The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing: A Novel

by Mira Jacob

  “I mean, you’ve got, like, a four-point-o,” she rushed on, not wanting to see him cry. “You never skip school. Besides, Cheney Jarnet got busted smoking weed in the baseball dugout last year, and he didn’t get kicked out, right?”

  Akhil said nothing, but let the car inch slowly toward the road.

  “Akhil,” Amina said.

  Silence.

  “Hey!” She pushed his shoulder, and when he fell heavily against the wheel, her heart shot up like it was trying to knock her brain out. Little bits of static floated everywhere. The wheel, she thought, turn the wheel, but when she grabbed for it, the seat belt smacked her back. They continued to slide forward, the cars bearing down on them now, metal grilles gleaming like dog teeth. And everything around Amina felt slippery then, the cool metal of the seat belt clasp in her hand, the rubber mat under her feet, the white line on the road they were heading toward nose-first, like a puppy pushing its way onto a horse track. For one brilliant moment she saw how it would happen, how the cars would crack through Akhil’s door and send them up into the sky, how the world would flash through the windows, how the metal and glass would explode into a thousand spears launched from a Lilliputian army. And then the seat belt popped open and she was slamming her foot down hard on top of Akhil’s, bringing the car to a lurching stop just as the cars went by them, swerving and honking and releasing the smell of burning tires.

  “Jesus fucking Christ!” she yelled, pulling the emergency brake with shaking hands and then scrambling back into her seat. “What the fuck is wrong with you?”

  Across from her, Akhil was still, body wedged awkwardly over the wheel. Fear filled her lungs. She lunged at him, pushing him back hard until he hit the seat heavily. She put her hands on his face, his lips. Breathing. He was breathing. And sound asleep.

  BOOK 4

  YOU CAN ALWAYS COME HOME AGAIN

  ALBUQUERQUE, 1998

  CHAPTER 1

  Albuquerque greeted Amina with a howling dust storm. Down below the plane, brown coils of sand snaked across the mesas and against the mountains, scattering with the shifting wind currents. They hissed against the windows in the descent, and Amina squinted and held her breath involuntarily as the sky faded from blue to beige. The plane slipped out from under her, and the woman on her side let out a gasp that smelled of white wine. The intercom clicked on.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, please check to ensure your seat belts are fastened and your bags are completely under the seat in front of you,” said a calm, cheery voice. “It’s a windy day here in Albuquerque, and we’re going to be hitting a little turbulence on our descent.”

  Thirty years before, Kamala and Thomas had arrived in a dust storm. Kamala still told Amina about it whenever she felt thwarted by the desert—when a drought shriveled her tomatoes or the mesas caught fire. Once, during a dry summer that drove bears down from the mountains and onto the freeways, she called at six in the morning: That day we flew in, I looked down and everything everywhere was brown, brown, nothing but brown! I had to walk all the way into the airport with my eyes closed!

  Amina looked at the swirling ground outside her window and imagined her parents descending into Albuquerque, their eyes wide open, India’s monsoon season tucked behind them like a shadow. With Amina not yet born and Akhil in Salem for the eight months it would take them to make a home, it was the first time they had been alone in years. She imagined them coming in at sunset, their hands clasped in a way she’d never seen, their cheeks blazing with orange light. They weren’t distant or shy or awkward in her fantasy; they weren’t a few years into a marriage that Ammachy hadn’t approved of. Instead, they were young and in love and racing into a new country at twilight. They had things to whisper to each other as the plane descended.

  “Koche! Here!”

  Amina looked behind her to find Kamala struggling down the escalator in a pink cotton sari and running shoes, her huge black purse hoisted over one arm, hair hanging down her back in the single black braid she’d worn her entire life. Short, slight-bodied, and bobbing from side to side like a furious metronome, Kamala made her way across the floor, entirely unaware of watchers she left in her wake. Even now, well into her fifties, with a few gray hairs framing the smooth flute of her cheekbones, she looked girlishly pretty.

  “I’ve been waiting upstairs ten minutes!” she shouted, grabbing Amina’s arm as though she might try to get away.

