Page 27 of A Curse for the Homesick

MAPS

2018

After Soren left, I went home and sat on my bed that still smelled like him. I waited to cry but didn’t. Eventually, I called Bianca and asked if she wanted to go to a party. She said sure.

The party was loud, dark, and sticky. In the comparative peace of the row house’s kitchen, I told Bianca that Soren and I were done.

“Thank god, honestly,” she said. “I didn’t want to say anything, but he was so controlling. We never saw you anymore.”

I didn’t think this was fair, but I didn’t feel like being fair to Soren, so I said, “Yeah, true.”

“It’s a good thing,” she said. “Why is it only women who are expected to sacrifice their careers? Like, hello, go back to 1930.”

“We should dance,” I said. We went back to the loud and dark and sticky part of the house and danced. I hadn’t been to a frat party since the winter of my junior year; I’d asked Soren if he’d wanted to go to one, just to see what it was like, and he’d laughed at me, not meanly, but like he’d thought it was a joke. I’d felt embarrassed at the time because I liked dissolving in the loud/dark/sticky of parties.

Someone slid behind me and put their hands on my waist. I could feel their breath in my ear. For a moment, I had the thought that it was Soren—that he’d come back from the airport to tell me he couldn’t live without me. Because I was imagining Soren, I didn’t turn around. I wanted to show Soren that I was disinterested in his return; I was not grieving. But then the voice in my ear said, “Hey, Tess,” and it was not Soren’s Stennish accent or his particular way of saying my name; it was a smooth Connecticut accent, and it belonged to August.

I spun, and there he was. In my ear, holding me close still, he said, “I heard you broke up with your farmer.”

It seemed impossible that he could have heard this so quickly, but then again, Bianca had never stopped being friends with him.

Maybe it was the lights, which were strobing, but for a minute I thought August’s face was melting. He looked like a photo with the sharpness turned all the way up: I could see his pores, gaping black holes in sweat-shimmering skin. Had his eyes always been so close together? Had his teeth always been so small, like Tic Tacs?

He pressed his body against mine. I was too surprised to move away. In my ear, he was saying, “I really missed you, you know that?”

It struck me as remarkable that he thought I would be pleased at his attention. For a moment, I wondered: Am I supposed to be pleased? But his face, it was melting, and he would not stop pressing his hips against me like he was eager to prove just how much he really missed me.

A hand closed around my elbow.

“Oh my god,” a woman’s voice—not Bianca’s—said. “I’ve been looking for you everywhere!”

Then I was being tugged away from August and out of the crowd. It felt like being pulled out of a riptide.

She was tiny, and she stood like a ballerina, her toes out to the sides. Even her hair was pulled into a bun that looked like something a dancer would wear. Her skin was light brown in the strobing light, and she didn’t seem to have any pores at all.

“You looked like you needed help,” she shouted into my ear.

“Thank you,” I said.

“That guy’s a fucking creep. He’s in one of my classes this quarter. I’m AJ.”

“Tess.”

Someone screamed her name as they ricocheted down the stairs past us, and I got the sense that I knew of AJ. There was this term people used, the “Stanford 500,” for the five hundred people who knew everyone and who everyone knew. I was whatever the opposite of that was. But AJ was Stanford 500, or maybe Stanford 50. I’d seen her tagged in Facebook things and on posters around campus, for plays or student government or a cappella shows.

“I’m actually about to go to another party,” AJ said. “Want to come?”

“I should find my friend,” I said. But then I remembered that Bianca had told August about Soren. And I said, “Actually, never mind. Sure. Let’s go.”

That was how I started dating AJ Maines.

Delayed grieving: like packing your brain in bubble wrap. For three months, I thought it meant I must’ve never loved Soren after all.

* * *

I expected Kitty to be ecstatic over AJ; she wasn’t.

“Though I am vindicated that you are embracing the angry bisexual I have always known you to be,” she said over the phone, “I was pretty excited about this whole ‘you legally become my cousin’ thing.”

