The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing: A Novel (55 page)

“What?”

“Sajeev and I are getting married.”

“What?”

“We’re—”

“Since when?”

“Last week. I wanted to tell you, but I didn’t want to, you know, interrupt.”

“Interrupt what? I’m not doing anything out here.”

“You’re dealing with your dad.”

“You’re getting married to
Sajeev
?”

“Well, you don’t have to say it like that.”

“No, I just mean … was this a, uh. I mean, did you …” Amina swallowed, entirely unsure of what she was trying to ask. “Okay, so wow.”

“You sound freaked out.”

“No! I’m just a little surprised. You just started seeing each other, you know?”

“We’ve known each other our whole lives.”

“Yeah, but not like,
known
each other.”

“I know plenty,” Dimple said with a telling laugh.

“Right,” Amina said, falling silent until she realized that Dimple was waiting for more, that this was one of those moments they weren’t going to get back. She swallowed and threw her voice an entire octave higher. “Congratulations!”

“Don’t be a dick.”

“No, I’m not! I’m happy for you! I mean, surprised, obviously, but happy!” She was aware that talking in exclamation points was undermining her message but could not stop once she had started. “He seems like a great guy!”

“Well, he is,” Dimple said suspiciously. “And we have more in common than you think. He knows a lot about photography.”

“I know—that day at the Hilltop. He was talking about it nonstop, remember?”

Dimple’s voice changed abruptly, the giddiness returning. “Really?”

“Yes,” Amina said, relieved to finally find her footing in the conversation. “Remember? He had all that stuff to say about Charles White, and it was good, really. And then he knew about my stuff, which, you know—”

“Clearly means he’s well versed,” Dimple finished.

“Exactly.” Amina smiled. “So what happened? Did he do the whole knee thing?”

“Well, no, because we were in bed.”

“Please tell me you didn’t tell your parents that part.”

“I haven’t told them anything yet. I’m thinking of not telling them at all.”

“Oh, c’mon.”

“No, really. We were thinking of eloping the weekend after the show. You know, like, Vegas-style or city hall or something.”

“You can’t do that! What about the family?”

“Oh my God, two months back home and they’ve brainwashed you.”

“No! Well, maybe. I mean, why start things like that? You’ve got your whole lives to disappoint everyone. Weddings are important.”

“Says the woman who captures their most compromising moments.”

“Not fair. And you know what I mean.”

“Yeah, I know.” Dimple was quiet for a long moment, and in that moment Amina realized her parents had stopped yelling. She limped down the hall to Akhil’s room and looked down into the driveway. Both cars were still there.

“I feel like my parents won,” Dimple said.

“Won what?”

“That’s the funny part. I mean, what did they win, really? So I’m going to end up with a Suriani guy. Sajeev, of all people. So what. I just … I don’t want to deal with my mom gloating.”

“She won’t gloat.”

“Amina.”

“Okay, fine, but it’s not like you did it
so
she would gloat. That would be worse.”

“Do you really think I don’t know him well enough?”

“No, it’s not that. I guess I just didn’t see it coming,” Amina said carefully, knowing she wasn’t quite telling the truth. She paused, thinking about how sometimes a surprise was just the acknowledgment of something you had tried hard to ignore. Of course Dimple was going to marry Sajeev. Amina said, “I guess it makes sense, in a way.”

“I just keep thinking, you know, our parents did it. And they didn’t know each other. And Americans get divorced all the time for, like,
no reason
. Someone cheats. Someone spends too much money. Someone tells someone they aren’t the person they married, like that’s so fucking unusual. So if you need to just close your eyes and jump …”

“You might as well do it with an Indian.”

“Exactly.”

Amina limped over to her desk, where the items found in the garden were now in the active dust-collecting stage. She ran her finger along the edge of the trophy.

“I think I’m falling for Jamie Anderson,” she said.

“AMINA!” The bedroom door flew open with a loud smack.

“JESUS!” Amina screamed.

Thomas stood in the door frame, his forehead dotted with sweat from the exertion of fending off Kamala.

“What?” Dimple yelled. “What happened?”

He walked into the room, fists clutched around a dinner roll and a bag of ice.

Amina swallowed. “I’ve got to go.”

“What just happened? Are you okay?”

“I’m fine. My dad’s just here.”

“Did you just say you were—”

“Later,”
Amina said as her father glared at her feet.

“Okay, but call me back!”

It was not, in fact, a dinner roll, Amina saw as her father uncurled
his fist. It was an Ace bandage. Thomas jerked his hand in the direction of the bed. “Sit.”

Amina limped over and sat. Her father pulled up a chair and raised her leg to rest her foot on his knee. His fingers went straight for the spot that hurt the most, pressing it. She gasped.

“How did this happen?” he growled.

“Accident.”

“What kind of accident?”

“I was running in the dark.”

He placed one hand on her heel and the other on her toes, rotating her foot forward too far. She jerked it away.

“That hurts?”

“Yes.”

He pressed his fingers beneath her anklebone. She gritted her teeth and nodded.

“You’ve sprained it. I’m going to wrap it, and then you should keep it elevated and iced.”

“How long will it be sprained?”

“Probably a week or two.” He began to unroll the bandage over her foot, wrapping it around. “Why were you running in the dark?”

“I was robbing a bank.”

The corner of Thomas’s lip twitched, though he was still too wound up to actually crack a smile. Below them, Kamala banged pots and pans. Thomas wrapped the bandage quickly and evenly, putting a nice layer of pressure between Amina and the pain. When he was done he lifted the whole thing and gently helped her swing it onto the bed. He put two pillows under it and then laid the ice over it.

“You’ve taken Advil for the swelling?”

“No.”

He nodded and left, returning shortly with a glass of water, two pills, and two more pillows taken from Akhil’s bed, which he put behind her.

