The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing: A Novel

by Mira Jacob

  Gone. Amina turned around and looked at the car and then back at her mother, whose shoulders trembled as if it were cold outside. Mittack.

  “Fuck,” Akhil said.

  Kamala pulled back the door farther to reveal Thomas curled over the dining room table like a question mark, his head in his hands.

  “Go,” she urged.

  They walked to their father. Even from a distance they could see the grief radiating from him. He was thumbing through an old photo album, the one that held the pictures of him and Sunil Uncle when they were kids. Amina knew the album by heart: her father as a fat baby with a thin string tied around his waist; Sunil riding a three-wheel bicycle around a pomegranate tree barely bigger than she; Ammachy and Appachen, two years before her grandfather’s heart attack, standing in front of the curving hood of an old Ambassador; Ammachy standing alone on the verandah, smiling in a way Amina had never seen in real life. It was this photo that he stopped at, working it gently from the yellowed corners that held it to the page. He lifted it close to his face.

  “Hey,” Akhil said. Thomas looked up, his eyes riddled with pink. Amina couldn’t recall the last time she had seen her father in daylight hours, but here he was, clutching at the dining table with his enormous grief and aching face.

  “Sorry,” Akhil said. Amina repeated the word, which felt stupid and scary at the same time, too adult, too full of nothing.

  “You don’t remember that day.” Thomas looked back at the photo.

  “No.” Akhil breathed tight, feathery breaths, his lower lip glistening with spit.

  Their father’s face contorted, as though this were a new tragedy.

  “What day was that, Thomas?” Kamala asked in the tone she used when the children were injured or sick.

  “The first day the clinic opened. She was just thirty-three.”

  Ammachy wore a sari, probably colored, but starkly black in the picture. She also wore pearl earrings, gold bracelets, and a braid wound with jasmine, but none of her adornments measured up to the wide arc of her lips, the even edges of her teeth hinting at a full smile like the glow of light before sunrise. Behind her, the Salem house rose up gloriously. The verandah gleamed, its walls as white as new paper. A tiny trail of light in the hallway led back to what would later become Itty’s room.

  Itty’s room. Amina’s eyes fixed on the dark hallway. Was Itty in his room when it happened? Had he heard the fire coming for him? Had he tried to escape?

  She must have made a noise. Kamala came up, hugging her from behind.

  “Burned?” Amina said, the word aloud unhinging whatever it is in humans that keeps them standing upright and balanced. She chattered and tilted to the side a little. “Are you sure?”

  “Koche!” Kamala squeezed hard. A warning.

  Amina twisted her head around to look at her mother. “Itty was on fire?”

  “Chi! Amina!” Kamala grabbed her face, squeezed her mouth shut. “Don’t say such things!”

  Akhil swayed a little on his feet, pale. He took a step toward the stairs. “I need to go lie down.”

  “Yes. Fine,” Kamala said, pushing Amina after him. “Both of you go. We will call you for dinner.”

  Akhil headed immediately upstairs, but Amina could not move. The roof, hot with tar. The smell of the cows, street fires. Itty, crying on the lawn, clutching his bare feet. She looked at Thomas. He did not look back at her, or even at the picture in front of him, but into the boundless middle distance, a flat plane that did not intersect with any other member of the family.

  “Are you going to go back?” she asked, and he flinched.

  “Of course he’s going back,” their mother said, and with this, Thomas’s chin began to tremble in a way that made Amina look up and down, anywhere else, so she sensed, rather than saw, how Kamala drew closer, how some part of her must have touched him to release a jag of sobs. When Amina finally looked over, her father’s arms were wrapped tightly around her mother’s waist, his head pressed deeply into her belly.

  The stairs. She had found her way to the stairs. She walked up them needing to stop the flood of images her mind seemed intent on retrieving. The halo of peeling paint around the dining room chandelier. The record spinning on the turntable. Sunil’s wrists floating in air as he danced. Mittack. Mittack. Mittack.

  “Akhil?”

  Her brother’s door was closed. Amina put her ear to the wood, listening. Was he crying? He would kill her if she opened the door and he was. She twisted the handle and looked inside.

