Page 10 of A Curse for the Homesick

TO LEAVE A PLACE

2013

I woke with a sense of complete wrongness.

My eyes opened. Thin daylight was beginning to stream through the curtains, which meant it must’ve been nine or ten in the morning. I saw the texture of the walls, which had been obscured in night: pale stone etched with knots, spirals, and ravens. I was lying on a sheepskin rug, cold prickling through from the floor. My face was turned toward the embers of a fire. Soren’s chest was pressed to my back, his jacket bundled under our heads like a pillow. We were dressed like we’d meant to go back to the party; of course we had. We fell asleep. We fell asleep.

A scream.

That was what had woken me up.

Someone screamed, and I shut my eyes so hard I saw red dots.

I felt Soren shifting behind me, still asleep or just sleepy as he tried to draw me closer to his chest. I ripped myself away from him. He said my name or something like it, but I’d already started stumbling toward the door.

It happened, of course. People fell asleep together and when they woke up and looked at each other, one of them was a skeld and one of them was stone. And when it happened, I had always thought: How could anyone be so stupid? How could anyone be so careless?

I touched my face, searching for a mark. I felt nothing, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t there. The scream came again, and this time, I could tell where it was coming from: through the wall, one room over. I reached blindly for the doorknob. Once through, I slammed the door shut again behind me.

Just for a second, I opened my eyes. Long enough to see my bare feet on the stone floor, to see the shadows moving as a door creaked open down the hall and a figure emerged. Delia, moving toward the stairs.

I ran after her. My eyes were open, closed, open again. She must’ve heard my footsteps because she started to turn, and I pressed my eyes shut so hard it hurt. They were gritty with dried makeup, and I couldn’t feel my hands or feet, and my mouth tasted like gin and stomach acid.

I slammed into Delia. We both went down, and I kept thinking Eyes shut, eyes shut , and I kept them that way even as my body crashed into the floor, even as the pain ricocheted through my shoulder and made my hands fly open. My lungs searched for air that wasn’t there. The blackness was complete. Eyes shut, eyes shut.

“Thomas,” Delia was saying. “Thomas, he was… He’s not…”

She kept trying to writhe out of my grasp, but I kept my arms around her.

“Stop it,” I said. “Delia. Delia!”

Eyes shut. Delia’s hair was curled against my face. I could feel her body shudder every time she gasped for breath. Eyes shut.

“Thomas was right there. He was just…” With every word, her voice got louder, shriller.

“Stop moving!”

Delia didn’t. She was starting to scratch my arms, hyperventilating now. I tried to grab at her face and felt wetness on her cheeks, tears or the sweat of panic. She kept saying Thomas’s name. Could she hear me? Did she know I was there at all? I thought I heard footsteps, and I called out some warning; what I said, I didn’t know.

My phone dug into my rib cage. It was in the pocket of my jacket, which had ridden up and left my stomach bare against the stone. I did the only thing I could think of; I covered Delia’s eyes with my hand, and then I dared to open my own. Just long enough to take the phone from my pocket, find my mother’s contact, and touch her name.

Delia tried to break away again. Before she could manage it, my mother answered.

“Hello? Tess? Is everything okay?” Her voice was staticky and distant. I shut my eyes again and shoved the phone at Delia’s face.

“Tess?”

Delia was going heavy and still in my arms.

“Tess…”

Finally, Delia whispered: “Something’s wrong.”

I laid my head against the ground.

“Okay, honey, it’s okay. Who is this? Is this Linnea?”

“It’s Delia Haugen.”

“Delia? This is Alice. It’s Tess’s mom, honey. I know you’re scared right now, but you’re going to be okay. Are you breathing? I want you to breathe for me.”

I listened distantly as my mother asked Delia where she was, then instructed her to stand up and walk very carefully to the fourth floor of the tower; she could wait there. She told Delia to keep her head down. To keep her eyes closed if she could. She knew the way up the stairs, didn’t she? Of course she did. There’s a good girl.

I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to follow Delia. I didn’t. Just let her leave. That was the point I realized I was crying. My face was sticky with tears and dust. Chunks of my hair clung to my temples. I managed to raise myself onto my hands and knees, and only then did I open my eyes again, not looking in front of me but at the splay of my fingers across the stone. My fingers were lavender with cold. Across my arms, blood welled in long, nail-shaped scratches.

