Page 25 of A Curse for the Homesick

PALO ALTO

2017

The woman at the gate called us Mr. Fell and Ms. Eriksson . Soren said he felt unduly fancy. I told him it was the flannel that tipped him over the edge.

It was an eleven-and-a-half-hour flight from Frankfurt to SFO. I told Soren he should take the window since he’d never flown farther than Tórshavn before. He told me I should take the window because the eleven and a half hours would be plenty exciting from the middle seat.

When the plane took off, Soren suggested we watch a documentary on Le Mans . I suggested we watch one about British people digging through mud for shards of pottery. The man sitting in the aisle seat said we sounded just like him and his wife, except that his wife would probably want to watch one of her rom-coms. Soren and I smiled indulgently at each other and decided not to tell the man that we were nothing like him and his wife, actually, because we were better at being in love than anyone who’d ever tried it before.

We watched both. When it came time to go to sleep, Soren rested his head on my lap and I ran my fingers through his hair, staring out the window at a black expanse of sky and an ocean just as dark.

* * *

Soren had a visitor visa. It lasted six months, and he couldn’t work on it. He’d also applied for an agriculture visa, but those could take months to process. When we told Elin about our plan, he’d been quick to mention the agriculture visa—that he’d be working, making money, learning about other farms in other places. But when it was just the two of us, I’d gotten the impression he wasn’t eager for that visa to get approved; it would mean working with animals that weren’t his on land he didn’t know, trapped under a hot, inland sun with little pay, probably at least a two-hour drive away from me.

So he was going to live in my room. The Bay Area was too expensive for him to get his own apartment. My senior-year housing was a pseudo-apartment on campus; I’d have a kitchen and a bedroom and a living space I shared with a woman I didn’t know, but who I hoped would keep to herself enough that she wouldn’t notice or care that she had two roommates instead of one. It was against Stanford’s policies, technically, and as plans went, it wasn’t particularly well thought out. But it was the first illegal thing either of us had done, and we were rather in love with ourselves over it, doing something daring in the name of romance.

Elin had said, “Jesus, Mary, Joseph, you’ll be bored out of your mind.”

“I won’t,” Soren had said stubbornly. “I’ll be applying to master’s programs. And reading.”

She’d grunted. It was the closest thing we got to her approval.

When I’d told my dad Soren was coming to California with me, he’d been making pancakes. He’d stared at the griddle for a while, then said, “For how long?”

“I don’t know,” I’d said. “Indefinitely?”

“You two are moving back here when you graduate?”

“No. Why would you think that?”

“I just figured,” my dad had said. “He goes where you want to be for a while, then you go where he wants to be.”

“Maybe he doesn’t want to be in Stenland anymore,” I’d said.

“Right. Of course. Don’t mind me, Tessie—I’m sure you’ve thought about all this more than me.”

My mum had been the bluntest. I’d told her on the phone, and she’d said, “You cannot be serious. He’s going to live in your tiny bedroom? In a country he’s never been to? With no friends, no family, and no work to keep him occupied?”

“He’ll be applying to master’s programs.”

“You’re putting him in a position where he’s going to be incredibly needy. You’ll end up killing him. Or breaking his heart.”

“Oh, because you’re such an expert on relationships?” I’d said.

She’d hung up on me, which had been immature, but also a relief. I hadn’t wanted to hear what else she’d had to say.

Linnea had thought it was a great idea. So had Kitty. In Linnea’s case, she’d thought it meant both Soren and I would end up coming back to Stenland at some point. In Kitty’s case, she’d thought it meant neither of us would. I’d begun to see it as a kind of Rorschach test for whether someone was a stayer or a leaver, which of the two they thought Soren and I would end up doing. I knew beyond doubt that we weren’t going back, but I also knew it made me sound cold and uncompromising to say so, so I didn’t. Soren knew, though. He’d known when he’d agreed to be with me again. That was the deal. I was almost entirely sure of it.

Probably because of what my mum had said, I was afraid I would begin to resent the space Soren took. I kept waiting, as we picked up my key and made our way to my apartment. I waited as he unpacked his books on my shelf and his clothes into the wardrobe. I waited as he hung up the painting Kitty had given me half a lifetime ago.

