The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing: A Novel (13 page)

And there it was, smooth and small as a child’s coffin. The russet wood glided under her hand; the tiny brass handles were cool on her fingertips. In Montana, the woman who sold her the antique flat file laughed at the two hundred dollars Amina had offered, telling her she could never accept that much for “drawers that won’t hold a damn thing.” When Amina told her they were for pictures, the woman laughed again, and took the money.

One by one Amina opened the drawers, pulling out the contents in order. She moved methodically, careful not to look down. It was important not to look down. It was important to be ready.

When every drawer was empty she walked out of the closet and back to the window seat, and placed the picture from Jose on top. She looked at it again for a long minute, staring at the scuffs in Grandmother Lorber’s shoes before flipping it over.

Underneath was Dara Lynn Rose, on the morning of her second wedding, her hand wielding a large hairbrush. She was screaming, her teeth bared like a tiger’s, thin strands of spittle hanging from them. Seconds later she had chucked the brush at her husband-to-be as he fled the room. (“I’m superstitious,” she had explained to Amina later. “My first husband had a heart attack chasing a black cat off the lawn.”)

The next was Loraine Spurlock, looking up at her stepfather with adoring eyes. He bent to kiss her, his mouth open, his tongue lying in it like a wet animal.

Then came the McDonald sisters, Jeanie and Frances, their four hands gripping a just-thrown bouquet, splitting the baby’s breath with
determined fingers. They smiled through jaws hard with determination.

Amina moved on to Justin Gregory, the five-year-old ring bearer who had been told he couldn’t leave once the ceremony started. He stood behind the bride and groom, staring up at them with a tiny pillow in his hands, a wet stain spread down the front of his crotch. A puddle shimmered at his feet.

Wide-lipped Angela Friedman and her new son-in-law greeted Amina in the next shot, her fingers digging into his neck as he kissed a bridesmaid on the cheek. Then it was the gray coil of Grandpa Abouselman, legs folded like newspaper against his wheelchair while couples danced in the background.

Amina lifted picture after picture, soothed by the rise of a lip, the splay of fingers, the stillness of passing disasters. She knew them well. She felt images rise off the page, the lines of one bleeding into the next until hands turned into flowers and veils became windows. Her heart unbuckled for the familiar faces, their familiar pains. She shuffled through them slowly until at last she was looking at the satin-covered knees pressing the ground next to a toilet, the bouquet on the tile floor. She stared at this one for long seconds, her fingers pressing against the edge. And then the stall turned into the underside of a bridge, the bouquet into a falling man. She was looking at Bobby McCloud.

CHAPTER 4

T
he George Washington Memorial Bridge, more commonly known as the Aurora Bridge, has been an anomaly in Seattle since its construction in 1932. In a city where eight-lane highways have been avoided in favor of two-lane roads that break for the rise of drawbridges between sweetly named neighborhoods—Fremont, Queen Anne, Ballard—it has always been violently off scale, looking from below like some terrible, sky-slung hammock. Touted as the final link in the Pacific Highway, it became the destination of choice for Seattle’s suicidal before it was even completed. The first person to jump off the bridge did so in 1932, one month before its opening to commemorate George Washington’s birthday. The 176th person arrived on August 26, 1992.

August in Seattle: an eternity of dusk that hints at Greek mythology, a sun setting so slowly over the Puget Sound that everyone looks like immortal versions of themselves. On August 26, 1992, it made them want their picture taken.

“Just one quick one, okay?” The Korean guy standing in front of Amina was too small for his cargo pants.

She looked at her camera apologetically. “I’m actually on assignment for the
Post-Intelligencer
.”

“Great.” He smiled and threw his arms around the two women at his sides. “Cheese!”

Amina did a quick calculation in her head (time explaining job versus time taking picture) and hit the shutter release. Fine. Done. She avoided eye contact with anyone else as she walked across the deck of the
Crystal Blue
, fighting the claustrophobia that crept into her lungs when on a yacht.

