The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing: A Novel

by Mira Jacob

  There was a long silence as the Eapens took pains not to look at one another.

  “We just mean if there’s something we can do—” Raj started.

  “We’re fine,” Kamala said.

  “And what about these hallucinations?” Chacko asked. “Are you having them regularly?”

  Thomas hesitated, then nodded.

  “And they’re primarily auditory or visual?”

  Amina watched her father shift on the floor, as if something was poking into his back. “They are both.”

  Chacko’s mouth puckered like he’d tasted something sour.

  “What’s wrong with that?” Amina asked.

  “It’s unusual to have both,” Chacko said. “The tumor is in the occipital lobe. As such, visual hallucinations are more common, but hearing things is highly unusual, unless it has spread to the—”

  “We’re looking into that,” Thomas said quickly.

  “It might also be bad spirits,” Kamala said. “What? It happens. Oh, don’t you look at me like that, Sanji Ramakrishna, this is a true and documented fact. You think all those monks in the sixteenth century were lying? Sometimes a toll in the body can be a portal to unwelcome forces.”

  Amina sighed. “It’s a tumor, Ma. You saw the scan yourself.”

  “No one is saying there is no tumor! I’m just saying that it is entirely possible that he’s being taken advantage of by dark forces pretending to be family. Why else would they be coming to see him? It’s not like they saw each other so much in real life.”

  Thomas stood up, walking out of the room. “Anyone want something to drink?”

  “Perhaps I was unclear.” Chacko frowned. “I did not mean to suggest that hallucinations are uncommon at all, Kamala, I merely mean that seeing and hearing things at the same time is unusual, although if the brain is seizing—”

  “My sister had hallucinations!” Bala said, nodding earnestly. “Every night, she would dream of an old ayah we had when we were girls, the nasty one with the crooked fingers who used to pinch us.”

  “That’s a dream, not a hallucination,” Kamala fumed.

  “Can we get back to matters at hand?” Sanji bounced a little on the couch. “I think we should set up some sort of a schedule.”

  The others did not hear the latch of the front door clicking open, nor did they notice, as Amina did, how the floor in the dining room lightened with a sweep of sun. She rose and muttered “Bathroom,” as if anyone was listening, and headed for the hall.

  The front door was wide open, and through it, she could see her father standing in the driveway, looking down the tunnel of trees that rose up on either side of it like hands clasped in prayer. He looked small there, arms hanging loosely at his sides. He did not turn around as she approached, and for a moment she thought he might be seeing them again—Itty or Sunil or Akhil or whoever else might show up late on a Saturday afternoon, wanting to take a tour of the house. She reached for his dangling hand, surprised by the strength with which he grasped her back, the surety. He pulled her to him, his fingers entwining around her own until it hurt.

  CHAPTER 4

  “Hello, handsome. How are you doing?”

  Thomas smiled at the dark-haired nurse who parted the curtains. “Maryann!”

  “I tried to get out of working today when they told me you were coming.” She smiled, her full Hopi cheeks growing fuller, and kissed Thomas on the cheek before taking a look at the IV. “So what’s on the menu today? You started with Decadron?”

  “Yup.”

  “And how’d it go?”

  “Fine. Slight head rush in the first thirty seconds or so, but I normalized.”

  One week later, and at Thomas’s insistence, they were starting chemo. A few experimental case studies at MD Anderson had left him convinced that it might work, and although Anyan George had been insistent about the low probability of that, he’d ultimately given in.

  The nurse looked at Amina. “Dad’s a real favorite around here, you know.”

  Amina knew. In the two hours since they’d checked in, at least half a dozen nurses and a handful of doctors had already stopped by with enthusiastic smiles and far too many questions about the presumably safe subject of Amina’s life.

  Maryann wrote something on her clipboard. “How is that arm feeling?”

  “Good.”

  “Cold?”

  Thomas hesitated, then nodded.

  She patted Thomas’s leg affectionately, sad under her smile in a way that made Amina both trust and fear her more than the others. “I’m going to get you a thermal pack. You nauseated yet?”

