by Gayle Forman
“Just be safe, ’cause I don’t want to catch any nasty-ass shit from some confection,” he said.
“You won’t,” I said.
“And don’t go falling in love, because that I can’t take.”
“I won’t,” I promised.
For the rest of the afternoon I let him think that I was having it off with some guy, and I let myself think that if he was okay with me hooking up with some guy, maybe he’d understand me being with some girl whom I wouldn’t even hook up with—not that often, anyway—and whom I’d certainly never love.
After that we had an okay afternoon. We fell asleep in Sheep Meadow and got food from the halal cart James liked best and walked all the way to the top of the park, where hidden by foliage and ferns and caressed by the welcoming spring breeze, we loved each other in the ways we knew how.
James was normally chatty during sex, but that day, weighed down by what he thought was my infidelity, he was quiet. I, on the other hand, who was normally quiet, was so overcome with love and fear and anguish that I cried out.
“Just you try to find someone better than me,” he said after. He smiled the saddest smile, and I knew that marrying a girl so I could keep hiding James from my family was not the same as hooking up with some confection.
“Next Thursday,” he said as we exchanged one final kiss under the cherry tree before he went uptown and I went home. “Park again, if the weather holds.”
How easy it would have been to say yes. To milk one more day out of it. To come up with some excuse about why I’d be away for six weeks. To continue doing this with James for as long as I could. To continue deceiving him into thinking there was a future for us when I’d known, all along, there was not.
I put my hand atop James’s chest. His heart beat strong and true under my fingertips—his open, loving heart, willing to shelter me and my secrets and my insecurities and even my infidelity. Willing to pay a price for things he cared about.
My heart was defective, not because it loved the wrong person but because it beat in the chest of a coward.
But even a coward has his limits. Even a defective heart knows right from wrong.
I moved my hands to the sides of his face, drawing him to me the way he had done that first time we’d kissed. “I have to tell you a secret,” I whispered.
And for that one beautiful moment, before I spoke again, there was James’s face, exquisite, expectant, all heat and warmth and optimism that the spring will return, that the sun will shine on all of us, waiting to receive my secret as he’d received me.
9
BROKEN HEARTS
Harun has always known where to find James. When he hopped from one couch to another, from cousin to aunt, Harun found out the location of the latest crash pad, committing it to memory. It made him feel better, knowing where to find him in case he lost him.
He could’ve gone to James’s aunt’s apartment anytime. He could’ve made some excuse for where he was going and taken the PATH to Manhattan, then transferred to the subway uptown all the way to the last stop, end of the line, James said, and walked the five blocks and knocked on the door and surprised James for no good reason except that he loved him.
But he didn’t.
Until now.
His hand trembles as he rings the buzzer. There is so much he has to say to James.
That he has told his family, and it was every bit as bad as he thought it would be, but that he finally understands, maybe a little, what James meant when he said coming out to his father was worth the fallout. He’ll never live down the terrible thing he made Nathaniel do for him. But the shame that has ridden atop his shoulders, an invisible and heavy stowaway since he was nine years old, has begun to, if not disembark entirely, at least pack its bags.
And that, as James might say, ain’t nothing.
And he wants to tell him about Freya. About this astonishing day. Maybe he won’t believe him, but Harun will play him the song that’s tucked into his keychain, and when he hears that voice, he’ll believe.
But mostly he wants to tell James that he’s sorry. And he loves him.
He’s buzzed through, and he climbs the stairs to apartment 3C. He knocks.
An older woman dressed in nurse’s scrubs, wearing a lanyard from Presbyterian Hospital, answers the door. “Help you?” she says.
“Is James here?” he asks.
The woman, who must be James’s aunt Colette, looks directly at Harun. Her eyes, Harun sees, are the same eyes as James’s, brown and gold and warm—at least until she seems to understand who he is, and the suspicion rolls in like a cloud and removes all the warmth.
“You?” Colette says. “You him?”
Harun nods.
Colette walks over to the couch on which James is sleeping. “J,” she calls. “Someone here to see you.”
There’s a split second when James wakes—pillow creases on his beautiful face, puffy circles under his eyes—when he’s still in that hazy limbo between sleep and wakefulness. Harun knows this place from the times they would fall asleep together in the park or in a quiet corner of a Starbucks or even on a subway when James would drift off. It would always take him a minute to emerge from sleep, to remember where he was. In that moment of in-between, Harun can see that James still loves him.
He blinks and it’s gone, and James is awake and cold. “What you doing here?”
“I—I came to see you.”
“I’ll leave you to it,” Colette says, touching James on the shoulder.
“I already told you, I don’t wanna see you again.”
“I’m not going to Pakistan. I’m not marrying some girl. I told my family tonight.” The words tumble out in a breathless confession.
There’s a flicker of interest on James’s face, and his expression softens the tiniest bit. He nods. It’s a start. “How’d that go?”
“As expected.”
James nods again like he knows. Because he does.
“And I love you, and I’m sorry.” Harun begins to cry. He takes a tentative step toward James and sinks to his knees. “I’m so, so sorry.”
