The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing: A Novel (43 page)

“Rob Halford?” Chacko asked.

“He’s a singing priest,” Kamala said, and the others nodded quickly. “Akhil admired him very much.”

“I want to go home.”

The voice, soft and shuddering, stopped them. Amina looked up to see Dimple standing in the corner, her elbows cupped in her arms.

“I want to go home,” her cousin repeated, her lip trembling. Her face scrunched into a ball and she held herself tighter as tears leaked out of her eyes. Bala Auntie moved quickly across the room, putting one arm around Dimple and the other forward, as if to stop anyone who tried to interfere with their swift turn toward the door.

“We should take her home,” she told Kamala, who nodded mutely, the light in her own face suddenly leaden.

“We’ll stay,” Sanji said, but Kamala shook her head.

“No, you go,” she said. “We’re fine.”

“Call us. You need anything, nah? Just please call.” Sanji Auntie wrung her hands in the driveway, looking at Amina and her mother as if to absorb their pain with her eyes alone. Kamala nodded, already walking back into the house. The doorway faced them, its squared light empty.

“Amina baby, you hear?” Sanji Auntie asked, cupping Amina’s chin in her hand. “Call me when you’re missing him, okay? Call me when you miss him too much.”

Amina nodded, felt Sanji’s fingers slip from her face, replaced by two wet kisses on either cheek. She turned and walked through the front door, shutting it.

CHAPTER 2

A
s it turned out, it was not Akhil whom she missed in those first weeks so much as her family, or the family they had been before. As her mother slept straight through dinner and her father wandered through the house like a horse that had slipped into an aquarium, Amina warmed bland casseroles, doused them in Tabasco, and turned on the news even though she had no intention of watching it. A few times she even took the stairs back up to her room, shutting her eyes and listening to Tom Brokaw through the floorboards and pretending that nothing had happened at all. It was amazing how easy it was to do, how utterly convincing. Oh, she wasn’t so dumb as to pretend it had all been good then, with Thomas at the hospital and her mother talking to the television for company and Akhil and Paige dreaming up a better world while Amina watched the empty driveway. But they were better. That much she was sure of.

She had forgotten about the picture entirely. It was only after arranging all her barrettes in order of size, turning her bedspread over to the plain white side instead of the tiny-flowered side, and placing her rolled-up Air Supply poster in the trash as some sort of peace offering to Akhil, that Amina remembered. Her book bag, unopened now for more than two weeks, lay under her desk chair. She tugged it out.

Schoolbooks. They spilled out of her bag like old friends from a town she’d moved away from. The hardbacks of algebra and biology slid out first, cheerfully jacketed in green and yellow, followed by two spiral notebooks, the copy of
On the Road
that Mr. Tipton had recommended she pick up, and a pencil case. And there it was at the back, her white photography binder, photos held in plastic sheets. Amina pulled it out and sat on her bed.

She steeled herself as she flipped it open, blurred her vision by almost crossing her eyes. Yes, these were Akhil. She would not really look, she would not see. She flipped quickly, turning past more of him, then her mother and Sanji Auntie, some dark shadows she knew for sure were her attempt to make a still life out of her mother’s perfume bottles, then Dimple blowing a bubble, then a study of her own foot. Fast, fast, fast, she stopped only when she saw the picture that looked almost pure black. She focused. There it was. She pulled it out.

It would be another few hours until dawn and another few after that until Kamala rose from her dirty bed to take a shower, or rather, sit in the shower, black hair matting against her breasts and the yellow tile until Amina handed her a towel. But Thomas, the night owl, had to be around. The TV was on mute in the kitchen, bright color flashing over the empty couch.

“Dad?”

Her father’s slippers were paired in perfect position in front of the couch, as if being worn by an invisible man. Sections of newspaper slid from the table to the floor.

“Hello?”

The refrigerator door shut behind her, and Amina spun around, guts in her throat.

“Jesus, Dad!”

Thomas blinked at her from behind a tumbler of scotch. “Amina? What time is it?”

She looked at the clock on the microwave. “It’s three. Well, three-fifteen.”

“What’s going on?” There was an edge of panic in his voice, one that had been growing since the funeral. He put his drink down. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah, I just …” Amina stepped back, a little unnerved by the fear and worry and protectiveness spreading out of him and diffusing through the kitchen. “I just wanted to show you a picture.”

“Picture?”

“Photograph.”

Thomas looked at her like she was speaking dolphin. Amina waved the sheet in her hand.

“Oh,” he said. “You mean a
photograph
.”

“Right.”

He found a steady look of interest and managed to hold on to it. “Let’s see it.”

Just like that? She hadn’t thought this through. She should have warned him, maybe, prepared him for it a little bit. Amina looked at her father, pants hanging loosely from his body, beard and hair fanning out from his face. He did not smell good. What if it scared him? Gave him a heart attack? Amina saw herself and Kamala growing old alone in the house together, the trees swallowing up the driveway. She put a hand on Thomas’s arm, and he swayed a little.

