Page 31 of A Curse for the Homesick

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2022

I texted Noah to see if he knew anything about this. He responded, validatingly:

Noah: What? That’s crazy. What a dickwad.

I also texted Bianca, with whom I had not spoken in over a year.

Bianca: Sorry, not really in touch with August these days. Hope you’re well!

When I texted Damian, he did not text back but almost immediately called, as if he had been waiting for this very missive to arrive.

“Hey!” he said. “So glad you reached out about the project.”

I had not spoken to Damian, like Bianca, in sixteen months.

“The project,” I said.

“You know August and I have been talking about doing a documentary on Stenland since college. We actually had some rough stuff in the works, and then when we heard you were a skeld—”

“From whom?”

“What? Oh, Annie. She was at some party with Noah where everyone was talking about it? Anyway, when we heard you were a skeld, we figured this was the perfect opportunity. To tell the story from your perspective, you know?”

I was in the hearth room, pacing in front of the fire. Henrik had just come through the front door, adjusting the mask over his eyes. Linnea shut the door behind him and peered curiously at me. I turned toward the fire and pressed my phone harder against my ear.

“You can’t come here,” I said.

“What?” His voice was hesitant, like a child who broke something. “What do you mean?”

“It’s too dangerous. The reason August can’t figure out if it’s safe to use dark sunglasses or cameras is because nobody knows, okay? You think this thing is—romantic, or something, but it’s not. It’s horrible. It kills people.”

“Obviously I know that. August’s uncle died that way.”

“That’s a lie.”

A pause.

“Well,” Damian said, “all the more reason not to worry. We’ll be careful, Tess. You don’t need to freak out on our behalf.”

“I don’t care about your behalf. I care that if you show up here and one of us sees you, it’s going to feel like our fault.”

“Frankly, I don’t know how I can help with that.”

“Don’t come.”

He let out a breath that seemed to indicate he was humoring me with the end of his patience. “Flights are booked. Equipment is rented. We’re going to tell the story of the curse, Tess—this opportunity matters. The story matters.”

I stared into the white core of the fire waiting for the right words to come to me, as if there were right words, as if I could string them together like the steps of a proof. “I don’t care whether the story matters. It’s not worth the risk.”

Damian didn’t respond.

“Please. Find somewhere else to make your film.”

“I’m really sorry you feel that way, Tess,” Damian said. “Let me know if you change your mind.”

The call ended. Linnea, who’d been standing near enough to hear his voice, said, “So, he’s not coming, right?”

“No,” I said. “He is.”

“It sounded like he was apologizing.”

“But that’s not what he meant.”

The three black slashes across Linnea’s forehead looked especially stark against her pale skin. “They won’t be allowed near Ramna Skaill, same as everyone else.”

“August grew up in a house with two tennis courts. He has never once thought he’s the same as everyone else.”

Henrik leaned against the wall and ruffled his hair above the mask. “You know, he’s the only person I’ve ever met who I really wanted to punch.”

“Don’t be macho,” Linnea said. “Though, same.”

“It’ll be fine, Tess,” Henrik said. “We’ll tell Hedda. I called Lukas and Soren as soon as Linnea told me about the email, and—”

A banging at the door. It was shoved open, and in came Soren, his hair sticking up in the back where the fabric of his mask had wedged it. He was wearing muddy boots and a raincoat over his sweater. “Why are some people such utter fucking cocks?”

Lukas, closing the door behind him, said, “Rowdy Soren has joined the chat.”

“Who’s here?” Soren demanded.

“Everyone but Kitty,” Linnea said, just as Kitty appeared on the stairs. “Oh, no—she’s here now.”

Henrik said, “I was just telling them we should call Hedda—”

“I already did.” Soren started pacing. “On the drive over. She said she’s going to tell the constable to put someone else on the road out here, just in case. And Lukas and I will stay in the cottage until they go.”

“Will we?” Lukas said. “Sorry, but don’t you think you might be overreacting?”

“No,” Soren said. “You don’t know August. He’s the worst person I have ever met.”

