February 16, 2019
The nurse coaxes Agnes to cross the length of the hallway. She leans heavily on the crutches they’ve given her, and even though it’s terrifying, even though her leg still drags unsteadily beneath her, she can walk. There’s more hardware, more pain. But she can move.
Standing at the exit, the final doorway separating her ward from the waiting room, is her father.
Ingvar had rushed her and Ása into the emergency room and they’d all been separated, almost instantly. Agnes had been wheeled into sterile rooms teeming with people who prodded her without introduction, who asked her to repeat what had happened. They asked her when she had last eaten. They stabbed her with needles. They took her to an X-ray. They told her they would get her ready for the operation.
She’d grabbed someone’s shirt. She told them about her pills. Her tolerance to morphine.
And then she’d heard Nora Carver’s voice, echoing through the hallway.
There’d been yelling. Closer. And there she was, telling one of the nurses that she was a friend. She’d felt her hand on her shoulder.
“It’s okay,” Agnes had said. “I’m okay.”
The next day, her father arrived. Disheveled, his eyes shadowed from prolonged panic over a too-long flight, Magnús had been quiet in Agnes’s hospital room when she told the police everything that had happened, everything that Thor had said. She’d been sorry for this, that this was how her father learned the truth. But it had been easier, if she had to admit it to herself, to tell him by not telling him.
The officers, though they had been kind and thorough, had left with a devastating parting blow. They’d found Agnes’s car keys. They’d been tucked into the front pocket of an old pair of jeans, thrown carelessly into a pile of clothes on top of her suitcase.
Thor hadn’t taken them from her.
Agnes had waited until she and her father were alone before she’d spoken. “I’ve been so stupid,” she said.
Her father leaned forward and smoothed the hair away from her forehead. His hand shook, as though he were afraid she might flinch away from his touch. As though he might hurt her. “You survived,” he told her. “That’s all that matters.”
Maybe that was true, Agnes thought. But when she closed her eyes, she could only see herself driving Ása through the pelting snow, along the curve of Ingvar’s driveway. Supporting each other on the walk to his front door. The shock on his face. She could only imagine sitting in the safety of Ingvar’s living room, while someone else handled Thor. While someone else heard the man’s monstrous confession.
“There’s something wrong,” Agnes said, surprised to hear her own voice, “about what Thor told me. He said he and Marie had been arguing outside the house, right by the river. When he saw what he’d done, he ran away. Immediately. To clean up the blood. His father found him, and he confessed.”
There had been something new in her father’s expression. A door struggling to remain shut.
“But,” she continued, “the bodies weren’t found outside the farmhouse. They were found upriver. Near the Thors’ place.” The father and son wouldn’t have gone to the trouble of moving the bodies, not when they were situated perfectly to frame the husband. Not when Thor Senior told them about Einar’s bloody hands. The open-mouthed horror of a man who just buried his wife and child.
It hadn’t been phrased as a question, but she let it sit as one.
Finally, when her father spoke, his voice trembled at the edges. “I was on my way home,” he said. “I’d been out all afternoon. Doing I don’t know what. I’m almost home when I see my father, standing over my mother. She’s lying down in the water. Her body … it’s not right. I don’t know what I’m seeing at first. But then he picks her up and her head—” He stopped, breath catching.
“Her head,” he tried again. But he couldn’t complete the sentence.
“I see her throat,” he said. “And I don’t know what he’s doing. He takes her away. And he comes back. And that’s when—Agnes. He takes her, too. I was too afraid to ask. He acted so strange. So quiet. They’d been fighting so much … He told me what to say to the police. Exactly what to say. I thought he did it. All my life, I thought he’d killed them.”
Agnes had wrapped her arms around her father’s shoulders. She didn’t ask him why he hadn’t said anything to the police, back then. You can’t predict how you’ll react, in the face of your own soul-searing terror. But she’d wondered about her grandfather. Standing over the bodies of his murdered wife and child. She tried to understand why he hadn’t called for help. Why he hadn’t accused Thor. Had he known who his wife was seeing? Had he suspected?
Had he simply reacted, without thought?
She couldn’t imagine her fastidious grandfather doing anything without carefully considering his options.
He had to have known how it would look. The arguments. The affair. To tell the police that his wife had been having an affair, that there was a not-insubstantial chance that his daughter wasn’t his, this would have condemned him. The jealous, vengeful husband. Would anyone have believed him? That he’d stumbled upon their corpses, in his own backyard?
Her grandfather had known he was innocent. And still he’d moved the bodies. He buried them, away from the property. On Thor’s land. An attempt, perhaps, to guide the police to the truth. A decision to entomb his wife and his daughter, together, in the snow. Misguided and tragic, the worst mistake.
