The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing: A Novel (50 page)

“He’s in the kitchen.” Amina motioned to the doorway. “Go see for yourself.”

Chacko inspected his way across the driveway, taking note of the encroaching yard like it was a traffic violation. He marched up the stairs and squeezed her shoulder before stepping inside.

In the kitchen, Kamala and Thomas pulled dish after dish out of Raj’s box, snapping and unsnapping lids.

“Chapati and beef
and
appam and stew?” Kamala frowned. “It’s too much. We don’t need.”

“Speak for yourself, woman.” Thomas pulled a chapati straight from the warming dish. “Between all your truffles and trifles, I haven’t had a normal meal in weeks.”

“You’ve had some nausea from the radiation?” Bala asked.

“Surprisingly little,” Thomas said.

“I’ll get you some beef.” Raj motioned to Amina for a spoon. “You can also have the stew, of course. I just thought the beef would be nice and rich in irons. I also made a tomato carrot salad, for vitamin C. It helps with the absorption, isn’t it?”

Thomas popped open another container. “My God! Samosas, too? You must have been cooking all night, Raj.”

“No, no, I just made a few things. I also brought a little homemade yogurt in case you’re having indigestion. Sanji says you’re thinking of starting chemotherapy?”

“Looking into it. Just spoon some salad, too, nah?”

“Excellent, yes, absolutely. Sanji, can you look in the cooler for the kichadi?”

“Ho ho!” Thomas looked more genuinely excited than Amina had seen him in weeks. “Yes, please, and thank you!”

“He should be eating only bland foods,” Chacko announced from the other side of the kitchen counter, where he had settled in. “Bland foods are better for nausea. Rice and curds, maybe a bit of dahl.”

“Kichadi!” Sanji held up a Tupperware.

“Actually, though, what you can eat differs from person to person.” Bala hovered uneasily in the doorway of the laundry room. “My sister with the breast cancer told me that everyone will say one thing or another about what you can eat and what you can do and how you will feel, but really it’s the individual body.”

“You have more plates?” Raj asked just as Amina was reaching for more. “Oh, good. Maybe get some bowls too, for the payasam.”

“Payasam!” Thomas crowed, and even Kamala had to smile.

Half an hour later they sat around the living room with plates that had been filled and emptied twice, the ladies and Chacko perched on the couches while Amina, Thomas, and Raj tucked themselves against stray couch cushions. Poor Raj. Coming down from whatever high had enabled him to cook thirteen separate dishes, he looked particularly spent, the crepey skin under his eyes pouching. Sanji squeezed his shoulder and leaned back into the couch.

“So then, I suppose we should all just take turns at the hospital?” she said.

“Hmm?” Bala fiddled with her bangles.

“I was just thinking one of us should always be with him.”

“
I’ll
be with him,” Kamala said.

“Of course, of course,” Sanji said. “I’m just saying that one of us should be there for you, too.”

“What me? Nothing is wrong with me!”

“Just to help,” Amina said, nodding to Sanji. “I think it’s a good idea, Ma. And you and I should take turns going, too.”

“And you like this Anyan George?” Chacko asked Thomas.

“Yes. Bright kid.”

“Never mind all that, can he
handle
this? I was a little surprised that you went with him over Rotter or Dugal.”

Thomas’s jaw tightened slightly. “I’ve shown my slides to Rotter as well; he agrees with everything Anyan has said and done so far.”

“And what about here?” Sanji asked. “At home? Things are manageable?”

There was a long silence as the Eapens took pains not to look at one another.

“We just mean if there’s something we can do—” Raj started.

“We’re fine,” Kamala said.

“And what about these hallucinations?” Chacko asked. “Are you having them regularly?”

Thomas hesitated, then nodded.

“And they’re primarily auditory or visual?”

Amina watched her father shift on the floor, as if something was poking into his back. “They are both.”

Chacko’s mouth puckered like he’d tasted something sour.

