Page 30 of A Curse for the Homesick

EASY

2022

Weekends in the keep felt mostly the same as our weekdays, except that I spent marginally less time working. On a Saturday, I was coming back upstairs after a needlessly long lunch when I heard music from Kitty’s room. Something orchestral and grim, like it was meant for a funeral. I pushed open the door and found her lying on her bed with a journal open. The pages were blank.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“Writing,” she said. “Ostensibly.”

“Why?”

“Posterity’s sake. I thought I should record what it’s like to be here just in case I ever get tempted to come back.”

I sat on the bed beside her and looked at the empty page.

“I forgot I hated writing,” she said. “Especially when I know I’m my only audience.”

“And the music?”

“Sad Classical for Posh Crying,” she said. “I put a lot of work into this playlist. Thank you for noticing.”

“But you aren’t crying.”

“I keep getting distracted.”

“You know,” I said, “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you cry.”

“Of course not. I only cry in the bath when I’m home alone and no one will bother me.”

“How is it we’ve been friends our whole lives and I’ve never seen you cry?”

“Because I would simply never allow it.”

I studied her. I knew, of course, how much she’d withheld from Linnea over the years. I wasn’t sure why it had never occurred to me that she might hide things from me too.

“I didn’t realize you ever got tempted to come back,” I said.

“Not really. Maybe just around Christmas.”

“Do you think you’d ever do it?”

She gave me a calculating look. “What are you planning, Eriksson?”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing, except that now that you’re here you’re remembering how much you love the shit weather and the state-run healthcare and the proximity to your friends.”

I grimaced at her.

“Come live in London with me,” she said.

“I can’t just move to London. I have a job. I have a boyfriend.”

“He’s not your boyfriend,” Kitty said. “He’s your roommate. Don’t you get tired of pretending you’re in love with him?”

I stared at her.

“Don’t tell me it’s not true,” she said.

“It’s not. That’s a horrible thing to say.”

She made an impatient sound. “Imagine Noah and Saffi are dead and a meteor is hurtling toward Earth. You have ten minutes. Who are you going to see?”

“That’s awful.”

“Who are you going to see?”

“You and Linnea. And my dad.”

“And Soren.”

I stood up. My throat felt too tight to speak, too tight to breathe. “I don’t know what you’re trying to do.”

“Just admit you still love him.”

“I don’t. We were so young. I’m not still—” She was giving me that look, and I couldn’t bear it so I turned away. “And even if I was, what’s the point?”

“I’m just trying to get you to be honest.”

“So you can feel smart? So you can feel good about yourself?”

She didn’t say anything to that. I went down the hall to my room, thinking she would call after me, but she didn’t. On my bed, I lay back with my knees over the edge and stared at the ceiling. I pressed my hands to my face and looked through the gaps between my fingers.

If Noah and Saffi were dead and there was a meteor hurtling toward Earth.

Only then.

I rolled onto my stomach and tried to breathe through the thickness of the quilt but couldn’t. It should not have persisted—not this long. It was just an emotion that should have died off but became chronic instead.

When I thought of Noah, I thought of lazy mornings, his rumpled hair when he pushed himself up in bed and blearily opened his phone. I thought of going back to campus with him for Homecoming and posing for pictures in matching red shirts and how I did not have to introduce him to anyone because he already knew everyone. I thought of comfort and ease and pleasant pastel sameness.

When I thought of Soren, I thought of the first time we’d had sex the summer I’d come back to Stenland: my face cradled in his hands, his body against mine, my name on his lips. Agony, euphoria. Misery, rapture.

I did—wish for the meteor.

I called Noah, not because I wanted to, but because it was too horrible to put it off, once I’d realized. He answered on the third ring, and when he said hello, my heart gave a dull thump: I would not hear him say hello again. This would be the last time.

“Are you there?” he asked.

No. This was a bad idea. I didn’t have to break up with my boyfriend of three years just because, what, I was attracted to someone else? That was normal. Everyone felt like that sometimes.

“Tess?”

“I’m here.” I sat up in my bed. Wrapped an arm around my knees. “What are you doing right now? Can you just…describe it to me?”

“Okay. I’m at my desk. I’m supposed to be debugging something, but I’m actually just responding to messages. I’m drinking some green tea I found at the back of the cupboard, but I’m pretty sure it’s expired. Can green tea do that?”

I had to do it. I knew—of course I knew. My roommate , that was what Kitty had called him . I did love him though, didn’t I?

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Where are you?”

“In my room.”

“Is it cold?”

“Yeah.”

A long pause.

“I got your email,” I said. “About your work holiday party.”

“Do you think you’ll be back in time?”

“If I leave the day the season ends.”

“You probably won’t want to hang around there, though, will you?”

