8
THE SABRINA WAY
Freya has always known where to find Sabrina.
When her sister moved away to that college upstate, Freya looked up the school online. She spent hours on the school’s website, picturing her sister living in one of the dorms, or taking notes in the lecture halls, or playing piano—if she still played—in the music studios.
When Sabrina graduated, Freya knew that she’d moved to the city, although the opposite side of it from her.
Freya has charted the route from her place in Williamsburg to Sabrina’s Harlem apartment many times. L train to the A train to 145th Street. An hour, door to door, according to Google Maps. So even though she’s never been there, she knows how to get there.
Outside the building, Freya’s heart pounds in her head, a steady percussive beat. She looks for her sister’s name on the buzzer, and there it is, Kebede/Takashida.
(She said yes!)
Someone is leaving the building, so Freya slips into the vestibule without buzzing first. The apartment is on the sixth floor. The elevator clanks all the way up, ba-boom, ba-boom, echoing Freya’s heaving heart. Her hand trembles as she knocks.
A man answers, tall, thin, delicate-featured, with a professorial air. Alex Takashida in the flesh.
“Can I help you?” he asks.
Freya is suddenly tongue-tied, unable not only to sing but to speak. Why is she here? Did she think stealing a song from Hayden, a song Sabrina always hated, would undo anything? Did she think a hug with Harun’s sister would deliver back her own? “I’m looking for my mother,” Freya finally manages to stutter.
Alex squints through his glasses at her. It occurs to Freya that he might not even know who she is. When Freya first met with a media trainer to practice how she’d talk about various parts of her life, she’d asked, “What do I say about my sister?” and the trainer had replied, “What sister?”
Does this man who is marrying her sister not even know Freya exists? Has Sabrina struck Freya from the record?
Has Freya not done the exact same thing?
“Of course,” Alex says. “Come in.”
Freya steps into an airy apartment, all hardwood floors, leaded-glass windows, views of treetops. A piano sits in the corner, sheet music and pencils on the desk. Unlike the apartment that she’s been living in for the past year, which came furnished, towels already in the linen closet, plates already in the kitchen cabinets, a piano that has seen no fresh composition on it during Freya’s tenure, this apartment looks like people actually live in it.
“Let me get Sabrina,” Alex says.
In a different context, Freya might not recognize her sister. Her face has narrowed, her hair, always worn long, is cut into a pixie. It sharpens her angles. Shows off her eyes. She looks, Freya sees, more like their father.
“You’re here for Mom?” Sabrina asks after only the slightest pause. She shakes her head. “How fitting. She’s looking for you.”
“Why?”
Alex and Sabrina exchange one of those looks, wordless but telling. Freya feels an ache, that age-old desire to have someone to understand her like that.
“She was worried,” Alex says.
“But why?”
Sabrina frowns. “You didn’t answer any calls or texts, and she tracked your phone and it showed you in Central Park, not moving, and then there was an Amex charge from an urgent care. So she thought maybe you’d been hurt. Or hurt yourself. She went to the police.”
What? That doesn’t make any sense. Freya’s mother hasn’t called all day. No one has.
Freya fishes out her phone for the first time, she now realizes, since she was back in the diner, several hours ago. Usually if she is away from her phone for more than a few minutes, her home screen has blown up with texts and alerts, but it’s blank. She presses the home button and nothing happens.
She asks Sabrina to call her phone. Sabrina does, but the phone in Freya’s hand remains dark. And suddenly it makes sense. “I, uh, dropped my phone in the park,” she tells her sister. “That’s why the GPS thinks it’s there.”
“You might’ve knocked your antenna loose,” Alex says. “I can take a look.”
“Oh, thanks.”
Freya hands Alex the phone, and he hurries away with it, likely relieved to be away from the drama. Not that Freya can blame him.
“You should call Mom,” Sabrina says, handing over her own phone. “She’s frantic.”
Freya shakes her head. If she calls her mother, she will wind up talking to her manager, and she’s done being managed. “Can you just text her that I’m not dead?”
Sabrina taps at her phone. The response comes in almost immediately. “She wants you to call her,” Sabrina says, reading along as the texts fire in. “Now. She says it’s urgent. She says Hayden called and—”
“Stop!” Freya’s voice is loud and firm, and for once Sabrina listens. “I’m not here to talk to Mom.”
“I see.” Sabrina puts down her phone and walks over to the dining table, upon which is an open bottle of wine. She pours herself a glass. “So why are you here?”
Freya doesn’t have an answer. All she knows is that after all that’s happened today, with the miracle doctor and with Hayden and with Harun and Nathaniel, she needs to be here.
“To congratulate you,” Freya blurts. “On your engagement.” To her surprise, the tidings are sincere. She is happy that Sabrina is happy.
Sabrina holds up her hand, the tiny engagement ring throwing prisms against the wall. She marvels—less at the ring, it seems, than at her own good fortune. “Thank you,” she says quietly. She drops her hands in her lap. “Did Mom tell you?”
“Mom hasn’t told me a thing about you in two years,” Freya says. “I found out on Facebook.”
“I didn’t post anything.”
“Alex did. She said yes!”
