The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing: A Novel (32 page)

“We should go,” Jamie said, breaking what had become a too long silence.

“Right,” Paige said faintly, backing up. “I’ve got to get my bag from inside. Can you grab the car and meet me?”

“Yep.” He held out his hands. Paige threw him her keys.

“You can drive?” Amina asked.

“Around the parking lot,” Jamie said, and started off, already ten feet away before Amina could say goodbye.

“Well,” Paige said to Akhil. “See you on Monday, I guess.”

“Yeah.” Akhil watched her go, grinning that crazy grin that made Amina want to kick him or cover his head with a paper bag. “Wait!”

“Yeah?” Paige stopped.

He cleared his throat. “So … what’s your name?”

Paige looked at him for long, increasingly painful seconds. Finally she said, “We’re in Mathletes together, I just picked your lock, and you’re going to pretend you don’t know my name?”

“Well …,” Akhil started, but she was already walking quickly away, fingers sprinkling a wave behind her. She was halfway to the gym, her dorsal softness jumping in and out of puddles of light before Akhil let out his breath. His features pooled with panic. “Shit. Should I …?”

“Don’t ask me—” Amina started, annoyed, but he was sprinting before she even finished, his shirt filling with wind, his legs slowing to a jog and then a very quick walk that would catch Paige just before she got to the gym door. Amina watched as he tapped her on the arm and then recoiled, running a hand through his hair and saying something she couldn’t hear. There was a beat. A pause. A moment of silence between them that Amina would later recognize as the forgettable turning into the extraordinary. Then Paige threw her head back and laughed, revealing a white slash of teeth, the long curl of her neck, and a fate that Akhil never stood a chance of resisting.

BOOK 6
WE BURY WHAT LEAVES US

ALBUQUERQUE, 1998

CHAPTER 1

I
f her mother had been surprised at all to see Amina come home from the airport, she had not let on, frowning briefly at Monica’s car idling in the driveway before walking straight back to the kitchen, opening the fridge, and pulling out the dosa batter and potato masala for lunch.

“So you’re staying?” Kamala ladled white batter into a flat pan, slowly circling it into a thinner and thinner round.

“Yes, for a little while.” Amina sat at the kitchen counter, starving, her bag at her feet. “A few weeks, at least. I just talked to Monica, and she said—”

“Then I will get some beef and some chicken.” Kamala straightened her braid with a sharp tug.

“What?”

“You need to eat, don’t you?”

“Yes. Right.” Amina sipped at her water, as though it could satisfy her roiling gut. The hunger was making it hard to think.

“And then you can photograph the Bukowskys’ wedding, too,” Kamala said.

“What?”

“Julie’s daughter! I told you about it! The wedding this weekend?”

Amina looked at her mother blankly.

“Jenny Bukowsky is one of the nurses in the OR. Her wedding is Saturday and we have to go anyway. You can take some pictures. We’ll buy them for them as a present.” In one smooth move, Kamala flipped the thin pancake onto a plate, adding a fist-sized clump of potatoes in its center and folding it in half. She handed it to Amina. “Coconut or tomato chutney?”

“Yes, please.”

Kamala spooned a generous amount of both onto her plate before turning back to the stove. As she placed the ladle back in the batter, she said, “I canceled the dinner with Anyan. Eat.”

The pancake cracked under Amina’s fingers with a burst of steam that smelled of turmeric and chilies, filling her with relief so sharp that it erased everything but itself. She ate one dosa and then another, dimly aware of her mother spooning more chutney onto her plate and refilling her glass with water. Finally, in the middle of the third, she sat back to breathe, mouth tingling. She knew she should tell Kamala about Monica, the car, the conversation, and instead found herself saying, “Ask him if Wednesday works.”

Her mother took a quick glimpse over her shoulder. “What?”

“For dinner. Dr. George.”

“Really?”

“Yes.” Amina felt momentarily guilty at the pleasure that fanned out over her mother’s face. “This is really delicious, by the way.”

“I’ll make you one more.”

“No! Jesus. You’re going to get me fat if you keep feeding me like this.”

“No Jesus,” Kamala scolded lightly. She lifted the pan from the stove and placed it in the sink, turning the water on so it hissed as it cooled. One by one, she replaced the chutneys in the fridge door and turned around. She walked over to Amina, hugging her so briefly and furiously that she was five steps out of the kitchen before Amina thought to hug her back.

Half the village of Corrales and most of the OR staff of Presbyterian Hospital turned out for the Bukowsky wedding the following Saturday night. Just-shined cowboy boots escorted broom-skirted ankles first across the horse-patty-strewn parking field, then to the dance floor, a patch of dirt stamped level in the middle of some cottonwoods. Up on a nearby trailer bed, the Lazy Susannahs played bluegrass at top volume under a ring of Christmas lights, while dogs and small children hurtled through folding chairs and Johan Bukowsky clutched his shirt.

“I’m all right!” he proclaimed loudly at several intervals, drawing hoots of appreciation from the crowd. “It had to happen sometime, right? I just didn’t think so soon.”

This got a good laugh from everyone as his daughter’s seven-year engagement had been made much of during the ceremony, and Jenny herself ducked a shaking head into the groom’s neck. Amina stepped lightly onto the dance floor, snapping a photo and then receding as the hired photographer popped into her frame.

