I Have Lost My Way(3)

“That could be you,” Hayden once told her.

Not anymore.

“Nothing,” her mother says.

“So I’ll see you back at the apartment.”

“Well, it’s Thursday.”

Thursday nights her mother and Sabrina have a standing dinner date. It usually goes unmentioned. Freya is never invited.

Obviously.

“I can put it off if you need me,” her mother says.

The bitterness is awful. She can taste it. She wonders if it’ll melt the enamel off her (recently whitened) teeth.

It’s also embarrassing. What should she have to be bitter about where her sister is concerned? Sabrina, who, as her mother says, has sacrificed so much. She whispers the last part the same way she whispers breather when discussing what’s going on with Freya. “You’re just taking a breather.”

(Breather is code for self-immolation.)

“You’d better go,” Freya tells her mother before the bitterness melts away her insides, leaving only a bag of empty skin. “Hayden’s waiting.”

Her mother glances at the SUV, the driver. “I’ll call you as soon as I get news.” She climbs into the car. “Clear your head. Take a day for yourself. Don’t think about any of this. You never know—it might be just what the doctor ordered. I bet if you can go the rest of the day without thinking about this, you’ll feel better. Go shopping. Go home and binge Scandal.”

Yes, that’s exactly what Freya needs. And perhaps a glass of warm milk. And a second lobotomy.

She waits for her mother to drive off before she starts walking, not south toward Barneys but west toward the park. She pulls out her phone and looks at her Instagram feed. There’s another shot of her, standing outside the studio on Second Ave., under a just-blooming cherry tree. The caption reads, #Music #Flowers #Life #BeautifulThings, and the comments are full of nice things that should make her feel better. Nothing more Btiful than U. And NEED NEW VID! And FollowbackPLZ!!!!

A car honks, and someone yanks her back onto the curb, sneering, “Pay attention.” Freya doesn’t say thank you, instead walks into the park, where there’s no traffic and she can read the comments in peace.

She toggles over to her YouTube channel. Per Hayden’s instructions, she has not posted anything in months. He wanted the fans to be “famished” for new material so that when the album dropped, and new videos, they’d be devoured. Freya was worried they’d forget her, but Hayden said there were other ways to stay in the public eye and employed a publicist whose job it was to place a series of anonymous scoops about her.

Freya climbs up a hill, onto a small bridge. A group of cyclists whizzes past her, blasting through the air with their shrill whistles, as if they own the park. She opens Facebook. She types Sabrina Kebede. Though she only allows herself this indulgence once a month, Freya knows there won’t be anything there. Her sister’s Facebook page has been all but dormant for the past two years, maybe two or three posts, almost always tags.

And yet, there it is, a fresh post, a few weeks old. A picture posted by someone named Alex Takashida of a man, presumably Alex Takashida, holding up a delicate hand with a small sapphire ring. The caption underneath reads: She said yes!

Even with the face cut off, Freya recognizes that hand.

She said yes! It takes Freya a minute to understand what this means. Her sister is engaged. To Alex Takashida. Someone Freya has never heard of, much less met.

Freya clicks on Alex’s timeline and discovers that Alex Takashida makes his posts public, and Sabrina, though not tagged, is in nearly all of them. There’s Sabrina clinking glasses with Alex at a restaurant. There’s Sabrina and Alex on a beach. There’s Sabrina beaming between Alex and their mother. There’s Sabrina looking not like someone who sacrificed so much but like someone happy.

It makes Freya want to puke. To console herself, she opens the app that tracks what her mother now calls her engagements. She doesn’t even need to see the comments anymore to feel better. She just needs to know that they’re there. That the likes and follows are growing. The uptick of numbers is reassuring. The occasional downtick makes her feel like her stomach’s falling out.

Today, the numbers are going up. Those posts of her in the studio always do well. People are excited about her album. She wonders what will happen when the months go by and there is no album.

Only she knows. At the first meeting with Hayden, he’d told her exactly what would happen.

She opens the comments from this morning’s ersatz post. Love the flowers. Can’t wait 4 the album. She refreshes the page to see if anything else has come in but nothing has, and though she knows it’ll only make her feel worse, she toggles back to the picture of Sabrina’s hand. The cyclists whip by, blowing their awful whistles at her, shouting at her to watch out, but Freya can’t take her eyes off her sister and all that happiness. Can’t escape the sickening sensation that she’s done it all wrong.

I have lost my way, she thinks once more, and understands how true this is. Another cyclist whistles by, and Freya, still staring at the image of her sister’s sapphire ring, jumps back and stumbles, and suddenly she is not just lost but falling, falling off the bridge onto some poor soul below.



* * *



— — —

Around the time Freya is speaking to yet another doctor who cannot help her, Harun is trying to pray.