At first James stands stiff as a board, and Harun thinks it’s over for him, but then he feels James’s tentative touch on his head, hears James’s soft voice say, “It’s okay,” and he thinks maybe it’ll all work out.
James gently lifts Harun to his feet and says the words he needs to hear tonight. “I love you too.” But it sounds different than it used to, mournful, and with a fist to the gut Harun knows there will be a but.
“But I can’t be with you.”
“Why not? I’m not marrying a girl. And I told my family. So I could be with you.”
“Nah, boo. You told your family so you could be with yourself. Live with yourself.”
“I don’t want to live with myself,” Harun cries. “I want to live with you. To be with you. To fly you to Fiji and Brazil and all the places.”
“You’re gonna have to fly there without me.”
“But you just said you loved me.”
“I do. But you almost walked. No coming back from that.”
“There is,” Harun insists. “I’ll earn your trust back.”
James sighs. “You stepping out with some confection, I could handle. Some girl? Even that. But you were planning to leave. Without a word. I keep thinking, if I hadn’t said something in the park, would Harun have even told me? Or would he have ghosted me, same as my mom?”
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.
So I stayed. And in the end, I found him on that kitchen floor anyway.
Déjà vu.
After the paramedics took Dad away, I waited for the calls to come. After Grandma Mary, that’s what had happened. People came. Her church friends. My cousins. People.
But the only person who called in those two weeks was the coroner giving me the toxicology report, which she called “inconclusive.” There were opioids and benzos in Dad’s blood, not huge amounts, not drug-abuse amounts or amounts that suggested this was intentional, but sometimes, the coroner explained, even small doses interact in unexpected ways. “We’re listing the cause of death as accidental overdose,” she told me.
Inconclusive. Accidental. What did that mean?
“What do you want us to do with the body?” she asked.
I had no idea. When Grandma Mary died, Hector had facilitated everything. He’d called the coroner and looked up her life insurance policy and arranged it with the mortuary. I knew at the time that he was doing something my father should be doing, behaving the way a father should behave.
“Just part of my job,” Hector had said, though I’d recognized this as the kindest sort of lie. He’d stayed until late that night, and he’d returned the next day, even though we weren’t on his rotation anymore. “I’m moving back to New York City at the end of the year,” he told me, pressing his business card into my hand. “But you can call me anytime. I put my personal cell number on the back of the card. You can always get me on that.” I palmed the card, thinking he was being nice, and he was, but in retrospect I understood Hector realized I was a frog in a pot long before I did.
“I don’t know what to do with the body,” I told the coroner.
The coroner explained options, the cheapest of which was cremation. Did my father have life insurance? she wanted to know.
“Was it on purpose?” I asked.
Another pause. “We’re listing the cause as accidental overdose,” she replied. “You should still be able to collect his life insurance if he has it.”
That wasn’t what I was asking.
“Was it on purpose?” I repeated, my voice starting to break. “I need to know.”
“We can’t divine intention, but we are listing it as an accidental overdose.”
“Did he do it on purpose?”
The silence on the phone was terrible because it was so familiar. It was that lag between people asking you if you were okay and waiting to hear that you were fine.
“Sometimes,” she began falteringly, “it’s better to just leave these things be.”
“How do I do that?”
“Well,” she said, “you just do.”
She paused again. I could hear how itchy she was to get off the phone. This wasn’t her job. She was not a grief counselor or a psycho
logist. She was a coroner calling with the good news that I could collect Dad’s nonexistent life insurance. She wanted me to tell her it was all good. It’s what everyone wanted me to tell them. Though they must’ve known it wasn’t all good. How could it be all good?
“Do you have someone you might call?” she asked.
Who? My mother? The last time we’d spoken was four years ago when I’d told her that I no longer wanted to see her. The reason I gave was not that I’d lost an eye and was afraid she’d make me lose my father but that I didn’t fit in her life and, more to the point, she didn’t fit in mine. She’d cried bitterly, accusing me of always loving my father more. I didn’t disagree. And I hadn’t heard from her since. She didn’t even know that the man with whom she had created me was gone.
Who else should I call? My coach, who’d kicked me off the team? My friends, who, having procured assurances of it being all good, had wasted little time in getting the hell away?
Hector, who had taken pity on me and had seen, in a way few others had, how it was with me and my father? But that was years ago, and anyway, he didn’t live here anymore. And what if he did what the rest had done? Asked me, with impatience in his voice, if I was going to be okay. That I couldn’t bear.
And anyhow, there was only one person I wanted to call.
Tell me something good, he said when I called over and over again.
But I had nothing good to tell.
Just us, buddy.
Not just us. Just me.
10
JUST US
Nathaniel has no idea where to find his father. He has no idea if Hector is right and he’ll find him in that space between life and death, where the departed appear to escort the dying. Or if they’ll meet in the afterlife. If there is an afterlife. Or maybe even in the Undying Lands, one of the many impossible places his father promised they would go together. Will he know the truth in the split second that separates life from death? Will it make a difference?
