She looks back and forth between them, her gaze skittering here and there until it lands on Nathaniel, whose Louisville Slugger has returned with a vengeance.
Halima scurries out, looking at anything but them.
* * *
— — —
They start to laugh.
“I guess we should go back in there,” Freya says, but she’s not sure she can. Her desire may not be as billboard-obvious as Nathaniel’s, but it is literally making her weak in the knees. “I need a moment.”
* * *
— — —
Nathaniel needs more than a moment. He needs all the moments. “Where’s the bathroom?”
“Upstairs, I think.”
He kisses her once more. More of a peck this time, hitting the side of her grinning mouth. As he retreats, his desire threatens to explode out of his skin.
“To be continued,” Freya calls after him. “Later.”
Climbing the stairs is painful, but it’s the good kind of painful. The alive kind of painful. The plan C kind of painful.
Later. He hadn’t considered the possibility.
* * *
— — —
Freya returns to the table, floating, melting, thinking the kinds of thoughts she ought not be thinking at Harun’s family’s dinner table.
“Where’s Nathaniel?” someone asks her.
“He’ll be right down,” Freya replies, and the anticipation of his return makes her feel giddy.
“Dad, we gotta work in the morning,” Saif says.
“Go on,” Harun’s mother urges. “We still have dessert.”
“Fine, fine.” His father looks at Harun, who is looking down at the table. “Beta, tomorrow you leave for the land of your family, to partake in a rite of heritage, and in doing so, you will enlarge our family yet again. Inshallah.”
A chorus of Inshallahs echoes around the table. Harun’s mother dabs at her eyes with a napkin.
“And maybe our family will expand again,” Harun’s mother says. “The table can always be set for more.”
Upstairs, the floor creaks. Soon Nathaniel will come back down. He will smile at Freya. The dessert will be eaten, the dishes cleared. And then . . .
“So let us all raise a glass to wish Harun well,” his father continues. “To hope he finds as good a partner as I did.”
They all raise a glass, except for Leesa, who scoffs. “Partner? That’s what you call it?” She turns to Freya. “Am I the only one having a hard time with this?”
Freya, still levitating five feet off the ground, doesn’t quite get Leesa’s question. Is she objecting to Harun being gay? “If it makes him happy, why should anyone else care?”
“See?” Harun’s mother says. “They probably have this in Ethiopia too.”
“They have it everywhere, as far as I know,” Freya says.
“And I really don’t see how it’s your business,” Halima tells Leesa. “It’s his choice.”
“And what about the girl? Is it her choice?” Leesa shakes her head.
Girl? What is going on? Freya tries to catch Harun’s eye, to say: Help me understand. I’m here to help. I can be your plan C too. But he won’t look at her.
“No disrespect, but between the burkas and the arranged marriages,” Leesa continues, “the way you people treat women is barbaric.”
“Babe,” Saif begins.
“‘You people’?” Halima fumes. “My parents had an arranged marriage, and they’ve been happily married more than twenty-five years.” She narrows her eyes. “Let’s see if you and Steve manage half as long. Because from what I’ve heard . . .”
“Okay,” Saif says, standing. “Time to go.”
“But we haven’t had dessert,” Harun’s mother says.
“I don’t want dessert,” he says. “Leesa, meet me in the car.”
“Gladly,” she says. She stalks off without saying goodbye, taking the half-empty bottle of wine with her.
When the door clicks behind her, Saif turns to his family. “This is why we never come here. Because none of you accept her.”
“Accept her?” Harun’s mother says. “When she says such terrible things about us?” She shakes her head. “Why did you have to marry . . .”
“An American? Because I am an American.”
“Someone who doesn’t respect us,” Harun’s mother says.
“Oh, so we’re all supposed to be like Harun? The good, dutiful son?”
“I’m not a good son,” Harun mumbles.
“Please,” Saif shoots back. “You’re the same kiss-ass you’ve always been.”
“Saif!” Harun’s father says, an edge of warning in his voice.
Freya is paying half her attention to the squabble and half her attention to the sounds upstairs. A toilet flushing. A sink running. The sounds of footsteps on the stairs. Whistling. Nathaniel is whistling.
He’s whistling and smiling as he enters the dining room. Freya tries to catch his eye to warn him that something is going down, but he doesn’t see.
But she does. In sickening slow motion, she suddenly sees that everything’s about to go sideways. She’s felt this way before. And once again, she is helpless to do anything.
* * *
— — —
“I’m not a good son,” Harun repeats.
“Of course you are,” Ammi says. “And you’re going to marry someone nice and bring joy to your whole family.”
* * *
— — —
Nathaniel, who only catches the bit about Harun getting married, and who is drunk on that kiss, feels elation for his friend. And relief. All day long, a melancholy has radiated off of Harun, even when he spoke of his boyfriend, and Nathaniel wondered why he hasn’t called this James, if something was amiss. He’d felt a kinship with Harun’s sadness, with his secrets. But now it’s different. Nathaniel has laters. And Harun does too. “So you’re going to marry James?” he says.
