The Friday after the cousins left, Abu asked me if I wanted to go to ’Asr again. I liked going to mosque with him, having time alone with him. But I’d been taught that Allah could see into our hearts. He would see me. I knew I couldn’t let that happen. I told Abu that I didn’t want to go anymore.
Abu sighed and frowned, but he didn’t argue. Saif had paved the road for me. He thought I was just being rebellious. I was just being American. I let him think that.
It was the first time I lied to him.
THE ORDER OF LOSS
PART III
NATHANIEL
When I was seven years old my father read me The Lord of the Rings for the first time.
“Don’t tell your mother,” he whispered.
“Why is he still awake?” my mother would complain when a half hour later we were still reading, and I was more keyed up than ever, visions of orcs and elves swimming in my head. “You’re supposed to be putting him to sleep.”
Then my father would conceal the book under the covers and wink at me. “You and me,” he’d whisper after she’d left. “Like Frodo and Sam.”
“A fellowship,” I’d reply, giggling.
“A fellowship of two.” He reached for a pen and scratched some note into the margin of his book before hiding it under my bed.
A fellowship of two—and Mom. The two of us wandering through the forest, looking for edible mushrooms one day, ents the next. The two of us staying out all night to catch a lunar eclipse (unseen, thanks to the omnipresent clouds). The two of us climbing trees, or building forts, or taking off on an impromptu road trip, never mind that there was school and we hadn’t brought any extra clothes. “Why do we need that, buddy?” Dad would say. “We have each other. We’re all we need.”
When Mom announced that she was leaving, I wasn’t even that sad. We had each other, after all.
“I’m so sorry, Nathaniel,” she told me. “But I can’t live with two children anymore.” She wanted me to move with her to California, where it was sunny. “Doesn’t that sound nice?” No, it did not. I didn’t want to go to California. I wanted to stay here, in my house, with my friends and my father. We were a fellowship, after all.
“I’m not leaving you alone with that man-child,” my mother said, and when I told Dad about that, he asked Grandma Mary to come live with us.
“And if she’s so mature, why’s she runnin’ off on an eight-year-old lad?” Mary asked the day she moved in, dropping her flowered suitcase on the entry hall floor and extracting a pair of rubber gloves from her pocketbook, as if anticipating, correctly, the pile of dirty dishes in the sink. “Never you mind,” she told me as she scrubbed three-day-old scrambled egg off a plate. “I brung up your father, and I’ll bring up you.” She glanced at my father, who was on the sofa in his pajamas, reading the funny pages. “Bring up both of you, it seems.”
Dad winked at me, and I knew what he was thinking without him saying it. It was Just Us. A fellowship of two.
Once Grandma Mary moved in, she took over what had been my parents’ bedroom, and Dad moved into the spare bed in my room. And just like that, he seemed to fully relinquish a role that had never fully fit in the first place. No more father and son, now we were truly a fellowship. We would stay up late in the night, talking about anything and everything: Was there intelligent life out there? Dad was sure of it. And could it be that we weren’t really living but were part of some video game someone else was playing? Dad thought it was a possibility. We talked about the places we might go one day. Dad wanted to see the hidden temples of Angkor Wat. I wanted to go to New York City because I’d started staying up to watch SNL and wanted to see it filmed.
“Done and done,” Dad promised, adding the places to our list. “We’ll do it all. We’ll see the world, together.”
“A fellowship of two,” I said.
It went on like this for years. I lived my life, went to school, and played soccer in the fall, baseball in the spring. I was getting pretty good as a pitcher and a first baseman, and the coach said I might get into a traveling league. Grandma Mary did the grocery shopping and cleaning and took care of me and Dad.
Dad still worked as an IT guy, but he didn’t have a steady job anymore; he was what he called a freelancer. Mom called it something else, but after a few years she remarried and had another kid, and stopped complaining about how much Dad worked, stopped asking me if I wanted to come live with her in California.
Grandma Mary was a creature of habit. She wore the same smocked apron every day. She went to the same mass every Sunday. She smelled of Nivea and Palmolive, and she always coughed. So no one noticed at first when the coughing got worse, more hacking and wet. And no one noticed the blood-speckled tissues that Grandma Mary coughed into, because she flushed them down the toilet.
When she caught a cold that turned into pneumonia, a chest X-ray revealed lung cancer. Stage four, the doctors said.
I had a teammate named Tyler whose uncle had recently died of colon cancer. He was the one who told me what stage four meant. Dad refused to believe it. He insisted Mary would be okay. “Not with stage four she won’t,” Tyler said.
“My dad’s going to figure it out,” I told Tyler, because that’s what Dad had insisted. He spent hours on the internet, ordering healing crystals one day and shark-fin powder the next. At one point, he was all set to charge airplane tickets to Israel, where some new stem cell treatment was being offered, only to be stymied when the charge was declined.
“She’s going to beat this,” he insisted.
Meanwhile, Mary grew sicker. She underwent two rounds of chemotherapy and then put a stop to it. “How can I take care of you two if I’m running for the toilet every five minutes?” she asked.
