I Have Lost My Way(59)

“He didn’t know about the original video, so he asked what song it was. I sang it to him. When I finished, he looked at me and said: ‘Where do you think hunger comes from? It comes from desperation.’ And that was it. He thanked me. Told me I was very helpful. And I realized what I’d done. Hayden was a shark, circling you. And I poured blood in the water. But before I could fix it or warn you, he dismissed me and called you in.”

“And I sang ‘Little White Dress.’”

“And you sang ‘Little White Dress.’”

“I betrayed you.”

“Only because I betrayed you first.”

“Have you ever heard that song, Sabrina?”

“Of course I have.”

“I know you’ve listened to it, but I don’t think you’ve heard it.”

“What’s the difference?” Sabrina rolls her eyes, skeptical.

The difference is everything. But Freya doesn’t know how to explain it, so instead she sings what she can’t say, sings what her sister can’t hear.

You must confess

I’m a white-hot mess

And I need you here

Need you near to quench my fear

Freya’s voice is strangled, as bad as it was that day in the studio, as bad as it’s been every day since. She keeps going.

Did the thing I said I would

Let music do what words never could

You’re a thorn in my side

But loving you is how I survive

All that I said I wanted

Was a little white, little white dress

All that I said I needed

Was a little white, little white dress

Do you remember? We used to sing:

Eshururururu, Eshururururu

Eshururururu, hushabye, hushabye, hushabye

And though I obsess ’bout being a black-tar mess

I’d rather have you

Than a little white dress

The song sounds nothing like it did in the recording studio, nothing like it did on Freya’s iPhone all those years ago. Nothing like it did when she first sang it to her sister, trying to sing what she could not say. Don’t leave me alone. I need you. I love you.

But maybe this is how the song is meant to be sung. Because for the first time, Sabrina seems to hear it.

There’s a tremble in her chin. Sabrina tries to tough it out, but the tremble becomes a wobble and then her stony expression cracks, revealing the human who’s always lived underneath. “That song isn’t for Dad,” Sabrina says.

“No,” Freya says. “It’s not.”

“You wrote that about me,” Sabrina says.

“I wrote that about us.”

Sabrina does something Freya has never once seen her sister do: she starts to cry. And Freya does something that, until today, she’s never had the opportunity to do: she wraps her arms around her sister and comforts her.

It doesn’t last long, because it’s still Sabrina. She quickly wipes away her tears and disentangles herself from the embrace. “What the hell happened to your voice?” she asks, the question delivered in a typically direct and indelicate way. In the Sabrina way. And for this reason, it makes Freya laugh.

“I don’t know,” she says, cracking up. “I just lost it.”

“You lost it?” The laughter is infectious, and soon Sabrina is convulsing with it too. “How’d you lose it? Did you leave it in a taxi?”

This makes Freya double over. “I don’t know why I’m laughing,” she says. “We had to stop recording. It’s a total disaster.”

“That’s terrible,” Sabrina says, wheezing for breath. “What are you going to do now?”

“I don’t know,” Freya admits, sobering up a little.

“Well, you’d better figure it out in two years,” Sabrina says, wiping away an errant tear.

“What’s in two years?”

“My wedding.”

“Why would I have to . . .” Freya trails off as she understands what Sabrina is asking. Sabrina, who also never knew how to say things. “You want me to sing at your wedding?”

“Not if you sound like that . . .”

“And if I do . . . sound like that?”

The question hangs in the air, and Freya is terrified of what she just asked, what Sabrina might say.

And then her sister says this: “We’ll come up with a plan B.”

Something expands in Freya’s chest. Acorns, after all, eventually bloom. They seed new oak trees, whole groves of them.

“Or even a plan C,” Freya murmurs.

“Got it working,” Alex says, emerging with Freya’s phone. It’s blowing up with the day’s missed notifications. All her mentions, her views, her likes, her engagements, all her texts and emails and missed calls. There are several voicemails from Hayden she knows she will never listen to and dozens of texts from her mother that she will have to find a new language to respond to.

The phone continues to buzz with the things Freya mistook for love. Buried amid all the noise is Halima’s text with Harun’s number. Buried amid all the noise is actual love.

In the quiet of that moment, in the sanctuary of that love, something happens to Freya. She is lifted outside of herself, outside of this apartment, outside of her own loss and into Harun’s. All of the stories he has yet to tell her—about airplanes, and Aladdin, and James—unspool inside her and become her own. Just as, she now understands, Nathaniel’s loss has somehow merged with her own. It sounds like a burden, to take this on, but really, it’s the opposite. To be the holder of other people’s loss is to be the keeper of their love. To share your loss with people is another way of giving your love.