Page 20 of A Curse for the Homesick

brUISE

2017

The morning after August left Stenland, I woke at noon to see that he had posted a photo on Instagram of his complimentary champagne in the airport lounge at Charles de Gaulle. I gave him a like. Just to be nice.

* * *

In the afternoon, I went for a hike with Linnea, just the two of us. When we reached the top of Fell Mountain, we sat down next to the cairn and looked out at the island. It was in perfect form. The sky was a chipper blue, innocently pretending it looked like that all the time. Sheep dotted the hillsides like kids’ drawings of clouds, lumpy and white.

Linnea pulled a flask out of her backpack and offered it to me.

“Oh,” I said after I sipped. “That’s much better than whiskey.”

“I know, right? Elderflower liqueur. Girls-only hiking trips! Hang on—I have chocolate too.” She rummaged around in her bag. “Oh, that’s where my birth control went.”

I choked on my drink, and Linnea waved a hand.

“Don’t worry,” she said. “I just missed, like, a day or two.”

“You’re giving me secondhand panic.”

“Hasn’t caught up with me so far,” she said, finally extricating a chocolate bar from the depths of her backpack. She broke off a square and passed it to me.

We ate our chocolate in companionable silence for a few moments, just watching the wind bob through the grass, before Linnea asked, “Does Kitty hate me?”

“Never,” I said.

“I wish she did. That would be better than feeling like she’s outgrown me.”

I looked over at her. Her cheeks were pink from the walking and the sun. She had her elbows wrapped around her knees, one long blond braid nearly touching the grass on either side of her.

“Do I make you feel that way?”

“No,” Linnea said quickly. When I gave her a look, she smiled grudgingly. “A little. Maybe. It’s hard—being left behind.”

“The world’s still out there waiting for you,” I said.

“Do you think less of me for not caring that much?”

“No. No, of course not.”

“Henrik and I are thinking of buying a house.”

I raised my eyebrows.

“I know,” she said. “It’s serious. It’s like, how much do you love your partner? Are you willing to bet all your money on it? But I think I am. Besides, money is mostly imaginary anyway.”

“Sure,” I said, skating past this point for the time being. “Do you think you’ll get married?”

“Oh, someday. Not yet. I’d rather just live together.” She handed me another piece of chocolate. “Henrik said that Soren said you were having dinner at the croft tonight?”

“Mmm.”

“And?” Linnea said.

“Apparently Lukas and Elin want to see me.”

She gave a delighted laugh. “Yes. Elin Fell wants to see you. That’s why you’re going. No other reason.”

“I don’t know, Lin…”

“Do you think I don’t know that you’ve been texting him for months now? I’ve never seen someone go from totally indifferent to their phone to completely addicted in less time. He’s still in love with you.”

“He can’t still be what he never was.”

“I might not be as smart as you or Kitty.” When I started to protest, Linnea held up a hand. “No, look, I was never good with school the way you two were. But I know people. I know what it looks like when someone’s in love.”

I almost told her that she clearly didn’t, given the whole Kitty situation, but I thought better of it. Instead, I said, “Even if we did…care about each other, I’m only here for the summer.”

“So you’re here for the summer. You don’t know where you’ll be in five years.” I opened my mouth to insist that I did, I always had, and the answer was not Stenland , but Linnea barged onward. “And he doesn’t know where he’ll be in five years.”

My throat felt tight. “You just want someone to go on double dates with.”

“No,” she said. “I just want my best friend to be happy.” She paused. “And also I wouldn’t mind the double dates.” She stood and brushed the dirt off her leggings, then offered me a hand. I took it, and she pulled me to my feet. “Now let’s go so you have time to shower before your date with Elin.”

* * *

On the drive to the Fells’, I played a news podcast at full volume from the speaker of my phone so that I couldn’t think too hard. As I parked the car, a New York Times columnist shouted in the cup holder about gerrymandering.