  “It’s my first day, you goose.”

  “Just testing.” She slipped back out of the curtain with a wink. “She’s one of the good ones,” Thomas said.

  Amina nodded. He had said this about every nurse who stopped by.

  Outside, the sharp incline of Central showed Albuquerque in strata: parking lots, billboards, apartment buildings, mountains.

  “Is it weird being back here?” Amina asked. “At the hospital?”

  “No. Not really. I thought it might be, but it’s nice actually.”

  “Familiar?”

  He smiled sadly. “It’s funny, you do something your whole life … and then just the other day I thought, What if I’ve touched my last brain? You get so used to it, you know, using your hands in a certain way.” He looked down at his own hands and flexed them, as if testing to see if they were really his. “How about you? How is work?”

  “Oh, you know.” Amina shrugged. She hadn’t brought herself to tell either of her parents about Jane, though whether it was out of guilt or nervousness, she didn’t quite know. “It’s fine. Glad I’m finding work out here.”

  “When is your next event?”

  “Saturday. The Luceros’ son is getting married.”

  “My God, that’s right. Am I supposed to go?”

  “Only if you’re feeling up to it.”

  Thomas nodded, looking down at the IV in his arm. He rubbed his shoulder and winced a little.

  “Numbness,” he said before she could ask. “It’s normal. I’ll probably lose some sensation in my arms and legs.”

  Amina stood up and walked to the window so he wouldn’t see her face. It was getting harder not to spiral these days, to hear one thing and think of the next and the next, until all that was left was a closet of her father’s sweaters and shoes.

  “Are you in pain?” she asked.

  “Not really. I’ve been lucky that way.”

  “Right.” Small, furious tears sprang into the corners of her eyes.

  “Come sit down, koche.”

  She turned from the window and walked back to the bed. What was it about hospital beds that made everyone look like puppet versions of themselves? She knew her father wasn’t actually smaller than he’d been before the diagnosis, yet in the bed his diminishing felt palpable, like a sun setting without the beauty or relief. He put a hand on her arm. His fingers felt like ice.

  “You doing okay?” he asked.

  She nodded quickly.

  “It can be hard, you know. The worrying.”

  “Dad, please.”

  “I’m just saying—”

  “Can we talk about something else?” She sounded like a child and she knew it. Next to them, the drip beeped a few times.

  Thomas took a breath. “How do you know when to take a picture?”

  “What?”

  “I always wonder. My pictures are terrible.”

  Amina smiled. He was right. His pictures were the worst, full of missing limbs, double chins, and grimaces.

  “It’s just practice.”

  “No, not true. I spent one whole month practicing, and they got worse, not better.”

  “What were you taking pictures of?”

  “Your mother.”

  “Well, that’s your problem. No one can get a good shot of Mom. She’s a pretty woman who makes ugly faces.”

  “My God.” Thomas looked
both dumbstruck and relieved. “You’re absolutely right.”

  Amina rubbed his cold hands with her own. His palms were peeling.

  “Do you ever think about moving back here?” he asked.

  “Yeah, sure,” she said.

  Thomas nodded, looking away so quickly that it took her a minute to understand that this had moved him, his mouth twitching as if he might cry.

  “Okay, honey, let’s get this on you,” Maryann said, coming back through the curtain with the thermal pack and an extra blanket. Amina stood up, listening to the nurse coo at and cajole her father, expert at soothing the body’s indignities.

  “Your father is too sick to come,” Kamala said the following Saturday. She stood by the doorway in Amina’s room looking a little sick herself, her hands smoothing and resmoothing the crimson-and-purple sari she had put on for the Lucero wedding.

  “Is he throwing up again?” Amina asked.

  “Nothing to throw up! He won’t eat!”

  “That’s normal.” Amina had read the flyer the nurses had sent them home with so many times, she felt sure she could quote paragraphs at random. “He might not have an appetite for a week or so.”

  “He’ll starve to death!”

  “What about chicken broth?”

