Page 26 of A Curse for the Homesick

EVERYTHING ELSE IN THE WORLD

2018

We didn’t go back for the funerals. I asked my dad if he wanted me to come home for Christmas, but he surprised me by saying he was going to stay with my mum in Edinburgh. I didn’t think there was anything romantic about it. But I was relieved to hear it anyway—that I didn’t have to go back to that place. That island.

And life kept going.

In January, Lukas flew out from Stenland, and Kitty and Georgia from England. I was almost certain Kitty’s parents had paid for Lukas’s ticket. Linnea and Henrik had wanted to come, but flights were too expensive.

Georgia had insisted we find some tall Californian trees and sleep under them. We spent the first few hours shuffling uncomfortably through grief and awkwardness, through Soren trying to talk about home and Lukas changing the conversation to anything else. But there was solace among the leviathan trees. You got the sense that your problems were small and your life was short, so why not just breathe? We all began to unfurl, then to curl back into each other, rediscovering our old rhythms.

On the first evening of our camping trip, we got back from a hike to discover a black bear pawing through the wreckage of our campsite. It looked up at us, startled, and Kitty said, “Maybe he’s looking for marmalade.”

Lukas said, “If that’s the last thing I hear before I die, I’ll be gutted.”

“Perhaps literally,” Kitty said.

There had been a sign near the entrance to the campsite warning about bears and how you shouldn’t leave food or deodorant or feminine hygiene products where a bear could reach them, including your tent or your car because apparently bears could smell through steel. I hadn’t paid much attention to these warnings because being afraid of bears felt fanciful, like being afraid of quicksand or dragons.

We backed away slowly from the bear, who was making a low, rumbling growl. I unlocked the rental car.

That night, we’d meant to make burrito bowls and s’mores over a campfire. Instead, I drove us to the nearest service station, where we bought seven sleeves of Oreos. When we got back to the campsite, the bear was gone. We set the tents back up as well as we could, which mostly involved throwing things away.

“We go back to civilization now, right?” Lukas asked.

“Nah,” Georgia said. “What are the odds it comes back?”

“Medium?” he said.

We started feeling queasy after about five Oreos, but Lukas made us eat all of them so the bear wouldn’t have anything left to smell.

“Besides us,” Kitty pointed out.

Lukas decided to sleep in the car. Kitty and Georgia took the tent the bear had ignored, which left Soren and me in a tent with two broken poles and a hole in the side that we fastened shut with a hair tie. We curled in our sleeping bags facing each other. Soren was illuminated by the angled beam of a flashlight. He was wearing a gray beanie pulled over the tips of his ears.

“Remember when we got attacked by a predatory mammal in Stenland?” Soren said.

“There are no predatory mammals in Stenland,” I said.

“Exactly.”

His visitor visa lasted two more months. He’d applied for master’s programs across the US and the UK; I’d applied for jobs everywhere that might even theoretically hire me. It had occurred to me that the visa process might be simpler if we were married, but that seemed like a stupid thing to bring up, so I didn’t.

“Are you tired?” I asked.

“I just saw a bear, then ate fourteen Oreos. Not really.”

“If only there was some way to amuse ourselves for a while.”

“Good point.” He turned away from me for a moment, rummaging around in his bag. He retrieved a book, which he proceeded to open and start reading under the glow of the flashlight.

“That’s not what I had in mind,” I said.

“Surely I don’t know what you’re talking about.” He flipped a page.

“I can tell you’re not actually reading.”

He flipped another page. “I am reading. About construction techniques in Neolithic Orkney.”

“Is that a euphemism for porn?”

“No. Sorry.”

As it turned out, the tents were not as soundproof as previously assumed; from a few feet away, Kitty yelled: “Soren brought porn on a camping trip?”

“I didn’t know they made analogue porn anymore,” Georgia said.

Soren lowered his book. “I bet John Aubrey didn’t have to live like this.”

The next morning, we packed up the scraps of our dew-soaked tent. The air was so thick with fog, you couldn’t see where the trees ended. Milky beams of light slotted through the branches as the sun began to break. Soren wrapped his arms around me from behind as I was stuffing the tent into the back of the car. “Coffee?” he said into my shoulder.

“Probably not until we find that service station again,” I said.

“No, I made coffee. With the gas kettle thing.”

I turned in his arms to face him. “You brought instant coffee?”

“I brought a pour-over and some filters.”

