Page 29 of A Curse for the Homesick

PATTERNS OF LIGHT

2022

On Halloween in Ramna Skaill, I found Kitty in the kitchen stirring a pot of something that smelled like spices and alcohol.

“What,” I said, “the fuck.”

“I’m being festive.”

“What are you wearing?”

She plucked her beaded dress. “I’m Zelda Fitzgerald.”

“Because…?”

“It’s Halloween. Here, try this.” She pushed a mug into my hands. It smelled even more like alcohol in close quarters. “I also sent for turnips because I thought we could carve lanterns.”

She went back to stirring. I sniffed the cup, but didn’t drink.

“To my original question,” I said.

“‘What the fuck,’” she said, “yes. Let’s all make fun of Kitty for embracing the holiday spirit.”

I kept staring at her. She hummed something off-key. A minute later, Linnea ran through the kitchen, her bare feet slapping against the stone floor. She hugged Kitty from behind. “You dressed up!” she said. “Oh my god! That’s so earnest and dorky.”

“See?” Kitty told me. “That was the proper response. Take notes for future reference.”

Linnea asked me what I was dressed as, and if it was Grumpy Woman in Pajamas. Kitty suggested I could be Scrooge in some sort of modern, feminist Halloween interpretation of A Christmas Carol. I sipped Kitty’s drink and told her it tasted like cinnamon rubbing alcohol. She curtsied.

I thought it was funny that they thought I was grumpy. I was afraid to admit I was the opposite.

Noah was going to a Halloween party with some of his friends. They’d all dressed up as characters from a TV show I hadn’t seen. It was still lunchtime there, but they’d started drinking already. I knew because he’d sent me a series of photos of red cups and people I only sort of recognized.

“Am I old and boring if I think this looks horrible?” I asked, showing the others my phone.

Kitty said yes. Linnea said no.

“How is Noah, by the way?” Kitty asked.

“Noah is fine,” I said. “He is always fine.”

* * *

Sometimes Henrik ate dinner with us, and sometimes Lukas. Soren made himself known only by way of silent deliveries: groceries, books, prepared food of considerably less questionable origins than Lukas’s. I talked to my dad most afternoons, if only for a few minutes, even if we didn’t have anything to say.

On Halloween, I called my mum: unprompted, with no agenda, just to hear her. I’d been thinking of another Halloween, back before Soren’s parents had died. I must’ve been seven or eight, and I’d wanted to go to the costume party Kitty had been throwing, but my mum had dragged me to the cultural center to watch the harvest ceremony. I remember standing with her, impatient, in the swiftly falling darkness. The cultural center was turf-roofed and surrounded by concentric, low stone walls. A bonfire had snapped and hissed. The man from the cultural center had told us a story I’d heard before but hadn’t cared about—something about trolls and keeping the sheep safe over winter—that had already sounded young and childish to my ears. I’d told my mum I wanted to go to Kitty’s, and she’d hushed me.

Then the monsters had arrived. I think they’d just been high school kids, but I hadn’t known that. They’d been covered in long black tendrils of seaweed. Driftwood masks had hidden their faces. They’d leaped and laughed in the flickering bonfire light, and I’d felt something move in my chest, a feeling between pride and fear that I would come to think of as distinctly Stennish. When it had been over, my mum had driven me to Kitty’s and asked if I’d had fun at the ceremony, and I’d said no because fun wasn’t the word for it.

When she picked up the phone, she said, “Is everything okay?”

“Yeah. Just doing laundry.”

“Oh. Well. How’s the keep? Do you want to rip out all your fingernails yet?”

“It’s okay,” I said, tucking my phone between my shoulder and my ear. “I like spending so much time with Kitty and Linnea.”

“You did get lucky in that respect. Imagine if you were stuck with a clompy walker. Or someone who uses the toilet with the door open.”

I set down my laundry and leaned against the wall. It was stone and windowless. The fancy new washing machine seemed anachronistic against the big slabs of stone. It didn’t make sense to me that a little dungeon of a room should smell like Morning Lavender.

“Have you ever considered moving back?” I asked.

“Why?” Immediate suspicion. “Is Kitty thinking about it?”

“No.”

“Well, you’re not. Are you?”

“No,” I said, “obviously.”

“Of course I’ve considered moving back,” she said. “It was home for the first thirty years of my life. I miss my friends and Hedda’s coffee. And I missed seeing you grow up.”

“So why didn’t you?”

“Because you didn’t want me to.”

I made a disapproving noise.

“You didn’t,” she said. “No one was ever going to let me forget what I did, least of all you. Or least of all me, really. So I went somewhere I could start over. Sometimes I think it was selfish, giving myself the chance to do that. Other times I think the homesickness helps pay for the crime.”

“But you like traveling, don’t you? And cities?”

“I love them,” she said. “Most of the time, I prefer them. But they are not Stenland. Are you going to tell me the real reason you’re asking?”

