The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing: A Novel (60 page)

“Wow. Albuquerque must have been so small back then.”

“You don’t know! One tiny speck of city in so much of brown!”

Thomas’s eyes snapped open. He squinted at the garden. Sat up a little.

“Had you always wanted to be a brain surgeon?” Jamie asked him. Thomas did not answer. Amina prodded him with her foot.

“No,” Thomas said, dragging his eyes from the garden to Jamie with some effort. “When I was young, I wanted to be a pilot.”

“What about you?” Kamala said, spooning a little more rice onto Jamie’s plate. “You always wanted to go into teaching?”

“Not at all. I just really enjoyed the field studies I was doing, and this is one way to keep doing them.”

“Amina said you’re in archeology?” Thomas asked. “Anthropology.”

“Anthropology,” Thomas repeated. “So do you just teach all day, or—”

“No, actually, my tenure-track status is pursuant to a study I’m conducting, so I spend a portion of my week out in the field. Or, well, at casinos.”

“Like the Sandia Casino?” Kamala asked.

“Actually, that’s the one I’m looking at right now.”

“Chi!”
she shook her head. “Horrible place! So dark inside! And not one thing to eat at the all-you-can-eat!”

“Not even the chicken fingers?”

Kamala looked aghast. “Who eats chicken’s fingers?”

“So Amina must have told you about all that terrible business with her picture,” Thomas said. “The Puyallup Indians and all that.”

“Uh, no, actually,” Amina said. “Can someone pass me the beets?”

“What picture?” Jamie asked.

“Nothing.” Amina shook her head dismissively. “Another time.”

“The Indian man jumping from a bridge!” Kamala said excitedly. “Not Indian our Indian, Indian feathers on the head. It’s famous! She didn’t tell you?”

“Wait, not the one from a couple of years ago. In Seattle? The chief?”

“Community leader,” Amina corrected with a wince.

“You took
that
picture?”

“You know it?” Kamala nudged Thomas, who was back to looking at the garden, jittery. “He knows it.”

“You took that?” Jamie looked impressed.

“Yes! And after, she became a wedding photographer,” Kamala said, nodding. “And now she might be starting her own highly successful events-photography business out here.”

“Ma.”

“What? You might! Did she at least tell you there will be one show of her work in a Seattle gallery in a few weeks?”

“Yes, that I know.”

“Be right back,” Thomas said, rising from his chair and making a beeline for the garden.

“Mrs. Eapen, would you mind if I had one more poori?”

“Have, have!” Kamala handed Jamie two more, and they fell into a discussion on pooris and why (in Kamala’s opinion) they were superior to fry bread and why hers (just ask anyone) were better than most. Amina turned around and watched as her father walked rigidly out to the garden, stopping at the gate. He leaned over it. Said something. Waited. Said it again. Then he turned around to come back, his face drum tight.

“Oh, hey, Dimple’s coming tomorrow,” Amina said, suddenly remembering. “Well, today, actually, but she’ll come over here tomorrow morning.”

Kamala frowned. “Why?”

“She wants to see Dad.”

“Pish. She should be so concerned about her own parents. Bala worries for her all the time only.”

Thomas returned to the table, sitting heavily.

Amina leaned forward, trying to catch his eye. “So, I was just telling Mom that Dimple is coming to see you tomorrow. Sometime in the morning.”

“Dimple is Amina’s old friend from school,” Kamala explained to Jamie. “Not much in common anymore, but what can you do?”

“Yeah, I remember her from school.”

“Oh!” Kamala’s face lit up. “You went to Mesa Preparatory? I didn’t realize! No one said!”

“It’s not some huge deal, Ma.”

“But then he will know everyone you know! All the kids and everyone who is out here. You’re in touch? Lots of socializing?”

“Uh, kind of.”

Amina looked away, distracted by Thomas. His eyes pinged from side to side, like he was trying to remember where he’d put something important. Amina nudged him with her foot again.

Kamala chewed her food a little, swallowing before asking, “So you knew Akhil, too?”

