The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing: A Novel (47 page)

“The day after I saw you.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

Was he? Amina looked at Jamie’s face for comfort or sympathy and instead saw reticence, like he did not want to catch what she had.

“So anyway, he’s starting treatment next week.” Her voice pinched with an effort to keep calm. She took another sip of water, her hurt blossoming quickly and more substantially than expected, like some stupid sponge toy that grows to five times its original size in water. So this was what it felt like to tell other people the truth. It felt like shit.

“Anyway.” She stood up. “So that’s what has been up with me. What about you? Seen any of your former students? How is Maizy?”

Jamie frowned. “What are you doing?”

She was pacing. Amina shrugged.

“Are you mad at me?” he asked.

“Are you mad at me?”

“A little.”

She stopped. “Wait, really?”

“Yeah.”

“Because I didn’t call? I just told you we found out—”

“I know. I know that.”

“Then what—”

“I don’t know. It’s not like you don’t have a good reason. But you asked if I was mad, and I am, kind of.”

There was something about the reasonableness with which he said this, the entitlement, that made her want to reach over and throttle him. Amina spun on her heel, heading toward the front door.

“Don’t do that.”

“What?” She turned around. “What am I doing?”

“Don’t turn me into some asshole.”

“You’re doing that all on your own.”

Jamie put his beer down. “Sit down.”

“What for?”

“Can you please sit back down?”

Amina wavered in the middle of the room, momentum shooting off to equally impossible outcomes. She wanted to be back in Seattle. She wanted to be in her car already, driving back to Corrales. She wanted to be back to the night in the park, with his collarbone on her tongue. Jamie motioned to the spot next to him on the couch. She walked toward him and sat stiffly. A fresh puff of dust motes flew into the air between them.

“I just thought you had left,” he said after a moment. “And that sucked, but then at least I had something to tell myself. Man, she felt so much she just had to
leave
.” He laughed self-consciously. “And then it turns out you were here ignoring my messages.”

His face turned toward her like a bruised flower, something sad and too delicate in its dark center, and she shrank a little.

“I didn’t want to talk about it,” she said.

He did not look particularly moved by this information.

“I just … I kept thinking once we knew for sure what we were dealing with, we could just tell everyone at once and get it over with.
But every week it seems like we know less, and now it’s just …” She leaned back against the couch, the fight in her replaced with a calmness bordering on exhaustion. “The biopsy showed low-grade cells, but the problem is that might just be that small area of the tumor, and it might be worse somewhere else. My dad thinks it is, anyway. And then he seemed totally fine until this afternoon, and now he’s …” Amina snorted, gesturing into the air. “And honestly? I don’t want to talk about this with you. Not now. This is like the biggest boner killer I could think of.”

She watched a piece of fluff wander through the air in front of her, horribly aware of the silence that descended.

Jamie cleared his throat. “Did you just say boner—”

“Yes. I don’t even know where that came from. Fourth grade.”

“It’s sexy.”

“Really?”

“No. But it’s sweet. That you were thinking about that, I mean.” She pushed her leg against his on the couch, thinking about how saying a small, true thing for the first time felt much scarier than not saying anything at all.

“I don’t know,” Jamie sighed. “It’s not like I’m some expert at this. To be honest, I was a total dick when my mom got sick.” He shook his head. “But I think you go one of two ways with this stuff—you either try to be good to the people around you, or you give yourself a free pass to act however badly you want to, you know?”

Amina nodded. He was right. Even if she hadn’t been appallingly close to his neck, the smell of his skin filling her with relief and arousal, she would have had to cop to that.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

His hand was on her leg. Amina watched as it slid down to her knee and back up, his fingers stroking the inside of her thigh.

“So what happened today to finally get your ass over here?” he asked, and she shook her head. She pulled his hand higher and watched gratefully as it disappeared under her skirt. She would tell him later, when they rose from the couch parched and flushed, ready to guzzle down the entire fridge’s worth of beverages, but for right now, she was ready to stop talking.

The entire household was asleep by the time Amina got home that night, which made the next thing she needed to do infinitely easier. She found Prince Philip curled up against the coolest patch of the dining room floor and tugged at his collar until he stood up.

“Come,” she said. He padded after her, through the living room, kitchen, and laundry room, out onto the porch, where they stopped just long enough to pick up a flashlight. Amina opened the screen door that led to the yard.

“Go,” she said.

She stumbled after him in the dark, trying to stifle the feeling that she was playing the part in the movie where the well-meaning woman gets murdered in her mother’s eggplant patch.

“Stay away from the beans,” she hissed once they were between the rows of vegetables. The dog went down the row that led to the trellis, and she walked down the other row, passing beds of lettuces, cucumbers, and snap peas, as she made her way to the back of the garden. Kamala’s bucket of garden tools waited mid-row, and she picked a small shovel out of it before continuing to the back.

“So what did he say about the jacket?” Jamie had asked as they sat on his kitchen counter that evening, passing a bottle of seltzer back and forth.

“He said that he was sorry.”

“That’s all?”

“What else would he say?”

“Well, why did he put it there in the first place?”

Amina frowned. “Did you hear the part about the tumor?”

“Yes,” Jamie said, squeezing her leg reassuringly. “But that’s medical. The doctors will deal with that. But what was he trying to do? That’s the part you’ve got to figure out.” There was an earnest, Hardy Boy–ish glint on his face that made her uneasy.

