Page 3 of A Curse for the Homesick

SOREN

2008

I don’t remember when I first met Fell. I don’t remember when I first met anyone, actually, because I grew up on a small rock between Scotland and the Arctic where everyone is someone’s cousin and the woman who owns the café also controls the nation’s politics. You don’t meet people. You just know them.

When I was twelve, my mum was arrested for accidentally killing ’s parents. You can see why it is unfortunate, then, that he was the first person I fell in love with.

* * *

The day his parents died, I had to get to school early for a field trip. My mum was still asleep in her bedroom, and my dad was making me pancakes. He was so tall, he had to hunch over the stove. When he and my mum had started dating, he’d looked like a teenage film star: straight teeth, broad shoulders, fair hair that would turn dusty but never gray. His eyelashes were so pale, you’d think he didn’t have them at all, but then you’d stand close and realize he actually has the longest eyelashes in the world. His name is Erik. Erik Eriksson; same as his dad. People from outside Stenland think it’s a stupid name. My mum even made a joke about it in her memoir, about the famine of creativity ravaging Stenland, about how she had to fight to keep him from naming me Erika. My dad isn’t the sort of person who would bother defending himself, but one time, I found an old photo of a woman in a drawer and asked him who it was. He said, Oh, that was my grandma Tess. You were named after her.

Before he gave me a plate, he got out the white plastic tub of Swedish lingonberries and spooned them onto the top pancake in the shape of a smile.

“See, look,” my dad said. “He’s happy.”

I rearranged the face so it was frowning.

“He’s about to be eaten,” I said. “He’s a realist.”

He went to the garage to start working on a car that had to be done by nine. I washed my plate and zipped my parka and turned on my flashlight, since the sun wouldn’t rise for two hours yet. I began the eight-minute walk to school just as I heard the first stirrings of movement from my mum’s bedroom. I did not bother waiting for her to get up. If I had, I would have died instead of ’s parents.

* * *

It was the last Friday before Christmas. That was why we were going on a field trip. Our teacher, Ms. Winwick, decided she could not possibly bear another day of students chattering about what presents they wanted and throwing peppernut biscuits at each other, so we were going to visit Fairhowe Cairn instead.

We waited in the playground while the bus lumbered toward the gates. It was a degree north of freezing, and puddles filled uneven gullies on the asphalt. Whenever I let the basketball hit the ground, it made a flat thump in the water. My hands were gray with wet dirt, and beneath, they were violent pink from the cold. I was shooting the ball at the hoop but only making it one try in four. I couldn’t unbend my fingers.

Kitty stood just out of splash range. She had a hat pulled far over her forehead and her hands tucked under her armpits. Every few moments, she’d stomp her boots like she was making sure her feet were still attached to her ankles. Linnea was drifting around us, occasionally interjecting nonsense comments like: “Does the headmistress think you’re ready for this mission, Sapphire?” I believed free time was for sporting pursuits; Kitty believed it was for talking; Linnea, for playing make-believe. We had given up trying to convince the others of our way and had instead settled on doing what we wanted in close proximity.

I’m not sure how people come up with an identity if they don’t have two best friends. From the time I was born, Kitty Sjoberg and Linnea Sundstrom had been my best friends, so whenever I wondered what my personality was, I just looked at the gaps they didn’t fill. Consciously or subconsciously, we didn’t encroach on one another’s interests. We didn’t even look particularly alike. Linnea was, in every way, the prototypical Stenn, tall and thin lipped, her cheeks round and her hair blond and wispy. Kitty, who was Chinese Stennish, had the same dark hair as her mother but a spatter of freckles from her father. I didn’t look as Stennish as either of my parents; apparently I took after Great-Grandma Tess, with light eyes and brown hair and solid little shoulders.

“I’ve decided we should start fancying boys,” Kitty said.

I looked over at her. Linnea was hesitating, one foot up, her skirt flapping against her leggings.

“I don’t think the headmistress would like that,” Linnea said.

Kitty rolled her eyes, which she’d been doing frequently and to great effect over the past few weeks because she’d read a book where the main character did it every other page.

“That sounds,” I said, “tiring.” I took another shot, and it bounced back off the rim. It landed near Kitty, and she didn’t kick it back to me, but that was fine, just part of the compromise. I stooped to grab it, and when I stood, Kitty had a businessy expression on her face.

“I was reading this magazine my mum had by the toilet, and it said it can happen to your children when they’re nine or ten, but it hasn’t happened to any of us yet, so I think we better figure it out before we get left behind. Don’t worry. I’ve already thought it all through.” Kitty pointed at me. “You can like Thomas because he swims and you swim and you can have swimmy babies together.” I made a face, and Kitty turned to Linnea. “And you can take , because Delia likes , and I don’t want her to have him.”

