by Mira Jacob
“So can you see Akhil, too?” Bala asked Kamala, passing her the potatoes.
“Bala!” Sanji scolded.
“What? I’m just asking!”
“Nope,” Kamala said. “But did Thomas tell you what he’s wearing?”
“Yes,” Raj said hurriedly, just as Bala said “No” and Sanji looked like she might kill somebody.
“His jeans are short and he has paint on his hands!”
Sanji looked at Amina, alarmed.
“Everyone comes back looking like they did on their best day,” Amina found herself explaining, hoping that it somehow sounded less crazy coming from her, though from the look on Sanji’s face, it definitely did not.
“And have you ever seen him, Ami?” Bala asked.
Amina felt the heat rise to her face and avoided looking at her father. She shook her head.
Kamala shrugged. “He hasn’t come for us.”
“Thomas, what can I get you?” Raj asked. “You’re not eating. How about just plain rice and curds?”
“Actually, I should probably just get back outside.” Thomas pulled his napkin from his lap. “It’s getting late.”
“But we just sat!”
“You stay and finish. I’ll just be outside.”
“No, wait!” Sanji looked flustered. There was a short silence, a flurry of eye contact between the others. “It’s just we thought we should all talk about, the, uh—”
“YOU HAVE TO GO BACK TO TREAMENT!” Chacko boomed. Amina looked over to find her uncle standing tensely at the end of the table, fists clenched.
Thomas’s eyebrows rose in surprise. He blinked at Chacko a few times before saying, “Of course I will. I told you that.”
“Right now.” Chacko rapped his knuckles on the table. “Tonight.” Thomas laughed a little. “That seems unlikely.”
“This isn’t a joke, Thomas.”
“I’m aware of that.”
“Then quit this now.”
Thomas cocked his head, like a dog hearing a frequency unavailable to human ears, and Amina tensed.
“I’ve already called Presbyterian,” Chacko continued. “They have a bed ready for you in Admitting. Dr. George says you can restart your treatments first thing in the morning.”
Thomas said nothing for a moment, but Amina could feel him taking in all of them through his periphery. She saw the slight tic behind his eyes as he recalibrated.
“It’s not time,” he told Chacko.
“You don’t have more time!”
“We don’t know that.”
“I most certainly do.”
“No,” Thomas said gently. “You don’t. My reaction to the treatment has been anomalous.”
A high, furious blush rose in Chacko’s cheeks, as if he had been slapped. “You know as well as I do that that doesn’t mean a damn—”
“The thing is,” Sanji intervened smoothly, looking at Raj for backup, “it’s not as if recovery is an indefinitely open window, is it? Your health can weaken to the point where it’s irreversible, and then no treatment will help, isn’t it?”
“It’s a calculated risk.”
Chacko snorted. “And what about your family? What are they supposed to do with this nonsense?”
Kamala looked up from her plate in surprise. “Who, me?”
“You’re willing to risk their future too?”
“I’m not risking their—”
“Of course you are!”
“Me?” Kamala repeated.
“They have no problem with this.”
“Eda! What are you talking? You think they don’t—”
“Wait just one minute, Mr. Big Horses!” Kamala yelled at Chacko. “Don’t you sit there yak-yakking for me!”
“And Amina?” Chacko pressed on, ignoring her. “After everything, you’re going to put her through this?”
At last then, something to penetrate the glimmering sea of Thomas’s cheeriness. Amina saw the words sink in, the sharp tug of doubt suddenly creasing an otherwise smooth brow. She could feel her father not looking at her.
“She’ll be fine,” he said, but his voice no longer held the conviction it had before.
“No she won’t! How could she be? A father who would rather die than stay with her?”
A chapati, hurled with significant force, slapped Chacko full across the face. No sooner had it dropped than another replaced it, flung from the surprisingly accurate throwing arm of Kamala.
“Kam! Stop it!” Sanji cried.
Amina watched as her mother took another and chucked it at Chacko for good measure. It smacked into his chest.
“KAMALA,” Thomas said loudly, and her mother looked at him, furious, wild-eyed, shaking with adrenaline. He waited for her to lower her arm before saying softly, “Enough.”
Her parents looked at each other, the air between them twitching with something so raw and intimate that the others had to look away. “Go,” Kamala said. “I will come soon.”
Thomas turned from the table without another word and left. They sat back down and waited in silence, staring down at the tablecloth grease stains and stray bits of potato until the porch door clicked shut. Then they waited some more.
“Kam,” Sanji finally said. “Please.”
Kamala leaned back in her chair and crossed her arms, scowling at them.
“Ma.”
“What?”
“You’re the only one he’ll listen to.”
“Ha! Your father? Ha ha!”
“It’s true. You know it is. He’ll pretend like he’s ignoring you, but in the end, he’ll do whatever you say.”
Kamala snorted.
“So then what?” Sanji asked, frustration raking her voice. “Just sit back and let him die? Is that what you want?”
Kamala stared at her for so long that the air in the room seemed to harden. “You think that is the worst thing that can happen?”
Sanji looked confused.