“Take it up with Soren,” I said.

“I have.”

“What did he say?”

“Oh, no. I’m not being your go-between. You two want to talk, call each other.”

We didn’t.

* * *

Right before AJ and I slept together for the first time, I started to panic. She had never slept with a man, and I had slept with almost exclusively men, and though she didn’t try to make me feel bad about this, she and her friends all laughed about it in this, Oh, aren’t you in for a treat way. It wasn’t a treat, really. It was mostly similar to the first time having sex with anyone, which was to say, not as comfortable or good as with someone you knew well, but kind of exciting anyway. I wondered if there was something wrong with me for not enjoying it more.

AJ had a giant map above her bed. It was the kind where you could scratch off countries you’d visited. I felt like I’d see the little, unscratched shape of Stenland and start counting the finger-lengths between there and here. I never looked. I never, ever looked. Until I did.

* * *

AJ was in the communal bathroom down the hall. I was lying on her bed scrolling through the Instagram feed of the self-driving car start-up where I would be working, courtesy of Carla Tapia. The map was watching me. I could feel it. It throbbed like a beating heart in my peripheral vision.

I opened my own Instagram profile to distract myself and looked at all the little squares of my face. At formal! At Bay to Breakers! Since starting to date AJ, I had restyled myself. I wore makeup. I lost weight. I thought about how I didn’t look as pretty as she did in photos we took together. In those photos, she was dressed more femininely, in skirts and sundresses, and I wore flannels and black jeans. I’d always worn flannels and black jeans, but now I wore them almost exclusively, like a statement. AJ said it was my aesthetic. It was closer to my aesthetic than whatever aesthetic I’d had with August, when I’d been playing my Regency-era character, but I was still conscious of the clothes as part of an act. Maybe dating was just trying on different characters until you found one you could pretend to be for the rest of your life.

I looked up at the map.

I couldn’t help it.

Stenland wasn’t there.

The bed creaked when I stood on the mattress. My eyes were level with the North Atlantic. North of mainland Scotland, I found Orkney, and north of Orkney, I found Shetland, and north of Shetland there was nothing, just ocean all the way to the Arctic. I pressed my finger to the place where Stenland was not.

That was how AJ found me.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“Where’s Stenland?” I said.

“Oh, is it not on the map? Huh. I guess they left it off.”

“Where’s Stenland?” I said again.

I think she answered; my ears were full of static.

There was a chance I had lost my mind completely. Maybe I’d made it all up; there was no Stenland, no skeld curse, no Soren or Kitty or Linnea. I was from somewhere else, Cheshire or Kansas, and there was another family, another life waiting for me there. So much static, and black pixels growing cancerously across my vision.

If Soren was not a real person, I did not want to be alive.

That was the thought that emerged fully formed in my head. I heard it like someone else was speaking it to me, word for word. If Soren was not a real person, then I had never really felt the things humans were meant to feel—love and sorrow and anguish and peace.

This would mark the end of my relationship with AJ, though I didn’t know it yet. She was kind about it in the ensuing days, but I nonetheless stopped behaving like the person she’d thought she knew, the person I had so studiously become.

I went back to my room and found the sunstone necklace in the otherwise empty top drawer of my desk. I read the Wikipedia page on Stenland all the way through, just to make sure. I looked at Google and found Stenland where it was supposed to be, the last thing in the North Atlantic until you reached the Arctic.

Stenland was real, which meant Soren was real, which meant I was too. I had loved him and he had loved me and we hadn’t loved each other enough. I had been pregnant with his child. That had happened. His child, his genes, his eyes, his smile—all inside me, like we might’ve been something permanent. Our daughter would never live in Stenland. I would not let her. She would end up killing her father. I would end up killing her father. We would be monsters. And he would be dead.

I cried in the frantic way children cry. The way that feels like you might die. That was the way I cried for Soren. But worse were the slow, heaving, nauseous gasps that came after. That was the way I cried for the person I was with him, who, in retrospect, had not been a character at all.