“Sure,” Lukas said, “that seems objective. Look, I’m sorry this is happening, and yes, it’s inconvenient, but they’ll make their stupid little film and then they’ll go home. They probably won’t ever get anywhere near Ramna Skaill, and even if they do, it’s not like they’ll come inside. And if the worst happens—”

“Don’t even go there.”

“If the worst happens,” he went on, “no one would blame you. Any of you.”

I pressed my hands against my face. “It’s my fault. I can’t believe they’re coming here.”

“I can’t believe you dated him,” Kitty said.

“I know. I have the worst taste. Just…abominable.”

“Yeah,” Soren said, “no, that’s fine.”

Linnea grabbed my hand, prying it away from my face. She looked intently at me. “Nothing is going to go wrong,” she said. “Nothing. I won’t let it.”

“I don’t think—”

“No,” Linnea said. “I brought August here last time. I brought you and Kitty back this time. I’m going to be the one who makes sure we’re okay.” She was squeezing my hand so hard my fingers were starting to tingle.

“It’s not like they have a death wish,” Lukas said. “Why do you think they’re going to be so stupid?”

“Not stupid,” I said. “Just not Stennish.”

* * *

We only had a few weeks left of our skeld season when they arrived. I knew they’d made it because Hedda called me while I was pulling something burned out of the oven, apparently left there by Linnea some hours ago. Black, acrid smoke came belching out of oven as I answered the call.

“Tess,” Hedda said. “Your friends just blew through. They told me we’d misspelled cappuccino on our menu and they didn’t leave a tip.”

“They’re not my friends. You did misspell cappuccino . And I have never once left you a tip.”

“They asked if I knew you. I misspelled it on purpose, to ferret out the assholes. And while you are not required to tip, they most certainly should have.”

I grabbed a rag off the counter and started flapping it through the air, trying to dissipate the smoke. It just seemed to create more of it.

“What did you tell them?”

“That they should stay very far from Ramna Skaill unless they want to end up the next mannequins for the Historical Society’s sewing circle.”

“Did they listen?”

“Of course they didn’t. The short one was carrying a video camera. The plastic-looking one was making phone calls. Why you have spent your life trying to be friends with those people instead of Kitty and Linnea will baffle me to my grave.”

“I’m not friends with them.”

“And yet you always seem to choose them.”

I lowered the dishrag and tried to blink the smoke out of my eyes. I turned away from the oven. Took a slow, shallow breath. After a minute, I said, “Hedda?”

“I know what you’re going to ask. Just ask it.”

What I wanted to ask was if she knew why her daughter had fled the keep. Why she’d turned nineteen people to stone. Why, for all my life, everyone had been telling the story of Matilda, the skeld who’d gone mad.

“What happened to your daughter?”

“What happened was that her father got turned to stone when she was twelve years old. Does that sound familiar? I put all my energy into Stenland, into making it a place I was still happy to call home. I didn’t see her. How unhappy she was. How angry. And when the time came and she was locked in the—I don’t know why she walked out that day. Maybe she hated me. Maybe she hated everyone. Maybe she was just scared.”

“Hedda,” I said.

“I don’t need your pity, Eriksson.”

“How could you stay here, after all that?”

“How could I leave?” she said. “Get your friends out of Stenland.”

I thanked her for the warning, and she hung up on me because a customer came in. I rubbed the smoke out of my eyes with the back of my wrist and went back to savagely waving my rag. We weren’t supposed to open the windows on the second floor in case one of the keepers happened to be walking to the cottage outside, but I thought I might asphyxiate if I didn’t clear the smoke, so I went to the nearest window and tried to push it. It didn’t budge. I couldn’t tell if it wasn’t meant to open or if it had just gone sticky with age. I blinked again, trying to clear the smoke from my eyes, and that was when I saw something small and red moving down the hillside.

The glass was fat and uneven, twisting things upside down and refracting light into rainbows across the room. The landscape was hazy and ill defined, but I could make out enough that I knew there was something moving quickly through the nearest croft.

