The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing: A Novel (35 page)

“Dad? Dad didn’t …” Amina turned to look at her father, who was staring at Akhil’s leather jacket with the sad, stunned recognition of a dreaming man returning to the waking world.

“Dad?”

Thomas shut his eyes.

“Dad, what did you do?”

“I’m so sorry,” her father said.

BOOK 7
AKHIL THE GREAT, THE LATE

ALBUQUERQUE, 1983

CHAPTER 1

P
aige and Akhil could not get enough of each other.

Yes, it was a cliché, one that Amina had often heard describing the kind of love that required couples to sit on each other’s laps when the whole couch was available, but with Akhil and Paige, it was literal. From the start, it seemed to her like they’d plunged into an underwater world in which the only way to breathe was through each other.

It was a shock, of course, seeing Akhil—only recently minted into fuckability by Mindy—approach Paige in the quad the following Monday with a notebook that he’d emblazoned with her name in black Sharpie. No one expected Paige to blush any more than they expected Akhil to reach out and tuck her hair behind her ear before walking quickly away. But then notes were exchanged in lockers. A hide-a-key box was left wrapped on the hood of the station wagon to prevent future lock-outs. Less than one week later, when they were kicked out of the library for talking too loudly about the drought in Ethiopia, it seemed strange that it had taken them two months to get together.

She was perfect for him. Yes, another cliché, but there were times
when Amina felt that somehow Paige Anderson had been pulled out of a very specific dream that no one but Akhil would have bothered to have. It wasn’t just that her upbringing on one of the finest university campuses in America had left her with a carefully curated collection of protest T-shirts (it had), or that she referred to her parents as “Bill and Catherine” (she did), or that she was leading a student coalition to campaign against the nuclear-waste site just outside Socorro (she was), or that her thighs and breasts and blurry mouth were primed for constant, prolonged attention (they were)—it was that every part of Paige, from her conscience to her politics to her grown woman’s body, was suffused by an optimism so assured that to stay with her, Akhil had to stop being such an angry dick.

“So what?” Amina overheard Paige saying to Akhil one morning during one of his poor-Indian-me rants as they walked across campus. “We’re a country of immigrants, and you’re the first wave. At least you’ve got an opportunity to set your own stereotype.”

Paige believed that changing the world for the better was a reasonable goal, that racism could be unhinged by education, that nuclear disarmament should be embraced in their lifetimes, and that equality between the sexes would surely occur as women integrated into careers dominated by math and science. She also believed every act of consensual sex released positive energy into the atmosphere.

Most important, Paige believed in Akhil. Or at least gave him the benefit of most doubts. In her eyes, Akhil’s political tirades became evidence of great passion. His neuroticism belied a big heart. His tendency to pick fights was a desire for honest communication. His pot habit was introspective.

And strangely enough, with Paige’s eyes on him, Akhil began to transform. Amina watched with marvel as her brother’s rants became less didactic, his worries developed rich humanitarian undertones, and his endless baiting turned into invitations for “discourse.”

“Do they ever stop talking?” Dimple asked some weeks later, as their dark heads crossed the campus, ducked to the world outside of each other.

“Not really,” Amina said. But she had listened in on enough of their phone conversations to know that it wasn’t so much what they
talked about (Van Halen, apartheid, Riemann sums) as the charged pauses in between, the reevaluating and rethinking, that was truly remarkable. In fact, it wasn’t until Akhil stopped driving Amina home altogether, and started returning from “after school activities” with lips rubbed to pulp, that Amina began to worry that the union might be too intense.

“We’re just driving to the top of the mountains and back down,” he told her when she hinted as much. “We do some of our best thinking at higher altitudes.”

And where was Jamie during all of this? Right there, and yet, somehow, not. He still showed up for English class, and he still seemed interested when she was talking, but beyond catching eyes once or twice, neither of them knew what to say to the other. It wasn’t a lack of interest so much as an eclipsing of one—a mutual embarrassment that their own odd exchange could be overshadowed by something as potent as their siblings’ connection.

“I am stone in love with her,” Akhil said to Amina a month after the dance, in one of the only direct exchanges they would ever have on the subject. They were just starting out for school. It was spring and everything was rain clean, and new, tiny shoots of green just beginning to dapple the fields. When Amina sneaked a look at his face, she saw that spring had come to Akhil as well, his insides finally catching up with his outsides, leaving him altogether reborn. He had finally found an America he could love; an America that would love him back.

CHAPTER 2

T
homas was home for dinner. What exactly the occasion was, neither Amina nor Akhil knew, but they had come home from school to find him chatting in the kitchen with their mother, stealing pinches of carrots from her cutting board as she grated them.

“What are you doing here?” asked Akhil, never one to wait for a reveal.

“Case finished early. Thought I’d get some rest.”

“Oh.”

“Carrot halwa!” Kamala announced, like anyone had asked.

“How was school?” Thomas smiled and the children mumbled vaguely at him, a little scared of his enthusiasm.

