Freyja

1. Reykjavík, 2018

An envelope appears in the mailbox on a Monday, slipped in without a stamp or address. Scrawled on the front is Unnur’s name in black ink. She does not recognize the handwriting, and a quick, cold twinge of unease courses through her. She glances at her daughter Lilja, who is crouched by the door, still learning to tie her shoes. Still here.

Unnur is about to tear the envelope open when her phone dings with a reminder about the parent-teacher conference. She tucks the envelope into her purse. Lilja has a greasy, purpling bruise on her right eye from the weekend, when Unnur crashed her car into a pile of snow. The car stopped; Lilja did not, her head whacking the back of the passenger seat. Lilja proudly announces her body is healing the black eye.

On the drive to school, Lilja asks if Pabbi is really coming tomorrow. Noi, Lilja’s father, is returning to Iceland for the first time in two years for a custody meeting at the district commissioner’s office. Unnur notes he has sent no calls, no texts, no word. She is evasive, telling Lilja he will be tired from travel and will not pick her up from school. Lilja worries whether Pabbi will recognize her now that she is taller, remembering their last meeting in Amsterdam, the purple dragon face paint, the fried calamari, the picture on the fridge. Unnur tries to save the memories for Pabbi. She prays this visit will be brief and unremarkable, like all his others. Unremarkable is what she prays for most in her life: lie low, keep Lilja safe, keep her past bound and gagged in a basement.

They arrive at school. In the hallway, Unnur drags a child-sized chair across the floor for Lilja, then enters the classroom. The teacher, Brynja, a big-boned woman with long gray hair in a tight ponytail, is shouting at a laptop. Noi’s voice crackles through the speakers, monologuing about continental Europe’s internet providers. Brynja asks Unnur if she wants to turn him off. Unnur covers her mouth to conceal a smile and agrees. At least Noi tried to show up. Progress, she supposes.

Brynja asks how things are at home. Unnur says great, mentioning Lilja’s fairy kick and the enchanted forest of her room. Then Brynja brings up Lilja’s Icelandic. Unnur glances at the closed laptop, grateful Noi is not there, because when it came to their daughter’s command of Icelandic he was interested, attentive, concerned, all the qualities missing from their marriage. Brynja assumes Unnur speaks only English with Lilja at home and suggests she find relatives or friends for Lilja to practice with. Unnur cannot help correcting her: she is not foreign, she is Icelandic, she just lived in America. Brynja says Lilja has explained.

Unnur remembers the truth: after the last summer of her childhood, she was shipped overseas to distant, childless relatives in the States, relatives of the father she never met. Her teens and early twenties happened in clean, East Coast American English. She did not speak another word of Icelandic until she was nearly thirty, when she overheard Noi talking loudly on the phone in the lobby of a Connecticut library. That was almost nine years ago, and still there is rust on her tongue. She speaks to Lilja in English; in public she hardly speaks at all. She often contemplates moving back to America, for the language or the anonymity, for thousands of additional miles between herself and a certain stretch of black-sand beach. But she cannot stomach the thought of Lilja crouching under a desk during an active-shooter drill, or of teachers stowing loaded guns in desk drawers. Better to be alone and safe and covered by healthcare on this ice cube than alone and scared and uninsured on the other side of the Atlantic, even if it means Lilja’s teachers think she is an idiot.

Brynja emphasizes that she has no worries about Lilja playing Peter in the drama students’ performance of Peter Pan. Lilja has been cast as the lead and has memorized not only her own lines but the entire play, catastrophizing that she might have to play all the parts if the other children forget theirs. Lilja is, without question, Unnur’s child. Unnur agrees that Lilja is good, so easily becomes someone else. Unnur knows the feeling.