“Ahh.” Sabrina smiles indulgently toward the room where Alex has gone to tinker with the phone. Then she looks at Freya. “Still stalking ghosts on Facebook?”
“Only yours.”
Sabrina’s eyebrow arcs in surprise. “Why?”
“Why? Are you serious? You’re my sister. At least I think you’re still my sister.”
“I don’t know. Am I?” Sabrina asks, her voice uncertain, as if she truly doesn’t know.
This rattles Freya. She’s used to the granite Sabrina. She came girded to confront that Sabrina. But she doesn’t know what to do with this tender, unsure person.
“Do you ever hear from him?” Sabrina asks.
“Who?”
Her sister’s eye roll is, at least, comfortingly familiar. “Dad.”
Not Solomon, but Dad.
“Not for a while,” Freya says. “What about you?”
“No. But I’m not you.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means I’m not famous anymore. Or almost famous.”
“Neither am I.”
“But surely famous enough to get his attention.”
There’s pain in her sister’s eyes, and Freya wonders just which one of them has been trying to get their father’s attention all these years.
Freya shrugs. “I’m not famous, and if I’m almost famous, not for much longer.”
“What do you mean? Isn’t it all about to explode?” Sabrina blows out her hands, an identical gesture to the one Hayden made for them years ago.
“Mom didn’t tell you?”
“Tell me what?”
“Never mind.” She looks at Sabrina and takes a deep breath. It’s now or never. “Why did you sing ‘Tschay Hailu’ in Hayden’s office that day?”
The instant she sees the blood drain from her sister’s face, Freya understands that she isn’t the only one who’s replayed that day over and over again. Sabrina stands up to refill her
wine, filling a glass for Freya too.
“Do you know what Hayden told me in his office that day?” she asks, handing Freya the wine.
“How would I?”
“I thought maybe he told you.” Sabrina shakes her head. “But then again, why would he?”
“What did he say?”
“He said I had a pretty voice, maybe even prettier than yours, and that I wrote a decent song, but that he wasn’t interested in me, only you. I asked why. He’d just told me that I was a better singer than you, and we both know I wrote better songs. He was blunt. He said I wasn’t interesting enough, wasn’t special enough, and wasn’t hungry enough.”
There are tears in Sabrina’s eyes as she continues. “And it wasn’t like I didn’t know. I’d seen how the fans reacted to you. Seen how much you needed that. But I was so pissed off. So I told Hayden he had it all wrong. You weren’t hungry. You were desperate. That our father fed you a story about being born singing and then disappeared, leaving you nothing but that false legacy and a pathetic white dress. I told him that every song you sang, from that very first viral video to ‘Little White Dress,’ was really about you trying to get him back.
“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.
And suddenly, Freya does know what she’s going to do. She’s going to hug her sister and then walk out of here and track down Nathaniel and Harun, these two strangers who entered her life today and showed her what love really looks like. She has no idea where they are, but if Hayden Booth has taught her one lesson it’s that if you want something bad enough, you find a fucking way to make it happen.
She’s going to find them. The rest will sort itself out.
She clicks on Harun’s number to open a text. Tell me where to find you.
THE ORDER OF LOSS
PART XI
HARUN
The last time I saw James was a beautiful spring day, as warm and soft as the day he found the fifty-dollar bill weeks earlier had been brittle and cold. The trees were in bloom. The women in the city had on dresses, and the boys wore tank tops that showed varying degrees of sculpted perfection.
We met that day in the park. James seemed happy. He was prattling on about g
etting his in-state residency after being in New York for a year and how he’d be able to start at LaGuardia Community College in the fall and how they had a food-service management program, which wasn’t exactly what he wanted, but maybe he could transfer to the Institute of Culinary Education.
I only half listened to him. The day before, Ammi had assembled a list of gifts to buy. I had been fitted by a tailor for a formal kurta. My passport had returned from the consulate with a visa glued into its pages.
I emailed or texted with Amir every day. When I’d first realized what he’d done, I had been so angry at him: What had given him the right? Who had given him the right? But I realized that I had. By being a coward, by relinquishing control. And anyway, my cousin seemed so optimistic about the way things were going.
“Am I boring you?” James asked.
I startled back to reality. “What?”
“I been talking to you, and I bet you can’t tell me one word I just said.”
“Culinary Institute,” I said. “Two words.”
He shook his head. “You’re distracted.” He gestured toward the shirtless confections sunning themselves in the meadow. “If I didn’t know any better, I’d say you were stepping out.”
He was so completely off base—I’d never had any interest in the confections beyond the aesthetic—and yet completely on the nose. Because wasn’t marrying someone else the definition of stepping out?
He’d been teasing, until he saw my expression. His face fell.
But he wasn’t devastated. Not yet. He would not tell me that I’d devastated him—ruined him—for another few hours. At that moment, he thought I’d maybe hooked up with some other guy.
“Ja—” I began.
He held up his hand. “You still wanna be with me?”
There was nothing else in the world I wanted. I nodded.
“Then I don’t wanna know. Do what you gotta do. I’m your first, and I plan to be your last, but if you need to figure out what it is you ain’t missing, I’m not gonna stop you.”
This was James. Giving me permission to be with someone else so I could be sure it was him I really loved. Because he was unselfish and brave and because he loved me.