I Have Lost My Way(8)

“Where are you going?” asked Sabrina, who had noticed.

“My mother is sick,” he replied, serving us big portions of food. “I am going home to visit her.”

“Will she be okay?” I asked. I had never met Ayate. She was too frail to travel, and my mother said we didn’t have enough money to afford the tickets to Ethiopia.

“She will be fine,” my father said.

“When are you coming back?” Sabrina asked.

“Soon, Sipara.”

Sabrina frowned. She did not like it when he used her Ethiopian name. “How soon?” she asked.

“Soon,” he repeated. “Is there anything you want me to bring back?”

“Will you bring us one of those white dresses?” I asked. I’d seen them on the women at the restaurant and in the pictures of my cousins. They were beautiful, gauzy and white, with delicate embroidery. I desperately wanted one.

“A habesha kemis?” He smiled. “I promise.” He looked at Sabrina. “Do you want me to bring you one?”

“No, thank you.”

We finished eating and he stood to leave. He had tears in his eyes as he held me close and sang to me, not the Billie Holiday or Nina Simone songs we sang together but “Tschay Hailu,” the rhythmic lullaby he used to sing to me every night. Eshururururu, eshururururu, ye binyea enate tolo neyelete dabowen baheya wetetune beguya yezeshelet neye yezeshelet neye.

“Sing with me, Freaulai,” he said, and I did.

When the song was over, he pushed me away to arm’s length, tears streaming down his face. “Promise me you will never stop singing.”

I said what I always said—that I promised.

He wiped his face, picked up his suitcase and trumpet, and left. I chased him to the hallway. “Don’t forget the white dress,” I called.

But he was already gone.



* * *



— — —

My grandmother died five weeks later. I cried, not because I was sad but because my father would be staying for the funeral and to settle her affairs. And the weeks without him had already been enough. With him absent, my family was like a three-legged chair.

“How much longer?” I asked over the crackling phone line when he’d been gone two months.

“Not much longer,” he said.

“And you won’t forget the white dress?”

“I won’t forget.”

I hung up the phone. Sabrina was standing there. She had spoken to him for only a few moments, monosyllabic yes/no answers. It was like she didn’t miss him at all. But why should she? She belonged to our mother, and our mother was still here.

She had her arms crossed in front of her chest and was looking at me with the same mean expression she wore when she pointed out some flaw of mine. “You know he’s not coming back, right?”

“What are you talking about?”

“He’s home now,” she said. “He doesn’t want to come back.”

“But we’re here.”

“Mom was going to kick him out anyway,” Sabrina said. “You think he’d come back just for you?”

“You’re just being mean.”

She looked at me. She was fourteen years old, but she already had a stare that could make a grown-up flinch. “He took his trumpet, Freya. Why would he take his trumpet if he was coming back?”

“Maybe he wanted to play music for Ayate,” I said.

“He’s not coming back,” Sabrina said.

“Yes he is!” I screamed at her. “You’re just jealous because he loves me more. Because I can sing. He’s coming back!”

She didn’t even seem mad. She looked at me almost pityingly. Because she knew. Sabrina always knew.

“No, he’s not.”



* * *



— — —

A few months after that I received a package in the mail. The stamps bore the squiggly, indecipherable writing of Amharic and showed that the package had been mailed weeks before.

Inside was a white dress. It was beautiful. Gauzy, embroidered with purple and gold thread. It fit me perfectly. There was a note from my father. I promised, it said.

And that was when I knew Sabrina was right.

I threw the dress into the trash. Then I went to my room and climbed into bed and began to cry.

“What’s gotten into you?” Mom asked when she found me there that night. It was still several weeks before she would sit me and Sabrina down in a booth at the Star Diner and solemnly announce what we already knew: that she and our father were getting divorced; that he was staying in Addis for the foreseeable future, but they’d work something out so we could go visit. Another promise unkept.

I didn’t answer. I just kept crying into my pillow.

“I don’t know what’s with her,” I heard my mother tell Sabrina. “Or how to snap her out of it.”

That was my father’s job. He was the one who sat with me when I was sick or scared. He was the one who didn’t ask for explanations when sometimes I was just so overcome with emotions I didn’t know what to do. “Sing what you can’t say, Freaulai,” he would say.

I was still crying when I heard the door creak open. It was not my mother, who had come in several times and admonished me to cut it out. It was Sabrina.