Page 28 of A Curse for the Homesick

GALLANT

2019

Elin Fell died around the same time Noah asked me if I wanted to date, like, officially. I felt anxious because I hadn’t dated anyone since AJ and was afraid it would end the same way. I didn’t know about Elin at the time.

It was a few days before Christmas, and we were eating takeout Thai food in my kitchen. My apartment—where I had lived for a year and a half since graduating—was the second floor of a Victorian town house in the Mission. I shared it with three other Stanford grads, but all of them were consultants, usually traveling, so it felt mostly mine. There was one big window at the edge of the kitchen and on the sill, a row of miniature succulents and potted herbs. I sat on the counter next to my tidy little chrome espresso machine and ate pad see ew directly from the container.

Noah got a second beer from the fridge, and while his back was turned, he asked the question casually, like he wasn’t particularly fussed whether I said yes or no.

“Officially,” I repeated.

“Yeah. You could meet my parents. I could list you as my emergency contact. You know—officially.”

“Oh,” I said.

Noah sipped his beer and shrugged with one shoulder.

We’d been together-ish, unofficially, for six months. Like me, he lived in a rental house with former Stanford classmates whom he only saw once every two weeks. We’d known each other from Oxford, so he’d started coming over for dinner whenever either of us had been bored or lonely. The third time it had happened, when we’d been watching a shitty horror film on my couch, he’d said, “Would it ruin things if we slept together?”

“You’re kind of my only friend on this continent right now.”

“Really? We don’t have to.”

“No,” I said, “sure.”

So for six months, things had proceeded the same way: Noah came over for dinner, or I went to his place; we slept together; he was still kind of my only friend on that continent.

He took another long sip of his beer, looking at me over the top of the amber bottle.

“You want me to meet your parents?” I asked.

“Sure. Come with me for New Year’s.”

“To Chicago?”

“Yeah. It’ll be fucking freezing. My mom will ask you invasive questions about our sex life. We’ll laugh about it later.”

With his free hand, Noah tossed the bottle cap up into the air, watched it spin, and caught it again. It made a metallic ting every time it launched off his thumb. He had approximately zero body fat, so when he tilted his chin up, I could see all the bones in his jaw. His eyes were fixed on the bottle cap. By this point, I knew him well enough to see he was nervous and pretending not to be.

“Why?” I asked.

“Why will my mom ask you about our sex life? I really wish I could tell you.”

“No, why do you want to date?”

He set the cap on the counter. “We’re basically dating already. I have a toothbrush here. Linnea loves me.”

“Linnea loves everyone,” I said.

“Kitty tolerates me.”

“That is rarer.”

Noah had met both of them on FaceTime, and Kitty in person when she’d visited in October. Linnea had said it was wonderful, so wonderful that I had someone in my life, and Noah was actually so cute, wasn’t he? Kitty had said he was fine, if I really wanted to date a tech bro. Kitty and her parents were in New Zealand for Christmas. Linnea was in Stenland. A few hours prior, she’d sent me a photo of her and Henrik at their house—the black windows, the tree glittering with white lights and red ornaments. They were drinking mugs of mulled wine, and Linnea was smiling at the camera, but Henrik was smiling at Linnea. I looked out my own window and saw the dusty gray sky of the city. No snow, no frost, no wind; just the lights of cars looking for parking.

“It’s not that I don’t want to,” I said. “I just don’t want us to do this because it’s the path of least resistance.”

“It’s definitely not,” Noah said. “You’re very resistant. Like when I try to make you coffee and you pour it down the drain when you think I’m not looking.”

“Look, you’re very cute, but you make a shit coffee.”

He gave me this smile, the uneven Noah smile I had grown, without realizing, to love. “I guess I was also thinking that it’d suck if you had to be alone for Christmas.”

“You don’t even celebrate Christmas.”

“Yeah, but you do.”

Being asked to be someone’s girlfriend, officially, made me think of Soren. I had not spoken to him in almost two years, but his ghost often appeared when I was with Noah: when we were watching a film where the main characters confessed their love, or when Noah asked where the dishwasher tablets were in his own home. When Noah did that, I thought of Soren, who did not need to be told how long to microwave his leftovers or not to pour the detergent directly onto the clothes or where to find the dishwasher tablets when they were, obviously, under the sink. But if Noah was less mature than Soren, he was also quicker to laugh, more easygoing than AJ, kinder than August.

