Page 53

CHAPTER FIFTY

February 12, 2019

She hears the pounding footsteps. Feels the cold rush of water on her skin. Sand everywhere. In her hair. On her face. In her teeth. She coughs through it. Blinks her eyes open, expecting to see the beach in Bolinas, the white spray of the tide coming toward her. The hands on her body, the surfers asking if she’s okay. Fighting with each other. Of course she’s not okay, the woman had said. Look at her.

But she’s not in California. She’s in Iceland. This isn’t sand gritting her teeth, but dust. At least forty years’ worth of decaying wood. It isn’t near noon. There is no sun in the sky. There is only the dark ceiling of her grandfather’s farmhouse.

There’s no one to save her. No one to pick her up, gently cradling her neck. No one to administer the painkillers she so obviously needs.

Her father is thousands of miles away. Nora and Ingvar, they might as well be, too.

She lifts her head and the world spins off-kilter. Nauseated, her head falls back with a hard jolt against a plank of wood. She doesn’t know how long she lies there, waiting for the dizziness to subside, but it’s all-consuming. There’s a groan, and she assumes it’s from her.

Taking a deep breath, she tries to move again. Smaller attempts. She twitches her fingers. They respond. She counts each finger, tapping them to the wood shards. Then her toes. It’s painful. But she can wiggle them.

She slides her arms back, rattling the debris around her, and props herself up on her elbows. Dust and splinters coat her body, muting her once luridly red jacket. For a moment, the floor lurches to the side and she thinks she’s going to die from the nausea. If she had to vomit right now, which is what she thinks her body wants to do, could she even survive it?

But then, in bits and pieces, the floor rights itself. She breathes in through her mouth and coughs around the dust. She’s alive. She’s going to get up. And she’s going to go back to the house.

To call Ingvar. Then Nora. Then the police.

Maybe the police first, for an ambulance.

Whining in the back of her throat, Agnes gets herself farther upright, so she’s sitting. She takes stock of her body’s injuries. She’s in shock. That must be why nothing hurts, other than the nausea. Or did she miraculously survive the fall with nothing more than a dizzy head?

She pushes herself up, laboriously, to standing, only to crumple back down to the floor, helplessly, like a rag doll. Now she calls out, unable to stop the scream of pain. It’s her knee. Her knee falls apart, giving out quick and fast, like someone’s blown it apart. She catches herself on her hands, but that doesn’t halt her momentum, and she can’t see anything but stars when her chin connects with the hardwood. She pulls her throbbing face out from the dust. She has to breathe. Breathe through this.

A line of spit falls to the floor underneath her. She probably broke everything all over again. Probably shattered the tenuously healing joints.

She’s going to die. Out here, in the dark and the cold. She’s going to die like her grandmother. She’s going to be found, days later. Frozen. A memorial to pain, to a young life cut tragically short.

No.

She thinks she speaks the word aloud.

She’s not going to die like this.

She drags her left leg back underneath her, bending at the knee. The bones grind together, and it feels—it feels twisted. Like she’s pulling on the last remaining threads connecting that part of her skeleton. Her kneecap pops in an explosion of fire.

But there’s relief. She brings her right knee in beside it. Then she steps, carefully, onto her right foot. Leans all her body weight into that one point of contact and lifts herself up to standing, only allowing the toes of her left foot to touch the ground for balance. Like she did for all those months after surgery. She can do this. She’s up. She’s standing. She holds back a battle cry. It’ll be slow, but she’ll get back to the house.

Agnes peers down at the broken boards of the staircase and selects the longest, sturdiest piece of wood. A makeshift cane. Propping her weight onto it, she attempts a step. It’s going to be a horrific, ugly shamble back to the house, but the adrenaline will get her there.

There’s the knocking again. The rush of wind, yes, but the knocking is so much closer now. And it’s not coming from outside.

Agnes feels the vibration under her feet.

There’s more.

Something like a scream.

Agnes strains her ears. It’s the wind. It has to be the wind whistling through the house, the secret hidden places that only wind or water can find. But it sounds like a woman. Is it Nora? Had she come back and found Agnes missing?

Knocking again. Turning around, Agnes wonders if she’s gone crazy. If this is what she’s become. She’s left her living world behind and has entered some new dream state she can’t escape. But she thinks someone’s there.

She tries to tune out everything but the present moment. Everything but this small section of the earth.

She sees it. Puffs of dust unsettling from the floor with each pounding knock.

Agnes lowers herself haltingly back to her hands and knees, keeping her left leg out of the way. She brushes the shards of wood away from her, clawing at the new floor. The knocking is coming from underneath the floorboards.

Scrambling now, Agnes makes her way forward, until she finds a latch. It’s covered. Easily overlooked in the shadows of an exposed staircase in an abandoned farmhouse only partying students frequent. And this latch, too, is new. The metal of the ring shines.

Threading her hands through the ring, she pulls, but the floor doesn’t budge. She tugs harder, but it holds firm.

She hears another round of knocking and she says, her voice wretched with pain and desperation, “I’m trying.”

The ring twists in the opposite direction and then she feels it wrench free. Forcing her broken body to stand once more, Agnes drags the heavy door open.

What she sees first is the eyes. Hollow, wide.

Then there’s the hair, white and stringy with oil. The cloth tied around her mouth. Hands, also bound, bleeding. Reaching above her head. The cellar around her black and molding and claustrophobically small.

“ása,” Agnes says. That’s all she can say. “ása.”