Then again, her children weren’t fools. They would know something was up. Besides, she was a terrible liar and they’d see through her sooner or later, and then they’d feel betrayed by her too. Charlie had already admitted to feeling unwanted because of Cam’s grumpiness. She was so angry with Cam for putting her in this position. Surely it should be up to him to tell them he wanted a break, not her. It was his mess; he should clean it up.
But life was rarely neat or fair, and she and Cam had always told the kids the truth – about their separation, about her illness, about the transplant. The only thing they’d never discussed with the kids was his marijuana use, because they thought that would send the wrong message; although Cam was in favour of legalising marijuana, he still didn’t want to encourage his kids to use it. His stance didn’t make sense to Gabby but she was happy to go along with it, being firmly in the ‘no drugs’ camp herself.
‘Listen, Fairy Cake,’ she said, putting her hand on Celia’s narrow shoulder, a shoulder too small to have to bear the weight of her father’s failings. Celia’s smile faded and her smooth brow puckered with worry. She was expecting this, Gabby realised. They probably all were. ‘Your dad’s going through a bad time right now and he needs a rest.’
‘From me?’ Celia squeaked.
‘Not from you. He loves you! But he’s struggling with all the everyday things he has to do, like going to work and looking after a small baby. Life gets really messy when you’re an adult and things build up.’ She couldn’t say she was enjoying defending him, not one bit. ‘Sometimes, people just need a bit of space to catch up on sleep and concentrate on one thing at a time.’
Celia touched one of the rainbow fish with her fingertip. ‘Doesn’t he want to see us?’
Oh, if Gabby’s heart hadn’t already been torn out and replaced with another it would have ripped in two right there. ‘He loves you,’ she repeated. ‘He just has a lot on his plate right now and needs a rest. He’ll be back soon, I promise.’
She didn’t like promising that. She had no control over what Cam did. But Celia’s eyes had started to well up and she would say anything to make her daughter’s pain stop. She tucked Celia’s brown hair behind the slightly-too-large ears that she would one day grow into. ‘Until then, how about we pop this in the post for Mykahla, and you can write a card or a letter to go with it?’
Celia wiped her eyes. ‘Okay.’
After Summer had waved goodbye to Freddie and Charlie had come home from swimming training, and after Monty had made them all butter chicken and rice for dinner and they’d filled their bellies, she repeated the same conversation for the benefit of her elder two children.
‘He doesn’t want to see us?’ Summer said, screwing up her face in disbelief.
‘I knew it!’ Charlie said, shoving his plate away and pushing back his chair.
Beside Gabby, Monty sat quietly, looking murderous, occasionally tapping the table with his knuckle in what she knew was calculated thought. She glanced sideways at him, nervous at his silence.
‘I know he loves you all,’ Gabby said, again attempting reassurance.
‘Just not as much as Mykahla,’ Summer said, her face bright red with suppressed emotion.
‘I promise you that’s not true,’ Gabby said, and meant it, though she noted that she’d again made a promise on Cam’s behalf and she really should stop doing that. It would be so much easier if she could just explain to them that Cam was on a bender and needed to spend time in meetings for addicts and concentrate on getting himself well again. In some ways, she realised now, she was actually relieved he’d made the call, as she didn’t want the kids exposed to his habits and she needed him to be a fully functioning caregiver. Still, that small mercy aside, she was furious he’d let this happen at all.
‘Whatever,’ Charlie snapped, in a rare display of temper. He left his plate where it was and stormed from the table, and they all sat in silence for a moment as they listened to his big feet clomping up the stairs to his room. It was an awful time for Cam to do this to Charlie, who’d be turning sixteen at the end of the week. Arguably, he needed his father now more than ever before.
‘I’m done here too,’ Summer said, getting up from the table and also heading up the stairs, though more sedately than Charlie.
Monty turned to Gabby, his jowls hanging low with contempt for Cam. ‘That went well.’
Gabby shook her head and rolled her eyes to the ceiling, feeling her lips pinching tight against words she wanted to say. Sally came to the table and laid her head in Celia’s lap, and the little girl flopped over to hug her. At least the dog was faithful to her.
It was a relief to drag her weary body to the sanctuary of her room later that evening, after everyone else had settled into their bedrooms. Charlie and Summer would be awake for a while yet, she knew, but she needed to lie down. It had been an enormous day. She stretched out across her bedspread, lamplight glowing gently beside her, and took some deep breaths, processing everything, from the cupping session and her progress with Luciano, telling him about the sense memories, to the woman in the cafe and the smell of smoke her presence had brought with it, and now her children’s reactions to the news about Cam. She groaned quietly and covered her eyes with her arms. She knew she had done as much as she could for the kids tonight and they would need some time to work through their feelings, so she let her mind go back to the woman in the cafe.
The woman’s presence had triggered the first vision and then a new one today. She was the key. Gabby sat up and pulled out her laptop, propping herself up in bed with fat ruffled pillows at her back. She opened the laptop and searched for ‘weird things happening to organ donor recipient’. She quickly came across the term cellular memory – the theory that an imprint of the donor’s living experiences was held within the cells of their organ. She’d never heard of it.
