I Have Lost My Way

I Have Lost My Way

Gayle Forman




Come, come, whoever you are. Wanderer, worshiper, lover of leaving. It doesn’t matter. Ours is not a caravan of despair. Come, even if you have broken your vows a thousand times. Come, yet again, come, come.

   —Jalaluddin Rumi



   Not all those who wander are lost.

   —J. R. R. Tolkien





1





I HAVE LOST MY WAY



I have lost my way.

Freya stares at the words she just typed into her phone.

I have lost my way. Where did that come from?

“Excuse me, miss,” the car service driver repeats. “I think I have lost my way.” And Freya startles back to reality. She’s in the backseat of a town car on her way to her seventh—or is it eighth?—doctor’s appointment in the past two weeks, and the driver has gotten turned around outside the tunnel.

She toggles over to her calendar. “Park and Seventieth,” she tells the driver. “Turn right on Third, then left on Seventy-First.”

She returns her attention to the screen. I have lost my way. Eighteen characters. But the words have the undeniable ring of truth to them, the way middle C does. The way few of her posts these days do. Earlier this morning, someone from Hayden’s office put up a photo of her gripping a microphone, grinning. #BornToSing, the caption read. #ThankfulThursday. Really it should read #TBT, because the image is not only weeks old, it’s of a person who no longer exists.

I have lost my way.

What would happen if she posted that? What would they say if they knew?

It’s only when her phone makes the whooshing noise that Freya realizes she did post it. The responses start to flow in, but before she has a chance to read them, there’s a text from her mother: 720 Park Ave, and a dropped pin. Because of course her mother is monitoring the feed as vigilantly as Freya. And of course her mother has misunderstood. Anyway, Freya hasn’t lost her way. She’s lost her voice.

She deletes the post, hoping it was fast enough that no one screenshot it or shared it, but she knows nothing on the internet ever goes away. Unlike in real life.

Her mother is waiting for her when the car arrives, pacing, holding the test results from the last doctor, which she had to hightail it into the city to collect. “Good, good, you’re here,” she says, opening the door before the driver has pulled to a complete stop and yanking Freya to the sidewalk before she has a chance to give him the ten-dollar tip she’s holding. “I already filled out the paperwork.” She says this like she did it to save time, but she fills out the paperwork at all of Freya’s doctor’s appointments.

They’re ushered straight past reception into the examination room. It’s the kind of service a $1,500 consult, no insurance taken (thanks, Hayden) buys you.

“What seems to be the problem?” the doctor asks as he washes his hands. He does not look at Freya. He probably has no idea who she is. He looks old, like a grandfather, though reportedly he has treated the sort of one-named wonder that as of a few weeks ago everyone thought Freya was on her way to becoming.

She wishes she’d read some of the responses before deleting that tweet. Maybe someone would’ve told her what to do. Maybe someone would’ve told her it didn’t matter if she could sing. They’d still love her.

But she knows that’s bullshit. Love is conditional. Everything is.

“She’s lost her voice,” her mother says. “Temporarily.” She goes through the tediously familiar chronology—“third week in the studio” and “all going flawlessly” and blah blah blah blah—and all the while the phrase I have lost my way goes through Freya’s head, like a song on repeat, the way she and Sabrina used to loop the same track over and over again until they’d dissected it, uncovered all its secrets, and made them their own. It drove their mother crazy, until she discovered the utility of it.

The doctor palpates her neck, peers into her throat, scopes her sinuses. Freya wonders how he would respond if she hocked a loogie. If he would actually look at her like a person instead of a piece of machinery that has malfunctioned. If he would hear her, singing voice or not.

“Can you sing a high C for me?” the doctor asks.

Freya sings a high C.

“She can hit the individual notes,” her mother explains. “And her pitch is perfect. Hayden says he’s never heard pitch like that before.”

“Is that a fact?” the doctor says, feeling the cords in her neck. “Let’s hear a song. Something simple for me, like ‘Happy Birthday.’”

“Happy Birthday.” Who can’t sing “Happy Birthday”? A child can sing “Happy Birthday.” A person who can’t sing at all can sing “Happy Birthday.” To show her opinion of such a request, she starts to sing, but in a heavy French accent.

“Apee birsday to you . . .” she trills. Her mother frowns, and Freya doubles down on the accent. “Apee birsday to vous . . .”

But her voice is smarter than she thinks. It will not be outsmarted by antics or a bad fake accent. And as soon as the song makes the baby leap in octave, from G4 to G5, she gets tripped up in it. The panic takes over. The breath turns to lead.

“Appee birsday, dear . . .” And on the dear it happens. The air shuts off. The song is strangled mid-breath. A stillborn melody.