The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing: A Novel (23 page)

“Everyone has a
personal
Jesus,” a newly saved Kamala had explained when Amina was in high school, believing, apparently, that Amina would greet this news with as much excitement as she would everyone having a personal Porsche. The following week she had forced her to come to a service at Trinity Baptist Church, where the congregants seemed to revel in the fact that Kamala was a saved
Indian
, a sort of born-again Bengal Tiger in their midst. Never mind that the Eapens were already Christians; Pastor Wilbur Walton had explained Amina’s presence as a sign of the Lord’s work being done. “Back in India,” he said, “these folks were following blue-skinned
gods
.”

“You think Jesus cares who got there first?” Kamala had asked when Amina fumed over it on the car ride home.

“But we were Christians while they were still praying to goddamn Odin!”

“Doesn’t matter! Jesus loves all equally! And quit quoting your father, you sound like an idiot.”

“Mom’s a lunatic,” Amina told Prince Philip when he returned with the stick, dropping it next to her ankle. The dog looked unimpressed.

Thomas came home a little early, and soon enough Kamala called them for dinner, which comprised not one but all of Amina’s favorite dishes—lamb vindaloo and bhindi baingan and chicken korma steaming quietly from the copper pots.

“You made too much, Ma,” Amina said, mouth watering.

“Speak for yourself,” Thomas said. “When you’re not here, she starves me.”

“Yeah, you look starved.”

Kamala put out several little jars of pickle. “This one Bala made; it’s lime but a little too salty. Raj gave us the mango. It’s dry. I made the garlic. That’s all you’re taking for vegetable?”

“I’ll get seconds.”

“You need the cabbage to keep you from slouching, and the okra will help with your lips.”

“What’s wrong with my lips?”

“They’re getting blackish.”

“They are?” Amina looked at her reflection in the microwave. Her entire face looked back at her in different shades of blackish.

“They’re fine,” Thomas said, helping himself to the food on the stove. “Stop giving her complexes.”

“Who’s giving anything? Not so much of ghee, Mr. Hardening Arteries.”

Thomas put the ghee spoon down with a sigh and set his plate on the table. “Amina, can I get you something to drink? Should we open a bottle of wine?”

“No thanks,” Amina said, sitting. “Just water for me.”

“Poosh. Party pooper.” Thomas grabbed a beer for himself from the fridge.

They ate. The lamb and rice were tender and pungent in Amina’s mouth, instantly settling whatever the turbulence had ruffled. Amina sighed deeply, chewing. Her lips buzzed with numbness from the heat. “So good, Ma. Thanks.”

“Thanking a mother for cooking is nonsense,” Kamala huffed,
looking pleased. “Anyway. Did I tell you my friend Julie’s daughter is getting married this weekend?”

Amina gave her father a pained look.

“No talk of marriage,” Thomas said.

“Who’s talking marriage?” her mother asked. “I’m talking
business
. I told Julie you would have been happy to take pictures, but you’re leaving. Unless you can stay?”

“I can’t. I work weekends, remember?”

“This is work!”

“Anyhow, I’m sure Julie’s daughter has had a photographer picked out for months. That’s how it works, you know.”

“I know that, silly, I just told her that you were a better photographer is all.”

“You don’t know that.”

“Of course I do,” Kamala said, and despite herself, Amina filled with a sudden stab of love, like a breath she hadn’t counted on taking. She reached for the jar of garlic pickle, putting a generous portion on her plate.

“You don’t need that much,” Kamala said.

“I like it,” Amina said, and her mother ducked her head to hide her smile.

Evening escape was always necessary. After leaving Monica a message, Amina took a stale cigarette from an empty cassette-tape case hidden in her old desk and wandered down to the ditch just outside the gate at the back of the house. The magic of the smoke and the high altitude sent her head swimming, but when she exhaled, she had one clear thought:
Dad is fine
. The notion surprised Amina with its assuredness, and she turned it over in the coming dark, unsure if she was having a genuine moment of insight or her fear was conspiring to tell her what she most needed to hear.