“It’s a very small bed they’ve provided,” Soren said.

“Almost as if they don’t want two people sleeping in it.”

“You can just sleep on top of me. I’ll lie very still.”

“Hot,” I said.

The first night back, we went off campus for dinner. Over pizza—“What kind of pizza costs twenty-eight dollars?” Soren asked—I introduced him to Damian and Bianca and a handful of our other mutual friends. No one mentioned August.

In the bathroom, while we were washing our hands, Bianca said, “Fucking hell, Tess, is everyone on Stenland that hot?”

“No,” I said smugly, “just him.”

When we got back to the table, Damian was asking Soren what he thought about a hard-hitting documentary about the skelds, and Soren was staring blankly at him like he was wondering if he’d misheard.

“Tess says you’re really into Stennish history,” Damian was saying. “I figured you’d be great for something like that.”

“People have done documentaries before,” Soren said.

“But all of them are shitty. No one ever gets the local perspective.”

“Can’t imagine why,” Soren said.

When Damian saw me, his smile faltered. “Just think about it, yeah? You deserve to tell the story your way for once.”

Once the conversation had moved on, Soren glanced at me, but he was too polite to make his feelings any more obvious.

Even when we were alone again, he never said he didn’t like my friends, but I knew he didn’t. I thought it probably had to do with the way they acted like I was engaging in some sort of exciting anthropological study by dating someone who had not even once interned at Goldman Sachs.

We didn’t spend much time with them after that—my friends. I told myself it was a small sacrifice to make to get to spend more time with Soren, who, after all, had no one but me. It didn’t occur to me until later that having no friends but me was worse than having friends about whom he was only lukewarm.

* * *

The calendar said it was autumn, but the air still tasted like summer. I woke up looking at Soren every morning. He sent me on long voyages to the library to collect textbooks and novels and bound theses that almost certainly no one had read in years. My head filled with new equations and programming languages, and my arms ached from sanding bits of metal clean for class projects. And Soren was always there.

For the first time in my life, I felt like an adult: we bought vacuum-sealed packages of gnocchi from Trader Joe’s and bottles of red wine, and we walked hand-in-hand with our reusable grocery bags back home through the eucalyptus trees. When a warm breeze came through, the pale green leaves spun on their axes. Soren had never been so tan. I could just make out the shape of his eyes through his sunglasses as he gazed at the bright sky, the fluttering leaves, the squirrels racing up rainbow-barked trunks. At the apartment, he cooked with a tea towel over one shoulder. I ostensibly did a problem set at the table, but mostly I watched his back—the way his shoulders moved beneath his T-shirt, the way he poured two glasses of wine and wiped a stray drop clean with his thumb.

We had so much sex.

* * *

Most of the campus emptied out for Thanksgiving. Soren and I had no reason to celebrate American Thanksgiving, so we drove to Santa Cruz and walked through the surf.

“I have something for you,” he said. He pulled a cardboard box from the inner pocket of his jacket and handed it to me.

“Oh,” I said, “Toaster Strudel. You shouldn’t have.”

“Open it.”

I did, and inside sat his mother’s necklace—the silver chain and the pendant with its ice-white crystal. I handed him the empty box and fastened the necklace around my throat.

“I didn’t want you to think it was a ring,” he said.

“It’s just a shame there weren’t also Toaster Strudels in there.”

“I’ll buy you more.”

We stood in the ocean until my feet began to ache with cold. I tried to pull him out, but for the longest time, he wouldn’t budge. He just kept staring at the ocean, looking at the waves like he was searching for something he couldn’t find. Eventually, I took off my shirt and threw it at the back of his head. He caught it, realized what it was, and looked back over his shoulder at me.

“Interesting tactic,” he said.

“I’m very cold.”

“Whose fault is that?”

“Can we get burritos?” I asked.

“Can I keep your shirt?”

“Only if you buy the burritos.”

Finally, he stepped out of the ocean after me. Neither of us said I love you. It seemed too obvious to bother.

