Page 32 of A Curse for the Homesick

KEEP

2022

The three of us stood on the cliffs with our shoulders touching—Linnea, then Kitty, then me.

Linnea said: “I don’t understand.”

Kitty said: “Fucking hell.”

I didn’t say anything.

I stepped forward, toward the edge of the cliffs. Faint footprints tracked a path through the frost.

Linnea made a choking sound behind me.

Where the earth gave way, right near the edge, there he stood: tall, windswept, wearing a sweater with a fraying sleeve. When the breeze blew off the ocean, the sweater flattened against his chest. Already, a layer of snow had fallen across the top of his head, the width of his shoulders, the tip of his nose. His mouth was open, like he was about to say something; he never would.

I took another step, my hand outstretched. I touched his cheekbone, and a part of me still expected it to be soft, warm, alive, but all my fingers found was stone.

The wind rushed around us, cold enough to burn.

My hand dropped from his still, stone face. When I turned, Linnea was on her knees.

“I just don’t understand,” she said again, her voice muffled through her hands. And then she raised her head, slowly, to look at me. She said, somewhere between question and accusation: “Tess?”

I held her gaze. Swallowed.

Then she turned, slowly, and her eyes met Kitty’s. She whispered, “Kitty?”

I never should’ve come back.

“Linnea,” Kitty said. “I didn’t mean to.”

“But it was you. Wasn’t it?”

Kitty was shaking her head even as she said yes. Yes, it was, and she hadn’t meant to, but it had just happened. Linnea had screamed, so they’d both come running. They’d both thought—

Well. It didn’t matter now.

“You never liked him,” Linnea whispered.

Kitty took a breath, sharp and horrible, like she’d been stabbed. “Linnea—”

Linnea climbed to her feet. She was covered in mud; her dress had a tear at the knee. She looked—oh, god, so young, with her eyes bright red and her hair wild and thistled. I tried to grab her hand, but she shook me away.

Kitty tried to say something, maybe Linnea’s name again, but Linnea was already throwing open the door and disappearing into Ramna Skaill. I was distantly aware of the sound of sirens. The looming threat of more people. Somewhere, Soren.

“We have to go inside,” I told Kitty.

She wasn’t moving.

“Kitty. Please.”

She wouldn’t get arrested. It was August’s fault, not Kitty’s. Kitty had just been trying to protect us, to protect Linnea. For a moment, I wondered if that was what Kitty was thinking about as the sirens wailed ever closer. But when I looked at her, she was reaching a hand to Henrik. She looked so small in comparison. Her fingers touched his wide, outstretched palm.

“Kitty,” I said again, quieter this time.

I didn’t realize she was crying until I heard her say his name. Just once. In a whisper, as a question. Like she thought he still might respond.

The wind came whistling off the water. Kitty turned and ran, back into the keep. My legs were too heavy to move. I could not stop seeing, on the backs of my eyelids, the way Linnea had looked at Kitty: like she wished we had never been friends at all.

A voice behind me said, “Tess?”

I shut my eyes.

“It’s me,” Soren said. “Why are you—”

I heard, in his breath, the moment he realized. It was the longest silence I had ever endured. I kept my eyes pressed shut as tears squeezed between my lids, as Soren came closer. He didn’t say anything, but he sounded like he was breathing through broken glass.

If I could’ve taken Henrik’s place, I would’ve done it. I wouldn’t have cared. I wouldn’t have even paused. I would have been dead if it meant Henrik was not, and I wished, completely, that I was.

“We should go inside,” Soren said finally, his voice hoarse and thin. “The police are—Lukas called them. About August. We didn’t realize…”

“You should keep your eyes closed,” I said. “I don’t know where Linnea and Kitty are.”

“They’re closed,” Soren said.

I felt his hand on my elbow. Instinctively, I started to lean into him, his warmth and his familiar smell, but I pulled away again before my body could fit against his. So we just stayed like that, barely touching—just his fingers against the crook of my elbow—as we made our way blindly back to the keep.

