The boys huddled together outside the cabin, and they looked like squirrels discussing acorns from this distance. The cabin itself looked like a birdhouse, I chuckled to myself; it was more of a loony bin than anything else. A loony bin on an island that I was stuck on. I knew what the smart thing to do would be: make some sort of truce with the guys, because we would be stuck together indefinitely, but I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to concede like I always did. I folded for my parents, for my friends at school, and I had almost folded myself into nothing at work. I may be weak and trapped, but I wasn’t going to fold now, I wasn’t going down to them to apologize, I wasn’t going to contribute, not today, I wasn’t going tell them that I had found an oak tree near the meadow, probably planted, as they didn’t grow naturally with the cold and wet and lack of sun, most likely planted when the farmers had planned to have pigs and wanted additional feed for them. No, I wouldn’t be the bigger person; I would be an asshole until I physically couldn’t any more.
I guessed what they were speaking about down there. They were most likely trying to figure out what to do with me. Or maybe I wasn’t even that important, maybe they were talking about something else entirely.
Slouching down, I pulled up the fleece until it covered as much of me as possible and stared out into the sea, regretting not bringing the firestarter to make a small fire at the very top of the boulder.
The morning passed by the same way. As much as I tried not to, I kept track of where all the boys were on the island, Bartosz at the far end of the pasture, seemingly staring at the sheep as they skittered away from him. Ettore, on the beach, was chucking rocks into the ocean with a level of aggression that I had never seen from him before. Jin Woo was moving sharklike through the forest, circling the island over and over again. IF I were speaking with Jin Woo, I would tell him to save his calories. IF I were speaking with Ettore, I would ask him to keep an eye out for any ships on the horizon as he tossed his rocks, even though we hadn’t seen any so far. I watched from my position on the boulder in the pasture, the smelly but warm sheepskin clasped around me, the island coming to life below me. IF I were speaking to Bartosz, I would tell him to stop fucking with the sheep, it would make it harder to catch another one next time. But I wasn’t speaking with them, so I just watched.
Oskar was the tricky one; he kept disappearing, which was a feat with the small size of the island. I should have known that he was going to come to me, especially when I lost him for twenty minutes straight.
“It destroyed me.”
He looked up at me from the foot of the boulder. It was probably eight or nine feet tall, so for a moment I felt like Juliet looking down at Romeo from her balcony and just as doomed. I could still make out his freckles, though, that furrowed brow that I used to trace when we were children. I gazed down at him, I took him in, but I didn’t answer him.
“It was my father’s fault for being so unbothered about what I was up to. My mother is Swedish, the rest of my fathersare all Nordic, but my father, my biological father, is from here, northwestern Norway, and he wanted me to know Norway and the fishing business. My mother had triplets five years after I was born and then twins when I was seven, and an apparel company that was flourishing, so she agreed to let my father raise me away from the rest of the family, as my grandmother was here and was lonely.”
He didn’t lean against the boulder as he spoke; instead, he stood with a ruler straight spine, and if he’d had a hat, I did not doubt that he would have been holding it in his hands.
“Work consumed my father’s time, though, and my grandmother was in her nineties; she couldn’t chase me around, so I basically had free rein. They had never properly told me about the dangers of being too close to normal humans; they thought that I was too young for anything bad to happen.
Obviously, they were wrong. I imprinted on you, and as time went on, I began to become more and more despondent during the times when you weren’t around. It wasn’t that bad at first, but by the year before our last summer, I was so depressed that even my absentee father became concerned.
He finally reached out to the rest of the family, and they all came to the island, some flying back and forth to Sweden for work, but they were on the island most of the time.”
It came back slowly, I remembered Oskar complaining about his annoying siblings, four brothers and a sister, during our last summer. There had been a couple of unfamiliar men jogging on the island's roads in the mornings. I’d caught a glimpse of a woman so perfect and beautiful that it was scary, her hands on her swollen belly, watching me with a dark look on her face as towheaded and chestnut-haired children ran around her. Even thinking of her now made me shiver.
