa chimed in. ‘What if she’d been a mother herself? That actually might make them feel rather shitty, that Gabby is here and their daughter or mother or wife isn’t. Sorry, Gab.’
‘Well, what’s left to say?’ Lottie had said. ‘I’m sorry for your loss, and thanks for the heart.’
Sally had come and leaned her body against Gabby’s legs at that moment and Gabby had realised – as had her sister and parents – that this conversation was causing her stress. The golden retriever’s presence was a large, visual indication that Gabby’s heart rate and cortisol levels had risen. Everyone backed off immediately. Gabby took a deep breath and stroked Sally’s ears.
Pippa was probably right – the shorter the better. Besides, the hospital would edit it and remove anything that might give away any personal details.
Four months after the operation, it was done.
Aside from my unending gratitude, the only thing I have to offer you in return is this: that I will look after my new heart with the care that it deserves, and together I hope we will live a long and healthy life.
‘So, Gabby,’ Harvey said from across the table, his humour having been improved by a few glasses of wine. ‘How are you feeling about your transplant today?’ She was surprised: it was unlike Harvey to raise potentially emotional topics. Monty
and Pippa turned to Gabby to wait for her answer.
‘I feel bloody lucky.’
‘As do we,’ Monty said, raising his glass. ‘To Gabby.’
‘To Gabby,’ echoed Pippa and Harvey.
‘Hello?’
Gabby looked up to see Summer standing at the back door of the house. She was wearing jeans and a light grey jumper, her blonde hair pulled back into a long ponytail and shimmering like something from a shampoo commercial.
‘Sweetheart!’ Gabby pushed back her chair and went to hug her. ‘How are you feeling?’
‘All good. Twenty-four hours since the last symptom,’ she assured Gabby.
Gabby squeezed her again. ‘I’m so glad you’re home.’
‘Hi, everyone,’ Summer said, waving at the others, who all welcomed her warmly. Then she turned back to Gabby. ‘Dad’s still outside. He wants to see you.’
‘Okay, sure,’ Gabby said lightly, while inwardly thinking, I bloody well want to see him too!
She walked through the house and stepped out the front door. The gardens were always cared for and the lawn always mown, her father disciplined in maintaining its appearance, though the narrow concrete footpath from the road to the front door was decades old, narrow and greyed with age.
She found Cam out in the street, sitting in his beaten-up blue sedan. He’d run into a pole in a supermarket a couple of years ago and had never fixed the long scrape down the passenger side. She went to the driver’s window.
‘Hi,’ she said, restraining herself from launching straight into him.
‘Hi.’ He was unshaven, and his T-shirt had a stain of some sort on it. Baby sick, maybe. He looked down at the dashboard and picked at something Gabby couldn’t see.
‘What happened? Why are you back so late? I’ve been worried.’
‘Stuff, you know, baby stuff. I just couldn’t get out the door before now.’
‘That’s not good enough,’ she said, firmly.
He ignored that. ‘Can I leave the kids with you for a month?’ he said, in a tone that suggested it wasn’t actually a question as much as a foregone conclusion.
‘What? Why? What’s happening?’
‘It’s back to school this week –’
‘Yes, I know. We have three children in school,’ she said, barely even trying to control her derision.
‘– and I’ve just got lots on.’
‘You’ve got lots on?’ She was almost lost for words. Since when did that make a difference? She had lots on too. Everyone had lots on. That was life. When Cam didn’t respond, she challenged him head on. ‘Being busy isn’t an excuse for not being a parent, Cam.’
‘Don’t be like that. When have I ever asked for time off?’
Her head spun. On the one hand, it was true, he’d never tried to get out of an entire fortnight. A weekend, or a day here and there, sure. He’d been late many times and had skipped extracurricular activities. But on the other hand …
‘Time off? It’s not a job. They’re your children. You don’t get “time off”. Everyone knows that! That’s the deal you make when you have kids. They come first.’
‘Well, stuff changes,’ he said lamely, shrugging like a teenager.
‘What stuff?’ She glared at him through the open window but he wouldn’t meet her eye.
He sighed and then groaned. ‘You know how hard this has been for us since Mykahla arrived.’
Us? Her hackles rose. Was this coming from Meri? And if it was, why would Cam be so weak as to let her dictate his relationship with his three older children?
‘What is it that you are saying, exactly? Please be specific.’ There was a long pause while she waited with a hand on her hip and her eyebrows arched.
‘I need a break from the kids.’
He may as well have slapped her.
‘I love them, you know that,’ he went on quickly. ‘But I’m just not coping.’
She moved her hand to her forehead and tried to ignore the panic that was tumbling through her. ‘Are you smoking again?’
‘No!’ He turned to glare at her then, his chin raised defensively.
She didn’t believe him. Cam wasn’t perfect but this was definitely out of character for him, and she knew all too well that odd behaviour from Cam went hand in hand with marijuana use, one of the biggest contributing factors to their break-up. ‘Well, you don’t get to have a break from your children,’ she said through gritted teeth. ‘End of story.’
