February 5, 2019
The jacket and boots cost almost as much as the flights. Agnes hands over her single credit card and prays it won’t melt in the polite woman’s fingers when she charges it. She hasn’t worked in a year, and even after spending the past six months at home not paying rent, she isn’t exactly flush with cash. But it goes through, and the woman wishes her luck on her trip. Feeling a little bit foolish, like a five-year-old wearing her new shoes out of the store, Agnes exits onto the street engulfed in the enormous, bright red puffy jacket—a necessity, the woman had assured her, especially if she’s traveling farther north—feet clunking in the stiff boots, her old jacket and shoes piled in a bag like dead fish.
In the time it took her to buy her new outfit, the city has finally woken up. A weak ray of sunlight penetrates the dense clouds, its illumination hardly any brighter than the Christmas lights that line nearly every storefront, every tree branch.
Agnes retraces her steps back to the café and the general direction of the rental car, but slowly. She doesn’t want to get lost, but she doesn’t want to rush out of here. She can hardly believe she’s really in Iceland. The language, spoken in the hushed, tired voices of morning commuters, draws her in like a magic spell. It awakens deep memories of her grandfather. Conversations overheard between him and her father. The clipped, gasping rhythm of Einar’s voice. She misses him more than she thought she could. Seeing his home country, listening to his language, she feels his absence as a yawning emptiness in the pit of her stomach.
Stuffed in her pockets, her hands shake—not from cold, but from suppressed emotion. Because this isn’t just grief tearing her apart. There’s anger, too. Anger at her father. She’s come all this way to help her grandfather, to reconnect with him after his death, and her father hates her for it.
Is this really who you are? Magnús had asked her, when he’d seen her suitcase by the door. Then, later, when both of their tempers had blown past shouting to a hoarse sort of verbal fistfight, You’re choosing fame over your family.
She doesn’t remember what she said. That’s always been her problem—one of her problems. She can remember, vividly, what has been told to her. Shouted at her. But when she loses her temper, there’s nothing there. The tape recorder presses pause to give her room to scream. Watching the mix of tourists and locals milling up and down the street, she knows she would have explained to her father that Nora Carver would be recording this series with or without Agnes’s help. There would already be a spotlight on their family again. There’s always been a fascination with this case. Because it’s unsolved. Because it occurred in a country where there’s almost no murder, nothing that vicious. Because of the different deaths. And because of that photo. The young white woman, beautiful even in death. Arranged to clutch her baby to her chest. The Icelandic Black Dahlia. The snow-covered Pietà.
With Agnes here, she can tell the world how wrong they were about her grandfather.
This is a choice, her father had said, his index finger thrust toward her face. This isn’t out of your control. You are choosing, yet again, to hurt me. Don’t forget this. I know I won’t be able to.
A door slamming. His return to his office. Agnes had left without another word. Her father has assumed the worst of her. He’s taken the most uncharitable reading of her motivations for coming here. He’s made her feel small when she knows she’s finally doing something right.
Back in the café, she’d texted her father looking for comfort, a reminder of home. She won’t make the same mistake again.
She’s on her own.
Agnes retraces her steps to the car, hoping the movement will loosen her stiff joints. She’s convinced she can actually feel the bolts in her ankle grinding against the bone, but there’s nothing she can do about that, nothing except another pill, and that’s the other thing. The other threshold she’d crossed, somewhere over the Atlantic. This past year, the pills have been a blessing, for their oblivion. But she can’t prove her grandfather’s innocence while she’s numb. So she distracts herself by watching the people around her, swathed in their winter gear, and pictures herself as one of them. Some American tourists, traveling as a group, are posing for photos in the middle of a road leading up to a dramatic, pointed church. The cement has been painted in the colors of a bright rainbow, making for the perfect photo op. The Americans take turns posing and laughing, encouraging each other. Agnes is one of them, the tourists, and she isn’t. She’s happy to be here. Stunned. And yet a part of her is gone. Held back in Berkeley, perhaps, lonely and trapped but ultimately safe.
Now that she’s had her moment in the city, it’s time to go to Nora Carver. To Bifröst, and to her family’s past.
I want to discover the truth, of course, Nora had told her on their one and only phone call last week, when Agnes had finally decided to join her, but the truth is rare and flexible. That phrasing has haunted Agnes ever since. Rare and flexible. Like a steak, or a woman’s body.