“What’s wrong with that?” Amina asked.

“It’s unusual to have both,” Chacko said. “The tumor is in the occipital lobe. As such, visual hallucinations are more common, but
hearing
things is highly unusual, unless it has spread to the—”

“We’re looking into that,” Thomas said quickly.

“It might also be bad spirits,” Kamala said. “What? It happens. Oh, don’t you look at me like that, Sanji Ramakrishna, this is a true and documented fact. You think all those monks in the sixteenth century were lying? Sometimes a toll in the body can be a portal to unwelcome forces.”

Amina sighed. “It’s a tumor, Ma. You saw the scan yourself.”

“No one is saying there is no tumor! I’m just saying that it is entirely possible that he’s being taken advantage of by dark forces
pretending
to be family. Why else would they be coming to see him? It’s not like they saw each other so much in real life.”

Thomas stood up, walking out of the room. “Anyone want something to drink?”

“Perhaps I was unclear.” Chacko frowned. “I did not mean to suggest that hallucinations are uncommon at all, Kamala, I merely mean
that seeing
and
hearing things at the same time is unusual, although if the brain is seizing—”

“My sister had hallucinations!” Bala said, nodding earnestly. “Every night, she would dream of an old ayah we had when we were girls, the nasty one with the crooked fingers who used to pinch us.”

“That’s a
dream
, not a hallucination,” Kamala fumed.

“Can we get back to matters at hand?” Sanji bounced a little on the couch. “I think we should set up some sort of a schedule.”

The others did not hear the latch of the front door clicking open, nor did they notice, as Amina did, how the floor in the dining room lightened with a sweep of sun. She rose and muttered “Bathroom,” as if anyone was listening, and headed for the hall.

The front door was wide open, and through it, she could see her father standing in the driveway, looking down the tunnel of trees that rose up on either side of it like hands clasped in prayer. He looked small there, arms hanging loosely at his sides. He did not turn around as she approached, and for a moment she thought he might be seeing them again—Itty or Sunil or Akhil or whoever else might show up late on a Saturday afternoon, wanting to take a tour of the house. She reached for his dangling hand, surprised by the strength with which he grasped her back, the surety. He pulled her to him, his fingers entwining around her own until it hurt.

CHAPTER 4

“H
ello, handsome. How are you doing?”

Thomas smiled at the dark-haired nurse who parted the curtains. “Maryann!”

“I tried to get out of working today when they told me you were coming.” She smiled, her full Hopi cheeks growing fuller, and kissed Thomas on the cheek before taking a look at the IV. “So what’s on the menu today? You started with Decadron?”

“Yup.”

“And how’d it go?”

“Fine. Slight head rush in the first thirty seconds or so, but I normalized.”

One week later, and at Thomas’s insistence, they were starting chemo. A few experimental case studies at MD Anderson had left him convinced that it might work, and although Anyan George had been insistent about the low probability of that, he’d ultimately given in.

The nurse looked at Amina. “Dad’s a real favorite around here, you know.”

Amina knew. In the two hours since they’d checked in, at least half a dozen nurses and a handful of doctors had already stopped by with enthusiastic smiles and far too many questions about the presumably safe subject of Amina’s life.

Maryann wrote something on her clipboard. “How is that arm feeling?”

“Good.”

“Cold?”

Thomas hesitated, then nodded.

She patted Thomas’s leg affectionately, sad under her smile in a way that made Amina both trust and fear her more than the others. “I’m going to get you a thermal pack. You nauseated yet?”

“It’s my first day, you goose.”

“Just testing.” She slipped back out of the curtain with a wink. “She’s one of the good ones,” Thomas said.

Amina nodded. He had said this about every nurse who stopped by.

Outside, the sharp incline of Central showed Albuquerque in strata: parking lots, billboards, apartment buildings, mountains.

“Is it weird being back here?” Amina asked. “At the hospital?”

“No. Not really. I thought it might be, but it’s nice actually.”

