The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing: A Novel (38 page)

“Let’s just get there,” Thomas said.

Sanji Auntie came barreling through the sliding glass doors like a maddened hippo, salwar bunched around her hips, wet hair clumped to her forehead. When she saw Amina she walked quickly across the room, shouting, “Are you okay?” and smothering her with a hug before she even had time to answer.

“Are you okay?” Sanji said again, holding Amina firmly back and looking at her.

“I’m fine. It’s Akhil.”

“Daddy said something on the phone about a car accident?”

Amina nodded. “The ambulance brought him in. The ER recognized him and called Dad.”

“So they’re inside? You’ve been waiting out here alone?”

Amina nodded again, suddenly feeling very teary. Sanji sat down
in the chair next to her and pulled her onto her lap, which should have felt ridiculous but didn’t. She shut her eyes tightly and pressed her face into her aunt’s neck.

“Poor thing, must have been scared, no?”

Amina nodded and let herself cry a little as Sanji Auntie rubbed her back in circles, talking up a storm.

“… almost didn’t hear the phone ringing because I was just getting out of the shower, but then I thought I’d check and your father told me and I came running. Uncle is on the way, and Bala and Chacko are at home with Dimple, who is so worried about you. I told them we would call as soon as I heard anything. Poor thing. But don’t worry, nah? Akhil is okay. Mummy and Daddy are just scared right now. But he’ll be fine.”

“Okay,” Amina whispered.

Sanji Auntie didn’t say anything but kept rubbing her back, which helped a little. Out the window Amina saw more flashing lights, and another ambulance pulled up. This time, when the EMTs hopped out to open the back she made sure to look away. Sanji Auntie inhaled and sighed, shifting Amina on her lap. She started to say something and stopped.

“What?” Amina asked.

She sighed. “I’m just thinking, this is a bad place, no? How about if I take you to the Kurians’? You can wait there instead?”

“What about Mom and Dad?”

“I’ll tell one of the nurses to tell them. They can come and pick you up later. This is no place for you to sit.”

Amina sat up and looked at the steel doors, feeling a little guilty.

“It’s fine, Ami, Mummy and Daddy would want you there instead anyway. Shall I just call Bala?” Sanji scanned the waiting room. “Come, there’s a pay phone.”

They walked across the room to the far corner, where two of the three pay phones were occupied. Sanji picked up the third and, after listening to a dial tone, dropped in a quarter. Amina watched a man sink into the chair she had abandoned, checking his watch.

“I have her,” Sanji Auntie was saying into the phone. “Shall I bring her over to see Dimple? I don’t want her waiting here with so much of awful things in this place.”

Bala Auntie’s voice squeaked over the line, and Amina thought she heard someone saying her name. She looked to her side.

“Ami.” It was her father. Amina caught a blurry flash in his eyes, and he looked away. Pink. His eyes were terribly pink. Behind him, Amina’s mother stood, holding something in her arms. A cat. A baby. Amina squinted and saw Akhil’s leather jacket.

“Kamala, what happened to your eye?” Sanji Auntie said, and Kamala looked through her like a window. And something stopped then. It might have been her breathing or the sirens or every beeping monitor in the hospital, but in those seconds, Amina saw how smooth and hollow her mother’s eyes had grown, how stripped of perception. When no one said anything else, Sanji Auntie hung up the phone.

“There was an accident,” Thomas started to say, then didn’t say anything else.

One hand covered Sanji’s mouth, and the other flew to Amina’s shoulders, as if to steady them. Someone somewhere was saying
no, no, no, no
.

“What?” Amina heard herself ask, even as her father looked at her, even as she knew. “What?”

Kamala held the car keys in front of her like a flashlight, guiding herself across the parking lot to the car door with steady steps. Behind her Thomas followed, and behind him, Amina and Sanji.

“Kamala, Thomas, let me drive you all home, please,” Sanji Auntie said again, and Kamala shook her head.

“We’re fine.”

“You’re not fine,
ben
, how can you be fine? It’s nothing to me; Raj and I will come back to pick up your car this evening—”

“No,” Kamala said firmly, unlocking the door. “No, thank you.”

Sanji stepped away from the car, watching as they got in. She pulled up the tip of her salwar and tugged the bulbous fruit of her nose with it. She bent down to place her palm against the backseat window, staring at Amina as the car started up.

“Call me,” she mouthed, and Amina nodded. She backed up as the car pulled away.

It was instantly worse without her there. They weren’t out of the parking lot before Amina felt the silence slam down swiftly between them, smooth and relentless as concrete. Kamala shifted the car into gear, and Amina watched her father through the passenger seat mirror. Strangely, he looked normal to her now—calm and fatigued, as he always did when he came back from work, but okay. She could not see her mother’s face.

“We need to call Chacko and Bala,” he said as they got on the highway.

“Sanji will.”

“We should call them ourselves.”

“You call.”