One day, I came home from baseball practice to find Grandma Mary collapsed on the floor. Dad sat beside her, legs crossed, holding her hand, tears streaming down his face.
“Is she dead?” I asked.
“I don’t know, I don’t know,” Dad replied.
I rushed to her, put a finger on her neck as I’d seen done on TV, and felt a pulse there. I was only eleven years old, but I stayed calm, like I already knew what to do, like I’d been preparing for this moment.
When the paramedics arrived, one of them asked, “How long has she been unresponsive?”
I looked at Dad, who was sitting in that same place on the floor, even though he was in the paramedics’ way. “How long?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know,” Dad replied, swaying back and forth.
Mary stayed in the hospital for three weeks. The doctors said she probably wouldn’t leave.
“Like hell she won’t,” Dad said. And he insisted on bringing her home. “What she needs is to be out of this institution, away from all those poisons they’re pumping into her.”
Mary was in no place to make such a decision; Dad was the official adult. The doctors had no choice but to listen to him.
But it was me who met with the hospice coordinator. Who filled out all the paperwork, who got Dad to sign on the dotted line, who arranged for a hospital bed to be delivered to our house and for the hospice nurse to visit.
The hospice nurse was named Hector. He came nearly every day that whole summer Mary lay dying, at first just for an hour or so to adjust her pain meds and make sure she was comfortable.
“Where’s your father?” he would ask me on the days when Dad was absent.
“Oh, at work,” I would lie. I didn’t know where Dad was. Out on a walk. Playing pool. Hunting for the cure for cancer out in the woods.
As Grandma Mary grew sicker, Hector stayed longer and longer, all afternoon, even toward the end when all she did was sleep. Sometimes he lingered in the kitchen with me, once frying me what looked like a green banana but turned out to be something called a plantain, and which was delicious. Other times, he sat with Mary, rubbing lotion onto her h
ands, combing her hair, talking to her, singing to her.
“Can she hear you?” I asked him once.
“I believe she can.” He beckoned me closer. I didn’t like to be in the sick room. It smelled sour, like slightly off milk, and Mary made a terrible rattling sound as she labored for breath. But with Hector I didn’t feel so scared.
I stood by his side as he ministered to my grandmother. The look on his face was serene, even happy. I didn’t understand. “Isn’t it sad watching so many people die?” I asked.
“We all die,” Hector said, rubbing Mary’s wrists. “It’s the only sure thing in life and the one thing we have in common with everything else on the planet.” He let go of her hand and put it in mine. I could feel her pulse, rabbity and weak.
“I think it’s an honor to be with people as they leave the world,” he told me.
“An honor?”
“An honor,” he replied. “And a calling. You know, I was about your age when I realized I wanted to do this.”
“Really?”
“Maybe not so concretely, but yes. I was with my own grandmother when she was dying. This was back home in Washington Heights, in New York City. She had barely spoken in weeks, but right before she passed, she sat up and came alive, carrying on a two-hour conversation with someone in the room. In Spanish. And I didn’t really speak Spanish, so I knew she wasn’t talking to me.”
“Who was she talking to?”
“Only she knew for sure, but I felt certain it was my grandfather. He’d been dead for twenty years. I never even met him. But at that moment, I knew he was in the room with her, there to escort her to what was next.”
Chills went up my spine.
“I’ve seen this happen more times than I can count,” Hector continued. “The dying speaking to the dead. The dead leading the dying to what’s next.”
“What is next?” I asked.
He smiled. “That I don’t know. And unfortunately, none of us finds out until it’s our turn, and then we’re in no position to report back.”
Two weeks later, Grandma Mary died quietly. If someone came to escort her to what was next, they did so silently.
“It’s just us,” my father said when they took Mary’s body away. Only for the first time it felt less like a promise than a threat.
2
IT’S ALL GOOD
It’s all good, Nathaniel tries to say.
Only he can’t seem to talk. Or move. Or think too clearly. Or see the shadowy person hovering over him, stroking his forehead, asking him to please, please wake up.
The stroking feels nice, though.
Everything else, not so nice.
“Can you hear me?” the voice asks. “Can you move?”
It’s a beautiful voice. Even in his current state he can hear this. If a voice could emit a scent, this one would smell like dates.
Grandma Mary used to buy dried dates. They ate them and spat the pits into the yard, hoping a date tree would grow, but dates grow in the desert, and he lives in the forest.
Lived in the forest.
There’s breath against his neck, whispery and warm. The breath says: “Open your eyes. Wake up.”
“Please,” the breath says.
It’s the please that does it. There’s something so raw, so plaintive in it. How can he not obey?
He opens his eyes. A pair of eyes stare back at him. They are maybe the loveliest eyes he’s ever seen. And the saddest. So sad, they could be his eyes, except they are brown and his eyes—eye—is green.
“What’s your name?” the Stroker whispers into his ear. And that voice. It sends a shiver down his spine, not because it’s beautiful, smelling of dates, but because it’s familiar, and it can’t be familiar because he doesn’t know a soul in . . . where is he? It doesn’t matter. He doesn’t know a soul in the world with a voice like that.