Back home, Unnur stares at the short stack of mail on the kitchen counter, the mystery envelope on top. She tallies possibilities: not a bill collector, not Noi, not a neighbor, not a mother from school, not a customer from the bakery where she works. She slices Lilja an apple and thins peanut butter with almond milk so Lilja won’t choke, knowing Noi would sigh that she is overprotective. Lilja takes her snack to the living room. Alone in the kitchen, Unnur tears the tape sealing the envelope. For a fraction of a second she is suspended in space and time, neither before nor after, only now.

A thin paper note flutters to her feet. She picks it up and reads four words in black ink that catapult her back to a night that cleaved her life in two: Hee, Unna. Remember me?

Unna is what Freyja called her, a name known only to them. Freyja thought it clever, a play on words, since unna is an antiquated way of saying to love or to cherish. Unnur thought it was pointless, just her own name with a little laziness at the end. Only one person in the world could have written these words. And she was presumed dead.

2. Dark Valley, 1990

The first day of the final summer of Unnur's childhood begins with a long drive. She is eleven, sitting in the back seat of a jeep, kicking the seat in front of her. Viktor, her aunt Sandra's freeloading boyfriend, spits her name like a bad taste and threatens to open the door and roll her onto the road. Unnur knows he doesn't mean it. Sandra would stop him. She is sure of this.

Sandra is the identical twin of Unnur's mother, who died when Unnur was just under two, so Unnur remembers nothing about her. Viktor has been living in their cramped Keflavik apartment, a few miles from the US naval base, for nine months. This drive is the first trip they've taken together as a family, though none of them would apply that term. Unnur has learned about family from dubbed American films: a square, equal angles, equal sides. Her own life looks more like a ball of tangled yarn drawn by a toddler.

She asks where they are going. Viktor tells her to just watch. Sandra mouths the word "South," then drifts into a glazed silence. The landscape offers nothing but green moss, gray skies, and whitecaps in black water, lava field on every side. Unnur thinks about the huldufélk, the half-height elven creatures Sandra fears will creep through the dryer vent and swap a well-behaved child for a changeling. Unnur has never seen them, but she wants their existence to be true, because living on a volcanic ice-rock in the middle of the North Atlantic makes a person feel small and lonely. That is why people huddle around fires with stories. That is why Sandra loses sleep staring at the washer and dryer where Unnur now sleeps on a mattress on the linoleum floor.

The bar at Dark Valley

Viktor rubs steam from the windshield and points to a building about the size of an outhouse, its sign battered by the wind. Unnur mumbles that it probably says toilet. Viktor whips around and smacks her ear, hissing "smart-ass." Beneath her armor of disobedience, Unnur feels lost, with little sense of where she came from or who she is. Her life story is missing its first hundred pages, most of its central characters killed off in the first act. Without a parent to defend her, she is an easy target at school, and she barrels through bullying the way she barrels through wind and snow: head down, chest forward, telling herself she will soon arrive somewhere safe and dry.

Viktor bangs on the wooden door, and a hulking man opens it, smiling. An orange tabby cat as thick as Unnur's thighs winds around his ankles. The man introduces himself as Binni, the place as his bar, and the cat as Whiskey. Viktor elbows past him and stands in the middle of the room, sopping wet, spreading his feet wide until he looks like he has peed in his pants. The bar is floor-to-ceiling wood, evoking the Viking longhouses Unnur learned about in school but without the fire.

Viktor asks where the farmer is, "the American." Binni says old Elias couldn't make it down tonight but offers to take them up to the house. Sandra refuses instantly, so swiftly that Unnur cocks her head in surprise; she is unaccustomed to hearing her aunt put her foot down. Binni gestures to a pair of stacked stools, joking that someone might steal their seats, though the room is empty. Unnur's cheeks flame at the joke. Viktor sits without offering Sandra first choice. As his gut spills over his belt buckle, Unnur considers a plot to kill him, imagining doing it while he laughs ahead of the punch lines of Australian soap operas on his dumpster television, reading Icelandic subtitles because he knows no English. He is a half-wit. Maybe even a quarter.