This particular yacht was teeming with the young programmers and developers of Microsoft. If it was jarring to see other kids just out of college having their success celebrated with an evening of play on the Puget Sound, it was downright annoying not to understand them. What on earth was a Linux? The very idea that something called C++ existed made her want to drink, but she was not there to drink, she was there to capture Seattle’s newest elite, their hoodied shoulders and chipper smiles.

“Give us a
feel
of the event,” the photo editor’s new assistant at the
P-I
had said, as though Amina would be attending a cashmere sweater. She had wandered around overwhelmed. She hadn’t found her shot yet, and now, crawling through the locks and canals on the way back to Lake Washington, she could feel her need to get off the boat as sharply as a full bladder.

“So fucking cool, right?” a guy with orange shorts said to his friend, pointing at the Aurora Bridge in front of them. “I can never get over how cool that looks. It’s so, like, Legoland, right?”

“Totally,” the friend agreed. “Majorly Legoland.”

Amina had slipped behind them, trying to get the right angle on their beers raised in toast to the cantilevered spine, when she saw the man. He was standing in the middle of the bridge, dressed in yellow with white on his face. A clown. This is what she thought at first. She zoomed in and saw a feathered headdress. She took the picture.

The guy in the orange shorts turned around. “Hey, didn’t see you. We should turn around, no?” He flashed her a smile.

“No … I …” She pointed at the bridge. “I was taking a picture of that guy.”

Orange Shorts followed her finger. “The guy cleaning the bridge?”

“I don’t think he’s cleaning it.”

“He’s wearing a uniform.”

“He’s wearing feathers,” Amina said.

“What?”

The
Crystal Blue
was slipping through the water at a steady pace, gliding closer to the bridge and the man, and now Amina could see him clearly through her viewfinder, his headdress shivering in the breeze.

“Hey, did they arrange for a bungee jumper?” Orange Shorts called out, pointing at the bridge. Heads turned up. The words buzzed over the lips of the crowd.

“Bungee jumper!” Someone yelled. A whoop went up from the boat.

This seemed to startle the man in the headdress, and he wobbled on the bridge uncertainly, eliciting a collective gasp. Amina moved to the edge of the prow, steadying herself against the railing.

The high wail of sirens seeped toward them, growing louder. Police cars were coming down Aurora in a steady line, and an ambulance followed, lights flashing. The whole boat seemed to swell with recognition:
Look! Police! It’s a jumper!
People were pressing in on her sides now, and Amina nudged them away, ignoring a disgruntled huff in her ear. She pulled her lens wide to get a better read on the cars, and this is what she was doing when Bobby McCloud decided to take a step forward. Not that she knew his name, or anything else about him at the time—all of those details would come later, as she scoured every last article she could find.

For weeks, months, she would wonder what made her ratchet up the aperture so suddenly, what guided her finger to the shutter release so that when Bobby McCloud flew past her lens, she would capture him. And yet she had done it. She’d gotten the impossible shot. In the photograph that appeared next to the article, her first ever and only to
run on a front page, Bobby McCloud would appear forever suspended between the arching underside of the Aurora Bridge and the flat screen of the water, his headdress folding against the air like wings in prayer, his arms flung wide.

“Spectacular,” the photo editor had said before rushing the picture to print.

He had pulled a few other pictures from her roll (“Where are the afters?” he had asked, looking fleetingly disappointed when she shook her head) and now turned his attention to the televisions in the far corner of the room. All three local stations were covering the story in as much depth as the few hours allowed, taking statements from eyewitnesses and panning again and again to the railing on the bridge.

Amina watched, wishing she felt sick, or distraught, or anything other than coolly relieved. Even the Microsoft crowd had the decency to be rattled—telling and retelling the last twenty minutes of the ride in shaky voices, as if there were some clue between seeing the man and watching him fall that would reverse the motion. One woman just bawled and bawled until two female colleagues hoisted her to the lower-deck bathroom.

