February 5, 2019
By the time they return to the house, Agnes’s body has stopped working. The frigid air hasn’t helped. It’s only made the shaking worse. Nora helps Agnes to the bathroom. “Oh, you poor thing,” she’s saying, “what’s going on?”
Agnes tries for an “I’m okay,” but the words dissolve into another painful heave.
On the floor next to her, Nora wipes the hair away from Agnes’s sweaty forehead. At some point, she’d brought in some supplies that she swears will help. Sparkling water, tap water, anti-nausea tablets, crackers.
“Traveling is a lot of stress on your body,” Nora says. “And I probably haven’t helped with the stress, have I? Bombarding you with so much trauma. I’m sorry, Agnes, I could see it was too much, and I pushed anyway. Get this out of your system, then we’ll get you into bed.”
Agnes endures the humiliation, because it’s nothing more than what she’s already endured this past year. When she’d come out of surgery, the pain in her leg had caused her first to faint, then to vomit into her lap. The nurses then, too, had been kind. Agnes accepts Nora’s anti-nausea remedies, even though she knows the only fix is in her backpack, in her room. Right now, though, her backpack might as well be at the bottom of the sea.
She tries to apologize, but Nora waves her away. “This might sound twisted,” she says, “but I kind of like taking care of you. My ex-husband used to get terrible food poisoning every other week—until we finally realized he had an ulcer—so I’m really used to it. He once accused me of poisoning him, like in that Daniel Day-Lewis movie, just so I could mother him.” Through the haze, Agnes can only really make out the pink circles of Nora’s glasses. “Men, right?”
Eventually, when Agnes is forcing nothing but air from her body, Nora helps her to bed, assuring Agnes she’ll be fine in the morning. Nora says so many words that Agnes can’t pay attention to, because she’s waiting for the woman to leave the room.
With the door finally, miraculously closed, Agnes staggers to her backpack, lying carelessly on the floor in the corner of the room, and claws through it. Here are the pills, here’s relief. She opens the bottle and digs out four white tablets. These will make her normal again. She could swallow them and be done with the shakes, the nausea, everything. And the temptation is so strong. Agnes had resolved to get off the pills so she could be alert, not so she could vomit into a toilet all day long.
She steadies herself with a hand on her desk. Her body slides forward, if only because her hand is sliding forward. It’s on top of the folder Nora had given her.
Agnes forces herself to look away from the pills to the folder and nudges it open. There’s the portrait of her grandmother, staring back at her with her own eyes. Agnes flips it over. Underneath is another Xerox of a photograph, this time in color. It takes a moment for the image to come into focus, and then it takes her breath away.
It’s a family portrait, posed outside the farmhouse. They’re all standing. The husband straight and proper, the wife holding a bundle in her arms, the son in front and in between. They’re all wearing their best clothes. A suit for the man, a floral dress for the woman, slacks and a button-up for the boy. It must be summer, because the earth around them is a rich green, the mountain beyond the river showing a different, happier face.
Agnes bends down for a better look at her grandfather’s face. He’s not smiling. He’s squinting, almost in a grimace, as if he were looking through the camera at her. As if he could see her pain, and it worried him. I love you, Agnes. She should have taken more pictures of him. Videos. Audio recordings. So she could hear those words again. She wipes at her cheeks, finding tears now instead of sweat.
The little-boy version of Magnús is staring not at the camera, but up at his father. As though he’s noticed the same concern. His mother has one arm around her baby daughter, one hand on her son’s shoulder. She’s smiling at the camera, radiant in sunshine.
Agnes tosses the folder onto the bed, then she deposits two pills back into the bottle. She pops the remaining two, savoring the bitter, almost rotten flavor as they go down. She has to be smart about this. Going cold turkey had been a crazy idea. She’ll just halve her usage. Two pills every few hours isn’t enough to ruin her focus. Just enough to stop the worst of her symptoms.
Then, returning to bed, she buries the bottle underneath her mattress. Removing her temptation in theory, but keeping it close by, just in case.
She lies back on top of the quilt, listening to Nora’s footsteps padding up and down the halls, weaving in and out of a hazy, fitful blackness. She can’t call it sleep. She can only call it the edges of unconsciousness, and she doesn’t rest there long. Whenever she comes to, she stares at the portrait.