I Have Lost My Way(28)

He doesn’t have an address. Can he make one up? Like 43 175th Street? Is that a place?

“My Uber’s not working,” Freya says, slapping her phone against her thigh.

Reprieve. Nathaniel exhales. “I can just take the subway.”

“No,” she says in a harsh voice. “I’ll put you in a cab and give the driver cash.”

She steps out into the street to hail a cab, and Nathaniel watches her. She raises her hand confidently, as if certain she will be seen. Nathaniel wonders what that must feel like.

Though he’s engineered his departure, he’s already mourning the absence of this formidable girl, this persistent boy. He’s seeing them disappear through the rear window of a taxi. He’s feeling the leaden weight of his solitude. At least he’ll see his father soon.

Freya jumps back onto the curb, holding her foot in her hand, cursing. Droplets of blood fall on the sidewalk. A shard of green glass glints from her heel.

“Are you okay?” Harun asks.

“I guess there’s a reason people don’t go barefoot in the city,” she says ruefully, hopping on one foot.

“That looks pretty bad,” Harun says. “Maybe you should go back to the urgent care?”

“No way. That doctor was a grade A douche, and they’ll charge a hundred dollars for a piece of gauze.” She glances at her foot. The blood is staining her jeans. “Fabulous. I look like a homeless serial killer.”

Normally, Nathaniel carries a first aid kit with him at all times; he started carrying one after the thing with his eye. Probably a strip of gauze and some Neosporin wouldn’t have changed anything, but it’s better to be prepared. But he left his kit at home. He didn’t see the point of being prepared.

“I can fix it for you,” Nathaniel says. “We just need some gauze and wipes.”

“There’s a pharmacy across the street,” Harun says.

The three of them cross the street, a wobbly chain like before but with the order shuffled: where once a shaky Nathaniel was flanked by Freya and Harun, now Freya is hopping between them. She keeps insisting she’s fine, but that’s a lie Nathaniel can see through.

Harun offers to get supplies, and so Nathaniel stays outside with Freya and her bloody foot.

“I’m so sorry,” he tells her.

“Why are you sorry?” she asks in a sharp voice.

“Because it’s my fault.”

“How is this your fault?”

“I threw up on your shoes.”

“You threw up because I fell on you,” she replies. “If anyone should be apologizing, it’s me.”

“No,” Nathaniel says.

“No?”

“Don’t apologize. I’m glad you fell on me.”

“Why would you be glad I fell on you?” she asks.

Because you can’t fall on something that doesn’t exist, he thinks. He may be feral, but he’s not been out of the world so long that he doesn’t know this is a profoundly odd thing to say. So he doesn’t say it.



* * *



— — —

Inside the pharmacy, Harun buys more supplies than necessary. To his mind, if he assembles the right first aid kit, he can keep Freya around for a little while longer, enough time to figure out how to get her in front of James, who’s clearly blocked him and won’t see any texts, and even if he did, probably wouldn’t believe him. Once James sees Freya in the flesh, though, he’ll have to understand that it’s a sign that they should be together.

He puts a bottle of hydrogen peroxide in his basket, a box of bandages, a roll of gauze, some medical tape, Neosporin, and a pair of scissors. He passes over the generic products for the more expensive name brands because it’s Freya. All together, it comes to almost thirty dollars, and he pays from the stash of money he purloined from his trip fund. It feels good to do something slightly worthy with the money, even if his intentions aren’t so noble. But he’d like to think that he would be helping out in the same way even if it weren’t Freya. Only maybe he would’ve bought the cheaper bandages.



* * *



— — —

As Freya sits on a cement planter, Nathaniel uses the scissors to extract the glass still lodged in her foot. He gently cleans the area with the hydrogen peroxide, and though he knows this must sting, Freya does not even flinch.

Formidable, he thinks.

He slathers her foot in ointment and slowly wraps the heel in gauze.

He takes his time. Because he is methodical by nature, but also because it feels incredibly good to touch another human being, and particularly this human being. It has been such a long time, and as he holds Freya’s foot against his knee, getting some of her blood on the front of his jeans, where it will match the drop of her blood on his shirt from when he wiped her face before, he feels something hatching inside him. He pictures a bird, all tiny and helpless. He remembers when a nest fell out of the eaves of their house and he and his father tried to save the chicks, feeding them with eyedroppers. “Hope is the thing with feathers,” his father had said, quoting Emily Dickinson, but then the birds had died and Nathaniel had realized that it was actually grief that was the thing with feathers.

He doesn’t want to hope. He can’t afford to hope. But there it is, the fluttering in his chest, all because a pretty girl (a beautiful girl) with beautiful eyes (sad eyes) is letting him hold her bare foot as he dresses a wound that he himself caused.