Page 24 of A Curse for the Homesick

FREESTYLE

2022

I stayed in my room while Henrik moved his things into the keepers’ cottage. Linnea and Kitty went down to chat with the men—to thank them, I supposed.

Kitty texted me to say it was time for dinner and that Lukas had made something of unsubstantiated gustatory delight. I considered staying in my room but decided that would be too childish, so I texted back saying I was coming to substantiate presently.

We ate in the hearth room on the first floor, where someone had dragged a table and six chairs in front of the fire. The men had sleep masks over their eyes. It used to be that the skelds had worn the blindfolds, even in the keep, but in the past decade, most people had decided it wasn’t fair to make us helpless in the one place we were meant to feel safe. While I was glad not to be blindfolded, I was nonetheless so embarrassed for the keepers that my skin hurt.

“Tess is here,” Linnea announced.

“I’m starving,” Lukas said. “Someone put food on my plate and hand me a fork.”

I asked warily if we were going to do this every night, and Linnea said, “Oh, no, of course not—just to sort out some details real quick.”

I took the seat between Linnea and Kitty on one side of the table, opposite Lukas, who was feeling around impatiently for his cutlery. Henrik was indiscreetly nudging Linnea’s leg under the table, smiling pleasantly to himself like this was a fine way to spend his would-be wedding day. For his part, Soren sat utterly still, jaw clenched, head tilted to the side, like he was trying to hear better to make up for not seeing.

“Okay!” Linnea said. “So, just to catch everyone up—Henrik is going to live in the cottage, but Soren and Lukas will come by every day to keep him company and make sure everything is going all right.”

“Because they’re lazy?” Kitty asked.

Linnea folded her hands primly on the table. I got the sense that she felt she was the leader of our skeld season, that it was her fault for bringing us back, so she would make sure nothing went wrong. “Because they have important farm things to do.”

“She means making sure the sheep fuck each other properly,” Lukas said.

“They know what she means,” Soren said.

Linnea continued: they would cover their eyes if they were in the keep, and we would cover our eyes if we left, though we were only supposed to go outside if there was some sort of emergency. If we were dying for fresh air, the windows on the fourth floor opened, but we should cover our eyes anyway because we might glimpse someone walking around down below. When closed, the windows were too mottled to see through clearly; no one had ever been turned to stone through them. The rest of the island had, of course, been made aware of the situation, and no one but Henrik, Lukas, and Soren would be allowed down the road to Ramna Skaill. Linnea had a printout of phone numbers we could call in case of assorted emergencies: fire, nervous breakdown, accidental poisoning.

“What about intentional poisoning?” Kitty asked.

“I’m not sure that’s actually helpful at this juncture,” Linnea said. “Thanks, though.”

Once Linnea was finished, Lukas declared he would keel over dead if he was not given something to eat, so Linnea slopped big spoonfuls of gustatory delight onto every plate.

“It’s shepherd’s pie,” Lukas explained.

Kitty poked it experimentally with her fork. “Is it?”

“I was telling Soren and Henrik. You can see.”

“That is one opinion,” she said.

“Okay, so Kitty will be cooking for herself this skeld season.”

“God, I didn’t even think of that. Have they invented delivery here yet?”

“Yes,” I said, “but it’s just one sheep with a scooter.”

“So that’s where she went,” Soren said.

I laughed, but no one else did. Everyone else just looked uncomfortable. I clattered my fork against my plate and wished the ceiling would cave in.

Soren and Lukas got up to leave soon after. Henrik lingered at the table with Linnea, whispering something into her ear, which left me wondering if I was allowed to ask if they were planning to embrace abstinence this skeld season.

Kitty took Soren by the arm and led him to the door, which left me with Lukas. He allowed himself to be guided, but he was so much larger than me that I felt off balance.

“How’s Noah taking it?” Lukas asked.

“Noah.”

“What did he say when you told him about skeld season?”

Kitty and Soren had stopped at the threshold, and they were quiet like they were listening.

“He said, ‘Wow, you were right all along.’”

“Has to be weird. You’re not going to see him for three months.”

“Right,” I said.

I dropped his arm and stepped back inside, by Kitty.

