February 10, 2019
She should have expected this. Not that she’d run into Lilja on a bare stretch of highway in the middle of nowhere, but that she’d run into someone she knows after she’s been crying so hard her eyes are swollen. She wipes at her runny nose, drags both hands along her pillowy eyelids. She knows it’s useless. She’ll look like she’s been crying because she has been. There’s no covering it up.
But there’s more than Lilja here.
There’s Óskar, too.
Lilja’s leading the charge across the road, with Óskar at her heels. When she catches sight of Agnes, Lilja pulls ahead. Or perhaps Óskar hangs back. He slows to a stop, his expression closing into his resting smirk.
“Agnes,” Lilja says. “What’s wrong?”
Agnes can only shake her head. She wraps her arms around Lilja, pulling her into her body.
“Lilja.” It’s Óskar. “Get away from her.”
Lilja responds in Icelandic. Whatever she says, it sounds harsh, but it has no effect on the man.
“You,” he says to Agnes. Stopping short of their embrace. “You’re everywhere. Einar Pálsson’s child. Why are you crying, murderer’s child?”
“Go,” Agnes says, “away.”
Óskar doesn’t move. It’s Lilja who pulls away. Now Agnes is standing alone in the whipping air and snow.
“What do you want?” Agnes asks.
He shrugs. “I want nothing from you. I just don’t think Lilja should be around you. You shouldn’t be here. The town is worse for having you here.”
“Are you accusing me of something?” Agnes asks, taking a step closer to him. There’s no chance she will intimidate him, not with her limp or her shaky voice. But this is the second time today someone has told her to leave Bifröst. It doesn’t matter that she’d considered running away, that not a few minutes ago she’d thought she didn’t belong here. That is her prerogative to decide. Not his.
Óskar drags his gaze up and down Agnes’s form and raises his eyebrows as if he’s seen all of her and isn’t impressed. “No,” he says again, more slowly. “I’m telling you to go.”
“Enough.” Lilja’s voice cuts in between them. “Go home, Óskar. I’ll talk to you later.”
Óskar holds his ground. Agnes wonders what she’ll do if he stays. If he insists on separating them. Exhaustion washes through her at the thought, as brutally as the wind wraps around her body.
“You aren’t my keeper.” Lilja’s frustration has transformed into something softer. Something much more intimate, a call to their friendship that only they know. It isolates Agnes from her with more totality than if they had spoken in Icelandic.
Óskar, too, softens. But when he says, “She isn’t Ása,” Lilja flinches as though he’s hit her.
She recovers slowly. “Go,” she says, and this time, finally, he listens.
He reaches his car quickly, but he doesn’t get in. Instead he stands by the passenger door, watching them.
Lilja sighs. She turns to Agnes, takes her in almost for the first time. “Are you out here alone? No car? Wearing this?” She gestures to Agnes’s jacket. Agnes hadn’t dressed for the cold. Compared with Lilja and her expert layering, Agnes looks like she’s naked.
“I needed to think,” Agnes says.
“Come on.” Lilja leads her to her car. They ignore Óskar. “I’ll drive you home.”
Agnes climbs into the passenger seat, skin prickling at the sudden warmth, and she fixates on Lilja’s hands at the wheel, the variations in her grip, the length of her fingers, the assured touch. She remembers a boy in her middle school art class asking her and her friend why girls were so attracted to hands. She hadn’t been able to articulate it then, and she can’t articulate it now. Her friend, however, had said, “Well, of course you don’t understand. Look at your hands, ewww.”
Lilja maneuvers her car through the gate. Agnes instructs her to follow the makeshift snow road, and they dip down and up through the lunar craters, the tunnel of trees.
“Out on the road, I thought you were Ása,” Lilja says, not even bothering to deny what they were both thinking. She steers them along the rim of another crater. “From far away, you looked like her.”
Agnes wipes at another tear. She’s horrified to hear herself sniffle.
“Why are you crying?” Lilja asks. Her tone is matter-of-fact, not pitying, not overly gentle, as Nora’s had been. Simply asking. She isn’t acting like Agnes’s mood is something to be fixed.
“My grandfather,” Agnes says. “Everyone thinks he’s a murderer. And I think they’re right.” She doesn’t elaborate. She can’t handle it. “And Ása,” she says, because she might as well be honest.
Lilja stops the car. They haven’t reached the house. They might as well be the last two people on earth. “What about her?”
Agnes knows what’s going to come out of her mouth is a mistake, but she can’t stop it. She needs to say it, just as much as Lilja needs to hear it. “She’s dead,” she says. “I didn’t know her, but I’ve heard so much about her life. She was in pain, wasn’t she? All the time, she was in pain. You have to start dealing with the fact that she might not come back. She didn’t want to. I know you love her. And I know it looks like I don’t know what I’m talking about. But trust me. She chose this. I’m sorry if she did. But I think she did. And that’s getting to me.”
Lilja squeezes her eyes shut. “You’re trying to hurt me.”
“No,” Agnes says. “I’m really not. I’m—”
“You are,” Lilja insists. “And I don’t know why.” She opens her eyes. Starts the car again. “I’ll take you home.”
“Lilja—”
“No,” Lilja cuts her off. “Enough. Don’t lecture me on what you don’t understand, and I will do the same. Okay?”
Agnes sits back and watches the house come closer. Her lone suitcase, encrusted in snow now, like powdered sugar. “I’m sorry,” she says, and she really, truly means it.
“I know.” Lilja pulls up in front of the house, bringing the car as close as physically possible to the door so Agnes won’t have to limp far.
The kindness of this simple, unspoken gesture is too much for Agnes. She waits until Lilja’s brought the car to a complete stop, then she reaches for her. She drags Lilja’s mouth to her own, begging her to understand. She feels Lilja’s response against her own skin. It’s complicated. There’s so much left unsaid. But there’s safety, too.