by Mira Jacob
“Amazing country you have here!” Thomas said now, looking comically perplexed, and a new round of laughter pealed forth. He held out an arm and Amina limped into it.
“What’s wrong with your foot?” her father asked.
“Twisted it a little. It’s fine.”
“You must be the daughter,” the woman half of the older couple said, smiling at her too familiarly.
“Yeah.”
“We’ve heard a lot about you.”
“You got the scan?” Kamala asked.
“Amina is a photographer!” Thomas said with a flourish, like she was a rabbit he’d pulled from a hat.
“How wonderful,” the woman said.
“Anyan is running late?” Kamala tried again.
“Dr. George should be here in about five minutes,” the receptionist said, and the room seemed to deflate a little, punctured by the reality of why they were there.
“She’s having a show of her work in Seattle,” Thomas pressed on, but the others just smiled wanly at Amina. The male half of the older couple stroked his wife’s hand.
“Dr. Eapen.” Anyan George swung through the waiting room door, looking harried. “Hello, sir. Sorry to be late. I have your slides. You ready to come back?”
“Sure, sure.” Thomas winked to the others with the bravado of a mischievous kid slipping into the principal’s office. “Let’s do it.”
Anyan George would not sit down. This would have been unremarkable had he not directed the Eapens into their seats and then sat down himself, only to spring back up seconds later, shoving his chair in. Now he stood at the light board, clutching the envelope in his hands with a strange look. The family watched him for half a minute. Finally Thomas asked, “Everything okay?”
“Yes.” He did not elaborate.
“The scans?” Amina prompted.
“Yes.” He flipped the switch for the light board and began mounting them. Thomas stood up, moved closer. Together, they looked at the scans. Or rather, Thomas looked at the scans, and Dr. George looked at Thomas, a strange, unreadable expression on his face. Her father moved closer to the scan, then farther. He pulled the slide from the light board and read along its edge.
“What.” Amina’s fingers dug into the chair.
“It’s yours,” Dr. George said. “I checked.”
“My God,” Thomas said.
“What’s wrong?” Amina asked.
“I was late because I called Wilker in for a second opinion,” Dr. George said.
“And he said?”
“Yes. By as much as thirty percent.”
“What?” Kamala asked.
No one answered for a long moment. Amina stared at the scan, trying to see whatever they were talking about last time, but it looked the same—the seahorses, the egg, the swirls of cortex.
“Did Lowry take a look?” Thomas asked Dr. George.
“He agreed, though obviously he’s concerned that we might not have gotten the angle right, so the reduction might not be quite so significant.”
“Reduction. Meaning it’s smaller?” Amina asked.
“Yes,” Dr. George confirmed.
“It’s getting smaller?” Her voice rose.
“It looks that way,” Thomas said.
“Ha!” Kamala shouted, jumping to her feet like a tiny, sari-clad swordsman. “Ha, ha, ha!”
Amina looked from her father’s perplexed face to Anyan’s. Her ankle throbbed dangerously. “That’s good, right?”
“It’s unusual.” Thomas looked at Anyan. “Did you talk to MD Anderson?”
“We’re sending the scans to Dr. Salki today.”
“Have they seen regression of this sort before?”
“No.”
“Is that bad?” Amina asked, hating how her lack of medical understanding left her with a five-year-old’s sense of nuance: good/bad, light/dark, nice/scary.
“No, not at all,” Dr. George said. “Just unusual. We haven’t seen a regression of this sort before, so we’re cautious about putting too much faith in it until we know more about what could have caused—”
“A miracle,” Kamala cut in. “It’s a miracle, isn’t it?”
Dr. George looked flustered. “I’m hesitant to call it anything at this point. I think it’s important that we temper our hope with—”
“Of course you are!” Kamala scoffed. “You doctors are always hesitant, isn’t it? Experts at poking around in the body but unable to accept real healing when it comes from God himself?”
