Page 12 of A Curse for the Homesick

SPAR

2014

When I invited my mum to Kitty’s and my going-away party, Linnea started to cry because she thought that was just so beautiful. “Love heals everything,” she said, wiping her face with the sleeves of her cardigan. Linnea had been crying with increasing frequency throughout the spring and summer. “I think it’s my new birth control,” she’d say, and Kitty would say, “No, it’s because you’re going to miss me.”

We had the party at the Sjobergs’ house on account of the Sjobergs having more money than anyone else in Stenland and a home that reflected this fact. It was designed as if on purpose to let out as much heat as possible. The ceilings were so high, the cleaner had to use a ladder to dust off the cobwebs. When Kitty’s dad was home, he turned up the heaters until you had to strip down to your T-shirt. And all along the west side of the house, there were no walls, just windows, providing an obstructed view of the ocean in all her grumpy September glory.

The party didn’t technically start until six, but everyone had been over at the Sjobergs’ getting ready for hours. Linnea and Kitty were blowing up balloons in the living room. Their mothers had run to the shops to buy drinks. Outside, all the men were doing whatever it was men deemed acceptable to help prepare for a party, which seemed to mostly include grilling things and making a fire in the fire pit. When I looked out the window, Soren was the one making the fire; Henrik and my dad were grilling; Mr. Sjoberg seemed to be “supervising,” by which I mean drinking a beer and talking loudly.

Ostensibly, I was helping my mother cook. Really, I just leaned against the refrigerator and occasionally found ingredients for her. It had been Soren’s suggestion to invite her, though she hadn’t believed this when I’d told her. The question of how much Soren resented her remained unresolved; I knew I should have asked, but the longer I waited, the harder it became. Sometimes I felt as if I knew Soren completely, but other times I wondered if I only knew him well in comparison to everyone else. He never told me how he felt about my mum or how he felt that I was her daughter.

My mum, for her part, brimmed with frantic energy. She had decided the party would be a disaster if it didn’t have pastelillos de guayaba, which were some sort of fried guava pastry she’d eaten on a recent trip to Puerto Rico. Her hair had come out of its bun and was starting to look disheveled. Every few minutes, she muttered a curse at her pastry dough.

“You know,” I said, “you could serve us white bread and tell us it was a recipe from New Zealand.”

“What’s your point?” she said.

“That this is less about the pastries and more about proving you’ve been outside the country.”

She glared at her bowl. “You’ll understand soon enough.”

Soren came into the kitchen to get a lighter for the fire pit at one point, and my mum, in a voice far too loud for normal conversation, said, “Oh! Soren! Hello!”

As far as I knew, it was the first time they had spoken since Soren’s parents had died.

He touched the small of my back like a question, and I wrapped an arm around his waist, trying to silently communicate my support.

“Hi, Ms. Eriksson.”

“Alice! Please.”

Soren nodded once. His face was formal and blank, the way he looked when we ran into Father Andersson, of whom we were all terrified. I wondered what my mum saw when she looked at him and if she saw the same person I did—his handsomeness, his adultness, how whole he was despite everything that had happened.

“Tess mentioned you read that book I sent?”

That book—which I never bothered opening but which Soren found on my bedside table—had some tragic title like In the Wake of Their Passing. It was about this man and this woman who married a pair of fraternal twins only to realize they loved each other more than the people they’d married. They almost ran away together, but instead they decided to stay in their mediocre marriages and raise their children and continue with their careers. And then, in the epilogue, their respective spouses had conveniently died and their children were all grown-up, so they ran away and fucked on a train.

“I liked it very much,” Soren said.

“No, he didn’t,” I said. “He called it saccharine.”

Soren looked pained.

My mum laughed. “Should’ve known better than to give a boy a love story. I’ll find something with more trench warfare next time.”

He shot me a pleading look.

“He doesn’t sit around reading war books either, Mum,” I said, feeling defensive.

She raised a spoon in my direction. “That book was excellent. It was long-listed for the National Book Award.”

“The prose was great,” Soren said.

“Saccharine,” my mother said, shaking her head.