“Fools.” Kamala hissed the word across the table like a dart, leaned into the silence that followed it. “Idiots. Know-nothings. Coming here with your dry potatoes and idiot demands that he get up tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, and for what? So you can say you did everything you could?”
“Ma, stop. They came because I wanted them.”
“And what about your father? Did you ask what he wants?”
“He doesn’t know what—”
“He wants to see Akhil.”
“A hallucination!” Chacko countered. “A side effect!”
“A miracle.”
“What does it even matter?” Raj cried, his voice high and wavery. “Kamala, don’t you see? He’s losing weight! He’s stopped sleeping! His bones are poking through his clothes!”
“You think I’m blind? That I don’t see?”
“We need to—”
“You think that I don’t know this man I have spent some thirty-five years with? I know him better than anyone—any of you! And you are wrong, Miss Amina Knows Everything, he does not listen to me! He has never listened to me! You think I don’t know what happens next?”
Silence fell over the table, heavy as a net, and in its descent, Amina’s head filled with the high electric keening of the lights, all of the lights, their background noise suddenly amplified. It felt like an invisible audience taking a step forward. It felt personal.
“You think he wants to stay with us more than he wants to go to Akhil?” her mother asked, voice tiny behind all the buzzing, and the truth felt like something small and sharp lodged into Amina’s heart.
The rest of the family was coming apart, Amina could feel it. At one end of the table, Raj had covered his face with his hands, and at the other, Chacko shook his head from side to side, like a dog trying to shake loose a collar. Bala and Sanji sat between them with wide, pooling eyes, Sanji already whispering, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” like she had caused what was to come.
“Then what …?” Chacko barked, his mouth trembling.
A spasm of
compassion flickered across Kamala’s face before it smoothed again.
“Go home,” she said.
CHAPTER 4
“I’m coming down,” Dimple said the next day.
Amina shut her eyes. This seemed to be everyone’s solution, as if it would make a difference. Monica had come just that morning, begging Thomas to change his mind and then weeping bitterly in the driveway when he wouldn’t. Son of a bitch, she’d said, and smoked two cigarettes right then and there.
“You can’t,” Amina said.
“Why not?”
It wasn’t that she didn’t want to see Dimple. She just didn’t want to see Dimple seeing what everyone else had. Amina sighed and rolled onto her back, coming face-to-face with the brassy smiles of the Greats.
“The show. It’s in three weeks. You don’t have time.”
“Don’t worry about that. It’s practically done already, and I can do most of the press from there. They want to talk to Jane more than me anyway, at this point.”
“Oh, great.”
“It’s not what you think. She’s saying she likes it.”
“She likes it?”
“No, duh, she fucking hates it. But she’s giving it good press because it’s the smart thing to do. She’s also saying you still work there even though she told me that if either of us set foot in Wiley Studios again, she will shank us.”
“She said shank us?”
“She said kill us.”
“Oh.” Amina tried not to feel upset by this. What did she think was going to happen?
Outside, Prince Philip was barking a low, constant complaint. Amina got up from the bed and ambled over to the window. Her parents were weeding in the garden, despite the afternoon heat.
“What?” Dimple asked.
“What?”
“You just said ‘nuts.’ ”
Amina moved away from the window. “My parents. It’s weird. They go everywhere together now. The garden, the porch, probably the bathroom for all I know. It’s like they’re dating or something.”
“That’s sweet.”
“No it’s not. It’s like having the sun set on the wrong fucking side of the sky.”
Dimple was quiet for a moment. “How are you doing?”
Why did everyone always ask that? “I’m fine.”
“My mom said last night was awful.”
“When are you telling her about Sajeev?”
“What?” Dimple’s voice bowed up in surprise. “I don’t know. I mean, that’s the last thing we need to think about right now, isn’t it?”
“Isn’t it just better to tell everyone and be done with it?”
“God, Ami. Compared to everything else going on? It’s practically a nonissue.”
“I mean, especially if you’re still planning on eloping after the show.” Amina paced around the room. “Because a wedding might be nice, you know. For everyone to think about.”
“What, like a distraction?”
“No,” Amina said, even though that was exactly what she meant. Was it really so bad to want something to look forward to? She opened up Akhil’s armoire and saw a grimy version of her own tired face staring back at her. “When do you get in?”
“Midnight tonight. We’ll come over in the morning. Who is that?”
“What?”
“Ami, seriously? Have your ears melted? Your doorbell just rang.”
It rang again. Prince Philip began barking like his back was on fire.
“Shit.” Amina looked down. She wasn’t wearing a bra, and her damp armpits smelled mildly like coffee. She looked around the floor for her bedroom slippers.
“Do you want me to call back?”
“No, I’ll just see you tomorrow.” She dropped the phone in the cradle and hurried down the stairs just as the ringing switched to knocking.
“Coming!” she shouted as she approached the door, and this unleashed a torrent of disapproval from Prince Philip, who seemed to be auditioning for the role of ferocious guard dog on the other side of it.
“Thank God,” Jamie said when she opened it, eyes looking back at the bared teeth. “Your dog is about to go Cujo on me.”
“Oh!” Amina crossed her arms over her chest. “Hey!”