Amina left the office, driving immediately to Linda’s Tavern. Forty minutes later, snug in the peaty blur of three beers, she ordered a fourth. When the door opened to reveal a young man wearing a jacket that looked like the one Akhil died in, her hands began to shake.

It was the money that killed him. That’s what the papers said, first the
P-I
and
The Seattle Times
, then the
San Francisco Chronicle
,
The Washington Post
, and
The New York Times
as the story went national. The $162 million settlement for the Puyallup Tribe of Tacoma Indians—the second-largest in history between the Native Americans and the U.S. government—had come for Bobby McCloud like it had for his brother, his cousin, and his uncle before that.

In the library, hunched over the microfiche reader in a sour-smelling
sweatshirt, Amina followed the previous years’ news. The tribe’s decision to give up their claim to the land along the Tacoma basin had been contentious from the start. The land—18,000 acres that were allotted to them in the Treaty of Medicine Creek in 1854 and then slowly poached in a series of “negotiations” that left them on about 33 acres by 1934—was their birthright. Taking money for it was a direct refutation of that right, and of everything their ancestors had stood for. It would only bring harm, even if it did give every member of the tribe twenty thousand dollars right away.

Blood money
, Amina heard Akhil saying so clearly that for a minute it seemed the past nine years had not actually occurred. She looked up from the hum of the microfiche, but the only other person in that dank corner of the library was an old man who looked half-asleep. She read on.

Opinions on taking the settlement varied widely within the tribe, as did the imagined uses of the twenty thousand dollars. People said they’d get food, winter clothes, but some expressed misgivings.

“I’m just trying to make sure I don’t blow it,” Raydene Feaks, a thirty-four-year-old recovering crack addict at the tribal treatment center, said (
PUYALLUP TRIBE PREPARES FOR WINDFALL
,
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
, February 23, 1990).

“The twenty thousand is not the point,” Bobby McCloud maintained. “The one hundred thirty-eight million in social programs, and business start-up money, and land—that’s going to be the end to our poverty.”

Bobby McCloud did not drink. He did not smoke, and he did not allow smoking in his office at the Tribal Center, where pictures of him with Jesse Jackson and Bill Clinton hung on the walls, along with his diploma from the University of Washington. At age thirty-six, Bobby McCloud was one of the very few in the tribe who had managed to dodge every statistic coming at him, from the eight-thousand-dollar median income to the ninth-grade level of education to the 50 percent chance of becoming dependent on alcohol or drugs by the time he was sixteen.

“Everyone is saying our birthright is the land. Our birthright is to live! It’s to succeed, and grow, and watch our children grow,” Bobby McCloud said.

A-fucking-men, Red Man
.

She must have PTSD. Or maybe it was just run-of-the-mill drunkenness. Or simply the obvious reaction to stumbling into the exact kind of story that would have infuriated her brother. The second time Amina heard Akhil, she was in bed, photocopies of Bobby McCloud articles scattered in piles around her. She blinked down the dark hallway that cut through the center of her railroad apartment. It was empty. She got up and shut the bedroom door.

When the phone rang, jolting her out of a midafternoon nap, Amina knocked over the glass of water on her bedside table. “Shit.”

“They are calling because you own the rights,” Dimple said. “You’ve got to do something.”

The water spilled over the edge and began pattering down on the last shirt she’d worn outside of the house three days earlier. Amina added a few stray socks to the pile to soak it up. A mostly full bottle of whiskey stood sentry on the nightstand, watching.

“Amina, are you listening to me?”

“Yeah.”

It had been a mistake to tell Dimple about the calls. Of course she was going to want to “take advantage” of the offers coming in from agencies wanting the picture. Of course she would see this as an opportunity for them to “cut their teeth” (an expression that always brought the image of a horse bit into Amina’s mind) in the world of agencies.