I watched it come closer with cold dread in the bottom of my stomach. It was too small to be a car. An ATV, then, rumbling over the grass and bypassing the road entirely.

It stopped moving about a hundred feet before the narrow spit that led to the keep. The windows were not clear enough—that was what I had always been told—but still, I felt dread sink through me. They were not moving. Because they were filming something? Or because I had turned them to stone? For a moment, they were Schrodinger’s documentarians, both alive and dead, and then, very slowly, the ATV reversed, and they drove away.

I exhaled. My breath fogged the glass.

That night, Henrik suggested everyone have dinner together in the keep, and this time, I didn’t argue.

* * *

I didn’t see the ATV at all over the course of the next week—a police car sat, unmoving, on the road to the keep, just in case—but I heard tell of spottings. Kitty’s mum ran into Damian and August at the grocery store. They showed up at my dad’s garage while he was working. I kept almost calling August, but I did not want him to have a recording of my voice for his film. I imagined the cold open. A shot of the keep hemmed by ominous clouds. Over the top, my voice, shrill: Leave my fucking island before someone gets hurt . I would not give him the satisfaction.

Henrik, Lukas, and Soren took to having dinner with us every night. I didn’t ask what Saffi thought of this, but I felt bad about it anyway.

When we had only a week left of skeld season and no one had yet died, I started to believe we might actually escape the curse. Everyone had always said Linnea, Kitty, and I would become skelds; no one had ever said we would kill someone. I was getting ahead of myself, but I couldn’t help it. I even caught myself humming while I washed the dinner dishes—a pop hit my dad liked while I scraped away singed layers of potato from a casserole dish. I could hear Kitty and Linnea fighting for control of the speakers; Linnea won out and the music went folksy. I shook the water from my hands and shut my eyes. It was a Stennish band, one I’d loved in high school but stopped listening to when no one in California had ever heard of them. I had anticipated, of course, all the ways coming home would be hard, but I forgot to account for all the ways it would be easy: the voices like mine and the music I’d always known; the inside jokes, the familiar stories. In San Francisco, I was forever moving at the not-quite-right speed. It was easy to start believing that people did not find me clever or interesting. But with these people, in this place, I slipped back into a self that fit naturally, some past Tess who did not need to work to make people listen, laugh, understand.

When I joined the others in the hearth room, I saw they’d shoved the table to the wall to clear space on the floor. I sat next to the hearth, which was sort of near Soren, but not exactly next to him, and I kept adjusting the fire even though it was burning perfectly well. Linnea was guiding Henrik through a complicated dance she insisted we’d all learned in primary school, but that no one else recalled. They were going to do this dance at Wedding 2.0.

“No, left,” she said.

“This is left,” Henrik told her.

“My left.”

“I went to your left.”

“Maybe you’re just not a very good dancer.”

“I am blindfolded,” Henrik said.

“Or just a talentless hack,” Lukas said. “Linnea, where are you? I’ll dance with you.” He stuck out his arms expectantly, and he just looked so, so stupid that I laughed, which prompted Kitty to tell him I was mocking him.

“Can’t anyone take this seriously?” Linnea said. “It’s for the wedding.”

“What if we just eloped?” Henrik said.

“That’s not funny.”

“Come get married in London,” Kitty said. “No curses in London.”

“We are going to have a wedding, and it’s going to be lovely, and the island won’t do anything to ruin it because I have only ever been kind to Stenland, unlike the two of you.”

There was a quiet beat where everyone tried to decide how much Linnea meant it—how much she believed that Kitty and I really had offended the island by leaving.

“Where’s Tess?” Lukas said loudly. “I want to dance with Tess.”

I told him Tess was a conscientious objector, but this unfortunately allowed him to locate me by the sound of my voice. He pulled me up off the floor and spun me a few times across the room, and when he finally let me go back to the fire, he said he had an announcement to make.

“Are you becoming a professional folk dancer?” Henrik asked.

