Page 21 of A Curse for the Homesick

TEN THOUSAND YEARS

2017

It was both humbling and embarrassing to realize how bad I was at fixing cars. Despite a childhood in the vicinity of cars and three-quarters of a mechanical engineering degree, I had little in the way of practical knowledge. On one of my first days in the shop, someone brought in a car that needed a new transmission. Henrik said, “Longitudinal powertrain, I hope?” My dad said, “Nah, it’s a transverse.” They sighed and laughed and made reference to how they’d need more coffee. I said, “Well, if you need anyone to use Bernoulli’s principle for something, just let me know.” As it turned out, they did not. I got us all coffees.

Damian and I only talked once, and when I explained to him what I was doing, he asked a string of curious and polite questions about my dad and Henrik that implied they were a peculiar species of animal he’d happened across at the zoo. He said they must’ve been very grateful for my help; I assured him they really weren’t.

Whenever I wasn’t working, I was with Soren. Sometimes also Linnea or Lukas or even Delia, but mostly Soren. He was busier than I was, so we spent most of our time at his house. We’d wander the hills together, dogs galloping through the grass ahead, relocating the sheep or searching for a broken pipe. Sometimes, out there in the mist, when it felt like we were the first two people on earth, we would lie in the tall grass and the world would shrink to the size of Soren above me. The first time we went out there, he called me kere , which he pronounced as care ; I asked him later about it, and he said, in Stennish, it meant “that which is precious to me.” That was when Soren seemed most Soren: in the hills, undone, speaking Stennish.

It felt needy to ask for more of his time than I already had, so I didn’t, even though I felt restless every night we didn’t see each other. Every time we saw each other, we exchanged books—I would give him something sexy and adventurous, and he would give me something dense and thoughtful. I read these books with the sense of peering into his brain and beginning to resolve the pieces of him that remained enigmatic to me. There was no limit to how much of him I wanted to have. I didn’t realize just how much time he was already carving for me until a man in tweed dropped off a decrepit car and greeted my dad familiarly. He was Anna’s brother, my dad explained, and he was a professor of Stennish studies at the university.

We shook hands and he introduced himself as Kirk Sandison. I recognized him by face, though we’d never been introduced. When I told him my name, his eyebrows pinched together.

“Ah,” he said, “yes, Tess. Of course. I’d forgotten. You’re Soren Fell’s…”

I must’ve looked confused—if not affronted—that Soren’s professors knew I was his dot-dot-dot because Kirk hurried to add, “I’m his advisor. He was meant to come with me to Edinburgh this summer. Now I see why he didn’t.”

“Oh.”

“Never mind that,” Kirk said. I was busily deciding I liked him less than Anna. “He’s a bright young man. He’ll land on his feet.”

It had never once occurred to me that I might’ve been the one standing in the way of Soren’s education rather than the other way around. The embarrassment, though, came with a pulse of hope because if Soren was becoming the type of person who might go abroad for academic conferences, maybe he was also becoming a person who did not need to stay in Stenland forever.

“Do you think he’ll be an academic, then?” I asked.

Kirk considered me. “He’s special enough that there are opportunities out there, if he wishes to seize them. But he’s not so special that the opportunities will seize him. Now, Erik—about these squeaky brakes.”

* * *

All summer, the weather was tauntingly nice, like the island had conspired to make me forget its true nature. I kept catching myself glancing at little houses with For Sale signs, then abruptly feeling like someone had dumped ice water over my head.

The first—and only—hot day of summer arrived in late July. My dad had gone to spend the night at Anna’s, which left Soren and me alone in the house playing at real adults. Well—I felt like I was playing. Soren carried himself with the same intent seriousness as he always did: cooking the chicken, wiping down the counter with a tea towel.

In my bedroom, Soren opened the windows, letting in a breeze that tasted like salt. It was light out, and it would be for hours, but not in the oppressively bright way of a California afternoon. Here, the sky was the golden gray of falling dust.

I lay back on my bed as he looked out the window. “I met Kirk Sandison,” I said.

“Oh?”

“He said you worked together.”

“That might be a stretch.”

“What are you working on? You never talk about it.”

He turned toward me. Where his hair didn’t lie flat, the light turned the strands white. “I didn’t think you’d want to hear.” I must’ve looked hurt; he added: “Because it’s Stennish. I know it’s not—the same for you. As it is for me.”

“I want to hear,” I said. “Really.”

He crossed the room, the curtains twirling behind him. When he lay beside me on the bed, the mattress caved slightly, tilting me toward him. Outside, seabirds called to each other: long, searching cries.

“You know there’s not much left of the Stennish language?” he said. “The carvings in the cairns. A prayer and a poem here and there.”