  Akhil was on the bed, facedown. He hadn’t even bothered to take off his Adidases.

  “Hey,” she said. When her brother did not answer, she tiptoed into the room. She stood by the bed, watching his back rise and fall in a deep, steady rhythm.

  “You’re asleep?” she asked, ignoring the obvious.

  She didn’t want to be alone. She didn’t want to sit in her room or even shut her eyes. How could he sleep right now? How could he just turn off like that? Amina stood over her brother, fury rising. Something was wrong with him. She undersood this suddenly, with the same conviction she would understand other strange truths later in life—that Dimple needed her more than she needed Dimple, that her parents’ fight was about America, not Monica. Sure, Akhil could talk about whether or not Indians were second-class citizens in the Western world, and how big government was the only recourse for marginalized people, but when something big happened, something so big that neither of them would ever be able to think of India without their own hearts splintering, he bailed. Left. Went out like a fucking light.

  “Wake up, asshole,” she said, crying now because there was no one left to talk her away from the conversation that had started in her mind, the one that she had imagined she would have had the next time she saw Itty, which wasn’t much of a conversation anyway, just some sort of weird shared understanding of how it was to always be outside of everything, even your own family, waiting to be seen. She sat on Akhil’s bed and put her head between her knees as blood and the roar of what had been lost filled her ears.

  If there was an upside to the disaster, Amina supposed it would have to be the way her parents suddenly united in the face of it. As the hours wore into days, Kamala and Thomas seemed to Siamese-twin, becoming an unrecognizable age (older? younger?) as they shared a child’s grief borne by an adult body. As the days wore on, Akhil and Amina felt the strangeness of their own presence in the house, their superfluousness to everything: the phone calls from India, the childhood stories whispered in Malayalam, the ticket bought, the suitcase packed, their parents, turning and returning to the dining room table to huddle over the old photo albums like caged parrots clutching at a shared axis. On the rare occasion that Amina met her father’s gaze, she looked away quickly, shamed by the disappointment she saw there—though what exactly he was disappointed in (her accent? her jeans?) felt as mysterious as it did unfair.

  Three days after the news, Akhil and Amina stood together in the driveway as their parents prepared to leave for the airport. Kamala pressed money for McDonald’s into Akhil’s hand in case she was not back before dinnertime, and their father nodded goodbye, looking right through them like they were the credits of a movie. Amina stepped forward and wrapped her arms around his waist, surprised by the force with which he hugged her back. His beard scratched her head when he kissed it. He pushed her away.

  “We should get going,” he said, and with that both parents got into the car, driving into the cool October afternoon.

  The phone rang a few nights later, just as Amina was drifting toward the heavy blanket of sleep. Her eyes flickered open to the green glow of the digital clock: 11:15. Even Dimple knew not to call after ten. She slid over to the side of her bed and pulled the phone out of the cradle.

  “… so hot, my God. Every night. I can barely sleep,” her father was saying.

  “Mmmm.” Her mother’s voice was milky with sleep. “Sounds awful.”

  “And those theaters! They added three mor
e! Can you imagine? Hindi films, Tamil films, Malayalam films. Nobody in my dreams understands anybody else.”

  Her mother laughed at this, a soft laugh that was echoed at the other end of the line by her father. A silence followed, punctuated by the wiggling squeals and blips of distance.

  “I think I’m going nuts,” Thomas said at last.

  “You’re not,” Kamala soothed. “You’re just tired. Pavum.”

  Thomas was silent for another long time, and Amina herself was growing drowsy when she heard him say, “The papers are calling him the Sleepwalking Killer.”

  Suddenly, she was awake, blinking furiously into the dark. Killer?

  “Ach,” her mother said.

  “I guess Mary and the girls talked to reporters before I came, filled them with some nonsense about how he was asleep when he set the fire, how he never would have done it awake. But how do you lock the doors in your sleep? How do you douse the whole house in petrol?”

  Kamala’s expulsion of breath was swift, as if trying to blow the words, their meaning, far away from herself, but the images bloomed in Amina’s mind. Petrol? Fire? Locked doors?