He shifted his weight. This was the usual moment at which he’d leave a conversation, considering himself no longer an integral part, but talking about books seemed to make his feet heavier, to make him that little bit more reluctant to walk away. “Not saccharine,” he said. “I just didn’t like that we were supposed to think it was a happy ending, them being together, when they’d forced themselves to be apart for thirty years.”

“But they ended up together.”

“I’d rather have the middle than the ending,” Soren said.

My mother looked up at him—really looked at him, squinting slightly, and he held her gaze, hands in his pockets, rocking back on his heels.

“Huh,” she said.

Henrik called Soren’s name from outside, and he pressed a quick kiss against my temple before retreating again. I wondered if my mum was also listening to his footsteps, waiting.

“You want to say something about him,” I told her.

“I’m thinking,” she said.

“About?”

“He’s not who I would’ve expected you to date in high school.”

“Why not?” I asked.

She gestured at the air. “He’s so…solemn. That’s not the right word. He’s just intense. You two are intense. It all strikes me as a bit serious for a high school relationship. What are you going to do when you leave?”

“We haven’t talked about it.”

My mum turned and stared at me. She set down her spoon for full effect. “You fly tomorrow.”

I crossed my arms. Behind me, the refrigerator hummed loudly.

“Are you breaking up? Doing long distance?”

I shrugged.

“Don’t you care ?” she asked.

Did I care. I was pleased she’d asked, pleased I had successfully convinced her I was the kind of chill and laissez-faire type of girlfriend who might not.

Since my acceptance to Stanford, I’d begun to imagine the holes in my conversations with Soren as a kind of currency. Every time I repressed the urge to ask him if we had a future, I felt like I’d won something. Each day closer we crept to my departure, I waited for him to ask me to stay, and he didn’t. I waited for him to say he’d call me every night, and he didn’t. I waited for him to buy a plane ticket to visit me over Christmas, and he didn’t. It was an arms race of weaponized silence, neither of us willing to admit we had more to lose even as we hurtled toward our mutually assured destruction.

Did I care.

* * *

Somewhere upward of a hundred people came to the party, including my dad’s somewhat-serious girlfriend, Anna (from the hospital). I never saw her and my mum standing in the same room, which was probably strategic on one or both of their parts.

Hedda gave me a leather passport case. The Sjobergs had gotten me a Longchamp duffel bag that probably did not pair with the flannel shirt I had on over my dress. From Linnea, I got a massive collage of photos of the three of us from infancy to present. Perhaps my most surprising gift was from Lukas, who handed me a newspaper-wrapped book of sudokus. Inside the cover, he’d written To keep you busy on the plane ride. I hope I can come visit you in California. When he gave it to me, he blushed to the tips of his ears.

After we ate, there were toasts, and my dad raised his beer to my future mechanical engineering degree and a lifetime designing cars he hoped to someday fix. Soren sat with his arm over my shoulder, and I pressed my face into his chest so no one saw me cry.

Once almost everyone had gone, Soren took my hand and tilted his head questioningly toward the door. My mum was staying with the Sjobergs, and my dad had rather conspicuously announced he was going to Anna’s house and would I be okay alone? When I said goodbye and thank-you to everyone who was left, Linnea started crying again, even though she was going to the airport with Kitty and me in the morning.

Soren and I stepped into the misty night and the dribbles of conversation were swallowed up behind us. I leaned against his shoulder as we walked. With the hand that wasn’t holding mine, he reached across his chest to stroke the ends of my hair.

When we got back to my empty house, I flipped on the kitchen light. Soren held me from behind, arms wrapped around me, chin against my shoulder.

“I got you something,” he said.

“Something good?”

He reached into his pocket—I felt him doing it—and pulled out a small black box. When he held it in front of me, I felt like the floor was dropping out, like I’d stumbled out of the set for my own film and into an entirely different one.

“Open it,” he said.

“No.”

He laughed into my hair. “What do you mean, no?”

“That’s a ring box.”

“It’s just a box.”

“Why are you giving me a ring?”

“Christ, Tess.” He flicked it open, and inside I saw that it was not in fact a ring but a necklace with a fine silver chain. The pendant at the end was an intricate knot with a crystal in the middle, mostly clear with veins like frost around the edges. It wasn’t a large necklace, but it wasn’t delicate either, and I liked it the second I saw it. “Can I put it on you?”

