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CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX

February 12, 2019

“I had no one,” Thor says. “My mother left without telling me where she was going. She didn’t want my father to find her. She was there one day, and then the next, gone. She left me alone with him. I had no one. And then, one day, by the river, I see Marie. She’s holding a postcard and she’s crying. I ask her what’s wrong and she says it’s a letter from her mother. She was crying like a baby, missing her home. I tell her I understand. I miss my mother, too. And then she’s holding me, and we’re both crying.” He marvels to himself, as though even now the memory comforts him.

“We sit out here.” Thor points to the small patch of land outside, overlooking the river. It’s hardly discernible in this storm. “She tells me about her home. I still don’t know how it happened, but we fell in love. She started leaving me gifts out here, where I could find them. Secret messages. One of her earrings. She would wear one and I would wear the other, and we would always be thinking of the other. My father saw it and took it out. He took everything from me.

“She grows with child,” Thor says, and he stops. He reaches into his jacket, pulls out a folded sheet of paper. Unfurls it, stares down at it, his expression unfathomable and strange. Then he’s showing Agnes the paper, shoving it into her face so she can see. It’s the printout Nora had given her, the family portrait. “Look at her,” he says. “My baby.”

He snatches the paper away, restoring it to his jacket pocket.

“But you kept meeting,” Agnes says. “She had Ingvar watch the baby, so she could spend time with you. Right?”

“In the warm months, we have picnics out here. I want to spend time with the baby— my baby. But she can’t. Little Ingvar is there. He tells everyone how he is Marie’s best friend. He would have told everyone he saw me. We had to be careful. But that was my child.”

The world slips a notch to the side. Agnes isn’t in pain anymore because she isn’t here. Not all the way. “Did she tell you it was?”

“She tells me it’s Einar’s, but I know the truth.”

“What happened?” Agnes asks. She thinks she knows. She doesn’t want to hear it, but she will, regardless. “How did Einar find out?”

“I go to her house,” Thor says, his hands flexing at his sides. Opening and closing into fists. “In winter, it’s difficult for us to see each other. Magnús is home. But for once, Magnús isn’t there. No Ingvar. And she’s got the baby in her arms, and they’re both crying. They’re both there, my family. When she sees me, though, it’s like—she acts like she is afraid. She tells me I shouldn’t be there.

“‘He knows,’ she says.

“I ask her, ‘He knows what?’

“‘Einar,’ she says, ‘he knows about us.’ I try to hold her, and she pushes me away. She tells me she doesn’t want to be with me. She wants Einar. If he’ll forgive her. That’s all she wants.

“I don’t believe her. She tells me to leave. She takes me outside, even though it’s cold and it makes the baby angry. I take the baby. She’s mine. I deserve to hold her.

“She’s so precious, and she’s mine.

“But Marie tells me to give her back. She loves her husband. She loves her baby. She loves her son. She doesn’t want to lose them. I tell her I love her. And she loves me. Doesn’t she love me?” It’s a cry of self-pity, of insatiable need. “And she says—she tries to take my baby from me—and she says, ‘Not enough.’”

There’s no light in the room anymore. The blizzard’s claimed the sky, painting it in a wash of static.

“And I won’t let her have my baby,” Thor says. “She tells me I am too young to understand. She has taken advantage of me, and she’s sorry. I tell her to stop. I know that I love her. But she keeps saying she doesn’t love me. She says I frighten her.”

Agnes grips her fingernails into her stomach again. Whatever’s coming, it’s coming fast now.

“I show her the baby,” Thor says, “and I’m telling her this is us. This is our love. She shouts at me. She tells me it’s Einar’s child. It will always be his child. Just like she will always be his.”

Thor looks down at his open palms. Then back up, to Agnes. There are tears in his eyes.

“You can’t imagine my regret,” he tells her. His voice breaks. “You have no idea the pain I felt. I didn’t know what I was doing, until I had done it. I am holding my baby, and then my hands are cold. So cold. The baby’s not crying anymore. She’s quiet in my arms. But someone is fighting me. Attacking me. I turn around and it’s Marie. She’s like a wild animal. And I feel this hatred. Then she’s underneath me, too, and there’s all this blood in the water. You have to believe me, Agnes, I didn’t know what I was doing until it was done.”

He’s lying. Somewhere in there, he’s lying. They were outside when he drowned the baby. But he’d cut Marie’s throat. Where had the knife come from? Had he left Marie, weeping over her murdered child, to go to the kitchen to retrieve the weapon? Had rage propelled him that far?

“I believe you,” Agnes says, horror somehow keeping her calm. Present. “After you killed them. What did you do?”

“When I saw what I’d done,” Thor says, sinking down next to her, hands clasped together as though asking her for forgiveness, “I ran home. I took off my bloody clothes, and I put them into bags. My father walks in. I try to make him leave. I beg him to leave. But he forces me to say it. He tells me he will kill me. But he doesn’t do anything. Not until that night. He tells me I will have to be the one to leave. ‘I will help you,’ he says, ‘but you must never come back.’”

A good man sacrifices for his family .

“He protected you,” Agnes says.

I didn’t tell, because of my promise .

“There is not a day,” Thor says, “that I have not missed her. That I have not seen her face in every girl I pass. That I have not wondered how my life has gotten here. I have lived with this regret for so long. Agnes. My baby. My sweet girl. Later, my wife, she couldn’t have children. We tried for so many years, but nothing. And I thought that that was my penance. I was paying for that mistake, by not having children. I will be left to live out my days knowing what I could have had. Then I met ása, and I thought my punishment was not over. I tried to fix it, but I should have known it wasn’t over. I should have known, too, that it wasn’t ása punishing me. It was you. The daughter I should have had. You are my punishment.”

Thor rubs a hand over his mouth, and Agnes can see his fingers trembling. “I’m sorry,” he tells her, and he sounds genuinely devastated. “I’m so sorry it had to be you.”

Agnes understands, again, all at once. He’s made a decision. They’ve reached the end.