“What’s your name?” the voice repeats.
His name. He knows his name. It’s just there, on the highest shelf in the back of the closet. He’s got to reach for it. It’s . . .
“Nathaniel,” the voice says. “Nathaniel Haley. Is that you?”
Yes! That’s him! Nathaniel Haley. How does she know?
“From Washington State.”
Yes! he wants to shout. From a house on the edge of a forest that’s been swallowed up. How does she know?
“And you just arrived here . . . today.”
Yes. Yes. Yes. But how does she know?
“Welcome to New York,” she says. “Pro tip: Don’t leave your wallet in your pocket. Any old person can get it.”
His wallet. He tries to summon it. He sees a billfold. A picture.
“Can you sit up?” the Stroker asks. Nathaniel doesn’t want to sit up, but there are those fingertips, and that voice, calling, Nathaniel, Nathaniel, come back. And that voice, so familiar it’s like an itch, and so beautiful, it’s like a song. He can heave himself up. To see the voice.
For one lovely moment, it’s worth the effort, to be face-to-face with that face. Until . . .
The pain is on a delay, and it catches up with him—it always catches up with you, he knows—and his head is symphonic with it, his stomach undulating with feedback. It undoes him. He is afloat, not of this world. He needs an anchor, and he finds it in the Stroker’s beautiful, sad eyes.
A small rivulet of blood—or two of them, because everything is double—drips down her temple and onto her cheek. It looks like a teardrop, and for a second Nathaniel thinks she is crying for him.
Only Nathaniel knows that can’t be. Tears are not blood-colored, and no one cries for him. Still, he is riveted by the trail the bloody tear tracks down her cheek. It is the prettiest of flowers, the loveliest of scars. He reaches out to touch her cheek. And though everything is tilted and blurry and double, he does not miss, and though she is beautiful and a stranger, she does not recoil.
* * *
— — —
No, Freya does not recoil, but her insides undulate too. No one touches me like that anymore, she thinks. Which is a strange thing to think, because these days she’s touched all the time, by stylists and trainers, by her mother, by a series of doctors, by Hayden and the execs from the label, who let their hands linger on her shoulders, her legs, her waist, just a moment longer than is comfortable. All these people who are there for her, to help her, their touch feels dead, but this stranger’s touch just made her heart trip.
What the fuck?
* * *
— — —
The blood from her cheek is on Nathaniel’s finger. He does not know what to do with it. Wipe it? Lick it? Transfuse it?
“Hey, you,” the Stroker calls. “You think you might give us a hand over here?”
The “you” in question approaches and begins to snap right in front of Nathaniel’s eyes.
This is extremely unpleasant.
“I’m not sure that’s necessary,” she says. “He’s awake.”
The snapping continues. “Are you okay?” the Snapper asks.
You’re doing okay, aren’t you? People used to ask Nathaniel that sometimes—the teammates he practiced with, the girls who used to flutter around him, the coaches who thought he had promise. You’re doing okay? they asked. After Mom left. After Grandma Mary died. After he lost his eye. You’re all right, aren’t you?
(Just us, buddy.)
Later, Nathaniel figured out it wasn’t really a question. People wanted reassurances; they wanted to be let off the hook, so even though he wasn’t all right or okay, even though he was a frog boiling in a pot, even though he was being swallowed up by the ground beneath him, he answered: “It’s all good.”
Which is such an obvious lie. When are things ever all good?
But people eat it up. When he tells them it’s all good, they smile. Their relief is always palpable and always
heartbreaking, because Nathaniel has once again allowed himself to think they meant it this time. He’s like Charlie Brown with that stupid football.
If you need anything, just holler, they say, reciting lines in a script. To which Nathaniel answers, on cue, You bet. And it hurts worse for allowing himself to hope.
Nope. He’s not falling for that again. He’s not winding up flat on his back. He’s already flat on his back.
He starts to stand up.
“Help him up,” the Stroker demands, and she takes one hand, the Snapper taking the other.
Give me your hand, Nat, his dad used to say as he taught him to climb trees, higher and higher, above the canopy, where he claimed you could see all the way to Canada. His mom would get so angry. “I don’t know who’s the bigger child.”
He’s steadier now. He’s fine.
(Not fine, not really, but upright.)
He just needs a moment here, to gather his wits, to gain his bearings, to have his hands held by two strangers before they let go.
“Are you okay?” the Snapper asks again.
“It’s all . . .” he begins to tell them, to release them of culpability. And before he can finish the sentence, before he can say the word good, he throws up. Right onto the Stroker’s feet.
* * *
— — —
Freya stares at her feet. Soiled with vomit. She has a short fuse these days. Anything sets her off: traffic lights taking too long, the weather report being off by three degrees, anything anyone says to her.
Some random stranger just puked on her feet.
And she feels like crying, but not because she’s annoyed or grossed out.
What the fuck?
She excuses herself to clean her feet.