“Do you two want anything tomorrow?” Lukas asked. “Board games. Knitting needles. Whatever it is Kitty does for fun when she’s not making spreadsheets.”

“Bring me books,” Kitty said, “so I may emerge from this hellhole morally and intellectually superior.”

To Soren, Lukas said, “That’s on you, Captain Superior.”

Soren shrugged and said he’d take a look.

We left Linnea and Henrik to engage in whatever ill-advised activity they were determined to engage in and went upstairs. Kitty declared she was going to take a three-month bath. I went to my room and lay back on my bed, wondering if this was the bed my mum had slept on after she’d killed Mattias and Sara Fell. I also wondered if anyone had noticed, when Lukas had asked me about Noah, that it was the first time I’d realized I had not yet told him.

So I called him. When he picked up, he asked me how the wedding was.

“Change of plans,” I said.

“They didn’t call it off, did they?”

“Temporarily.”

There were loud voices in the background and what sounded like an acoustic guitar. In all the time we had dated, I had never once heard Noah turn down an invitation. Sometimes he went to two dinners in the same night. He usually didn’t make a show about it when I didn’t want to go—which was always—but I felt guilty anyway. My first thought when I heard that discordant acoustic guitar was Thank god I don’t have to go to a house party for three months .

“Why?”

“Skeld season.”

He repeated it back to me, louder and pitching high at the end. I heard the music falter and wished he’d take this call somewhere else. I could’ve asked him to step outside, but I was hoping he’d think to do it for himself.

“So,” I said, “I guess I’ll see you in three months.”

“Wait, shit, really? What does this mean for your job?”

“I have to send some emails. Hopefully I can work remotely.”

“What if you leave?” he asked. “Get on a boat to Iceland or something?”

“I’ll still be cursed for three months. I’ll just be cursed in Iceland.”

“Can you do video calls? Does the curse work that way?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think anyone’s ever tested it.”

“Why not? Should we?”

“You’re going to risk being turned into stone so you can have a video call?”

“Oh,” he said. “Fair point.”

He wasn’t stepping outside. The music had stopped altogether, but I could hear voices murmuring in the background. I caught On Shetland and then No, it’s Stenland and then Why did I think she was Danish?

“Anyway,” I said. “Just wanted to let you know.”

“I’m so sorry, Tess. Shit luck. Let me know if you need anything.”

What I needed was for him to step outside. I needed for him to understand that my mum had killed two people and that their stone bodies were currently standing in a cemetery of other stone bodies, some a thousand years old. I needed for him to get it because I could not bear to explain.

But he would never be able to understand how Stenland had shaped me because I had not given him the opportunity—with him, I had done my best job yet of becoming un-Stennish. His sound briefly cut out, and I felt a pressure in my throat at the distance, the absence of him, the fear that I had not let him see the truth of who I was.

“I love you,” I said.

“I love you too. This’ll be over before you know it.”

I ended the call and hoped he was right.

* * *

That night, I woke up just past one because I’d been dreaming about Soren. Not the one with the plane and the dead daughter. In this dream, we were having sex under a Christmas tree while snow fell tastefully from the ceiling. During, I thought: I forgot that this is what he looks like up close. When I woke up, I realized I obviously hadn’t forgotten. Good try, though.

I punched my pillow into a more reasonable shape and fell asleep again after some hours.

This time, I had the dream about the plane and the dead daughter.

* * *

When I considered the fact that I was still attracted to Soren, it made me feel sinful and grotesque, like an evil stepmother from a fairy tale. To combat this, I mentally appended everything he said with the phrase because I am so in love with Saffi . I chose this phrase for two reasons. The first was that it made me deeply uncomfortable, which I felt I deserved. The second was because my subconscious could clearly use the fucking reminder.

While we were eating breakfast on the third day of our captivity, he called—Kitty, not me—and got put on speakerphone.

“I’m going to the store,” he said, “ because I am so in love with Saffi . Do you need anything?”

“Wine,” Kitty said.

“And?”

“Just wine for me, thanks.”

“Linnea,” he said, “can I get you anything? Because I am so in love with Saffi? ”

“I wouldn’t mind ingredients to make some sort of kringle. So, you know. Kringle things.”

“Text me.” There was a pause. “Tess?”

“Coffee. Please. The beans in the blue bag.”