She read further, then stopped short: Heart transplant recipients seem to be the most vulnerable to taking on the donor’s memories, sensations and personality traits.
Gabby stared at the screen for a moment, then clicked on more links. As she read the case studies, a surreal feeling of knowing settled into her bones. A part of her had already known it, though she’d managed to cultivate some robust denial. Yet it made sense. Your heart was everything, wasn’t it? People said to follow your heart, or speak from the heart, or open your heart. We were encouraged to live our life from the heart. Some ancient cultures believed the human spirit resided in the heart, and that it was an organ far superior to the brain.
An organ recipient’s essential immunosuppressant medications might actually make them more able to receive imprinted messages, as the body’s natural defences against outside influences are already lowered.
It felt true. At the same time, it was undeniably creepy. No one in their right mind would actually want to take on a dead person’s living essence. She followed the links to the sources that refuted the case study evidence. They argued that most of the reported changes in sense of smell, or taste, or preference in music and so on could be explained by other things, like the major trauma the patient had been through, or a side effect of the medications.
She thought back to the others in her support group who’d gone through the process at the same time as her. Margaret had lost her appetite for meat and become vegetarian overnight. Eunika had loved pop music but now listened to classical all day long, even taking up piano lessons. Lars had weird, frightening dreams and developed a phobia of water, even struggling to stay calm in the shower. And there was Gabby, with her odd memories of hotdogs, and now vivid all-too-real flashes of someone else’s life.
She read case after case of patients knowing things they couldn’t possibly know about their donor – things that the donor’s family had later corroborated. Most of the cases came from America, as Australia had fewer examples of donor families and recipients being able to meet with each other. But when she got to the story of a young child who’d helped the police find the killer of t
he little girl whose heart was now in her body, Gabby shut the laptop.
It was a sickening and terrifying concept.
Her first instinct was to make sure she never saw this woman again. Then, maybe, the visions would stop. But how could she keep the woman away? She could go to the hospital to see her donor coordinator and ask her to intervene, to talk to the woman and tell her to go away, but that would mean the coordinator would have to confirm that Gabby was indeed the donor recipient the woman had been looking for, and there was no way the coordinator could do that. A breach of privacy and ethics of that magnitude would cost her her job.
A restraining order? Ha! On what grounds? The woman hadn’t done anything other than try to talk to her, and that wasn’t a crime. It wasn’t an option for Gabby to stop going into work. Young businesses were like small children – they needed constant attention.
Then she realised the woman already knew her name. She could find out where Gabby lived. She could turn up on the doorstep at any moment. She could phone her at work or even find her personal phone number. She could contact her via the cafe’s email address. There was no way Gabby could hide from her. She couldn’t stop the woman from coming back.
If she couldn’t make her go away then she really only had one option, and that was to face her, though the thought of another weird vision erupting in her made her feel queasy. Maybe if she did speak to her, though, the woman would say her piece and move on, and take the visions with her, and Gabby could stop fearing her. Maybe she needed to see this woman in order to make it all stop.
With that, she reopened her laptop, trying to remember the woman’s name. Katy? Carla? Damn her useless short-term memory. She’d be able to search for her on Facebook if she could just remember. Kylie? And what about the surname? Anders?
No matter how hard she tried to recall it, the name had slipped away. Instead, she set up a simple blog and new Facebook profile with her transplant date and location, and explained that she was looking for her donor’s family. For many reasons, transplant teams discouraged recipients from searching for donor families. She knew she was opening a can of worms. What if they wanted money from her as payment? What if they judged her for the way she lived her life? What if they stalked her? What if they were smothering and possessive and bought a house to be near her and expected her at all their family gatherings?
It was a risk worth taking. She needed to find this woman, not only to make the visions stop, but also to help her. The woman had donated her husband’s heart so that someone – Gabby – could go on living. She owed her. Maybe through meeting her she would finally be able to let go of some of the guilt that went along with knowing she was only alive because someone else had died. And maybe then this heart in her chest could rest easily once more.
12
During her lunch break on Wednesday, Krystal jumped in her car and headed down to St Kilda Beach to clear her head. She found a park easily, kicked off her boots and wrapped her lightweight camel-coloured cardigan tightly around her against the breeze. The sand was cold underfoot, palm trees swaying and seagulls ducking, diving and cawing. She and Evan had come here often, hiring bicycles and riding the coastal track before the boys came, and later playing in the sand with their sons. She felt close to him here.
She began to walk, the sun high in the sky, her sunglasses barely blocking out the bright white glare off the water’s surface. She’d been so close to connecting with Gabriella on Monday but the moment had been ruined, and she wasn’t even sure what had happened. All she knew was that Gabriella was saying odd things about ‘a new one’, and the dog had thought Krystal was some kind of threat, and she’d been hustled from the cafe. The humiliation still burned.
She’d thought speaking with Gabriella would somehow ease the pain of her loss. But now she was more confused than ever. She realised that she’d harboured some sort of fantasy that Gabriella might hold the answers she needed. She had no idea why a policeman had phoned her late in the evening and summoned her to urgently get on a plane with her two tiny, sleepy, grumpy children in tow. No idea what Evan had been doing running down an alley in the dark when the car had struck him. And no idea why he hadn’t told her the truth.