What’s your definition of truth, then? Agnes had asked.
A laugh. Rich and low, as though they were having a philosophical debate over drinks and not discussing something so very violently real in Agnes’s life. Oh, I like you already. Most people approach cold cases with the mindset that there is one simple answer, just waiting to be uncovered. But life isn’t so simple. We all carry our own individual truths, our own stories, our own reasonings for our actions. No one wants to be the bad guy, and so we distort facts to suit our images of ourselves, and we do this so often that eventually, the lie becomes the truth.
What I’m saying is, don’t expect a clean answer about your grandfather’s case. Or any answer at all. Forty years is a long time. Memories change every time we access them. How many times have the people who remained in town accessed and changed their memories?
Agnes wonders, suddenly, if Nora has edited the teaser trailer for her, specifically, to remove the rumors about Einar. There hadn’t been any mention of potential suspects. Or the prevailing theory, the one Agnes has learned more through osmosis than anything else over the years, that Marie, suffering from postpartum psychosis, drowned her daughter, and her husband, driven by rage, by grief, slit her throat.
Nora had focused purely on the photograph, and the moment when the little boy found the frozen, ravaged bodies of a local woman and her infant daughter in a field. She hadn’t said that there were no obvious suspects, other than the woman’s husband. A professor at the university, known to be a strict, quiet man, except when it came to his young Danish bride, whom he doted on. There hadn’t been any evidence to condemn him in her murder. No witnesses, no mysterious behavior, no unexplained absences. No formal conviction. There had been, however, an informal conviction. The town decided it was him. He was guilty, they just couldn’t prove it. Or maybe they didn’t need to. Maybe it was enough to know it.
When he took his nine-year-old son and fled for America, that apparently proved his guilt.
Agnes had grown up with the other side of the story. The one given to her by her father, near her thirteenth birthday.
I’m going to tell you this once, he’d said. And only once.
On February 9, 1979, Einar had reported his wife and daughter missing. He’d spent that day in his office at the university, staying late to work on a personal project, returning home to find his son alone in the living room, listening to his radio.
Where’s your mother? he’d asked his son as soon as he’d stowed his snowy boots, his coat. The house was quiet. There were no signs of dinner, of life outside of the rock music he hated so much.
Why are you asking me? Magnús had countered.
In response, he’d been hit.
Then came the phone calls. To the school where she worked. To her few friends. No one had seen her that day, and she hadn’t called in.
There’d been panic. Drives. More calls. Magnús had gone to bed hungry that night, and who knows how many more nights thereafter.
Search parties. A small child discovering the bodies. Conversations with the police. A comprehensive look at their lives. Exoneration—or something like it. Then rumors. Building tension. Kids bullying Magnús until they broke his nose and knocked out a couple of his teeth against the hard earth.
The escape to America.
There was nothing of the devastation of Agnes’s family in Nora’s teaser trailer, beyond the two deaths. That’s what Agnes will give her. A personal account of how her grandfather never recovered, never remarried, never spoke of his wife and daughter again. How her father chose to keep his silence and how he, traumatized in his own right, couldn’t get close to anyone, not even his daughter. And how Agnes, the granddaughter, has inherited all of this. Einar’s silence. Magnús’s secret self.
Agnes settles herself back in the car, contorting her body in awkward positions to remove her new jacket in the safety of the car’s heat. The empty jacket rests on the passenger seat like her shadow self, the packet of black licorice from the café weighing down its right side. She places her phone in the cupholder.
It’s time, finally, to go.
She nudges the car out of its mini snowbank and grinds her teeth when she feels the wheels slide, momentarily, on a patch of ice. She makes it out of the downtown area easily, turning away from the water and the city, onto the highway that should hopefully guide her north. The sky’s opened enough for her to see without her headlights.
They took everything from me, her grandfather had said, close to the end of his life.
She can give everything back to him, even if it’s a lifetime too late.
As she drives on, as the landscape changes from the storybook cityscape to something she’s never seen before, everywhere white, mountains rising and falling in the distance like mirages, she hopes she’s strong enough to do this. This past year has shown her, truly, how weak she is. Too weak to resist the pills. Too weak to fight for Emi. Too weak to speak to her father. And now she has gambled everything on this one trip, and Nora Carver. It’s too late to turn back now, but Agnes wonders, suddenly, if she should.