by Mira Jacob
“And the trophy was for Ammachy?”
“Amina,” Kamala called over her shoulder. “Leave it.”
“I just, I don’t want you to feel like you can’t talk about it,” Amina said. “You’re seeing things. You can’t help it. I don’t know why we have to be so weird about it.”
“No one is being weird! Who is being weird?”
“You are, Ma.”
With surprising force, Kamala lifted a plate above her head and threw it. It shattered in the sink, releasing a live, buzzing silence. Amina watched her mother’s small body hunch over, hands clutching the edges of the sink like she would lift the whole thing and slam it down if she could.
“Itty asked, so I gave them,” Thomas said.
Amina nodded calmly, trying to keep her face from registering any hint of worry, but something in her chest bunched up on itself, like a cat being cornered. From her periphery, she saw Kamala bend into the sink and begin picking up the pieces, which scritched against one another like beetle shells.
“Did Ammachy ask for the trophy?”
“No,” Thomas said, looking uncomfortable. “I just thought she would like it.”
“And the album?”
“That was for Sunil when he …” Thomas looked helplessly at the counter.
“He what?”
“He wanted to hear it.”
It wasn’t stupid to think that talking would make things better. Weren’t there entire schools of psychology dedicated to that premise? Wasn’t the television talk show confessional born from it? Still, as Thomas leaned in and told Amina about his last few months (haltingly at first, but then faster and more freely, as if each word were water carving out a bigger channel from brain to mouth), as he spoke about not only a brief encounter with Derrick Hanson, but whole weeks of Itty, Sunil, Ammachy, and even Divya (“My God, was she always such a hand wringer?”), she found herself feeling distinctly worse.
Everyone was exactly as they had been before, her father said, no kinder, no better, no more enlightened. They only came to him one at a time. They mostly wanted to see things, like the house or the tools or the supermarket. They looked like they had on the best day of their life.
“Like the best they’ve ever looked?”
“No. Exactly how they looked on their favorite day. Same age. Same clothes.”
But how could there be one favorite day in a whole lifetime? Amina did not ask, but her father shrugged anyway, as if to say, Who knows how these things work? And for a minute she felt the pull of that logic as keenly as a hand.
“Enough,” Kamala said from the back of the kitchen, her face striped with tears.
“Ma.”
“Don’t you ‘Ma’ me. You stop this talk right now.”
“I just think we should—”
“You’ll bring the devil into this home!”
“We’re just talking about what’s happening. There’s nothing wrong with that.”
“Yes, yes, of course, Miss Psychology Degree! Miss Freudian Lips! Because you know what’s best, right? Yes, let’s dig it all up, get it out in the opening!”
“Okay,” Thomas said quietly. “It’s fine. Let’s just—”
“Idiots! You don’t meddle with these things! You don’t bring them in the house. You don’t think they wait for tumors and cancers and whatever else? Of course they do! Weak minds are always the target!” Amina glared at her mother. “Like yours?”
“Hey!” Thomas barked, but it was too late. Kamala covered her mouth with her hand and then turned and left the kitchen. A few seconds later the master bedroom door slammed, sending a quiver through the house.
Amina looked back at her father, who had slumped over the counter. “She didn’t mean that, Dad. She’s just—”
“Don’t you ever talk to your mother that way.”
Her face flared hotly. “I was just trying to—”
“This is hard on her.”
“It’s hard on everyone!”
“She’s your mother.”
Amina looked down at the counter, sullen and flustered. She never knew what would trigger Thomas’s loyalty toward Kamala, but whenever it happened, it was unshakeable, as if all his mishandlings could be vindicated in one act of allegiance.
“Fine,” she said.
Her father’s shoulders dropped a little. He looked unhappily at the kitchen counter.
“What about the jacket?” Amina asked.
Thomas did not say anything. The lines in his face deepened into shadows.
“Did Akhil want it?”
“No.”
“Did you just give it to him?”
“I haven’t seen him.”
Amina idled into silence, surprised by the answer and the sudden blow of disappointment that came with it. “But then why did you—”
“I have no idea.”
“But it was in the garden with the rest!”
“I know.”
“Then why—”
“Amina, I don’t know.” He was angry—angry about the way she’d spoken to Kamala, but now also about this, as if Amina had betrayed him by even thinking any of it meant anything. And hadn’t she? Amina watched her father across the white countertop, pained by her own transparency, her need for the fog that was closing in around them to mean something.
Thomas laid his head down on the counter, his pate shining through a corona of curls. He breathed slowly and deeply, and Amina reached out, pressing her fingers to the stubbly spot where the hair from his biopsy was growing back in. How far were they from the tumor? She’d always had a healthy skepticism about shamans and the like, but lately, the conviction that she might somehow will the cancer away with the right amount of desire and supplication was hard to shake.
“They’re going, anyway,” her father said, his voice soft, begrudging.
“What?”
“The visions. With the chemo. I see them less.”
“Really?”
He nodded, his head bobbing under her hand, and Amina said nothing, afraid of her own hope, of leaning too hard on any hint that he might be getting better. Instead she laid her head next to his on the counter, sliding forward until they were skull to skull.