She bent down to pick up a particularly beautiful shell, almost in the shape of a heart, a rainbow of purple and blue and pink spilling through it. Was it a sign from Evan? He’d been good at finding beautiful things in the world, something she’d once believed was a birthright of the wealthy, until Evan showed her differently.
For their first date, Krystal and Evan met at Rippon Lea Estate in Elsternwick, a late-nineteenth-century mansion on the outskirts of the city. It was a bright, blue-skied day in spring, the wind still cool enough to make jackets necessary, but the sun gorgeously warming on their backs. The mansion itself – dark brick with mustard-coloured trimmings – made her jaw drop. She’d never seen anything like it. There were two storeys above ground, with stone pillars, moulded ceilings, gilded wallpaper, wide staircases and landings, plush carpets and curtains, and more rooms than she could count.
They joined a tour group alongside tourists from America, England, Japan and Germany, as well as a couple of Jewish men wearing mink hats and black silk coats, with long beards, who may well have come from the orthodox Jewish community just outside the estate’s gates. Together the motley group moved through the mansion, gawping at the formal drawing room, sitting room, dining room, bedrooms, bathrooms. There was a glass conservatory overlooking the magnificent grounds. Stained-glass windows to rival great cathedrals. Marble fireplaces and bronze statues. Below ground, there were a wine cellar, butler’s pantry, wood cellar, coal cellar, scullery, laundry and kitchen. It was simultaneously breathtaking and infuriating. All that money! For one family!
Then there were the gardens. Pathways meandered through the sixteen acres of lawns, waterfalls and rock tunnels. A broad lake boasted waterlilies and quacking wood ducks. There was a boathouse extending out across the water with purple froths of wisteria behind it. A steel windmill cut a striking figure against a backdrop of white puffs of cloud. The arched bridges were impossibly romantic.
With every step their surroundings shimmered with greenery and pops of blues, pinks and orange. Blooming beds of purple pansies. A magnificent old oak tree near the stables showing off its flush of seasonal green. They walked through an orchard of heritage apple trees, their boughs laden with pink and white blossom. Inside the domed fernery, dappled light rained down through rainforest species that towered above them. It was nothing short of magical.
They walked until their feet ached, and somehow the peace and tranquillity soothed Krystal’s ruffled working-class feathers. They rested for tea and a selection of tiny sandwiches at the old gatehouse, sitting outside below a tree, filtered light dancing across their hands.
Surprised by how much emotion this place had stirred in her, Krystal attempted to deflect it. ‘It’s a bit much, isn’t it?’ she teased, glancing at their surrounds. ‘Imagine all of this belonging to one family. It’s obscene.’
Evan put down his sandwich and levelled his attention on her. ‘It doesn’t mean they were happy, though.’
Now it was her turn to squirm. ‘Well, no, of course not. But it helps, doesn’t it? All this wealth! I mean, you’d have to be trying not to enjoy yourself.’ She attempted to laugh off her criticism. Over the course of the day she’d found herself enjoying Evan’s company more and more, and now she hoped she hadn’t put him off with her envious words.
Evan nodded slowly and wiped his hands on his serviette. ‘My family is well off,’ he said, straight to the point.
‘Really?’ She didn’t know why she was surprised. Evan spoke like an educated man. He was deeply knowledgeable about wines of the world. He’d brought her here, to this place of excessive wealth.
‘They’re all lawyers. I was one too.’
‘You’re kidding. And now you’re a sommelier?’
He nodded, smiling a little, obviously pleased he’d
surprised her.
‘Why on earth would you leave a job like that?’
He laughed again, heartily this time. ‘Because it made me miserable.’
‘Oh.’ She didn’t know what she thought about this. She felt ridiculous for just moments ago having allowed hope to swell in her chest that there might be something between them. How could she have thought he might be interested in her?
‘Money shouldn’t make you miserable,’ he said.
‘Sadly, I have no relevant experience to be able to offer an opinion on that.’
‘The thing is, though, all of this –’ he gestured around them – ‘the only reason it’s even here for us to enjoy today is because someone donated it to the National Trust. Louisa Jones gifted it all, despite having children she could have passed it on to. She was motivated to protect the grounds and the history for future generations.’
Krystal thought back to the tour guide’s words. She vaguely remembered the tour guide saying something about this, but she hadn’t really paid attention, too preoccupied running scripts in her head about how unfair it was that some people had so much while others had to struggle for everything.
‘People with money can be generous too,’ Evan said. ‘So, promise me you won’t hold it against me that my family have money?’
‘Okay,’ she agreed. ‘I promise.’
Evan’s lovely warm eyes took on a cheeky glint. ‘But do feel free to hold it against them that they’re priggish, selfish bores.’
She burst out laughing. ‘All right, will do.’
Krystal turned around on the sand and began to head back to the car. Memories like this one were a precious gift but they were also like being stabbed through the heart all over again, not just with grief but with the betrayal. In his final hours, her husband had been lying to her and she had no idea why.
The Gift of Life Page 11
