I Have Lost My Way(20)

Dad stayed locked in his room, scribbling in his notebooks. He would be like this until the fever broke, and then he’d be on to the next documentary—about serial killers, about mountain gorillas, about salt, about suicide tourism—that would click an idea in his brain and send him running again.

When I woke up the following morning, my eye was on fire, an ooze of bloody pus trickling down my cheek. I went to the nurse’s office at school and was immediately sent to the ER, and it was there that the doctors said the entire socket was infected and the eyeball itself had been deprived of blood for so long the tissue was probably dead. The eyeball would likely have to be removed.

The surgery was delayed because we needed parental consent and Dad was not answering his phone. I made up a story about how he was a writer and turned off his phone when he was working. It wasn’t that far from the truth.

“What about your mother?” they asked me.

My mother could not find out about this. I’d see to that just as I’d made sure she’d never found out about the week we’d gone without electricity or the time Dad had left me in the forest all night.

(Don’t tell your mother.)

“My mom’s dead,” I told the doctors.

They eventually got hold of Dad and I was rushed into surgery. I woke up alone, in a dark room, and knew my eye was gone. As I lay there, groggy, my head throbbing, I wanted someone to wrap their arms around me, to kiss my forehead, to tell me things would be okay. But nobody did. Tentatively, I touched the gauze packing around my eye, and realized, with equal parts terror and relief, this secret would be impossible to conceal from my mother. Because she would see, and she would know, and if she knew, she wouldn’t let me stay here. Would she?

My father came into the room, and when he saw me awake, he began to weep. “Oh, Nat. Oh, buddy,” he said. “Look at you.”

At the sight of my father doubled over, sobbing, I understood that I would not tell my mother. The decision had already been made long ago. And with that, the lie I’d told the doctors about her being dead suddenly became true. To keep this secret from her, I’d have to keep myself from her. The realization sent a bolt of fury through me, shaking off the remaining sedation. In that terrible, tiny moment, I didn’t just hate my father, I wished he were dead.

But the moment passed, leaving me exhausted, and hungover with shame. I didn’t hate my father. I loved him and he loved me.

He had begun sobbing convulsively, like he’d heard my horrible thoughts. I knew if I didn’t calm him down, it would only get worse. So I told him what I’d already learned people wanted to hear: “It’s all good.”

“But you lost your eye,” he said.

“It couldn’t be saved,” the doctors had told me. So I saved the only thing I still could. Or I tried to.

“Maybe I had to lose the eye to gain sight,” I told him.

The look on his face, it was so hopeful it was painful. “Really? You really think so?”

I didn’t think so. I didn’t believe half of what my dad said anymore, but I couldn’t write him off completely. Because he was occasionally right. And because he was Dad. And we were a fellowship of two.

“Really,” I told him.





THE ORDER OF LOSS


PART V





FREYA



The first video really was an accident. People didn’t believe that. They thought it was part of the concocted narrative, but it was the one detail of all of this that Hayden didn’t invent. It just happened.

Sabrina had been right. Two years later, our father was still gone. The promises to come back, to have us visit him, turned out to be made of smoke. The weekly Skype calls had begun to dwindle, and on the phone he was vague about his life. He no longer asked if I wanted to visit. He no longer asked me if I sang.

But I did still sing—only with Sabrina now. Every day. After school, Sabrina made the snacks—grilled cheese sandwiches with sliced tomatoes—and helped me with my homework. She was a far better student than me, straight As across the board. When homework was finished, we listened to music together, picking apart songs we loved, seeing if we could sing them better.

Sometimes we went online, watched videos on YouTube. Other times, we went on Facebook, trying to get a glimpse of our father. Back when he lived here it had been his professional page, with videos of him playing gigs or offering music lessons after Mom had come up with the idea that he should teach to earn some money. These days the posts showed him at church, at family meals, smiling broadly, arms around aunts and uncles and cousins we’d never met. Did he miss us? I couldn’t tell. The status updates were usually in Amharic.

That day, we were scrolling through Facebook when we came upon a picture of a woman holding a baby bundled in a green blanket. The caption read: ????? ??? ?? ???.

“Let’s look it up,” Sabrina said, and we pasted the words into a translation program. I thought it would say something about a new nephew, a new cousin for me, but the translator spat out: Finally, we have a son. And suddenly I understood why the phone calls had dwindled.

I began to cry, something I did often, which irritated Sabrina, who never cried. But this time, she patted me on the shoulder. “I’m sorry,” she said.

Her pity made me cry harder. She looked at the screen. “Solomon doesn’t deserve your tears.” Solomon, not Dad. “I mean, how could he forget you like this?”