Agnes had clutched her father tighter. She thought she heard him thank her.
“You gave me my father back,” he told her.
She hadn’t been able to do anything but weep. Weep for her grandmother, for her aunt. For her grandfather, for his years of silence, of guilt and suffering. But mostly, she’d wept for the child version of her father, long gone, left alone to struggle with the deaths. Left alone fearing the only family he had. Somewhere in there, too, was gratitude. That her father experienced such a great loss and it didn’t destroy him, as it very easily could have.
That he kept moving forward.
Now in the hallway, considering her father’s impatient form, Agnes turns instead toward a familiar voice. Crutching slowly away, she follows the growl of Óskar’s voice to an open door.
There, in the bed by the window, knees curled up to her chest, sits Ása. Holding her, one arm slung around her, is Lilja. On the windowsill, watching over them like a protective rooster, is Óskar. There’s no subtlety with crutches. As soon as Agnes has moved, she’s announced her presence. Together, the three students turn to watch her progress.
“Hey,” Agnes says, not wanting to interrupt, but not wanting to leave, either. She can’t bring herself to look directly at Lilja, to meet those dark eyes. She’s split her time between Agnes and Ása during visiting hours. She’s sat with Agnes while she received her methadone. She’s seen Agnes shivering and sweating through the worst of it. She’s accepted her changing moods.
Agnes has apologized to her so many times over the past few days that the words “I’m sorry” have lost all meaning. “I’m sorry” are weak words, Lilja had told her yesterday, exasperated by the many apologies. Don’t thank me, either. Just accept it.
“They finally discharged me,” Agnes adds, aware that she’s looking in the space between Ása and Lilja. “I guess I’m going.”
Óskar hops off the windowsill. He crosses the room, fast, and before Agnes can do anything to stop him, he’s enveloped her in a tight hug. She smells cologne and stale coffee.
“Thank you,” he says.
She tries to accept it, as Lilja had told her. But she’s uncomfortable, not just because she’s being held so tightly it’s making her panic, but because—“Ása did it all herself,” she says.
Agnes isn’t being modest, or self-deprecating. Ása saved herself. She’s the one who stayed awake in that cellar, who fought to survive, who managed to find Ingvar in the snow. Agnes helped, she knows this. She knows she did what she could, and that without her falling through those stairs, Ása might never have been rescued. But when people thank her, she can’t help but feel they are attributing everything to her and ignoring Ása’s fight. She doesn’t want to take anything more away from her.
Óskar releases her, nodding. He pats her shoulder in an awkward attempt at camaraderie. “No hard feelings,” he says. “Yeah?”
“Sure,” Agnes says with a half-hearted laugh.
There’s a burst of Icelandic from Ása. Óskar and Lilja both seem to agree with whatever she’s said. Óskar gives Agnes one more solid pat on the arm. “You did good,” he tells her. “But you should have killed him.” He steps out into the hallway, waiting for Lilja to join him.
Lilja stands. Agnes forces herself to meet Lilja’s eye. Lilja’s smiling, slightly, at her own private joke. She passes Agnes with the ghost of a touch to her hand gripping the crutches. “Find me before you go,” she says. “I’ll walk you out.”
Then Agnes and Ása are alone again. Agnes crutches toward her bed, taking her in and feeling, finally, a sense of peace. Ása’s still hollow around the eyes, but she’s back on her medication. She’s being taken care of.
“So you’re really going,” Ása says.
“I guess.” Along with “I’m sorry,” “I’m going” is the other phrase that has lost meaning in the past few days. What’s waiting for her in California? Her bedroom, her stash of pills under the mattress? Job interviews? Finding an apartment? Starting over again?
She’d had so much time to think, lying in that hospital bed. Disturbed every few hours for new tests. She had never been alone, exactly, and she hadn’t slept, no matter how much the hospital staff had been accommodating her. She’d found herself thinking about her life in a new way.
She’s decided she’ll talk to Emi when she gets home. She’d like to do it in the community garden, where she’d properly fallen in love with her. She doesn’t want to hold on to Emi anymore.
She knows what she’ll say already, even if it sounds cheesy. A quote from their favorite movie.
I’ll see you in another life, when we’re both cats.
“Are you going to be okay?” Agnes asks Ása. It’s a ridiculous question, but she doesn’t know how to talk to Ása. They’ve spent time together in the hospital, but they’ve never really spoken. They’ve held hands through the worst and best moments of their lives. There’s too much to say.
“I don’t know,” Ása says honestly. “What about you?”