“Yes. Actually, he dated my sister, Paige.”

Kamala blinked rapidly, mouth moving slightly, as if she was finishing the rest of the sentence without sound, and Thomas’s gaze snapped from the garden to Jamie. “You’re Paige’s brother?”

“Yes.”

He leaned forward. “From high school? That girl he dated?”

“Paige Anderson.”

“Paige
Anderson
,” Kamala repeated softly, like a lyric to a song she’d been trying to remember.

“The girl.” Thomas looked at Amina for confirmation. “The one.”

“She came here once, I think,” Kamala said, and Jamie nodded. “Unbelievable!” Thomas howled, and slapped the table.

“Yeah,” Jamie started. “Kind of a strange coincidence, I guess.” Thomas laughed loudly, and Jamie smiled despite the strangeness of the situation, because who could resist Thomas’s sudden burst of joy, his smile growing by the second like he’d won some sort of cosmic lottery?

“Did you hear that?” Thomas called out to the garden. “Paige Anderson’s brother is here!”

Amina shot Kamala an alarmed look.

“Here!”
her father shouted, a little louder. He pointed at Jamie. “Right here!”

“Pa,” Kamala said, touching his arm softly, but he shooed her away, fumbling for his binoculars.

“Hold on, I want to see his face.”

Kamala bent her head to his ear, slipping into a heated whisper of Malayalam that Thomas did not even pretend to listen to.

“He’s ignoring me. Pretending he can’t hear me again.”

Amina tugged Jamie’s arm, but he was riveted, his mouth slightly open, like he was watching a movie.

“YOU HEAR ME?” Thomas yelled, a thread of frustration in his voice making them jump. He was growing agitated, one hand holding the binoculars while the other clenched and unclenched. His arm shook as he motioned to the garden. “See how he does that? Acts like he’s not listening but he’s listening? I used to do the same thing. Drove my mother nuts.” Amina looked helplessly at the garden, the blue evening spreading out around it like water.

“Me too,” Jamie said.

Thomas turned to him.

“My mother hated it,” Jamie continued, a flush rising to his cheeks. “Told me I’d regret it someday.”

Thomas looked at him for several long seconds before sitting back down slowly. “And did you?”

“Yeah. I did, actually.”

“And are you close now?”

“She died a few years ago. Breast cancer.”

“And were you with her when she died?”

“Yes.”

“In the room? Right there?”

“Dad!” Amina said, but Jamie was already nodding, a sad, surprised smile on his face, like he’d just caught an unexpected glimpse of a place he missed, and this seemed to mean something to Thomas, who leaned back in his chair, shutting his eyes.

“You have nothing to regret,” he said.

After dinner, she led Jamie up to her room and went down the hall to take a shower. When she came back, he was lying awkwardly across her bed, entirely too large for it, staring at the canopy.

“So this is what girls like?” He motioned upward, the lines in his
face carved deep with thought. “Looking up at tiny flowers all day and night?”

“When they’re, like, seven.” She sat down.

“Can we talk about Air Supply?”

“Nope.”

“Damn.” He wiped a drop of water from her shoulder. “I knew you’d say that.”

He looked exhausted, bags the color of bruises under his eyes. Amina bent over and kissed his cheek, then his forehead. “We wore you out.”

“I sleep better with you in the bed.”

Amina smiled, her eyes moving from his mouth to his neck to the button she most wanted to undo on his shirt. She leaned over him, letting the towel unfold.

“Whoa. Wait, no.” Jamie sat up, pushing it closed with both hands. “Not happening. Not in here.”

“Seriously? They won’t even know.”

“Yes they will. Your father will know. And then he will come up here and he will kill me with his freakishly large thumbs.”

“Jamie.”

“And there’s no way I’m getting turned on in this bed. And frankly, you should question the moral fiber of any guy who does.”

Amina looked at the bedroom door, perplexed. “My dad has large thumbs?”

“How do you not know that?”

She lay back on the bed. “So you survived dinner.”

He grunted.

“I’m sorry about that whole thing. Your mom.”

