Page 34 of A Curse for the Homesick

FAIRHOWE

2022

Kitty bought us coffees while we were waiting for our plane. The café was a new addition to the airport, and they only served one size. When Kitty asked for oat milk, the teenage boy behind the counter gave her a suspicious look.

We sat facing the window. Outside, the world was night black even though it was only four. In California, it never got this dark. Not even at midnight. Not even in winter. The lights from the tarmac and the taxiing plane were trapped under fog that hung low like a dome overhead. Around us, the other travelers spoke in low voices, like someone nearby might be trying to sleep. Most of them were tourists, but I recognized some. Our Year Three teacher looked like he was going to come over, maybe to offer condolences, but Kitty gave him such a withering look that he changed course and bought a medium-sized coffee instead.

Linnea tucked her feet beneath her and leaned against my shoulder. “Tell me again what we’ll do in London.”

“Kitty gives a very good tour,” I said. “She’ll tell you about how Paddington Bear became prime minister.”

She shut her eyes. “Keep talking. Please.”

“I’m going to take you to a musical,” Kitty said. “There will be big dance numbers and voluminous costumes. And then we’re going to the British Museum to see how many loud comments we can make about returning artifacts before we get kicked out. Followed by a night dancing at a club in a converted button factory where all the drinks glow in the dark. Oh, Lin.”

The last part was because Linnea had started crying. No sound; just tears. I ran my hands through her hair, and she turned her face to my collarbone.

The plane was the kind you had to board from a little staircase that folded out in front of the wing. We stood in the cold and wet and waited our turn. Inside, it was too hot. The lights in the cabin glowed impossibly brightly. Already, I could not see the airport, either because of the angle or the fog. It felt like we were the only people in the world.

It was not the type of plane from my dream. There were no screens above the tray tables, and the seats were in twos, not threes. Linnea and Kitty took two together, and I was alone on the other side of the aisle. There must’ve been something in my expression, though, because as soon as we took off, Linnea unbuckled and moved to the seat next to me.

“Tess?”

I had been looking at my phone, which I had not yet turned to Airplane Mode. As the plane shook, I kept thinking it was an incoming message. There was nothing, of course; I didn’t want there to be anything. What would it say? It was better that there wasn’t.

“Tess,” Linnea said again. “Are you okay?”

Don’t go.

That’s what it would say. If I got a message.

It was better that there was no message.

“I’m okay,” I said.

“Are you actually okay, or do you just think I’m less okay and you don’t want to worry me?”

I gave her an almost smile, and she gave me one back.

“Did you know all along?” she asked.

“Know what?”

“About Soren and Saffi. Saffi just told me. After the funeral. It wasn’t—I wasn’t trying to keep it from you.”

“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “It’s not important. In the scheme of things.”

“I was just thinking, if not for Noah—”

“We broke up,” I said. Linnea gave me this look and opened her mouth, but I said: “In the grand scheme of things. It really doesn’t matter anymore.”

By it , I meant: the message I did not get.

Linnea rested her head on my shoulder. “Okay,” she said. “If that’s how you feel.”

When I looked out the window, I tried to make out the shape of the island: the lights of Lundwall and the narrow black roads snaking across the coastline and the little house at the northern tip of everything. There was too much fog.

* * *

Kitty lived alone in a one-bedroom flat. I called it an apartment, and she said, in a French accent, “You stupid American.”

“How much money do you make, exactly?” Linnea asked when Kitty unlocked the door.

“Honestly?” she said. “A lot.”

Linnea and I set our bags by the foot of Kitty’s bed, which was unnecessarily large and covered in several dozen throw pillows. Her bathroom counter was so inundated with makeup and skincare products that I knocked a bottle of perfume to the ground while I was trying to wash my hands.

“Sorry,” I said.

“Don’t apologize to me,” she said. “Apologize to the people standing next to us on the Tube as they slowly asphyxiate on vanilla.”

Linnea went to take a nap, and Kitty and I sat at her tiny kitchen table in front of cups of tea we hadn’t touched.

“You don’t have to try so hard to seem like you’re okay,” I said.

“If I stop trying so hard,” she said, “I’ll remember what happened.”