“Yeah, no,” I said. “Of course not.”

We went quiet again.

“Did you see Rob and Annie got engaged?” he asked.

“Which Rob and Annie?”

“They were in my freshman dorm. They started dating week two or something.”

“Oh,” I said. “Wow.”

I stared at the stack of books on my bedside table. Took a breath; let it out again. It wasn’t about Soren, really, because I already knew there was no future for us, and I wouldn’t do that to him or Saffi. But it also was, sort of, because if I had never loved Soren, I might not have ever wondered if love could be more than this.

“Do you love me?” I asked.

“What? Of course.”

“No, I mean it. Do you really?”

More slowly, he said, “Yes. I mean—yeah, I guess.”

“You guess?”

“It’s a weird question. You caught me off guard.”

“I’m not angry with you for answering it that way,” I said. “I just—don’t you think it shouldn’t be a guess?”

I heard him shift in his chair. “I don’t know. Do you love me?”

“I don’t know.”

It was so quiet on the other end I thought maybe the call had dropped. Finally, he said, “Well, fuck, Tess, what are we supposed to do?”

“Maybe we can fix it.”

“You just told me you didn’t love me,” he said.

“I said I didn’t know.”

“That’s basically the same thing.”

“You said you guessed.”

“Because I wasn’t expecting an interrogation,” he said. “Do you even want to fix it?”

“Of course I want to fix it,” I said. “We live together.”

“That’s not a reason.”

I hugged my knees tighter to my chest. “Do you? Want to fix it?”

“Well, now I’m not so sure,” he said.

“Maybe we should talk later.”

“I don’t know that we need to, actually.”

“Oh,” I said. “Okay. Just like that?”

He didn’t say anything for a minute. Then: “You know, I was talking to my sister about how easy our relationship was. And she said, ‘There’s good easy, and then there’s easy like you don’t care what happens to it.’”

“I don’t not care.”

“Yeah,” he said. “But it’s still not enough, is it?”

I didn’t say anything to that.

“Sometimes I feel like I never knew you at all,” Noah said.

A cold ache spread through my chest, starting behind my ribs and spiderwebbing outward. Quietly, I said, “Don’t be cruel.”

“I’m not trying to be,” he said. “It’s just true.”

When we ended the call, I turned off my phone and put it under the bed, like it was the source of the ache.

I promised myself I wouldn’t tell anyone about Noah because I didn’t want them to ask what I knew they would ask—if I had done it because I still loved Soren. I didn’t want Saffi to worry, or Linnea. Most of all, I didn’t want Soren to feel the need to tell me that he had stopped loving me a long time ago.

* * *

A week passed, and I waited for the pain of the breakup to hit me. I wondered if it would be delayed, like with Soren. I wondered if it would not come at all, like with August. If Kitty and Linnea thought I was acting differently, they didn’t say.

I flicked through my email with the sense that these messages belonged to someone else and I was invading her privacy. A meeting had been rescheduled; a test engineer had a question about a malfunction. Most of my life since graduation had been about work, but now I couldn’t bring myself to care. It felt suddenly shallow. I had not improved as a person; I just had more money.

The sensation burrowed deep under my skin. When I had dreaded staying in Stenland, I had dreaded not just the curse but the threat of stagnation: being trapped in a sameness, caught in deep ruts I never saw until I was too far gone to climb out again. I’d been so determined to avoid stagnation in Stenland that maybe I’d tossed myself headlong into it elsewhere.

I was so distracted by this uneasiness that I almost skimmed right past the email that did not belong. I blinked, sure I had misread. Opened it.

It was stilted and unfamiliar, like a letter to an estranged family member. I saw, in every sentence, a vision of his fingers on the keyboard, carefully deleting anything that sounded too conciliatory, anything that let on to the fact he knew exactly how this message would be received.

I read it a second time, then I went to find Kitty and Linnea.

Kitty read it first.

“He’s not serious,” she said. “He’s serious?”

Linnea read it second.

“Oh,” she said. “Oh, that’s not good.”

“You think?” Kitty said.

The email went like this:

Dear Tess,

I hope you are well. I am writing to you in regards to our prior discussion about a documentary on Stenland and the skelds. I have been informed that you are currently involved in a skeld season. I am sure you want the opportunity to tell your side of the story. Please let me know when you are available for an interview. We will be in town beginning on November 15.

Additionally, I would appreciate the best email addresses to contact Kitty Sjoberg and Linnea Sundstrom.

Finally, I hope you can advise on safety precautions. Despite thorough research, I have not been able to determine whether very dark sunglasses are sufficient protection against a skeld. I would also like to know whether there is any danger when looking at a skeld via a video camera. As you can imagine, safety is our highest priority.

I look forward to hearing from you.

Regards,

August van Andel