“Apollo.”
This was Emma’s voice, coming from behind him. At least that’s what he thought. Because he couldn’t see her face, couldn’t see her lips moving, it felt as if she were speaking to him inside his head.
“Look at what’s in your hand,” she said.
Apollo raised the stick so he could see it in the moonlight. Hard and off-white, almost gray. The top part of it had two knobby bulbs at the tip, and the bottom had a single, more prominent knob. Not a stick or a piece of broken branch.
It was a bone.
He held a bone in his hand. But it was small. A child’s leg bone. A child’s femur. When Apollo realized this, he dropped it with a start, and it clacked onto the stones.
The stones.
Now Apollo went on one knee. His ears filled with a kind of hissing, like steam playing from a radiator, but this was only the sound of his confusion and disgust. He dropped the serving lid and didn’t even hear the noise it made when it landed. He grabbed at a large, rounded stone with his right hand. He turned it over.
It was a child’s skull.
It had a hole the size of a silver dollar in it, right above the left ear. Apollo’s hand pulsed with a painful spasm, but he couldn’t drop the skull, couldn’t look away from the hole. He felt rage, roiling like bile, in his throat. He turned and took a step toward the cave.
“You go in there now, and you won’t survive,” Emma said.
She’d come out of her cocoon, risen from her crouch. She stood at the top of the valley of bones and spoke with the assurance of a prophet.
Apollo moved backward, and the bones beneath his boots chucked and clattered. He still held the skull. It felt cruel to drop it on the ground again. He decided it was the skull of Agnes. The first Agnes. Agnes Knudsdatter, the first abandoned child in Queens.
Apollo sat beside Emma in the cold. He placed the serving lid back on the tray, hiding the sheep’s head. The skull of Agnes remained in his lap, but when he looked down at it now, it resembled only a large, gray rock again. Apollo almost laughed, but he felt too weak. The world is full of glamour, especially when it obscures the suffering of the weak.
“So we stay here till morning,” Apollo said.
“When the sun is up, it sleeps.”
“And you’re sure Brian is still in there?” Apollo asked. He couldn’t make himself say the second question—And that he’s still alive?
But Emma understood him. She brought one hand to her belly. “A mother knows,” she whispered.
“What do you do during the day, while it’s asleep?” Apollo asked.
“I walk,” she said.
For the first time, Apollo risked bringing his hand closer to Emma. He pressed it, lightly, against the small of her back.
“In the morning I want you to come with me,” Apollo said. “I know a house nearby where we can rest. No one there can bother us now.”
Emma didn’t answer him. Didn’t lean into his touch or otherwise appear relieved, but she didn’t shrug his hand away either. Apollo kept it there, and they sat together until dawn.
EMMA AND APOLLO stood over the body of Jorgen Knudsen.
It had actually surprised Apollo to return to this house and find the old Viking still dead on the kitchen floor, utility knife still stuck in his throat. He’d been anticipating, in some way that wasn’t conscious, returning to find Jorgen up and pouring himself another of his Ensure cocktails. No matter how much the old man deserved killing, such a thing still costs. Seeing the body, the blood already dried on his clothes, the floor, even droplets of it on the ceiling and the table where Apollo cut cabbage, made Apollo blink wildly, as if he’d never washed Jorgen’s blood from his face. He would probably always feel the stain of it, until his last day.
Nevertheless this much reality still held. Dead was dead. Jorgen Knudsen lived no more.
The only surprise here was Emma. She stared at the body and tapped her throat. “I made him do that,” she said.
Maybe Apollo didn’t expect shock really—think of all she’d experienced so far—but she discussed Jorgen’s wound, his death, so casually, like a bit of home improvement. A tasteful choice for the backsplash above the kitchen counters.
“I wouldn’t let him sleep,” Emma said without passion. “I wouldn’t give him any peace. Every night I slipped inside his head and made him listen.”