“You know Linnea doesn’t blame you.”

“She does. A little. It would be weird if she didn’t.”

I lifted a shoulder.

More quietly, Kitty said: “I hope she likes it here.”

“So much that she stays and we never have to go back?”

Kitty gave me a funny look, like she misheard me, then she shook her head and drank her tea.

* * *

We did the things Kitty said we’d do. Kitty went back to work, and Linnea and I wandered through the parks and along the Thames. We spent too long on the Tube, just rumbling through the darkness with no destination in mind. Sometimes we’d talk and laugh and get off at a station, any station, and wander until we found a bakery. Other times we’d just ride to the end of the line because we didn’t have anything to say.

I scrolled through job postings on my laptop. London, New York, Melbourne. Once, Linnea came up behind me so quietly I didn’t hear her, and she said, “Does that say Lundwall?”

I closed the tab. “I was just curious.”

“You’d think about going back?”

“No.” I felt like a traitor. “Of course not.”

* * *

Two weeks in London felt longer—a whole universe inside Kitty’s flat. I had counted all thirty-seven photos of the three of us. We had our places and our routines. Kitty and Linnea slept far apart on the enormous bed, and I slept on an inflatable mattress on the floor because Linnea tossed and turned so much I couldn’t sleep near her. Not that I slept much anyway. Mostly, I stared at the ceiling and waited for night to be over. Once, just as I was drifting off, my phone lit up. I grabbed it, frantic, but it was just an email inviting me to Get Christmas Discounts Now.

* * *

Kitty was the one who found the article, but Linnea was the one who showed me. We were in Kitty’s kitchen, and Linnea was sitting cross-legged on a wooden chair with her phone on the table beside her porridge. She was drizzling honey into the porridge, but she was looking at her phone and didn’t seem to notice the rate at which her bowl was becoming more honey than oat.

“Lin?”

“Have you seen?”

I took the honey bottle. “Seen what?”

“Kitty showed me this morning, but she had to leave. For her coffee date. She made me promise I’d show you.”

I held out my hand, and she passed me the phone. When I scrolled back to the top, I saw a familiar masthead. The Stennish Independent , and a picture of Cairn—the inside, not the outside, and the thin, scratchy writing of an inscription in the stone. The heading said: X-ray fluorescence imaging reveals 500-year-old inscription in Neolithic monument.

“Have you finished reading?” Linnea asked.

“Give me a second.”

“How about now?”

“Linnea.”

“Okay, sorry, sorry.”

The new inscription had been found on the wall opposite the most famous of the inscriptions; they were dated to the same decade, which made noted Stennish scholar Kirk Sandison believe they’d been carved at the same time. According to Sandison, this inscription had gone unnoticed until now because it was carved over the top of a pre-existing scrawl of Norse runes, which in turn had been carved over Pictish lines. The five-hundred-year-old inscription was in Stennish, and it would provide a consuming translation project for years to come. In the interim, as a first attempt to satiate curious minds, Sandison and a small group of research assistants had translated the text as: Pity on me should I wait ten thousand more.

“Now?” Linnea asked.

I passed her the phone.

“Tess,” she said.

“I can’t,” I whispered.

“You can.”

“I can’t go back. Not for… I can’t make my life smaller for a man.”

“Who said loving someone makes your life smaller?”

“My mum.”

“You’re not your mum,” Linnea said. “You’re an engineer and a swimmer and my best friend, and you don’t stop being those things just because you’re in California or Britain or Stenland. And a small place doesn’t mean a small life.”

I was blinking now, quickly, and I wished Linnea would look away, but she didn’t. Outside, a car horn blared and a bare branch rapped against the window.

“You don’t hate Stenland,” she said. “You’ve never hated Stenland.”

“Of course I have. Do.”

“You fucking don’t!” Linnea said, loudly enough that I leaned away. She looked like she couldn’t decide whether to laugh or throw her porridge at me. “You love the fucking snow, and you love that fucking pool, and you love all those winding fucking roads through the hills between the sheep, and Hedda’s stupid fucking coffee, and Soren fucking Fell.”

“I don’t.”

“Yes, you do.”

