The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing: A Novel (46 page)

For her part, Kamala bought an unlikely copy of
Mastering the Art of French Cooking
and began the even less likely task of following the recipes to the letter, resulting in a beguiling array of foods so layered in cream and butter and flour that she seemed to be baiting a familial heart attack, even as her family shunned the change. (“You’re trying to kill me?” Thomas asked without irony one evening, frowning at a pot of béchamel sauce.)

Even Amina, propelled by the distinct need to do
something
, shrugged off her career limbo, clearing her new plan with Jane and charming the guests at Nina Vigil’s daughter’s quinceañera with such success that she lined up two more gigs before the night was over. She rifled through her room looking for every last hidden cigarette, flushing them down the toilet as a kind of karmic payment for Thomas’s health. She would quit smoking and he would get better.

Through all of this, the family kept a complicit silence about Thomas’s condition, which itself started to feel oddly progressive as the second week bled into the third. More imaging was done, a month’s worth of patients rescheduled, and then Thomas lost a half-dollar-sized patch of hair to the biopsy. Sure, it felt strange, smuggling him in and out of the hospital and ignoring phone calls (Bala, Sanji, Dimple). It felt especially weird to ignore the two messages from Jamie, or rather, to
listen to them five times apiece and never call back, but somehow every time she picked up the phone she found herself putting it right back down. It was too much. Too heavy. It would be better to wait and call everyone after, when she could tie it up into a tidy bundle of
the past
.

By the third week, their handling of Thomas’s diagnosis actually seemed proactive, as though by refusing to acknowledge the tumor, the Eapens had quarantined it from spreading into their actual lives. More than once over that week and the next, and usually when driving her father to his appointments, Amina found herself looking at their present from a twinkling vantage point in the future, sure that once this stage was over (the details for how it would become over being vague but surely possible), they could return to the life they knew before as unremarkably as tourists reentering their own living room. And so it all went on, cleanups and chicken a l’orange and appointments layered thickly enough to keep fear of what the future might hold from penetrating until exactly four weeks after the original prognosis, when out of the blue, Thomas sat down in his chair on the porch and began a long, gentle, occasionally exasperated conversation with Cousin Itty.

“Still?” Amina asked. Kamala nodded, looking through the screen porch with a frown and crossed arms. A timer set to announce when the beef bourguignon next needed tending ticked quietly behind them.

At least he was no longer sitting down. Something about coming home and finding Thomas prattling away to the empty chair beside him had made the situation seem much more dire than it did now, some nine minutes later, as he wandered around the shop, explaining things.

Amina glanced at her mom. “Does he still think—”

“DON’T TOUCH THAT,” Thomas boomed, springing forward, and both mother and daughter jumped. “You’ll lose a finger! Do you want to lose a finger?”

“Jesus Christ!” Amina hissed.

“No Jesus,” Kamala said.

The worst part was that there seemed to be no stopping the talking. Amina had tried to interrupt when they first came home, and
Thomas had just stared at her blankly until she left the porch. Five minutes later, armed with the notion that he couldn’t possibly have lost his grip this suddenly or showily, Amina had confronted him again, only to be completely ignored. He did not answer her questions. He did not acknowledge her at all. He just waited until she ran out of words and continued his tour of the shop.

“To cut boards,” Thomas explained now, tapping the leg of a table saw. “Big ones. Bigger than that.”

He was talking to Itty, no doubt about it. Even though she hadn’t heard it in decades, Thomas’s flat, loud cadence was instantly recognizable, like a foreign language.

“You called Anyan?” Kamala asked.

“I left a message with his service.”

“And what did they say?”

“They said he’d call me back.”

“But what did they say about
Thomas
?”

“They didn’t say
anything
about
Thomas
because I didn’t tell them about
Thomas
. They are not doctors, they’re operators.”

“So then what? We just sit and wait?”

“What else?”

“Go talk to him.”

“You go talk to him!”

“Chi!”
Her mother snorted to cover up the fact that even now, in the midst of illness and disaster, she was unwilling to set foot on the porch. “What nonsense! Leaving your own father to wander around like some yakking idiot?”