They’d retrieved the suitcase on the way back to Jorgen’s house. Taken the same path she’d led him on the night before but in reverse, the suitcase lying right there in the underbrush like the last piece of luggage at a baggage carousel. He’d scooped it up and pulled it along with them, but at this point it had been too heavy. Though he’d been loath to do it in front of Emma, Apollo unzipped the case and slipped out the grave marker. She watched him but didn’t speak about it. He set the grave marker there in the woods, and this felt appropriate. The changeling had been born nearby—where better to commemorate its passing? To this day, there’s a bronze grave marker with the name “Brian Kagwa” hidden in Forest Park.
Meanwhile Emma and Apollo returned to Jorgen’s kitchen.
“He showed up with food every night,” she said. “He thought he could appease me. You know how much sheep’s head I’ve eaten? Last night I’d had enough. I made him bring me Starbucks.”
“That’s the reason?” Apollo asked. “You just wanted a different meal?”
Emma watched him quietly for a moment and pursed her lips, a look that verged on playful. “Why else would I do it?” she asked. She kicked at one of Jorgen’s limp legs. “You don’t know the things this man has done in his life,” she said to Apollo.
“He told me some of it.”
She tapped her temple. “I saw it. All of it.”
“Let’s go upstairs,” Apollo said.
Emma looked at the ceiling then back at him, wary but ready. “What’s up there?”
“A bathroom. A tub.”
Apollo ran the water. He tried to unzip her coat, but the zipper had frozen or rusted up by her neck long ago. He left her in the bathroom and went down to the kitchen and found scissors in a drawer. He stepped carefully over Jorgen’s body so he wouldn’t slip in the blood. Upstairs he cut the old coat off her. The puffy fabric fell from her stiff as a beetle’s shell.
Emma had always been a small woman, but without the coat she appeared whittled down to a pine needle’s width. Strangely, this didn’t make her seem weak. Imagine the coat falling away to reveal a single plutonium rod underneath.
The clothes, on the other hand, had nearly bonded with her skin. He tried to pull at the sleeves of her wool sweater, and they crumbled between his fingers. Her jeans were nothing more than long strips of denim that came off in faded blue ribbons when he tugged at them. Her socks couldn’t be slipped off her feet. They would have to come off when she stepped into the tub, so rotten they’d dissolve in the water.
He turned off the faucet. It was only when he leaned close, right up against her skin, that her smell overpowered the Brennivín coating his skin. She smelled so tart from dried sweat and a longtime lack of soap that Apollo’s eyes hurt when he leaned into her and picked her up.
“Ready for the water?” Apollo asked, but Emma didn’t answer. She stared at the bathroom mirror and, maybe for the first time in four months, saw her reflection. She couldn’t look away from it.
“Who is that?” she whispered.
He leaned over the tub and let her down. The water turned to a murky, almost greenish sludge seconds after she was immersed. Months of filth floated off her body. Apollo lifted the plunger and let the water drain, then refilled the tub. It took three refills before the water stopped turning dirty. Then Apollo found a cloth and a bar of soap and washed Emma’s body.
They were in the bathroom for two hours.
When they finished, Emma couldn’t really stand. It was as if the bath had also scraped away some armor she’d constructed, an exoskeleton. He carried her into the largest bedroom, what he assumed had bee
n Jorgen’s bedroom, though the bed clearly hadn’t been slept in. No indent in the sheets or the pillows. Emma had been keeping the old man awake for a long time. Maybe he’d stopped coming into this room at all. This wasn’t the room where Apollo found the clean wardrobe. This meant he was wearing Kinder Garten’s clothes.
He pulled back the covers and laid Emma on the bed. There were two space heaters in this bedroom, neither one turned on, so the room felt chilly. He spun each one’s black dial. Late morning light curled in through two windows at the head of the bed and clarified just how gray, how bloodless, Emma’s skin had become. She looked like a body that had been dug out of the ice. Cleaning her up actually made Emma look worse. As a witch, she had been imperious; she walked in a blue cloud of power, a being for whom the trees parted and the woods whispered. The woman on the mattress now nearly got lost in the bedsheets. She should’ve been hooked up to an IV and put on bed rest for six weeks. She hadn’t spoken once since Apollo ran the bath. Emma appeared more lost than she’d been out in the forest. Had he done more harm than good by bringing her back?