I looked at my hands. My shoulders curled up to my ears. When I tried to swallow, it got caught in my throat. Linnea just waited, waited for me to say something, and when I finally did, my voice was almost too quiet to hear.

“What if I kill him?” I said.

“What if you don’t?”

A long pause.

“Just tell me,” Linnea said. “If you could know for sure that you wouldn’t hurt him, what would you do?”

“But I can’t know for sure.”

“Please look at me.”

When I did, she took my hands in both of hers. She had honey on her thumb, and I tried to wipe it away for her, but she just shook her head and held my fingers more tightly.

“I would never take away having loved Henrik. Even if I knew how it ended. And I—I guess I can’t say if Henrik would’ve risked it, but I—”

“We both know he would’ve.”

Linnea hesitated, then said: “If you were eighty, and you’d spent your whole life not letting yourself love him, and he was eighty, and he’d never been turned to stone—how much would you regret it?”

I blinked again, but it didn’t help this time. “You already know. Why are you asking?”

“Pity on you,” Linnea said, “should you wait ten thousand more.”

I started to stand, then sat again. “That place takes so much from us.”

She nudged the phone with her pinkie, showing me the picture of the cairn, meaning: Sometimes it gives us things too.

I called Kitty in the car. When she picked up, she said, “You know I don’t do phone calls.”

“I know.”

“And I’m in the middle of a date.”

“I know.”

“It’s going really well, in case you were wondering. She’s sitting across from me now, giving me an annoyed look for answering my phone.”

In the background, a voice said: “I’m not annoyed.”

“She’s not annoyed,” Kitty clarified. “Because I’ve spent the entirety of the morning providing her with backstory. And I’m actually quite eager to get back to this date, so please do ask whatever question you called me to ask.”

“You think I should go? After everything?”

Kitty paused. “After everything,” she said, “I do.”

“But you hate the island.”

“I don’t hate the island. I hate the lack of modern art museums and underground speakeasies where the bartenders wear flapper dresses. I hate that there are no direct flights to Rome. But I don’t hate Stenland. And, more importantly, neither do you.”

“That’s what Linnea said.”

Kitty made an impatient sound. “Well, if I can’t convince you, and Linnea can’t convince you—”

“I’m in a car now,” I said.

“Going?”

“Heathrow.”

“Really? Shit. Really? So why did you call me?”

“Just—” I said. “Thanks.”

“I’m going to hang up now,” she said. “This could’ve been a text.”

* * *

The plane cut through the fog, and I saw the tallest ridges stretching skyward like the shoulder blades of a giant. Where the snow was patchy, the earth was indigo, same as the sea. Around the tarmac, golden lights glittered. I pressed my temple against the window, but I couldn’t see Lundwall.

My heart was sitting somewhere near the base of my throat, and when the plane thumped and skittered along the runway, I felt it jump higher. Everyone was getting off the plane too slowly, clogging up the aisle and bumping around to put on their puffy jackets. When I climbed down the stairs to the tarmac, the wind came straight at me: glacially cold and too thin to breathe.

We waited, all of us, for the men in hi-vis to toss our suitcases onto a cart. I buried my hands in my pockets and stomped my feet. The ground was black, shiny, wet where they’d melted off the snow. The highly visible men called to each other, laughing. One was wearing a Santa hat. Why did I bring a bag? I didn’t need a bag. I could leave without it, really, and I almost did, but then they were wheeling the cart toward us and there was an elbows-out dash for the luggage: boxes of Christmas presents and overstuffed backpacking backpacks and there, my suitcase, which I grabbed by the handle and yanked free.

In the airport, the doors were strung with pale green willow boughs and bells. Even inside, my breath came out in fog. On the far wall, probably put up by the tourism board, there was a picture of Cairn—five-thousand-year-old rocks dusted with freshly fallen snow. I looked at it instead of at the short line of travelers getting ready to leave on the plane that just brought me in.

I wasn’t a leaver, if only for the next hour; if only until he told me to be one. So I looked at the photo of , and I didn’t look at them, the leavers, and I probably never would have if he had not stepped out of line with a boarding pass in one hand and a book in the other and called my name.

* * * * *