“Have I ever told you that you are a very handsome man whose propensity for reading about Neolithic construction techniques is actually quite admirable?”

He sniffed. The tip of his nose was pink from cold. “It doesn’t hurt to hear it again.”

I had the thought, loud enough to be jarring: this is the happiest I have ever been. And then, just as abruptly, the natural follow-up: this is the happiest I will ever be.

* * *

When we got back to campus, I bought Lukas a twenty-dollar acai bowl. He said he never wanted to leave. I think it was supposed to come out like a joke, but his voice cracked on the word leave. When we dropped Lukas at the airport, Soren spent the whole time quizzing him about how things were going on the croft. The men they’d hired to help in Soren’s absence? The sheep? Elin? Lukas kept changing the subject.

The last thing he said to me before he left, he said in a whisper while he hugged me, a little too long and a little too tight. “It’s better going back knowing you’re here, you know?” He didn’t say it loud enough for Soren to hear. Like the two of us were in a little club—those who didn’t love Stenland.

Kitty and Georgia flew back to London the next day. I reminded Kitty to text Linnea once in a while; she promised she would.

Once it was just Soren and me again, he seemed more subdued. We fell back into our normal routine: I did problem sets, applied for jobs, swam. He read, applied to universities, went on trail runs that lasted hours. Every night, we went to sleep in the same bed, and every morning, we woke up facing each other.

A month before Soren’s visa was due to expire, he booked a flight home. He booked it for just two days before the expiration date, which I took as a good sign. When I asked if he’d be coming back as soon as possible, he said, “I mean, I guess, why not?”

* * *

Three days before Soren’s flight to Stenland, one of my professors asked me to stay after class. Everyone called him Tim, though as far as I could tell that was neither his first nor his last name. Before starting Tim’s class, I’d been warned that he only paid attention to how well you did on the first project and gave you the same grade on everything thereafter, so I made sure I did well on the first project. I was pretty sure he liked me despite the fact that I was a decidedly middling student in most regards.

“Did you ever meet Carla Tapia?” Tim asked without preamble.

I shook my head.

“Really? She graduated last year. Also ME. She’s working at a self-driving car start-up now.”

“The name sounds familiar,” I said, even though it didn’t.

“She was one of my advisees,” he said. “She was tearing her hair out this time last year trying to figure out if she could get a job that would sponsor her—she’s from Chile—and I know you’re from Scotland, so I figured maybe you were doing the same.”

I decided now was not the time to inform him about the Stennish Treaty of Secession. “I am,” I said. “No one’s getting back to me.”

“Email Carla,” Tim said. “Tell her I told you to. I know her company’s hiring—we had coffee last week.”

I told him I would and stumbled through my thank-yous. On the way back to my dorm, I felt like I was being propelled upward—like when you’re swimming right on someone’s toes and their wake slips under your stomach, buoying you to the surface. I had never been so glad Soren lived in my room. I had never wanted to tell anyone something so badly.

When I got back, the room was empty. His running shoes were gone. I sat at my laptop and searched around for a Carla Tapia in the alumni directory. I drafted a friendly email, removed two of four exclamation marks, and pressed Send. Still no Soren. I fidgeted over my problem set. Ate dinner and set aside a plate for Soren. Carla wrote back—oh, god—and she wanted to get coffee! Coffee like an interview? I said yes, sure, absolutely, and I left in all my exclamation marks. Soren still had not returned.

I ended up drifting off around midnight, still fully dressed. When I heard the door open, I watched Soren through my eyelashes. His shirt and shorts were soaked through with sweat, and his hair was plastered against his head. I didn’t say anything because I felt like I was punishing him, not sharing my good news because he’d taken so long to return and hadn’t intuited that I’d wanted to tell him something. I pretended I was asleep.

Soren walked very quietly to the desk chair and sat down in it. I watched him unlace his shoes. But once they were unlaced, he just stayed like that, eyes trained on the floor, head in his hands. He was breathing so hard—from the run, I thought—that the silhouette of his body shook even though he never made a sound.

I should’ve stopped pretending to be asleep, and I should’ve asked him if he was okay. Instead, I imagined laying a circle of flat stones around myself like the ones in Fairhowe Cairn. A perfect, even ring turning into a perfect, even wall.

That was when I knew he was not coming back.

* * *

Like being in the middle of a car crash, time slowed down in the two days before Soren’s flight to give me full opportunity to realize how obvious it had been all along.