I nodded.

“It’s just translation work. Seeing how much of a dictionary we can build. If we can find more fragments. That sort of thing.”

“Why?” I said. “I don’t mean it in a bad way.”

He laced his hands behind his head and looked at my ceiling. “There’s this word in Russian— razbliuto —that means something like ‘the feeling you have toward someone you’ve fallen out of love with.’ And in Old English, sorhlufu , which meant ‘sorrow-love.’ Feeling love and fear at the same time, or loving someone even when it’s painful.” When he blinked, slow flutters of his long, pale lashes, spidery shadows moved across his cheeks. He tilted his head to me. “I guess I’m looking for words like that.”

“In Stennish?”

“Sometimes I think…” He took a breath. “I’d only be able to say the thing I really mean if I could say it in Stennish.”

“What’s the thing you really mean?”

Soren took my hand. His skin was cool against the summer air. When he pressed his lips to my fingers, he looked at me over the ridges of my knuckles. He kissed the inside of my wrist, my elbow, the hollow where my neck met my collarbone. His hands breathed down the sides of my body, coming to rest where the top of my jeans met the bottom of my shirt. Then they were off and his were pushed haplessly to the floor, my quilt kicked to meet them.

I held his jaw in my palm. Ran my thumb across the plane of his cheekbone.

“You know how I feel,” I told him.

“Do I?”

“You always know.”

I touched his chest, the width of it, and his waist, the narrowness.

“Tell me anyway,” he said.

The fine golden hairs at his stomach; the cord of muscle along his thigh.

“Maybe if I knew Stennish,” I said.

He shut his eyes and tilted up his chin. His voice was so thin I had to ask him to say it again. It was my name: once, softly, like that was all there was.

After, when I thought he’d started dozing off, he said: “Sometimes I think I’m only me when I’m with you.”

* * *

Linnea and Henrik had decided to put a down payment on the little house by the cemetery, so she asked me to come with her for a final inspection. The estate agent stood by the door texting while Linnea showed me around the house. Ostensibly, she wanted my opinion because I was practical and not prone to daydreaming about DIY renovation. But she was distant in a way I couldn’t quite place. At one point, she rested her elbows on the kitchen counter and gazed out the back window, where there was a view of a miniature yard and an empty plot of soil. I had to say her name three times before she heard me.

“It’s cute,” I said.

“Do you think it’s too small?”

“No smaller than my house.”

“It’s three bedrooms,” Linnea said.

“Okay, great. One for you, one for Henrik, and one for yoga. Or painting. Or a dog.”

She chewed on her lip. “It’s really more of a closet.”

“So use it as a closet. Besides, we grew up in closet-sized bedrooms and turned out fine.”

“I just don’t want to outgrow this place, you know? I want to put art on the walls and plant things in the backyard, and I want to feel permanent. Does that make sense?”

No, actually—the idea of anchoring myself in one place sounded terrifying—but I took her point. I reminded myself that I wasn’t the one who was making these permanent decisions and tried to look at the house objectively.

It was small. Three bedrooms, yes, but none bigger than the beds that would snug inside them. The kitchen had lots of light, and the fixtures looked like they were from this century. My least favorite thing about the house was its proximity to the church and the cemetery; from the front steps, you could see long rows of headstones and tombs and, towering above them like guardian angels, the stone statues of those who hadn’t had flesh left to bury. To preserve their modesty, the statues were draped in traditional Stennish clothes—red woolen skirts and bodices laced with silvery chains, tunics with fine buttons and delicate embroidery. There was a group, mostly older women, who made and repaired the clothes. You couldn’t go as far as the grocery store without seeing ten flyers inviting you to come join them. Preserve local tradition; honor our families. Sewing circles every Wednesday and Saturday at the cultural center. They were beautiful, the clothes, but they also made the statues look eerie, like they’d only been turned to stone a moment ago, like maybe you’d just done it.

“I’m just worried, I guess—” Linnea started, but before I could find out what she was worried about, my phone vibrated in my pocket. I gestured that I wouldn’t pick it up, and she gestured that I should.

“Hello?”

“Hey,” Soren said. His voice sounded echoey and grainy, like he was driving through a tunnel. “I did something stupid.”

“Who is it?” Linnea asked.

“Soren. He did something stupid.” Into the phone, I asked, “How stupid?”

“Six out of ten,” he said. “I twisted my ankle, and now I can’t drive home because I can’t use the clutch. Can you pick me up?”

“I’m just at the new house with Linnea—”

She made a shooing motion, mouthing, Go, go. I nodded my thanks.

“Are you at a soccer game?” I asked.

“Fairhowe,” he said.