“At first, when summer came, and I became that happy, joyful kid I had been before, they all relaxed. They just blamed mydespondent-ness on my missing my mother and the rest of the family when I couldn’t be distracted by running wild outside, and maybe some seasonal depression. They made plans for me to only stay on the island during the summer months, for the whole family to move to Spain for a year, to soak in the sun and avoid the endless winter nights, but then they saw the way I was around you, and they knew that the issue was something worse.”
I leaned slightly over the edge of the rock. There was something fascinating about hearing your history, the very crux of your trauma, being laid out by someone else, the holes you didn’t even know existed being filled. To me, it had been the flip of a switch. One day, I had been able to see him, and then the next, I was not, but in the story he was telling, there had been a process. Somehow, truly beginning to understand what happened loosened something in me.
“My mother was furious at my father for not watching over me closely enough. Honestly, I think it broke their relationship. To this day, my father only visits the family; he never stays full-time. My mother consulted with the best Renai child psychiatric specialists, and they all recommended separation, though some recommended that it be done in stages, and others recommended it be done all at once. You can guess which route my mother chose,” Oskar said ruefully.
“One day in the middle of that summer, my mother sat me down, and all of my parents told me that I was hurting you by being so close to you, and that I had been hurting you for years, and all I could do to stop hurting you was to never see you again. I felt so guilty and scared, I did what they asked. I didn’t speak to you or answer any of your calls. I stayed in my room, miserable, but determined not to cause you any more harm.
They talked to your parents then, told them that they had spoken to a child psychiatrist, and that the psychiatrist had told them that our relationship was unhealthy. Your parents agreednot to let you come back to the island. After you left, I sank into depression and was practically catatonic. With the help of even more Renai-specific psychiatrists and doctors, I was able to get back to close to normal, but I’ve missed you every day we’ve been apart. It was like you had taken some of my bones or some crucial organ with you when you were forced away.”
I knew that feeling. We had never slept in the same bed before, but back in D.C. or in Massachusetts, for years I would wake up grasping for him, and it was a shock every time he wasn’t there. My parents didn’t get it and probably never would. The psychiatrist said that it was an example of how unhealthy our attachment was, but that didn’t mean I could stop looking for him. If I saw a glimpse of that distinct auburn hair, I always had to run after it. Just in case.
“When I saw you on the ferry, it felt like the world was ending and beginning all at the same time. I had vowed to never hurt you again, and so, I-I-pretended that I didn’t know you, even though I knew you before you had even turned around. The years apart hadn’t changed a thing.”
He placed his hands on the boulder, and I realized that I had sunk down to my stomach, my hands and arms underneath my chin, cushioning me while he had been speaking. There was a short distance between us, and more importantly, a tension.
“I love you, Mina, I don’t think I’ve ever stopped, I don’t think I can ever stop.”
I let one of my hands fall over the side of the boulder, and Oskar leaned forward, rising up slightly onto his toes, and kissed first the palm of my hand, then, carefully, he turned my hand over and kissed the back as well.
“I would never, ever do anything to hurt you; I would rather die.”
“Don’t do that.” It seemed that my voice should have been more croaky and rough than it was, despite it only being twelve hours since I last spoke.
“Whatever you say,” he replied, gently pressing my palm and my fingers against his face, letting me feel the rough start of a beard. He softly rubbed his face into my hand and then pulled away, his expression pained.
“I still don’t want to hurt you because of what I am. Ettore and Jin Woo have ideas about how Renai and non-Renai can be together without the non-Renai being harmed, but I don’t know,” he trailed off. For the first time since he started speaking, he looked away from me, staring into nothing as if trying to solve an overly complex puzzle. He looked at me again with frank, vulnerable eyes, “and I don’t know, I don’t want to presume that you would even want to becloseto me anymore.”
Of course I did. Even if I didn’t crave him, like I craved oxygen, even if I was angry at him, even if adult Oskar was someone whom I truly didn’t know, I still wanted him. I’d rather not die of depression or whatever the consequences of being with one of the Renai were, but we could at least try.
“You are stuck with me, and I’m stuck with you, Oskar.” I told him as I sat up on the boulder and threw my legs over the side of the rock, “Catch me.”
I didn’t give him the time to protest. I slid off the side of the boulder and into his arms, and he caught me as I knew he would, as I knew he always would.
