Page 13 of A Curse for the Homesick

THE REHEARSAL

2022

While most of the room drank, the wedding party practiced walking up and down an imaginary aisle. I was paired with Magnus Invers, who was, apparently, Henrik’s cousin; I’d forgotten that. Because we were at the back, Magnus and I were in charge of sweeping heather brooms down the aisle, which was tradition but made me feel like an old witch. Kitty was paired with Henrik’s older brother, who kept having to dash off to help his wife with their kids, a one-year-old son and a three-year-old daughter who were experiencing simultaneous meltdowns. I did not understand why so many people had to be here if they weren’t even part of the rehearsal. I did not understand why they looked so amused, watching us as they drank their wine. Soren and Saffi practiced standing right behind Linnea and Henrik, and if you held up your bouquet to blot out the center two figures, it looked like they were the ones getting married.

Once we were done learning how to walk and stand, the seven of us—the wedding party, sans Henrik’s brother, who was still trying to sort out his toddler—were seated at a table at the head of the room, over by the big windows. There were handwritten cards with our names on them. I was placed between Kitty and Magnus. Soren was seated directly opposite me, almost as if whoever had created the seating arrangement had wanted to put as much distance between the two of us as possible. Consequently, he was constantly in my line of sight.

Around the same time the soup arrived, Henrik’s father came over from the parents’ table to say hello. He spouted a series of logistical details that entered my left ear and puddled out my right. Then he clapped a hand on Soren’s shoulder and said, “See if Father Andersson’s schedule is free for the best man and the maid of honor after, eh?”

“Dad,” Henrik said, and I took a lingering sip of wine.

Saffi laughed. Soren did not.

When Henrik’s dad left, Magnus asked me if it was true I was building cars now.

“Not whole cars,” I said. “Just one sensor, actually.”

“I feel like I’m back at the nerd table in high school,” Magnus said, leaning over the table to bump Henrik’s shoulder. “Kitty, Tess, Fell—gang’s all here.”

Linnea pursed her lips at her plate. I groped for something to say that wouldn’t draw even more attention to the line Magnus cut between us. Before I could find anything, Saffi said, “Soren got an offer to do a PhD at Oxford.”

“You did?” I said.

I didn’t mean to say it. The whole table shifted in discomfort.

“He’s not going to go, though,” Saffi added.

I waited for Soren to confirm this. He just shrugged. I couldn’t read his mind anymore.

“You still swimming?” Magnus asked me.

I opened my mouth, but Kitty said, “With staggering speed and delphine grace.”

“And, um,” Magnus said, “liking Frisco?”

“Frisco!” Kitty said, swatting my arm with the back of her hand. “You’re right—that is worse than San Fran.”

Everyone else looked at her blankly, except for Soren, who said, “Don’t be shitty.”

The silence was dense and claustrophobic. Magnus, who still looked unsure how, exactly, he’d been made fun of, said, “Oh, right, Fell, I forgot that you lived—”

Then he thought better of it and shut his mouth.

Another silence.

“This soup is incredible,” Henrik said to Linnea. “Isn’t it incredible?”

“Mmm,” she said. Her face was turned toward the table, but I could see pink splotches on her cheeks.

Kitty poked at a white lump in her bowl. “What do you think this is?”

“Potato,” I said.

“How sure are you?”

“Pretty sure.”

“Because remember that time in Paris when you ordered soup and it had sheep testicles in it?”

I choked on my spoon.

“Right?” Kitty said. “ La vie est trop courte to eat testicle soup, etcetera, etcetera.”

Linnea stood up, her chair squeaking. She hurried in the direction of the bathroom.

Henrik threw his napkin onto the table. “You’re better than that.”

“What?” Kitty said. “If she doesn’t want us having a pleasant soup conversation, then she shouldn’t have served soup.”

A vein in Henrik’s neck twitched. He stood up and went after Linnea.

“Do you think it’s the word testicle ?” Kitty whispered to me. “Because I know—gross, but we may have to give her a talk before this wedding goes through.”

I snorted, not quietly enough, which made Saffi get up and follow the others.

“And then there were four,” Kitty said.