“If you say yes,” Kitty said, “you don’t need to get me a Christmas present this year.”

“I got a job. In France. I’m going to nanny some rich people’s kids for three months. I start right after New Year’s.”

Everyone clapped. Kitty said, “Toutes nos félicitations!”

“Yeah, well,” Lukas said. “I just thought it could be fun for a while. See the world a bit.”

I looked over at Soren, who had clapped along but whose mouth was unreadable.

Lukas excused himself a few minutes later because his mask was starting to itch, and Kitty left when he did, citing her need of a bath. Henrik and Linnea stayed a few more minutes, talking in clipped tones about their wedding, which I increasingly understood as Linnea’s way of reclaiming control over the curse’s chaos—a perfect wedding was what the island owed her. If anyone had asked me which one of us would handle being a skeld best, I would’ve said Linnea. What I failed to account for was that neither Kitty nor I had ever expected the island’s kindness. Eventually, Linnea and Henrik stole away to Linnea’s room to engage in something almost certainly not advised in the skeld/keeper handbook, which left just two of us.

It was the first time Soren and I had been alone together since the night of the rehearsal dinner, when we’d waited for the baker to return with my cake. I wasn’t sure he knew I was there, and I rubbed my palms on my jeans, wondering if I could sneak away silently before I said something awful, like, Sometimes I wish we were about to be hit by a meteor.

“I think he’ll be good at it,” Soren said.

I curled my knees to my chest and leaned closer to the fire. “What?”

“Lukas. Nannying. He’s good with kids.”

“Did you know?”

“He told me when he first applied.”

“You two seem…” I paused. “Good.”

Quietly, Soren said, “Yeah. I think we are.”

The fire popped; a twig sizzled and snapped.

“I’m sorry about Elin,” I said. “I miss her.”

Soren rubbed his neck. The mask shifted slightly, and I flinched, but it stayed firmly fixed across his eyes. He didn’t even seem to notice. “She really liked you. I know it was hard to tell sometimes.”

That ache in my chest. It whittled into the bones and spread like a fracture. “I always worried she was angry with me for taking you away from home.”

He let out a breath through his nose. “You never took me anywhere I didn’t want to go.”

I was glad he couldn’t see me; my eyes were starting to water from sitting so near the fire. “Thanks for the books, by the way. I don’t know if I ever said that.”

“Did you like Elsa Bergquist’s memoir? ‘We should all endeavor to be awed at least once a day.’ I think about that a lot.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I actually really liked it.” A pause. “And are you?”

“Am I what?”

“Awed at least once a day?”

“I think so,” he said.

“By?”

He was sitting with his elbows on his knees, and he was drumming his fingers slowly across his opposite forearm. “I don’t know.”

“No, tell me.”

“Just—everything, I guess.” He paused, like he was embarrassed. “The wind and the sea and the clouds and the stones.”

“That doesn’t count. You see those every day.”

“They awe me every day.”

The fracture feeling spread farther through my ribs. “Okay, Board of Stennish Propaganda,” I said, though my voice sounded strained.

Another pause, then hesitantly, he said, “I was reading about riddles from the Exeter Book yesterday.”

“I appreciate that you think I know what that is.”

“It’s a collection of Anglo-Saxon poetry. Tenth century. In it, there’s this riddle that goes something like: My parents abandoned me, but a nice woman took me in like I was her own child. Eventually, once I was big and strong, I killed her other children. What am I?”

“A right dick.”

He snorted. “A cuckoo.”

“I don’t get it.”

“That’s what cuckoos do. They lay their eggs in other birds’ nests and take off. When I read that, my first thought was, How long did that English monk have to sit around watching cuckoos before he figured that out? But then I realized—no, not just some monk. Someone else was expected to guess the answer to the riddle. This was just something everybody knew or observed or…” He trailed off. “I guess, realizing people from a thousand years ago were paying so much attention to the world. That’s what awed me yesterday.”

His voice went from reverent to sheepish the longer he spoke. I felt a fierce sense of protectiveness that wasn’t mine to feel.