“Wash up!” Kamala commanded. “We’ve got lamb curry and rice.”

Half an hour later, they sat at the table, Kamala ordering everyone to try everything, as though they had never had her cooking before.

“So I’m going to prom,” Akhil said, trying not to look pleased.

“You are?” Amina said.

“What’s a prom?” Kamala asked.

“It’s a dance. A formal one. That you go to. With a date.”

“Neat!” Thomas said. “And you’re going?”

“A date who?” Kamala asked.

“A girl in my class. Paige Anderson.”

“Paigean?”

“
Anderson
, last name.
Paige
, first.”

“Oh.” Kamala nodded. “How do you know this Paige?”

“Through Mathletes.”

Kamala smiled. “A nice girl!”

“Well, yeah.”

“You asked her?” Amina asked.

“We asked each other,” Akhil said haughtily, as though she had missed some essential point he had made earlier.

“We should meet her,” Thomas said. “You should bring her here before the dance.”

“Dad, it doesn’t work like that.”

“What do you mean? Shouldn’t the parents always meet the date before the outing?”

“Only if you’re the girl’s parents. It doesn’t matter for the guy’s.”

“Oh.” Thomas looked fleetingly disappointed. “Well, no matter, we could simply meet her afterward.”

“No, no, no.” Akhil shook his head. “Afterward is the casino party, and then after that is … another party.”

“So many of parties?” Kamala asked. “Who is having them?”

The parties after prom, Amina knew (well, not knew firsthand, but knew in that Dimple had told her), were always conducted in hotel rooms on the side of the highway. Akhil put a chunk of lamb in his mouth, chewing and stalling. He swallowed and said, “Just some friends of mine in the class. Nice kids. Mathletes.”

The last line blew it a little, Amina could see, her father’s features darkening slightly. “We should talk to the parents.”

“What parents?”

“The parents of the kids with the parties. Just to make sure it’s okay.”

“What do you mean, make sure? Of course it’s okay.”

“We’ll see,” Thomas said.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that unless we feel good about it, you’re not going anywhere.”

“You can’t do that!”

“He’s going to need to rent a tux, you know,” Amina said, to change the subject. “It’s required.”

“Tux?” Kamala asked.

“Tuxedo,” Amina said. “They’re, like, required. All the boys have to wear them.”

“One of my patients has a tuxedo rental shop!” Thomas said, sounding pleased. “We can go see him together. Bill Chambers. Nice man. You’ll like him.”

Akhil said nothing.

“Eh, Akhil? We can go see him?” Thomas stopped eating, his cheek bulging with a pocket of unchewed rice. “Akhil?”

Across from him, head tucked to his chest, Akhil didn’t stir. His breaths were light and shallow.

“What’s wrong with him?” Thomas asked.

“Nothing. He’s asleep,” Amina said.

“What?”

“Don’t worry, he’s just tired,” Kamala said.

“What do you mean? He was just asking us if he could stay out all night. He was getting upset.”

“And now he’s sleepy,” Kamala said. “So what? Growing boy, you said it yourself.”

“He’s done this before?”

“He’s always tired during dinner,” Kamala said, wiggling her hand for the curds, which Amina handed her. “He needs to get more sleep.”

Thomas rose from his chair, walking around the table. He hovered over Akhil, peering at his face, but when he moved to pick up his wrist, Kamala slapped him away.

“
Chi!
Let him have some rest.”

But Thomas would not be deterred. He leaned over Akhil, first waving his hand across closed eyelids, then pulling them up, one by one, exposing two pockets of white. He lifted his wrist and pinched it
between two fingers, listening to his pulse. He turned to Kamala. “How often has this happened?”

“How often has he fallen asleep?” Kamala snorted. “At least once a night.”

“Fallen asleep in the middle of doing something else.”

“He hasn’t! He just sleeps a lot. My God, I told you that months ago! But he’s getting better. Ask Amina.”

“Have you seen him do this?” he asked Amina.

Amina looked at him uneasily. “Yeah.”

“During normal activity? When he should otherwise be in an alert and stable condition? Are the triggers usually emotional?”

“I …” What was he asking her? “I don’t know.”

“How often has it happened?”

“I don’t remember. A few times.”

Thomas tugged at his beard, frowning at his watch. “And when did it start?”

“I’m not sure. Six months ago, maybe.”

Thomas kneeled down, his brow furrowed into dark canyons. He held Akhil’s hand, stroking it lightly. Watching them, Amina realized it had been years since she had seen her father do anything so intimate as touch any of them. When Thomas pressed his brow to Akhil’s sleeping face, she had to look away.

“What are you doing?” Akhil asked, jerking awake.

Thomas backed up. “Hey. Are you okay?’ ”

“Why wouldn’t I be okay?”

“You just fell asleep.”

“No I didn’t.” Akhil looked at Amina, who tried to nod with just her eyes. “I just shut my eyes for a second.”

Thomas sat back on his heels.

“Finish eating,” he said. “We’ll talk after.”

Two days later, they left for the hospital.