February 12, 2019
Her eyes roll in her head when she hears the knocking. She doesn’t know where she is. She’d been in a half sleep, back home in California, listening to her father’s footsteps on the old wood floors. He’d been calling her for dinner, and she’d been disoriented, too stoned to be able to do anything but drowse.
Then comes the man’s voice and it isn’t her father’s. “Hello?” Thor calls. “Did you lose electricity, too?”
And she’s back in Iceland. Back on the big couch, back in the dark, back in the hellhole of Thor’s making. Her entire left leg, she can feel from its throbbing, is swollen now. She wonders, briefly, what they’ll be able to do to fix it, if she takes it to a doctor. What can they do?
All thought deserts her. There’s Thor, hanging above her. “What a storm!” he exclaims. “Have I disturbed you?” Then, with alarm: “What’s happened to you?”
“I fell,” she croaks. When did her throat start to swell, too? She attempts a swallow, but it doesn’t quite make it all the way through. “Broke my leg.”
“How?” he asks, and she feels a hand on her thigh. It sends a shower of sparks behind her eyes that nearly blinds her. She tastes the edges of a blackout. The hand reappears on her forehead. She welcomes the cool touch. “How did you do this?”
“Ambulance,” she manages to say. “I need a hospital.”
“Of course,” he says. The cushion beside her dips. He’s sitting next to her, his face so close it’s all she can see. “What’s happened? You look—” He doesn’t finish that sentence. He brushes his hand on her puffy jacket. Her hair. He stares at his fingertips.
“Fell,” she repeats. “Ambulance.”
“Yes,” he says. He drags more dust from her jacket. “Are they coming?”
“No power.”
“I see,” he says, and she realizes her mistake, slowly, in stages. She should have said yes. The authorities are on their way. Let him run away while she waits for Ása and Ingvar. That is, if Ása has made it to Ingvar’s. Reality comes crashing through the doorway her pain had tried to shut. She’s sent Ása, drugged and traumatized and disoriented, into a snowstorm, to find a place she’s never been to before. Up a long, steep hill Agnes could hardly manage herself. And now she is alone with Ása’s kidnapper.
“It’s okay,” Thor tells her. “I’ll help. What happened? Where did you fall? Why are you covered in—” He shows her the dust on his fingertips. “Were you in the farmhouse? I told you, it’s dangerous while I work on it.”
Agnes wonders if this is really happening. If she’d actually found Ása and freed her, or if she fell in the farmhouse and she’s still there. Hallucinating.
“This storm,” Thor’s saying, “it’s too dangerous to take you to a hospital. We will wait it out. You will be okay, I promise. I will take care of you.” He pushes himself to standing. “I will get you some water.”
The world sets back to spinning while she waits for her water. But there’s no sound of the tap running. There’s only a shocked noise. A “What’s this?” and then dead silence.
Agnes buries a hand underneath the layers of her jacket and hoodie and shirt and digs her fingernails into the soft flesh of her stomach. This is real. This is actually happening to her. She can’t drift away. She starts to push herself up to sitting, but stops.
There’s Thor again, standing at the edge of the couch. Holding the length of the rope that had once bound Ása’s hands.
“Agnes,” he says, and there’s no smile, no paternal twinkle in his eyes, “what have you done?”