February 6, 2019
“I know who I need to talk to,” Nora says, dropping onto the couch opposite Agnes. “Finally.”
“Finally?” Agnes can’t hide her skepticism. “Hasn’t it only been a day since she was reported missing?”
Nora tosses her hair over her shoulder. “An eternity for someone as impatient as I am.”
Agnes feels herself relaxing. She hadn’t thought she would, hadn’t even given it a second thought, but she likes Nora. That had never been part of her considerations, when she’d decided to come here. As a person, Nora was irrelevant. All that mattered was what she could do for Agnes. But now, listening to Nora’s plotting, Agnes has to admit to herself: she likes Nora and that does matter.
Find a friend.
“You have no idea how much I hate not knowing,” Nora’s telling her. “It’s been excruciating waiting to know what they’re looking for, what they’re thinking, and now … I know more than they do.” She barks out a triumphant laugh. “This means I’ll be out again tomorrow, though. So I have a proposition for you. It’s unorthodox, but I’d like for you to join me when I talk to Ása’s friends. I don’t love the idea of you here all by yourself when you’ve come all this way. And when, frankly, it does sound like something happened to Ása. I’d feel better if you weren’t roaming the woods by yourself. What do you say?”
“Yeah,” Agnes says. “Cool.”
This isn’t what she came here to do, but she might as well join Nora. She’s curious about this missing woman. And she doesn’t think she could handle another day to herself, alone with all her temptations.
“What’s the lead you’ve got?” Agnes asks. “You said you know who to talk to?”
“It’s something I overheard when I walked in. I passed a couple of the kids who had been at the party, just as they were leaving. They were arguing about a phone. The girl said, ‘We have to tell them about the phone.’ And the guy told her to be quiet. He was furious.”
Agnes waits. When Nora doesn’t elaborate, only looks at her like, See? she asks, “That’s it?”
“Are you kidding?” Nora asks. “I know who Ása’s friends are. I know that, for whatever reason, her friends are keeping something from the police, something about a phone. It’s so much information.”
“Did you tell this to the police?” Agnes wonders, watching Nora’s mind work, if she should tell her about Júlía. He killed her. We all knew. What would Nora do with that information?
“Not yet. I’d like to talk to these students first. Hildur’s helping to find a time for us all to talk tomorrow. She’s an adviser at the school. She knows these kids.”
“She’s the one who wrote the book on my family, right?”
“Exactly.” Nora eyes Agnes. “You sure you’re up for it? You’re still looking a bit clammy.”
“I just need some sleep tonight, I think.” Agnes wipes her forehead, whisking away a fine mist of sweat. She probably has a fever. She hasn’t taken her usual handful of pills, hasn’t eaten properly for days, hasn’t slept, and she’s walked more today than she has in a year. She’s lucky to be speaking in full sentences.
“If you’re sure…”
“I am,” Agnes says, and it comes out more harshly than intended. “It’s just jet lag,” she says.
“Understandable,” Nora says. Then, stretching her back, she gets that same daring look from yesterday. “How would you feel about an interview? A bit more official, this time.”
“Right now?” Agnes’s stomach lurches. She knows this is why she’s here, but she can’t help but feel a knee-jerk burst of stage fright.
Nora repeats, “Only if you’re up for it,” but she doesn’t wait for Agnes’s answer. She’s up and at the dining table in a heartbeat, digging through the pile of machinery, searching for a microphone. “You signed the consent form, right?”
“Yeah,” Agnes lies.
As Nora clips the microphone to her sweatshirt, Agnes comes to a decision—or, she realizes that she’s already decided and has only just now noticed. She’s not going to tell Nora about her talk with Júlía. For all that Agnes likes Nora, this isn’t Nora’s family. This is only a show to her.
“Oh, hey,” Agnes says, “you know that family portrait you gave me? The one where they’re all standing outside? Did you take it from my room?”
“No,” Nora says. She returns to the dining table to set something up on one of her expensive laptops. “I have my own copy.”
Agnes pinches the bridge of her nose, trying to remember what she did with it. “Maybe I really did misplace it.”
“I’ll make you another copy,” Nora offers, “if you can’t find it.”
Agnes rebuffs her offer, for now. She had the printout this morning. It didn’t disappear into thin air.
By the time they’re finally sitting across from each other, both wearing their respective microphones, the sun has set again. The world outside the windows is a uniform black. Nora has flicked on the lights, started a fire, and even set them out a bunch of “pre-dinner snacks.” The atmosphere in the room is intimate, but there’s too much darkness, too quickly. Agnes is upside down, not even confident what day it is anymore.
“In my more ‘official’ interviews,” Nora begins, “I use a bigger, more impressive microphone. It’s a lot of pageantry. You’ll see it tomorrow. But between you and me, I want you to try to forget, as much as you’re able, what we’re doing here. This isn’t me asking you a series of leading questions, hoping to get one particular answer. I just want to know what your grandfather was like. Who was he to you? Not, Is he a murderer or isn’t he? That’s not helpful to anyone. I mean, unless he said it explicitly to you, unless there’s something you want to tell me.” She waits. When Agnes doesn’t speak, she adds, “Does this sound fair?”