  “That’s the departure zone, Ma.”

  “So?” She looked Amina up and down. “You’re looking too thin. Not eating?”

  “I gave it up.”

  “What?”

  Amina squeezed her shoulder, gently guiding her back toward the escalator. “Of course I’m eating. I just had dinner with Sajeev and Dimple last night.” She silently cursed herself as the information lit up her mother’s face.

  “Well, well. And how is Mr. Sajeev?”

  “Fine.” Amina stepped onto the escalator, and Kamala followed, springing forward gingerly, like a cat onto a pile of papers.

  “He has some big job now, isn’t it? What, exactly?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “I think computer programmer.” Kamala smiled.

  Outside, the old orange Ford was being pelted on all sides by thick sheets of sand. They watched it for a minute, gathering their breath.

  “Okay! Run for your life!” Kamala shouted, and they did, throwing the bag into the back and jumping into the front.

  “Hoo! What a business!” she yelled when they’d made it inside, laughing as Amina slammed the door shut. She pulled out from the departure zone, cutting off an approaching car and waving benignly as the driver swerved around them, his middle finger extended. “So the Ramakrishnas want to see you tomorrow. Raj is making jalebis.”

  Amina winced. “Why can’t we tell him that I don’t like them?”

  “You loved them when you were little!”

  It was Akhil who loved them, but saying so would hurt her mother in the way all mentions of Akhil hurt Kamala, the prick of his name silencing her for minutes or sometimes hours. “Well, I really don’t love them now.”

  “Raj loves making them for you, and your father loves eating, so no big deals, right?”

  Right. “Where is Dad, anyway?”

  “Big case. Your skin is looking good. You’ve been using the Pond’s I sent you?”

  “Wait, he’s operating?”

  “What else would he be doing?”

  “I don’t know. Resting?”

  “He’s not sick.”

  “He’s sick enough for you to ask me to come down.”

  “I said he was talking, not sick. You’re the one who decided you needed to come down.”

  Amina shook her head but said nothing. Why bother? Once rewritten, Kamala’s history was safer than classified government documents. The wind hit harder as they turned north. A few miles away, the hospitals—part of the only cluster of buildings higher than ten stories in the entire town—rose up into the dirty air. Amina squinted at them.

  “How was yesterday? You had a wedding?”

  Amina pushed away the memory of Lesley Beale’s face and the coats and the limbs. “It was fine.”

  “The bride was a nice girl?”

  “Eh.”

  “What’s her name?”

  “Jessica.”

  “Je-see-ca,” her mother repeated, nodding to herself. “How old?”

  “Twenty-three.”

  “I see,” Kamala said softly, switching lanes. “That’s lucky, no? Mother must be so relieved.”

  “I’m sure she is. Poor you, huh?”

  “No one is saying that!” Her mother looked over her shoulder. “So Sajeev is seeing someone?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  Kamala waggled her head from side to side, shaking up and reevaluating the information as it settled. She flexed her fingers against the steering wheel a few times before saying, “So then you and Sajeev could go on a date.”

  “
No we can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because he’s not my type.”

  “Oh, that,” her mother snorted.

  “What that? That’s important, Mom! That’s not a crazy thing to want.”

  “No need to yell about it.” Kamala frowned. “I’m just saying is all.”

  “Anyway, I’m thirty,” Amina muttered. “You don’t tell a thirty-year-old who to date.”

  “Twenty-nine! And your friends don’t tell you? Dimple doesn’t tell you?”

  “That’s different.”

  “Yes, of course. This brilliant country where the children listen to other children about who to spend their lives with.”

  Amina leaned closer to the window. Up ahead on the road, a herd of tumbleweeds skipped toward the truck, their thorny bodies buoyant with wind.

  “Take me to the hospital.”

  “What?”

  “I want to see Dad for a sec.”

  “Just wait until he’s home. Besides, he might be in surgery.”

  “Then they will tell me that when they page him.”

  “But why go at all? Hospital is a horrible place.”

  “Ma.”

