February 8, 2019
The conversation happened on one of their Sunday visits. Einar had less than two weeks to live, though neither of them knew that at the time. They were just going through their routine as usual, or as best as they could. Einar hadn’t been able to leave his bed. The living room was too far for him, the garden practically a galaxy away. Agnes had brought tea to his bedroom and opened the window, so they could smell the sun-warmed magnolia tree.
I have been thinking, Einar had said.
Good stuff? Agnes had tried for a joke. It didn’t land.
Some of that, he said. But mostly the regret. I have made so many mistakes in my life. I hope you can live without so many regrets. Nothing is clear, when it’s happening. You try to control the outcome. But life has a way of playing with you, doesn’t it?
Agnes, still madly in love with Emi, agreed with him. She was losing her grandfather, she understood that intellectually, and she’d been able, so far, to comfort herself with the idea of Emi. Einar had reached for her hand, squeezing it as tight as he could. It wasn’t much, but she felt it, felt the pressure squeeze her heart.
I love you, Agnes, he’d said. And you love me, don’t you?
I love you so much, she’d said.
You know what they say I’ve done, he said. My life—before.
Yes.
You never believed it, did you?
No. Of course not. That had been true.
Because you love me.
Yes.
A strange smile, then. A twist of his eyebrows. Would you still love me, he said, if it were true?
When Agnes finally emerges from her bedroom, haggard and hollow, it’s to find the house empty. There’s a note from Nora on the kitchen counter, telling her that she’d tried to wake her, but she’d had to go. Something to do with the police, or Ása’s friends. Agnes finds she can’t bring herself to care.
Standing in the kitchen, Agnes lets Nora’s note drop back to the counter. She pulls up her phone, squinting at the screen.
Hi, she’d sent to Lilja.
Hi, she’d answered. Late last night, after Agnes had finally slipped into sleep.
It’s not much, but right now, it feels like enough. Something bright and different. Agnes types, What are you doing today? Can we talk? Not for the podcast, just us?
The response comes back almost instantly. I’m home all evening.
Great, Agnes types.
She is still learning who she is, she’s still finding out so much about herself, but she knows that she can’t be alone today. She’s about two seconds away from swallowing a handful of pills in one gulp, just to start. Seeing Lilja is one way to stop herself from doing that. Until then, though, she can’t be here. So she returns to her room, bundling herself into her many layers, and she marches out the front door.
She has only a vague formulation of a plan. She’ll join one of the search parties looking for Ása, out in the snow. She used to process her feelings physically, used to swim or paddle or run through the feeling until she was out the other side.
Agnes is afraid of what she’ll do if she stays inside today.
She’s almost to her car when she hears someone calling her name. She turns in place, but she can’t see who called her. There are the trees, the snow, the house. The shadow of the space where Nora’s truck had been parked. Agnes looks for color. The day is overcast and dark, the ground and the sky the same shade of gray. She’s starting to think she imagined the voice, when she sees the man emerge from the trees.
It’s Thor. He’s dressed in a khaki-green snowsuit. In the forest, it had been like camouflage. He pushes his hood away, revealing a bright orange beanie.
“Hello!” he calls, raising a hand. He reaches her quickly, moving confidently and powerfully through the snow. “I hope I didn’t frighten you.”
“I’m fine,” Agnes says. “If you’re looking for Nora, though, she’s not here. She’s—”
“—in town,” Thor finishes for her. “I know. She tells me that she has business there. Interrogating Ása’s friends, like the Hollywood detectives. I thought I might come and ask you for company while I searched the fields. We didn’t get much chance to meet each other. But if you’re busy, too…”
“No,” she says. “I was actually just going to try to join the search.”
“Wonderful,” he exclaims. “We’ll go this way.” With a gentle touch to her lower back, Thor guides her to the right side of the house, in the direction of Bifröst. All Agnes can see are the trees surrounding them, the backdrop of the river below. There’s no easy way to walk through the thick, frozen blanket of snow. Each step is a crunch and then a drop, about six inches deep, in the unmarked snow. Thor has more grace, or perhaps practice, but Agnes soldiers on, gritting her teeth against the grind of her joints.
“Where have you been searching so far?” Agnes asks, already out of breath.
“We have looked in the radius of the house and her apartment building,” Thor tells her, indicating that they should turn right again. The earth pulls downward, and they stop at what appears to be a staircase, embedded in the rock, snaking a path to the riverbanks. “We will walk along the water,” he tells her, “then cross up and over. Now that we’ve exhausted the usual places, we are having to expand away from where she might have taken herself. Go where she might have been taken.”