Agnes isn’t listening. She’s too distracted by the weight of the microphone, the touch of its plastic to her skin. She imagines the comments on Nora’s podcast. The thousands of ratings. The reviews that treat the real people involved like characters in one of Agnes’s murder mystery shows. He’s guilty and the granddaughter knows it. She’s lying when she says she doesn’t know anything.
“He’s innocent,” Agnes hears herself say. “I don’t have proof. I know that’s not what you want to hear. He’s gone, and he can’t say it for himself anymore. He never could. It was too huge. But he wasn’t a murderer.”
Nora asks, “What was too huge?”
“The truth,” Agnes says. “His grief. His sadness. My grandfather led a very solitary life in California. I spent every Sunday with him—that was our day—but I don’t think he went out much during the week. He read. He tended to his garden. He went swimming. But he never remarried and he only had me for company, which isn’t much. He died alone.”
At the very end, Agnes’s father had arranged for a daytime nurse to take care of her grandfather’s needs. Agnes had been living with Emi then, had been too busy with work. Einar died sometime in the night, alone in his apartment. He’d been young. Too young for how he looked. He lived a hard life, her father had told Agnes, after. Stress has a way of ruining a body. Stress, and a nasty bout of meningitis from which he never fully recovered.
Her grandfather had been found by the nurse in the morning. Agnes had been too busy to help him, and so a stranger had been the one to tend to him. This fact haunts Agnes, the loneliness of it threatening to swallow her whole.
Nora nods. “Sundays were your day. Was this religious? Was your father present?”
“Not religious,” Agnes says, feeling her face relax. Her grandfather, a staunch atheist, would have been insulted by the question. “And no, it was just me. The visits started when I was in elementary school. My parents’ marriage was falling apart, and I wasn’t taking it well, so I think they thought I needed something more stable. Or maybe they just needed time to themselves, to figure things out. We kept up the tradition, though, after the divorce. Up until the end, actually. We would try to see each other more often throughout the week, too, but we always ensured we had that time together. I loved those days. He was like my second father.”
More than that, Agnes thinks. Her real father. But she holds back from saying this, if only because Magnús might listen to this. She’s angry with him. They have a complicated relationship, which is probably downplaying it by a lot. But she’s never wanted to hurt her father. Especially not now, when he’s the only ally she’s got left.
“It doesn’t sound like he was close with your first father,” Nora says, calling Agnes back to the present.
“I don’t know.” The answer is no, Magnús and Einar hadn’t been close. They hadn’t known how to speak to each other, not for much longer than a short visit. But they’d loved each other, Agnes had felt it. “My dad would never have left me alone with him, though, if he thought his father was a murderer. If he thought his father had killed his own wife and child. That has to be worth something, right?”
“Can I give you some advice?” Nora asks. “Recalibrate your expectations. You aren’t here as the sole advocate for your family. I know that’s what it feels like, but I’m not out to get anyone. And you also aren’t here to prove your grandfather’s innocence. Frankly, you can’t. I just want to know about your life with him, and without him. It sounds like you two were very close, and that’s valuable. Far more valuable than your opinion on the case.”
Agnes says, “Right,” if only to keep the conversation moving forward. She has to be able to prove his innocence. She doesn’t know what she would do, if she couldn’t.
“Besides,” Nora says, “you say Einar never spoke to you about his wife and daughter at all. Right?”
Agnes hesitates. “Yeah,” she says, finally. “I don’t speak the language. I’ve never been here before. My family never talks about Iceland. It’s not a casual topic in our household. I don’t blame my grandfather for his silence. I know what people think, that if you’re innocent, you’d scream about it. I know that they say silence is complicit admission, or whatever. But that’s not fair. That’s not human. What my grandfather went through—what my father went through—I don’t think people understand what that must have been like, for them. I don’t think they understand how much grief changes you.”
“Trauma,” Nora says.
Agnes doesn’t hear her. She sees her grandfather’s hands, the skin mottled and papery thin, as they were in those last months. She had grown up with his strength, with the power of his arms vaulting her through the waves in Bolinas, the unshakable grip. She’d grown up watching that power transform from something external to something entirely internal. And then it had waned, until he was something delicate. She sees him suddenly as a man, not a source of comfort. A man who had been born in another country, who had endured many lifetimes of tragedy in one, and who had held his tongue. Who had contained the world in his body, until that, too, failed him.
I love you, Agnes. And you love me, don’t you?
Nora’s speaking still, prompting her, but Agnes isn’t listening.
“I don’t want to talk about it anymore,” she says.
“You’re doing great,” Nora assures her. “It’s always messy at the start, but—”
“I can’t,” Agnes says. “Not right now.”
“All right,” Nora says, and there’s so much tenderness in her voice Agnes could cry.
Agnes runs a hand through her hair, but her fingers don’t get far. Her hair is tangled, windswept and unbrushed. She wants nothing more right now than the oblivion of sleep. “Can I have a melatonin?” she asks Nora. It’s like asking for cucumber water when what she needs is vodka, but it’ll have to do.
Nora agrees. She digs through her stash in the kitchen and returns, putting a handful into Agnes’s waiting palm. “This ought to last you a few days,” she says. “Are you going to sleep now?” She checks the time. “I was about to make dinner.”
“I’m sorry,” Agnes says, “but yeah.”
Nora touches her shoulder. Just lightly. “You should rest, then. Tomorrow’s a big day.” The touch disappears. “You aren’t alone, Agnes. I’m right here with you.”