It had taken him six months to read it to me. It took me five days to read it to him.
The rain continued to fall. The water continued to boil.
* * *
— — —
It rained the entire time I was reading. It was only when I got to the very end, when Sauron has been vanquished and Frodo and Bilbo leave the Shire, that the rain began to slow to a drizzle.
I paused for a moment at the last page. My voice was hoarse. My nerves were shot. My heart was broken. And for a moment I was transported back to the day when we finished reading the book the first time, before my mother left, before Mary died.
“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.
There’s just emptiness.
Just us, buddy.
As it always was. As it always will be.
* * *
— — —
Freya returns to Harun’s house. Halima is sitting on the cement stoop next to the driveway.
“Did you find Nathaniel?” Halima asks.
Freya shakes her head. She didn’t find him. She didn’t warn him. She didn’t even give him back his fifty-dollar bill, and now he’s out there, alone and broke.
“Is Harun okay?” she asks.
“I don’t know.” Halima hangs her head. “I came downstairs, and he was gone. He’s not answering his phone.”
“Maybe he went to James’s?”
“I doubt it.”
As soon as Halima says this, certain things become clear to Freya. Harun has not spoken to James all day, in spite of the fact that she’s supposedly his favorite singer.
“I think they broke up,” Halima says. “I mean, I don’t know for sure. He never told me. But I suspected that he was gay, and I suspected he was with someone, and once, I followed him into the city and saw him meet up with a guy.”
“James?” Freya asks.
“I think so. But I never told him. Even when this whole marriage thing happened and I knew something had gone wrong.” She puts her face in her hands. “But I never told him I knew he was gay. I let him bear it alone.” She looks up at Freya, eyes so very solemn, so very much like her big brother’s. “I think I failed him.”
“I think I did too,” Freya says.
Halima wipes away a stray tear. “I’m not supposed to be driving at night, but I’m going to look for him. Maybe he went to the PATH station. It’s not that far. Will you come?”
“Or course,” Freya says.
They climb into the car and crawl down Sip Avenue. The stores are all shuttered. There’s hardly anyone out. It’s like the night has swallowed everyone, and all their secrets, up.
When they get to Journal Square, Halima sighs. “Maybe it’s better if I go home, in case he comes back.”
“Okay,” Freya says, not knowing where to go. “I guess I’ll get out here. Maybe I’ll bump
into him on the train.” But she doubts it. Finding each other like they did was . . . she doesn’t know the word for it. Luck? Fate? Miracle? But she’s pretty certain whatever it’s called you only get so much of it in a lifetime, let alone a day.
“If he gets in touch with you . . .” Halima begins.
“He can’t,” Freya says. “We only met today. He doesn’t even have my phone number.”
“So give it to me,” Halima says. “I’ll text you his number and give him yours. And you call me if you hear from him, and I’ll do the same.”
“Okay.” Freya tells Halima her number. She opens the door to the car.
“If you see him, tell him . . .” Halima trails off, gesturing behind them, toward the quiet streets, toward home. “My parents need time. They thought he was going to Pakistan to marry a girl. They’re in shock. But they love him. They just need time.”
“Do you think so?” Freya asks. Did time heal everything? Or were some things broken beyond repair?
“I don’t know,” Halima admits. “But if they can get used to Leesa, they can get used to anything.”
Freya chuckles ruefully. “Fair point.”
Halima leans in to hug Freya. “I was looking forward to learning to cook with you,” she whispers into Freya’s ear. “I always wanted a sister.”
“Me too,” Freya says.
THE ORDER OF LOSS
PART X
FREYA
The first thing Hayden did after he took over was to quietly rename the Sisters K channel the Freya K channel, and a few months after that, to quietly drop the K. That was how easy it was to disappear my sister.
I continued to record songs and make videos, though now his team produced them. At first, they didn’t look or sound so different from the videos Sabrina and I had made. They dropped weekly, on Tuesdays, same as always.
But with every new addition, Hayden deleted a couple of the Sisters K videos. If it was gradual, Hayden said, the fans wouldn’t even notice. “Turn up the heat slowly,” he said, “and the frogs in the pot won’t know they’re boiling.” He looked at me. “Soon, no one will remember the Sisters K ever existed.”
By that point, I wondered if my sister remembered I existed. Sabrina had not said a word when Mom announced that I would work with Hayden alone. She hadn’t even looked that surprised, probably because Mom had consulted with her ahead of time.
She didn’t say a cross word to me. Didn’t accuse me of betraying her or selling her out. Didn’t yell at me or call me a bitch. If anything, she was more benignly pleasant to me than she’d ever been. But two months after we inked the deal with Hayden, she moved upstate to finish college and didn’t come home or speak to me after that.
Bit by bit, Hayden began to change the sound and look of my videos, nudging them—me—grittier by degrees, transforming what he dismissively called the “suburban cover artist” into someone edgier, more glamorous, more raw. “I’m not changing you,” he claimed. “I’m revealing you.”
We had lived in White Plains, but after a year, we moved to Williamsburg, which was closer to his office and more in line with my brand. Hayden had a furnished sublet we could have for cheap. Mom gave up the apartment I’d grown up in, and the family we once were disappeared entirely.
