Chapter 28

28

October 31, 2:55 a.m.

less than four hours until low tide

My mother said that it was nobody’s fault that my heart stopped that day, but I think being so scared on that stage might have had something to do with it. I have never liked people looking at me, which I think is because of all the doctors who stared at me when I was a child. They would look at my face, then stare down at the scar on my chest, then shake their heads and frown their frowns and look very disappointed indeed. When people stared at me, it was almost always for the wrong reasons, which was why I would rather they didn’t look at me at all.

There were months of hospital visits the fifth time I died, including a trip to see yet another specialist in London the following February. The private hospital fees were paid for by Nana, who always refused to believe that there wasn’t a way to fix me. Most memories of my times in hospital have faded around the edges over the years, but I remember that week for two reasons. Firstly, it was Valentine’s Day, and the boy in the bed opposite me on the ward gave me a card. I had never received a Valentine’s card before and didn’t know quite what to make of it.

“Why does it have a heart on the front?” I asked.

“Because I love you,” he said, pushing his jam-jar glasses a little higher up his nose. He was eleven, I was nine, and I’m not convinced either of us knew too much about love.

“Well, don’t get any funny ideas. I have a boyfriend,” I lied.

“No boys have ever come to visit you,” he replied. “What’s his name?”

I didn’t hesitate. “His name is Conor Kennedy. But even if I didn’t have a boyfriend, which I definitely do, given the ward we’re on, we might both be dead by morning. So please don’t spend what might be your final hours having fanciful thoughts about me.”

From the boy’s expression, I thought maybe I shouldn’t have said what I said. But his freckled face soon recovered from the shock of my words, and he smiled, revealing shiny silver braces. “God will watch over us, and I’m sure we’ll both still be here for breakfast.”

I’ve never been religious; nobody in my family is. Nancy said that she believed in God until the day she found out I was broken. They had a bit of a falling-out after that, which resulted in her not speaking to God for several years, so in some ways her relationship with God wasn’t unlike her relationship with my father. I suppose the doctors were like gods to me; it was up to them whether I stayed alive. They always seemed to find a way to fix me, so maybe I should have been more optimistic about living long enough to endure another hospital meal. But I wasn’t—optimistic, that is; it’s something I’ve always struggled to be. I have a highly active imagination, and it’s been self-taught to imagine the worst.

The boy was still staring at me with a dreamy expression on his face, holding the homemade Valentine’s card. I didn’t much like the look of him or it.

“Why do you think you love me? You don’t even know me,” I said.

“Yes, I do. I’ve read all of the Daisy Darker books,” he replied with a grin.

It was my first taste of fame, and I didn’t like the flavor. Just because someone has read a book with my name on the front, it doesn’t mean that they know who I am.

I put the card on the little table, said that I needed to sleep, and asked the nurse to pull the flimsy curtain around my hospital bed. Then I tried to pretend that the boy and the rest of the ward weren’t really there. I didn’t like sleeping in a room full of sick strangers—I don’t suppose anyone does. I stared at that Valentine’s card, wondering why the red heart on the front looked absolutely nothing like the heart inside my chest. I’d seen enough posters on enough doctors’ office walls to know it was a very poor likeness. And I wondered how and why this rather ugly internal organ had become the universal symbol for love.

Over the next few days, I asked all of the doctors—who were supposed to be clever—and all of the nurses—who seemed even cleverer than the doctors to me—but nobody seemed able to answer my question. When Nana came to visit, I asked her, because Nana knew everything.

“You’re far too young to start worrying about love. I suggest you concentrate on getting better,” she said, pulling the curtain around my hospital bed before perching on the side of it. She was wearing a purple coat with a matching purple hat and gloves, and I could tell from her rosy cheeks that it must have been cold outside. “Here,” she whispered, opening up her huge pink-and-purple patchwork bag. “I brought you a snack.” The red-and-white tablecloth made another appearance. She laid it across the bed between us, then produced two parcels of takeaway cod and chips wrapped in newspaper. She set the makeshift table with wooden cutlery, sachets of salt and vinegar, and a pot of mushy peas mixed with green gumdrops. The memory still makes me smile.

“Why do you let your sisters treat you the way they do?” Nana said, dipping a chip in ketchup.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“You need to stand up for yourself, or life will always knock you down.”