* * *
— — —
Harun exhales.
There. There it is. At last.
“James?” Saif asks. “Who’s that?”
* * *
— — —
The hospice nurse, Hector, once told Nathaniel that you could tell when someone passed because the air changed. “It’s like the departing soul leaves a shadow behind.”
No one has died, but Nathaniel feels the sudden change in the room. Where moments before there had been plan Cs and laters, now there is only emptiness. It’s a feeling he knows all too well.
He snaps back to reality as he takes in the heaviness in the room. Harun’s trembling hands. Freya’s contorted face. Did he do this?
“Who’s James?” Harun’s brother asks again.
Nathaniel sees the despair on Harun’s face. It’s a look he knows all too well.
What the hell has he done?
* * *
— — —
“Is this James another friend from school, beta?” Abu asks.
When Harun turns to Ammi, her face is so hopeful, he almost wants to say yes.
School was where they met, after all. Harun was lost and James showed him the way. It wouldn’t be a lie.
But he has just heard his father say James’s name out loud. He won’t deny him any longer.
“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 w
ay 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.
When it stopped swimming, Dad pulled it out of the water and put it back outside, but it was already dead. He seemed surprised that he’d killed it. The water hadn’t been boiling, just very hot. He got very quiet and broody, locking himself in his room for several hours. When he came out, he was ashen. “I didn’t mean to,” he whispered.
* * *
— — —
I realized that I was the frog in the pot. I had a lifetime to figure this out, but it took those two weeks on my own to realize I was cooked.
Two weeks might not sound like much, but you try spending two weeks alone in a house. Totally alone. No TV. No phone calls. No visit from the mailman. Nothing.
I did.
I thought the world had ended.
It had.
I waited for someone to come, to call.
They didn’t.
Outside, the rain was unrelenting. Biblical. If it kept up, I thought the whole house would be washed away, swallowed up into a gap in the earth, leaving no trace of its existence. Only forest. And frogs.
Maybe that was how it should be.
A few years earlier, my father had watched some doomsday documentary and had gone into full-on survivalist mode, readying the house for all manner of catastrophe. He ordered a bunch of dehydrated food, jugs of water, canned juices and fruits, granola bars, industrial-sized vats of peanut butter. “Enough for us to survive for a month,” he said.
I’d thought it was his usual impulsiveness. I thought it was Dad. I thought the food would collect dust in the basement for decades. I never thought I’d eat it.
But I did. I lived on that cache for two weeks. I’m not sure if I survived, though.
* * *
— — —
Two weeks alone in a house. It did something to a person.
All those years alone in a house with my father. It also did something to a person.
I could see that as I roamed the empty house, waiting for someone to call, to show up, to say my name.
No one did. Why would they? I was already dead.
* * *
— — —
As the rain continued to fall and the phone continued to not ring and the doorbell continued to stay silent, I went through my father’s things. Without him there to put it all in context, to make it seem if not normal then typical, or at least Dad, I understood the water had been boiling for some time.
Under his bed I found the stash of mood stabilizers, the drugs Mom had insisted he take if he wanted to retain full custody after Mary died, the drugs I dutifully picked up at the pharmacy in town every month, the drugs I poured him a glass of water before bed each night to swallow down. He’d been hoarding them. For years, it looked like.
Next to that box was Mary’s old suitcase. Inside were the notebooks where he’d written his theories, gleaned from the documentaries he’d watched over the years: The healing tree frogs and his absolute certainty that the cure to Mary’s cancer was in our forest. The man who wrote the longest novel in history, discovered only years after his death, setting off a search for the thing he would create to leave behind after his death. The one about empaths, the one about suicide tourism, the one about th
e seeing blind man. There were pages and pages of notes, drawings, quotations. It seemed normal enough. Dad enough. Until I got to the entry about people who had learned to harness all 100 percent of their brains.
Dad had written pages and pages on this particular documentary. According to his notes, most humans utilized only 10 percent of their brains, but the people in this film had found the ability to access close to 100 percent and had accomplished superhuman feats like flying and learning dozens of languages. If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear as it is, infinite, Dad had scrawled.
I remembered when Dad first told me that; it was the day we’d gone out into the forest blindfolded, in search of limitless sight. I knew my life had changed that day, but I belatedly understood that his had too.
A lot of the films Dad watched were rife with conspiracy theories, which was why I’d stopped watching with him. This one had sounded particularly outlandish—but also familiar. I tried to recall it, and when I did, I realized it wasn’t a documentary at all. It was a science-fiction movie.
Not long after that, I discovered my father’s copy of The Lord of the Rings. The pages were darkened with underlined passages, full of doodles and quote callouts, theories scrawled into the margins, epic ideas about the location of Middle-earth. Had my father lost the ability to distinguish between science fiction and documentary, between real and imaginary, between Middle-earth and Earth? Had he ever had it in the first place?
Fellowship of two.
Had I?
Just us, buddy.
It was hard to read the book with all his scribbles, but as the rain continued, I forced myself. I read it cover to cover, out loud, as my father had read it to me all those years ago.