When Kitty said ’s name, my stomach plunged with something like panic. I had not yet put a name to it—the fact that I knew exactly where was in the geometry of the schoolyard, over playing soccer on the frosted grass, the same way I always seemed to know when he’d entered the classroom or what book he was reading for English.

“What if I already like someone?” Linnea said, and I felt my body slacken with relief.

“Is this Linnea speaking,” Kitty said, “or are you playing a character right now?”

“This is Linnea. What if I already like someone?”

“You can’t possibly,” Kitty said. “You would’ve told us. And besides, it’s so tidy if you like because if you got married, we’d be cousins.”

’s mother and Kitty’s father were siblings. I forgot that sometimes because I saw so little of Kitty’s father, who always acted like he was in a Very Big Hurry to see someone Much More Important than You.

“Okay,” Linnea said, looking troubled.

Kitty rolled her eyes again. “Don’t just say okay. You can’t just say okay. If you have a crush on someone, you can’t just…move it to the left.”

I dribbled my ball once, twice. Jumped for another shot. It went in this time, not so much with a swish as with a slap against the sodden net. It fell with a thump, solid and dead against the ground, and in the same moment, wind came roaring off the sea. I shivered as the fence around the school clinked. Everything smelled abruptly like low tide.

Ms. Winwick called us to the bus, and we all piled on. ended up in the line just behind us, and I was convinced he’d overheard our conversation. When I glanced back at him, trying to be surreptitious, his cheeks were pink and his sweaty hair was tangled. He was wearing a long-sleeved gray shirt and had a jacket slung over his shoulder. When our eyes met, he looked away quickly and his ears turned red.

On the bus, I slid into a row toward the middle and Kitty and Linnea pressed in after, squeezing me against the window. and Henrik Holm took the row behind us, but I pretended not to notice.

The bus rumbled away from the school. I rubbed the squeaky fog from the glass. Outside, the potholed road curved to the right and slumped down the island. The sun was just starting to warm the air, turning the frozen fog the color of shortbread. We crested a hill, and for a moment, I could see all of Lundwall: down the hillside, past the turf-roofed buildings and stone fences, over the cement church with the clanging bells, all the way to the black-sand beach and out to the sea.

Fairhowe sat on the eastern edge of the island. It was past Lundwall, past the airport, past where all the stone walls ended and the hills rolled together unbroken. Without the big parking lot and the visitors’ center, which sold excellent ice cream, you’d never know there was anything worth seeing out there. Fairhowe was a burial site, one of many across the island—thousands of years old and surviving because it was made entirely of stone. I had already visited the cairn twice on various field trips.

When we got off the bus, there were no other cars in the lot. Three purple-black ravens took noisy flight from where they’d been perched on a plaque.

We followed Ms. Winwick in a scraggly line past the visitors’ center and toward the mouth of the cairn. From the outside, it just looked like a little hill: a mound of frost-deadened grass surrounded on three sides by a plastic fence. The doorway was an open slot in the sod, and beneath it you could see the piles of stone that held the structure upright.

It was then, as we were waiting our turn to go in, that I overheard Delia Haugen say that a skeld season had just begun.

Delia was the only one in our class who had a phone. She had it peeping out of her jacket pocket as she read off text messages from her mum. One of the skelds, apparently, was my swim coach’s girlfriend. No one knew about the other two yet. Kitty and Linnea and I glanced at each other, but none of us said anything, like speaking any fears aloud would call the curse closer to us.

Inside, the cairn was cramped as a coffin. Once you were through the hallway, it opened up slightly—just enough that Linnea and Kitty could fall into step next to me.

“Can you imagine living here?” Linnea said.

“Nobody lived here,” Kitty told her. “It’s a grave.”

“How do you know no one ever lived here? They might’ve.”

“Well, they didn’t.”

“There could be ghosts,” Linnea said. “Ghosts are people.”

“Right,” Kitty said, and she shot me a look.

People said Linnea was scattered, which I’d always thought was unfair. Earlier that week, Ms. Winwick had told us the old riddle—the farmer with the fox, the chicken, and the sack of grain trying to get across a river—and Linnea had said, Well, the river can’t be more than a mile wide, can it? Everyone had groaned and laughed—oh, that Linnie, at it again, entirely missing the point—and Linnea had looked confused and flushed. Afterward, I’d asked her about it, and she’d said, Foxes can swim a mile at a time. They’re very good at it. Why wouldn’t you just make the fox swim?

The inside of the cairn was lit by bare, buzzing bulbs that looked like something out of the last century. The walls were made of carefully stacked stone, and at eye level running around the perimeter there was a shelf that had once (if Ms. Winwick was to be believed) held human skulls. At each end of the space, facing each other, there was a stone figure: one a man, one a woman. They were naked, presumably because they’d been dead so long no one felt embarrassed for them anymore. Except me; I felt embarrassed, so I tried to distract myself with the jagged lines cut into the wall. All the walls were covered in carved inscriptions: modern graffiti, Norse runes, Pictish lines, maybe things even older than that.

