The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing: A Novel
Page 19
“Nothing smells like the desert.” Kamala smiled. “We went to Texas, remember, for the wedding of that Telegu girl in your high school?”
“Syama?”
“Yes, she married some Houston boy, father arranged the whole thing, but I tell you what about Houston: too much of smell! I was so happy to come home. Nice, dry air, everything crisp in the morning.” She bent over the eggplant. “What about Seattle? You have a garden there?”
“You know I don’t.”
“How can you stay in that place? No yard?”
“I don’t want a yard.”
“Everybody wants a yard!” Kamala knelt to pull a few weeds that were springing up next to the peppers. “Oh, by the way, don’t make plans for tomorrow night. I’m making you appam and stew.”
“Oh, Ma, you don’t need to do all that for me.”
“What all that? It’s nothing. And anyway, Anyan is coming for dinner and it’s his favorite.”
“Who?”
“Thomas said you met him at the hospital—the neurologist? He has a son, so he’ll bring him, too.”
“Oh, right. Dr. George. How old is his kid?”
“Eight.”
“Cute. What’s his wife like?”
“Foo! Horrible.” She pushed a strand of loose hair behind her ear. “I met her last year at some hospital fund-raiser something or other, but then she left him! Can you believe? She’s living in Nob Hill with some Afghani now.”
Amina stopped weeding. “Wait, what?”
“I know, poor Anyan! Can you imagine? I’m sure he’ll meet someone though, hot commodity in the hospital and all that. The nurses are probably plotting over him now.”
Amina looked up at the sky, taking pains to breathe evenly. “No. I’m not doing it.”
“Doing what?”
“I’m not doing this.” Her voice rose slightly as she stood. “You are not doing this to me.”
“Having dinner?”
Amina took off the gardening gloves and dropped them in the dust. She turned to leave the garden, willing herself to stay calm until she was in her room.
“Where are you going?” Kamala asked. “We’re not done planting!”
“You know, Dimple said this. She warned me you would do this, and I—God!—I didn’t believe her. I thought it was too low. Even for you. You’re trying to set me up with Dr. George?”
“It’s dinner, koche, not some formal thing where you have to make a decision and—”
“Make a decision?”
“Amina, listen, it’s no big deals. I just thought you might like to—”
“Oh my God,” Amina laughed, shaking her head. “Is Dad even sick?”
Kamala looked at her for a long moment before saying, “I never said he was sick. You said he was sick.”
Right. Of course. “So then what was the plan, Ma? You get me back here and Anyan George and I make a decision and what? He gets a wife and his son gets a mother and I get a family you can brag about?”
“What’s wrong with a family?”
“I don’t want one!”
“Yes you do. You need someone, koche. Everyone sees it.”
It was a soft hit, an unexpected knock that cut Amina’s breath short.
“You never try to meet anyone because you think that something is wrong with you,” her mother said like it was a simple fact, like she might have been saying It’s a quarter to noon or Water the radishes. “I know, we all know. Sanji and Bala and even Dimple says you haven’t acted like yourself since you took the picture of that man on the bridge, and—”
“Dimple says nothing! Dimple doesn’t even talk to you!”
“She talks to Bala.”
“Bullshit! When?”
“When she’s worried about something, dummy.” Kamala tugged nervously at the bottom of her shirt, and Amina knew it was true suddenly, a thought that made her queasy with shame.
“I’m going,” Amina said.
“Oh, Ami.”
“No, I mean, I’m leaving. Tomorrow. I’m going back to Seattle and going back to my work and my life, and I’m sorry if it doesn’t seem like it’s enough to you, but it is for me, okay?”
“Hey, koche …”
Amina unhinged the garden gate and opened it, walking quickly toward the house. Her mother was still calling after her as the screen door behind her banged shut.
That night she could not sleep. At three in the morning, she officially gave up, getting out of bed and walking across to Akhil’s room.
It was a different room now—still his, but also all of theirs, claimed bit by bit as the years had passed. His bed and desk and dresser had stayed put, but certain things—the orange beanbag, the chair covered with heavy-metal stickers—had been taken out at some point, coming to what end, Amina did not know. There were also additions to the room—clothes and newspapers and house detritus (an empty water glass, an aluminum-foil-covered flashlight, a December 1991 issue of American Photo)—that marked the rest of the family’s comings and goings as steadily as a logbook. Akhil’s leather jacket—ferried from one holding spot to the next like a paralytic cat—was folded up on his desk. Amina picked it up, sniffing the collar before putting it on.
Thomas had been in last, according to the indent in the bed and the surgical booties curled up like pill bugs under it. Amina lowered herself into his impression like it was a snow angel. She looked up.
There they were, still smiling down at her after all these years. Gandhi still looked like a baby with reading glasses, while Martin Luther King, Jr., and Che Guevara seemed to be connected by the hair. All of their painted faces glowed electrically, a dicey mixture of reality and aspiration. Amina shut her eyes, seeing the coral mouths of the Greats tattooed in pale green across her eyelids.
