Page 4 of A Curse for the Homesick

MIDSUMMER

2013

Around the time we started high school, people had begun telling Kitty, Linnea, and me that we would be skelds. Today, tomorrow—someday. They’d seen too many trios like ours, friends so close they might as well have been sisters, and they knew, by now, what it meant.

Unless we left.

By the summer before my final year of high school, I knew, down to the day, how long it would be until I could leave Stenland. We had not had a skeld season in thirty months. I felt the overdue pressure of it hanging above me like an overripe fruit on a bowing branch.

While in prison, my mum had written a memoir about her time as a skeld. After her release, she’d gone straight from the courthouse to the paisley-patterned couch of a women’s morning talk show. She’d become medium famous among memoirists, which made her low-level famous among the general population. After reading her book, in which she’d categorized my dad as slightly sinister and deeply stupid, I’d developed a resentment toward her that lingered in my mouth like sticky candy. If she had not married my dad, she’d said, she would have left Stenland after high school. She’d wanted to flee the curse, but she’d made the mistake of falling in love, and wasn’t it just like men to trap you? I agreed with some of her points but begrudged her for making them at my dad’s expense.

Last I’d heard, she was living in Edinburgh. I could’ve gone with her, and there were times I wished I had, but the only thing I wanted less than to be a skeld was to spend all my time staring at her, at the serene and inspirational self-help feminist guru she had become. So I stayed in Stenland and plotted my way out. I swam every day. Talked to coaches at US universities. Took the classes and sat the tests and wrote the essays. With whatever time I had left, I helped my dad fix cars so we could have a little more money so I could buy a plane ticket away from this place forever.

There was, in fact, little I allowed myself to do that didn’t relate to escape. Which was why Kitty and Linnea had spent so very many hours convincing me to join them on the beach on .

It was nearly midnight, and though the sun had set, it wasn’t dark; you could still see the fuzzy glow just below the horizon. We called it simmer dim , that kind of light. The sky and ocean were matching periwinkle, and for once the wind was calm.

I sat propped on one of the big flat rocks at the bottom of the cliffs with my knees bent and my elbows resting on top of them. An old skeld cave loomed behind me. A thousand years ago, the skelds had lived in these caves to protect the island from outsiders. The walls were etched with carvings of raven women and smeared with dark red paint. Down the black beach, some of the boys from my class were throwing peat bricks onto a bonfire that already loomed above their heads. Most of the girls wore white, but the boys were more mixed—a blue sweater here, a red T-shirt there. We had been a Viking island and a Norwegian territory, then we’d been part of Scotland and then part of the United Kingdom, and now we were part of nothing, just our own little speck out in the Atlantic. A few decades ago, someone had gotten the bright idea to start celebrating in a big way to honor our Scandinavian roots. So now we had a parade and a maypole and girls in white dresses. It was unclear how much of this had been devised by the tourism board.

I was wearing black shorts and a large red flannel, thin from age. When Kitty had seen me that morning, she’d said, Oh, so you’re too good for tradition? You think you’re better than everyone?

Kitty was wearing a black jumpsuit.

That hardly seems fair , I’d said.

I mean , Kitty had said, I think you’re better than everyone. It’s just a bad energy, you know? Very prickly.

Linnea, who had chosen a pretty white dress for the day, had said, You are both radiant like the sun and effervescent in spirit. Can we go now?

I’d lost them a few minutes before because Linnea had said she had to pee and Kitty had decided to get us more drinks from the hole someone had dug in the sand. I was still sipping one, a cider in an amber bottle, and picking at the corner of the label. If I concentrated, I could make out conversations happening along the beach: one boy yelling at another about the best way to architect the fire, a flirtation in the shadows of the cliffs, someone saying something funny by the water’s edge.

I’d never liked this beach because the caves down here were purported to have once been part of some sort of skeld ritual, so you were as likely as not to stumble on a carving of raven women and stone giants. In the ’80s, a nineteen-year-old named Matilda had escaped the keep while she’d been a skeld, and she’d come to this beach while all her classmates had been having a party. She’d set out turning them to stone, one by one, and a handful had run into the ocean to try to escape, but she’d followed them out there. At low tide, when the surf was calm, you could see their stone heads and hands just breaking the surface. In the end, somebody had shot Matilda from the shore.

She was Hedda’s daughter. In spite of Matilda, or maybe because of her, Hedda remained a fixture of the community. Plenty of Stenns were just one degree of separation from a skeld tragedy. Part of the reason Hedda was so beloved, I thought, was because she handled her proximity to Matilda’s crimes in the way Stenns were meant to handle things: without asking for pity and with eyes set forward. Hedda did not behave as though Matilda’s crime condemned her, so the rest of the island followed suit.

But Hedda was Hedda, and I was not. I felt that what my family did, what my friends did, most especially what my mother did bled into me. I wanted to move so far away that my mother’s crime stopped feeling like my own.

Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed Kitty walking back down the beach toward me.

“I feel like I’m a hundred years old,” she said, sitting on my rock.

Her hands were empty.

“No drinks?”

“I got distracted,” she said.

I looked at her, waiting for the follow-up. Her hair, that morning, had been in a braided crown. The crown part had come loose, and now it hung in two long braids on either side of her face. Her lipstick remained immaculate and served to emphasize the sour knot of her mouth.

“The Faerie Queen,” Kitty finally said, “continues to charm the masses with her ephemeral grace.”

I followed Kitty’s gaze to the bonfire. Linnea was standing in a group of three boys a year older than us, recent graduates. She looked, in the firelight, very slender, almost stretched. Her arms and legs were as pale as her dress: moon planes of skin in the dim. The boys were laughing as she gestured, and one of them was gathering the wild wisps of her long hair so they stopped flying into her face.

In every friend group, there are three types of people: one who likes everyone, one who everyone likes, and one who would like everyone to go away.

Linnea liked everyone. I had never seen her not forgive someone, no matter what they said or did. She wore floaty clothes and spent a lot of time staring at the horizon. Men tended to like her and women usually didn’t. With some regularity, Linnea was accused of playing a character because no one could be so high and airy and innocent.

Kitty, everyone liked. As often as not, she didn’t reciprocate, but that was part of her charm. She was sharp, untouchable, incisive, which meant that winning her approval felt like the sun. She wore shades of lipstick with names like Ferrari Bombshell and Incorrigible Harlot. She would tell you the truth, but she would probably couch that truth in seven metaphors and five paragraphs.

Which left me as the third type of person.

I had a habit toward silence that had been compounded by my mum’s memoir. It struck me as so presumptuous to imagine that anyone would want to hear her innermost thoughts that I felt the need to even the scales; she had already said so much on behalf of the Eriksson women that I figured I may as well shut up. Once, Kitty had told me that if I swam less and talked more, I could be the smart one. I’d said I thought I was the smart one. She’d said, Please.

“Why are you angry at Linnea?” I asked.

Kitty gestured toward the fire. “She’s being… Delia would say she’s scrounging for attention.”

“Delia would say.”

“Yes. Delia would say she’s being a—flirt.”

“You can’t pretend you aren’t slut-shaming Linnea by blaming Delia for saying things she’s not even here to say.”

Kitty crossed her arms. “I’m not slut-shaming Linnea. She can do whatever she wants. Hashtag feminism. It’s just that you and I both know Linnea doesn’t have the best track record of taking care of herself, and I don’t want to be the one holding her hair out of the toilet bowl when she starts puking.”

“Don’t you?” I asked.

“Piss right off,” Kitty said. Then: “Of course I do.” She leaned against me and scowled. “Say something distracting.”

“Pulchritudinous.”

“What? No, like, a distracting topic of conversation.”

“Hedda just bought a ’78 Mustang, and she’s having it shipped here next Tuesday.”

Kitty made a noise of disgust. “You’re no help at all.”

I shrugged.

“Wait,” she said, “where’s Linnea?”

I looked back to the bonfire, and sure enough, no Linnea—gone like mist in the wind.

The three older boys were still in a huddle, but they were turned the other direction now, backs to the fire and faces to the ocean.

My heart did a slow one-two beat as I looked out at the waves: ink dark where they weren’t tinged with the simmering midnight sun.

That was when I heard Linnea scream my name.

I was already standing.

I was already halfway down the beach.

My flannel was coming off as I ran—the thread-ripping noise of a button flying—and my shoes were somewhere behind me. I saw Linnea, a flash of pale, and I was running into the surf.

The water was pins-and-needles cold. So cold it was hot. When it got as far as my stomach, I couldn’t breathe from the shock of it. I dove, and my skin sang in pain.

It had been calm just a moment ago, and now it wasn’t. The waves were coming at me diagonally, splashing at my mouth when I tried to breathe under my elbow. I opened my eyes. Too dark, too cold.

My hip collided with something—hard.

I gasped. Water filled my mouth, and I had to stop, breaststroke paddling with my arms as the pain radiated out from my hip bone, down my leg, and up my torso.

I’d hit one of the petrified figures. The statues, reaching their hands toward the surface with their immovable stone fingers.

Linnea called my name again, and on the crest of the next wave, I saw her: her dress spinning out wildly around her, her hair in a tangled noose around her neck.

She kept surging away from me. The current was pulling both of us, so the longer it took to close the gap between me and her, the farther we got from shore. But then, finally, we were in the trough of the same wave. Her face was doll pale, bloodless. She kept reaching wildly like the water would solidify in her grasp, become something to hold on to. I was shouting at her—I didn’t even know what I was shouting; I couldn’t hear my own voice—and her eyes were wide and white. Her mouth and nose kept going under. She angled her face to the sky, and the waves knocked at her, and she just kept grabbing, grabbing at the water.