‘I have to go,’ he said baldly, and turned the key in the ignition. He pulled away from the kerb, leaving Gabby to jump out of the way of the wheels. In the two years since her operation she hadn’t had one episode of rejection, but today rejection had found her and her kids anyway.
Gabby lay alone in bed, awake in the dark, staring at the ceiling, wondering if yet another vision or dream would come to her tonight, wondering how frightening it would be, how awful. Would something new happen? Something that might add more information to the scene that kept playing out? Her pretty, French provincial-style room – she and Pippa shared a taste in decor – should have been a sanctuary, but now the nights made her anxious, worrying about what was to come.
Instead of waiting for it, she flung off the duck-egg blue and white bedspread and opened the drawer of her bedside table. Inside, curled at the back, was a stethoscope. She hadn’t felt the need to use it for a long time. When she’d first come home from hospital, she would fall asleep every night listening to this new heart beating inside her, willing it to keep going, to keep her alive. Some of the nurses told her to speak to the heart, to send it good wishes and welcome it into her body, to help make it feel at home and lessen her body’s fight against it – ultimately, to lessen the chance of rejection.
Rejection. The word they all feared most.
She snuggled back under her doona, placed the earpieces in her ears and lay the chestpiece over her heart.
Lub-dub … lub-dub … lub-dub.
There it was, beating away, pumping her blood, keeping her alive. Someone else’s heart. A heart full of nerve cells that had lived inside another human being from not long after conception to their time of death. A heart that might have travelled the world. Fallen in love. Been betrayed. Been educated. Indulged. Danced. Lied. Cheated. Gambled. Recovered. Swum in foreign oceans. Rock climbed. Painted. Loved horror movies. Craved friendships. Felt, seen or experienced a million things that Gabby never had.
‘Who are you?’ she whispered, closing her eyes.
Lub-dub … lub-dub … lub-dub.
‘I’m listening, if you want to talk,’ she said, this time feeling more than a touch foolish, but needing to tell him that she was open to what he had to say. He’d been trying to get her attention, after all. He wanted to share something with her; he wanted her to listen. On this day, even more than any other, she owed him that at least.
Lub-dub … lub-dub … lub-dub.
The room began to spin.
His heart rate increased. Lub-dub lub-dub lub-dublubdublubdub.
Fear sizzled.
Her first reaction was to pull back, to make it stop, but she knew she had to find out what was on the other side. It was her duty to listen. She squeezed her eyes shut, holding the stethoscope to her chest despite the rapid rise and fall in her breathing, despite every instinct that told her to push it all away.
She was running. It was the same cold, dark street she’d seen before. Night-time. Her feet stung as they hit the ground. Her breath rasped in and out, the air painfully cold.
Gabby wrenched the stethoscope away, sweat beading across her forehead, her rapid breaths dizzying, on the verge of hyperventilation.
Sally was at the door again, scratching and whining. Gabby jumped out of bed and let the dog in, calling her up on the bed, pulling her body against her own, holding her tightly while her heart rate and breathing slowed and then returned to normal. She stroked Sally’s soft fur, then spooned with the retriever for the rest of the night.
8
&
nbsp; The only way Krystal was going to make it through Cordelia-Aurora’s offensive celebration of Evan’s passing was to have a drink before she went. The boys appeared to have finished vomiting – some kind of twenty-four-hour thing – though if they managed to vomit over Cordelia-Aurora’s Italian leather couch, Krystal didn’t think it would necessarily be such a bad thing. She poured a shot of vodka into her glass of orange juice, a trick she’d learned from her mother, and something she tried now to pretend she wasn’t replicating. But this was an emergency.
Roxy texted.
Thinking of you today, having
to go to that awful party. x
Thanks.
Krystal sipped her drink, thinking how lucky she was to have Roxy. With her mother out of the picture, Krystal might have been able to rely on her sister, but Liesel had moved as far away from their mother as she could, taking up residence in Norway more than ten years ago. Liesel had emailed, offering condolences, but the last time the sisters had talked on the phone was at the start of the year. As for her father, he was a serial cheater who had ruined his wife’s and daughters’ belief in men, all of which made Evan’s deceptions on that final night that much worse.
Good luck. I’m here if you
need me. x
Krystal gulped down the rest of her laced juice while the boys were distracted by the television, ignoring the voice telling her she was no better than her mother and should be ashamed of herself. ‘Don’t worry, I am,’ she replied to the voice. But it wasn’t as if she was an alcoholic; she was just trying to get through this awful day. And it was only one drink. She could still legally drive.
When they were young, Liesel had named Carol’s phases of sobriety ‘blooms’ because, just like lovely flowers, they would burst into colour and vibrancy and bring joy to everyone around them. When their mother was blooming, the sisters were treated to glorious times that involved baking, packed lunches, clean clothes and arriving at school on time.
The Gift of Life Page 7
