Page 58

CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE

February 12, 2019

Agnes babbles through her panic. “I found her,” she’s saying, and she can’t stop herself. “I got her out of the cellar, and I brought her here. The power went out. I couldn’t walk. So she—she’s gone. She’s somewhere safe. Somewhere far away and safe.” She repeats the last words, as though she could assure herself of this fact. But ása isn’t safe, is she? She’s walking through a blizzard looking for help.

Thor doesn’t seem to be listening to Agnes, though. He’s staring out at the storm, somewhere else entirely.

“What—” Agnes begins, but she’s not brave enough to finish the question. What are you going to do to me?

This one word, though, is enough to call him back to her. Thor drags a hand down his face, giving her a brief glimpse at the gaudy pink flesh protecting his eyes. Suddenly, he seems ten years older, haggard and strange.

“Agnes,” he says with a heavy sigh. “Why did you do this? You hurt yourself,” he says, more to himself, it seems, than her. He rests his hand on what used to be her knee. Even the lightest touch feels like he’s dragging a fishhook through her chest, down the line of her body, to her groin. Everything loses focus. “You found ása.”

He eases up. Still, she can’t recover.

“You say she’s gone,” he says. “Car’s still here. If someone picked her up, they would take you, too. Did you make her walk ? Where? To Ingvar? Oh, Agnes.”

He squeezes her knee, and she wonders if this is it. This is what it’s like to die. To be hauled into it. She wants, more than anything, her dad. She wants to be home in Berkeley. She wants to be a kid again, safe in her dad’s bed, listening to him flipping the pages of his book, feeling his hand on her hair. Agnes and Magnús, two sides of the same coin.

But she’s here.

She can’t wish her way home.

Thor’s eyes seem to look straight through her. “She wouldn’t make it to the road,” he tells her. “You killed her.”

“No,” she says, knowing it’s useless. Knowing, in that moment, exactly what is coming for her. “How could you do it?” she asks. “You took her. You drugged her.” She tries to push herself upright onto her elbows, but Thor’s there in an instant, and he stops her easily with the pressure of one hand on her chest.

“Settle down,” he tells her.

“You put her in a cellar,” she says. She takes big gulping breaths. “You kept her underground.”

The hand pressing on her chest digs deeper. “You are the one who sent her out into the snow.”

“You’re a monster,” Agnes chokes out.

“Did she tell you,” he asks, emotion raising the volume of his voice to a near shout, “what she did? No? Six months, we are together. She tells me she loves me, we have something special. She’s never felt this way before. And then something changes. She stops answering my calls. She doesn’t want to see me. I beg her to talk to me. To tell me what it is I’ve done. Is it someone else? She tells me no. It’s no one else. She tells me she was pregnant. With my baby. And she killed it. She wasn’t answering her phone, she wasn’t here, because she was in Reykjavík, killing my child.”

His rage threatens to tear him into two. He drags himself away from Agnes and paces the length of the living room while he speaks. “She tells me this and she expects me to be calm. She expects me to accept what she’s done. Then she’s sending me these texts, telling me I am too angry. She killed my baby, and I’m the monster ?”

“You’re insane,” she says. It comes out unbidden. But that’s what this is. That’s what’s sharing the room with her: insanity.

“You don’t understand,” he says. “You’ve never had children and lost them. You’ve never dealt with this pain before, have you? You don’t know what I feel. You can’t even imagine it, and you don’t want to. I know you. You feel so much, but you’re selfish with it. You’re like Marie. Selfish.”

“Like Marie,” Agnes says. Something bubbles up underneath the surface of her panic. She can’t grab hold of it. She’s hardly able to hold onto her own sanity now. She suspects if she blacks out now, though, she’ll wake up in the cellar. And then there will be no escape.

“Marie killed my baby, too,” he says.

The final pieces of the puzzle fall into place. Thor had been eighteen when Marie, age twenty-six, was killed. As old as Marie had been when she’d met Einar. Too young, far too young, but old enough.

“It wasn’t your father,” she hears herself say. “It was you.”

“I loved her so much,” Thor says. The smile he sends her, so sad, chills her blood. “And she loved me.”