Page 52

CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

February 12, 2019

Back in the wind, Agnes bends her head to the current, as though she were at the bottom of the ocean, pushing herself against a relentless tide. She sticks out an ungloved hand to check that she won’t walk straight into a tree. She’ll get back to the Wi-Fi, then she’ll call Nora. Nora will know what to do.

Agnes should have taken the phone with her. But she couldn’t have risked it, could she? Not right now. Not alone. Nora will believe her. Agnes just has to get to the house, then she’ll call her.

But, Agnes realizes with dawning horror, she can’t go to Thor’s house. It’s his house. He’ll have a key.

She has to go somewhere safe. To Ingvar. He’ll help her.

Her boot slips painfully over a buried rock and for a moment Agnes nearly pitches forward into the snow. She rights herself with an effort, checking her bearings.

She can’t think properly. She could scream.

He lied.

Thor lied.

He lied about his relationship with ása.

Why lie, if there’s nothing to hide?

Is it the age difference?

Agnes stops in place. The house is in front of her, but once again she’s veered off the path. She’s managed to make it to the side of the house, to Nora’s room. There are glass walls here, too. She can see the big bed. The chairs.

And a light on, that she hadn’t put on.

She’s trying to think if there’s any chance she could have done this by mistake. There are so many different light switches in the house, and it’s not like she’s lived there long enough to know them all. She could have turned it on, accidentally, when she was turning on the hallway light. She thinks she had left the house in darkness, but she hadn’t checked Nora’s room. Why would she?

But that’s when she sees the movement inside. The figure crossing the hallway beyond Nora’s open door.

Heart pounding, Agnes ducks out of sight, hurrying as best as she can to the cover of the trees. She’s making noises with her breathing, can’t stop them from coming, can only listen as they transform into words. Words like god oh god what do I do.

Someone is inside.

And it had looked like he was going into her room.

She leans against the tree, praying he doesn’t step into Nora’s room. She hadn’t been able to see him clearly, only the dark silhouette of his body, but she knows who it is. Who it must be.

Thor.

What does he want from her?

I would have loved to have a daughter like you.

He wouldn’t hurt her.

She knows that, rationally.

But she can’t get her feet to move. To take her inside, to speak to him as though she doesn’t know about his relationship with a woman thirty years younger than him who disappeared after breaking up with him over text.

ása broke up with Thor and he reacted. Reacted in the same way her own grandfather did, forty years ago. The certainty of it solidifies within her.

She knows what she has to do. First, she needs to get somewhere warm. Even with her jacket on, she’s cold. Some people die from being this cold. A lot of people do, actually. Exposure is what they call it. She’s never appreciated this fact until now, that she could die from this feeling.

She can’t go into the house. Not with Thor there.

She can’t go to the rental car. The keys are in her room, thrown carelessly on her bedside table.

Ingvar. That’s where she’ll go.

But her body is still sore from the hike she’d made to his home the other night. She pictures that long, steep driveway. The endless curve around the hill. She’d hardly been able to manage it then. Today, in this weather, she doesn’t trust she’d make it. Not when she’s starting to vibrate, bodily, from the shivers.

There’s only one other place she can go. Not to stay. Not for long. Just to think.

Agnes crouches as low as she can and she hurries across the driveway, careful to keep her body beneath the porthole of her bedroom. Her body protests every step. The joints in her left leg scrape against their bearings, their frozen ligaments and cobbled together bone fragments. She can’t slow down, though, she can’t wait to see if she’s been caught.

When she’s in the trees, she straightens and pushes herself into an all-out run. She can’t hear anything behind her, no door opening, no following footsteps. Nothing but the wind pressing against her, the crunch of her own footfalls, the pounding of her heartbeat. This is the first time she’s tried anything faster than a halting quick-step since the surgery. And it doesn’t last long. She doesn’t know if it’s her body or something she’s stepped on, but her knee buckles at an odd angle, and suddenly Agnes is tumbling forward into the snow, and she doesn’t have time to catch herself. She lands in the snow in a breathless heap.