The realization

Binni sets down two tar-black shots for the grown-ups and a Coke for Unnur. The scent of licorice stings her nose. With her back to Viktor, Unnur places her hands on her aunt's knees and studies the thin red lines inside Sandra's eyes. Sandra smells like sweat and syrup and seems like she might cry. She wrings her hands, cracks her knuckles, refuses to return Unnur's gaze. And in that moment Unnur starts to understand why they are here: why Viktor asked about the farmer, why Binni seems to be expecting her. She grips Sandra's knees and begs, "Don't leave me." No one has said anything about leaving her. But sometimes you just know.

Viktor sighs into a chuckle and tells her this is how you grow up, through hard, back-bending work, and not to be a pansy about it. Unnur hates that he is bigger and stronger than her. She hates that she wants to fold like a limp flower and cry. Sandra rubs the skin on her neck until it turns red, looks out the window, and says they all did it, working on a farm, Viktor did it, she did it, the air is better out here, fresh. Unnur's mamma would have wanted it. Viktor is allergic to any mention of Unnur's mother. Unnur whispers "Please" in Sandra's ear and asks for soccer camp instead, or a job picking weeds and planting flowers. Viktor hefts himself to his feet and remarks that it's no wonder this shithole is named Dark Valley. One hand on the knob, he snaps his fingers at Sandra. Without words, without tears, without even running a hand over Unnur's head, Sandra stands and follows him to the door. They leave.

The vanishing jeep and the girl at the window

For a moment Unnur doesn't allow her legs to move. She is certain Sandra will turn around and tell her how sorry she is. But fear tingles in her fingertips. She counts silently to eight before ripping open the door and dashing outside. Mud slops onto her shirt. Viktor's jeep is facing the wrong way, driving the wrong way, barreling too quickly away, bobbing up and down the hilly path. Unnur screams, "STOP! WAIT!" She swallows spit and rainwater and keeps screaming, but the fog is so thick that in another minute the tires, then the roof, then the bright red taillights disappear.

Later, she will hardly remember Binni rushing out from the bar with her tackle box, empty except for a photograph of her mother, its edges worn away in the spots Unnur has rubbed. She will hardly remember Binni echoing her screams, wrapping his arms around her from behind, pinning her to the mud, telling her things are different out here and she can't go raging like a spirit spooked, disturbing the peace. She will hardly remember him telling her she is standing on uncertain ground, that the cursed water knows well the sound of children's voices, and that she should be careful. What she will remember, clear as day, is this: by the time her heart quits stammering, the jeep is long gone, and she is looking up at a window, and the window is looking back. There, on the other side of the pane, ghost-white, head backlit by faint sunlight, the sky setting her apart and anointing her to a world other than theirs, is a girl.

3. Dark Valley, 1990

Chapter: "3. Dark Valley, 1990"

After Aunt Sandra drives off, Unnur sits in the front seat of Binni's pickup truck, shivering in her wet clothes as he pats her soaking hair with a bar towel. Black birds swoop overhead. Binni says they would normally walk, but he doesn't want her catching cold on her first night. He gestures through the rain toward a small wooden building: the bar where she wiped out, "flat on your little behind." Unnur tries to make sense of it. She wonders about the little girl she saw earlier. Was the girl inside the bar the whole time? This place already seems to defy logic and direction.

She scans the valley, searching for clean lines on which to impose an invisible atlas, trying to figure out which way Viktor's jeep drove, which direction she should run. The valley is dark, like its name. At the mouth of it, a black volcanic-sand beach stretches between two dwarf mountain ranges, with an endless ocean beyond. Freeform basalt rocks rise from the water like three fingers on the far right. On the far left, a gaping cave opens with tight hexagonal columns of cooled basalt arranged in a menacing arc, a portal into darker darkness. Scatterplotted across the rolling hills are three dilapidated buildings, decaying concrete boxes with no lights or signs of life. Binni's bar sits level with the sea. A pebbled path forks: bear right toward a church with boarded windows and an overgrown cemetery full of weeds and invasive purple lupine; bear left toward a house. The church and the house stand at nearly the same height on opposite sides of the valley, as if in a duel. Together with Binni's bar, they form a lopsided trinity.

