The Girl With Two Heartbeats

Sara Moon was born in the fall at 3:35 in the morning with two heartbeats, caramel eyes that wandered the room as if searching for someone who had stepped out only moments before, and by noon the nurse was already complaining that the child refused to sleep. The midwife heard it first and counted again, pressing her ear harder against the small wet chest. When she looked up, she did not say anything for a moment. Then she told the mother that sometimes the heart echoes itself for a few minutes after birth and that it would pass.

“What is wrong with her?” her mother said.

“She’s a curious little one,” the nurse said. “Hasn’t stopped looking around yet. But eventually she’ll tire herself out and sleep.”

The nurse set the baby down again beside her mother, and she and the midwife left the room without hearing the mother clarify that she meant the second heartbeat. A few hours later the doctor came in with a faint whistle in his nose, and Sara’s mother kept looking toward the counter for a kettle that was not there.

“Is she going to be all right?”

“Oh, she’ll sleep eventually.”

“But the second heartbeat.”

The doctor listened, frowned, and said nothing. For several weeks the doctors listened carefully and argued among themselves, but by the time Sara was old enough to walk the matter had settled into the background of her life, like a clock in another room that no one bothers to wind.

“I’ve heard of stranger things,” one doctor said. “In Colombia there was the report of the girl turned into a spider. And in Japan the emperor has been suffering from a spell of hiccups now entering its third year, and the finest doctors in the world have not been able to stop it.”

“Who said there were two anyway? It’s probably suggestion.”

“Perhaps we should consult a priest.”

“Or a shaman.”

In the end they did nothing at all, which proved to be the most practical solution. By the time Sara was five the whole town knew she had two heartbeats, and by the time she was ten no one thought it worth mentioning anymore. It seemed, after several weeks of counting, that two heartbeats were not nearly as troublesome as a child who refused to sleep.

Sara Moon clapped to a different beat than everyone else. When she was three, she played in the park with the other children. To her, the rest sounded mistaken, as though they had all agreed on the wrong beat. A girl named Samantha stopped clapping and looked at her in confusion. Sara, missing several teeth and grinning like a cheerful gargoyle, turned toward her mother on the bench.

“Mother,” she said, still clapping, “why ithn’t Thamantha clapping with uth? Why ithn’t she thinging?”

She mostly learned to ignore the two small rhythms that argued gently inside her chest, except on nights when the house had fallen asleep and the second beat refused to follow the first. As a child she sometimes paused in the middle of the yard and turned slowly toward the west, listening to the restless rhythm in her chest as if it had suddenly remembered something important.

By the time she entered school most people had forgotten there had ever been anything unusual about her. She sometimes felt the odd sensation that someone had just left the room, although no door had opened and no footsteps had crossed the floor. When she reached adulthood, the second heartbeat had become little more than a quiet companion. It occasionally wandered elsewhere, but it caused her no real trouble. She married and settled into the comfortable routines of a life that appeared perfectly ordinary.

Her husband brought home fresh flowers every Thursday because Sara had once mentioned that was the day they looked happiest at the market. He trusted routines and believed that most things in life could be understood if given enough time. On the third night after their wedding, while they lay together in the quiet of their new home, he placed his head against her chest and listened.

“There are two,” he said after a moment.

“Yes,” Sara replied.

He listened a little longer, then nodded, as if confirming something minor.

“Well,” he said, “it seems you have more to give than most of us.”

He kissed her and did not mention it again. Their life together settled into a comfortable rhythm. They shared meals, small arguments, and the quiet repetition of days that never seemed to hurry anywhere. There was no lack of happiness between them, and nothing in their life suggested that anything was missing.

Once, as he embraced her, he paused.

“Why is your hair wet?” he asked, though the day was dry.

She made a face and laughed. Then couldn’t stop laughing. He began laughing too, and the question was forgotten.

The doctors returned, listening with their instruments as though the answer might have arrived in the intervening years.

“Still there,” one would say, as if reporting the weather.

“Still there,” another would agree.

They spoke of valves and echoes and rare conditions that did not trouble the body, and after a while even these explanations grew tired and stopped appearing altogether.

Sara sat at the table, her hair flowing over her shoulder like black water. She heard the lock turn and rose to greet her husband as he stepped through the door. She was wearing nothing. They ate fish with rice. Another knock came, and her husband went to answer it.