Coming back to the house, she saw that her father was already waiting for their nightly conversation, the deep yellow of his porch light beckoning like a fire. She walked toward it, wondering once again how anyone could insist on calling the burgeoning mayhem on the
back of the house a “porch.” Sure, it had started out as a verandah some twenty years earlier, but time and Thomas’s endless additions—platforms, nooks, shelves, newspapers, tools, inventions—left it floating in the backyard like a junk barge.

Large, darkened outlines grew clearer as Amina drew closer, turning from monsters to machinery—a router table, two planers, table saw, and drill press. Clamps of varying sizes hung across the back wall, along with several lassos of extension cord, three levels, and two wall-mounted shelves of tiny boxes that held everything from safety pins to masonry drill bits. Three headlamps, a hard hat, a cowboy hat, and a felt touk dotted the wall above a coatrack, on which a lab coat, a yellow rubberized suit, and a flame-retardant jumper were draped. The only actual furniture in the room consisted of two wingback chairs—one made of cracked leather and permanently empty, save for the times Amina filled it, and the other a patchy red velvet, in which Thomas was currently sitting. He shifted, looking vaguely impatient, as she came closer.

“I don’t think so,” he said.

“You don’t think what?”

A lone moth cast a hand-sized shadow across the wall behind him, and he turned to it. He frowned and looked at his watch.

“Dad?”

His eyes zeroed in on her. “Hey, Amina! There you are! I was waiting.”

“Sorry. I needed a walk after all the food.”

She made her way in, skirting a sawhorse strangled by surgical tubing.

“Where did you go?”

“Just now? Just to the ditch.”

“You should be careful out there. High school kids park there now. A whole lot of them are in gangs.”

“Like the Crips and the Bloods?” Amina joked.

“Lots of them,” Thomas said. “Ty Hanson lost his son last month in a shoot-out in the mall.”

“Oh my God, really?” She had known Mr. Hanson in the loose way she knew a handful of her father’s patients—more a flash of features
and a diagnosis than any real connection. He had a beard of some sort, a recurring meningioma, and a towheaded toddler. “That little kid?”

“Derrick. He had just turned seventeen in April.” Thomas’s face hollowed with a grief they both knew had nothing to do with Ty or Derrick Hanson, and Amina looked down, her breathing gone tight. The bin at her feet held the double-headed snakes of jumper cables, and she studied their copper jaws until she heard her father standing up.

“You want a drink?” He walked across the porch to rattle around in the old hospital lockers that lined the back wall. “This is the good stuff. Old ER nurse sent it. You remember Romero?”

Amina did not remember Romero. She nodded to avoid being given a full explanation of Romero. A minute or so later, Thomas crossed the porch, holding out one of two jelly jars.

“Cheers,” Thomas said, and they toasted without clinking. Amina took a deep swallow. The good stuff tasted like a campfire.

“You don’t like it?”

She exhaled. “I don’t know yet.”

Thomas looked amused, wandering back to his chair and gesturing for her to do the same. “So how is Seattle?”

“Oh, you know. Pretty much the same.”

“You’re still liking your job?”

She smiled tightly, strangely comforted by how little Thomas understood about her career derailment. “It’s fine.”

“Do you like the weddings?”

“Yeah,” Amina surprised herself by saying, “I guess I do.”

“That’s nice. Lucky, right?” It wasn’t a real question, more an affirmation of what Thomas had taken upon himself as his most important life lesson for Amina—to have a job she felt passionate about. “It’s such a crucial business, this liking what you do. Americans get into this idea that you do one thing to make money and then live like royalty when you are away from it—such a strange way to live. Makes you”—his fingers danced around his head—“imbalanced!”

“You never felt that way about work?”

“Never. I had bad days—who doesn’t have bad days? But still I
look forward to going in every day. Excited and whatnot.” His face brightened as he talked, ramping up for his favorite revelation. “I wasn’t a good medical student, you know.”

“No?” Amina said, like this was a surprise.

Thomas shook his head vigorously. “Terrible, actually. I was such a troublemaker, and Ammachy … But going to medical school was a fluke, really. I had the grades, you see, but not the ambitions.”

Amina took another long pull of scotch, watching his features soften in the giddy, distant way that fathers in movies did when remembering how they fell in love with their wives.

“Dr. Carter?” she prompted.