When I woke up the next morning after an uneven sleep, Soren was already gone. He’d texted me: Going to Philz. Want coffee? The message was already an hour old. I was angry that he used a period instead of a comma in his text even though the period was more correct. He had told me once he could not abide a comma splice. At the time, I’d thought it was funny.

I opened the top drawer of the desk. Soren’s drawer. I never went through it, not even when I’d glimpsed an envelope in there with his name written in a curling, feminine hand. The envelope was still there. I pulled the card out of it, feeling mean and destructive. It was a birthday card from Linnea’s little sister, Saffi. She’d said she hoped Soren got to eat lots of strawberry ice cream ( your favorite!) and signed it xxxxxx. The card was only five sentences long. There were two comma splices.

Also in the drawer, Soren had a neat bundle of traveling paperwork—a printed ticket, a Stennish travel declaration, all things that existed happily on his phone but that he’d chosen to print anyway, as if he was terrified of being turned away at the airport, as if that would be the worst thing.

I found a notebook—one of mine, the paper gridded instead of lined. I wanted to find diary entries and love poetry. Instead, I found notes, all written in a self-consciously tidy hand, as if he imagined someone riffling through these papers for evidence of his brilliance.

Grimm’s law

Posited by Jacob Grimm (of Brothers fame)

Linguistic theory that certain letters/sounds shift to other specific letters/sounds in Germanic languages

P becomes f and t becomes th, for example, so Latin pater becomes English father

Languages layering on top of each other… Like archaeology—buildings on top of buildings, stories on top of stories…

Palimpsests all the way down

Below that, he’d started doodling: little sketches of stones slotted on top of stones, a cairn covered in dirt. I didn’t know the word palimpsest , which annoyed me, so I looked it up on my phone. Parchment whose text has been erased (through scraping or washing) either fully or partially so the page can be used again.

The desk drawer rattled when I shut it. I started angrily taking off my pajamas and angrily putting on my jeans. When it came time for me to leave for class, he still had not returned. I left the sunstone necklace on the desk, as if I’d forgotten to put it on.

I couldn’t concentrate during Tim’s lecture. I kept thinking about that word, palimpsest , and about the amorphous anger I felt building toward Soren. Anger was a palimpsest—a feeling on top of a feeling on top of a feeling. It didn’t matter why you’d been angry last time, if it was for the same reason or a new one. It just mattered that the anger was there: layer upon layer, building over time.

I was angry that he hadn’t told me what the word palimpsest meant. I was angry that he didn’t think I would be clever enough to get it or that he didn’t think it wouldn’t have meant something to me the way it meant something to him.

* * *

He was gone again when I got back home. So were his running shoes. When we’d first moved in, I’d been grateful to learn that my roommate had mostly planned to live with her boyfriend on the other side of campus, but now I longed for her company—for anyone’s company other than my own. I banged around the kitchen loudly making dinner, even though the only person I was annoying was myself. Around the time the pasta was done cooking, I’d worn myself out and begun to feel childish. I poured two glasses of wine and sat at the table to wait.

It was because of what my mum had said—that Soren would suffocate me. All this time, I’d been on high alert for signs of my own discomfort. Selfishly, it hadn’t occurred to me that Soren might be the one to leave me. I still thought of myself as the leaver.

By the time he got home, the pasta was cold. He was soaked in sweat again, a dark line down the middle of his chest, cleaving his heart in two. I didn’t understand how he hadn’t hurt himself yet, hadn’t run his feet clean off. Sometimes it seemed like he was trying to. He examined the pasta on the stove.

“Just leave it.” I was so tired. “It won’t be any good anymore.”

He scooped himself a bowl anyway and came to join me at the table. He lifted the mostly empty bottle of wine. “Jesus,” he said.

“You could’ve texted me.”

“You knew I was out for a run,” he said. “It’s not like I have anywhere else to go.”

I didn’t have anything to say to that. I drank the rest of my wine even though it was starting to taste sour and my head was already throbbing. He ate silently and methodically and did not complain that the pasta and the sauce had congealed in the pot.

“I got in,” he said abruptly.

“To a master’s program?”

He nodded.

“Which one?”

“All of them,” he said.

Which meant Edinburgh, Oxford, Trinity, Berkeley, UW, Stenland. He’d applied to slightly different programs at each of them— None more likely than the others to make me any money , he’d joked—depending on what they offered.