Soren leaned back in his chair, his arms crossed.

“So…” Magnus said. “What did that soup taste like?”

“Don’t encourage them,” Soren said.

“Encourage what?” I asked.

He gave me a look that said You know exactly what.

“If Linnea has a problem,” Kitty said, “maybe she should tell us instead of running away like a disconsolate Victorian orphan who’s just been denied another bowl of porridge.”

“I don’t think Victorian orphans did a lot of running,” I said. “On account of the malnutrition.”

“Point, Tess!”

Soren made a disgusted noise.

“Problem?” Kitty asked.

He stood up. It seemed like he was answering Kitty, but he was looking at me. “We already know you think you’re better than us.” He followed the others and left behind a carcinogenic silence. Even the tables around us caught it.

“I wasn’t thinking about it that way,” I said.

“Of course you were,” Kitty said. “I want more wine.”

“No,” I said. “We should go apologize.”

“For what? Living our lives? Having been to Paris? Are we expected to sit around listening to them talk about the fucking weather all day? Breaking news—it rained.”

I started to stand, but Kitty grabbed my wrist and yanked me back down.

“Oh, don’t do that, don’t join the exodus. If Linnea has a problem, she should say something.”

“It’s her wedding,” I said.

She sighed. “Fine. It’s not you she’s angry with anyway. I’ll go make nice with the parents, and everyone will come back. Parents love me.” She pushed herself to her feet and away from the table, and then it was just Magnus and me.

“Shit,” he said finally. “I’m not drunk enough for this.”

Kitty was right, though; once she left, the others came out of whatever bathroom they’d been in and sat back down at the table. Linnea’s eyes were puffy, but her makeup was still perfect. Probably Saffi had fixed it. I was angry it hadn’t been me. I didn’t want to embarrass Linnea, so I texted her under the table.

Me: I’m sorry, Lin

Me: I wasn’t thinking

Me: I love you

Linnea: It’s okay

Linnea: It’s not you

I wished it was, though, because if it was me, I could fix it. I wanted to grab hold of Kitty with one hand and Linnea with the other and force them to stare at each other until this was better. The thought of Linnea and Kitty not liking each other, truly not liking each other, made me feel like my childhood had been a lie.

When Noah and I had moved in together, he’d had a giant cardboard box labeled SENTIMENTAL SHIT . A Chicago Cubs flag, a photo from his sister’s bat mitzvah, a highly impractical bong. When he looked at my boxes, full of disassembled IKEA furniture and textbooks, he told me, Sometimes it seems like you sprang to life fully formed at age nineteen .

I wondered if he knew I thought about that every day.

Kitty never came back to the table. I watched her in my peripheral vision as she artfully ducked from one table to another, chattering and laughing and looking for all the world like she was having a grand time. My table mostly ignored me. At one point, Soren said something too quiet for me to hear, meant for Saffi alone, and she laughed and laughed. She seemed to laugh so easily, Saffi. I’d always liked her. I still did. Really. She kissed him, right in the hollow below his cheekbone. It was a normal amount of jealousy. The same amount I would feel if Saffi kissed Noah in front of me. Maybe a little more, but only because you never forget the first person you fell in love with. Soren looked up at me through his eyelashes, and I turned away, my cheeks hot from having been caught.

Someone dimmed the lights, and a procession of waiters brought out a cake with twenty-six candles. When my mother had been twenty-six, she’d had a seven-year-old daughter.

It was too rich to eat but very pretty: velvet layers of fudge on chocolate cake with a sticky caramel drizzle. I was wondering if there was some sort of geometric proof for how you could rearrange cake to get the maximum ratio of looking eaten to actually eaten when Lukas dropped heavily into Kitty’s empty seat.

“Tess fucking Eriksson!” he said. “I’m offended I wasn’t the first person you came to see.”

Lukas sent me emails still. Long diary entries about the island (too cold) and the croft (so dull) and whatever girl he was seeing (always, by his telling, more interested in him than he was in return). I responded infrequently, afraid to reveal my own interest in the world I’d left behind. The stiffness of my replies didn’t deter him. I imagined, to him, pressing Send on those emails was the emotional equivalent of launching garbage into space; I was too far away for it to matter.