Binni bears left toward the house, trying to make conversation. Anyone would have slipped in this mud, he says. Not true, she thinks. Only somebody like me. He asks if she saw something back there. She shakes her head. "Good. That's real good." He warns that if people start claiming they saw something in one of these boarded-up buildings, the wind carries rumors along the whole coastline: "Ghost in the Dark Valley! Another hex on the hills." His knuckles go white on the wheel. If she were on speaking terms with the world, she might ask him to elaborate. But her plan is to stay silent until Sandra elbows Viktor in the nuts, turns the jeep around, and comes back for her.

The truck lurches up and down small hills in clips and starts. A few wayward sheep scuttle by, but the valley mostly seems stripped of life. The steep mountains lean inward as if penning her in, and she struggles to draw a good breath. She is used to horizon in all directions, 360 degrees of possibility. Here she feels infinitesimal, claustrophobic, trapped in the grave of the valley. She has an urge to bolt to the beach for air. Two minutes at a sprint. It is her only solace so far.

They pull up to the lone house: an army-green box with white trim, no shutters, a bloodred roof. A small sign reads LITLU-HOLAR. Little Hills. She whispers the name and feels it pinball behind her teeth. There are no animals, no tractors, no hay. She wonders why, in the most sunken pit of her stomach, she feels she has been here before.

Elias and the Kitchen

Unnur follows Binni onto the porch. The door stands propped open, the wooden stairs worn in the middle. A man steps forward, his face deeply carved with muscles, tendons, angles. If Binni is bright and round, this man is dark and sharp: nails caulked with dirt, knuckles raw and blistered. The sight of him sends a shiver through her. From inside the house, the scent of flowers snakes out, and a memory clobbers her. Suddenly she is shin-deep in dirt in a garden hundreds of miles away, helping Sandra dig holes. Sandra is saying that Unnur's mother, Stella, could grow anything, that people figured huldufolk lived in their yard because of her tomatoes. As quickly as it arrives, the memory fades.

In the darkness of the doorway, she sees the small girl again, pearlescent as the moon. Unnur draws in a quick breath. Elias shifts, blocking the girl from view. By the time Unnur steps inside, the girl has vanished.

"Coffee," Elias says. It doesn't sound like a question, so she doesn't give an answer. She is only eleven. He leads her through the house to an L-shaped kitchen, dim despite all the windows. The shelves should hold photos, but instead they hold pressed wildflowers in frames, the occasional whale tusk, bleached sheep skulls. The house reminds her of a wooden boat: dank, airless, oak everywhere. "Sit," he says, gesturing to a small rectangular table flush against the wall. She sits in one of the three cramped chairs. "Eat." He drops a short stack of paper-thin pancakes on a floral-rimmed plate in front of her. She wonders if his Icelandic is so basic that he can only speak in one-word commands.

Binni wanders in, pours himself a steaming mug of coffee, and lodges a sugar cube between his front teeth. He smiles meekly into the uncomfortable silence and sips.

It occurs to Unnur that these men could crush her with a hand tied behind their backs, pin her to the floor with three fingers. Whatever they wanted to do to her, they could. No one would hear. No one would see, except the little girl, wherever she is, whatever she is. Tears spring to Unnur's eyes again, so she pinches them shut. Sandra hasn't told Viktor to turn the jeep around. They are probably halfway back to Keflavik by now. Unnur makes a silent plea: let me open my eyes and see Sandra sitting on an upside-down laundry basket, let me hear her say, "You're okay, Unnur. You're safe."

Instead, Elias pulls a chair out from the table with a screech and sits. The fabric of their sweaters brushes. He stabs his fork into a pancake and slathers it with whipped cream and runny red jam that smears on the table. He weaves a butter knife between his fingers like a baton and points the tip of the blade at her.