“I don’t think we leave him at all, not when we’re not sure if he’s …” Amina watched her father lift a level into the air, reading the fluorescent bubbles like they were measuring something. “Anyway, I think we should keep an eye on him.”

“I am not watching this man like one television! You think I have nothing else to do?”

“Oh, that’s right, you’re busy cooking food that
no one likes to eat
.”

“I am cooking food that will fatten him up! You want him to waste away to nothing? He needs reserves for radiation!”

“So go back to the kitchen, if that’s where you want to be!”

Kamala gave her a long, cold look. To Amina’s surprise, she threw open the screen door, marching straight onto the porch. It seemed to curl and shrink around her, like wood chips spent by flame, and she paused for a moment, getting her bearings. She thumped through the machinery with her fists clenched, little puffs of sawdust gasping at her heels. “Thomas!”

He took no notice of her, bending to adjust the radial dial.

“Thomas!” Kamala shoved a pointer finger between his shoulder blades.

“Cha!”
he yelled, wheeling around to face her. “What!”

“What are you doing?”

Thomas looked around nervously. Whether it was the simple fact that she was on his porch for the first time in fifteen years or that her clenched, fuming face was doubled up on him like a fist, Kamala had him spooked. He took a quick breath before saying, “Talking to Itty.”

“Why!”

Why?
Amina blinked from the laundry room. She would not have thought to ask why.

“Because …” Thomas looked behind him, presumably to where Itty stood. “Because he’s
here
.”

Kamala took this in with a frown, then dodged to the side suddenly, as though she might catch a glimpse of Itty if she were fast enough. She straightened, looking back up at Thomas. “You see him?”

“Yes.”

“Right now?”

Thomas nodded.

“Then tell him to go.”

Thomas looked stricken. He began to tremble visibly, dropping his eyes to the floor.

“Thomas, you hear me? Stop this now.”

Thomas shook his head, lost, it seemed, to the shavings and filings and occasional winking screw or nail.

“Hey!” Kamala barked and he looked up at her. “What are you doing?”

“I … I don’t know.” He swallowed, his eyes filling with tears. He looked behind him and then back at Kamala. Amina watched from
behind the screen, her eyes and nose suddenly liquid with grief. He should not go like this. He should not lose his dignity.

Thomas’s shoulders tented up and down with the effort of trying to speak, but Kamala stopped him, squeezing his forearm. She spoke so softly, Amina had to stop breathing to hear her.

“Never mind. Not important. I am going to be in the kitchen cooking. I will not leave unless I tell you first. Come get me if you need. Okay?”

Thomas’s head dropped. Kamala turned and strode back toward Amina, who only now realized that the droning she had heard in the back of her mind was not just some by-product of too much emotion, but the live and urgent trill of the telephone. Anyan George was calling back. Kamala opened the screen door and walked into the kitchen, past the still-ringing phone.

“It’s for you,” she said.

Jamie Anderson had not swept his entryway recently. That afternoon, as Amina rang his doorbell and paced, she almost crushed a tiny cluster of anthills dotting a seam between bricks and had to do a funny hop-skip to right herself. But no, even breathing hard, even disturbed by Anyan George’s lack of help (“Keep an eye on it,” he’d said, as though looking away were an option), she would not destroy another creature’s carefully wrought world. If she were God, she’d be a little fucking kinder.

A few seconds passed. She rang the doorbell again. She had hung up the phone with Anyan George and driven straight there, not admitting to herself that she knew exactly where she was going until she had pulled up behind Jamie’s station wagon.

Could he really be out? Amina banged on the door. She stepped forward, letting her forehead drop against it. If this were a movie, Jamie would open it right now. She’d fall into his arms. They would make love. She wouldn’t know if she had an orgasm because women in movies never touched themselves during sex, and it made her suspicious of their climaxes.