I thought she might be right about that. Nana was almost always right about everything. So I decided things would be different from that day on with my sisters. Nana was as wise as an owl, she even had a new owl-shaped clock to prove it, so I asked her the question again.

“Do you know why the heart is a symbol of love?”

“Well, that is an interesting question and therefore deserves an interesting answer,” Nana said. “The ancient Egyptians thought that the human heart epitomized life, the Greeks believed that it controlled our thoughts and emotions, and the Romans declared that Venus, the goddess of love, set hearts on fire with Cupid’s help. The Romans also believed that there was a vein connecting the fourth finger on the left hand directly to the heart. There isn’t, but that’s why people traditionally wear wedding rings on that finger, even today. In the Middle Ages, Christians agreed that the human heart had something to do with love, and hundreds of years later, the familiar red shape still appears on greetings cards, playing cards, even T-shirts. The heart symbol became a verb in the 1970s, with I heart New York. Does that answer your question?”

“I think so. How do you know the answers to everything?” I asked.

She laughed. “I don’t, nobody does! But if I do know more than most, it’s because I read. Books will teach you anything you want to know, and they tend to be more honest than people.”

We finished our fish and chips as the sun was setting outside. Then we read Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland together, which has always been one of my favorite books.

“Speaking of love…” Nana said. “I hope you know how much I love you.”

I grinned. “How much?”

She looked out of the hospital window and pointed at the full moon. “I love you from here to the moon and back.”

“I love you from here to the moon and back twice,” I replied.

It was her turn to smile now. “I love you from here to the moon and back three times and once for luck.”

Later that night, when I was alone again and tucked into my hospital bed, I started to wonder if my heart being broken meant that I could never truly love someone. The human heart beats eighty times a minute, one hundred thousand times a day, and about thirty-five million times a year. In an average lifetime, a heart will beat two and a half billion times. Maybe it had something to do with endurance, something that hearts and love have in common?

The second reason I remember that particular hospital stay so well was because my mother cried the next day when she came to visit. It was something she rarely did—the crying part, I mean—and as I watched her talking to a doctor on the other side of a window on my hospital ward, I wished I could lip-read. She never told me what that doctor said or why it upset her so much.

Rose looks as startled as we do as she lets go of the handle, the key still in her hand.

“I just need to pop to the loo,” she says, as we continue to stare at her.

“You’re going to go out there again? Alone?” Lily asks.

“Yes. Or do I need a hall pass? You told Trixie off for being scared to go to the bathroom earlier. I’m a lot older and I have a gun. There’s no need to worry about me. I’ll be two minutes,” Rose says, and leaves the room before any of us have time to reply.

“Conor,” Lily whispers.

He looks up like a startled meerkat, then whispers himself. “What?”

“Do you think it was a bit strange how quickly Rose knew what was wrong with Trixie? Finding the blood between her toes like that?”

“She was missing a sock…”

“I know, but still…”

“When was there blood between my toes?” asks Trixie. “And who was that man in the audience on the lawn in the home movie?” She has a habit of asking too many questions, sometimes not waiting for the answer to one before asking another.

“That was Conor’s dad,” Lily says.

“That’s weird,” Trixie mumbles. “I thought I recognized him. Also, on the video, Nancy said something about his work getting noticed. And the Scrabble letters on the tape’s cover said NOTICE ME.”

“She’s right about that,” I say, and Lily stares at her daughter as though she is a child genius.

“Why was Conor’s dad at Seaglass?” Trixie asks next.

Lily shrugs. “Because he became friends with Nancy.”

“Are they still friends now?”

“No,” Conor says, without further explanation.

Rose returns, slots the key in the door, and locks us all inside the room once more. She sits down on the sofa, a little too close to Conor again for my liking. None of us say a word, but she was gone longer than a couple of minutes.

“Shall we finish the tape?” she asks, aiming the remote at the TV and pressing play without waiting for any of us to reply.

“What’s happening? Is it broken?” Trixie says, staring at the screen.

She’s too young to remember what it looks like when someone tapes over an old recording on VHS. The picture looks stretched and distorted while one image replaces another, as though wiping away the memory of what was there before. We all stare at the screen now, but Conor is the first to say anything about what we see.

“Oh my god, that is terrifying.”