“Can you help me out here?”
“SHUT IT, PRINCE!” Amina shouted, and the dog looked immediately sheepish, tail wagging. He sniffed Jamie’s pants.
“Prince like the singer?” Jamie watched him nervously.
“Like Prince Philip of England.”
“Ah.”
The dog wandered away, and Jamie looked at her expectantly.
“You look great,” Amina said.
Actually, he looked like a banker on a business-casual day—chinos, checked shirt, and good leather shoes, face the kind of clean-shaven that felt rubbery—but still.
“Yeah? Cool. I wanted to look nice to meet your parents.”
“Ha!” Amina tried to tamp down the flare of panic between her ribs. “Of course. Yes. And they want to meet you, too! We all do. I mean, not me, but you know, have you meet them. The thing is, though, it’s just not really a good time.”
“Yeah, I figured,” Jamie said. He took a step back, glancing at his car as if he were going to get back in it, and for a moment Amina thought it would be that easy. Then he shrugged. “I mean, I get it. I really do. Which is why yesterday when we got off the phone I just thought, You know what? It might never be a good time. So I might as well just go over.”
She was nodding like one of those nodding dolls, the ones that go from cute to stupid in about a second. She stopped. “Weird.”
Jamie frowned.
She shook her head, tried again. “We are weird right now. And the house. It’s …” She looked down at the good leather shoes. The good leather shoes were not going to like what was passing for normalcy behind the front door. Amina sighed. “It’s fucked.”
“Amina.”
It seemed like a bad idea, looking right at him. It seemed like the inevitable first step toward some tedious, emotional conversation about how bad things were getting, how shakily she’d handled them, how long it had been since she’d showered. But when she looked up, there was something sympathetic and a little amused in his eyes, and she found herself backing up. Jamie walked inside. He looked around slowly, lingering on the windowsills, the furniture, the chair with the clocks. Overnight, Christmas lights had been laid on the floor on either side of the hallway so that it lit up like a merry runway.
Amina pushed her hair behind her ear. “It doesn’t always look like this.”
“Okay.”
“Do you want some tea or something?”
“Sure.”
It was funny to have him walking behind her, his height out of context in her house. She felt like she needed to point out lighting fixtures, doorways, to push the walls a little farther apart. They went into the kitchen, where Thomas had crammed the countertop with candles of all shapes and sizes that morning, despite Kamala’s vocal disapproval. Amina turned the kettle on and retrieved a paper bag, opening it with an efficient snap. She began dropping the candles into it.
“Pretty house,” Jamie said.
Amina gave him a look.
“No, really. It’s obviously not, you know, in its best state right now, but it’s still nice. The trees are huge.” He looked into the courtyard. “Is that …?”
“A halogen lamp wrapped in Christmas lights. Yes. It’s funny how that’s the one that gets people. What kind of tea do you want?”
“Anything. Actually, decaf if you have it.”
She finished with the candles and rolled the paper bag tight, setting it down on the floor. At the back of the cabinet, she found an old herbal sampler and pulled out a bag of chamomile for him and a Red Label for herself. She turned on the kettle. “You hungry?”
“Nope.”
She walked a few paces toward and away from the stove. She could feel him watching her.
“I’m fine,” she said preemptive
ly. “I mean, I haven’t showered in a while. Or slept, really. And I keep worrying about my parents doing something crazier than they already have, but that’s just, you know. Fine.”
“Crazier?”
“You know, like pushing the fridge into the garden. Or burning the house down.” She laughed self-consciously, and sat. There was something sticky on the countertop, and she scraped her nail against it, aware that Jamie was still watching but unable to stop.
“So how is he?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe fine? Maybe metastasizing?”
“I’m sorry.”
“So am I,” she said, and felt a little pop in her chest when he reached across the counter and held her hand. The water heated with a quiet roar. “Was it like this with your mom?”
“Not really.”
“Just the part where she covered the whole house in lights?”
Jamie squeezed her hand.
When the teakettle screamed, Amina poured water into both cups, thinking of all the other things she had assumed would kill Thomas one day. The smoking. The scotch. Some kind of extremely rare blood-borne disease that he’d get but save the rest of the hospital from with a final heroic act.
“I guess I just didn’t think it would be like this,” she said out loud.
“Yeah.”
“No, I mean … it’s not like I never thought about how we would die. When I was a kid that’s all I thought about for a while—when it would happen and who would be next and how it would feel. I was sure one of them would disintegrate just from having to get up every day and take a shower. That part is the worst. But we made it past that, you know? I just thought we were in the clear.”
She heard Jamie get up and come around the counter, and jumped a little as his hands settled on her shoulders. She did not want to cry, so she didn’t, she just kept her chin tucked to her neck and let Jamie pull her into a backward hug, his long arms folding around her, his newly smooth chin pressing into her neck.
“And half the time, I don’t even know what’s real anymore,” she said, quieter now because it felt like the kind of secret you keep. “All these days start feeling like one really long day, like there’s no difference between being awake and asleep, and nothing will ever make it end, except that it’s ending, and I know that, and I don’t know what the fuck I’m supposed to do about it.”