CHAPTER 5
That night Jamie and Amina sipped wine at a new place in the Northeast Heights. Dark and cavernous, it boasted stools that looked like slabs of ice, an impressively large wine list, and an inversely diminutive bartender (“Let me know if I can help,” she’d offered, with a face that said she couldn’t possibly). On either side of them, Albuquerque’s moneyed set watched one another’s jewelry catch the light. The bar menus, rich cream card stock embossed with a font so modern it looked like a digital sneeze, suggested things like “rice paper crab” and “foam of duck.”
“What are we doing here again?” Amina asked, trying and failing to sit comfortably.
“Risking everything to save innocent lives.” Jamie handed her an errant flyer—a lone misstep of cheap pink Kinko’s paper. Come see us for happy hour! it read. Watch the sun set in a symphony of color! “I don’t know, I thought maybe we should mix it up with people our age.”
“These people are our age?”
“Does that make you feel old?”
“It makes me feel poor.”
The bartender came by again, a smile taped to her face. “Any questions?”
“What’s a symphony of color?” Jamie asked. He held up the flyer.
She didn’t even look at it. “We have a really nice sunset.”
“Ah, thanks. Do you also have Budweiser?”
“We only have Sierra Nevada on tap.”
“We’ll take two,” Amina said.
An hour and two beers apiece later, they were grinning. They were also talking too loudly. Amina knew this from the way the bartender was pointedly avoiding them. But who cared? She was on a date with Jamie Anderson. He smelled like something she wanted to eat.
“So I went to Mesa Prep today,” Amina said.
“Oh yea
h? What for?”
“I don’t know. I wanted to take pictures of it. Anyway, I couldn’t get in.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean they literally wouldn’t let me in. The guard outside.”
“Guard? Wait, that little booth at the gate is actually manned by someone?”
“Yeah!”
“No way!” Jamie said. “I’ve passed it a couple of times. I just thought it was for, I don’t know, show or something. They have real guards?”
“Ninjas.” Amina spat out the word.
Jamie laughed and took a long tug of beer.
“No, really. That’s what they’re called. Ninja Security. That’s what the guy’s pocket said. There are, like, twenty-five of them on campus. Apparently they will stop anyone who doesn’t have an appointment or a press pass.”
Jamie choked a little. “Wait, he asked if you had a press pass?”
“Yes. Because I had my camera.”
“But you were a student!”
“That’s what I said!”
“That’s bullshit! It’s not like you’re some … some”—Jamie’s hand gestured furiously in the air—“delinquent!”
“Sha!”
“I mean, you paid to go to school there for, like, years! And they treat you like a criminal?”
“Insulting.” Amina nodded. “Criminal.”
“So did you complain to someone?”
“I couldn’t get in to complain to anyone!”
“Fascists!” He hit the bar with a force. The bartender made a face at another one of the patrons. “I mean, what, so now it’s some kind of dictatorship? Ninjas?”
“Ninjas,” Amina said.
“Fuck them.” He set his beer down on the bar. “We’re going in.”
“Totally.”
Jamie waved to the bartender. “Hey, can we settle up?”
“Wait, now? You want to drive all the way to Mesa now?”
“We can hop that fence in, like, two seconds. And then we’ll pretty much be on the mesa in the dark until we get to the buildings.”
Amina imagined them storming across the marble-floored admissions office and threw her head back, laughing. The bartender smacked down their bill.
“I’m fucking serious!” Jamie glanced at it and set two twenties down. “We’re going to take our school back.”
Amina did not move.
“What, you’re scared of the ninjas?”
She nodded. She was totally scared of the ninjas, whom she had imagined as short and quick and Japanese despite Albuquerque’s notably small Asian population.
“Come on, that campus is huge! Forty acres, and most of it just barren mesa! How many of them can there be?”
“Twenty-five.”
“So we cut in through a random section of the fence across from that Chinese place—what’s it called?—the Great Wall. Yeah. And we stay away from the booth entirely. Then we’re golden.”
“Jamie.” She put a hand on his arm.
“Amina.” He pulled it to his chest.
“This isn’t a good idea.”
“It’s the best idea.”
“What if we get caught?”
“Then we explain to them that we used to go there and decided to take a harmless walk and I guaran-fucking-tee you they will not want to press charges against their own alumni, no matter how they deal with people at the gate. I mean, c’mon. I’m a UNM professor. They want to mess with that?”
“Oooh,” Amina laughed despite her misgivings. “Are you going to bring the full wrath of your department down on them?”
“I might.” Jamie dropped his voice a notch. “Or I could just bring the wrath of my department down on you.”
“What does that even mean?”
“No idea. Finish your beer already.”
She didn’t have to go. She knew this. But there was something really lovely about the smell of hops rising in the air, about Jamie’s wincing smile and yellow T-shirt, about how close her hand was to his heart.
She took a last gulp and slid off the bar stool. “Let’s go.”
Twenty minutes later they sat in Jamie’s car, under the yellow glow of the Great Wall.