“The cairn?” I asked. “Or the ice cream place in the visitors’ center?”

“The cairn.”

“Disappointing.”

“Please?” he said. “The tourists are starting to stare at me.”

I apologized again to Linnea; whatever she’d been thinking about telling me seemed to have slipped back out of reach. I promised myself I wouldn’t forget about it and got in my car.

At Fairhowe, I parked by a discarded waffle cone and sent a collection of curious puffins scattering. Soren’s truck was in the corner of the lot, but he wasn’t in it. When I tried to text him, the message wouldn’t go through.

From here, the cairn just looked like a mound in the earth, grass patchy and golden in places. Between us stood two fences, four informational plaques, and a bored-looking woman with a name tag whom I recognized as Eva Rendall from swim team.

I squeezed past a family of Italian tourists—who didn’t look particularly pleased with me—and tapped Eva’s shoulder.

“If your ticket—oh. Hi, Tess. You must be here for Soren.”

“Is he inside?”

“Looking very sorry for himself.”

I ducked under her arm—earning me another annoyed look from the line of tourists—and approached the cairn. It was smaller than I’d remembered. I had to duck to get through the entrance. There was the drip drip drip of water against stone, the echo of my shaky breathing.

I emerged into the main chamber, the one with the stone man and woman on opposite walls, staring at each other for eternity. When I stepped into the line of sight of the male statue, I was, for a moment, convinced I knew this man: the long lines of his lean body and the precise shape of his fine lips. What he looked like—what I had not realized as a child because Soren had still been a child then too—was that the statue looked like him, like Soren, like the contents of my heart turned to stone and perfectly preserved. And in the right light, if you didn’t look too hard, you could almost convince yourself the woman looked like me.

I dragged my eyes away from the statues and scanned around for Soren. He was tucked behind an upright slab of stone, seated on the damp floor and facing the wall.

“Do you often hang out in tombs when I’m not around?” I said.

Soren looked up at me through his eyelashes. The greenish light made hollows of his cheeks. “I twisted my ankle.”

“So you said. On what?”

“Outside. Before I came in. Eva told me that if I was going to look pitiful, I may as well look pitiful while I stare at my wall.”

“This is your wall?”

“Hardly,” Soren said, so bitterly I laughed.

I squatted next to him and looked at the stone slab. There were carvings in it, some more elegant than others. M + F , Genesis 3:7 , something that looked angular and runic. It felt like I was being offered a rare and breakable glimpse inside of his head, or his heart.

Carefully, I said, “Why are you looking at this wall?”

He seemed to consider the question for longer than it needed considering. Finally he said, “I’m meant to be editing this paper.”

“But you’re on break.”

“Not a school paper. Academic.”

“You wrote a paper?”

“Just helped, really.”

“And it’s getting published somewhere?”

Soren shrugged. “Don’t know. Sandison thinks I should have it so I can apply to master’s programs.”

I was simultaneously excited by the thought that Soren might leave Stenland after all and annoyed he’d never brought it up with me. Keeping my voice neutral, I said, “So what’s this wall?”

He pointed to, but didn’t quite touch, a line of text carved at ankle height. The markings were thin and precise, but it was dark enough that I couldn’t read what they said.

“What language is that?”

“English,” Soren said. “‘Let me not dwell in this bare island by your spell.’ It’s Shakespeare. The Tempest. ”

“Who put it there?”

“Unclear. Sandison thinks it’s from the 1870s.”

“What does it mean?”

“It’s from the end of the play,” he said. “ The Tempest takes place in this island full of magic, and in the epilogue, Prospero—he’s a sorcerer who’s been trapped there—asks the audience to free him by applauding.”

I was distracted by a sharp burst of laughter. The Italian family, who’d come in behind me, was taking pictures of the male statue. I couldn’t tell what they were saying, but I felt almost violently protective. I forced myself to swallow and look away. Soren was leaning toward the lines, his teeth pressing into his lip.

“So you wrote a paper on why someone would carve that here?” I asked.

“Not that line, specifically. It’s—it’s the fact that Prospero says in. He doesn’t say ‘ on this bare island.’ He says ‘ in this bare island.’”

“Oh. Like how Stenns say we live in Stenland, but tourists say they’re staying on Stenland.”

He nodded. “That’s what the paper is about. We looked at all these old texts to see when someone used in and when someone used on. Because when you say you’re on an island, it’s like saying you’re above it. But if you’re in it, if you’re part of it, it’s—” He stopped abruptly. “I just think it’s an odd line to choose. You have all of Shakespeare sitting in front of you, and you choose that.”

“A line about being trapped,” I said.

“A line about being part of a place,” he said.