* * *
— — —
Hayden stuck to his two-year plan with the precision of a German train. After a year had gone by, a year of building my brand, getting me out there and visible, turning me into a commodity, we dropped the first single and took down nearly all the previous work from SoundCloud. “Gotta get your fans used to paying for the milk,” Hayden said.
There were some fans who objected, who accused me of selling out. Some even asked what had happened to Sabrina. Has your sister died? they wrote. But these comments remained in the minority as I was discovered by more and more new fans who had never heard of Sabrina.
I was the talent, I was told, because I was the voice. But, really, Hayden was the voice. Hayden made the calls. My look, my hook, my sound. He dictated all of it. When it came time to record the album, he hired a team of songwriters to create what he said would be a moody, atmospheric, and—without a touch of irony—confessional album. He employed a director who would shoot several videos simultaneously, to solidify the brand. “People want to see inside the real you,” he said. “And we’ll show them that.”
He presented me a list of songs he’d chosen to record. Twelve of them were written by his team. But number thirteen was my song. It was “Little White Dress.”
“Sing me a song that proves it,” Hayden had commanded as soon as I’d closed the door behind me that fateful day in his office. Sabrina had just sung “Tschay Hailu,” and when she’d emerged from Hayden’s office, she wouldn’t look me in the eye, dispelling any doubts I’d had about what she’d done.
“Proves what?” I’d asked him.
“That you are the only one I want,” he’d said.
That was the first, last, and only time I’d sung him “Little White Dress.”
“‘Little White Dress’?” I asked Hayden two years later, looking at his list of songs. “How can I record that?”
“How can you not record that?”
He stared at me for one silent, squirmy moment. He didn’t know the history of the song, other than it was the one I’d sung for him, choking back tears, all the while thinking that if Sabrina was going to betray me, I was going to betray her back. Had Hayden seen the bloody dagger in my hand? Had he been the one who’d given it to me in the first place?
“It’ll need to be rewritten, of course,” Hayden said, taking back the list. “But I do love that song.”
* * *
— — —
By the time his team finished with it, the song was radically different. What had been just vocals and percussion was filled out with lush instrumentals. The lyrics had been rewritten so it sounded like an angry love song. The Amharic lyrics were gone. But the DNA of the song was still there. The melody was mine. And the story behind it—that was, for better or for worse, still mine.
We were three weeks into recording when it came up on the schedule. It started out as a normal enough day. I woke at eight, did some yoga, ate a light, nutritionist-approved breakfast, drank some herbal tea (no coffee on singing days because it was an irritant, though Hayden sometimes gave me a caffeine tablet to compensate). Did a baking-soda-and-water gargle. Self-consciously warmed up in the back of the car Hayden sent to bring us to the studio.
When we got to the studio that morning it was already crowded—more so than usual. In addition to Hayden, his assistants, and the engineers, there were a handful of label execs and some other people I didn’t know. Everyone was hunched around a monitor.
“Freya, look,” Mom said. “They’ve mocked up a few prototypes for the art.”
“Don’t get too attached,” Hayden warned. “They’re just ideas.”
I peered at the images. Body parts, black and white and sultry, the face half-showing. The name Freya in huge type. I didn’t recognize myself. I’d been Freya Kebede. The Sisters K. And now I was just Freya, a menagerie of well-lit body parts.
“Let’s get to work,” Hayden said.
Usually we did a take or two to warm up. Then we began recording. Sometimes, Hayden would stop in between takes to give a note: Go soft here, hit that note harder. But this time, he kept shaking his head.
“Nope,” he said over and over. “Not there yet. Not even close.”
This kept up all morning. When it was time to break for lunch, Hayden waved everyone out of the booth and came into the studio to talk to just me. He didn’t say anything for a while, just stared at me. I looked around for my mother, an assistant, anyone. But they’d left me alone with him.
“Freya,” he said. “Look at me.”
I made myself look at him.
“You’re
not giving me what I want.”
“I’m doing what I’ve been doing,” I replied. “So I don’t know what you want.”
“I want you,” he said. “I want the real you.”
But who was that? The girl who’d been born singing? The girl who’d betrayed her sister? The girl who could be the next Lulia? The girl in pieces on the computer screen?
“I don’t know who that is.”
Hayden tapped himself on the chest. “I know who that is,” he said. “I’ve always known. It’s why I chose you. So give me what I want.”
“I just said I don’t know what you want. More intensity? More growl? More volume? Tell me.”
From inside the booth, I saw Nick, the engineer, return. He pressed the intercom. “We’ve got some pretty good takes, Hayden. She can maybe punch out a few lines and we’ll get it in the mix.”
“When I want your opinion I’ll ask for it,” Hayden told Nick. He turned back to me. “This song can’t be done piecemeal, Freya. This song only works if we can hear your guts on a platter, hear your chest splayed open. So dig down deep and figure it out and sing me that fucking song the way you sang it in my office.”
Hayden went back to the board, sitting beside a now-frowning Nick. I put my headphones back on and I sang. I sang that song to the bone. I sandpapered my voice, going back in time, year by year, through all the layers of varnish, through all the broken promises, trying to dig back to the girl who was born singing. I sang my voice raw, sang my heart to shreds looking for that girl. Did I find her? Had she ever even existed?
It was dark out when I finished the final, bloodiest take. Hayden came out of the booth, clapping his hands slowly. He was smiling proudly, almost, you might say, paternally.
“That,” he said, “is the song that will make you famous.”