Apollo pulled the covers over her and returned to the first floor. There were clothes in the suitcase—he’d brought a change for Emma and for Brian—and he thought maybe seeing the clothes would return her focus. He didn’t know what else to do. In the kitchen he found Jorgen’s body once more, but being alone with it again, he had to steady himself against the counter. This was when he felt the powerful cold throughout the house. He stepped into the hall. That damn front door had been open all night. He walked down the hall. The whole first floor felt frigid, the place gone as silent as a tomb. He shut the front door and turned off the porch light.
He dragged the suitcase up the stairs and unpacked nearly everything, even the mattock. He showed her the clothes he’d picked for her, but her eyes remained focused on the ceiling, unfocused, dazed.
Apollo checked the small zippered side pockets of the suitcase, the faint bulge suggesting something he’d overlooked. He found the packet of bendy straws and the bottle of massage oil. The last of the labor kit. Apollo took up the faintly yellow liquid and shook it, unscrewed the cap, and smelled. Pure almond oil. Emma had packed this suitcase over a year ago, so it was as though she’d packed this small gift for herself.
He pulled the covers away from Emma and poured a dollop of the almond oil into one hand. He moved to the bottom of the bed and brought two hands around Emma’s right foot. He squeezed her foot and rubbed the almond oil across the skin until it soaked in. The skin looked no richer or softer, no less gray. He poured more oil into his hand and rubbed it into the bottom of the same foot, pressing at the heel and running his thumb all the way up to the toes. When he finished with the first foot, he moved on to the other and continued upward across her legs and along her sides.
When he’d finished, she rolled onto her side, facing him, but still didn’t say a word. Apollo brought the blanket up to the bridge of her nose. Her hair had tightened into its curls as it dried. The two of them stayed in a moody silence for ten minutes or ten years.
“I should’ve believed you,” Apollo eventually said.
Two fingers appeared at the top of the sheet and pulled the fabric down below her chin. “I wouldn’t have believed you either,” she said. “If it had been the other way around.”
Apollo tapped her fingers gently. “We’re together now,” he said.
She nodded quietly, then locked her gaze with his as she pulled the bedsheets back for him to see her. Her skin shone like burnished brass now. She held the sheet open for him.
He hadn’t felt this nervous since he’d been fifteen. When he took off his clothes the scent of Brennivín filled the room, as if the odor had seeped through his clothes and into his skin. But in the moment it hardly mattered. He slipped in beside Emma, and she dropped the sheet around them both.
So long since they’d even kissed each other. He’d forgotten the goodness of her lips. The soft slope of her long, narrow throat. He climbed on top of her, and to his happy surprise, she wrestled him for the position. She laughed with him when her forehead bumped his chin. She humped against his thigh and climbed higher along him. They made love until they fucked. They fucked until they were spent.
When they finished, they came to rest with their heads near a window so the sunlight bathed both their faces. A comfortable silence, they lingered in it, this short reprieve.
Emma rested a hand on Apollo’s chest and patted it twice. She rose on an elbow and kissed his shoulder. He raised his left arm and brought his hand to her ribs, but before he could touch them, she grabbed his wrist. She turned his hand so she could see his ring finger.
“Did you make a wish with this?” she asked.
“I did. But I’m ashamed of it now.”
“Why don’t you wear it until you can put your real ring back on?”
Apollo lowered his hand. “I threw the ring into the East River.”
She clapped a hand to his chin and squeezed a little too tightly. “You’re going to have a real hard time finding it there.”
Apollo laughed. “You’d make me do it, too.”
She brought her nose to his rib cage, sniffing theatrically. “Smells like you’ve already been there.”
