I Have Lost My Way(54)



“Why does Frodo have to leave?” I’d asked my father, distraught about the dissolution of the fellowship. “Why doesn’t Sam go with him?”

“Because Frodo was damaged in a way Sam wasn’t,” my father said.

“Why?”

“Because of the beautiful, terrible burden of the ring.”

“Where is Frodo going?”

“To the West. To the Undying Lands.”

“Does he go there so he won’t die?”

“I think so he can heal.”

“Can we go there?”

“Someday. If we need to.”



* * *



— — —

I put the book down. I walked to my father’s closet, ran my fingers over the fading list. The places were all there. New York City. Rivendell. Mount Denali. The Shire. Angkor Wat. The Undying Lands. Dozens of places, some real, some make-believe. We hadn’t gone to any of them.

Next to the list was a mirror, old and scratched. I caught a glimpse of myself in it. I hadn’t showered or shaved or even changed my clothes in two weeks.

I looked feral. I looked like a madman. I looked like my father.



* * *



— — —

The rain stopped. I called the airline.



* * *



— — —

I gathered up all of Dad’s notebooks and went to the forest, to the place where we’d spread Grandma Mary’s ashes, where we’d buried the birds we couldn’t save, the frog he hadn’t meant to boil, to the place where Dad had tried to find limitless sight and I’d lost half of mine. I ripped out a single page from one of the notebooks and laid the rest in a pile. I lit them on fire. The flames danced and hissed, the sodden earth steaming under them, and soon the notebooks, like everything else, had turned to ash.

I showered. I shaved. I changed my clothes. I emptied out the refrigerator. I packed a small rucksack with a few changes of clothes I wouldn’t need, with Dad’s copy of The Lord of the Rings. I put the key under the mat. I walked down the driveway for the last time. I walked two miles to the bus stop. When I boarded the bus, there were people on it, but I no longer felt like one of them. My axis had shifted. I was invisible. I was already in the Undying Lands.

I went to the bank and withdrew the rest of the money that Grandma Mary had left me. I went to the library and checked out an outdated guidebook I knew I’d never return. I threw my library card in the trash. I rode another bus to the airport. As the plane climbed above the trees, the clouds, the mountains, I didn’t look down.





7





THE SWALLOWING OF SECRETS



Freya tears down unfamiliar streets, past the buttoned-up modest frame houses, past the cemetery, its flowering trees ghostly in the quiet moonlit night. She calls out: Nathaniel. Nathaniel. Nathaniel.



* * *



— — —

In the silence that has descended upon the dining room, Harun hears Freya calling to Nathaniel. It mingles with the muffled sound of Ammi’s sobbing upstairs and Halima’s inaudible comforting words.

There had been so many of them before—his parents, his siblings, his friends—and now there’s no one left but him and Abdullah, who is staring hard at the table, as if straying his glance even an inch will cost him something dear.

“Abdullah,” Harun asks. “What should I do?”

His brother won’t help him. He won’t even look at him.

It is the thing he knew would happen, the thing he feared would happen, being cast out, being alone. But just because he anticipated it doesn’t mean he’s prepared for it. The wallop of anguish is so powerful, it separates Harun from his body, so he’s floating outside himself, watching from above as he picks up Nathaniel’s discarded backpack, opens the front door to the only home he’s ever known. Before he closes the door behind him, he turns back to his brother. “I used to want to be a pilot,” he tells Abdullah. “Did you know that?”

Abdullah doesn’t answer. Because of course he didn’t know that.



* * *



— — —

Freya stops in front of a closed auto-body shop, momentarily disoriented. How did I get here? she asks herself for the second time that day. But then she remembers how. Harun, Nathaniel. She regains her bearings. She continues looking.



* * *



— — —

Outside, Harun walks down his block, past all the other houses, warm lamplight and the blue splash of TV spilling out of drapes. Houses holding families still intact. He hears Freya’s sad lament: Nathaniel!

All day long, he has witnessed them fall in love with each other as he fell in love with them too. People think love can’t happen that fast, but he loved James the minute he saw him.

“Nathaniel!” Freya calls.

Harun holds his breath, waiting for Nathaniel to answer.



* * *



— — —

Nathaniel does not answer. How can he? He cannot hear. He cannot see or be seen. His world has collapsed once more, a black hole sucking up all the space where light, where love, where laters might live.

Gayle Forman's Books