  “Fine, fine,” Kamala sighed, squinting into the rearview mirror and shifting lanes. “But I’m not coming in.”

  Within minutes they were idling in front of the ER, where a few brave nurses sucked down cigarettes, palms shielding their eyes.

  “You sure you’re going to be okay out here?” Amina asked, pushing a stray lock of hair behind her mother’s cheek.

  “Yes. I will be taking one nap. Go fast.”

  Amina pushed her door open and ran.

  CHAPTER 2

  She held her breath. It didn’t matter that the upholstered seats had changed from mauve to green to blue, or that the television had been updated to a more recent model, or that new pay phones stood in place of the ones that had been there when she was a kid; every damn time Amina went into the ER, the fear and hope and worry emanating from the families surrounded her like thick water, filling her lungs with dread.

  “AMINAMINAMINA!” Thomas boomed, white curls springing out of his head like daisies as he crossed the linoleum toward her. “I just got the page! What are you doing here?”

  “Just wanted to see you,” she gasped as his arms swooped down around her, squeezing her air out like wet from a sponge.

  “You’re lucky I wasn’t in the OR!” He pulled back, looking, she thought, no crazier than usual. Graying eyebrows huddled over his eyes like permanent weather, and his dark irises glinted sharply through them. His mustache and beard were as carefully trimmed as ever, outlining his wide, flat lips. “Come, let’s walk.”

  “Okay, but I can’t go far. Mom is waiting.”

  “Fine, fine.” Thomas kept one arm over her shoulder as they walked, and she was filled with the smell of him—deodorant and aftershave and the slight masala that always came out of his pores like incense. “So how was your trip?”

  “Turbulent.”

  “I’ll bet! A lot of pish and hizoom out there, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah.” A nurse passed them and waved. Thomas nodded at her. “So how are you?”

  “Excellent!”

  “Yeah?” Amina fought a brief urge to pull back, to study his face like a cop or a shrink or someone else who was paid to know when people were lying.

  “Yup. Come, I told Monica I’d bring you to her.”

  Amina stifled her shiver of repulsion. Over the twenty years Monica had worked as Thomas’s physician’s assistant, she’d gone from calling herself Amina’s “aunt” to her “older sister” to her “buddy,” each claim of increasing closeness causing Amina to feel its corollary in claustrophobia. Still, no one spent more time with Thomas. Monica would know if something was really wrong.

  They walked down the twists and turns of the hospital corridor, puddles of light guiding them like lines on the road. (“How do you know where you’re going?” Amina had asked once, when she was five, and Thomas had tapped his skull and answered, “It’s in here,” so that now when she thought of his brain, it was a bright linoleum maze, the dead and the dying hidden in corners, waiting for release.)

  “Anyan, you still here?” Thomas bellowed at a man approaching them from the far end of the hall. “I thought you would have left hours ago!”

  “Dr. Eapen.” Small and dark and tucked into his white coat like a check in an envelope, the man came to an abrupt stop when he reached them, smiling with a precision that suggested military training or a sociological disorder. “Is this your daughter, then?”

  “This is Amina! Amina, Dr. George.”

  “Hi,” Amina extended her hand. His grip was cold and soft.

  “Nice to meet you.” His turn back to Thomas was a swift though not unkind dismissal. “You didn’t by chance get a moment to look at Mrs. Naveen’s MRI, did you?”

  “I did.”

  Amina listened as they exchanged the same words that embroidered her childhood with their unknown specificities—decompressive, craniotomy, extracerebral. She studied Dr. George’s face for hints of wariness or disbelief, but he seemed to swallow Thomas’s opinion whole, nodding at the right points.

  “Heyyyyyyy, Amina!”

  Down the hall, the steel doors of the ICU swinging shut behind her, Monica came barreling toward them, linebacker thick and squinting from under a pouf of blond hair.

  “Amina, nice to meet you,” she heard Dr. George say before she was swept up into Monica’s embrace.

  “How are you, hon? How’s Seattle? Things?”

  The pens from Monica’s lab coat stabbed her left breast. “Great.”