“The thing is, I took it a while ago, like, after Ammachy died?”

She paused. Thomas seemed to understand a second too late that something was required of him. “M’okay.”

“So. It was kind of this thing for me, and then I forgot about it, and then I remembered. Just now.”

“Uhn.”

“And the thing is, Dad, this wasn’t even in a single photograph, it was two, you know? I mean, I used two negatives. So I probably couldn’t even print it again. But it came out this way.”

She handed him the photograph. Thomas flipped it over, and they were looking at him six months earlier, newspapers scattered around his ankles, a white bulb glowing in the corner of the porch. Her father’s eyes skidded all over the frame, bouncing from light to shadow.

“What is it?”

“It’s you.” She put her finger on his figure in the chair. “See?”

He raked his fingers deep into his beard. After a pause he looked back at Amina. “It’s very nice work. Lovely.”

“Do you see her?”

“Who?”

“Ammachy.” She tapped the figure in the picture. “Look behind the chair.”

Thomas stared at her, confused.

“Here,” Amina said, pointing again. “In the picture.”

But he was not looking at the picture. He was looking at her face. Curiously, repulsed, as though she were a bug that had found its way into his shower.

Amina’s pulse quickened. “I know. I mean, I know it’s weird, but you know, maybe she knew you were sad, maybe she just came to be—”

Thomas let the picture drop out of his hands. He was trembling. Amina tensed with dread, suddenly understanding how large her father was, how quickly he could knock her to the ground. He lurched at her. He clutched her head so tightly to his chest that her ears were flattened and she could hear his heart crashing against his ribs like rough waters against a dock. To her horror he began to sob. He was trying to say something.

“What?” Amina asked, muffled by his shirt. She pushed her head back for a pocket of air. “What did you say?”

“S-s-sorry.”

“What?”

He pushed her back, hands clamped hard around her biceps. Tears swam down his cheeks. “I’m sorry, Amina. It shouldn’t … shouldn’t have happened. I should have s-seen it. Coming. I should have been h-h-here, I know.”

“What are you saying?” She was scared. “Why are you saying that?”

“You can be mad. I don’t expect you to forgive me right now. I don— … I don— … I really don’t.” Thomas tried to compose his face but instead succumbed to a new round of choking and gasping.

“I’m not mad at you!” Amina’s voice broke and now she was crying, too. She pushed him away. “I’m just showing you, I thought you would … I thought it would make you happy, or something.”

“It’s okay if you need to hate me right now, I understand that it might—”

“No, wait! Stop!” Amina swooped down to the floor, picking the photograph up and thrusting it at him.
“Here,”
she said, pointing to her grandmother’s sari. “
That’s
her body!
That’s
her head. See?”

Thomas shut his eyes, face quivering. He inhaled deeply, exhaled a night’s worth of scotch. When he opened his eyes, they were dull, focused. “There’s nothing there, Amina.”

“You’re not even looking!”

“There is no reason to look. There is nothing in the picture.”

“But we saw her in my class! We saw her and my teacher said—”

But he had closed in on her again, smothering her into a hug so tight that her voice box crushed against his shoulder. He was saying sorry again, whispering it desperately like a man at confessional and adding to the indignity by rocking her from side to side like she was some kind of baby.

“They don’t come back,
koche
,” he murmured into her ear. “I’m so sorry, they don’t come back.”

“Don’t!” She pushed him and his arms dropped instantly to his sides. His face was a jag of despair. She wiped the wet off her face with her sleeve.

“Ami, please—”

“Jesus, just forget it, okay? Forget it!” She left the kitchen, pounding up the stairs as loudly as possible. Who cared? Her mother would never wake up, and her father was a scotch zombie. Back in her room, she shoved the books off the bed with one hand, letting the photography binder crack open as it hit the floor. She turned on her desk lamp, slid the picture under it, and looked.

Yes. She was still there. Right there. Ammachy’s teeth and eyes were the only bit of white in that corner, but the happiness that radiated out of them pushed up from the photograph like starlight. Well, then. Amina placed her thumbs on the top edge of the picture and ripped it clean down the middle. She stacked the halves and ripped them again, and then one more time, until they were inch-big scraps on the desk table. She picked up her trash can and swept the whole pile in, piece by piece. When she was done, she pulled out her Air Supply poster.

Back at school a week later, the whispers were everywhere. They followed her from English to biology, moving from the back of her neck to the space behind her ears as she opened her locker. A few of the kids in her class had tried to talk to her on the first couple of days back but soon gave up with an air that suggested they had just been doing her a favor in the first place. Crowds parted as she walked through them, heads ducked fast to homework when she entered classrooms without teachers. Kids whose brothers and sisters were in Akhil’s class talked to everyone else like they had extra insight.

“What?” she had shouted at Hank Franken that Friday, when he was staring at her. He dropped his pen and Dimple had also glared at him then, but later, sitting on the deserted track field with Amina, she looked uncomfortable.