February 7, 2019
“Finally,” Nora says, hoisting up her glass, “we can have dinner together.”
Agnes, seated across from her at the dining room table, lifts her wineglass in a half-hearted salute. She has hardly eaten. Her appetite hasn’t returned, not at all. Instead, she’s focused on the wine, trying to dull the pounding in her skull, the aches in her joints. She’s done it. She’s made it a couple of days now without getting stoned. She’s earned this.
Nora’s drinking Icelandic gin. She says she likes to integrate herself into a place. “Taste everything, smell everything,” she says, leaning back in her seat. “Enjoy myself, you know?”
The gin tempts Agnes. The sides of Nora’s tall glass glisten with cold sweat. But the wine, at room temperature, seems to be soothing her stomach. The icy drink will only complicate things.
“Tell me something,” Agnes says, taking courage from the alcohol. “Ingvar. How come you’re so sure he isn’t Ása’s secret boyfriend?”
“I’m not sure,” Nora says. “Not at all. But I just don’t really see it. The guy’s practically a saint. He left his job and his girlfriend and his place in the city to move back home and care for his dying mother. You couldn’t pay me to do that with my own mother. Not that I have anyone to leave at the moment, but the point still stands.” Nora finishes her drink. “I don’t see him dating a student at the same time.”
Agnes raises her eyebrows. “Maybe that’s exactly why he’s dating her. No one’s a saint. He might need some excitement in all his martyrdom.”
Nora laughs.
“What?” Agnes asks, feeling defensive.
“Nothing,” Nora says. She tosses back her mane of hair. “I like you.”
Agnes huffs, secretly pleased. Then, more seriously: “Speaking of Ingvar’s mother … What about this story she told us? Do you think there’s any truth to it?”
“That Marie hated her daughter?” Nora asks. She pours herself more gin, then tops up Agnes’s wine. Agnes hasn’t had much to drink in the past year, not with her focus on other, more pleasurable pursuits, but this is helping. “I don’t know. This is all forty years in the past. Júlía’s got memory issues, but with stuff like that, it’s short-term memory that’s the problem. Long-term memory tends to take over. I think Marie probably said it, or something similar.”
“And?” Agnes prompts.
“And what?”
“And what about the theory?” Agnes doesn’t want to have to say it. Tell me you still think he’s innocent. “Marie’s postpartum psychosis.”
“Well,” Nora says, dragging out the word. She looks uncharacteristically uncomfortable. “From what Júlía told us, it sounds like Marie may have experienced postpartum depression with her firstborn. Magnús. Of course, she was still a teenager when she had him, so she could really just have been overwhelmed by the sudden responsibility. I wouldn’t be surprised, though, if it was also PPD. That gives more weight to the idea that she might have experienced it again, with her second child, and this time … without her support network…” She doesn’t complete the thought. And she heads off Agnes’s objections with a raised palm. “It’s not what you want to hear, I know. But I’m not going to sugarcoat this for you. I want us to be on the same page. Square. You’re trusting me with your memories of your grandfather. The least I can do is make sure you know where I’m at. Right?”
Agnes sits back. “What,” she says. It’s not a question.
“I’m going to try to talk to Júlía again, because she is the one who called the police. Originally.” Nora says it as though this is supposed to shock Agnes.
“So?”
“So,” Nora says, “I’ve lived in small towns. They take care of their own. With something like this, you’d think that they’d at least spend a day or two figuring things out on their own, before calling for help. That’s just the way it works, especially when the nearest police station is not in the town proper. But Einar calls Júlía to ask if she’s seen Marie, she says no, they hang up, and she immediately calls the police. That’s suspicious. What did she know about their relationship that made one day’s absence worthy of a call to the police?”
Agnes pushes her chair away from the table. “I have to sleep,” she says. “It’s the jet lag.”
“Wait,” Nora says. She stands, too. She’s wobbly, but in control. She grabs for Agnes’s shoulders. “If it were me, I would want to know everything. So I’m telling you everything. You have to let me know where your limit is. Did we hit it?”
Agnes takes a deep breath. “No,” she says. “I want to know everything.” She can see the relief, visible, on Nora’s face. She wishes she felt the same.
“Tell me,” Nora repeats, “where your limit is. It can change at any time. Just tell me. I like to think we’re friends. Or we’re getting there, right?”
Agnes says, “Yes,” and is surprised by the truth of it.
“Friends tell each other things.” Nora gives her a tiny shake, then releases her. “Now go to bed, you’re starting to look like a zombie.”
Once she’s safely hidden in the dark shadows of her room, Agnes folds herself onto the floor, leaning her back against her bedframe. She should shower before she gets into bed, but that requires much more effort than she can afford at the moment. She checks her phone.