As I crawled to the bedroom where Delia had spent the night, my stomach tensed and flexed like it wanted me to vomit. I kept hearing my mum’s voice echoing in my ears, as if she’d been talking to me: Are you breathing? I want you to breathe for me.

It was just like the room where Soren and I had slept. A fire dying in the hearth; symbols etched on the walls. Thomas’s feet were pointed toward the door, so at first all I could see were the bottoms of his shoes. Black runners, the tread caked with sand, like he’d been out on the beach before this. I kept crawling, and I saw his jeans and then his sweatshirt—oh, god, he was wearing a swim-team sweatshirt—and then his face.

One of his hands was pillowed under his ear. His wavy hair was flopping to the side of his head in this boyish sort of way. I had always loved the expression he wore when he finished a set in the pool behind me. He’d never been annoyed to be outpaced by a girl. He’d touch the wall and lift his head out of the water and laugh; his lips would curl in this playful little smile, and he’d say something like, I don’t know what I’d do if I couldn’t coast along on your feet, Tess.

That was the smile. The one frozen on his face. That playful little smile, now immortalized in smooth, gray stone.

I touched his cheekbones. I was crying now, really crying. He still looked so alive; his clothes weren’t even cold yet. I realized I was lying in the divot of rug where Delia must’ve slept. They’d slept facing each other. They’d woken up facing each other. Thomas’s eyes were sleepy and happy because it all must’ve happened too quickly for him to realize he was dead.

“Tess?” Soren said from the door.

I clenched my eyes shut. More tears slid down my cheeks and into the sheepskin. I could hear Soren stepping carefully toward me, but I just buried my face against Thomas, into the soft swim-team sweatshirt stretched across an unbreathing chest.

“Tess,” Soren whispered, and he was right behind me now, leaning over me; I could tell from the shadows behind my eyelids.

“Go away.”

He was smoothing my hair out of my face, and I tried to wrench away from him, tried to bury myself in Thomas’s unmoving embrace.

“You don’t have it,” Soren said. “There’s no mark.”

I didn’t believe him. How would he know? He had not spent every morning of his life staring at his own reflection, wondering at every smudge and shadow and spot. He had not been trained to examine his face for a monstrosity that felt like a promise. When wind whispered through the tower as we slept, some fickle god of the island looking for girls to ruin, it did not go looking for him.

From the time we were born, we knew the rules. Spend the night with someone if you must, but wake up alone. Always wake up alone. Look at your reflection before you let anyone else see you because if you don’t, the first person to gaze into your eyes may pay a price that can’t ever be repaid.

“You’re not a skeld, Tess,” Soren said. He was still running his hand through my hair. Touching my forehead where I was sure there were three dark lines he was too stupid to see.

I grabbed his wrist and flung it away from me. Maybe I swore at him. My words were muddled in my own ears, like I was hearing someone else say them from a distance.

I had never been so happy to hear him leave. Footsteps growing quieter on the stone, and I started to sob. Full-body, wracking sobs, holding my face against the soft darkness of Thomas’s sweatshirt. It smelled like chlorine and sex. Every few minutes, I would remember that Delia had done this and not me. I had not killed him, but I could’ve. I did not this time, but there would always be another skeld season.

In the space between remembering, I would feel a guilt like being buried alive. Here it was, the crescendo of panic: Why, why , why had I not run away from this place when I’d had the chance? If it was Delia and not me, Thomas and not Soren, it was just luck. Soren could be dead right now, and it would be my fault.

* * *

I was in my bedroom with my comforter pulled over my face when my dad brought my phone back. Delia’s father had delivered it, apparently. He was going to be one of the three keepers. Of course he was. Delia, Delia’s mother, Delia’s grandmother: those were the three skelds this time.

I hadn’t left Thomas’s body until Kitty and Linnea had found me. When they’d told me I wasn’t marked, I’d believed them where I hadn’t believed Soren, but there’d still been a part of me that was afraid to look anyone in the eye until I’d made it home and stared at myself in my mirror. I was bruised and scratched and matted and altogether torn apart by the island in every way except for my forehead, which was bare and unmarked.