  “Do you know how many chapatis your father can eat in one sitting?” Kamala looked around the room, as if daring the furniture to guess before announcing, “Eight!”

  Amina counted rolls of film, packing them into her backpack. These midday weddings would kill her with their too bright, too flat light. Kamala took a step into the room.

  “And now he’s yelling at me to go. Telling me all the hovering is making him nervous. What else should I do? Not check on him? Not bring him food when he hasn’t eaten for one whole day?”

  “Maybe the smell of it is making him sicker.”

  “The everything is making him sicker! What are we supposed to do about it? Should have just stuck to the radiation!”

  Amina took a deep breath. “Give it time.”

  “What is all this?” Kamala was looking at the things from the garden, which were still lined up on the desk and looking dustier by the day.

  Amina sighed. “Yeah, I’ve been meaning to tell you. I found them in the garden. Near where the jacket had been. They were buried in the same bed. I dug it all up.”

  Kamala moved forward slowly, leaning down to look at the jar of mango pickle, then the album. She touched the shoes briefly before picking up the bunch of keys. “He told me he’d lost those.”

  Amina shrugged. “He probably thought he had.”

  She flinched as her mother dropped the keys and cried out as if she had been cut, understanding too late that it was too much, and that some measure of refuge had been sought out and not found in Amina’s company. She moved hastily toward Kamala, hugging her rigid shoulders until she was gently rebuffed.

  “You go,” Kamala said. “I’ll stay here with him.”

  “No, Ma, come. He wants you to. And I have to. And it’s just down the road.”

  “But someone should stay.”

  “Prince Philip will stay.”

  Her mother shook her head at this but smiled a little.

  “It’s just for a few hours,” Amina said, suddenly feeling hopeful, like getting out of the house would somehow change what was going on inside it. “And he can call us if he needs us, right? Let’s just go.”

  “Fine,” Kamala sighed, as if this was a war they had been waging for weeks instead of minutes. “Let’s go.”

  The next morning Amina woke to a note.

  Your father needs to eat.

  It was written in her mother’s tiny, curly script and taped to the upstairs bathroom mirror with no further instruction. Amina went downstairs. Her parents’ room was empty, blinds raised, bed made.

  “Dad?” she called. “Prince Philip?”

  The kitchen was also empty, as was the living room. Amina poured herself a large glass of water and gulped it down, walking back to the laundry room. She found her father and the dog on a cot on the porch. Thomas lay like a plank, and over his lower legs, Prince Philip was trying valiantly to curl himself into a neat ball, his paws sliding over the edges. Sunlight streamed in, bleaching the walls and the tools and the piles of newspaper. The dog wagged its tail as Amina approached.

  “Dad?”

  Thomas’s eyes rolled slowly in his sockets, resting on her. He hadn’t been asleep.

  “Hey.” She turned a chair around to face the cot, sat in it. “What’s up?”

  He shrugged.

  “You just wake up?” she asked.

  Thomas shifted, prompting Prince Philip to rise and wobble off the cot.

  “You want breakfast?” she asked.

  Her father rolled onto one side, facing the wall opposite her. Prince Philip turned his head slightly, looking from father to daughter with canine nervousness. Poor dogs. All that intuition and no recourse.

  “Dad?”

  Thomas shook his head, muttering something. She leaned in closer. “What?”

  “I did not ask you to come.”

  “I know that. Mom left me a note.”

  Thomas threw an arm over his head, blocking his ears. Prince Philip leaned in to sniff his armpit, and Thomas sprang up, grabbing his muzzle and shoving him away hard.

  “Dad, stop! What are you—”

  “I DON’T WANT YOU HERE!” Thomas shouted, rising up with his teeth bared, and Amina shot out of her chair, backing away fast. But Thomas was not looking at her. He was looking at the coatrack.

  “Dad?”

  “GET OUT.”

  “Who are you talking to?”

  Thomas stared furiously at the coats, dragging his eyes from them to Amina as if they were conspiring together.

  “Dad? Daddy?”