  “I’ll let you two catch up,” Thomas said, squeezing Amina’s shoulder. “Ami, just say bye before you go.”

  “Yeah, okay.”

  He hit a button on the wall, and the steel doors flew open again, the rich darkness behind them unsettling.

  “And Dimple?” Monica’s mouth was pursed around a breath mint, and cool, sugary air blew over Amina’s face. “You guys still close?”

  “Yeah, of course. What about you? Things here?”

  “Oh, fine, you know. Same shit, another week. You just here for a visit?”

  “Yes, until the end of the week.”

  “Your dad is so excited. You should get him out for some fun. He could use a break.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Maybe take him to Cochiti Lake for a few days or something. His Thursday and Friday are light.”

  Amina nodded as two men with stethoscopes rounded the corner, walking toward them. “Is there something wrong?”

  “What?”

  “Is there a reason he needs a break?”

  “No!” Monica bugged her eyes out at Amina with a funny smile as the men passed. “He just, you know, loves to fish with you.”

  Amina cocked her head, frowning. Thomas did not love to fish with her. Was this some kind of weird code, or just one of Monica’s not-that-great-memory moments? Amina was trying to figure out a way to ask when Monica’s beeper went off, startling both of them.

  She unclipped it, wrinkling her nose. “Crap, I need to take this. You gonna be here for a little while? We should get a coffee in the cafeteria.”

  “Actually, Mom’s waiting in the car.”

  “Damn. Well, can we get margaritas this week? Have some girl time? I want to hear all about the love life.”

  The internal shiver was coming back, the repulsion harder to fend off now that Monica was actually in front of her, all hair and nosiness.

  “Perfect, call you tomorrow,” Amina said, and went to find her dad.

  “Over there,” the nurse on duty whispered when she entered the ICU, and Amina followed her pointing finger to the far end of the room, where Thomas’s feet were visible under a white curtain.

  “Hey, Dad?” she whispered when she was just outside it. “I gotta get going.”

  Thomas peeked out of the curtain, then motioned for her to enter
, and she did, suddenly finding herself in a space heavy with the stale breath of a patient. Her father moved aside, and she looked down to find a tangle of silvery hair that fanned out across the pillow like fishing net. The woman was older, maybe in her eighties, her skin thin and tanned and waxy-looking.

  “Infection is getting worse,” Thomas said, writing something down on her chart. “She won’t make it through the night.”

  “Should you just say it like that?”

  “Hmm?”

  “You know, in front of her like that.”

  Her father looked up from his clipboard and smiled at her sweetly, as though she had asked if the Tooth Fairy was making enough money in dental collection. “I’m sure she already knows.”

  It took three rounds of knocks to wake Kamala up. Amina hopped in the wind, the dust replaced by a cold blast of northern air. She pounded on the windows and, when that didn’t work, kicked the doors. Finally, one loud thump sent Kamala shooting up in a puff of sari, her face tattooed with the checked imprint of the truck seat. She looked at Amina and frowned.

  “I’ll drive,” Amina said, and Kamala scooted over wordlessly, unlocking the driver’s side. Amina climbed in.

  “Put it into gear.”

  “I remember how to drive, Ma.”

  Kamala leaned away, resting her forehead against the window. She was quiet as they pulled away from the hospital, quiet as they got back onto the highway, but when Amina checked to see if she’d fallen back asleep, her eyes were wide open, staring out at the service road that ran alongside them.

  “He’s so happy you’ve come,” she said.

  They were heading out of the city fast, into the barren stretches of the Indian reservations, where dried hands of sagebrush crisped in the summer heat. Albuquerque’s June sat flat and brown around them, the whole desert parched and waiting like an open mouth for the relief of July’s afternoon rains.

  Up ahead was the exit to the village of Corrales, where a descent into the valley would bring air that was sweeter and clearer with every passing mile. The road would grow wide, the sagebrush replaced by locoweed and prairie grass, and soon Amina would see the soft line of bosque cottonwoods that enveloped either side of the Rio Grande. She held the wheel loosely, letting it ride out the familiar curves of the road home.