Through the door, I opened my eyes. Found a mask and set it in his hands. He put it on. Pressed his hands to his face.

“Tess,” he said again, no more noise than a breath. “How did you—How did it happen?”

That was the first time I realized that he thought it was me.

“August wanted to get film of someone in stone by the keep,” I said. “They must’ve gone to the cemetery. He—It was your dad. Soren, I’m sorry.”

Soren lips parted slightly. He swayed slightly, as if in an invisible wind. “My dad?”

“At the back of the keep,” I said. “I was in my room and I—thought it was you. I thought you were dead.”

“So you ran outside.”

“Yes.”

“And then you—saw Henrik?”

I didn’t say anything to that. It could’ve been me or Linnea as easily as it had been Kitty. Like it could’ve been Soren or Lukas as easily as it had been Henrik.

“They moved my dad?” Soren said.

“I’m sorry. It’s my fault they’re here. It’s my fault any of this happened. I never should’ve—”

Soren’s arms moved around me. It was not like the way we would’ve hugged when we’d been something more than this; we were too still, too afraid of each other. But it was desperate and necessary. His breathing was unsteady in my ear. I pressed my face against his chest and shut my eyes. We held each other like that until the sirens were right outside and someone was knocking at the door.

“I’ll talk to them,” he said. “Go find Kitty and Linnea.”

“Soren—”

Soren what?

Soren, I wish I were dead instead of him.

Soren, I told you something like this was going to happen, and you never listened to me.

Soren, sometimes I still wonder if we’re in love with each other, but maybe now we can finally stop wondering because there is no love worth this.

* * *

Eventually, the documentary would come out, released independently because they could not find anyone to back them. It was riddled, commenters said, with obvious inaccuracies. They had only managed to interview a handful of locals. One user asked if she was the only one who thought the Stenns were fucking with these shitheads. Her comment had more likes than the film.

I never saw either August or Damian again. I thought about it, sometimes. I wondered if I met them on the street, years later, if I would just keep walking or if I would stop and ask if it was worth it.

* * *

Upstairs, I knocked on Linnea’s door. When she didn’t answer, I pushed it open anyway. She was lying on her back on the bed with her thin fingers pressing into her eyes.

“Can I come in?”

She didn’t say anything to that, which I took as a yes. I lowered myself onto the bed next to her and held a pillow against my stomach. She was crying: completely without noise even as her body shook like so many unfastened pieces rattling apart.

I touched her hair. Ran my fingers through it. Outside: the sirens shutting off, voices—Soren’s. The light bruised and vanished out the window, and still Linnea and I sat. I picked the thistles and grass from her sleeves and set them in an empty mug on her bedside table. I pretended it was an important task because I didn’t want to let myself think. It didn’t seem fair to Linnea to cry, so I tried to watch my fingers and suppress the thick pressure in the back of my skull.

She didn’t speak until after midnight.

“Please say something.” Her voice was sandpapery.

“I’m so sorry.”

“Something else.”

“It was my fault.”

“It wasn’t,” Linnea said. “If you—”

A knock at the door. After a pause, it creaked open. Kitty stood at the threshold with her phone in one hand, pressed against her leg.

“I just got off the phone with Soren,” she said. “They’ve revoked all the visas of anyone involved with the film. The police don’t want to charge us with anything because we were just acting in self-defence. And they know they shouldn’t have left us—they got another call, probably a fake report, about shots fired near here. That’s why the patrol car was gone.” A long pause. “Tess, why did you tell Soren it was you?”

“I didn’t.”

“But you didn’t tell him it was me,” Kitty said.

“You only went outside because we were already there. I left the keep first.”

“But it was my fault,” Kitty said. “I was the one who looked at Henrik. I told Soren so. It was…” She moved her gaze to the ceiling, blinking rapidly. “Thank you, Tess. But it’s never going to stop being me who looked at him last.”