“It was Jorgen’s favorite cologne,” Apollo said.
“Go take a bath,” she said. “I need to sleep just a little before it becomes night.”
Apollo slipped out of bed and pulled the covers over her. He did need a bath, but there were even more important things that needed to be done. He picked through his pile of clothes and found the phone in his coat pocket. Emma had already fallen asleep.
He went downstairs with the phone. When Emma woke up, they were going back into the forest and, this time, marching into that cave. Maybe he’d give her the knife that had killed Jorgen, and he could heft the mattock. But suppose they never made it back out? Anna Sofie hadn’t, and neither had all those children. Who knew how many other bodies had been lost down there? He didn’t want to disappear without saying goodbye to his mother. He turned on the phone and dialed Lillian.
“MOM,” HE SAID when Lillian picked up.
“Apollo? Apollo.” She whispered when she spoke because it was either that or choke up and say nothing.
“How are you?”
“Happy to hear your voice,” she said.
Upstairs Emma slept. Apollo walked to the front door and almost opened it casually, as if this were their home, and he’d called for a weekly check-in with his mother.
“Things have gotten pretty wild,” Apollo said, the line a true achievement in understatement.
“I left you alone,” Lillian said quickly. “I left you alone, and that’s when things went bad.”
Apollo leaned against the door. He’d only meant to say goodbye, but now he shut his eyes as if Lillian were about to tell him a bedtime story.
“The last time we talked, you were so angry at me. I understood why, but I’ve been thinking and thinking about everything you said, everything I said. There’s so much I never explained. I guess I hoped I would never have to.”
“What does that mean?”
“You were so young,” Lillian said softly. “I prayed you’d just forget.”
“Then I started having the nightmares.”
She sighed on the line. “Yes. And even then I pretended that’s all they were.”
“But why? I’m not accusing you of anything, I’m just asking. What was the point of pretending my dad didn’t come back for me?”
A longer silence now, so long Apollo thought she’d hung up the line. He pulled the phone from his ear, but the battery still had plenty of power, and the two of them hadn’t been disconnected.
“I got to know that lawyer, Mr. Blackwood, once I’d been at the job for a few years. We didn’t become friends, but if you work with people long enough, you’re going to have a few conversations. At some point he told me why he’d been so hard on me in the beginning, forcing me to come wor
k on Saturdays.
“And do you know he had a whole story about how he was trying to help me? The firm was going to be letting go of staff, and as the newest hired, I’d be the first one fired. But if I’d learned enough about how the firm worked, proved myself a hard worker by coming in on weekends, they’d probably consider me valuable enough to keep. That’s what he said. Maybe that was true, but it certainly wasn’t the only reason that man forced me to come to the firm on Saturdays. I knew it, and I thought he knew it, too.
“But by the third or fourth time he told me this story, I realized he did believe his version. If you asked him if he’d ever pressured me for a date he’d swear it never happened. That fact had left his mind. He’d done me a favor, and look, five years later I still worked at the firm and even had two promotions. He was trying to tell me how grateful I should be! I’m not saying he lied. Not exactly. But his story was more flattering to himself, so with some time and distance, that’s the story he chose to believe. I’m realizing that by telling you nothing about your father, I might have been doing the same thing. Not just for myself but for him.”
“Just tell me what happened,” Apollo said. He stood straight now and began to pace, but Jorgen Knudsen’s kitchen lay directly ahead, and in that kitchen lay a man he had killed. He didn’t want to hear this story while staring at a dead man. He stopped moving and braced himself against the door that led to the den.
“I came home from work at one,” Lillian began. “I’d brought some McDonald’s for us. I felt guilty, and you liked the French fries. But when I reached home, the front door wasn’t locked. Already that was very strange. I heard the bath running. I panicked. Dropped all my things. I thought you’d gotten yourself in there, and what if you drowned or something? I ran to the bathroom and opened the door and saw the ugliest thing I’ve ever known.”
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