I Have Lost My Way(18)

“Sadness?”

“Yeah, sadness.”

“You want me to rate sadness?”

“Yep,” the doctor says. “Zero to six, please, Nate.”



* * *



— — —

Freya is over it. Over doctors who pretend to know everything, who act like they can fix her, who ask what’s wrong without reading a chart, who ask people to sing “Happy Birthday” or to measure sadness on a scale of zero to six.

“His name is Nathaniel!” she snarls with an irritated confidence she has no right to. For all she knows, he goes by Nate.



* * *



— — —

He does not. Though his father calls him Nat.



* * *



— — —

“And what does it have to do with a concussion?” Harun asks. Is this doctor even a doctor? He scans the walls for a medical school diploma.

“Hey, I don’t write the checklist,” the doctor says, fully out of patience. “So how about you give me a number so I can get you out of here. Sadness, zero to six?”

“No, he can’t give you a number,” Harun says.

“You can’t measure sadness in numbers,” Freya agrees.

“So how would you measure it?” the doctor asks. “Please do tell, so I can refer it to the American Academy of Neurology.”



* * *



— — —

The question is asked in a most scathingly sarcastic tone, but Freya, Harun, and Nathaniel all ponder it seriously.



* * *



— — —

Freya thinks of music, and then silence, and being totally alone.



* * *



— — —

Harun thinks of love, and family, and Get the fuck out my life.



* * *



— — —

Nathaniel thinks of his father, and Sam and Frodo, and a house being swallowed up by the forest.



* * *



— — —

They may be complete strangers, with different lives and different problems, but there in that examination room they are measuring sadness the same way. They are measuring it in loss.





THE ORDER OF LOSS


PART IV





NATHANIEL



“Nat, you gotta come see this,” Dad called the minute I walked in the door.

I took a breath and pushed back against the irritation. I was sweaty from baseball practice, and I needed to shower and do Dad’s breakfast and lunch dishes and get dinner going, and I needed to go online to register for a free SAT prep course.

The day before, my mother had called me, wanting to know if I’d started thinking about college. “You’re going to be a junior. Has your father even started this process?”

I assured her he had, fumbling some lie about arranging to visit schools together, which is something I knew a couple of kids had done with their parents. Mom didn’t press. The woman who’d once said she couldn’t live with two children now had two new children and her hands were full, so I knew she wouldn’t follow up. Still, I’d made an appointment with a guidance counselor and had seen her earlier that day.

“Nat, hurry up!” Dad called from the living room.

Sometimes if I ignored him, he got distracted. Most of the time, he only got more insistent, and it became that much harder to calm him down. It was better to see what had gotten him all riled up, talk to him a bit, and maybe I could get on the computer.

The guidance counselor had been surprised I hadn’t been to see her before. “Your grades are pretty good, and a sophomore on the varsity baseball team is very impressive,” she said. We’d made it all the way to the division finals and we’d had a few scouts come to our games. “With your grades, you could get into a fine school,” she’d said. “Maybe even a partial scholarship if you play baseball. Not a division one school, but somewhere smaller—if you do well on the SATs. Let’s get you set up for a course.”

“Nat!”

I went into the living room. The TV was on, as it usually was since Dad had stopped working. I’d learned to gauge his mood not from how he was acting but from what he was watching. Cartoons, CNN, Real Housewives meant he was checked out. Documentaries meant he was good. Dad loved documentaries, not because of what they told you but because of what they suggested.

I squinted at the TV. Some guy was riding a bicycle.

“Yeah?” I said.

“The guy riding the bike is blind.” Dad smiled triumphantly. But I knew there was more. There was always more. “Hear that sound?”

It was faint but unmistakable, like a woodpecker.

“He’s clicking,” Dad said. “Like a bat.”

“Echo-locating,” I said.

Dad snapped his fingers. “Exactly! He’s been doing that since he was little, when he lost both his eyes to cancer. He does not have eyes, but he can see—literally see.”

“You can’t literally see if you don’t have eyes.”

“Can’t you?” Dad asked with that glimmer in his own eyes, and I sighed because I knew what that meant.