A dog started barking when I opened my door. The driveway had been lined with gravel since I’d last been there, but other than that, it was the same as always. The windswept grass; the moss-furred stone; a blue-gray ocean beneath a blue-gray sky, both of them stretching so far in every direction you’d swear you could see the earth curving.

I thought I was more nervous to see Elin than Soren since I’d already seen Soren and the thought of parental disapproval made me anxious. But when I knocked on the front door and Elin opened it, I felt a rush of relief. So maybe I was more nervous about Soren after all.

Since I’d last seen her, Elin’s hair had grown wispier; it was now less the color of steel and more the color of ash. She’d never been someone who wasted smiles, and I didn’t get one, but I did get a hard, appraising look, like she cared enough to make sure I hadn’t grievously injured myself since leaving.

“One of the neighbor’s horses started foaling,” she said by way of greeting. “He’ll be back when he’s back.”

I got the sense Elin was daring me to voice annoyance at this turn of events. Like she thought I might insist we call Soren away from his equine midwifery. I just nodded.

The kitchen smelled like lamb and rosemary. Elin gestured vaguely toward the fridge in what I thought was a get yourself a beer signal, so I did. She was already drinking one. I glanced around for Lukas, but he wasn’t in his usual place on the couch. Answering my unspoken question, Elin said, “Lukas is out with the chickens. Don’t look so surprised. He does help sometimes, you know.”

As I chopped potatoes and onions for Elin, I kept glancing through the window, waiting for Soren’s silhouette to appear in the hazy light of the drive. When I finally heard the door open, my knife skittered off a potato, and Elin snorted. It was Lukas.

His face cracked open in a smile, and he strode across the kitchen to hug me. His body was bigger and broader than I’d remembered, oddly mannish, and the hug went on just long enough that I started to feel uncomfortable. Then he stepped back and grinned down at me. He’d let his hair grow long; it was pulled into a bun at the back of his head. I’d never thought he looked much like photos of Soren’s mum, but he did now. Something in the nose, maybe.

“Jesus fucking Christ,” he said. “Never thought you’d be stupid enough to come back here.”

Elin clicked her tongue, but Lukas looked undeterred.

“How’s California? Do you have pictures?”

“I didn’t think anyone ever wanted to see someone else’s travel pictures,” I said.

“I expect an exhausting recap.”

“Exhaustive,” Elin said.

Lukas just shrugged, still looking pleased. “How late are you staying? Is this, like, a slumber party sort of scenario, or—”

“Lukas,” Elin said, “take a shower. You smell like manure.”

He made a face, but ducked out of the kitchen anyway. When it was just Elin and me again, the silence felt thicker than it had before. I kept waiting for her to say something about Soren: Don’t hurt him or Stay away from him or He hasn’t been the same without you. She didn’t say any of these things, which made me feel oddly disappointed, like perhaps Elin didn’t think anything that might or might not happen between Soren and me was of particular import.

When the clock on the oven read 10:00 and Soren still wasn’t back, I went to the bathroom and splashed water on my face. Maybe it was because I’d never seen a horse give birth, but I felt nervously fascinated by the thought of Soren helping with it. I liked that while my classmates and I were learning niche and computer-based skills so we could work for start-ups, Soren could tumble any number of generations back through time and still be useful and steady and competent. Like if I were giving birth and the power went out and the roads were flooded, Soren would know what to do.

I went back into the kitchen and hovered awkwardly in front of the fridge. Dinner was long since done; Elin was just keeping it warm. She’d turned her attention to a jigsaw puzzle set up on a card table in the living room. Lukas was eating a bowl of cereal for pre-dinner.

When Soren finally appeared, his cheeks were pink and his eyes were bright. He must have cleaned up at the neighbor’s house before coming back because as far as I could tell, he wasn’t covered in any horsey birth bits.

“Sorry,” he said to the room, sounding breathless. “She was upside down. Beautiful, though. She looks just like her mother.”