“How’s the job?” he asked.

“Oh, fine,” I said. He waited expectantly. “How are you?”

“Oh, you know. Same as usual.”

I did know, and it was the same as usual. He gave me all the details anyway, talking until everyone else at our table had stood up to clean or mingle or put their toddlers down for the night. While Lukas was regaling me with a story about the sheepdogs, Soren helped Saffi to her feet, his hand brushing her waist. Lukas must’ve seen me watching, because he said, “But you don’t give a shit about that, do you? Tell me about you. How’s the boyfriend? Can I see a picture?”

I scrolled for a while before I found one I liked. Noah was more handsome in person than he was in photos. I settled on one from after his company’s holiday party—lying on a couch, dressed in a suit, thumb to his lips. Byronic and idle.

Lukas said, “I reckon he looks like me.”

I looked again at the photo. At Lukas. “Sure,” I said. Noah texted me again then, like he could sense he was being talked about.

Noah: Found a spider but trapped it in a cup and brought it outside instead of killing it

Noah: Made me think of you

I stared at this message and tried to remember if I was someone who trapped spiders in cups or squished them. I couldn’t remember. Could not. A buzzing filled my ears; it wasn’t a natural buzz, not like bees, so I’d started to think of it like static, like I was a character in a little box, but the TV was losing reception. Bzzz. I didn’t know why the spider, or the trapping, made Noah think of me. I thought I would sound inane if I asked.

“Are you okay?” Lukas asked.

“I should go home.” It was impossible to know at what volume I said this.

I found my dad standing with Linnea’s and Kitty’s mums, his hands in his pockets and his shoulders near his ears. We nodded in mutual agreement at the door. On the way out, we passed a hallway from which I could hear Saffi’s clear, easy laugh.

In the car, I rolled the windows down even though it was too cold.

“Do I set bugs free or kill them?” I asked my dad.

“I suppose I’ve seen you do both,” he said. “Why?”

The static was getting louder again. “I can’t remember.”

Back at home, in my childhood bedroom turned guest room, I stripped off my dress and curled under the quilts in just my underwear. I was both sweating and shivering.

I looked at last-minute flights on my phone; there was nothing until the next afternoon. Curses always find you when you’re sleeping, so I decided not to sleep. Not until it was time for me to leave. I would sway deliriously through the ceremony, and I would not laugh at any of Kitty’s inside jokes, and I would clap when Saffi caught the bouquet. Outside, the wind smashed against the sides of the house. The ceiling distended. My skin felt too thick and too heavy, probably just dry from the travel, but I would’ve sworn it was spreading, the dryness, calcifying. Thirty-six hours. I would leave in thirty-six hours.

I really didn’t mean to fall asleep.

* * *

The dream always looked like this:

I went into the kitchen wearing faded jeans and a blue cardigan, no shoes. It was morning, cool and bright. Our daughter was eating carrot sticks.

“Carrots for breakfast?” I asked.

“If I eat a lot of them,” she said, “I’ll be able to see through walls.”

She was seven. We had argued about whether she would end up liking words or numbers better, but as it turned out, she liked bugs. Bugs! Whose daughter liked bugs? Ours did.

Soren handed me a cup of coffee. “How fast can you drink that?”

“Are we running late?”

“Depends how fast you can drink that.”

I drank it in one go and handed him the cup. He still had coffee grounds on his fingers. He was wearing that red sweater he’d given me after I’d pulled Linnea out of the ocean; it was pristine.

“No longer running late,” he said.

I was on car-seat duty. Our daughter hated the car seat—it was always an ordeal—but I bribed her by telling her the plane would probably have a bug film on the in-flight entertainment. We had so much luggage—we always did—in our boring little suitcases with the yellow ribbons on the handles so we could find them at the carousel more easily. Our daughter had a backpack shaped like a ladybug. It had room for exactly two outfits, so of course it was instead jammed with embroidery thread so she could braid friendship bracelets to add to the fourteen thousand already on her wrists.

We sat at the gate underneath a big sign that said our destination on it. Soren bought muffins and more coffees from the café by our gate.