“It’s fine,” he said, and when she looked at him, he looked fine, the plates in his face shifted to seal off whatever had pierced through when he was talking to Thomas. “Anyway, they’re way nicer than you said.”

“Last month my mother wouldn’t have even talked to you.”

“Yes she would have.”

“You don’t know my mother!”

“Okay, fine. She would have thrown chutneys at my head. So what, now she’s too worried about your dad to bother?”

“No, she’s in love,” Amina said, understanding it was true as she said it. She thought of her mother’s face that night at the table, waiting to laugh at some story Thomas had told a thousand times, and her chest tightened like she’d swallowed a pocket of wind.

“Love is good,” Jamie muttered, his eyelids heavy.

Amina watched his breathing, the little flickering pulse at the base of his neck. Just when she thought he had fallen asleep, he said, “So that picture. That was the one, huh?”

“Yeah.”

His eyes fluttered open. “Do you like it?”

“It’s horrific.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

It was a funny question because no one had ever asked her before, and because she wasn’t sure she knew the answer until she felt herself nodding, and then she knew it absolutely. Jamie’s eyes slid shut.

“I’d like to see it,” he said.

“Really?”

“Yeah, of course.”

Amina chewed at her cuticle, watching him. “You want to fly out with me for the opening?”

“Drive.”

“What?”

“Let’s drive.”

“That’s a long way to drive,” she said, but he was already drifting away, the knot between his eyebrows smoothing.

Amina rolled onto her back, staring up at the canopy. She reached out, pinching a corner of his T-shirt between two fingers, feeling it rise and fall with his breaths. She imagined them driving north and west, the aspen, the Tetons, the ragged coast of Oregon. Jamie’s profile against a blur of landscape. They slept.

CHAPTER 6

H
ow had she forgotten about Dimple’s beauty? And could it have actually increased in her absence? The next morning Amina stared, trying not to be thrown by the surreality of her cousin’s overlarge cheekbones and liquid eyes, the way her skin glowed like a baby’s butt in a diaper commercial.

“He’s so skinny,” Dimple said, watching Kamala and Thomas garden through the screen door on the porch. She had come over before the others, claiming she’d wanted some time alone with Thomas, but now that she was there, she seemed stuck somehow, unable to actually go into the yard.

“The meds kill his appetite,” Amina explained.

“Isn’t there something you can do about that? Like a permanent IV or something?”

“Not really.”

“Or, like, fatty foods? Can he just eat really fatty things?”

“He can’t keep them down.”

“Fuck.” Dimple’s chin trembled and she quickly rubbed it.

“You want me to go out with you?” Amina asked.

Dimple shook her head, her face shadowed with nervousness. She watched Thomas bend down, biting her cuticle.

“Do you want to go have a smoke on the Stoop?”

“Yes. I mean, no.” She took a sharp breath. “I just … I think some part of me really believed that it was an exaggeration. Like maybe he was doing better than everyone thought, or maybe everyone had been here too long to see things clearly.” She swept a fingertip under her left eye, quickly ridding it of the tear that threatened to spill over. “The fucking height of narcissism, right?”

Amina shrugged. “It’s hard to get it unless you see it.”

Outside, Thomas rose slowly, his legs shaking until Kamala rose too, wedging herself under his arm. Dimple turned away, her eyelashes shivering over the shop, the piles of lights, the parched mound of what had been Akhil’s jacket. “So is there anything I should know? Anything I shouldn’t, you know, talk about?”

“Oh, you know. Treatment. Tumors, medications, prognoses. Eating, sleeping. Akhil, but I guess that was always the case, although now if you talk about him, you’ll hear all sorts of stuff.”

“Like everyone comes back looking like they did on their best day?”

“Like clocks make it harder to see them.”

“Wow.”

They watched Thomas and Kamala walk away from the tomato plants, toward the back of the garden.

“You know what I don’t get?” Dimple said. “How do you know what your best day is? I mean, aren’t some of them tied?”

Amina smiled, nudging her cousin gently. “So are you going to do this or what?”

Dimple nodded but didn’t move.