Agnes says, “Okay,” while hoping desperately they aren’t going too far.
Thor insists on descending the staircase first, to which Agnes readily agrees. She follows his steps slowly. “No one wants to say it,” he tells her, “but this is no longer a rescue mission.”
“I’m sorry,” Agnes says, and it’s true. “Do you know her?”
Her foot slides out from beneath her, but Thor’s hands are right there. He keeps her upright. “Careful,” he says. Then: “I see everyone. I know everyone. But it’s not about her. It’s about the town. We are a connected, living thing. Losing someone, after Marie and Agnes—” At this, he gives Agnes an odd look. A frowning smile. “—your namesake, I am guessing. We all remember, and we can’t have this happen. Not again.”
What had Nora said? They’re all afraid to say it. Murder. Thor’s not afraid. She supposes it’s because he’s already dealt with this before. She sneaks a glance at him. He was eighteen when it happened. This makes him nearly sixty. He looks closer to her father’s age, maybe just a bit more lived-in.
Thor catches her staring. “I apologize,” he says. “I shouldn’t speak of this. It makes it real, when you speak of it.”
“Yeah,” she says. “Sometimes, though, it helps to talk about it.” She thinks of her sessions with Dr. Lee. At first, it had felt like she was lying. Like she was coming up with things to say, because that’s what the woman expected of her. Then, the more she spoke, the more she understood that everything she’d said was true. They’d felt like lies because Agnes had alienated herself from those thoughts.
She’d alienated herself from herself. Or so Dr. Lee had told her, when she’d confessed to this experience, much later in their sessions.
She can feel it happening again. Swift and complete, like she’s shutting a door within herself.
This walk was supposed to help her work through the feelings. But instead it’s just helping her to shove them away. She focuses on Thor. On the beautiful landscape around her. She is nothing but this Agnes right now. The tired woman walking in the snow, searching for a missing student. Soon, the other Agnes, the one who had never doubted her grandfather’s innocence, not once in twenty-six years, not until he himself had planted that seed within her mind, disappears from view entirely.
Once they reach the riverbank, though, Agnes loses some of her calm. The chill of the rushing water overwhelms her. It hurts, physically, to breathe. There’s no air. There’s only cold. Has anyone choked on cold before?
Intuiting her distress, Thor stops. He pulls at his neck, producing a thin woolen scarf, and holds it up to her face. “This will keep you warm,” he tells her. “Trust me.”
Desperate to keep moving, she relents. Thor wraps the scarf over her nose and mouth, around the back of her head, crisscrossing and pulling it tight. He tucks the ends into the neck of her jacket. “Secure this,” he instructs her. While she fumbles with it with her numb fingers, he yanks her hood over her head.
It works. The scarf retains the heat of her breath, warming the tip of her nose. “What about you?” she asks.
“I’m used to it.”
They continue forward, skating the edge of the rushing water. Ice extends far into the stream, but still an unimaginable amount of water flows underneath, fighting against the rocks strewn about the middle, billowing like silk scarves in a strong wind.
Here, though she believes—hopes—that they’re walking over solid earth, there’s a layer of ice on top that slows her steps to what could be considered a crawl. Thor graciously doesn’t comment on their speed. He just matches her pace, wrapping a hand around her elbow to keep her upright. They make it to a land bridge that crests over a narrow portion of the river. Thor tells her to hold his hand. Hers is bare, aching, in his gloved fist. To follow each of his steps exactly. He won’t let her fall, but—
“Pour your weight down into each foot,” he tells her, miming the motion. “Straight down.”
Nodding, terrified, she tells him to go. She grips his hand through his glove, hard, and feels the breath leaving her in a rush. There, to either side of her, is the water. The silk scarves surging beneath, beckoning her down.
Over too many agonizing moments for her to catalog, they reach solid land again. Out of an impulse born of pure exhilaration, Agnes throws her arms around Thor’s shoulders.
“There, there,” he says, squeezing her in return. “That was easy, wasn’t it? You’re your father’s daughter.”
She pulls out of the hug. “I guess you knew him well, right?”
“Not well,” Thor says. “He was a little boy, and I was a man. But he was Magnús! The little goat. He used to tell stories about climbing that hill, you know.” He means the mountain they’re standing underneath. “He had a big mouth. I thought he was lying, trying to impress me. But then one day I saw him from the house. This tiny body, against the sky.”
“From the house?”
In answer, Thor points to the trees across the river. Agnes turns, scanning the line of the forest. There’s a glint of metal not too far away. “Is that the house you grew up in?” she asks.