I nodded. He brushed my hair out of the way and fastened it behind my neck. The pendant hung at my breastbone.

“It’s spar,” he said. “The stone. There’s a theory that sailors used to use it to find the sun when it was cloudy. They called it sunstone.” He paused. “I had a romantic speech planned here, but you can figure out the tortured metaphor for yourself.”

I turned to look at him, touching the pendant with one hand. “Thank you.”

“Do you like it?”

“A lot.”

“It was my mum’s.”

A flutter of panic. “You can’t give me your mum’s necklace.”

“Why not?”

“It’s too important.”

He pressed his lips together. “Calm down. It’s not like I gave you an engagement ring.”

“You gave me an engagement-ring box.”

“I didn’t think about it, okay? It was just the box the necklace was sitting in. I’m sorry you thought I was proposing .”

“We’re nineteen,” I said.

He lifted his chin, staring at the ceiling in this god give me strength sort of way, and it struck me as the most patronizing thing anyone had ever done. “Thank you. I had forgotten.”

I took off the necklace and held it out for him to take.

His hands stayed at his sides. “What are you doing?” he said tiredly.

“Take it. I don’t want it.”

“You said you liked it.”

“That was before I knew it was your mum’s.”

He just shook his head at me, at the necklace, at the whole thing.

I set it on the kitchen counter and crossed my arms. “I don’t even know what this is supposed to be,” I said. “Is it supposed to remind me of you? Am I supposed to wear it to scare off other men? Or is this, like, some sort of goodbye, thanks-for-the-sex-while-it-lasted gift—”

His expression slid from horror to betrayal to anger in the span of a breath. I watched it like I was watching myself knock a glass of the edge of a table. He picked up the necklace and shoved it into his pocket.

“Why did you even date me if you thought that’s who I was?” he said.

“Did?” I asked.

Time slowed down. He hunched his shoulders. A pressure was building behind my eyes, and I told myself that if I started to cry I would never forgive myself. We had never said it, that we were in love, except when we teased each other about being in love since age twelve, and that never quite felt like it counted.

“I kept waiting for you to say something,” Soren told me.

“You could’ve said something.”

“You’re the one who’s leaving,” he said.

My back straightened of its own accord. “You’re not allowed to be angry at me for leaving. For wanting…more than this.”

“Who said I was angry at you?”

“You just want me to stay here and marry you and have kids and—and never see what the rest of the world is like or see what I could be or…” I was beginning to shake, my hands clenching into fists and my nails digging into my palms. “You think I should, what, turn down Stanford? Stay here and do Stennish studies?”

“Don’t say it like that. I’m doing Stennish studies.”

That made me pause. “You never said you were taking university classes.”

I wasn’t sure he’d ever looked at me as unkindly as he looked at me then.

“Maybe you should’ve asked,” he said.

I wrapped my arms around myself. He kept standing there like he was waiting for something, but we’d reached a dead end in the maze and I didn’t see where else we could go.

“Were you always planning on breaking up with me tonight?” I said.

I wanted him to say We’re not breaking up, Tess.

“No,” he said.

“But,” I said.

“Do you ever see yourself coming back here?” he said. “If we kept dating and you graduated and it was four years from now. Do you think—” His voice cracked, and for a second, just a second, I thought there was another turn in the maze after all, another path, another road to take that was not this. “Do you think there’s even a chance you would consider living here again?”

I thought of Delia screaming.

I thought of the smell of Thomas’s sweatshirt.

I thought of the uncountable number of times I had been told that there was no escaping it, not for the three of us, not for Linnea and Kitty and me, not if we stayed on this island.

“No,” I said.

Soren exhaled. Nodded once. He turned and made it all the way to the door, and as he went, I felt like there was a rubber band stretching between my heart and his, just waiting to snap. At the door, he paused. Ran his hand through his hair.

He looked back at me over his shoulder and said, “I don’t understand how you could’ve loved me when it seems like I’m everything you hate.”

I couldn’t look at him. “I never said I loved you.”

“No,” he said. “I guess you never did.”