The door gives enough for me to squeeze through and as I send the torch light around the room to get my bearings, I can’t suppress a cry – it is as though the sound is torn from my insides and will now remain an eternal echo in the room.

42

Leah, days before

The blood stops as suddenly as it started. She has heard of sporadic bleeding in pregnancy; it doesn’t have to mean anything at all. She prays; she doesn’t know what else to do, and though she’s never done it before, she knows how to ask for mercy.

Please, please let the baby live.

She conjures up the baby in her mind the way she constructed the characters in her book; she gives it little details that make it feel more real – a fuzzy little patch of strawberry blonde hair atop a soft pink skull, tiny fingernails, a slightly upturned nose, slim, almost see-through wrists. She breathes life into the imagined child, until she has a vivid image of it there inside her womb, fingers and toes moving, heart fluttering.

Please, please live.

She’s in bed, with her legs elevated on a tall stack of pillows. She’s waiting, for Kristina, for morning, for the dull ache in her stomach to stop. She brings her phone out, and realizes there is, unusually, a single bar of reception. She does something she has never done before: she dials Kristina’s number, which she knows by heart. It rings for a long while before she picks up, and when she does, tears begin to flow from Leah’s eyes at the sound of her voice. There was a time when Leah believed that Kristina could fix everything, and a part of her must still believe it, and maybe it’s true, because there is something so soothing in the silence that unfolds between them on the crackly line that Leah feels her heart resume its normal beat. In the end, she puts the phone down and lies back against the pillows. She prays again, feeling new hope and energy flow through her after hearing Kristina’s voice. Maybe now she’ll come.

She falls asleep. When she wakes again, she feels strange, as though her limbs are weighted down, and she has the sensation of being submerged in water. She blinks in the dark, getting her bearings, taking in the outlines of her surroundings; Bekkebu, she’s at Bekkebu. Fragments of the day before return to her. The screaming, the slashed tires, the fall, the blood, the email. It is completely dark outside but she can make out the glow of the moon through the gauze curtains. She tries to sit up but a searing pain across her abdomen stops her. Then she realizes she is bleeding again.

43

Kristina