“My name is Kenji Yamamoto,” the man said in a measured voice. He dressed with the careful precision of a man who mistrusted disorder.

He wore a stethoscope around his neck so comfortably that Sara’s husband briefly wondered whether the doctor examined himself between patients.

“I’m here to see the woman with two heartbeats.”

He had heard of her case years earlier from a mentor who had once cured the emperor’s prolonged fit of hiccups. He stood in the doorway longer than seemed necessary. He did not look at the husband, but at the house itself, as though trying to recall where he had seen it before.

When he stepped inside, he paused.

“There is a smell,” he said.

He closed his eyes briefly, as if following it. But the thought left him.

Sara dressed and came to greet him. She noticed that one of his loafers was slightly greener than the other, though she could not imagine why.

“My name is Sara Moon,” she said. “Thank you for coming. Would you like something to eat or drink?”

“No,” he said. “Let us begin.”

He took out his notepad, made a few notes, and went to work. He listened longer than the others had, asking her to sit very still. At first he counted, then lost his place and began again, then stopped counting altogether.

“Moon,” he said slowly, as if testing the word.

When he finished, he removed his glasses.

“Curious.”

It was not clear whether he meant the name or the heart. He remained there a moment longer than required. Then, quite suddenly, he turned toward the mantelpiece.

“Where did you get that doll?” he asked.

“It belonged to my grandmother,” Sara said.

He nodded, as if something had been confirmed. He did not mention the heart again.

“I would like to return in three days,” he said.

Sara tilted her head and nodded. He left without another word. Sara did not think much of it.

Walking through crowded streets, she would occasionally feel a sudden and inexplicable calm, as though the two rhythms inside her had briefly agreed on something, only to fall apart again as quickly as they had come together. Once, standing at the edge of a market, she stopped without knowing why and listened. The crowd moved around her as though nothing had happened. But beneath it she thought she heard something—another rhythm, distant and indistinct, that seemed to answer her own. By the time she tried to follow it, the feeling had already passed.

At home, her husband sometimes found her standing at the window, looking toward the west.

“What are you watching?” he would ask.

“Nothing,” Sara would say, though she had the distinct impression that something had just disappeared from view.

Kenji Yamamoto stayed at the inn a few steps from the cathedral, where he learned that Sara Moon had been baptized twice, once for each heart. This confused him, as she did not appear to possess two souls, at least as far as he could determine.

“I am visiting a patient,” he said at the cathedral. “Sara Moon—the woman with two heartbeats.”

“Ah yes,” said the bishop. “I remember the day clearly. The sun held in the sky at noon, unmoving, and then dropped all at once. We felt a breeze and stopped sweating.”

“And the girl?” Kenji pressed.

“Wouldn’t sleep,” the bishop said. “But I saw her last Sunday at the market. Buying turmeric.”

Kenji nodded and was quiet for a moment. Then he asked, as if it had just occurred to him, whether anyone else in the town had ever seemed to be waiting for something—not impatiently, but in the way a room waits after a door has closed.

The bishop looked at him for a long moment.

“That,” he said carefully, “describes half the town.”

Kenji wrote nothing in his notebook on the walk back.

He returned three days later. As before, he stood at the doorway longer than seemed polite. When he entered, he felt at once that the house was different, though nothing had changed. The table and chairs remained in the same places, the wine stain still running down one leg. The porcelain doll on the mantelpiece sat angled toward the clock, as if keeping it to its duty. The plants—seven of them—were carefully tended, and beside them lay a book of poetry he had already noted, along with his suspicion that she read to them.

“Thank you for coming again,” Sara said. “Would you like something to eat or drink?”

Though he stood perfectly still, she had the strange impression that he had arrived out of breath.

“There is a smell here,” he said, already reaching for his notebook. “Not unpleasant. I cannot identify it.”

“Sunlight,” she said.

“I beg your pardon.”

“That is what I call it.”

Kenji Yamamoto’s expression softened. Sara thought she saw the trace of a smile.

“Please,” he said. “Let me listen again.”

He listened for a long while. Then he stopped and tilted his head slightly, as if distracted by something in the next room. He removed the stethoscope.

“Do you hear that?” he said.

“Hear what?” Sara asked.

