The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing: A Novel (26 page)

“Shockingly, she did not,” Amina said, ignoring the dark look Thomas shot her. Was it her problem Kamala selectively deleted messages when they came from people she did not like? No, it was not. Monica looked down at her watch. “Well, what time is your flight?”

“Around two.”

“I’ll give you a lift.”

“You have time?” Thomas asked.

“What?” Amina said, surprised. “Dad, I thought you—”

“Great! It will be fun,” Monica said, smiling. “We can sit at Garduño’s and have guac and beer until your flight comes. You wanna? I’ll bring the car around.”

Amina did not wanna, actually, but Monica was already going out the office door fast. Well, then. Amina stood up and looked around the office, feeling let down. She had wanted the drive to the airport with her father, but he had already turned back to his work, his eyes scanning the folder in front of him.

“Well, that’s lucky isn’t it?” he asked, and Amina nodded, embarrassed by the sudden tears that provoked her eyes. What were they for? Not her father’s constant distraction. Not Kamala’s predictable meddling. No, this was the feeling that always arose when she left, an unmet urgency, as though she hadn’t really done whatever it was she was supposed to do to make home feel like home again.

Thomas’s face fell. “Oh,
koche
. Don’t be upset about your mother.”

“I’m not,” she said unconvincingly, and he came around his desk. He rubbed his chin on the top of her head and pulled her into a tight hug.

“It’s all going to work out.”

“Yeah, I know,” she said, giving him one final squeeze before she picked up her bag and walked out of his office, to where Monica’s idling car waited.

The woman could not have driven more slowly. On the highway, cars shot by like comets, an occasionally curious head staring back, looking for signs of engine trouble or a flat. Monica flipped open the glove box, removing an emerald pack of menthols.

“What are you doing?” Amina asked.

“What does it look like?”

“I thought you quit years ago.”

“Did you quit?” Monica looked at her with a strange, flat gaze.

Amina flushed, and Monica thrust the pack at her with shaking hands. The car lighter popped out. Plumes of smoke filled the car. They were heading down the wrong exit ramp now, the blinker ticking wildly. Monica took a right at the end of it and then another right. She parked outside a Village Inn.

In front of them, the restaurant window showed two worlds laid one atop the other like splices of film: diners hunched into burgundy booths with cheap, brassy chandeliers hanging overhead, and the blank windshields of empty cars fading in and out.

“Your dad tried to save a dead kid,” Monica said.

Amina stared at the silhouettes, turning the sentence over in her head, trying to bend it into something that made sense. It did not. Monica cracked a window and pushed in the car lighter again.

“What?”

“Your dad. A few weeks ago.” She picked a stray piece of tobacco off her tongue, flicking it out the window. “In the ER.”

“A dead kid?”

The lighter popped out and Monica handed it to her. “Massive head trauma. There was a shoot-out in the mall.”

“Wait, Ty Hanson’s kid?”

“You should light that. Damn thing works for exactly three seconds.”

Amina pressed her cigarette into the fading orange coils.

Monica nodded. “He told you about it?”

“He told me Derrick had died.”

“Did he tell you what happened in the ER?”

Amina shook her head, and Monica looked out the window on her side.

“We were making rounds when we got the call that they were coming into the ER. Two kids. So we went rushing down to the emergency bay, and he just …” She shook her head. “I don’t know.”

“What?”

“He went to the wrong kid,” she said softly, sounding surprised. “The other kid was right there, the team already working on him, and Thomas just ignored him and went to Derrick instead.”

“But … well … he knew Derrick and not the other one, right?” Amina asked. “I mean, why is that such a big—”

“He was talking really loudly. Telling Derrick to calm down, that everything was going to be okay. Telling me to restrain him. And at first I just thought he was seeing something everyone else hadn’t noticed, like maybe—who knows—the kid is still alive? Stranger shit has happened in that ER, believe me. But then I see the kid’s eyes and he’s really gone and Thomas is on top of him, pushing him down like he’s fighting to get up, yelling at me to quit just standing there and help restrain him.” She looked at Amina apologetically. “I didn’t know what to do. I mean … I tried to tell him the kid was dead, and he got really angry. He asked another one of the nurses for help. She told him the same thing. He was furious, screaming at everyone. It took us a few minutes to get through.”

A few
minutes
? “Shit.”

The blur in the corner of her eye was Monica nodding.

“Have you seen that happen before?”

“You mean in a patient or in your dad?”

“Both. Either.”

Monica rolled a pocket of smoke around her mouth. “Sure, if someone is delusional. If he has, say, post-traumatic stress disorder or is taking hallucinogens or something.”

“You think he has PTSD?”

“Honestly, Amina, I don’t know what to think. There could have been any number of things that factored in. Did he eat enough that day? Had he slept well? Were there other things we didn’t know about?”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know. You know, something like this happens, you revisit a lot of things, wonder if you should have seen … I mean, but even that is not particularly useful. I have my theories, but they’re just that—a bunch of thoughts, not a medical diagnosis.”

“Like what?”

“Oh, Amina, I don’t think we should get into—”

“Like what?”

“I think he had a psychotic break.”

Amina looked down at her lap feeling like she had once when she was swimming in the ocean and something large had brushed against her leg. “What’s that?”

“It’s a loss of contact with reality.”