Outside, the cars passed blurrily, buffeting against them with a pop of wind before breaking away into the horizon. Kamala moved into the left lane.

“Where are you going?” Thomas asked.

Amina looked out the window and saw they were headed up I-40.

“The car,” Amina’s mother said.

“Later, Kamala. We’ll see it later. They haven’t gotten it off the mountain yet.”

“Today.”

Amina felt her father’s gaze through the rearview mirror. He leaned over her mother and whispered something to her in Malayalam, but she shoved his head away.

“So? She’ll stay in the car. So what.”

“I need you to stay in the car,” her father was saying. He had opened the backseat door and was kneeling next to her, looking into her eyes. “I need you to stay here, okay? Can you do that, Ami? Will you do that for me?”

The car was parked at the side of the road. Outside, the mountain air smelled like pinions and rock and gas and ashes, and Amina nodded. She watched as he turned and ran to catch up with her mother,
who was already stalking up the bend toward the guardrail, her black braid bouncing against her back.

Watching her parents through the window, Amina was sure they were in the wrong spot. The road looked much too itself, the same twisted vein of asphalt they always rode to the peak, the same low guardrails that held the tops of the evergreens at bay. Two white pickup trucks and men in orange jackets greeted her parents, pointing below with gloved hands. Her parents turned and looked.

What was it that they saw that day? What had happened to Akhil’s car that rooted her father to the spot as her mother turned around, first walking toward the road, then carefully kneeling on it, her eyes flickering shut? And were they forever lost to each other in that moment, completing the severing that had begun on the last trip to Salem, or did their connection fray more slowly, as the everyday weight of what had happened came to bear down on them? Amina would never know, but for days she could not close her eyes without seeing her parents as they had been right before they looked down, the tips of the evergreens spread out before them like waves, the New Mexico sky blank and white as eternity.

BOOK 8
HIDDEN PARK

ALBUQUERQUE, 1998

CHAPTER 1

G
etting Kamala out of the garden and into bed was no easy feat. The shock of finding Akhil’s jacket buried among the vegetables was one thing. The mud, another. She had been covered in it—streaks drying on her forehead, black lining her fingernails, clumps falling from her sari as she followed Amina back to the house like a zombie. In the end there was nothing to do but strip her to her underskirt and blouse and hose her down while Thomas slunk off to find her some Valium. Dried and dosed, she had fallen into bed without a word, turning her head away on the pillow when Amina asked if she was okay. Amina lowered the blinds and closed the bedroom door.

Outside, Thomas was waiting, his hands clamped in front of him. “Well?”

Amina put a finger to her lips, guiding him into the kitchen. She left him on one side of the counter and crossed to the other, needing the hard slab of white between them.

“How did she seem?” Thomas asked.

“Tired.”

“Good.” Her father paused. “Your mother is very strong, you know.”

“So you put the jacket there?”

Thomas nodded once.

“Why?”

“I apologized to your mother. I apologize to you. It was inappropriate.”

“But I don’t understand why you would do that.” She was starting to shake and trying to stop shaking because it felt stupid to be so undone, so upset over a goddamn piece of clothing. She crossed her arms trying to shore herself up.

“Hey,
koche
,” Thomas soothed. “It’s not some huge thing. I had a bad night. I’ve been working a little too much. I might need to slow down for a bit.”

Amina looked at him, his glasses tucked into the front pocket of his overalls, and for a moment his explanation felt like it was not only true but right, like a newly paved road or a toothpaste-commercial smile or a horoscope you really wanted to believe in.

“Go get yourself a glass of water,” her father was saying, “and drink it slowly.”

“What happened in the ER with Derrick Hanson?”

She watched his face move quickly from surprise to something else, the skin around his mouth tightening. His eyes grew sharp, and Amina felt a flush spread from her throat to her scalp.

“That’s not your concern,” he said.

“If something is wrong, then I should know. To help.”

“I don’t need your help.”

“Or get you to the right doctor.”

“Goddamn it, Amina, there’s nothing medically wrong with me!” Thomas shouted suddenly, and Amina’s heart clattered around her rib cage.

“B-but how do you know that?”

“Because I do!”

“But did you talk to someone afterward? Did you get tests done? Are you taking medication? Dr. George said he tried to get you to come in and—”

“You talked to Anyan about this?”

“I … it … yes. But—”

“You talked to a
co-worker
of mine?”

“Yes, I just thought if—”

“Do you have any idea what you’ve done?” Thomas’s face drained of blood. “No, of course not! Why think through anything when you and your mother can sit here wringing hands and pointing the blame at me? Haven’t you grown tired of that yet?”

Amina’s eyes filled with tears. It was a distinctly feminine humiliation, the kind daughters close to their fathers go to great pains to avoid, as betraying of their fragility as a stain on the back of a skirt.

“Oh, stop it.” Her father plucked two napkins from the holder on the counter and shoved them at her. Amina breathed into the napkin, aware of the pressure gathering against her skull like beads of condensation. She blew her nose. It did not help.