"Unnur, huh. Unnur what?"

She swallows. "Unnur Stelludottir." Last names aren't supposed to be derived from the mother. She should be the daughter of whomever her father was. Elias hums, places the knife on the table between them, and asks her age. "Eleven." "Enunciate." "E-lev-en," she says slowly, not meeting his eyes.

He asks when she last raked a field, whether she knows anything about baling hay, ever built a fence. He jabs a finger at her biceps, her scrawny little rod of an arm that can barely press into a single push-up. Her gaze falls to her lap. She wants Sandra to burst through the door and swoop her into her arms. But equally, she doesn't want Elias to kick her out. Where would she go? Where would she sleep? What would it say if this farm becomes the latest in a long line of places where she isn't welcome? She can't fight the tears any longer. She lets them stream down her face.

"Hey, hey," Elias says, his voice suddenly softer. "I'm just giving you a hard time. No crying at the kitchen table, that's a rule." "I break it at least once a week," Binni jokes. Elias hovers an awkward hand above her shoulder, then finally grips her upper arm. Instantly the tears stop. Her breathing steadies. "Fence comes from the word defense," he says, picking up where he left off. He grabs another pancake and plops a spoonful of whipped cream in its center.

Through the window above the sink, the sun flares its last flickers of light: orange and yellow and bright white, an explosion, a brief respite from the rain. Maybe this is the only glimpse the Dark Valley ever gets of the sun, the split second before it sets.

The Bright Side

"Look at the bright side," Binni says. On instinct, Unnur huffs. Bright side? She has been abandoned to a handful of strangers in the actual middle of nowhere. But she follows his thick pointed finger. On the other side of a dwarf mountain, a scatterplot of lights glows. Signs of life grow in number and density. Small specks of light jitter and swarm like fireflies, forming a small town. The dark side of the valley is indeed dark. The other side glows bright with life.

Binni clears his throat and explains, sounding like a nature documentary: since the volcanic eruption that rifted this valley in two, the bright side and the dark side have been like warring siblings. With its lack of light and slim prospects beyond failed farming, the dark side never stood a chance. A new fish factory opened in the Bright Valley, and farmers flooded there for work. "Before you showed up, the door to the Dark Valley opened only out. One farmer at a time folded his cards and left." That explains the desolation.

Unnur

4. Reykjavík, 2018

Unna finds a note waiting for her on the kitchen counter—Hee, Unna. Remember me? —smoothing the paper flat even as her pulse quickens. The envelope is still full, and when she reaches inside, her fingers meet the sticky surface of a Polaroid. Then another. About a dozen in all. She laughs nervously, trying to convince herself this is nothing—just pictures, not a death sentence, not a court summons. Then she lifts the first one and stops breathing.

The photograph shows muted greens and blues, billows of fog, frog-green hills swelling in the distance. Two girls stand with their backs to the camera, both wearing faded jeans and cream-colored lopapeysa sweaters with navy yokes. Their heads tilt toward each other in a gesture so intimate, so familiar, Unna can almost hear their whispers and feel the cold wind on their breath. She is staring at herself at twelve years old. She is staring at her friend Freyja.

She cannot place the moment. It could have been the night Freyja disappeared—but it could have been any night. The picture makes no sense to her, because she has no memory of anyone taking it. When she and Freyja played, they were always alone, roaming the crests and troughs of the Dark Valley. No other children lived there, and the adults left them to their own devices.

The rest of the stack is more of the same: nature, mist, Unna, Freyja. The camera always seems slightly elevated, watching from above or from a distance. Unna tries to arrange the images into a timeline, to anchor them to what she knows. She and Freyja knew each other for just about a year before Freyja went missing. At the time, most people in Iceland had never heard of the Dark Valley—an unofficial name locals gave the land. But within days of Freyja's disappearance, the place was swarming with detectives, dogs, search and rescue crews, the coast guard, volunteers. When they failed to find her on land and sea, they searched for someone to blame.