I heard footsteps—the family leaving. For a moment, we were alone, just me and Soren and the statues and the graffiti. Our breathing echoed. It felt momentarily like we were inside the body of a giant, listening to the pump of his heart and the rasp of his lungs.

“A master’s program?” I asked.

“I don’t know.” He touched the stone with the tip of his index finger, exquisitely careful. “Sometimes I think none of this matters at all. Sometimes I think it’s the only thing that does.”

I set a hand on his cheek and tilted his face to mine. He kissed me, slowly, gently, comfortably, like we’d done it a thousand times and would do it a thousand more.

“I can’t believe you twisted your ankle,” I said.

“I was looking at my phone. Henrik has started sending me dog memes that were probably not funny when they were first created circa 2009.”

“That really doesn’t make it better.”

“No,” Soren agreed. “Help me up?”

I stood up, dusted off my hands, then offered them to him. “My damsel in distress.”

“My knight in shining armor,” he said.

“Ice cream?”

He put his arm around my shoulder. Now that I saw it, his ankle really did look terrible—swollen and discolored in the dim light. He leaned his weight against me, and when he looked at me, I could see the glow of the bulbs reflected in his eyes, the darkness filling the hollows of his face.

While I waited for ice cream, Soren safely seated on the hood of my car, I googled Fairhowe cairn runes. I opened the Wikipedia page. Under the “Graffiti” section, there was no mention of The Tempest. It did, however, explain the largest inscription running across the length of one wall, carved circa 1500 in Stennish, and when I read the translation, I felt as though I was happening upon a bit of information I’d known my whole life. When I returned to the car with our ice creams, I asked Soren if he was familiar with that inscription.

He said, “Everyone’s familiar with that inscription. Oh, strawberry—I love you.”

“Sorry?”

He looked slowly up at me. “Ah,” he said. “Fuck.”

I laughed because I didn’t know what else to do. After a minute, he did too, setting his cup of ice cream on the car so he could take my hand. I let him.

“Just imagine if I’d brought you chocolate,” I said.

“You don’t have to say it,” he told me.

“Soren.”

“Tess.”

“Did you actually mean that, or is it just because I bought you an ice cream?”

“That’s not a real question,” he said.

“Of course it’s a real question. You’ve never said it before.”

“That’s not fair. Henrik told you years ago.”

I was about to say, That doesn’t count because you had just walked out of our first would-be double date , but before I could, I spotted Eva hurrying through the parking lot toward us. Her eyes looked red, and her cheeks.

As she went by, I reached out to brush her arm.

“Mia,” she said.

I shook my head uncomprehendingly.

She didn’t say anything else. She just got into her car, slammed the door, and screeched out of the parking lot. Soren was watching the place where her car had been, grimacing against the sun.

“Mia?” I asked.

“Her little sister,” Soren said.

We wouldn’t know the full story until that night, when gossip reached us via Saffi, who was friends with Eva. It went like this: three girls had a sleepover. They stayed up too late and drank liters of chocolate milk. When they woke up, they found black talon marks had appeared on each other’s foreheads. Afraid they would get in trouble, they hid in the cellar of one of the girl’s houses until their parents banged down the door to get them out. The girls were smart enough to close their eyes. They probably shouldn’t have been sleeping in the same room at all, really, in case the curse had caught just one of them rather than all three. But no one really policed that rule until girls became young women, which these girls were not. It had been a long time since anyone had heard of such a thing: three skelds, just eight years old.

Soren and I didn’t say anything else about love on the drive home. It was by silent agreement that he crawled into my bed that night; I would not wake up a skeld in the morning—because another skeld season had already begun.

As I brushed my teeth, I scrolled through my phone looking for more news about the girls. A text from Linnea: Coffee tomorrow morning? It’s urgent… I remembered that I’d meant to figure out what was wrong. I told her I could meet at seven, before work, and she said that was fine.

I wondered if she, like me, felt her edges fraying. Three little girls, eight years old. Why not the three of us? Why them? I didn’t know the girls, but I felt a cavernous maternal instinct thinking of them: I would take every skeld season if it meant those girls never had to. They would spend three months cooking and cleaning for themselves, pretending to be adults, and when their time was up, that was how they’d be treated. Like women. Like goddesses. Like witches. If one of them killed someone, she would never forgive herself, and I would never forgive Stenland.

I spat out my toothpaste and closed the newspaper’s website. The tab behind it was still open, the one on the Fairhowe Cairn. It had a photo of the scratchy engraved letters and, below it, a caption that said:

Do you feel like the two of us

have been falling in love for ten thousand years?

* * *

The next morning, over coffee, Linnea told me she was pregnant.