“It came from the chemo, Ma,” Amina pointed out, but her father shook his head.
“That’s unlikely. I’ve only gone through one full course. It would be highly unusual for that to have any effect, much less a sizeable one.”
“What about your symptoms? Have you noticed any change?” Dr. George asked.
“Yes, actually. The hallucinations have lessened significantly.”
“In intensity or frequency?”
“Both. I don’t see them as much. I don’t hear them talking. Although lately …” Thomas shook his head. “I don’t know.”
“What?”
“I’ve been smelling something burning for the past few days. At first it was faint enough that I thought it was just one of our neighbors clearing brush a few houses away, but—”
“That’s all in his mind,” Kamala said to Dr. George, as though this needed explaining. “No one in the village is dumb enough to start fires in June.”
“Seizing,” Dr. George said.
Thomas nodded. “I thought it might be.”
“What?” Amina asked, looking from Thomas to Kamala. “You thought you were having a seizure last night?”
“That’s why I wanted a scan,” Thomas said.
“The good news is that it appears you weren’t,” Dr. George said in a calming voice that seemed to trigger his bedside manner. He looked from Kamala to Amina to Thomas, reassurance settling over his features, and took a seat, motioning for Thomas to do the same. “Thomas and I are trained to be skeptical of a sudden shift like this, especially when it has no predecessor, but it is obviously a welcome development. The best option now is to proceed with the exact same treatment over the next month and see how things go.”
“Yes,” Thomas said, nodding along. “Yes.”
“So what,” Kamala said. “We do more of everything? Chemo, radiation, everything?”
“Yes. Stick to the course. We’ll need to keep an eye out for symptoms, erratic behavior, anything new or unusual. Amina, you’ll be in town?”
“Yes. Mostly. I mean, I might travel for a day or so, or a weekend, but yes.”
“Amina’s having a show!” Thomas burst out, glad to finally have somewhere to put his hopefulness.
Dr. George wrote down something on a prescription pad, handing it to Thomas.
“Very high, prestigious show of work.” Kamala nodded, nudging Amina. “An honor of her artsmanship by the authorities of Seattle.”
“It’s a favor for a friend,” Amina corrected, glaring at her mother, but Dr. George seemed to take no notice either way, standing up abruptly.
“So then, barring any changes, I’ll see you all back here next week?”
He ushered them out of his office brusquely, his eyes guarded, as if the hope of living was somehow harder to deliver than the threat of death.
Outside, in the bright slam of midmorning light, the Eapens stood stunned on the sidewalk. Amina shifted her weight carefully, but even her ankle felt deceivingly better, and she stood on it gingerly. Nobody knew quite what to say, though there was a palpable relief between them, a collective cord that seemed to have slackened, leaving them both more independent and more connected than they had been entering the office.
“Well,” Kamala said, and Amina turned to find her mother’s face frozen in a pained, happy grimace, as though her cheeks were trying to detach from the worry that had taken it over for the last months. Thomas saw it, too, and put out his hand, wiggling his fingers like you woul
d for a child until she took it. He squeezed her hand, blinking the wet out of his own eyes.
“Well,” he repeated.
BOOK 11
A STATE OF HOPE
ALBUQUERQUE, AUGUST 1998
CHAPTER 1
That night Thomas and Kamala fought each other from one side of the house to the other. Teeth bared, eyes flashing, they tore into each other with carnivorous gusto, laying bare all the injustices they had suffered at each other’s hands over the last decades, the slights, the missteps, the heartbreaks. It was as if, released from the burden of having to care for each other, they’d found themselves in a pain deficit and were working hard to restore the equilibrium.
They were doing a good job of it, Amina thought from the safety of her bedroom. While the cause of the fight was unknown to her, the accusations of selfishness, martyrdom, ineptitude, and snobbery were staples from her childhood, none too surprising, though all tripped the same old fears, resurrecting a years-old sadness that her parents, at their core, were absolutely wrong for each other. In the midst of everything, she’d forgotten about that. She called Dimple.
