I Have Lost My Way(52)

“James is a boy,” Harun explains. “A boy I’m in love with.”

“But you’re going to find a girl to marry,” his mother says. “You’re leaving tomorrow. Khala and Khalu have arranged it.”

“I’m sorry, Ammi,” Harun says. “I can’t do that.”

And in the hanging moment of silence that follows, as blanks are filled in, suspicions are confirmed, things unseen emerge from the corners, Harun believes that whatever happens next, it will be worth it.

He will make for him a way out.

“Why can’t you do that?” Ammi asks.

The silence is awful. But Harun is powerless to speak. So it falls to Halima.

“Because he’s gay,” she says.

Saif guffaws. “Wait, Harun’s a faggot?”

“Don’t call him that!” Halima says.

“I don’t understand,” Ammi says.

“I know you don’t,” Halima says, patting her on the hand. “It means he loves boys, not girls. Like Assad Khan.”

“The actor?” Ammi asks, more confused now.

“Yeah, and you know Auntie Zahra’s daughter, Na’ila? She’s gay too.”

“All this time, you’ve been riding me because I married Leesa, but Harun’s a chaka,” Saif says, switching to Urdu. “I knew. I freaking knew it.”

“If you knew it,” Harun cries out, “why didn’t you say something? Why did you make me bear it on my own?”



* * *



— — —

    Harun’s brother is shouting. And his mother is crying. And now formidable Freya is crying too.

Nathaniel watches in frozen horror. He did this. He doesn’t know how, but he knows he did. Everything was fine and good and happy until he showed up, and now this family is splintering. In front of his very eyes. Like his own family splintered before his very eyes.

I did this, Nathaniel thinks. It’s not the other people. It’s him. He is the poison pill. He’s the one who makes things fall apart, makes people disappear, one after the other. Turns it all to ash. No wonder everyone runs away.

Just us, buddy. Fellowship of two.

His father is the only person he understands, who understands him. The person who protects him. He’s the only person he’s ever belonged with. What was Nathaniel thinking? Weekly pickup games? Family dinners? Kissing girls like Freya? Plan Cs? Laters?

There is no later. That was the point in coming here. To do away with the possibility, decapitate the hope of a later.

His heart pounds, the earth opens. It’s already swallowed up everything he knows, everything he touches. It’s coming for him too.

He’s so tired.

You’re almost there, buddy.



* * *



— — —

Ammi is crying, repeating, “I don’t understand,” which is bad enough. But when Abu says, “You deceived us?” with an upward tilt, like a question, like he does not believe Harun is capable of such a thing, his defective heart breaks once and for all.

“I didn’t mean to,” Harun says. “I never meant for all this . . .” He gestures to the table. “I was trying to spare you.”

“Spare us what?” Abu asks. He collapses his body over Ammi’s body, to protect her, Harun realizes, from him.

“This.”



* * *



— — —

Nathaniel snatches his backpack. The contents spill out. He leaves them on the floor, except for one thick book, which he grabs before bolting toward the door.

“Nathaniel!” Freya calls out after him. “Wait!”

Nathaniel doesn’t hear her. He tears past, both eyes wide open and unseeing.

“Nathaniel!” Freya shouts. “Look at me.”

He does not look at her. He does not see her.

Freya reaches out to grab his hand. He yanks it back, violently, and Freya loses her balance for the second time that day. Only this time, there is no Nathaniel to break her fall.



* * *



— — —

Harun surveys the wreckage of his family. Ammi has run upstairs, Halima and Abu following her. Saif is gloating. Abdullah won’t look at him. Yet it is the sight of Freya and Nathaniel that threatens to undo him. Before this moment, Harun thought nothing could be as soul-killing as the look James gave him when he’d called him a coward and told him to Get the fuck out my life. But the way Nathaniel looks as he runs out of the dining room, pushing Freya to the floor—that is worse.

Who but a coward would employ strangers to do such dirty, dirty work? Who but a coward would imagine this is the proper way to do things?





THE ORDER OF LOSS


PART IX





NATHANIEL



You know that saying about a frog in a pot? How you can put a frog in boiling water and it’ll jump straight out, but if you put a frog in tepid water and slowly increase the heat, it’ll adjust and adjust until it dies?

Dad decided to try an experiment once to see if it was true. He caught a frog from the crick, put it in a pot of water, turned the burner to low. He stood over the stove, talking to the frog. He was convinced it would jump out once the water got uncomfortably warm, but it just sat there docile, swimming around.