“I had a poetry professor who reminded me of you,” I said.

“Esoteric and taxing?”

“He talked like you. He made me care about poetry. And I really do not care about poetry.”

“Your point?”

“Why aren’t you doing a PhD?”

He turned his face to the fire. He was quiet for so long I thought maybe I had only asked the question in my head. Outside, the night air scuttled across the walls of the keep. Finally, he said, “The wind and the sea and the clouds and the stones.”

The feeling in my ribs was in all my bones now: skull and arms and hips and feet. It was like homesickness, but I did not know what I was homesick for. For the wind and the sea and the clouds and the stones, maybe; for the fact that I had never once let myself love them.

“I should go to bed,” I said.

“I should go back to the croft.”

“Do you need a hand to the door?”

“I’m fine.”

I watched him stand, and I watched him drag his fingertips along the wall as he found his way through the hearth room.

“Soren?” I said.

“Tess?”

I swallowed. “I’m sorry about your parents. I know we never really talked about it, but I’m so, so sorry.”

“It’s not your fault,” he said. And then: “It’s never been your fault.”

“I didn’t love you because I wanted absolution,” I said.

“You loved me because you had sympathy.”

“That makes it sound like I pitied you.”

“Does it? I had sympathy too.”

At the door, he paused like he was going to say something else, but in the end, he just let himself out and closed the door silently in his wake. I turned the word over in my head, sympathy , and eventually looked it up on my phone, searching for an answer to the pressure against my ribs. The dictionary said: Sorrow for the misfortune of another. It also said: Shared feeling.

The next day, Soren didn’t come to dinner. I didn’t see him at all. But he left another box of books on our doorstep. Hamlet , The Exeter Book Riddles , and then, slimmer than the others, a bound copy of his master’s thesis. I texted him a photo of it.

Me: We don’t talk enough about this pretentious streak of yours

Soren: You don’t have to read it

Me: As if I would miss the chance to find a typo in your work

Soren: I hope you know that if you find a typo, I will die

Me: I love a challenge

The title was “‘For Ten Thousand Years’: Echoes and Allusions in Stennish Literature.” I flipped through it and stopped at a photograph of Fairhowe Cairn and the Stennish inscription inside and the translation, Do you feel like the two of us / have been falling in love for ten thousand years? The point of the thesis was that people in the past weren’t so different from us. They were awed by history as we are awed by history. They were inspired, and they in turn became inspiration. Reading, I felt a pressure on my breastbone like a physical thing, pushing out from inside my chest and making it hard to breathe. He traced one text to another so gracefully, arguing that this poem inspired that graffiti inspired that tombstone across centuries. He wrote like he couldn’t bear it not to be true.

I did not find any typos.

* * *

With three days left of skeld season, I saw them again.

I was on the stairs at the time. At first, I just glimpsed movement; and then, when I turned, I saw them. Three figures set between the keep and the sea. Through the mottled glass, I couldn’t make out their faces. They were an impressionist painting: the gestural strokes of a man with a camera, a man in an expensive jacket, and a man in just a sweater and muddy jeans. Beside them was an ATV, and I could hear the low rumble of the motor.

For a moment, I didn’t react because even bigger than my fury that they were standing there was my fear that they would look at me. Once I acknowledged this fear, I hated them for giving it to me.

I slammed my fist against the window. The men lurched, glanced at the keep, then quickly away again. The glass was too distorted, I figured, for the curse to do any harm, but I was afraid to look in the direction of their faces anyway. They clambered into the ATV and started to drive. Two of them, that is. The man in the sweater, a red sweater, and the muddy jeans, he stayed where his feet were planted. I waited for him to turn as August and Damian disappeared through the grass. I waited for him to turn. I waited.

My hand fell from the glass.

The wind tugged at his sweater.

I waited.

Down the stairs. I didn’t remember deciding to run, but I was running. I didn’t remember deciding to throw open the door, but it was open, and I was falling through it. Across the grass in bare feet. Gasping for oxygen in the too-thin air. Frost burned my skin. And still, he did not move.