“They’re going at it.”
Downstairs, the yelling had switched abruptly into Malayalam. It rumbled up the stairs like an oncoming thunderstorm.
“Sounds like fun.”
“Pretty much. Anyway, how are you?”
“Good! Good. Really good, actually.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. I, um …” Amina heard the opening of the gallery door. “Hold on a sec.” A crinkly paper noise, and when Dimple next spoke, it was through chewing gum. “I’m engaged.”
“What?”
“Sajeev and I are getting married.”
“What?”
“We’re—”
“Since when?”
“Last week. I wanted to tell you, but I didn’t want to, you know, interrupt.”
“Interrupt what? I’m not doing anything out here.”
“You’re dealing with your dad.”
“You’re getting married to Sajeev?”
“Well, you don’t have to say it like that.”
“No, I just mean … was this a, uh. I mean, did you …” Amina swallowed, entirely unsure of what she was trying to ask. “Okay, so wow.”
“You sound freaked out.”
“No! I’m just a little surprised. You just started seeing each other, you know?”
“We’ve known each other our whole lives.”
“Yeah, but not like, known each other.”
“I know plenty,” Dimple said with a telling laugh.
“Right,” Amina said, falling silent until she realized that Dimple was waiting for more, that this was one of those moments they weren’t going to get back. She swallowed and threw her voice an entire octave higher. “Congratulations!”
“Don’t be a dick.”
“No, I’m not! I’m happy for you! I mean, surprised, obviously, but happy!” She was aware that talking in exclamation points was undermining her message but could not stop once she had started. “He seems like a great guy!”
“Well, he is,” Dimple said suspiciously. “And we have more in common than you think. He knows a lot about photography.”
“I know—that day at the Hilltop. He was talking about it nonstop, remember?”
Dimple’s voice changed abruptly, the giddiness returning. “Really?”
“Yes,” Amina said, relieved to finally find her footing in the conversation. “Remember? He had all that stuff to say about Charles White, and it was good, really. And then he knew about my stuff, which, you know—”
“Clearly means he’s well versed,” Dimple finished.
“Exactly.” Amina smiled. “So what happened? Did he do the whole knee thing?”
“Well, no, because we were in bed.”
“Please tell me you didn’t tell your parents that part.”
“I haven’t told them anything yet. I’m thinking of not telling them at all.”
“Oh, c’mon.”
“No, really. We were thinking of eloping the weekend after the show. You know, like, Vegas-style or city hall or something.”
“You can’t do that! What about the family?”
“Oh my God, two months back home and they’ve brainwashed you.”
“No! Well, maybe. I mean, why start things like that? You’ve got your whole lives to disappoint everyone. Weddings are important.”
“Says the woman who captures their most compromising moments.”
“Not fair. And you know what I mean.”
“Yeah, I know.” Dimple was quiet for a long moment, and in that moment Amina realized her parents had stopped yelling. She limped down the hall to Akhil’s room and looked down into the driveway. Both cars were still there.
“I feel like my parents won,” Dimple said.
“Won what?”
“That’s the funny part. I mean, what did they win, really? So I’m going to end up with a Suriani guy. Sajeev, of all people. So what. I just … I don’t want to deal with my mom gloating.”
“She won’t gloat.”
“Amina.”
“Okay, fine, but it’s not like you did it so she would gloat. That would be worse.”
“Do you really think I don’t know him well enough?”
“No, it’s not that. I guess I just didn’t see it coming,” Amina said carefully, knowing she wasn’t quite telling the truth. She paused, thinking about how sometimes a surprise was just the acknowledgment of something you had tried hard to ignore. Of course Dimple was going to marry Sajeev. Amina said, “I guess it makes sense, in a way.”