CHAPTER 6
“Whoa,” Monica said the next morning, stopping abruptly in Thomas’s office and sniffing like a hound. “What are you doing here?”
Amina looked up from a pile of brain parts, twirling the hippocampus in her fingers. The rest of the model was strewn across her father’s desk like a dismembered animal. “Waiting for Dad to give me a ride to the airport.”
“I thought you were leaving Friday?”
“She’s fleeing the state,” Thomas said, not looking up from his computer. “Fight with her mother.”
Monica sat on the arm of the couch, looking more stunned than was really necessary. “Really? I was hoping we’d have that girl time tonight. Didn’t your mother tell you I called? I called three times.”
“Shockingly, she did not,” Amina said, ignoring the dark look Thomas shot her. Was it her problem Kamala selectively deleted messages when they came from people she did not like? No, it was not. Monica looked down at her watch. “Well, what time is your flight?”
“Around two.”
“I’ll give you a lift.”
“You have time?” Thomas asked.
“What?” Amina said, surprised. “Dad, I thought you—”
“Great! It will be fun,” Monica said, smiling. “We can sit at Garduño’s and have guac and beer until your flight comes. You wanna? I’ll bring the car around.”
Amina did not wanna, actually, but Monica was already going out the office door fast. Well, then. Amina stood up and looked around the office, feeling let down. She had wanted the drive to the airport with her father, but he had already turned back to his work, his eyes scanning the folder in front of him.
“Well, that’s lucky isn’t it?” he asked, and Amina nodded, embarrassed by the sudden tears that provoked her eyes. What were they for? Not her father’s constant distraction. Not Kamala’s predictable meddling. No, this was the feeling that always arose when she left, an unmet urgency, as though she hadn’t really done whatever it was she was supposed to do to make home feel like home again.
Thomas’s face fell. “Oh, koche. Don’t be upset about your mother.”
“I’m not,” she said unconvincingly, and he came around his desk. He rubbed his chin o
n the top of her head and pulled her into a tight hug.
“It’s all going to work out.”
“Yeah, I know,” she said, giving him one final squeeze before she picked up her bag and walked out of his office, to where Monica’s idling car waited.
The woman could not have driven more slowly. On the highway, cars shot by like comets, an occasionally curious head staring back, looking for signs of engine trouble or a flat. Monica flipped open the glove box, removing an emerald pack of menthols.
“What are you doing?” Amina asked.
“What does it look like?”
“I thought you quit years ago.”
“Did you quit?” Monica looked at her with a strange, flat gaze.
Amina flushed, and Monica thrust the pack at her with shaking hands. The car lighter popped out. Plumes of smoke filled the car. They were heading down the wrong exit ramp now, the blinker ticking wildly. Monica took a right at the end of it and then another right. She parked outside a Village Inn.
In front of them, the restaurant window showed two worlds laid one atop the other like splices of film: diners hunched into burgundy booths with cheap, brassy chandeliers hanging overhead, and the blank windshields of empty cars fading in and out.
“Your dad tried to save a dead kid,” Monica said.
Amina stared at the silhouettes, turning the sentence over in her head, trying to bend it into something that made sense. It did not. Monica cracked a window and pushed in the car lighter again.
“What?”
“Your dad. A few weeks ago.” She picked a stray piece of tobacco off her tongue, flicking it out the window. “In the ER.”
“A dead kid?”
The lighter popped out and Monica handed it to her. “Massive head trauma. There was a shoot-out in the mall.”
“Wait, Ty Hanson’s kid?”
“You should light that. Damn thing works for exactly three seconds.”
Amina pressed her cigarette into the fading orange coils.
Monica nodded. “He told you about it?”
“He told me Derrick had died.”
“Did he tell you what happened in the ER?”
Amina shook her head, and Monica looked out the window on her side.
“We were making rounds when we got the call that they were coming into the ER. Two kids. So we went rushing down to the emergency bay, and he just …” She shook her head. “I don’t know.”
“What?”
“He went to the wrong kid,” she said softly, sounding surprised. “The other kid was right there, the team already working on him, and Thomas just ignored him and went to Derrick instead.”
“But … well … he knew Derrick and not the other one, right?” Amina asked. “I mean, why is that such a big—”
“He was talking really loudly. Telling Derrick to calm down, that everything was going to be okay. Telling me to restrain him. And at first I just thought he was seeing something everyone else hadn’t noticed, like maybe—who knows—the kid is still alive? Stranger shit has happened in that ER, believe me. But then I see the kid’s eyes and he’s really gone and Thomas is on top of him, pushing him down like he’s fighting to get up, yelling at me to quit just standing there and help restrain him.” She looked at Amina apologetically. “I didn’t know what to do. I mean … I tried to tell him the kid was dead, and he got really angry. He asked another one of the nurses for help. She told him the same thing. He was furious, screaming at everyone. It took us a few minutes to get through.”
A few minutes? “Shit.”
The blur in the corner of her eye was Monica nodding.
“Have you seen that happen before?”
“You mean in a patient or in your dad?”
“Both. Either.”