“Yes! Exactly. I had never touched a live brain before he came to Vellore, can you imagine? And then the exposition! The surgery! We must have stood for eleven hours that first day alone. People always say time stands still, and it really is that, you know. You find the thing you love the most, and time will stop for you to love it.”

He looked at her, clearly pleased with his recounting, and Amina felt a pinch in her heart. She swallowed the rest of her scotch with a gulp. He stood up and motioned for her glass. Prince Philip made a halfhearted attempt to stand, then slid back into position on the floor.

“Oh, I don’t know about that,” Thomas said, shuffling toward the lockers.

“Know about what?” Amina watched him, body pulsing lightly with heat. The good stuff was apparently a little bit stronger than the regular stuff. Or maybe she was just becoming a lightweight.

“What, Ami?”

“Did you just say something?”

“Nope.” He opened the locker. “It’s nice to have you here. So you just came home because you had some time off?”

Something about his tone made Amina look up. He held his body still, the bottle poised in midair for her answer.

“More or less.” She waited until he was back and had handed her the glass to say, “Mom was a little worried about you, too.”

“Worried about what?”

“That maybe something’s not quite right with you.”

“Pssht.” Thomas waved a large hand. “She’s thought that forever,
no?” Amina conceded with a small shrug, and Thomas’s frown deepened. “Anyway, your mother has always been afraid of anything she can’t control.”

“Maybe she just read the situation wrong.”

“Yes, she’s quite good at that, too.” Thomas cleared his throat. “Did she tell you she sent two thousand dollars to some radio preacher?”

“What? No! When?”

“Last month itself.”

“Oh, God. What did you do?”

“Nothing! What to do? She never spends money on herself, now she wants to give it to some quack? Her business.” He looked out across the yard for a long time. “I think”—he swirled the liquid around his glass—“she’s having a spiritual crisis.”

“Really? Mom?”

He nodded, not looking at her. “This business of not belonging to a church, of not having a place for all her beliefs. I think it’s affecting her. Making her see evil and whatnot where it isn’t.” He looked at her, his nose wrinkling with a
What can you do?
shrug. Amina looked hard at him, at his assured posture, his sharp eyes. There were rings around his irises, the pale harbingers of age.

“You’re fine,” she said out loud. Thomas nodded. She let her head sink into the back of her chair. “Of course you are.”

“You really thought something was wrong?”

“I don’t know. I mean, it did sound crazy. She said you were out here all night talking to Ammachy or something.”

She expected him to laugh, as he usually did when they had weathered another bout of Kamala’s insanity, but when she looked at him, his mouth was puckered.

“What?”

“You believed her,” he said.

“I didn’t know what to think.”

“Sure,” he said, clearly hurt.

“Dad.”

He looked away and she slid her feet across the floor until her sneakers rested on top of his black work shoes. She nudged him, and after a moment he nudged back. Prince Philip shifted in his sleep, rolling
until he was all belly and genitals, his canines sharp under a sagging lip.

“Oh, hey!” Thomas jumped up, startling her. He walked toward one of the shelves. “Have I told you about this yet?”

Amina watched as he rummaged in the dark, flipping on one light switch and then another. He pulled out two large spoons tied together and waved them.

“What is that?”

“Come. I’ll show you.”

“What? Where?”

Thomas nodded to the fields. “You’ll love it.”

Ten minutes later, Amina stood back in the dark yard with her father, staring into the truck bed.

“And what, exactly, does it do?” she asked.

“Stuns them a bit, when done at close proximity and with soft produce,” Thomas said. They had moved Kamala’s truck from the driveway to the very back of the field. Two cords of surgical tubing hung between the spoons that were bolted into each side of the bed. In between was a pillow-sized square of leather. Thomas picked it up and pulled it back.

“Holy shit,” Amina said.

“Holy
Raccooner
!” Thomas corrected.

The slingshot, if it could still be called that at such enormous proportions, took up the better length of the truck bed when stretched fully backward. Thomas pulled it tight, explaining to Amina, “Thing is, you need to find what works best. We’ve been doing experiments. Tomatoes, potatoes, that kind of thing.”

“We?”

“Raj and Chacko and me. I thought the tomato was something else, but then Raj went and baked an eggplant whole and brought it over and
pshoom!
You’ve never seen anything like it!”