“I know which bag,” he said, “because I am so in love with Saffi.”

I told myself it was normal to still be attracted to other people outside your relationship as long as you didn’t do anything about it, which I never would. I also told myself that this was clearly a sign I needed to keep busy, so I threw myself violently into work. My supervisor, Carla, was fine with me working remotely for three months, but she asked if I wouldn’t rather just take some sick leave or something. I said, No, thanks, please don’t make me .

When Soren deposited the groceries on our front step, he also left behind a cardboard box of books. Kitty spread them across the table and said, “It’s like he’s trying to prove a point.”

“What point?” Linnea asked.

“That he’s the cleverest boy in all the land.”

There were thirty books, give or take, in a variety of genres. I recognized some of them from his shelves and bedside tables over the years: the one on Neolithic structures he’d taken camping in California, and The Tempest , and Independent People . There was Downwelling , the only Stennish novel to win the Booker Prize. There were mysteries and a box-set fantasy series Soren had read all of, thousands of pages of sexy elves and dragons, just because I’d loved it.

Kitty picked up Beowulf and said, “Ah, fuck, I probably have to read this now that he’s gone and made a point about it.” She opened to the first page, frowned, and said, “Then again, maybe I won’t and say I did.”

Linnea picked up something with a blue cover. “I can’t help but notice there are no shirtless men on any of these.”

“Yes, perhaps Soren is withholding his supply of erotica.”

Linnea sniffed. “I want sex and a happily-ever-after. He’ll have to make a trip to the library. Here, Tess, this one’s for you.”

She tried to pass me the book with the blue cover, but I flinched. “What do you mean, for me?”

“Go on,” Linnea said. “It’s obviously for you.”

When I still didn’t take it, she set it on the table by my laptop. , the cover said, A Memoir by Elsa Bergquist. Elsa Bergquist was Stenland’s only Olympic medalist; she’d swum the 800 free in the eighties. She hadn’t lived in Stenland for years, but she still occasionally made the news for attempting frigid and shark-filled channel crossings. Her book had been published two years prior. I had been given it as a gift three times and never read past the first page.

I finally opened it that night. Unlike my three gifted copies, stiff and sterile, this one had all the ease of a pre-read book. The pages didn’t lie flat. There was a tear in the inside cover flap.

Eventually, past midnight, I got to the end. Soren had drawn a box around the last page, underlining sentences he liked. There were other underlines throughout the book, but this page had the most of them.

Distance swimmers know that you can’t think about anything in the water for more than seven minutes. That’s the cutoff. Once you’re swimming for longer than seven minutes continuously, you stop noticing your body is a body at all. You’re just a pillow of saltwater in a bath of saltwater, dreaming your way through the waves.

I swam this morning, and while I was out, I saw the biggest shark fin, as tall as my forearm. All around me, the clouds were heavy and the waves were thrashing. It’s not that I wasn’t afraid; it’s that I was busier being awestruck.

That’s the thing we’re all after, I think: awe. We should all endeavor to be awed at least once a day. Awe makes your body transparent and lets everything flow in and out again. How you manufacture awe, I’m not sure. Perhaps there’s no way. Perhaps that’s the whole point.

In the meantime, I will keep swimming.

I texted Noah as soon as I finished to tell him he had to read it, the way I used to text Soren about everything I read, and Noah wrote back to say, Looks good, I’ll check it out! I did not actually think he would ever check it out.

Noah and I loved each other, but were not obsessed with each other. He had never felt the need to crawl inside my brain and make sense of what he found. It was healthier this way, I thought—just to be comfortable.

I thought about texting Soren too, to tell him thank you. I wrote the text. Deleted it. Wondered if there was any way to speak to him that would not feel morally suspect. Maybe there were some people who couldn’t just exist in the periphery of your life; maybe Soren was my all or nothing. Because I would tell him I loved the book, and then he would ask for a recommendation from me, and back and forth we’d go, just like when I’d dated August. I couldn’t do it to Noah, to Saffi, to Soren, to myself. We should all endeavor to be awed once a day , Elsa Bergquist had said, and what awed me then was this: that even if Soren and I never spoke again, there was no excising him from me because we had already done too much to each other when we were too young to know any better.