I Have Lost My Way(14)

“One day, we’ll meet her,” James used to say as they huddled around his phone, watching one of her videos. “We’ll tell her how we’re her first, biggest fans. She’ll be famous, bigger than Beyoncé, but we’ll be best friends. She’ll sing at our wedding.”

Statements like that took Harun’s breath away. It seemed daring enough for him to imagine a future with James, let alone things like a wedding, let alone a wedding where James’s favorite singer, whom they’d never met, would sing.

Now, as he watches her throw away her shoes and rinse her feet with a bottle of Poland Spring, he has three thoughts.

The first is: It can’t be her. There is simply no way. Not this person, in this park, on this day. He is conjuring her as a way to bring back James.

His second thought: James, whose last words to me were Get the fuck out my life.

His third thought: If it is her, James will have to forgive me.

The young man he’s holding heaves against Harun, and Harun turns his glance away from her to him. Him, he now sees, is very good-looking, the kind of pretty white boy James called a “confection.”

“I’m all good,” the confection keeps saying, even as he sways like a green tree in a strong gale.

She (he can’t bring himself to even think her name) returns, barefoot, and takes hold of her half of the swaying tree of a confection. Harun can’t look at her face, so he stares at her feet. Which are still wet.

“Thanks for your help,” she says in that husky voice of hers.

“Uhh,” says Harun.

“It’s all good,” the swaying tree of a confection says.

It doesn’t look all good to Harun. Aside from the swaying, there’s the eyes. Two different colors. Can a fall do that?

“Is there someone we can call?” she asks.

James, thinks Harun. But no, this isn’t about him. He turns to the swaying tree, who is squinting as if someone just asked him the square root of 17,432.

“Dad?” Nathaniel says at last.

“Dad. So your father’s here?” she asks.

Nathaniel sways and nods.

“Do you have a way to contact him?”

Harun sees the phone on the path, alongside the other spilled contents of his backpack. He scrambles to pick it up. “Perhaps you can call?”

The swaying tree opens the phone, one of those ancient flip numbers, and presses a button. It rings loudly enough for them all to hear. The voicemail picks up. A man’s voice: “Tell me something good.”

The command irks Harun. What if there’s nothing good to tell? What then?

There’s a long beep, followed by a robotic voice that informs them the voicemail box is full, and Harun understands he must be in the minority, that lots of people have had so many good things to share that the voicemail box is full of glad tidings.

“I think we should probably get you to a hospital, Nathaniel,” she says, turning to Harun. “He seems pretty out of it.”

Well, a human being did fall on him. And even though that human is her (he’s almost certain), it must have hurt. Harun suspects the boy is concussed. Abdullah got hit with a cricket bat once and could not remember their address or his birth date.

“What do you think?” she asks.

It takes Harun a moment to realize she is asking him for his opinion. He responds, helpfully, with another “Uhhh . . .”

“Do you think you could see if there’s one nearby?”

“Yes, yes, hospital, hospital,” Harun says, his speech returning to him in double. He pulls out his phone, enormously relieved to have a focus for his attention that is not her. But his thumb has a mind of its own, because it’s hovering over the text app, so tempted to tell James whom he is with, to snap a surreptitious picture. Surely, if James knew, he would relent. He would take him back.

“Did you find one?” she asks, and Harun feels his ears go red because this poor boy is clearly unwell and he is still thinking about James. Will he ever not be? Amir has promised him yes, that one day he will look back and not believe this happened. It will be wiped from the record.

He prays so.

He prays not.

She clears her throat.

He scuttles to the map, finds an urgent care clinic. “Yes, yes. There’s one on Columbus Avenue. It says it’s about a quarter mile from here by foot.”

“Can you walk that far?” she asks Nathaniel. “If we help you?”

“We?” Harun blurts out in joy and relief and realizes, too late, that it sounds as if he is objecting to helping when it’s the we that has tripped him up. “Yes, yes. Of course, of course. We will. We will.”

“Really, you don’t have to,” Nathaniel says. “It’s all good.”

“I’m sure it is, but let’s get you checked out by a doctor,” she says. She bends down to pick up the rest of the contents of his backpack, as if she were a normal human being and not her.

Harun should help—he is merely an ordinary person—but seeing the boxers, the books, the T-shirts makes him flash on the suitcase that Ammi has lovingly packed for him, full of new clothes, a new kurta, gifts. And when he does, he is paralyzed by shame. And here he had thought he had plumbed the depths of his shame when, on the edge of this very park, James told him to get the fuck out of his life.