My dad sat on the end of my bed. “I don’t think she’ll have to do any jail time, if that makes you feel better.”

I kept my comforter over my head. “Why would that make me feel better?”

“Jon, from the station, he thinks they’ll rule it criminal negligence. But she’s still seventeen. Community service, maybe, or a fine.”

There was a hierarchy of badness when it came to skeld killings. Stories like Matilda’s, about skelds who left the keep, who turned people to stone on purpose, those were the very worst, but they were rare. Second were stories like my mum’s, skelds who were too careless to check themselves for a mark before wandering out in public. Then you had cases like Delia’s—cases where women accidentally fell asleep with a loved one—and those usually got treated with some degree of mercy, maybe because it was so obviously accidental, so obviously horrible. And then there were keeper deaths. Keepers were more likely to die than anyone else. It just sort of happened, never on purpose, and everyone treated the keeper like a hero afterward.

“Would you look at me?” my dad said.

I yanked down the comforter. When he met my eyes, he flinched. Just for a second, but it was there.

“You called your mum,” he said.

I shrugged, like I could unseat the weight on my shoulders.

“That was a good idea. It sounds like she helped Delia keep everyone safe. It sounds like you helped keep everyone safe. It could’ve been much worse today, for Delia and everyone in the keep.”

I didn’t want to be told how much worse it could’ve been. My hands were numb, like they were still pressing against the cold stone of Thomas’s face.

“Do you hate Mum?” I asked.

“Of course not.”

“No, really. Because I do sometimes.”

“I don’t hate your mum,” he said. “I resent her for being careless, but what do I know? I’ve never been a woman in Stenland.” A pause. “Besides. I’m the one who convinced her to stay.”

“You did?”

“She wanted to move after high school. Travel, see the world. I didn’t care about any of that. So maybe you should hate me sometimes too.”

“Why did you want to stay, though?” I asked.

My dad set my phone on the bed. He looked tired and scruffy. There was a grease stain on his shirt. “It’s not easy to leave a place.”

“You could’ve gotten a job somewhere else. They have cars other places. More of them, actually.”

“But then a job would’ve been all I had. No family, no friends. No coffee from Hedda’s. No darts at the pub. I’m—you know I’m no good with words. Not like you. I don’t know how to explain. I never wanted to leave because it never occurred to me I could. It’s like asking me why I never bought a rocket ship to Mars.”

“You could’ve left, though. Mum did eventually. There are ways.”

He looked down at his lap. “You aren’t like me, Tess. You think the school is paying your friend Henrik to take SAT courses?”

“Henrik’s not stupid,” I said quickly, and my dad shook his head.

“I didn’t say he was. I just mean… We pick people, you know? The island picks people, like you and Kitty, who we just know are going to do great things. Bigger things than I was ever going to do. Your mum too, she’s like that. We all get to live through her, off being a writer, doing things the rest of us don’t even bother dreaming of.”

My dad stood up. His eyes were still downcast. It made me feel awful, like I’d done this to him, made him feel ashamed or like he wasn’t good enough. I wanted to tell him that it wasn’t true at all, but I couldn’t find a way to say it. I didn’t know when he’d decided I was good with words. “I’m going to make soup for dinner. Let me know if you want any.”

I sat there for a minute, staring at the poster on my far wall, the one Kitty had given me. I don’t have anything nice to say. I looked at my bookshelf with its collection of fantasy books about places with curses worse than ours and my ribbons for swimming faster than everyone else. When I picked up my phone, I saw I had a missed call from Soren and another from my mum. An email too, and I wondered if my dad had seen the preview before he’d brought my phone back in here. You didn’t need to open it to know what it was about. It was from the coach at the University of Maine. The preview said: Hi, Tess. I’ve got some bad news…

My phone only had three percent left. I plugged it into the charger by my bed and made the call.

After a few rings, the voice on the other end said, “Tess? Are you doing okay?”

I stared at the ribbons, and then I shut my eyes. “Can you help me?”

“What’s wrong?”

“I’m not going to get a swimming scholarship, and I don’t know how else I’m supposed to afford college, and I have to get off this island.”

There was a pause. I heard the sound of a computer turning on. Keys tapping.

“Okay,” my mum said. “Let’s see what we can do.”