“I just keep thinking, you know, our parents did it. And they didn’t know each other. And Americans get divorced all the time for, like, no reason. Someone cheats. Someone spends too much money. Someone tells someone they aren’t the person they married, like that’s so fucking unusual. So if you need to just close your eyes and jump …”
“You might as well do it with an Indian.”
“Exactly.”
Amina limped over to her desk, where the items found in the garden were now in the active dust-collecting stage. She ran her finger along the edge of the trophy.
“I think I’m falling for Jamie Anderson,” she said.
“AMINA!” The bedroom door flew open with a loud smack.
“JESUS!” Amina screamed.
Thomas stood in the door frame, his forehead dotted with sweat from the exertion of fending off Kamala.
“What?” Dimple yelled. “What happened?”
He walked into the room, fists clutched around a dinner roll and a bag of ice.
Amina swallowed. “I’ve got to go.”
“What just happened? Are you okay?”
“I’m fine. My dad’s just here.”
“Did you just say you were—”
“Later,” Amina said as her father glared at her feet.
“Okay, but call me back!”
It was not, in fact, a dinner roll, Amina saw as her father uncurled his fist. It was an Ace bandage. Thomas jerked his hand in the direction of the bed. “Sit.”
Amina limped over and sat. Her father pulled up a chair and raised her leg to rest her foot on his knee. His fingers went straight for the spot that hurt the most, pressing it. She gasped.
“How did this happen?” he growled.
“Accident.”
“What kind of accident?”
“I was running in the dark.”
He placed one hand on her heel and the other on her toes, rotating her foot forward too far. She jerked it away.
“That hurts?”
“Yes.”
He pressed his fingers beneath her anklebone. She gritted her teeth and nodded.
“You’ve sprained it. I’m going to wrap it, and then you should keep it elevated and iced.”
“How long will it be sprained?”
“Probably a week or two.” He began to unroll the bandage over her foot, wrapping it ar
ound. “Why were you running in the dark?”
“I was robbing a bank.”
The corner of Thomas’s lip twitched, though he was still too wound up to actually crack a smile. Below them, Kamala banged pots and pans. Thomas wrapped the bandage quickly and evenly, putting a nice layer of pressure between Amina and the pain. When he was done he lifted the whole thing and gently helped her swing it onto the bed. He put two pillows under it and then laid the ice over it.
“You’ve taken Advil for the swelling?”
“No.”
He nodded and left, returning shortly with a glass of water, two pills, and two more pillows taken from Akhil’s bed, which he put behind her.
“How’s that?” He backed up, knocking his head against the canopy.
“Much better, thanks.”
“You should take it easy for a few days.” He walked to the window, hands in pockets, shoulders rounded, entirely too large for the room. “So your mother tells me you’re dating a boy from here.”
“Yeah. Jamie Anderson.” She paused a moment for the recognition and, getting none, added, “We went to high school together.”
“Mesa?”
Amina nodded. Where else? “He’s a professor at the university. Anthropology.”
“Interesting. Well, tell him I look forward to meeting him next week.”
“Yeah. Wait, what are you talking about?”
“Your mother said he’s coming to dinner.”
“What? No! Jesus! I haven’t even asked him yet. I haven’t even decided to ask him yet. Not that I won’t. I just, you know. Never mind. It’s fine.”
Thomas raised his eyebrows at her.
“It’s fine,” Amina repeated, embarrassed by her outburst. “I should probably just be thankful that she’s over the Anyan George thing.”
“I wouldn’t go that far. You know your mother.”
Amina shook her head. It was amazing, really, how much knowing Kamala didn’t actually help.
“Invite the boy to dinner,” her father suggested. “It will force her to give up.”
This was a lie, the kind Thomas had told Amina often in her teen years, when saying “Nothing can make your mother give up” would have been as unkind as it was true. And Amina nodded, not because she believed him but because she appreciated the sentiment behind the lie, which was simply that her father wanted to help. She grabbed his hand, squeezed it.