There’s a text from an unknown number.
Lilja.
So Agnes now has her number, too.
Agnes stares at the screen, trying to see through it to the woman’s face. Had she sent this message happily? Nervously? Why hadn’t she said more? Agnes slides her right foot into her body, hugging herself tight. She considers her options. Leave it? Let the message sit until she’s somewhat sober? Somewhat rested?
She’s never been the type to wait.
Hi, she types.
Restless now, almost giddy, she dials her father’s number. She doesn’t think of the time when she calls, but she figures it must be early for him. With the phone pressed to her ear, it’s all just a matter of leaning over to one side, to grab the pill bottle from beneath the mattress.
He answers on the second ring. “Yes?”
She squeezes the bottle in one hand. “Am I interrupting you?”
“Yes, but what is it? Are you okay?”
Agnes remembers her father standing at the foot of her hospital bed, after the accident. One hand wrapped around her right ankle. She can still feel the tremor in his fingers. He hadn’t been able to look at her left leg, encased in gauze and metal and smelling of disinfectant.
What did you do? he’d asked her, as though the doctors hadn’t told him.
Hot tears poured down her temples. There was nothing to say. He knew it all, already.
And still, though, he’d asked. Why would you do this?
Now, her body aching and her mind fuzzy, she wants to tell her father she’s glad she came here. You were wrong about everything, she could say. About Nora, about me. Even with all the hurt. She’s doing the right thing. Instead, she says, “I’m really tired,” because that is also true.
“You should sleep.” There are the familiar clunks and shuffling noises of him rearranging himself in his office chair. “What’s it like?”
“So cold,” she says. “How did you ever survive the winter?”
“Out of necessity,” he says. She imagines him at his desk, a mug of coffee cooling next to his keyboard. Forgotten, as it frequently is. Long tracks of the liquid delineating the sides of the mug, from when he spills on his walk from the kitchen to his office. “I hated it. All that relentless darkness. It was awful. In summer, I could camp out on my own. In winter, I would’ve died. It’s like living in two different places.”
“I’ve been hearing stories of you going outside on your own,” she says. “Júlía says hi, by the way.”
There’s a horrible, thick silence.
“Júlía,” he says, finally. Agnes wishes she could see his face, so she could read his mood, but there is only the faint echo on the line, his wooden voice. “She’s still there.”
“Yeah,” Agnes says. “I think she’s dying, though. We could only talk to her for a few minutes. Sometimes she thought we were in the seventies.” She considers telling her father more. She thought I was your mother. She keeps quiet, if only because she doesn’t want to have that particular argument. Why didn’t you tell me? she could ask. Why didn’t you ever tell me how much I look like her?
Talking to her father has never been easy. Now, at this distance, it’s next to impossible.
“You know, Agnes,” her father says, breaking the silence, “you’re an adult and you’re entitled to do whatever you want. But what you are doing is making a terrible mistake.”
“Dad—” she begins, but he interrupts her.
“No,” he says. “No Dad. You have no idea what you are doing. You have no idea what this Nora Carver is capable of. How are you going to feel when she proves that your grandfather killed his wife? His child? How are you going to feel when you’ve helped her destroy our family?”
“That’s not fair,” she says. The world spins around her. “He didn’t—”
“He did, Agnes.”
She disappears inside herself, her father’s words echoing down the hollow halls of her body. She imagines she says, “What?” but she can’t be certain she’s actually said it aloud.
“Come home,” her father says.
“No,” she says. “What do you mean, he did? Dad? What are you saying?”
“Why do you think we left, Agnes?” Her father’s sigh is harsh in her ear. “Why do you think we moved halfway across the world? Just because it was difficult?”
She comes back to herself, all at once. The searing pain in her chest won’t let her dissociate into the ether. Her fingers strain around the pill bottle. “Why didn’t you tell me?” she asks. Then, the incredulity: “Why would you let me near him? Why would you ever leave me alone with him, if you thought he’d slaughtered his wife and daughter? What’s wrong with you? Why did you wait until I—”
Her father cuts her off. “Because he’s my father.” The words reverberate between them. “He was the only family I had. For whatever reason, he did what he did. And he didn’t hurt me. I had to trust him, Agnes, because he was all I had left.”
She ends the call before she’s aware of what she’s done.
The phone is in one hand. The other has the bottle of pills. She places her phone on the mattress, then doles herself out two pills. Then, without another thought, three more.
Agnes, her father had said, standing over her hospital bed, the large hand encircling her ankle like a cuff, what did you do this time?