I Have Lost My Way(62)

And it’s at the mention of his mom that Harun understands that it’s not the action, it’s the deception. With James. With his family. James might love him and might even one day forgive him, but he isn’t going to take him back.

“So all of this was for nothing?” Harun cries.

“Not for nothing,” James says softly. “Just not for this.”

James turns away from him. But no! Harun can’t let him go. Not just yet. “Wait!” he calls, yanking James back.

James’s expression is so naked, his face so worn down by anguish, and it’s seeing him like this that makes Harun surrender. To push James any further would inflict more pain, cause more damage. It would be the act of a coward.

And Harun wants, so very much, to be brave.

He unhooks the flash drive from his keychain and puts it in James’s hands. She’ll sing at our wedding, James once promised. “This is for you,” Harun says.

James stares at the drive for a moment, but he doesn’t ask what it is. He just closes his hand around it, nods once more, and retreats into the hallway. Harun hears a door close. The click is quiet and final.

Colette comes back into the room, looking at Harun with an almost painful compassion.

“You gonna be okay,” she says.

“How can you know that?” Harun asks.

“When a broken bone heals, it’s stronger than it was before the break,” she replies. “Same holds true for broken hearts.”

Harun nods. Prays this is true. Of his own heart. Of James’s and Ammi’s and Abu’s.

Colette opens the door, gestures that it’s time for Harun to leave. “Go be with your people,” she tells him.

As he walks down the stairs, back into the moonlit night, he wonders: Who are his people? James? Not anymore. His family? Maybe one day again, but not yet.

Overhead, he hears the sound of a jet, and looks up to see a 737 circling toward LaGuardia Airport, and for a brief instant he’s still the boy he once was, no secrets, only love. He blinks his eyes and then it’s Nathaniel he sees, arriving, that very morning, on a jet like the one above, all secrets, so little love.

There’s a yank on the cord around his heart, a reckoning in his bones.

He flips open Nathaniel’s phone. He will call his father, speak to Nathaniel, reassure him he did nothing wrong. He will help him track down Freya, so they can continue to fall in love. It is the least he can do.

But it’s peculiar. There are no contacts in the phone except for one. He checks the call log. There are dozens of outgoing calls, all to that one number. He dials and gets Nathaniel’s father’s tell me something good greeting. He hangs up and tries the incoming call log, but there’s just one number. He dials it and is connected to an automatic greeting for the Skagit County Medical Examiner’s Office.

He hangs up the phone and opens the guidebook. A slip of paper falls out. Harun picks it up and reads.

Mt. Fuji

Prince Edward Viaduct

Golden Gate Bridge

George Washington Bridge

80 MPH. Quickest way to die.

At first, he doesn’t understand the meaning of Nathaniel’s father’s note, only that reading it rattles a knowledge that already resides in his bones, the same way his own secret has always lived in his heart. The flash of anguish that tears through him is different from the fear and uncertainty he’s lived with for so long. It pushes him out of himself and when he returns, everything has gone quiet and still, and in that moment it all becomes clear. The vague destination near 175th Street, the father who never called back.

“As’alu Allah al ’azim rabbil ’arshil ’azim an yashifika.”

The prayer comes to his lips automatically. He asks God to help Nathaniel. To help him find Nathaniel. To help him find Freya. To help all three of them heal one another. Because Nathaniel and Freya, they are his people. They are one another’s people.

When his phone buzzes, he knows without looking who it’s from, knows that this prayer God has answered.

He reads Freya’s text. He tells her where Nathaniel is.

And then he starts to run.





THE ORDER OF LOSS


PART XII





NATHANIEL



The night I found my father on the kitchen floor, I had the most powerful déjà vu.

At first I thought that it was because Dad was lying not far from where Grandma Mary had been lying when she’d collapsed all those years before.

Later, after the paramedics came, not even trying to resuscitate Dad or pump his stomach because what was the point, after I found the hoard of pills in a shoebox under the bed, I understood that the reason seeing my father lying dead on the kitchen floor felt like it had happened before was because I’d been imagining it all my life.

I’d imagined it when Mom left and I was too young to know what I was imagining.

I’d imagined it when Grandma Mary died.

I’d imagined it when we buried the baby birds and the dead frog. I’d imagined it when I’d seen him weeping in the hospital after I came out of surgery. I’d imagined it every time I walked through the door after school, saw Dad on the couch, with the TV on, and exhaled a breath I’d been half holding since I’d left that morning.

I’d imagined it every time he told me, “It’s just us, Nat. A fellowship of two.” It was why I didn’t leave. I thought if I left—for college, for Mom, for a life—I’d find my father, one day, on the kitchen floor.