He was facing away from me. Where his hair should’ve been blond, it was dull gray, every strand etched like it was carved by the loving hand of a master sculptor. It was pushed to the side messily, like he had just run his hand through it.

I said Soren’s name. The wind ripped my voice back out to sea. I said it again, and then I stopped in front of him and stared at his face.

It took me a moment to realize. I knew so much of this face: the angle of the nose and the shape of the lips and the crease just between the brows. But it wasn’t Soren. It was his father: Mattias Fell, turned to stone by my mother when he’d been hardly older than Soren was now. He was missing two of his fingers; they’d been chipped off. I touched the wool of the sweater, which was already gathering snowflakes, and I looked up at his face, seeing but not understanding.

I heard Linnea call my name. She came running through the door, and I knew what she must’ve seen, what she thought this was, but I couldn’t find the words to explain it. Even when she saw Mattias’s face, she was still calling him Soren. They looked so alike she couldn’t tell. I was distantly aware of the sensation of prophecy averted. It felt like maybe I was living in two realities at the same time: one where Soren was dead, and another where he wasn’t. Both seemed true, like one story was superimposed over the other—a palimpsest.

“It’s not Soren,” I said numbly.

“What? What do you mean?”

“It’s his dad.”

“How did… I don’t understand.”

“August,” I said, because that was the only way to make sense of it. “They must’ve wanted a statue in front of the keep. For filming.”

Linnea shrieked. I had never heard a sound like that, from her or anyone—the wild rage of it. For the first time, I noticed the way her lashes were dark with tears, and noticing made me aware for the first time of my own face, sticky and salty and cold. Every breath I took was too shallow. I felt like someone had broken all my ribs.

Linnea ran. She tore along the path where tires had flattened the grass, the soles of her bare feet flashing through the mud. I called her name, but she didn’t stop.

I ran after her.

Off the isthmus and up the crest of a hill. For the first time in days, the police car had gone. Where, why? I could see the ATV in the distance—just dipping out of sight into another croft—and there was no way to catch them, but Linnea did not care. She screamed after them that she would kill them, just wait, she would follow them to the end of the island and she would kill them, and I believed her.

I only caught her because she slid on a patch of ice going down the hill. She fell, and I fell with her, and when she tried to get up, I wrapped my arms around her and held her to the ground.

“Let me go,” she said.

“No.”

“They—they defiled him. They made you think—”

“Linnea, no.”

“I’ll kill them,” she said, but now she was crying, pressing her face against my shoulder. “What’s the point of being a skeld when we can’t even protect ourselves?”

“We need to go back to the keep.”

“Because we could hurt someone out here, right?” She was crying harder now. “Aren’t you tired of being afraid of yourself?”

“Lin.”

“I was going to protect you this time.”

I swept her hair out of her collar, where it had gotten caught on a button. She accepted my hand when I offered it, and when I pulled her to her feet, she shut her eyes and tilted her head to the sky.

“I’m just so tired,” she said quietly.

“I know.”

We walked with our eyes on our feet. Mine were red with cold; Linnea’s were ghostly purple. I thought about calling Soren to tell him about his dad or calling Henrik to tell him where we were, but I didn’t have my phone. I’d run out of the keep without it.

I was so consumed with the act of not looking up that I almost did not notice. Linnea didn’t. She stepped through the door of the keep with a shiver and a shaky breath. But I saw movement in my peripheral vision: Kitty’s movement and her voice under her breath. I turned to see her facing the statue of Mattias, but—no, Mattias was on the other side of Ramna Skaill.

Kitty looked over at me. “Linnea screamed,” she said.

I took a step forward.

“We must’ve both heard her,” Kitty said. “I wasn’t thinking. I just—I heard her out here.”

Another step.

“Tess,” Kitty whispered. “I didn’t—”

I stopped at her side.

Looked up at Henrik.

From behind us, Linnea said, “Tess, where did you…?” Then, seeing: “Henrik?”