“Did you get it?” Kamala asked anxiously from behind her. “Do you need to get another?”

“Nope.” Amina turned the lens on her parents, who were looking particularly dashing and out of place in their best silks, like Bollywood actors who had wandered mistakenly onto the set of a western.

“Not us!” Kamala dabbed her upper lip with the tip of her sari. “You need to get the bride and groom standing and kissing! And then one of all those people that stand at the altar in fancy clothes and do nothing. And the cake! Don’t forget the cake!”

“The real photographer will do all that,” Amina reminded her. “I’m just here as a favor, remember?”

“It won’t be a good favor if you don’t get any nice pictures.”

“Isn’t this wonderful?” Thomas crowed. “Can you believe it?”

At least his inability to stay tear-free during a wedding was still firmly intact. Amina took a few quick shots of the Christmas lights reflecting in her father’s eyes, his hands rising as he danced at the side of the floor. It hadn’t been hard to convince him that a few weeks of
her events had canceled, suddenly opening up her schedule. Harder was convincing Jane she needed to stay, and to get freelancers to cover the gaps for three weeks of work. Or, as Jane called them, “people who really want your job.” The laugh that she had inserted to take the sting out of the threat only made Amina more nervous.

Amina pushed through the ring of people watching the dance to the backyard.

Tubs of beer glistened like buoys across the evening. A smattering of chatty groups had settled in for the night, and she tried to take a few candid shots of each before they grew aware of her. A dark-haired girl, one good year away from being self-conscious, was trying to make a black Labrador dance with her, paws to shoulders, and Amina backed up to get the right angle, not realizing until after the picture was taken that her ass was pressed into someone’s very still hands.

“Jesus!” She whirled around to find a tall old man in a huge suit looking vaguely stricken. “I’m so—”

“S-sorry about that,” the man stammered, looking down. “I wasn’t trying—”

“No, no, it was me. I wasn’t looking.” She felt herself blushing and held up her camera like it had pushed her. “Pictures!”

“Right. Yeah, okay.”

He was not old at all, she realized, on closer inspection of the man’s face. It was the baldness that had thrown her. His face was actually youngish, all thick eyebrows and rocky lines. The man smiled apologetically, and Amina automatically looked into her viewfinder, liking something about the shape of his skull and the curve of the cottonwood trunk behind him.

“Oh no, don’t do that,” he said, stepping out of the frame but not before she caught something. A flash of deep-set eyes. The girlish mouth. The cover of her high school copy of
Heart of Darkness
veered sharply into her mind, and she lowered the camera.

“Jamie Anderson.”

His smile was the same, a wince. “Hey, Amina.”

“I didn’t recognize you.”

“I know.”

“You’re bald.” Her shoulders jumped Tourretically. “I’m sorry!
That’s not—I just, uh, you know, you used to have”—Amina held her hands out from her head a foot in either direction—“hair.”

“I shave it in the summer.” Jamie rubbed his ear, which was burning pinkly. “Less hassle.”

His head glowed like a porcelain dish, and she fought the absurd urge to lick it. Time had rendered him taller, a little thicker, fuller in the face and shoulders. But that mouth. It had not changed even a little—heavy-lipped, petulant, hanging open slightly as if ready for argument. Amina stared at it, dimly aware that it was asking her something. “What?”

He pointed to the camera. “You’re the photographer?”

“Yes. I mean, not
the
photographer, like
the wedding
photographer, but a photographer. In the world. For a living.” Was she speaking English? She looked down and patted her camera like it was a lap dog.

“Ah.” Jamie took a sip of beer. “So what do you photograph? In the world. For a living.”

Amina colored, cleared her throat. “I can’t believe you still live here.”

“I just moved back six months ago. Position at UNM.”

“You’re a professor?”

“Anthropology.”

“Seriously? I mean, that’s great.”

Jamie looked at her curiously, half grinning. “So you’re back, too?”

“Visiting. Just for a little while. A few weeks. Something is wrong with my dad.” Why on earth had she said that? Amina’s face grew warm as Jamie looked at her with a little more concern than she felt comfortable receiving from near strangers. She looked away. Across the courtyard, a thin woman sat alone in a folding chair, a full paper plate of enchiladas on her lap. Amina lifted her camera and took a quick picture. “Is it serious?” Jamie asked.

“I don’t know.” Amina shifted uncomfortably.

“I’m sorry, I don’t mean to pry—”

“You’re not. I mean, you are, but it’s fine.” Amina fiddled with the flash on the top of her camera. “Anyhow, I should get back to it. I promised my mom I’d get pictures for her.”

“Oh. Right, sure.” Jamie backed up to let her pass, and she moved swiftly toward the bar.

“Good to see you,” he called after her, and she waved behind her, too unnerved to turn around.

Ridiculous. She had been ridiculous. Talking nonsense and still undone by the lower half of his face. The wine the bartender handed her a few moments later was a little too sweet, but she sipped it steadily, not daring until it was mostly gone to turn around and look at the party. Jamie had walked clear across the lawn, where he was bending down to give the bride a kiss on the cheek.