“I just told you he won’t talk about it,” Amina said.

Jamie scratched his neck. “Is the jacket the only thing he buried?”

Now, in the dark, she scooped through the damp soil, trying not to think too hard about the snakes that roamed the garden regularly or
made temporary houses from sun-warmed spades and bags of blood meal. Her hand brushed something hard, and she recoiled, fumbling for the flashlight.

Glass. Not a shard, but a nice, rounded edge, which when pried loose appeared to be a jar of something. For one horrible moment, she thought she was looking at human organs, but a longer, calmer look revealed nothing more terrifying than Kamala’s homemade mango pickle. She put it down next to her and kept digging. Not ten seconds later she hit a cardboard corner, which turned into a warped copy of Nat King Cole’s
Love Is the Thing
. Just under that, the gilded cup of Thomas’s
BEST DOCTORS IN THE SOUTHWEST 1991
trophy lay on its side. A few minutes later, as she stared at the glittering clump of Thomas’s car keys, Amina shut her eyes, submerged by the panicky feeling that the objects had not been hidden so much as they’d been biding their time, waiting for her to find them. She stood up, feeling sick.

“Fucking
fuck
,” she said out loud, and across the garden Prince Philip wagged his tail guiltily, sending the bean pods into silvery applause.

“Let’s go,” she said, walking toward the gate with everything jumbled in her hands. Prince Philip did not follow her. She shined the flashlight on him. “Hey, move it.”

He walked toward her reluctantly, one long bean disappearing under the soft curtain of his lip, but stopped, looking dolefully back at the trellis. She did not have patience for this. Amina stalked the twenty feet toward him, grabbed his collar, and wheeled around. A flash of white burst into her line of vision. She gasped. There, waiting politely at the side of the path she had just walked down, was a brand-new pair of white Velcro tennis shoes.

CHAPTER 2

T
he next morning, the pounding would not stop.

“Hullo? Ami? Hullo?” Fattened through the fish-eye lens, Sanji’s nose had turned into its own island of sorts, as craggy and pockmarked as any dotting the South Pacific in recent millennia. Her eyes, in comparison, were hard, distant stars. She turned her head, blinking rapidly into the peephole, and rang the doorbell again.

“Who is it?” Amina stalled.

“Surely you are not pretending that you haven’t been staring at me for the last half minute?”

Amina opened the door. “Hi, Sanji Auntie.”

Cool, flabby arms squeezed her around the middle hard, more a Heimlich than an actual greeting. She peered behind Amina to the empty hallway. “So? Where are your parents?”

“Running a few errands.”

“Really? Where?”

“I’m not exactly sure. They didn’t tell me.”

Sanji tugged her ear sharply. “Liar!”

“Ow!”

“They are in the hospital itself! Bala called me half an hour ago saying Chacko called her and your parents were checking in for some scans! Are you people going to talk to us or what? Because if you aren’t, we would like to know right now and be done with it!” Sanji breathed hard, dabbing at her upper lip with her chuni.

“Done with it?” Amina asked skeptically, but her aunt’s glare was unrelenting. She shifted tactics. “How did Chacko Uncle know it was a scan?”

“Excuse me?”

Amina raised her eyebrow.

“Well, of course he snooped around!” Sanji bellowed, incredulous. “You think that is some problem? One month and we haven’t heard one word from any of you, and now you want to talk patient-doctor confidentiality nonsense? Really?”

Really, Amina did not. Really, she wanted to shut the door and go back upstairs, to try to get a handle on what she would need to shoot the Lucero wedding that weekend, or maybe just not think about anything at all.

“Well, don’t just stand there looking pathetic,” Sanji ordered. “Give me some tea.”

They walked back to the kitchen. Amina motioned to a counter stool, and Sanji took it, fluffing herself up and resettling like a pigeon in an airshaft.

“Caffeinated okay?” Amina asked.

“Decaf is for children and Americans.”

The cabinet was stocked like a bunker, Typhoos, Red Labels, Darjeelings, and Assams packed tightly. Amina wiggled a box loose. “Dessert?”

“No, thank you.”

“Mom made a crème caramel.”

Sanji sniffed suspiciously at this information. “Just a bit, please.”

Amina found the right Tupperware, spooned a generous amount into a dish, and handed it to her aunt, who was frowning at Amina’s hips.

“Looking too thin, Ami.”

“Am I?” Amina looked down in surprise. “Weird.”

“Weird.” Sanji snorted. “My God, what I would eat with your no-tummy tummy! Pastries! Villages!”

Amina turned toward the stove, adjusting the kettle and watching Sanji eat the crème caramel through the reflection in the microwave oven. It was actually nice to have her in the house, her solid, shouty anger a relief from all the other, undirected craziness.

Milk, sugar, a bowl of mixture, two spoons, two mugs of tea. A minute later Amina set everything on the counter between them and sat down, instantly more jittery, like there was a panic button on her ass. She watched the cream cloud the tea and stirred as slowly as possible.

“Ami?”

She looked up, surprised by the reciprocal nervousness in her aunt’s face. “You’re okay, baby?”

“I just don’t really know how to start.”

“Perhaps the beginning?”

There was a crack in the wall behind Sanji’s head. Amina watched it and said, “Dad has a brain tumor. He’s been undergoing radiation for a few weeks, and now he’s getting another scan to see if it’s helping. He can’t work because he’s seeing things that aren’t there.”