Sparks of electricity radiate up her left leg. Did she twist her knee? Sprain her ankle? She can’t pinpoint where the pain is coming from. It’s just—everywhere. Agnes doesn’t know how long it takes her to recover enough to come to standing, but she knows she’s wasted a lot of time. Her hands burn from the snow, the skin of her fingers turning almost neon yellow with cold.

Standing, shaking, she attempts a step. Her knee buckles again, but she’s ready for it this time. She falls forward into a tree.

No, she thinks, she would never have made it to Ingvar’s.

She’ll be lucky to get to the farmhouse.

It’s an endless shuffle to the house, and a fight to get to the front door. By the time she’s reaching for the doorknob, she’s breathing heavily through her mouth in harsh, desperate heaves. Sweat drips down the length of her face.

She hobbles inside. The relief from the wind is enough to make her cry. But the reprieve doesn’t last long. It’s cold in here, too. Despite her sweat and the exertion getting here, she feels the shivers on the edge of her body, threatening to consume her again.

She doesn’t need to stay here long. Just long enough to call Ingvar for help. For him to drive here and pick her up.

Treading carefully, haltingly, she threads her way up the rickety staircase. In her father’s room, there are old sweaters. His old bed, relatively okay. She will likely have to share it with a nest of rodents, but she can’t afford to care about that right now.

Wind pounds at the walls. She stops at the top of the stairs, icy water trickling down the sides of her arms. Pivoting in place, she stares down the staircase, expecting to see Thor’s silhouette at the bottom. Knocking on the wall to let her know he’s there.

But there’s no one. Only the repetitive pounding against the walls. A tree branch, thrown against the stones by the storm.

Agnes forces herself onward. There’s not much else she can do.

She gathers up everything from her father’s displaced wardrobe, everything he left behind. It doesn’t amount to much, but it’s something. Hesitantly, her left leg crooked and screaming, she lowers herself onto the small mattress. There’s no movement underneath her, no bodies writhing, desperately searching for air, so she relaxes a bit more, draping the old threadbare clothes on her legs. The wood of the bedframe creaks and moans. She fights the hysterical urge to shush it.

There’s that pounding. The knocking of the tree branches.

And there’s her breathing.

Nothing else.

She’s safe.

What must Thor think she’s doing? Had they somehow missed each other on their walks through the woods? Had he seen her rental car, still in the driveway, and assumed she left with Nora?

She wrestles her phone out of her jacket pocket, her hand bare and stinging from the cold. She enters the passcode, her fingers clumsy and not cooperating. She switches off airplane mode, but her phone can’t seem to find a signal. The bars keep loading, back and forth, like piano keys trilling. When it finds service, she’ll call Ingvar. Then Nora. Then the police.

On-screen, the bars disappear.

No service.

Agnes resists the urge to throw the useless device across the room. Instead, she digs again in her pockets. She finds ása’s phone, presses her thumb against the power button, and prays. If she has to go back out into the wind, she doesn’t know if she’ll make it back to the house.

The phone screen blinks on. There’s an icon of a dead battery. And then it goes dark.

“Fuck,” she shouts.

Now what?

She stows the two phones in her pockets, crosses her arms over her chest, and leans forward over her legs, as though this tiny bit of scrunching will warm her up. She doesn’t want to die, not like this, cowering in a cold room. She’s been so close this past year. She leapt from the rocks. Suddenly, though, it feels like she never jumped at all. That in fact she’d slipped and lost her footing on life. Dropped and caught herself just by her fingers on the ledge. And for the past year, slowly, agonizingly, she’s lifted one finger off at a time, until she’s down to one hand. Now that she’s here, now that she’s faced with it, with death coming for her, racing toward her, not her meeting it. She wants to live.

She stands, joints grinding. Her father’s moth-eaten sweaters fall to the floor. She starts out of the room. There’s no other choice.

It’s either go to Thor or stay here and die.

She steps onto the top stair. Ingvar’s voice calls to her, again and again. In this cold, even in there, you can lose consciousness from hypothermia. She takes another trembling step, her knee buckling under her weight. And then you’re not waking up.

There’s a crack underneath her. The loud bang of a spring exploding from its coil. And then the staircase opens up beneath her, gravity welcoming her downward. She doesn’t have time to scream.