Monica rolled a pocket of smoke around her mouth. “Sure, if someone is delusional. If he has, say, post-traumatic stress disorder or is taking hallucinogens or something.”
“You think he has PTSD?”
“Honestly, Amina, I don’t know what to think. There could have been any number of things that factored in. Did he eat enough that day? Had he slept well? Were there other things we didn’t know about?”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know. You know, something like this happens, you revisit a lot of things, wonder if you should have seen … I mean, but even that is not particularly useful. I have my theories, but they’re just that—a bunch of thoughts, not a medical diagnosis.”
“Like what?”
“Oh, Amina, I don’t think we should get into—”
“Like what?”
“I think he had a psychotic break.”
Amina looked down at her lap feeling like she had once when she was swimming in the ocean and something large had brushed against her leg. “What’s that?”
“It’s a loss of contact with reality.”
Heat flared between Amina’s fingertips, and she looked down to a solid inch of ash. She lifted the cigarette carefully to the window, tipping the spent end over and watching the ashes scatter through the glass. “He’s psychotic?”
“No, he’s not fucking psychotic, God.”
“Well, I don’t know!”
Monica glared at the steering wheel for a few moments before sighing, “Sorry. I just mean people can have psychotic breaks without harming themselves or anyone else, okay? He wouldn’t have hurt anyone. I’ve told them that.”
“Them?”
“The board.”
Amina’s mouth fell open. “They know?”
“They heard about it, obviously.”
“From who?”
Monica smiled sadly. “Amina, it’s a small hospital. I’m sure they heard it from a few people.”
Amina’s mind went to the white hospital corridors, the pools of light, the nurses’ faces as she and Thomas walked past. Did they know? Had the ICU nurse known? Had Dr. George? She flipped the air vents on the dash open and shut. “And was there, I don’t know, disciplinary action?”
“He was talked to. He’s knows he’s being watched.”
“Does my mom know?”
“I tried to tell her.”
“And?”
“She hung up before I could get it out.”
“Great.”
“I know, but what did I expect? No love lost there. And anyway, I’m not sure what we need to do at this point, besides get him to talk to someone.”
“Like a shrink?”
“Well, that would be great, but barring that, I mean, anyone.” Monica looked at her. “Someone he’d be honest with. You.”
Amina thought of her father on the porch, the tumbler in his hands. Your mother has always been afraid of anything she can’t control.
“Are you okay?” Monica asked, and Amina realized she was gripping her knees, her breath light and shallow.
She gave a quick, reassuring nod. It seemed important to be okay, suddenly. To be a part of Team Okay. “Yes, of course. It’s just a lot.”
“Yeah. That’s why I was trying tell you earlier in the week.”
They sat in silence, the sun settling on them like a hot, heavy sheet. The car seemed to grow smaller, the space between them suddenly filled with a thousand twitching anxieties.
“So now what?”
Monica shrugged, dropped her butt out the window. “I don’t know. I guess we just have to take what we know and go from there.”
“And what do we know?” Amina’s voice sounded small.
“We know that your dad had a delusional episode of some sort. We know that this isn’t typical behavior for him, and could even be an isolated incident. We know that typically, late spring is a hard time for him emotionally, and that the kid who died was the same age as, you know”—she took a short, sharp breath—“your brother.”
“You think this is about Akhil?”
“Honey, I have no idea what this is about.” Monica paused. “Why did you ask me if he was okay the other day?”
“What?”
&nbs
p; “At the ICU. You asked me if something was wrong.”
“Oh, I … just thought he seemed off or something.” It wasn’t that Amina wanted to lie to Monica so much as she wanted to buy time, to think through things, to sit somewhere alone until she could put all the pieces together and come up with a plan. “I mean, has he seemed fine to you? Other than this?”
“It’s hard to tell. Mainly he just seems really exhausted. A little withdrawn. He sure doesn’t laugh as much.”
“Has he had any more episodes?”
“Not as far as I know.” Monica leaned back and ran her thumb under the seat belt still strapped over her chest. “I mean, look, thirty years with the same hospital, no one wants this to be a lasting mark against him. But he’s not there to fix bunions, you know?”
Amina nodded, wanting to get out of the car, to walk around the parking lot until her head came back together.
“Okay,” Monica said after a moment, like they had come to some kind of resolution. “Well, so, you hungry?”
“Huh?”
Monica tipped her chin at the restaurant. “I mean, I know it’s no Garduño’s, but if you want some pancakes or something, we have the time.”
Amina shook her head. “I think you’d better just take me home.”
BOOK 5
THE BIG SLEEP
ALBUQUERQUE, 1982–1983
CHAPTER 1
Shortly after almost driving himself and Amina into untimely deaths, Akhil went to sleep for three months. It wasn’t a straight sleep of course, but a persistent one, a sudden fever of exhaustion that lasted from December through February and found him sprawled over chairs and couches and rugs the minute he came home from school, eyes spinning under the silk of his eyelids. Gone was the constant barrage of words, replaced by an infantile drowsiness, eyes that barely focused, a mouth that opened only to eat or snore. He was too tired to think, he said when asked any question, and it was obvious.