  Thomas flinched. Dropped his head in his hands. Rocked back and forth with his arms wound tight around him. When Amina touched his shoulder, he shuddered.

  “What can I do?” Amina asked, trying to hold his rounded shoulders, his flinching spine. “What helps?”

  Her father shook his head.

  Two nights later, lured by the scent of coriander and ginger, Thomas walked into the kitchen looking slightly puffy but determined. Curls matted around his head in tufts, and his raggy blue robe exposed two knees that looked only slightly larger than another man’s Adam’s apple.

  “Kam—” he began, and his wife set a plate of chicken curry in front of him before he could finish. Two chapatis, one nice drumstick, and a little bit of curds later, he motioned for seconds.

  “You going to eat?” he asked Amina between bites.

  “Not yet.”

  It was only six-thirty. She watched her father gnaw the flesh from the bone, the recent loss of weight making him look more like an animal. Human bones devouring chicken bones. Meat eating meat.

  Kamala set down a plate in front of her. She had another plate for herself and a foreboding look on her face, as if the only thing standing between Thomas and starvation was everybody eating chicken curry at once. Amina picked up a chapati without a word, and for the first time since the diagnosis, the Eapens enjoyed a regular dinner alone together, parsing the meat and the bread into smaller and smaller portions until they were sweeping their fingers over clean porcelain.

  “Maybe I’ll take a shower,” Thomas said, but he made no move to leave the kitchen. He looked around with the heady gaze of a man stumbling home from a walkabout. “So what’s been going on? Any news?”

  You’ve been sick. You thought the coatrack was a person. Amina shrugged. “Not much.”

  “The Luceros’ son got married,” Kamala offered.

  “Ah, yes, how was it?”

  “Awful. Food was terrible. Bride was fat.”

  “Ma!”

  “What? It’s true.”

  “She was pregnant!”

  “Well, she was fat, too,” Kamala said, licking the pads of her fingers clean like a cat, and Thomas loo
ked amused.

  “What else?” he asked.

  “I’m having a show,” Amina said, and watched as the surprise prismed both her parents’ faces. “Or, well, Dimple is. Dimple’s gallery is showing my work.”

  “Wow!” Thomas smiled weakly. “Will people see it?”

  “That’s the idea.”

  “When?” Kamala asked.

  “It’s in September. I’ll probably head back for the weekend or something.”

  “Good for you. Excellent, excellent.” Thomas squinted at her like he was seeing her in the future, when she’d finally become the person he always knew she’d be. “What photos? Any we’ve seen?”

  “Not really, no. Some newer stuff. Mostly weird moments at weddings.”

  “Jane must be so proud.”

  Amina nodded. Sure. Why not?

  Thomas stood up, uncurling his spine slowly, and picked up his plate.

  “I’ve got it.” Kamala reached for it. “You go take that shower. I put a stool inside in case you need it.”

  “Pshht! I’m not an invalid, woman.”

  “I know that. It’s only for just in cases.” She smiled shyly at him, sweetly, Amina thought, filled with an eagerness to reassure him that there was no frailty she couldn’t forget, no action she couldn’t rewrite, and it occurred to Amina that there was never going to be a good time to talk about what was going on.

  “I found a bunch of your things in the garden,” she said.

  “You want rasmalai for dessert?” Kamala asked, shooting her a look.

  “What things?” Thomas asked.

  Amina told him, feeling bad about the way his eyes dropped to the brick floor, the way he reached for the counter, looking newly nauseated. He sat back down heavily.

  “You don’t remember putting them there?” Amina asked.

  “No.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” Kamala said. “Nobody cares anyway.”

  “None of it?”

  He looked at her uneasily. “Not really.”

  “I thought you had maybe left the shoes for Itty.”

  “Don’t be an idiot!” Kamala huffed. She snatched Amina’s plate away, taking it back to the sink. Thomas looked at her carefully. “That’s who you were seeing the other, day, right?” Amina asked. Her father’s brow knotted, as if he was trying to locate his own memory. After a long moment, he nodded.