“How’s that?” He backed up, knocking his head against the canopy.

“Much better, thanks.”

“You should take it easy for a few days.” He walked to the window, hands in pockets, shoulders rounded, entirely too large for the room. “So your mother tells me you’re dating a boy from here.”

“Yeah. Jamie Anderson.” She paused a moment for the recognition and, getting none, added, “We went to high school together.”

“Mesa?”

Amina nodded. Where else? “He’s a professor at the university. Anthropology.”

“Interesting. Well, tell him I look forward to meeting him next week.”

“Yeah. Wait, what are you talking about?”

“Your mother said he’s coming to dinner.”

“What? No! Jesus! I haven’t even asked him yet. I haven’t even
decided
to ask him yet. Not that I won’t. I just, you know. Never mind. It’s fine.”

Thomas raised his eyebrows at her.

“It’s fine,” Amina repeated, embarrassed by her outburst. “I should probably just be thankful that she’s over the Anyan George thing.”

“I wouldn’t go that far. You know your mother.”

Amina shook her head. It was amazing, really, how much knowing Kamala didn’t actually help.

“Invite the boy to dinner,” her father suggested. “It will force her to give up.”

This was a lie, the kind Thomas had told Amina often in her teen years, when saying “Nothing can make your mother give up” would have been as unkind as it was true. And Amina nodded, not because she believed him but because she appreciated the sentiment behind the lie, which was simply that her father wanted to help. She grabbed his hand, squeezed it.

“How are you doing?” she asked.

“I’m nervous,” he said, and then looked as startled as she felt that he’d said it out loud. He walked a few paces from the bed, stopping short at the sight of things on the desk. “I always tell my patients, it’s unwise to believe you’ll be the anomaly. Part of a small percentage for whom certain treatments work, maybe, but the anomaly? Not likely.”

“Yeah, but it’s not like you just
think
you’re getting better. Dr. George said—”

“The tests could be wrong,” he snapped, and she understood suddenly that the look on Anyan George’s face that morning had been fear masquerading as impatience, much as it was on Thomas’s now. “Anyway, I should get going. Monica is waiting.”

“Now?”

“Yes.”

“That was fast,” Amina said, with a twinge of sympathy for her mother.

“Getting the business back up to speed will take a while.”

“Uh-huh.”

“It’s not like the money makes itself in this house!”

“I didn’t say anything. Did I say anything?”

Thomas opened his mouth as if to say something but then checked himself. “I’ll be back in an hour.”

“Okay.”

He nodded once, dismissing himself, and walked toward the bedroom door.

“I thought I saw Akhil last night.”

She had not known that she was going to tell him until she had told him. Thomas stopped at the door, his back squared toward her for several long seconds. He turned around to face her, cheeks pale.

“You what?”

She cleared her throat. “I mean, I didn’t, obviously. I just, you know … I guess I just wanted to tell you that I get it. Why it was hard for you.”

“You saw him here?”

“No. I mean, I thought I did, but—”

“In our yard?”

“No. At Mesa.”

“Which mesa?”

“No, Dad, my old school. Mesa Prep.”

Her father nodded at this, his features held tightly in place, and Amina knew then how wrong she had been to think they’d had something
in common, much less felt the same way about it. Thomas did not look like a man reconciling with hallucinations. He looked like someone hearing a phone ring in the next room and willing himself to stay put.

“Did he say anything to you?” her father asked.

Amina stared at him. “He wasn’t real, Dad.”

He nodded, looking away.

“Oh God, I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have told you. It’s not the same thing. I just thought—”

But he was already squeezing her shoulder, walking toward her bedroom door.

“Don’t worry about it,” he said, and let himself out.

CHAPTER 2

T
hey fell into a state of hope. As the last long weeks of summer sighed out across the mesas, as the mornings grew slightly cooler with the promise of September, good and then better news came to the Eapens. The follow-up scan confirmed what the first had hinted: The tumor was indeed shrinking. Thomas took the news with a bowed head and little emotion, but it was obvious in the days that followed that he had turned a corner, suddenly filled with a frantic, zealous energy. He was going to go back to work. To retrieve his patients from the competition. To show them all what was possible. Even as the second round of chemo took its toll, lining his mouth with cold sores that made it impossible to eat and leaving him eight pounds lighter in five days, he rose to meet with Monica, who clutched Amina like a long-lost relative, whispering “It’s a miracle” with such grateful intensity that it seemed she’d gone the way of Kamala.

As for Kamala, she was also getting back to normal, handling her newly free time by pickling a deluge of cucumbers, making Chowpatty corn on the cob, and demanding, along with Mort Hinley, whose
radio harangues once again blasted through the kitchen, the fiery repentance of all sinners. Two weeks in, she took the additional step of announcing that she would be perfectly happy to stay home if the rest of the family wanted to take over the chemo rounds. She did all of this so quickly and efficiently that it felt like a wardrobe change in a theater production, and would have been completely believable had Amina not seen the occasional longing look on her mother’s face when she glanced out to the porch.

Was it fair to leave Thomas to himself and his work so quickly? To somehow feel slighted in the wake of his recovery? As much as Amina saw the folly in this, she could not deny that as the weeks went on, the feeling of their being unnecessary to her father’s recovery was both relieving and damning. Monica was there now, sitting through more and more evenings with him, and the hospital staff was everywhere else, flocking around him from the minute Amina walked him into the hospital until they walked back out the doors.

Gone was the tight, needy family unity, the lulls and spaces in which their best conversations grew, supplanted by an optimism so vigorous that it seemed to scrub away all traces of the last months. Other than a few nights in which Thomas had staggered around the fields, insisting that there was a fire closing in around the house despite their protests, his grip on reality seemed strong enough to not need reinforcement.