After Freyja's father Elias reported her missing and spent the next week anesthetized by hard liquor, Unna was questioned. For hours, for days, for weeks. First at a whisper, then at a shout. Beer-bloated men convinced she knew something, convinced she wasn't saying it. She told them the same thing more times than she could count: a full moon and a dented car. The moon on that night was colossal, close enough to touch, bright enough to blind her. And past the tufts of tall brown grass marking the beach from the road, there sat an idled car. Dented on the passenger side by the headlight. Hood facing the boarded-up church. The car was red, she said. When they asked what kind of red, she turned her hands to face them—bloody cuticles. This kind.

She was their only witness, and they did not agree with what she claimed to have seen. The moon wasn't full, for starters. No one had seen a bloodred dented car where she'd placed it. So they told her to start over, try again. The more she spoke, the more they reacted; the more they reacted, the more she panicked; the more she panicked, the deeper she sank into the void of her memory. Not forgotten—excised, as though cut out with a scalpel, leaving an empty drawer where the memory should have been. By the second week of the investigation, she stopped speaking altogether. Six months later, half a world away, in a different language, she began to speak again. By then she no longer knew anything about that night with certainty—except how it began. Volcanic rage too big for her body. Shattered ceramic. Tears. Threats. Screams.

The final photo in the stack is turned upside down, out of sync with the rest. She assumes it's like the others—old, all but impossible. When she turns it over, Lilja is staring back at her. Her daughter wears a light-brown dress with tiny dark-brown flowers, the one Unna splurged on last Christmas. Her eyes are warm, cast slightly up, as though the person taking the photo is someone she knows.

Unna bolts into the living room, bracing for the worst. Lilja will be gone. Someone will have stolen her from underneath her. But Lilja is there, turning to face her with peanut butter at the corners of her mouth. "Mamma, what's wrong?" She points out that Unna is doing that thing—the look she gets, as Lilja once described it, like she's watching a scary movie no one else can see. Unna kisses the top of her head, smells her smell. "Everything is fine, baby. I love you so much." Lilja shrugs it off and returns to her show. Unna lingers, forcing her legs to move, and tells her daughter she'll be in the kitchen if she needs her. Lilja's eyes have already glazed over.

Back in the kitchen, Unna lays the photos in a line on the counter and scrutinizes the handwriting on the envelope. Maybe the script will reveal something. Maybe the person who wrote her name has nothing to do with what was inside—and maybe that's deliberately so, like how she always asks a coworker to write the labels for Lilja's Christmas presents from the yule lads, the jólasveinar, so her daughter can stay a child, can keep believing in magic, can keep needing her.

The handwriting is not Freyja's. It could not be, because Freyja is—must be—dead. Unna knows this. Everyone knows this. But deep down, she is less certain. She left the valley. She left her childhood in a heap on that beach, discarded like a coat. She left behind any faith that Sandra would come to save her—Sandra, who when offered the chance to take her back, declined. Unna left Iceland, left the Icelandic language. But she never abandoned her hope. At airports, in long grocery lines, behind moss-green hills, in early morning mist, in dreams: always, she looked for Freyja.

She remembers the early weeks with Noi, when they were shiny and unprecedented to each other. Noi asked who Freyja was, because Unna kept saying her name in her sleep. Unna pretended to be surprised, pretended to rack her brain, then dismissed it: "I used to have a friend named Freyja, but that was so long ago. Another lifetime."

Alone in her kitchen now, dusk haunting the windows, the inscrutable photographs taunting her eyes, Unna lets her mind dart through the land of the impossible. Freyja is alive. Freyja somehow knew these photos were being taken. Freyja chose now—right now—to reemerge and send a message. But what message is there to send to a woman, a stranger now, who was once your best friend? What is there to say to the person who, long ago, may have tried to kill you?