Agnes shrugs. “We’ll see.”
She has nursed a secret hope, a seed that’s germinated in the dark, liminal hours of the night, when everyone is supposed to be sleeping, everyone except her and the graveyard shift. She’s fed it water, she’s tried to let it grow.
“When I made it to Ingvar,” Ása says, reaching again for Agnes’s uninjured hand, “I didn’t tell him what happened. I could only think of being away. He was going to call the police when he saw your voicemail. He listened to your message. That’s why it took so long. I’m sorry.”
The absurdity of the apology hits Agnes in stages. She squeezes the woman’s hand. “You saved me,” she says, suddenly understanding Lilja’s Accept it philosophy. She doesn’t need an apology. “That’s it.”
They exchange their contact information. Agnes leans forward for a hug. Then she forces herself to leave. She limps out with one last look behind her.
Ása, hair luminous in sunlight, smiling.
Agnes doesn’t make it far down the hallway before Lilja joins her. She walks steadily, unhurried next to her halting progress. Agnes sucks in a shaky breath, shocked at how quickly her heart started pounding, how she can feel it everywhere now, but mostly in her ears. “I’m terrible at goodbyes,” she hears herself say. Her voice is rough, filled with unspoken words. “Really terrible, actually.”
“Is this goodbye?” Lilja asks her. She tips those black eyes toward Agnes, and there’s that seed growing. That idea blooming, wide and searing and exultant.
Agnes wrestles with the words while they find their way to the end of the hallway. Lilja stops at the door separating them from the waiting room. She puts a hand on it, but she doesn’t move. “It’s too soon,” she says. “You shouldn’t fly when you can hardly walk.”
The words are there. They’re filling Agnes’s chest, she’s a balloon about to burst. She’s saying, “It’s crazy, but—” when the door swings open, out of Lilja’s hand.
“Ready?” Agnes’s father asks her. He’s already gotten her bags to the rental car. “Let’s get out of here.” He looks around him, cagily, as though expecting someone to stop them, physically, from leaving. When his eyes light on Lilja, they flit back to Agnes. Back to Lilja. “Oh,” he says.
“One sec,” Agnes tells him.
“No,” Lilja says. “It’s all right.” She rocks forward on her tiptoes to brush her lips against Agnes’s. She wraps her in a hug, but it lasts for only the time between heartbeats, and those are coming fast for Agnes. “Goodbye.”
“I’ll call you,” Agnes says desperately, but it doesn’t stop Lilja from walking away. From waving at Agnes and saying, “Okay,” like they’ll see each other later that afternoon. Like they have so much time, boundless, that they can be lazy with it.
Magnús clears his throat. “She seems nice,” he says. “Are you two—?”
Agnes says, “Not anymore.” She can sense her father wants to say more, so she sucks in another shaky breath and tries for a smile. “Let’s go.”
He’s relieved. And he’s fast. She crutches along in his wake, out the front doors to the rental car, idling near the entrance. She doesn’t know if she’ll have to testify at Thor’s trial. She’ll cross that bridge when she gets to it. For now, she’s following her father’s silhouette, wobbly from unshed tears.
She climbs into the backseat, much like she did in Ingvar’s truck, sliding her leg straight out on the seats, and there’s no more ceremony than her father starting the car and driving them out of the city, back to the airport. This time, there’s no snow. There are sudden, torrential showers of rain that occasionally splatter the windshield, but the light has been turned on. She drinks in the view. Thinks, This is the last time I will ever see this country, and then, Maybe not. This can’t be the last time she will ever see these black lava fields, covered in their blankets of moss, of snow, the mountains that look close enough to touch but are always jumping out of reach.
She’s in outer space. She’s an astronaut. And she’s going back to Earth.
She’s tired of the goodbyes. To Ingvar, who had been the first to meet her after her operation, who had waited all those hours to make sure she was all right before he went home to his mother. She’d been groggy, the anesthesia casting everything into a surreal shadow, but she’d been aware enough to feel the lips on her forehead. To hear him tell her she’s brave. Not empty. Brave.
She will see Nora again. She’s staying behind, but she’s promised to find Agnes in Northern California, or Agnes will visit her in Los Angeles, when she feels ready.
Her father drops her off in front of the airport, so she can wait for him while he drives the car back to the rental company. While he handles the logistics of leaving a country behind—he’s done it before. She stands in the chill breeze, leaning her weight on the crutches, and watches the world pour in and out of the building. The idea comes to her again, more urgent and vibrant than any color she’s seen before.
She has to sit down on a bench to take out her phone. She sends the message before she can second-guess herself.
The answer comes almost immediately.
Yes.