“Can you read this?” I asked, pointing to the largest inscription.

“I think I can,” Linnea said.

“No, you can’t,” Kitty told her. “It’s in Stennish. The plaque outside said so.”

We all went quiet and looked at the words. We did not speak Stennish. No one in Stenland did. It had died two hundred years prior.

“Has anybody translated it?” Linnea asked.

“Yes. Why does no one else read the plaques?”

“Because they’re covered in raven poop,” I said. “Tell us already.”

But I did not get to hear what the inscription said. Ms. Winwick had appeared behind Linnea and was clearing her throat. The unsteady fluorescent light made her look solemn and sharp.

“Tess?” she said. “I’d like you to step outside with me, please.”

I tried to remember if I’d done anything wrong. Ms. Winwick usually liked me because I was the only student who’d done the factorization chapter in our pre-algebra book and because I had never once spoken during silent reading. I followed her out of the cairn and blinked against the delicate morning sun.

was already standing there, staring straight ahead. Delia was saying something and touching his elbow with one hand while she held her phone aloft with the other. When Ms. Winwick said her name warningly, she darted past us and back into the cairn. did not move.

“, sweetheart?” Ms. Winwick said. “I’ve called your grandmother. She’ll be here any minute, and then she can take you home, all right?”

No reaction.

I looked up at Ms. Winwick, waiting for an explanation that did not come. To me, she said, “Your father is on his way.” She did not call me sweetheart.

My dad arrived first. We lived closer. He got out of the car and had a hushed conversation with Ms. Winwick. I gathered he was offering to drive home. Ms. Winwick raised her voice when she said, “That hardly seems like a good idea, Erik.”

I climbed into my dad’s car and looked out the window. was still standing at the edge of the parking lot with his shoulders hunched to his ears and his face to the wind. When my dad started the car, ’s eyes found mine through the window, and the moment they did, he flinched.

Once we cleared the parking lot, my dad said, “How much have you already figured out?”

All of it.

“Nothing,” I said.

His hands were too tight on the wheel; his knuckles looked like they might pop right through his skin. “A skeld season just started,” he said. “Your mum was marked.”

He kept glancing over at me, but I felt too ashamed to look at his eyes. I didn’t want him to flinch, like had.

“She—didn’t check herself in the mirror, I guess,” my dad said. “She came to say good morning, but I was under a car, so I didn’t see her.”

I picked at the stitching on the seat with the corner of my thumbnail. I got a whole tangle of it loose, long enough to wrap twice around my index finger.

“She said she was going to Hedda’s for coffee. She was walking on the waterfront when Mattias and Sara Fell stepped onto the footpath. It sounds like they were just dropping off their younger son at school.”

The thread was cutting off the circulation in my finger. I had pulled it so tight my nail was going purple.

“Tess?” my dad said.

“She turned them to stone.”

Hoarsely, my dad told me she did not mean to. It was probably the first time he’d ever said it, but he already sounded tired of the excuse. I asked him if that made them any less dead. He turned on his blinker.

“No,” he said. “I guess it doesn’t.”

* * *

A long time ago, people had thought the skelds were touched by the old gods. Later, people had thought they were touched by the devil. The word skeld meant shield in Stennish, which made sense because they were our protection from the outside world, from people who came to Stenland and tried to take it.

You couldn’t tell when a skeld season was going to begin. Sometimes they came in rapid succession. Sometimes the island went years without. On the first day of a skeld season, three women woke up with marks on their foreheads: three black slashes like the wound from a raven’s talon.

If a skeld’s eyes met yours, you would turn to stone.

So the skelds went to Ramna Skaill, a stone tower at the northeastern reaches of the island, where they only interacted with each other and three keepers, selected to keep them safe or, depending on your perspective, keep everyone else safe.

After three months, the skelds would become human again. Their marks would disappear and their curse would go away. But the people they turned would never come back. You could not unmake stone.

* * *

In school, after Christmas, Delia came up to me at recess and said she couldn’t believe I’d show my face here right now because didn’t I know it was hurting people to be reminded of what my mother had done?

was walking by when she said it. Maybe that was by design. He was surrounded by a tight knot of people, some his friends and others who had recently decided they were his friends. He looked up at me, and I wished I had said something to him when we’d been standing in that parking lot. This was the moment I took the thing I felt for , the thing I had not yet named, and packed it away. There would be no more catching his eye when he walked into the room, no more subtly comparing the books on our desks, no more placing ourselves in adjacent bus seats.

My mother would be in prison for two years.

I would hate her the whole time.