Steinunn Sigurdardottir - Place of the Heart

I’m going to lie down in the garden. I had a faint inkling that I’d heard Edda say this one spring, when everything was as good as could be. That one fine day she’d gone out into our Bollagata yard and sprawled out, covered with a sheet. Being a redhead, she can’t tolerate sun.

The noise of caps and firecrackers assailed me as I went out the door. A group of teenagers or children was persistently shooting off fireworks in the playground across the street. One of them lit a flare, casting a red glow over the swings and seesaw and a sparkling slide of snow. It was just past six o’clock in the morning. Many a self-respecting person might wake at the noise now. What were children doing out at this hour? Who was taking care of them? What was wrong with this nation?

I started by sauntering into the yard as if I were going out for fresh air. The lamp in the arched window cast a gleam onto the snow. The lowest tree branches touched the ground beneath their white loads. The snowfall was still on its way toward stopping. A flake or two drifted to the ground and landed on a fence, branch, or the ground beneath my booted feet. I stood in vague cat tracks, probably made by Mr. Björn and ending at a small slanted drift in front of my arched window. I followed the trail as far as it went and stopped. Then I walked slowly around the corner of the house. There the pawprints were visible again, in the dim glow of a streetlight, and up over the pole shone the terrifically clear moon in full size, coming in low in the sky on approach, preparing for landing. The cat tracks led to the old spruce tree in the corner of the yard. A person’s leg was sticking out from under the tree, and cat paws had stepped along its snowy trouser. At first it appeared to be a single leg, but when I bent down to take a better look, I saw that it belonged to a whole person, tall and slim. A cat sat on the person’s chest. It hesitated before dashing off with a hiss. The chest was bare and scratched with blood, as if the cat had gotten to it. The person had long sparkling snow-hair that spread out over the ground. When I bent all the way over and peeked under the tree, I saw a lock of red hair. My daughter, Edda, had done exactly as she’d said.

I grabbed her legs and dragged her through the yard to the basement steps. I’d once heard of a woman out east who died of exposure. She’d bared her chest to accelerate her death. I put down Edda’s legs when I reached the steps, grabbed the keys from my pocket, opened the door, ran up the steps, took Edda in my arms, and dragged her in, right into my bed, spread the quilt over her, and called an ambulance.

To accelerate death.

While I waited, I sat at the foot of the bed with my back turned to Edda’s face. I wrapped the quilt better about her feet, over her shoes. I didn’t check to see whether she was breathing, and wondered what had possessed the cat to settle down on her chest. I didn’t even know whether this was our daily visitor or some other cat from around town, maybe a stray. Why had it scratched her? To wake her, maybe? But weren’t cats just wild or stupid beasts, lacking the mind to save a person’s life, as dogs sometimes did, or was it that they simply had no interest in doing so? Were there such things as Saint Bernard cats, trained to look for children buried in snow?

BURIED CHILD is the name of a famous play, but it’s about something entirely different.

I hurried back out because I was sure that the ambulance would go to the wrong house. I was right. They were waking up my neighbor, a woman who was close to her delivery date. I heard the distant sound of her denying having made the call and directing the paramedics to my basement. The snow on my boots had left puddles on the floor by the bed. I noticed that Edda’s face was wet and I wiped her cheek with the quilt before they put her on the stretcher. She was transforming from a frozen girl into a beached corpse.

Who are you? asked one of the medics as we walked out the front door. He looked more horrified than surprised.

I’m an assistant nurse, same line of business as you, I said, to lighten the mood. My name’s Harpa Eir.

Were you on Háteigsvegur Street just before? he asked.

Yes, I came across a hypothermic man on someone’s steps. He wasn’t related, but this is my daughter.

We said nothing more to each other. I sat on a bench in the back with Edda. They drove so fast I had to hold on tightly. At one turn I nearly fell over onto the stretcher. I wanted to ask them to turn down the siren so that they wouldn’t wake the child. I looked out the window. As we approached City Hospital, a firework shot into the air somewhere in the Breiðholt neighborhood, bursting with an incredibly expansive display of red, green, white, blue. It was irregular in shape, like an orchid, and appeared to me to stretch across the sky, from Hengill all the way south to Bláfjöll.

Edda had begun to shiver by the time we arrived at the emergency room. I’d never seen her so pitiable before, not even when she was bloodied and battered. I didn’t want to be in the room while they were examining and treating her, so I waited in the corridor and watched the hobbling, bandaged people and white coats pass by.

A doctor came and showed me into a room where there were bandages and plastic trays on shelves, crutches in one corner, and crumbs of plaster on the floor.

I found her in the yard, I said, under a large spruce tree by the trash bins. She was bare-chested, with Björn, I think, sitting on her chest.

Were there two of them?

No, she was alone.

Didn’t you say Björn?

Yes, but he left immediately.

What was he doing? asked the doctor.

They know each other.

Did he make the scratch marks on her chest?

He must have.

How long had she been lying there?

She was in the yard the whole time. I’d just been sitting in the living room.

Can you come up with an idea of how long she was lying there?

Maybe since three thirty, because she became separated from her so-called friends around three, downtown. We live in Norðurmýri.

The doctor had a lot of freckles, including on the backs of his hands. He spoke with a lisp and had pointy yellow teeth. I thought he sounded stupid, and was certain he would make a mistake costing Edda her life.

Very drunk, on drugs?

On a lot of things, most likely. Ecstasy, for example. They must get it at the big festivals. Could she die?

No. Not unless there are complications, which I don’t expect at all. Her body temperature is right around ninety-two degrees. We’ll warm her up gradually. If freezing people are warmed too quickly, the heart pumps cold blood into warmer organs, with bad results.

COLD BLOOD INTO WARM ORGANS. An abrupt trembling came over me. I didn’t tremble under my own power, but rather, it was as if the world shook me, the room, the chair. I tried to hold on to the chair’s arms, but it was no use, because an outboard motor was shaking us both.

The doctor gave me an injection and had me lie down on a hospital bed. The tropical firework that stretched over half the surrounding mountains as we were on our way here in the ambulance lurked like a giant bird over a big map of the human musculoskeletal system. A sign not to give up even though the year had started like this.

I didn’t fall asleep, and got up and called Heiður. It was almost nine o’clock.

I’ll be right there, she said.

Aren’t you drunk? I asked.

Not really. I’m coming. And she hung up.

I wandered to the waiting room, a doped-up woman with springs for legs. I should have told the doctor not to give me a full dose, because I’m so small and light and so sensitive to drugs.

The waiting room was almost entirely packed, but I didn’t notice anything in particular except a thin woman in her fifties with her head wrapped in a blood-soaked bandage. She was so plastered she could hardly keep herself in her chair. Next to her sat a very prim man of around thirty, bowled over with shame. I wasn’t sure whether it was her son or a young lover. It dawned on me that the woman had the appearance of a foreigner, in much the same way I did. I took a good look at her to see how I would turn out after thirty years and didn’t like it, even if I took better care of myself than she had. Not that anyone can be certain how long they’ll live.