Heat flared between Amina’s fingertips, and she looked down to a solid inch of ash. She lifted the cigarette carefully to the window, tipping the spent end over and watching the ashes scatter through the glass. “He’s psychotic?”

“No, he’s not fucking psychotic, God.”

“Well, I don’t know!”

Monica glared at the steering wheel for a few moments before sighing, “Sorry. I just mean people can have psychotic breaks without harming themselves or anyone else, okay? He wouldn’t have hurt anyone. I’ve told them that.”

“Them?”

“The board.”

Amina’s mouth fell open. “They know?”

“They heard about it, obviously.”

“From who?”

Monica smiled sadly. “Amina, it’s a small hospital. I’m sure they heard it from a few people.”

Amina’s mind went to the white hospital corridors, the pools of light, the nurses’ faces as she and Thomas walked past. Did they know? Had the ICU nurse known? Had Dr. George? She flipped the air vents on the dash open and shut. “And was there, I don’t know, disciplinary action?”

“He was talked to. He’s knows he’s being watched.”

“Does my mom know?”

“I tried to tell her.”

“And?”

“She hung up before I could get it out.”

“Great.”

“I know, but what did I expect? No love lost there. And anyway, I’m not sure what we need to do at this point, besides get him to talk to someone.”

“Like a shrink?”

“Well, that would be great, but barring that, I mean, anyone.” Monica looked at her. “Someone he’d be honest with. You.”

Amina thought of her father on the porch, the tumbler in his hands.
Your mother has always been afraid of anything she can’t control
.

“Are you okay?” Monica asked, and Amina realized she was gripping her knees, her breath light and shallow.

She gave a quick, reassuring nod. It seemed important to be okay, suddenly. To be a part of Team Okay. “Yes, of course. It’s just a lot.”

“Yeah. That’s why I was trying tell you earlier in the week.”

They sat in silence, the sun settling on them like a hot, heavy sheet. The car seemed to grow smaller, the space between them suddenly filled with a thousand twitching anxieties.

“So now what?”

Monica shrugged, dropped her butt out the window. “I don’t know. I guess we just have to take what we know and go from there.”

“And what do we know?” Amina’s voice sounded small.

“We know that your dad had a delusional episode of some sort. We know that this isn’t typical behavior for him, and could even be an isolated incident. We know that typically, late spring is a hard time for him emotionally, and that the kid who died was the same age as, you know”—she took a short, sharp breath—“your brother.”

“You think this is about
Akhil
?”

“Honey, I have no idea what this is about.” Monica paused. “Why did you ask me if he was okay the other day?”

“What?”

“At the ICU. You asked me if something was wrong.”

“Oh, I … just thought he seemed off or something.” It wasn’t that Amina wanted to lie to Monica so much as she wanted to buy time, to think through things, to sit somewhere alone until she could put all the pieces together and come up with a plan. “I mean, has he seemed fine to you? Other than this?”

“It’s hard to tell. Mainly he just seems really exhausted. A little withdrawn. He sure doesn’t laugh as much.”

“Has he had any more episodes?”

“Not as far as I know.” Monica leaned back and ran her thumb under the seat belt still strapped over her chest. “I mean, look, thirty
years with the same hospital, no one wants this to be a lasting mark against him. But he’s not there to fix bunions, you know?”

Amina nodded, wanting to get out of the car, to walk around the parking lot until her head came back together.

“Okay,” Monica said after a moment, like they had come to some kind of resolution. “Well, so, you hungry?”

“Huh?”

Monica tipped her chin at the restaurant. “I mean, I know it’s no Garduño’s, but if you want some pancakes or something, we have the time.”

Amina shook her head. “I think you’d better just take me home.”

BOOK 5
THE BIG SLEEP

ALBUQUERQUE, 1982–1983

CHAPTER 1

S
hortly after almost driving himself and Amina into untimely deaths, Akhil went to sleep for three months. It wasn’t a straight sleep of course, but a persistent one, a sudden fever of exhaustion that lasted from December through February and found him sprawled over chairs and couches and rugs the minute he came home from school, eyes spinning under the silk of his eyelids. Gone was the constant barrage of words, replaced by an infantile drowsiness, eyes that barely focused, a mouth that opened only to eat or snore. He was too tired to think, he said when asked any question, and it was obvious.

The first week, neither Amina nor Kamala had any idea what to make of it. While Akhil’s wordy tirades had been exhausting, his sudden silence was eerie.

“He’s like this in school?” Kamala asked, her hand pressed to his forehead.

“I have no idea.” Amina tightened her ponytail, crossed her arms. It was paid misinformation. The day after “the car incident,” as she and Akhil referred to it, they had come to an agreement of sorts. Amina
now woke him after his lunchtime nap, made sure his eyes didn’t flutter while he drove, and said nothing about it to anyone. Akhil paid her $4.50 a week. Still, unlike the other brief nod-outs, this kind of sleeping was new. And worrisome. Amina looked at her brother, the stinky cavern of his mouth, his twitching nose.

“Must be the flu,” Kamala said, and Amina nodded just so she wouldn’t have to say anything incriminating.

During the second week of the Big Sleep, they found themselves conducting strange experiments. On Tuesday, Amina repeatedly kicked her brother’s ankles until he opened his eyes and pushed her away. At the Thursday dinner table, Kamala shouted out, “How about this trickling-down theory?” in a desperate attempt to engage him in a conversation. On Friday, they took turns shaking him hard until he woke up.