“No,” I said.

She said okay and changed the subject.

* * *

Six weeks into skeld season, we’d carved out our routines. Kitty and I could work remotely, so we spent our days sprawled across the couches in the hearth room on our laptops. Linnea, I worried about. At first, Kitty and I had joked that Linnea had gotten a vacation, but as the weeks passed, we watched her get increasingly restless. She attacked the replanning of the wedding like it was her career, calling florists and watching long YouTube videos on DIY centerpieces. “Wedding 2.0 is going to be way better than the original,” she told us while eviscerating a length of fabric she planned to turn into some sort of garland. “It’s actually a silver lining, to get a do-over.”

“Right,” Kitty said. “Um, maybe be careful with the crafting scissors?”

When we weren’t working, Linnea tried to teach us to bake and Kitty tried to teach us to knit and I tried to teach them how to do a push-up. Results were mixed. Most nights, after dinner, we read by the fire, though because Kitty kept getting distracted by her phone, she was still ostensibly on Beowulf by the time I’d circled back to read Freestyle again. We were heaped together on the same couch, with Linnea on her stomach in front of the fire reading a rom-com.

“It can’t be that good,” Kitty said, lifting Beowulf . “Look, why has Soren gone and scribbled all over it?”

I swatted her with Freestyle . “He just underlined things.”

“He’s so annoying. If I have to read one more annotation about Grendel’s mother, I’ll hurl myself from the roof.”

“You could read something else, you know,” Linnea said. “Soren hasn’t annotated this one.”

“Do we think Soren’s read that one?” Kitty asked.

Linnea held up the cover, which said: Once Upon a Christmas Tree Farm. “I do hope so.”

Kitty made a face and reached for my book. “Gimme. I want that one.”

“Hey,” I said, curling my arms protectively around it.

“You’ve already read it.”

“If I can’t swim, I’m going to read about people who can.”

“You’re being selfish,” she said. “Don’t you want me to finally learn the difference between butterfly and breaststroke?”

“No,” I said. “You’re beyond help. Go back to reading about Grendel’s mother.”

“How much do you swim these days?” Linnea asked. “When you’re not in a tower, that is.”

“Not that much,” I said. “Three times a week, maybe.”

“I never understood why you stopped.”

“Because she wrecked her shoulder getting you out of the ocean,” Kitty said.

There was a tense, taut silence.

Linnea’s eyes were wide as she awaited confirmation.

It wasn’t a secret I’d meant to keep forever. It had just—stopped being relevant. Swimming had been my way to get out of Stenland. I’d gotten out anyway.

“I hardly remember anymore,” I said.

“Oh,” Linnea said, standing. She blinked quickly. “Sorry, I—Bathroom.”

I spent the whole rest of the evening thinking I’d upset her. But when I put my mug in the kitchen sink before bed, I found her drizzling icing on a plated pastry. She pushed it toward me and said it was a Sorry for Ruining Everything kringle. I told her it tasted so good, I’d try to fracture my scapula more often.

We ate it together on the floor of her room, just the two of us.

“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you,” I said.

“How can I be mad? You were just trying to protect me. I’m the one who always ruins everything.” She scraped the side of her fork across the plate miserably.

“Lin.”

“I made you and Kitty come back.”

“Bad luck, that’s all.”

“We spent so much money on the wedding,” she said, “and now we have to plan a new one. And you know what? I’ve never left Stenland.”

“I don’t follow,” I said.

“Sometimes I just think I’m so stupid,” she said.

“Linnea.”

“It’s nothing—I’m just—just sit there a minute.” Abandoning her fork, she shifted to sit behind me. She ran her fingers through my hair, separating it into three strands. “Your hair was always the best to braid because the chlorine makes it gritty. I think we should braid your hair for the wedding. You’ll look so pretty. It’ll be perfect, and then you can leave, and I’ll never ask you to come back again.”

I looked out her window and tried to locate the place where sky turned to ocean. It was too dark, or the window was too warped.

I wanted to tell her the truth: that I felt almost terrifyingly like myself here, as if I had been slipped back into the correct skin after a long absence. There was a fundamental rightness in the patterns of light, in the background noise of wind and tide. My body wanted to be in Stenland in some sort of basal, primordial way even when my mind didn’t. I thought about swimming again in the steamy, concrete pool of my childhood and could smell the chlorine so precisely it made my chest ache. This was what I wanted to tell Linnea, but I didn’t say any of it because I didn’t want her to tell me what she’d said three years prior: that I could not keep hurting him. Him was Soren, but also my dad and Lukas and Henrik and Linnea and Hedda and everyone. I would not last here. I never did. The feeling would pass. It always had, hadn’t it? It would be ridiculous to imagine such a thing—that I had been in love with Soren more or less without pause for the entirety of my adult life.

In the end, I just thanked Linnea for braiding my hair and went to bed.