I hadn’t even noticed Elin look up, but she must’ve because she said, “You get kicked in the arm?”

Soren was peeling off his sweater. He wore a gray T-shirt underneath, and right at the edge of the sleeve, on his upper arm, a reddish-purple bruise was spreading. “Grazed.”

“Do I need to tell you to put ice on that?” Elin asked, fitting another piece into her puzzle.

Soren was smiling at me; he still looked twitchy and pleased from the evening’s work, bruise aside. I smiled back hesitantly. Once the moment had gone on a little too long, Soren lifted me by the waist and moved me a foot to the left. He opened the freezer door and grabbed an icepack. I went to find the salt shaker so he wouldn’t see me blush.

Lukas drove the conversation while we ate, asking if I surfed (no) and if I’d been to American football games (yes, but I didn’t really get it) and if the food was brilliant (I grudgingly admitted acai bowls were fairly brilliant). Soren and I sat next to each other, and at one point, when he reached for the water jug, his knee touched mine. It stayed touching mine, and I felt like every cell in my body had gone to sleep except for the ones in that knee. It seemed impossible that it was an accident, but then again, my foot was actually edged up against Lukas’s, and I hadn’t noticed that at all. I pressed my knee a little harder against Soren’s, and he held up the water jug in question. I nodded, and he poured. He didn’t move his leg away.

No one has ever washed dishes more slowly than Soren and I washed those dinner dishes. I kept waiting for Lukas and Elin to leave so that I didn’t need to be conspicuous about wanting to be alone with Soren. But Lukas turned on the TV; Elin puttered at her puzzle.

I picked up the glasses one by one. I handed them back to Soren and said I could still see soap in them even though I couldn’t. He washed them again. The countertops weren’t dirty, but I wiped them down anyway.

After a half hour of this, Elin said, “For god’s sake, just make up an excuse about showing her a book or something.”

Soren turned the water off. His ears were pink, and he looked down at his hands, flicking water in the sink. Then he met my gaze and tilted his head toward the stairs with a question in his eyes.

I nodded back.

While we were on the stairs, I heard Elin tell Lukas, “Mimes would do better.”

Soren went into the room first, so I was the one left on the threshold wondering whether to close the door. He met my gaze as I was hesitating, and his lips twitched toward a smile.

I kept my hand wrapped indecisively around the side of the door. Soren leaned against one of his bookshelves and crossed his arms.

“You got another shelf,” I said.

“I got a lot more books. For school.”

“I hope you’re still the smartest person in class.”

“ Smartest is a stretch.”

“If it makes you feel better, I am easily the most confused person in any class I take.”

He laughed under his breath and shook his head, which I appreciated even though it was completely true.

I ran my fingers down the painted wood of the door. It creaked under my weight.

“What are we doing?” I asked.

His lips inched up at one corner again. “Rationalizing.”

“What are you rationalizing?”

“You know.”

“Breaking up with you was shit,” I said. “I don’t want to do it again.”

“Then let’s not.”

“Start anything?”

“End anything.”

I opened my mouth but couldn’t think of how you were meant to respond to something like that. He rested his elbows on the shelf behind him. It stretched the gray T-shirt across his chest. Through the window: a summer dim sun and fog against the glass.

“I have to leave at the end of the summer,” I finally said. “And I still don’t want to live in Stenland after.”

“Okay,” he said.

“But you do.”

“Do I?”

“You just came back from a horse birth looking like you won an award. This place is—who you are.”

He shrugged.

“So what are you suggesting, then?” I asked. “If we—if it was like the summer before I left, and it was time for me to leave again, would you…”

“I don’t know,” he said.

I swallowed. My throat felt raw, like it was lined in sandpaper. I closed the door slowly, watching him. It clicked shut. The bedroom wasn’t big, but it felt that way, him on one side, me on the other.

He moved toward me. Not all the way; just to the bed. He sat on the edge of it and looked up at me.