  “And now it’s all the sensation over here, you wouldn’t believe. In the Dinamalar and the Janmabhumi Daily and someone even told me there was a mention in the Hindu Times. I can never come back here again.”

  “Chi!” Kamala scoffed. “What are you saying? Of course you can.”

  “They blame me.”

  “Who cares what Mary and the girls think? Their opinions are hardly—”

  “Not just Mary and the rest of the bloody servants! The town! All of Salem! My mother’s old patients. Divya’s parents. I saw Chandy Abraham at the funeral, and he could barely look at me.”

  “People are just sad for you!”

  “Bullshit. They are saying it’s my fault.”

  “It is not your fault.” Kamala’s voice was angry. “You didn’t do this! Sunil was unhappy! Nothing could have made him happy.”

  “Couldn’t it have?” Thomas’s voice broke. “You know, he wasn’t like this when we were young. He was sweet then. This little fat ball, always following me with a grin. Trying to go wherever I went, pedaling his bike with his cheeks puffing as I rode away. I never waited for him. Did you know that? I don’t know why, I just didn’t.”

  “You were a boy.”

  “I was his brother!”

  “Oh, Thomas.” Kamala made a tiny noise on the end of the line, and Amina realized her mother was crying. “Pavum. This isn’t going to help.”

  There was a rustling. Thomas blew his nose, swallowed. “I want to come home.”

  “Come home,” her mother said. “We’re waiting.”

  “Class, any reaction?”

  Of course the results of her family-in-action photographs were awful, which meant that Mrs. Messina wanted to talk about them first. Amina stared at the pictures that she had taped up on the blackboard with everyone else’s. Why hadn’t she realized that she had taken so many close-ups of body parts? Her mother’s sneakers (the sole surviving remnant of the Dillard’s excursion) curtained by a sari. Sanji Auntie’s powdered neck craning upward as she exhaled smoke. Dimple’s nostrils flaring. Akhil cupping a flame for Sanji Auntie.

  “I like the one with the sneakers,” someone said.

  “Say more.”

  “I think it works.”

  “More.”

  “Well, like the symbolism,” Missy Folgers offered. “The whole Indian American thing. I totally get it.”

  Amina fought the urge to stare down Missy and whatever she thought she got.

  “Tell us about the composition of this one,” Mrs. Messina said.

  “That’s my dad,” Amina said.

  She had taken the picture the day after he had come back from India, too scared to actually go sit on the porch with him though she had wanted to see him, to make sure he was okay. “I should check on my patients,” he had said after dinner, and Amina watched her mother straighten in her chair, whatever part of her had been tenderized by compassion slowly stiffening again. But then he never actually made it to the car. She had watched him drink straight from the bottle for fifteen minutes before setting up the shot. If he noticed her at all, he hadn’t said anything.

  “It’s psycho,” someone said.

  Why had she superimposed the empty-classroom picture against the back wall? She didn’t know. She hadn’t even thought that the pictures she took of the classroom were good at all, but somehow, when she was printing, she had reached for the negative, carefully working it into the frame. She had thought it would work on some symbolic level, making it look like her father had been trapped in the hard lines of desks and chairs. Instead, it just mucked up the wall behind him.

  “Anyone have anything intelligent to say?” Mrs. Messina asked.

  No one said anything.

  Mrs. Messina sighed, crossing over to the photograph in three long strides. “C’mon, people. What do you guys feel when you look at this?”

  “Scared,” said Missy Folgers. People laughed.

  “Why are you laughing? She’s right,” Mrs. Messina said. “It is scary. Why, Missy?”

  “I don’t know. The way he’s sitting, like he doesn’t notice anything else going on around him. Like he’s in another world.”

  “A bad world,” someone said, and Amina stiffened.

  “Exactly. And that’s what makes it beautiful,” Mrs. Messina said. “We’re looking at figures that seem isolated somehow, cut off from the rest of the world. What else gives you that feeling?”

  “The porch light,” Tommy Hargrow said. “It looks too bright somehow. Which makes everything else look dark.”

