February 10, 2019
They arrive back in time to prepare for Thor Junior. Agnes stands in the snow, watching Nora unpacking her equipment, their two suitcases. She doesn’t move to help her. She doesn’t feel like she can move at all. She hears her name. But she is not there.
She’s able to connect to the Wi-Fi. Messages from Lilja pile up on the screen. Lilja, only Lilja.
“We should go inside,” Nora tells her.
There is the wind. There’s the general overwhelming chill of this place. But Agnes doesn’t mind. For once, she welcomes the pain of it. “You go ahead,” she tells Nora.
“I know that was a lot,” Nora says, her voice impossibly gentle. “Do you want to talk about it?”
“I’m fine.”
“Okay,” Nora says. “But just so we’re clear: we don’t know if what Thor Senior said is true. He could be lying. He explained why he didn’t bring this information to the police all those years ago, but I don’t fully understand why he’d tell us this now. Not after keeping the secret for forty years. Do you see the danger of this whole line of work? I ask people to narrate their lives for me. They’re going to editorialize.”
“Nora,” Agnes says, feeling heavy. Like she were filled with lead and she’s slowly sinking through the icy ground, cracking the earth into eggshell shards. “I get it.”
“But you believe him.”
“Why do you care what I believe?” Agnes asks, sinking further.
“Because I care about you. I genuinely do. And it’s okay to not be fine, Agnes. It’s okay to grieve your grandfather, to reckon with the idea that maybe, just maybe, he wasn’t the man you thought he was.”
Agnes’s stomach twists. I care about you. It’s exactly what she needs to hear, and it isn’t. It’s not enough, certainly, to stop the hurt from spilling out of her. “You don’t know who he was to me,” she says. “You don’t know what I thought.”
“You thought he was innocent,” Nora says softly. “I’m not trying to win any points here. And I know it’s not my place, but if I can give you some advice … don’t let this taint your memory of him. He’s your second father. Something horrible happened in his past. It sounds like, if he did commit those acts of violence, he wasn’t that person with you. That’s all that matters.”
Lilja’s messages are brief, letting Agnes know when she’ll be back in Bifröst. There’s an attachment, though. A portrait of Agnes. It’s quick, done in pencil and what looks like scrap paper, but it captures her. The tilt of her nose, the sweep of her hair. Her thin lips, caught in a smile. A real smile.
Agnes presses the phone to her chest, gripping it hard enough to hurt.
“Agnes,” Nora presses.
“I’m okay,” Agnes tells her, and it’s not quite a lie. “Thank you. I appreciate what you’re saying. Really.” She doesn’t have to finish the rest of the sentence: But you can’t help me. Not with this.
Nora hears it anyway. “I’m going to get dinner started,” she says with a sigh. “Thor Junior will be here soon.”
Agnes lets her go. Nora leaves Agnes’s suitcase behind, as though she knows how much Agnes wants to run away, and she’s accepted it. Agnes could throw the suitcase into the trunk of the rental car and rocket out of here. But she doesn’t know where she’d go. Home is so complicated, so far away. She’s in the middle of the ocean. She could go in either direction and find land, but she’s frozen in indecision. Not even in indecision. Indecision implies options, well thought-out choices. No, she’s frozen in blankness.
It’s the thought of Lilja that compels her to stay. To abandon her suitcase in the gathering wind, and to walk.
She doesn’t want to go inside. Not where Nora is. Nora, who sees her, who understands her, who cares about her.
She follows the path of the driveway blindly, not paying attention to where she goes, so long as she is out, away. She walks, she limps, she embraces the grinding pain in her leg. For once, she doesn’t even crave a pill.
She believes Thor Senior. He confessed only after he knew Einar was dead, that his promise to Einar’s father would not be broken. She believes her father.
Her grandfather, the man who raised her, murdered his wife and child.
That’s the truth.
And then there’s Ása.
It shouldn’t bother Agnes, the disappearance of a woman she’s never met. But it does. There are two options in Agnes’s mind: someone, probably Óskar, hurt Ása and buried her, likely in the river, or Ása met her death on her own terms, also likely in the river.
Agnes fights the wind, the slip and slide of the snow, and she lets herself articulate what has unsettled her the most. What has begun to haunt her. Despite what she has told herself, she actually, truly, wholeheartedly hopes that it was someone who hurt Ása. It’s a terrible wish to cast out to the universe, but the alternative, that the woman crossed the finish line on her own, is devastating.
Agnes doesn’t deserve to feel this way. She’s the one who has spent the past year courting death, dipping her toe over the line, waiting to see what will come for her. She’s resented her life.
When she sees what Ása has done, though, it all feels so hollow.
She should have fought.
Agnes emerges from the protection of the trees, out into the open air where there’s nothing but the snow and the empty highway. She grips the metal gate separating her grandfather’s land from the rest of the world with one ungloved hand. The wind gouges at the exposed skin of her face and her hands and her joints howl. She pushes past the gate. She’s walking blindly toward the road, feeling nothing, seeing nothing, except the pain. But somewhere underneath, there’s something else.
Release.
It catches her by surprise. The sobs fight their way out of her chest. She cries for herself, and she cries for Ása, until the two women blend into one. The impulse and the action.
Agnes doesn’t notice the cars whipping past, just beyond her. Or when they both come around, moments later, parking in the shoulder of the highway across from her.
She notices only when the doors open. When the voices, harsh, carry over the wind to reach her, and when the owners of the voices follow.