February 6, 2019
Once she’s safe inside Thor’s house, Agnes peels off her jacket and removes her boots with trembling fingers. He killed you. We all knew. There it is. The certainty with which everyone who knew her grandfather best labeled him a murderer. Agnes feels rubbed raw, her nerves chafing and frayed. She’ll have to talk to Júlía again. She’ll have to find a better way to ask the old woman what she knows. What did they all know, that they didn’t bring forward to the police all those years ago?
Drained, Agnes staggers back into her room. She drops onto the side of her bed with a groan, her leg almost not bending at the knee. She unfolds herself in stages, grunting with the effort.
She hadn’t reached for the bottle consciously, but the pills rattle in her left hand. She can’t seem to let go of the bottle, even though she’s telling herself she won’t open it. She’s gotten this far on just one. In her right hand is her phone.
She logs in to the Wi-Fi. No messages.
She finds her way to Emi’s Instagram, out of habit. The last time she checked, Emi still had photos of them together on her profile. Selfies posing in the garden, sun soaked and dirty, scenes of Agnes draped on their couch in their apartment. A portrait of Agnes surfing in Bolinas, her grandfather in the foreground, hands on his hips, watching her. The caption reads: tfw Kate Bosworth in Blue Crush was your sexual awakening and now you’re dating her. That had been a day so wonderful it had wounded Agnes. The drive into Bolinas, all three of them carsick from the curving roads, her grandfather’s booming laughter at Emi’s jokes. When they got home, Emi had thanked Agnes for sharing her family with her.
Her heart squeezes. She had to scroll for a while to find these photos.
Her family’s gone. Grandfather dead, Emi reduced to the occasional polite text, her father no longer speaking to her, and her mother—well, her mother’s in Maine.
She dials Emi’s number.
What time is it in Berkeley? Seven a.m.? Eight?
Agnes listens to each ring, the line staticky and different, and pops the pill bottle open. She digs out one tiny white pill. Not to swallow. Just to look at. They’d given her so many of these after the operation. Her surgeon had lamented, over and over, what bad luck she had. This is going to be a long road, he’d warned her. In addition to destroying her kneecap and tearing the ligaments surrounding it, she’d shattered the bottom of her shinbone, right at the root of the ankle. At first, the pills were what kept her from screaming. But somewhere in the third month, when her leg had wasted away to skin and bone, she understood them for their true effects.
That, unsurprisingly, was around the time when Emi broke up with her. She wouldn’t kick Agnes out of their apartment for another two months, when Agnes started to get the pills not from the pharmacy but from a man she met through a mutual acquaintance.
The line picks up. There’s a burst of something on the other end—a laugh, maybe. Then there’s Emi’s hushed, concerned voice. “Hey, baby. What’s going on?”
“I—” Agnes stutters, thrown by Emi’s tenderness. Does Emi know that she was just collateral damage? Does that make their breakup better or worse for her? Agnes is afraid to ask. And what a way to start a phone call. So she hears herself say, stupidly, “I made it. I’m in Iceland.”
“Oh, good. How is it?”
Agnes searches the room for something to look at, something to distract herself, but there’s nothing. She is held captive by the silence on the line. By how much she’s left unsaid.
“It’s okay,” Emi tells her. “You’re okay. Have you eaten anything today?”
Agnes lets out a hoarse laugh. “No.”
A harsh sigh. “I will fly out there and force you to eat, don’t tempt me.”
The confession spills out of Agnes. “I’m so lonely, Em.”
There’s a pause, unbearably long, long enough for Agnes’s gaze to finally snag on something. The writing desk. It’s where she’d arranged Nora’s notes and the photos of her family. She had placed them in a pile, the family portrait propped up on the table.
It’s gone.
Agnes scans the floor. Stands to get a better look at the table. It could have slipped back down onto the pile.
“… honey,” Emi’s saying.
“What?” Agnes shuffles through the pages. No sign of the portrait.
“Oh, I’m sorry, am I interrupting you?” The snap in Emi’s voice brings Agnes back to attention. “You called me. You’re the one putting this on me.”
“I’m not putting it on you,” Agnes says. She drops back onto the mattress, rubbing her eyes. Maybe she put the portrait in her bag for safekeeping and forgot about it. She isn’t exactly operating at full capacity right now. “Or if I am, I don’t mean to. I just—I need—I need a friend right now, Em. That’s it.”
Another sigh. “I know.”
Agnes waits for more, but it doesn’t come. “I’m sorry,” she says, even though it’s not enough. She fidgets with the tiny white pill in her hand. She’s never been any good at resisting temptation. “Are you—have you—I mean, have you been seeing anyone?”
A long inhale.
“That’s great,” Agnes says quickly. “Don’t tell me.”
The conversation ends abruptly. Emi has to get ready for work. She reminds Agnes to take care of herself. “Find a friend,” she tells her. And then the line goes dead.
Agnes returns to Emi’s profile, to the more recent photos she’d ignored on her quest to find herself in Emi’s life. There’s a new photo of her, sitting in someone’s backyard. There’s someone else with her, cradling her body from behind, tucking their face into her neck. The caption reads, Soft launch.
She had known Emi would find someone else. Would tell anyone honestly that she’d hope she’d move on, be happy. But still it’s a blow. It’s a reminder of the before. Before Agnes became this shell of herself. Before she discovered the pleasure that comes in skirting around the edge of something completely, vastly unknown. Something that consumes you not because it’s seeking you out, but because it simply is there and it is so much bigger. A black hole.
Sickened, suddenly, by herself, Agnes drops the pill back into the bottle. She seals it shut and stashes it back under the mattress.
She checks her bags, both the backpack and the suitcase, for the family portrait. Nothing. She hobbles out into the hallway. Considers Nora’s closed door. She’s opening it before she can second-guess herself. She’s not snooping, she tells herself, she’s looking for something Nora gave her. Maybe Nora took it back, without Agnes knowing, for reasons known only to herself. Agnes skims the surfaces of the expansive room.
No Xeroxes, no loose papers. Nora’s tidy. There’s a pile of plastic storage boxes in the corner of the room, filled with folders. Agnes gets lightheaded just imagining pilfering through those files.
She returns to the living room. She might have dragged it out here. It doesn’t make any sense, the desperation she feels, but she wants to see her grandfather again. The Before-Him, as he’d called it. She’s so close to him, but she feels so far away. He killed her. We all knew. Agnes is searching between the couch cushions when the front door opens.
“Perfect timing,” Nora says. She beams at Agnes and throws her arms wide open. “I have a lead.”