“Oh,” I said, feeling lightheaded. I wondered how long he’d known, but I was afraid to ask. Afraid to sound shrill. “Congratulations. That’s great.”

His fork shrieked against the plate, and he winced. “Thanks.”

“And you’re leaning toward…?” I said.

“I might defer a year,” he said. “Just to make sure the croft’s okay.”

The words hit me with a sharp sting of betrayal. He wouldn’t look at me, like he knew what expression I’d be wearing and didn’t want to bother seeing it.

“I got a job interview,” I said; even I thought my voice sounded too combative. “At a self-driving car company.”

“That’s great, Tess.”

Never before had two people sounded less happy for each other.

“It’s based in SF,” I said. “So, if you went to Berkeley…”

He kept his gaze fixed on his plate.

I leaned back in my chair and crossed my arms.

He got up, did the dishes, and got into the shower. We didn’t even say good-night to each other.

As I lay in bed, trying to find a centimeter of space on the tiny bed where I would not touch Soren, I wondered if people were doomed to always act the age they’d been when their relationship had started. If we stagnated in love but grew with heartbreak. Here we were, Soren and I, and we had not changed at all.

* * *

The day of the flight, I borrowed Damian’s brand-new Tesla to drive Soren to the airport. We made it halfway there before I couldn’t take it anymore. Soren won. Fine.

“Were you ever going to tell me?” I said.

“Tell you what?”

“You’re not coming back.”

A pause. “I was still making up my mind.”

“You could’ve told me that there was something to make your mind up about.”

He leaned his head against the window. Finally, quietly, he said: “I’m so tired.”

“Maybe that’s because you go on four-hour runs to avoid being in the same room as me.”

“I hate it here, Tess. Is that what you want me to say? I hate the way people look at me, like I don’t belong, and the way they talk to me, like I’m an idiot. I hate that it’s so bright and dusty all the time. I hate that this car costs more than I’ll ever have in my bank account, and I hate that all anyone here talks about is how hard they’re working all the goddamn time. I hate that this is not Stenland. I hate that I am not in Stenland. And I hate you a little bit for making me choose.”

I kept my eyes fixed forward on the road. My hands tightened around the wheel. “And I hate you a little bit,” I said, “for loving an island that turned those girls into monsters.”

“No one but you would call them monsters,” he said.

“I’m sure they call themselves that.”

“Don’t lecture me about the curse. Not me. Of all people.”

“You’re right,” I said. “You should be mad. You should hate me more than a little bit.”

“Please stop.”

“I’d rather you just say it for once. That my mum killed your parents. You never talk about it, but it’s always just sitting there.”

“That was never your fault. And even if I thought it was, once, I forgave you years ago. You’re the one still holding on to that.”

“I don’t think that’s the truth,” I said.

“Sometimes,” he said, “I wonder if you only want to be with me because you want absolution.”

I turned to look at him. His head was still pressed against the glass. I said: “Sometimes I wonder if you only want to be with me because forgiving me means you’ve forgiven Stenland.”

We made it all the way to the airport before either of us spoke again. I gestured to the directional signs—drop-off or parking?—and Soren said tiredly, “Just drop me off.”

I pulled the car up to the curb. Soren unbuckled his seat belt.

“So you’re not going to go to Berkeley,” I said.

“Can we figure this out later?”

“It sounds like you’ve already figured it out on your own.”

We looked at each other. I knew his face better than I knew my own. Every angle and plane and hollow of it. I felt possessive, jealous, livid, lonely, humiliated. I felt tired.

“I guess I have,” he said.

“Is this an ultimatum?” I asked. “I move back to Stenland, or we’re over?”

“It’s not an ultimatum. I already know what you’d say.”

“Oh.”

We were done, then. I had known it was coming; I hadn’t really known , though.

“So,” I said, “you don’t love me anymore.”

“Don’t. You know that’s not it.” He shut his eyes. Exhaled unsteadily. “I’ll always love you, Tess. I just thought I could love you more than everything else in the world put together. And I can’t.”

He climbed out of the car. Collected his suitcases. Went through the double doors and didn’t look back.

I realized, once he was gone, that my hand was on my throat. I was touching his mother’s sunstone necklace. For a moment, I considered calling him so I could give it back, so I could tell him not to go.

Instead, I drove away.

I would not see him again for four years.