“You have a problem,” I said.

He passed me one of the coffee cups. “Fortunately, so do you.”

I put my head on his shoulder, and we watched our daughter braid her long, neon threads. It was so boring. We were so boring. Some people spent their whole lives without ever getting to taste such warm and magnificent boredom.

We got on the plane and found a bug film. An hour in, Soren gestured for me to take off my headphones. He set a hand on our daughter’s head—she always sat between us—and said, “This is just King Lear with butterflies.”

“Daddy.” She tugged at his sweater. “You’re not paying attention.”

“I already know how it ends. Because it’s King Lear .”

“With butterflies,” I said.

That was when the plane started to shake. Everything went weightless. I heard this buzzing, and at first I thought it was bees, and then I thought it was static, and then I realized it was the sound of a plane ripping apart bolt by bolt. She was screaming. Then—impact.

Everything was black, and then everything was blue and cold. I kicked my way to the surface. Plane bits were scattered around me, bobbing on the sea, but no one else was there. Just empty seats, dangling seat belts, tray tables, and dinners still wrapped in plastic.

I screamed Soren’s name over and over again, but where was everyone else? Why wasn’t anyone else swimming? When the safety crew arrived to rescue us, they were sailing a yacht called Serena . I was on the deck with no recollection of how I got there. A man in an orange vest was putting a crinkly reflective blanket over my shoulders. I kept screaming Soren’s name.

“You’re the only one we’ve found so far,” the man said, and then I remembered that it was Noah. I grabbed him by the vest.

“You have to get them back,” I said.

“They’ll come if they hear you calling,” Noah said. “But you don’t even remember your daughter’s name, do you?”

That was always when I woke up.

There were some details that were always the same. Soren’s sweater. The way the little girl braided those bracelets, her hands tiny and nimble. Other details never stuck no matter how hard I tried to remember. Like where the house was, Palo Alto or Stenland or suburban nowhere. Whether we were leaving home or coming back. It never occurred to my dream self to wonder. I hated her, dream Tess, like I had never hated anyone. I hated that I didn’t know if she had a career. I hated that she was soft and maternal and unbothered, right up until the crash. The crash was punishment for daring to feel so mundanely complete.

I cried with my blankets pulled over my face so my dad wouldn’t hear. How were you supposed to grieve something that wasn’t real? I’d asked Noah once if he ever had dreams about his exes. He’d said yeah, but it was no big deal, just the way memory went sometimes.

I hauled myself out of bed and pressed the heels of my hands into my eyes. They were going to be red. My eyes always stayed red and puffy for hours after I cried. Maybe Kitty could fix me with enough makeup. I dropped my hands and looked at my reflection in the mirror, and I watched my mouth form the soundless word—oh.

* * *

I called Kitty first, not quite knowing why her and not Linnea. She picked up on the second ring.

“My alarm wasn’t set for another seven minutes,” she said. “I begrudge you those seven minutes.”

“Look in the mirror,” I said.

A pause. The rustling of blankets.

“Kitty?”

“We should call Linnea,” she said.

I could not stop staring at myself. At the black lines seared across my skin. I touched them, expecting them to smudge. They didn’t, of course. It was as dark as a fresh tattoo, except the skin wasn’t raised. Just above my brows, in line with the bridge of my nose, were the three jagged lines, just the size of a raven’s talon.

I added Linnea to the call. It rang and rang. I called her again. This time, she answered groggily.

“Tess?” she said. “Is everything okay?”

“Tell me you’re not with Henrik,” I said.

“It’s bad luck to see the bride on the day of the wedding. Oh my god. I’m getting married today.”

“Or not,” Kitty said.

“Look in the mirror, Linnea,” I said.

A pause.

“Oh” was all she said.

And then we all went silent, all three of us. I wondered how many times we had cumulatively been told this was our destiny. I wondered how everyone had known, like they had seen this story before, like they already knew the ending—the way I had always known, on some level, that I would end up accidentally killing Soren.

When my reflection stared back at me, it didn’t feel so much like my face had been altered as I slept, but rather like a lie had been scrubbed away to reveal the truth of what had lain underneath.

This was how the story always went.