I said yeah, okay, could I think about it? Noah said no stress.

* * *

I woke up before him the next morning and checked my phone while I was making coffee. That was when I saw the text from Kitty, sent at three in the morning, telling me that Soren’s grandmother had just died. I didn’t stop to consider before I dialed.

The espresso machine hissed. I leaned my forehead against the cabinet in the cloud of coffee-scented steam. In my head, Elin was saying: I have a phone call for the very gallant young man who offered to sleep on the couch tonight.

The ringing stopped; someone picked up.

“Soren?” I said. “I’m so—”

“Tess, it’s me, Henrik.”

“Where’s Soren? What happened?”

Henrik paused. “It was cancer. It’d been—it’s been coming for a while.”

“Oh.”

There was someone in the background—a man’s voice, faint, but I couldn’t tell who it was for sure.

“Listen,” Henrik said quietly. “I know you just want to help, but I think it’s probably better if you just…let him be.”

“Right.” My throat felt dry and scraped. “Of course.”

“I should—I have to go. Talk soon.”

The call ended. I stared into the steam, blinking and blinking and blinking. Then I called Kitty, who didn’t pick up, and Linnea, who didn’t pick up, and I would’ve called Henrik next if he hadn’t just told me to go away. The first hazy beams of morning light were streaking through the windows, yellower and brighter than a December had any right to be. Outside, a car drove past playing loud Christmas music. A plane roared overhead. When I looked at the white knuckles clenched around my phone, I was sure they didn’t belong to me.

I typed: flights Stenland

I got to the part where I was supposed to enter my credit card information when Linnea called me back.

“You heard?” she asked by way of greeting.

“I’m coming home.”

“What? Tess—”

“I’m booking a flight.”

“I love you, Tessie,” she said. “But you can’t do this to him.”

“Do what?”

“It’s—I thought you two were done hurting each other.”

I blinked again, more slowly this time, and wiped my eyes too hard with the heel of my hand. I told her right, of course, sorry, and she promised she’d call back soon. It wasn’t until after the call had ended that I thought to ask if she’d known Elin had been ill all along and if she’d chosen not to tell me because she’d been afraid of what I would do. Come back, hurt Soren, leave again—was that all I ever did? It was the first time I realized that I had succeeded: Stenland was no longer my home. It no longer mattered that I had loved Elin too. I had ceded my rights—that was what Linnea thought—when I’d chosen to leave Stenland behind. I closed the tab on my phone with the flights, and then I went to the bathroom and stood in the shower until my skin was bright pink. I remade the coffees, two this time, and I brought one to Noah in bed.

“I was planning to sleep for three to six more hours,” he said.

There had been a part of me, I realized, that still believed life might pull me back to Stenland, and now finally that part had been broken. No one was trying to drag me back anymore; I had won, for whatever winning was worth.

I sat on the edge of the bed and smoothed Noah’s hair from his forehead, cataloguing his face for what felt like the first time: his sleepy eyes, the elegant angles of his cheekbones, the smooth tan glow of his skin. Lovely and funny and calm and easy—I could fall in love with Noah, if only I let myself.

“I got some bad news from home this morning,” I said.

He propped himself up on one elbow. “Are you okay? Do you want to talk about it?”

“Not right now,” I said.

“I’m here if you change your mind.”

And he was there. Had been there for a long time now, and I had not been seeing him. I set my finger under his chin and tilted his mouth to meet mine, and he kissed me back slowly and sweetly, like honey.

“I think we should date,” I said. “Officially.”

“Whoa, whoa,” he said. “Let’s not be hasty with labels.”

“I always underestimate how annoying you can be.”

“Annoying, or charming and funny? You know what, who cares. For you, I’ll be all three.”

He wrapped his arms around me and pulled me into the soft burrow of the comforter, my back curled against his chest. “This makes me happy,” he said quietly, and he lightly kissed my shoulder, right where the fractured bone had stitched itself together again.