I wrapped my arms around her from behind. She seized my hands, trying to keep them in place or claw them off.

I frog-kicked on my back. It was something between treading water and survival backstroke. Linnea kept choking on the waves. I glanced over my shoulder, trying to make out the silhouettes around the bonfire. My heart was starting to beat faster—the first push of adrenaline giving way to a different kind of fear. I told myself we didn’t need to get there quickly; we just needed to keep moving faster than the current could drag us out again.

Linnea was going boneless in my arms. She was still breathing. Almost there. Almost there.

I saw a wave coming for us. Not yet breaking but moving like a predator. I was only thinking of Linnea—angling her so she didn’t swallow half the ocean. The wave lifted us, and I kicked. Then it dropped out from underneath us, so much water rushing away, and pain pierced my body like I’d been stabbed.

I let go of Linnea.

Everything was dark.

I couldn’t breathe.

My legs and arms and face had all disappeared, turned to nothing with numbness; the entirety of my being was concentrated in a palm-sized point on my left shoulder. The pain blossomed and crescendoed: I moved out of myself, transcending, and I had a moment of sudden clarity. There I was, sinking through the water, Linnea grabbing for me. In the water nearby, a man made of stone was raising a hand toward the surface.

I fell back into my body with a crash of pain.

I gasped at the water. Found my way to the surface. Coughed lungfuls of ocean as Linnea’s hands closed around my arms. That place in my shoulder shrieked, or maybe I was shrieking, or maybe I was silent, too out of breath to make any noise at all.

Everything was pulsing black as I paddled to shore. Linnea was kicking now, just a little, and I noticed it and forgot again just as quickly. It began to feel like this would be my whole life: fighting the waves to shore as my shoulder seared like it wanted to come detached from the rest of my body.

And then there was sand beneath me. I tried to put a foot down but found I couldn’t stand. I shoved Linnea farther ahead of me, and she stumbled out of the surf while I crawled on my hands and knees. The sand under my fingers was a depthless dark. When I inhaled, I felt like I was being set on fire.

Everyone on the beach had collected in front of us. I would learn, later, that one of the boys had dared Linnea to go touch one of the stone figures. Linnea had been too drunk or happy to remember that she could hardly swim at the best of times, in a pool with a shallow bottom and a lifeguard on duty. The waves had swept her out, and all the boys promised they’d been about to go in after her, but I had dived past them before they’d gotten the chance.

At the time, I was only vaguely aware of the conversation going on. Kitty was shouting. Linnea was crying softly. Everyone else was whispering.

I was too numb to feel the cold when the water frothed against my hands and knees. Stand up , I told myself. You have to stand up.

I did, slowly, and there was one angle that made my body spasm so violently I almost went crashing down again. But then, all the way upright, it was slightly better, hardly bad at all, as long as I didn’t inhale or exhale or move.

Most of the group’s attention was fixed on Kitty, who had one arm tight around Linnea’s waist and was continuing to tell the group of boys that she would personally carve their eyes out with spoons. The boys were starting to get defensive, crossing their arms and looking taller than they had a moment ago, and I found my heavy legs moving—dragging me across the sand, taking me to the place I belonged beside Kitty and Linnea. It was probably only a few feet, but it felt like the whole length of the beach. By the end of it, my eyes were watering. I leaned against Linnea’s side, and she shot me a concerned glance.

“How was I supposed to know she couldn’t swim?” one of the boys demanded of Kitty. “Who the fuck jumps in the ocean when they can’t swim?”

“It was just a dare,” one of his friends said. “She didn’t have to do it.”

Linnea hid her face against me as color bloomed across her cheeks.

“And I don’t have to fill your car with bees,” Kitty said. “But let’s see if I do it anyway.”

“You need to calm down,” the first boy said. He was flexing and unflexing his hands in fists at his sides, the universal sign of hoping to punch someone. I wanted to go stand between him and Kitty. I wanted to flex and unflex my hands into fists. When I let out a breath, black fringed my vision from the outside in.

“Hey,” someone was saying, “hey, hey, hey.” It was Henrik Holm, who had been in our class since we’d been born, who had hands the size of steering wheels and big, broad shoulders and a pink-tinged face framed by shaggy blond hair. He played rugby and didn’t do well in school and never watched where he was going, but when he inevitably crashed into you in the hallway and sent your things flying, he would kneel on the tile next to you collecting books and say, Ah, shit, I’m sorry—here, let me buy you a coffee or something.

Henrik’s cheeks were red from wind or beer or frustration. He was bigger than the other boys, and they glanced at each other like they were trying to make up their collective mind about something.

“There’s no need for this,” Henrik said. His hands were raised in a placating way. More quietly, he added, “She’s already rattled.”