“Familiar?”

He smiled sadly. “It’s funny, you do something your whole life … and then just the other day I thought,
What if I’ve touched my last brain?
You get so used to it, you know, using your hands in a certain way.” He looked down at his own hands and flexed them, as if testing to see if they were really his. “How about you? How is work?”

“Oh, you know.” Amina shrugged. She hadn’t brought herself to tell either of her parents about Jane, though whether it was out of guilt or nervousness, she didn’t quite know. “It’s fine. Glad I’m finding work out here.”

“When is your next event?”

“Saturday. The Luceros’ son is getting married.”

“My God, that’s right. Am I supposed to go?”

“Only if you’re feeling up to it.”

Thomas nodded, looking down at the IV in his arm. He rubbed his shoulder and winced a little.

“Numbness,” he said before she could ask. “It’s normal. I’ll probably lose some sensation in my arms and legs.”

Amina stood up and walked to the window so he wouldn’t see her face. It was getting harder not to spiral these days, to hear one thing and think of the next and the next, until all that was left was a closet of her father’s sweaters and shoes.

“Are you in pain?” she asked.

“Not really. I’ve been lucky that way.”

“Right.” Small, furious tears sprang into the corners of her eyes.

“Come sit down,
koche
.”

She turned from the window and walked back to the bed. What was it about hospital beds that made everyone look like puppet versions of themselves? She knew her father wasn’t actually smaller than he’d been before the diagnosis, yet in the bed his diminishing felt palpable, like a sun setting without the beauty or relief. He put a hand on her arm. His fingers felt like ice.

“You doing okay?” he asked.

She nodded quickly.

“It can be hard, you know. The worrying.”

“Dad, please.”

“I’m just saying—”

“Can we talk about something else?” She sounded like a child and she knew it. Next to them, the drip beeped a few times.

Thomas took a breath. “How do you know when to take a picture?”

“What?”

“I always wonder. My pictures are terrible.”

Amina smiled. He was right. His pictures were the worst, full of missing limbs, double chins, and grimaces.

“It’s just practice.”

“No, not true. I spent one whole month practicing, and they got worse, not better.”

“What were you taking pictures of?”

“Your mother.”

“Well, that’s your problem. No one can get a good shot of Mom. She’s a pretty woman who makes ugly faces.”

“My God.” Thomas looked both dumbstruck and relieved. “You’re absolutely right.”

Amina rubbed his cold hands with her own. His palms were peeling.

“Do you ever think about moving back here?” he asked.

“Yeah, sure,” she said.

Thomas nodded, looking away so quickly that it took her a minute to understand that this had moved him, his mouth twitching as if he might cry.

“Okay, honey, let’s get this on you,” Maryann said, coming back through the curtain with the thermal pack and an extra blanket. Amina stood up, listening to the nurse coo at and cajole her father, expert at soothing the body’s indignities.

“Your father is too sick to come,” Kamala said the following Saturday. She stood by the doorway in Amina’s room looking a little sick herself, her hands smoothing and resmoothing the crimson-and-purple sari she had put on for the Lucero wedding.

“Is he throwing up again?” Amina asked.

“Nothing to throw up! He won’t eat!”

“That’s normal.” Amina had read the flyer the nurses had sent them home with so many times, she felt sure she could quote paragraphs at random. “He might not have an appetite for a week or so.”

“He’ll starve to death!”

“What about chicken broth?”

“Do you know how many chapatis your father can eat in one sitting?” Kamala looked around the room, as if daring the furniture to guess before announcing, “Eight!”

Amina counted rolls of film, packing them into her backpack. These midday weddings would kill her with their too bright, too flat light. Kamala took a step into the room.

“And now he’s yelling at me to go. Telling me all the hovering is
making him nervous. What else should I do?
Not
check on him?
Not
bring him food when he hasn’t eaten for one whole day?”

“Maybe the smell of it is making him sicker.”