  Amina looked at the bubble of porch light, the shadows tucked around it.

  “Exactly. Which, by the way, Amina, is why your mother isn’t quite in focus.” Mrs. Messina pointed at the blurred corner. “You probably would have gotten her if you had had just a little more light. My guess is she moved.”

  Her mother? Amina leaned forward, squinted at the portion Mrs. Messina had motioned toward. There was nothing there. She scanned the newspapers on the floor, the door leading to the laundry room, the vigas, the fuzzy lines of classroom behind her father. Then suddenly, sharply, as though the figure itself were rising from the paper, she saw the woman. She was standing in the corner, just behind her father. Amina saw the braid, the jasmine, the sari, the smile buried in her face, and knew she was not looking at her mother at all. She was looking at her grandmother at age thirty-three.

  She had to show someone. Not her father. Or her mother. Definitely not Dimple. Amina paced the yellow lines of the parking lot, placing heel to toe to heel very carefully, waiting for Akhil. She was sweating. She looked at her watch. Half an hour late. She opened the notebook and peeked inside, both relieved and doubly nervous to find the picture exactly the same.

  Maybe they could tell Thomas together. Or maybe they could tell Kamala first, and all three of them could show the picture to Thomas. And what would he make of it? Would he be relieved? Scared? Would he come home more or less?

  Fifteen minutes later Amina sat on the hood of the car, watching a thin film of cloud traverse the southeast edge of the mountains. The windshield was hard against her back, the notebook warm on her lap. She turned toward the approaching footsteps. Akhil’s forehead creased like a Chinese dumpling.

  “It’s about time,” Amina said.

  Akhil looked up at her, eyes glassy, face puckered.

  “Are you crying?” She slid off the hood.

  “No.”

  She looked for the telltale bruises. “Did those guys beat you up again?”

  “No! Jesus.” Akhil hunched his shoulders. He dug the keys out of his pocket, flung the door open, ducked inside, and slammed it shut. Amina watched him through the window. His mouth was twisting nervously. His nose was gleaming and viscous. He wiped a shiny trail across the back of his hand and unlocked her door. She sat down.

  “I fell as
leep and missed all my afternoon classes,” he said finally, his voice sticking in his throat. “Farber said if I did it one more time, I’d be suspended.”

  “Suspended? For falling asleep once?”

  “It’s been more than once.”

  “Oh. Like, how much more?”

  Akhil stared at his lap, and another tear worked its way out of his eye, falling onto his chinos. He brushed his cheek angrily. “He thinks I’m doing it on purpose. He said that if I thought he wouldn’t expel a National Merit Finalist, I was wrong. Motherfuck!” He was really crying now, his round shoulders shaking under his powder jacket, his head down on the wheel. He lifted it up just to ram it back down. The car keys slid out of his hand and landed on the floor mat with a soft clink.

  “It’s okay,” Amina said lamely.

  “On purpose? He thinks I’d …? Doesn’t he know that the only thing that’s going to make anything better is if I get the fuck out of here?”

  “You won’t get kicked out.”

  “FUCK!” He kicked the floor. The car shook. “FUCK! FUCK! FUCK!”

  “Akhil, stop! It’s not going to happen! It’s …” She looked around the car, as though some piece of clear logic could be found on the dashboard. “He’s just trying to scare you. You know that. It’s a Farber power trip, man—don’t fall for that stuff!” The words felt ridiculous in her mouth, like she was telling a joke with a punch line she didn’t understand, and Akhil wouldn’t even look at her as he reversed and peeled out of the parking lot.

  He was driving too fast for being on school property, but Amina knew better than to say anything about it, so instead she said a little prayer that they wouldn’t get spotted by Farber or, worse, his secretary, who loved reporting traffic violations. They caught air over the speed bump and landed with a thump that sent up a little cloud of ash from the ashtray. Akhil screeched to a stop at the gate.

  “It’s going to be okay,” Amina said again, trying to sound a little more official this time, but all this did was make Akhil drop his head to his chest with a sticky gasp. From far away, the dotted line of oncoming traffic swooped toward them like a fleet of planes.