Linnea pressed her face harder into my shoulder. I tried not to gasp from the pain.

Gesturing past Henrik to Kitty, one of the boys said, “She’s fucking threatening us, yeah?”

Kitty gathered her breath to spit something back, but Henrik quickly said, “Please, can you just leave it?”

The boys were still tensed, but then through them slipped someone else, and there was Soren Fell standing at Henrik’s side. I hadn’t noticed him on the beach earlier; maybe he’d showed up when Henrik had. Between the two of them, lean, soccer-playing Soren and solid, rugby-playing Henrik, they looked better equipped for a fight than the three older boys.

Soren didn’t say anything. He just stood there and looked at them. Since the deaths of his parents, Soren had taken over much of the responsibility of running the Fells’ croft with his grandmother. Each year that went by, he did a little more and seemed a little older, like he was aging twice as quickly as the rest of us. By the time we’d turned seventeen, the men of the island were treating him as one of their own, calling him Fell and asking him about bank loans and crop yields.

The longer Soren stood there silently, the more the pressure built, like everyone was waiting for a mic drop, something clever and scathing to make the boys look like children. In the end, Soren’s eyes just swept them up and down, and he turned away from them and faced the three of us.

“Thank you, O knight, for your heroic protection,” Kitty said.

Soren inclined his head toward her. To Linnea, he asked, “You okay?”

“I’m fine,” Linnea said.

His eyes found mine, but he didn’t speak. Behind him, Henrik was successfully coaxing the boys back to the bonfire, and the crowd was dispersing. The numbness from the water was starting to fade, and without it came a sharp awareness of the cold air and an incongruous heat across my back. Was I bleeding? I hadn’t thought to check.

Soren extended something to me. It took me moment to realize it was my flannel. I accepted it—and for the first time noted that I was wearing nothing but my shorts and a black bra. I put on the flannel slowly and tried to keep my face emotionless. When I lifted my arm to get my hand through the sleeve, my vision went temporarily black.

“You must be freezing,” Henrik said. I thought he was talking to me at first, but no, his gaze was fixed on Linnea as he peeled off his fleece jacket and draped it over her shoulders. “Want to sit down? Make sure you’re okay?”

Linnea was nodding, and I felt a weight come off me. I trusted big, gentle Henrik, and besides, Kitty was stomping after them, and I just wanted them gone for a minute so I could figure out what was wrong with me.

Soren was still standing there.

“What?” I said.

He shook his head, but didn’t go.

“Can you look at my shoulder?”

If he thought this was a strange request, he didn’t show it. He just tilted his head to the side, and I turned away from him.

I felt his fingers on the collar of my flannel as he eased it off my shoulders. His index finger skimmed the back of my neck, my spine, and then his thumb slid across the skin to the left of my shoulder blade. The breathlessness now was deeper than before, and I felt stupid about it because this was Soren.

Our school was too small for everyone to not consider everyone else carefully when it came to romantic potential, so it would’ve been pointless to pretend that I did not like the way Soren looked or that I had not noticed. His hair was still fair, but not yellowish white like when he was a kid. It was closer to gold now—and cut terribly, with lumpy edges around his ears. Haircut aside, general consensus was that he had become attractive rather spontaneously last year. Linnea said it was because of his face, which was sort of squarish when you looked at it straight on but angular from the side. Kitty speculated it was because he kept his mouth shut most of the time, so he seemed less stupid than everyone else. I refused to comment on the matter because I refused to concede that I found him attractive. Nothing could happen between us because of my mother. We’d had classes together over the years, but this was the first time we’d been alone since we were twelve.

“What happened?” Soren said. His fingers ran carefully down my shoulder blade, and I arched my back away from him. “Sorry.”

“The statues,” I said. “I think I hit one.”

His hand rested around my bare arm, thumb angled toward the locus of the pain. I wanted to be less aware of his touch than I was. “You’re bleeding,” he said.

In a way, I was glad for this. If it was bleeding, it would scab and it would heal. The idea of an invisible injury was more terrifying.

He dropped his hand suddenly. The warmth evaporated as I felt him step backward. I turned slowly, feeling embarrassed and vaguely rejected. He was tugging off his sweater, briefly exposing a band of stomach and faint golden hair.

I accepted the sweater, which was dark red and smelled overwhelmingly like soap, and pulled it over my head. It swallowed my hands and stretched lower than the bottom of my shorts.

“Thanks,” I said.

“Yeah,” he said. “I should go.”

Go where? “Okay. Hey—don’t tell Linnea.”

“About your shoulder?”

I nodded. He frowned slightly, but in a way that felt like an assent.

Then he was gone, and I was alone on the beach, wrapping his overlong sleeves around myself and trying to fend off the feeling that my life had lurched imperceptibly in a direction I could no longer control.