February 8, 2019
Agnes stands at the front door, frozen. She’s holding a missing woman’s secret phone. She’s holding it because Ása’s friends took it from her, the night she disappeared. She’s holding it because those same friends lied to the police. And now Agnes is responsible for it. She puts it in her jacket pocket.
She’ll give the phone to Nora. That’s the only course of action she can take. Nora’s probably handled sensitive evidence like this before. She’ll know what to do, what to tell the police. Agnes can only hope she’ll keep Lilja out of it.
Lilja, who’s lied. Who’s caught in a web of lies. Agnes understands. God, does she understand. She’s stuck in her own web, too.
Once again, though, she is on her own. Once again, she’s faced with an opportunity. The pills. Take the pills. Swallow a handful. Stop thinking.
She thinks of Ása, drunk and desperate. Everyone wants everything all the time. Maybe Óskar did hurt her. Maybe the secret boyfriend did. But somehow, Agnes doesn’t believe it. She can only imagine the young woman, her brain chemistry out of balance, leaving behind her phones, all ties to her life, in search of some peace. Finding it, somewhere in the snow.
Agnes forces herself to go outside. The rental car has been waiting for her in the driveway. She scrapes away the ice from the windshield, and it feels as though she’s scraping away the surface of her skull.
She doesn’t let herself think about it. She just goes, her frozen hands locked on the wheel, until she’s pulling up in Ingvar’s driveway. There’s no smoke coming from the chimney, no truck in sight, but there are lights on inside. Júlía, alone. Perfect. Her heart in her throat, Agnes knocks on the front door. There’s no doorbell. Nothing but her frozen knuckles against the thick wood. She waits, counting to fifteen in her head. If this doesn’t work, she’ll drive into town. Find Nora, give her the phone.
Just as she’s turning to leave, though, the door opens, revealing the tiny old woman.
“Marie,” Júlía says, then there’s more Icelandic than Agnes could ever dream of following. Are there separate words? Or is everything just one long descriptive word?
It’s a precipice. Does Agnes correct the old woman, or does she deceive her? She wavers on the edge. If she does this, she’s crossing a line. Betraying a moral code she never before had to articulate to herself.
But when has she ever let the fear of falling stop her from leaping?
“Can I come in?” Agnes asks.
The old woman steps aside. She switches over to English, following Agnes’s lead. “No baby for me today?”
“No. Just me.”
“This way.” Júlía leads Agnes into the sitting room. “I am knitting a sweater for Karl.”
The old woman resumes her knitting—as far as Agnes can tell, she’s just begun, because all there is on the needles is a thin tube of blue yarn—and watches as Agnes folds herself onto the couch. “Out with it,” she commands, her hands flicking laboriously on the needles. “What has happened now?”
Agnes doesn’t hesitate. “It’s Einar.”
“What did he do?”
“Have I ever told you that he’s hurt me?”
“He tells Karl that he only wants two things in this world: his work and you. But he gets so angry.”
“Do we fight often?”
“I am not your husband.”
How does Nora do this? How does she find the right questions to ask, to get the other person talking?
Agnes tries another way. “Why did you call the police? When you heard I wasn’t home, why did you call them?”
Júlía considers her answer carefully. She threads the yarn over and over, a repetitive motion that makes Agnes a little seasick to watch. “I was afraid for the baby,” she says finally.
“Why?”
Over and over, the blue yarn.
Agnes asks, “Did you think I would hurt her?”
A mistake in the needles. “Did you?”
“Have I ever?”
No answer.
“Do you really think I hate my child?” she asks. “Is that why you think I hurt her?”
“You hate both of them,” the old woman says. “Magnús and Agnes. You don’t want them. You take care of all the children. You take in my Ingvar, but now he tells me he watches over your baby, while you rest. I see it. You are mother to all, but you hate it. You don’t want this.”
“I don’t?”
“I see it,” Júlía insists. “When you think no one sees, I see the emptiness in you.”
“Why am I empty?”
The needles drop to the old woman’s lap. “Because it was all taken from you,” she says, her voice tough and unforgiving. “Everything inside of you. That man, he loves you more than anything. But sometimes love takes, and he took everything from you. You were a child in another country about to start your life. Your paintings. Now you are a child with two children in an unknown place. You have been ravaged. But you cannot punish your children for this. You have to find a way to live.”
“Thank you,” Agnes says, and she means it. She’s grateful for the old woman’s brusque comfort.
“Don’t thank me,” Júlía snaps. “You are so close to ruining your life, Marie, and you will have no one to blame but yourself. You are not allowed to use your pain as a weapon against your family. Einar has tolerated your humiliations enough.”
“Humiliations,” Agnes echoes, stunned.
Júlía looks angry enough to spit. “Running around with the neighbor,” she says. “You ask for so much trouble. You’re lucky you still have a bed to sleep in.” The rest of her vitriol dissolves into Icelandic.
“The neighbor,” Agnes says. Before she can ask who he was, there’s a knock on the door. The sound startles both women in their seats.
There, standing in the threshold of the sitting room, is Ingvar. Agnes jumps to her feet, guilty and desperate. She doesn’t know how long Ingvar was listening for, but she’s been caught. Caught abusing the kindness of a sick, elderly woman. And stopped, just at the wrong moment.
Júlía beams at her son. “Look who’s here,” she says. “It’s your other mother.”
Ingvar’s expression, unreadable, softens when he considers his mother. “Yes,” he says. “How lucky I am.”