I took a step closer, then another. Our socked toes touched.

“Do you really think you’re everything I hate?” I asked. When he shook his head, confused, I said, “The day we broke up. You said you didn’t see how I could’ve loved you because you represent everything I hate.”

“And you said you didn’t love me.”

“That’s not exactly what I said.”

He swallowed. I watched his throat bob, like he was working to keep his face from showing too much. He touched my waist with bird-light hands, so careful, as if I might skitter away. When I didn’t, his fingers became solid against me, his thumbs just beneath the hem of my shirt, the faintest press of bare skin.

I climbed onto his lap, resting a knee on either side of his legs. His hands never left my waist; he pulled me closer to him so our hips were fitted together, and our chests. He tilted his chin up to look at me, and it wasn’t until I watched my fingers touch the sides of his face that I realized they were trembling.

We leaned together. Our noses brushed, and our lips, not quite, as if there was a decision to be made, as if we were coming back from this. I could feel his pulse in his throat and his chest. His hands moved up my waist, around my chest, through my hair. He was so close I couldn’t see him anymore; it was just his lips so near to mine I could feel the heat of them.

“Do you want this?” he whispered.

Like I had not wanted anything since I was nineteen.

I kissed him, and whatever force had kept him so carefully controlled before was gone. He stood, lifting me, kissing me as I clung to him. I was landing back against his pillows, and he was leaning over me, his lips on my neck, my breastbone, the line of my bra. I fumbled with his belt as he pulled my sweater over my head. My jeans against his boxers; my bare stomach against his shirt. Too many clothes, still too many, but his fingers were at the button at my waist, and my hands were reaching up his chest. Just underwear, then not even that, and he let out a sound like pain.

His eyes were intent on mine as he slid his hand up my thigh, then slid it higher. I made a noise without meaning to, and his lips went up at one corner. I told him he looked pleased with himself. He told me he rather was, thanks.

When I rolled on top of him, I held his wrists against the pillows. He rocked his hips slowly against mine, and even when he shut his eyes and lifted his chin, he reached to push my hair behind my ears and cradle my face in his hands. He whispered my name, and I thought, You must know how much I’m in love with you .

In the stillness after, he set a ten-minute timer on his phone so we wouldn’t fall asleep. He lay on his back with one hand under his head and the other tracing idle circles across my arm. His eyes were closed. I lay on my side and watched him. The bruise from where he’d gotten kicked by the horse was turning a vivid shade of purple.

It was both terrifying and relieving to find I could still want someone as much as I wanted him. For most of my relationship with August, I’d felt ambivalent about sex, like maybe we’d both have been better off if we’d just handled our own urges when they’d struck. But there had been a certain power in that. August had wanted me more than I’d wanted him. With Soren—this was the same fear I’d felt when I’d been nineteen, staring into that chasm of longing and thinking I was hopeless up against a force as big as all that.

When Soren’s phone timer rang, he made a sleepy noise and dragged himself unwillingly around the room to collect his clothes. He tilted my chin upward and kissed me once, all sweetness and no passion.

“Sleep well,” he said.

I curled my knees to my chest. “Good night.”

His footsteps were soft on the stairs. From below, I heard murmured voices; maybe Lukas was still watching TV.

I lay back down and touched the empty pillow on the other side of the bed. The faintest static buzzed in my ears. It was that trapped feeling, that claustrophobic feeling coming back. I’d tried to convince myself it was August-specific, but here it was again.

The pillowcase was cold beneath my fingers. I traced the outline of a shadow running down its middle. The static was getting worse, louder, and I thought about calling Soren. I thought about telling him everything and resting my head against his chest and letting myself cry.

When I tried to think of what Soren had said or done that had made me feel this way, I couldn’t find anything. So maybe it wasn’t him. Maybe it was me. Maybe this was a thing I did and would always do to myself: invent cages that shrank whenever I breathed in.

Maybe loving someone always meant trapping yourself.