Impossible to move. Impossible to flee. The heat of the hot wind melted the snow around him in a ragged half circle. Farther up the little valley it remained winter, but a warmer season started here. The nearby stones, once lost under a layer of snow, now lay exposed.
Apollo lifted the serving lid again, like a shield, and now he found a stick partially upright on the ground. This was what had snagged the serving tray. A piece of a tree branch maybe, as close as he could find to a weapon. He pulled it up from the stones and held it out, as high as his makeshift shield.
“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.