I Have Lost My Way(10)

I do, I wanted to say. Only I didn’t. Not entirely, though I felt certain it was tied up with Ammi and Khala’s conversation about Amir, and with the strange tickling in my stomach.

I knew Jasmine was meant to be pretty and her manner of dress sexy, and I knew she was an object of desire by the way my brother was talking. But I didn’t care about Jasmine. It was Aladdin I couldn’t take my eyes off of. His face was pretty, delicate, kind of like Amir’s. And the scenes with Aladdin bare-chested made that tickling in my belly stronger than ever.

We finished Aladdin and started watching The Little Mermaid, but the DVD was scratched, and halfway through we gave up and went to bed.

We had shuffled around to accommodate everyone’s sleeping arrangements. Amir and I had been relegated to a leaking blow-up mattress in the living room. We’d been sleeping there all week and nothing had happened, save for a crick or two in my neck.

That night, I dreamed of Aladdin. We were on a carpet, only not the one from the movie but one from the mosque. I could smell the musky scent of it in the dream.

Aladdin was bare-chested, and I was running my hand over his smooth skin. And he was not a cartoon; he was real. In the dream, Aladdin became Amir. And we were flying. And I was holding on to Amir as Jasmine had done to Aladdin.

The mattress shifted. I opened my eyes slightly, and the tickling sensation blossomed into something stronger, a tingling over my entire body, a throbbing between my legs.

A cool breeze rustled through a gap in the window, and I opened my eyes all the way and saw that in sleep, I had wrapped myself around Amir. My hand was on his chest, warm and sticky. My heart felt full. I understood in that moment that this was who I was.

The mattress moved again, and Amir opened his eyes. “What—?” he began to ask, in that same guilty way he’d asked earlier when he thought he was about to be chastised for drinking too much soda. He looked at my hand. “What are you doing?”

I snatched my hand away. “Mosquito,” I lied.

He rolled over and went back to sleep, but I lay in bed rigid, afraid that if I got too close, he would know, as I suddenly knew, that there was something very wrong with me. The next night, I moved to the couch, claiming Amir kicked, and after that I rebuffed his requests to do more plane-spotting. He seemed hurt, but hurt was better than disgusted.

The Friday after the cousins left, Abu asked me if I wanted to go to ’Asr again. I liked going to mosque with him, having time alone with him. But I’d been taught that Allah could see into our hearts. He would see me. I knew I couldn’t let that happen. I told Abu that I didn’t want to go anymore.

Abu sighed and frowned, but he didn’t argue. Saif had paved the road for me. He thought I was just being rebellious. I was just being American. I let him think that.

It was the first time I lied to him.





THE ORDER OF LOSS


PART III





NATHANIEL



When I was seven years old my father read me The Lord of the Rings for the first time.

“Don’t tell your mother,” he whispered.

“Why is he still awake?” my mother would complain when a half hour later we were still reading, and I was more keyed up than ever, visions of orcs and elves swimming in my head. “You’re supposed to be putting him to sleep.”

Then my father would conceal the book under the covers and wink at me. “You and me,” he’d whisper after she’d left. “Like Frodo and Sam.”

“A fellowship,” I’d reply, giggling.

“A fellowship of two.” He reached for a pen and scratched some note into the margin of his book before hiding it under my bed.

A fellowship of two—and Mom. The two of us wandering through the forest, looking for edible mushrooms one day, ents the next. The two of us staying out all night to catch a lunar eclipse (unseen, thanks to the omnipresent clouds). The two of us climbing trees, or building forts, or taking off on an impromptu road trip, never mind that there was school and we hadn’t brought any extra clothes. “Why do we need that, buddy?” Dad would say. “We have each other. We’re all we need.”

When Mom announced that she was leaving, I wasn’t even that sad. We had each other, after all.

“I’m so sorry, Nathaniel,” she told me. “But I can’t live with two children anymore.” She wanted me to move with her to California, where it was sunny. “Doesn’t that sound nice?” No, it did not. I didn’t want to go to California. I wanted to stay here, in my house, with my friends and my father. We were a fellowship, after all.

“I’m not leaving you alone with that man-child,” my mother said, and when I told Dad about that, he asked Grandma Mary to come live with us.

“And if she’s so mature, why’s she runnin’ off on an eight-year-old lad?” Mary asked the day she moved in, dropping her flowered suitcase on the entry hall floor and extracting a pair of rubber gloves from her pocketbook, as if anticipating, correctly, the pile of dirty dishes in the sink. “Never you mind,” she told me as she scrubbed three-day-old scrambled egg off a plate. “I brung up your father, and I’ll bring up you.” She glanced at my father, who was on the sofa in his pajamas, reading the funny pages. “Bring up both of you, it seems.”

Dad winked at me, and I knew what he was thinking without him saying it. It was Just Us. A fellowship of two.