It was not a movie. He really wasn’t home. Amina backed up, willed
the pressure in her chest to ease up. It was probably a good thing. What was she doing there, really? She did not know this man. She did not know his temperament, his cleaning habits, and the haste had been a ruse, a trick to keep from thinking clearly. By now her hand had found the doorbell and she rang it over and over again, not for any real hope of summoning Jamie, but to feel the power of her own cause and effect. There was a bubble in her lungs, the kind that happened when she stayed underwater for too long.
Air Supply
. She gasped with understanding. They really were such a better band than anyone knew.

Without warning, the hair on her arms stood on end, her animal brain understanding a split second before the rest that someone was behind her. Amina turned around to see Jamie stopped on the sidewalk a full house back. His park blanket was tucked under his arm, football-style.

“Hi,” she said. Jamie nodded at her once, the kind of nod you give across a room when you have no intention of getting closer. A neighbor switched on a radio that briefly blared rap before it was turned down and rerouted to NPR.

“You’re here,” he finally said.

“Yeah.”

“You didn’t go back to Seattle?”

“No.”

He waited for her to say more, but she couldn’t, unnerved by the reality of him, his
94 ROCK
T-shirt, the wariness on his face.

“Can I come in?” she asked.

“I left you two messages.”

“I know. I’m sorry.”

Jamie’s eyes did not leave her face, and though nothing in them looked vulnerable toward her, she remembered their first kiss, how strange and eager they had both been, like two mutes trying to describe a freak storm.

“I had a funny week,” she said.

This seemed to release him from whatever paralysis he’d fallen under. He walked to his car, opening the hatchback and putting the blanket in, shutting it with a neat slam. She backed up as he made his way to the front door.

“How long have you been here?” He smelled sweet and chlorinated, like a day by a pool.

“Not long.”

“Huh.” Jamie unlocked the door and pushed it open, motioning for her to enter first. She walked through a foyer to a sunny, sunken living room with two couches. Amina walked toward the smaller one as Jamie set his keys down.

“Nice place.”

“Have a seat.”

She had not been so far off about the rugs and fertility sculptures. A huge kilim calicoed the floor, and earthen pots of various sizes nestled in niches. Pillows dotted the sofa, and in one corner a surprisingly ornate wooden desk held neat piles of paper. Other than that, though, it felt like a man’s house, plantless, dusty, and with a barrenness she couldn’t quite place until she realized there was nothing hanging on the walls.

“Nice artwork.”

“Want something to drink?” Jamie ducked through an archway, and she heard the fridge door open. “I’ve got seltzer or beer.”

“Just water is great.”

The soft thud of cabinets turned into a running faucet, and a cheerless, robotic woman’s voice announced three messages. The first beep was followed by a reminder from the dentist’s office. The second was a husky-voiced girl. “Hiii, Professor Anderson, I’m really sorry to have to call you at home, I just have some questions about next semester,” she said, sounding stoned and possibly naked. Jamie hit the fastforward button.

“James Mitchell Anderson,” a laughing voice said after the third beep, and Amina’s stomach lurched with recognition. “Your nieces would like to talk to you. We’ve made up this game with that photo from the Quinns’ party where we draw you new hair every week and tape it on, and this week Cici—”

“Mohonk!” someone clearly little and delighted screamed in the background.

“Yes,” Paige laughed. “You have a Mohawk this week. Green, actually. But I think you’d totally dig it. Anyway, call us back. We’ll be around all afternoon.”

“Paige has kids?” Amina asked as Jamie walked into the room with a glass of water and a Corona.

He tossed her a coaster before sitting on the opposite couch. “Three daughters. The youngest is six months old.”

“Does she live here?”

“Yup.”

Amina nodded. “Cool.”

Jamie took a long swig of beer. His gaze bounced toward her and away.

“So how have you been?” she asked.

“Fine.”

“Working a lot?”

“Yup.”

A light-blue sedan pulled up in the driveway of the house across the way, and Amina watched it, breaking into a sweat. Did he want her to leave?

“I’m sorry I didn’t call,” she said. “I had a kind of weird week.”

“No big.” His fingers drummed against the bottle. “Four weeks.”

“We got my dad’s test results back. He has a tumor.” She was too nervous to look right at him but sensed his flinch from her periphery. “In his brain. A brain tumor.”

“When did you find out?”