“That whistling.” He looked toward the window, which was closed. He put the stethoscope back and listened again briefly. “Ah,” he said, almost to himself. “There it is.” He made a single note, crossed it out, and closed his notebook. Then he removed the stethoscope and placed his hand over her chest. They sat that way in silence. Fifteen minutes passed. Then he nodded, as though hearing something familiar.

“Yes,” he said quietly.

“You know what I have?” she asked.

He did not answer. He gathered his things and made one final note.

“But you’re not going to tell me,” she said.

He rose and moved toward the door.

“You will understand,” he said. He bowed, and left.

Sara Moon felt a loneliness she had not known before. Many people had come to see her over the years—witch doctors, pseudoscientists, new age gurus, students, old sages—each one certain of something, and none of them correct. Most had spoken too much. This one had said almost nothing. After he left, the house seemed slightly larger, though nothing in it had changed. She moved through her days as before, but with the uneasy sense that something had been said to her in a language she almost understood. In the days that followed, she remembered the pauses in the conversation more clearly than the words themselves. The only thing that remained was the memory of his hand—small and still—placed flat against her chest, as no one before him had thought to do.

After that, her husband turned away anyone who came asking about her heart. Even when she visited a doctor, she asked that no mention be made of the second heartbeat. And in time, she let the question go.

She still paused, now and then, looking westward or stopping mid-sentence, but she no longer followed the feeling. It passed, as many things do, when left alone.

One day, at the market, she felt her heart stumble. It startled her. She took the chicken from the grocer and went to the washroom, where she washed her hands in cold water and dried them in her hair, as she always did. When she returned, the second rhythm surged again, louder than she had ever known it. She moved through the crowd, unsteady, her hand pressed against her chest. The two beats argued sharply now, no longer distant from one another but insistent, overlapping. She stopped at a fruit stand and picked up an apple. The second heartbeat quieted. She held herself still, afraid that even the smallest movement might disturb it. When she looked up, a man was standing beside her. He was already looking at her, as if she had just said something important. She stepped away. The second heartbeat rose again. She stepped closer. It softened. He took a step forward. When their chests met, the sound disappeared. For the first time in her life, there was silence. She closed her eyes. They stood that way for some time. Neither of them spoke. She opened her eyes. He tilted his head slightly, as if listening.

“Ah,” he said softly. “So it was you.”

They did not speak again. The market moved around them as it always had, but for Sara it all seemed arranged around a still center that only the two of them could feel. After a while, they stepped apart at the same moment. As they did, his hand brushed hers. For a brief instant, he turned her hand just enough to see the ring. He nodded once. Then he turned and disappeared into the crowd. The market rushed back into itself all at once. The second heartbeat rose sharply and resumed its restless argument. Sara stood there a long while, her hand still resting on the apples she had not yet chosen, until the grocer called her name twice.

That evening she went home and prepared dinner as she always did. Her husband spoke to her about small things—the price of fish, a neighbor’s complaint—and she listened, answering where she was expected to answer. When he laughed, she laughed with him, though a moment too late, as if adjusting to a rhythm that had shifted only slightly. He noticed.

“You’re tired,” he said, watching her carefully. “The market was crowded today. It does that to you sometimes.”

She looked at him. He nodded, satisfied.

“We should go earlier next time,” he said. “Before the crowds.”

That night, lying beside him, she placed her hand over her chest and listened. The two heartbeats had resumed their quiet disagreement. But beneath them there remained the memory of something else.

The grocer mentioned it to no one in particular, only that Sara Moon had stood very still at the fruit stand for some time before selecting her apples, which were ordinary apples, and that she had paid the correct amount and said thank you as she always did. The bishop, who had been passing with his hands folded behind him, noted only that the afternoon light had been unusually flat, the kind that makes shadows disappear. The woman at the fabric stall said she had seemed distracted, but then Sara Moon had always seemed distracted, ever since she was a child clapping to the wrong beat in the park. None of them mentioned the man who had stood beside her, partly because they had not noticed him, and partly because by evening they were no longer certain there had been a man at all. The second heartbeat continued as it always had. The town agreed, without discussing it, that nothing of consequence had occurred.

In the years that followed, the rhythm would falter from time to time—never for long. A few seconds, perhaps. Once, nearly a minute. She never saw the man again. But when the silence came, she no longer looked around for its source.