“Okay,” he whispered, like they were already inside the Mesa Prep gates. He pointed to the far north section of the fence. “So I’m thinking we head to the north corner, hop over that big brick thing, and run through the mesa until we hit the parking lots.”
“Run through all that mesa? In the dark?”
“Thing is, we’ve got to avoid the security house and the spot where traffic slows, so I think the only way to do this is take the natural route.”
“Cactus,” Amina reminded him. “Rattlesnakes.”
Jamie leaned over her, opening the glove box with a smile. “Flashlight,” he said, handing her the cold metal. “I’ve got two. And I’ve got a first-aid kit in the car.”
“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.”
“What?”
“The amount of stuff you keep in your car! It’s got to mean something. Savior complex? Abandonment issues?”
“Quit stalling.”
Amina opened her door, popping out into the night. Jamie followed. They looked across the street. The wall seemed a little sturdier without the remove of the windshield, a little meaner. It was a combination of iron railing and thick brick posts, the kind of thing well suited to military schools and southern graveyards. Amina started doing jumping jacks.
“What are you doing?”
“Warming up.”
“Oh. Right.” Jamie followed her lead. They did twenty together and stopped, breathing hard.
Jamie leaned into a lunge. “Remember to stretch your hams and quads.”
Amina nodded, lunging. “And we should do our shoulders after this.”
Thirty seconds later Jamie was chicken winging his arms with vigor, while Amina pulled her elbows across her chest.
“You ready?” Jamie asked.
Amina looked across the road to the darkened mesa surrounding the school. “Absolutely.”
Ten minutes later they panted outside the gate, hands and forearms and shins surprisingly banged up for what was supposed to be an easy hurdle. Amina spat to the side while Jamie paced and coughed.
“Okay,” Jamie said, frowning down at his scratched palms. “Okay, so maybe not? Maybe we just quit while we’re ahead?”
Amina shook her head. No, they would not be giver-uppers in the face of Mesa Preparatory. Now she wanted this.
“I mean, it’s bigger than we thought, right?” he said, motioning to the gate. “Definitely bigger than what you see from the road. So there’s that.”
“You are simply capable of more,” she told Jamie, putting a foot at the base of the ironwork. “Here, give me a boost.”
Jamie held his hand out.
“No, dummy, like …” Amina wove her fingers together, hunched down.
“What am I, a mind reader?” Jamie leaned down.
“I mean, it’s a boost. People know how to give a boost.” Amina shoved up and over, holding on unsteadily to the iron railing. And then suddenly she was falling, the spade points receding. She landed on her ass with a thud.
Jamie smiled at her through the fence. “Nice.”
“At least I got over.”
“Hold on.” He followed her lead, looking decidedly nervous as his groin skimmed the iron points. He lowered himself with shaking biceps and grinned at her.
“We’re in.”
Amina looked at the blank expanse of mesa in front of them, the wooly darkness tinged brown by the edges of sagebrush catching light from the road.
“Don’t worry. If there are any snakes here, they’ve heard us and they’re moving out,” Jamie assured her.
“You’re not going to lay any bullshit on me about them being more scared of us than we are of them, are you? Because I know for a fact that I’m the scaredest animal out here.”
Jamie squeezed her hand and they walked forward. On t
heir right, the campus was clearly visible, rows of lights blazing down the cement walkways and bricked arches. On their left lay the football field, ringed by the track and bordered on one side by a small mound of built-in stadium stands.
“Where are we going?”
“Stadium.” Jamie pointed.
“What about the ninjas?”
“I mean, it’s a football field. What is anyone really going to do to it? Besides, the lights aren’t on, so it’s not like we’d be so easy to see.”
They walked forward for what seemed like fifteen minutes, though of course it could not have been. She followed Jamie, trying to avoid the darkest shadows, until he stopped suddenly, grabbing her arm.
“Shh!”
“What?”
Amina froze, listening. Far away, a car honked at another. Beside her Jamie slowly squatted, holding his finger over his lips. She followed, her heart pounding.
“I thought I heard someone,” Jamie whispered after a moment.
“A ninja?” Amina looked around, eyes wide.
“I don’t know. What do ninjas sound like?”
“Padded footsteps. Chinese stars.”
“It was totally a ninja.”
She laughed silently, terrified of the ninjas and of pissing herself. Jamie waited a few moments, then rose slowly to standing and put out his hand, pulling her up. They looked across the road to the stadium, which rose into the black night like a temple, the empty metal benches watching nothing.
“Beautiful,” Jamie said.
They split a joint on the grass, staring up at the place the stars would have been if there wasn’t a weird, brownish haze clouding the night. The grass was itchier than Amina would have liked, and she needed to pee, but other than that, the campus was bizarrely peaceful, full of the hypnotic symmetry found on campuses everywhere—trees and lampposts and benches evenly spaced. She exhaled a tiny cloud, and it seemed to float right up into the pollution, where it would join gaseous and particle pollutants and come back down as acid rain in some northwestern lake, if that’s how that worked. Was that how that worked?
“Who did you have for chemistry?” She handed the joint back.
“Brazier. Who did you have?”