“Stop it!” Linnea said. I flinched, but she grabbed my wrist and squeezed it. Kitty set a hand against the door frame, like she wasn’t sure if she was supposed to go. “Tess, you only went outside because you thought one of us had just killed Soren. And Kitty, you only went outside because I screamed. I’m the one who went running away from the keep, and I’m the one who Henrik thought he needed to come help, and—and it’s his fault too, isn’t it, because he could’ve been more careful, right? And maybe it’s also Soren’s fault, while we’re at it, because if he was a better keeper, he wouldn’t have left Henrik here to handle everything on his own? And Lukas? Do we want to blame Lukas, too?”

Kitty and I didn’t say anything. Linnea’s face was wet and shiny.

“I don’t need you to fight about whose fault it was,” she said.

“What do you need?” I asked.

A long pause.

“Just talk to me,” Linnea said. “Please.”

Kitty sat hesitantly on the edge of the bed. I listened: to the wind rattling the windows and the pop of the fire in the hearth and their breathing, Linnea’s and Kitty’s, in this room we had always been doomed to enter.

“You know I have thirty-seven photos of us in my flat?” Kitty said. “I counted the day before my flight here. I was trying to convince myself it was a good idea to come. There’s this one from when we were, like, six. We’re making something—I think it’s shortbread—and it looks like it’s in Linnea’s kitchen, but I don’t remember it at all. But in this photo, Tess is weighing ingredients on a scale, just completely focused, and Linnea has drawn little faces in this huge pile of sugar we spilled, and I’m standing on a chair with the cookbook looking so fucking annoyed.” Kitty took a breath. “I guess I’m just saying that even if we never spoke to each other again, I’d still only be me because of the two of you.”

When Kitty stopped talking, Linnea looked at me, like it was my turn, and I didn’t know what I was going to say until I opened my mouth. When I did, I told them then about the map on AJ’s wall. The one that didn’t have Stenland. I told them about knowing to my bones that my life was worth fuck all if not for this place. If not for Soren and Henrik and Linnea and Kitty.

“I’m sorry I didn’t stay away,” I told them. “But I’m also sorry I didn’t come back sooner.”

Linnea let out a horrible, juddering breath. “I lied to you.”

I shook my head, not understanding.

“When Elin died. I told you—I told you not to come back. That it would just hurt him.”

I touched her shoulder. “That wasn’t a lie, Lin. You were right.”

“No, it was. Because right after the funeral, he got a flight to California. To—see you. And Henrik…” She paused, swallowed. “Henrik and I convinced him to cancel it. Because we knew how Saffi felt about him. And I was afraid if you were together, you’d both leave forever or you’d keep hurting each other, and I told myself it was the best for both of you, but really, I think I was just angry. Because you left. Because you gave up on me.”

I blinked quickly, trying to clear my eyes as they began to burn. “I would never give up on you.”

“But you did,” Linnea said.

But I did.

“I’m sorry,” I whispered. “I’m so sorry.”

She shook her head frantically. “No. No, no. I should’ve come to see you. Both of you. I just thought if I did, it would be like when Lukas went, and he came back thinking everything here was—pathetic, or something. I just didn’t want to realize my life was pathetic.”

“If anyone ever makes you feel pathetic,” Kitty said, “I’ll rip their fucking throat out.”

“I do want to go, though,” Linnea said. “Visit you both.”

We were all quiet for a moment, then Linnea took a sharp breath. “I’m sorry I made you both come back,” she said, and then she was crying again.

* * *

I waited until Linnea and Kitty were asleep, sometime just after seven, when the sun was still hours off rising. Not long until the shortest day of the year, then Christmas, then another January to start over again.

I went to the hearth room and made a fire, slowly and deliberately, concentrating on every bit of kindling. When I opened my laptop, there was a moment before the screen lit up where I saw my reflection in the blackness: puffy, pale, hollow. I watched my fingers as I typed. The glow of the screen hurt too much. In the end, I only proofread it once, quickly, before I pressed Send.

It was a polite letter thanking Carla and the company for giving me a job three and a half years before. I said I was grateful; I meant it. I also said that due to unforeseen circumstances, I would be resigning so that I could spend more time with my family.