“Yes.”
She revolves in place to take in the rest of the river. There, almost laughably close, is the new house. It feels like they’ve been walking for hours, but they’re still within shouting distance.
“Close neighbors,” she says.
“My father and your grandfather had a lot of…” Thor says, choosing the words carefully, “disputes over that. The land, you know. We weren’t as close as we should have been.” At her questioning look: “It’s one of those boring arguments people have when it comes to property ownership. There was a common ancestor, not too far back. Different sides of the family had different parts of the land. It fell down to your grandfather and my father.”
“But then Einar sold his side to your father,” she says, “when he and Magnús left.”
“Now I have everything, yes.”
Agnes tries to block it out. Why do you think we left, Agnes? But it’s there, it’s inescapable. She shoves her hands deeper into her pockets, trying to warm her frozen fingers. “Does that mean we’re related?” she asks Thor.
He huffs. “The joke is that everyone in Iceland is related.”
“But we go back, don’t we?”
“We do,” he says. For a moment, he doesn’t seem too happy to follow that train of thought. She wonders if he’s worried she will try to lay claim to her part of the land. But he shows her his gap teeth in a wide smile. “You could be my daughter. My Californian daughter. Tell me about it. Is it sunny?”
While they continue up the river on this side, she describes the Bay Area. She expects some kind of homesickness to take her down, to cut her at the knees. But it feels so far away. This place, it’s reducing Agnes’s life there, and her grandfather, to a distant memory. Even her own emotions, she watches them drift away, until it feels like she’s describing dreams she’s had, ones that she can hardly remember.
Dr. Lee would say she’s alienating herself.
Agnes would say she’s handling things as best as she can.
“Do you miss it?” Thor asks her. “Home?”
“The sunshine, yes,” Agnes says. “But I like it here a lot. More than I thought I would, and I always thought I would like it here.”
“Here, Iceland? Or here, Bifröst?”
“Both,” she says. “Right now, though, mostly here, Bifröst. It’s a special place.”
“You feel it, too,” he says, beaming. “The gravity.” He stops her again. They’re on a ridge now, overlooking the river, the trees, the valley beyond. The sun, as though summoned, peeks its face out of the clouds. She feels the tendrils of its light on her skin—the small bit left to the air—and warms. Thor’s face has brightened, the glitter of his eyes taking on color again.
“My ex-wife used to talk about this Swedish concept called smultronställe. Have you heard of this before?” Thor chuckles. “No, I suppose not. It means, literally, the place where wild strawberries grow. But it can also mean a special place. A place that belongs only to you, that you return to, again and again, because it’s yours and it’s safe. You share it with only those you love, with only those you can trust. This is what Bifröst is to me. Maybe it can be this to you. You have returned here, after all. And you should. You are Marie’s twin, and you are named for her daughter. You belong here.”
“Thank you,” Agnes says. He couldn’t know how much she needed to hear that. “That’s very kind.”
“It’s not kind,” Thor says. “It’s just true.”
The rush of the river lightens. Up here, it’s nearly completely frozen over. They turn again, away from the river. Now they’re walking into the vast, blank fields, keeping their steps careful and light on the uncertain ground. The open world, so alien, momentarily steals her focus. There’s no sign of life out here, other than trails of some type of animal footprint. They’re small, clearly paw prints. Foxes? Otters?
Thor stops them, not to look at anything in particular, just to enjoy the view. “It took me so many years to understand that I belonged here. I left when I was eighteen. I moved to study in Copenhagen, and I stayed there, until my father moved out and I realized, this place is who I am.”
“When was this?”
“Three years ago.”
“Where did your father go?” The first-generation Thor. Thor Senior.
“It doesn’t matter,” Thor says, his expression hardening. He guides them forward again. “It’s better that he is gone.”
“I’m sorry,” Agnes offers.
“No,” Thor tells her. “He wasn’t a good man, my father. He took great pleasure in your grandfather’s loss. We should only mourn those who we love.”
Agnes closes her eyes.
Would you still love me, if it were true?
She’d said yes. Of course she had. Of course she would.
But not in the same way. Not anymore.
Thor guides them in a wide, meandering circle through the fields of snow. Stopping, now and then, to examine a lump of snow, peeling away the layers of frozen water to discover yet another rock, yet another hibernating bush. No bodies. No faces in the snow. There are no footsteps but for their own, and those of the foxes. In the silence, in the cold that threatens to solidify Agnes from the inside out, she wonders what it means about her, to belong to this place.