* * *

When I got out of the shower back at home, I wrapped a towel around myself that was probably too small to try to wrap around myself. I noticed myself doing things like that often: pretending I didn’t notice how low my shirt had slipped down my chest or how high my skirt had ridden up my hips. Maybe it should’ve felt like an act, the way it had with August. Maybe it did feel like an act. I kept doing it anyway. I felt at my most powerful when Soren wanted me and my least powerful when he didn’t.

So when I found Soren sitting on the side of the bed, hunched over, phone pressed to his ear, the annoyance came half a second before the concern. When I heard the voice thinly through the other end—Lukas, sounding panicked—I sat next to Soren and put a hand on his knee. He set his hand on top of mine absently.

“Okay,” Soren said. “Love you too.”

When he put down the phone, I expected him to tell me what the call was about. He didn’t; he just held my hand where it was and looked down at our tangled fingers.

“Lukas?” I asked.

He nodded.

“What’s wrong?”

“The girls,” Soren said. “The skelds.”

I was ashamed how little I’d thought of them since getting back to California; as if they no longer represented me, or my theoretical daughter, now that I wasn’t in Stenland. I nodded, and slowly, haltingly, Soren told me the story.

It was the last week of their time as skelds. Wasn’t it always? The worst always seemed to happen right at the very end. Right when you started to think you’d escaped.

They’d been making dinner. Heating up a casserole that one of the keepers had left at the door. One of the girls was taking the dish out of the oven, but it was heavier and hotter than she’d expected, hot even through the potholders, so she’d dropped it and the glass and molten food landed on one of the other girl’s feet. Mia. Eva’s little sister. Mia wasn’t wearing any shoes, not even socks, and her feet were burned and bones were broken. She passed out from the pain, but the other little girls had been good, so good, calling their keepers and dutifully wrapping blinds around their eyes and around Mia’s.

They hadn’t wanted to take her out of Ramna Skaill, but there were so many tiny bone fragments that she needed surgery. So one of the keepers, an aunt, found an old pair of ski goggles and covered the lenses in fabric and secured it so it would definitely not come off. When Mia woke up—I kept imagining it, the darkness, the sterile lemon smell, the beep beep beep of machinery—she didn’t remember what she was. She’d torn the goggles off her face before anyone had realized she was awake.

There were three people in the room at the time. One was Mia’s father, who had gone to sleep with a blindfold around his eyes as a precaution. While he’d slept, it had slid up his forehead, exposing his eyes. Of course they’d opened when his daughter screamed. And now he was dead.

The other two people, a senior nurse and a new student, had come to change the bandages on Mia’s feet. They’d been keeping their eyes carefully averted from the girl, just to be safe, but when a child shrieks, you look. You just look. It’s so hard not to.

The student managed to shut her eyes again just in time. Mia had looked at the senior nurse first.

Soren said, “Tess, I’m really sorry.”

He told me that Linnea had survived, and Anna had not.

The funerals would be in three days’ time.

Soren and I spent the night curled around each other in our too-small bed with my phone, set to Speaker, sitting on the mattress. It was hours to dawn in Stenland, but everyone was awake. We talked to my dad, to Linnea and Henrik, to Kitty, to Elin. Everyone was crying. Someone would say, That poor little girl . Then someone would say, But if she’d just kept on the mask…

My spine pressed against the curve of Soren’s chest and stomach. He ran his hands through my hair until it was smooth and fine. None of us talked all that much, not on either end of the phone. We just sat together in our bubble of mourning, Soren and me and our family on the other side of the world. You could escape Stenland, but you couldn’t escape being Stennish.

Between calls, he got up to get me a glass of water. When he settled himself around me again, he called me kere in his softest voice.

“Please don’t,” I said.

“Don’t what?”

“Bring it here.”

“Stennish?” he asked.

“Why can’t you just hate it already?”

I felt his forehead press against the back of my neck. His muffled answer: “I don’t know.”

“But your parents…”

“I don’t know, okay?”

It wasn’t. “You should hate the island and the curse and my mum and me. You just should.”

But then Kitty’s mum called, checking in, so he never ended up responding. Finally, when my phone was dead and it was just the two of us again, I told Soren that I would never let my daughter set foot in Stenland.

“Yeah,” he said. It was only when I heard his voice that I realized he was crying. “Yeah, I know.”