The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing: A Novel (44 page)

“No one is trying to make you feel bad, you know. They just don’t know what to say. That’s what they tell me, anyway.”

“Why are you even talking about it?”

“What?”

“Don’t ever talk about my family with anyone again.”

Dimple blinked, looked confused. “Right. Okay. Listen, I only say anything when people tell me that they’re sorry or something, and even then I barely say—”

“What are they sorry to you for? You aren’t even really related to us.”

It shouldn’t have felt good to see the naked hurt in Dimple’s eyes, but it did. It felt like sunlight on cold fingers. Amina leaned into the air
and felt something snap between them. She watched Dimple’s mouth tremble.

“Maybe you should sit alone if you need to cry,” she suggested.

Dimple jumped up, and she was yards away before Amina stopped smiling. She watched until Dimple turned and walked across the parking lot, taking a seat on the low wall there. And for the first time since his death, Amina felt the urgent need to talk to Akhil.

A few nights later the doorbell rang. Up on the Stoop, Amina dropped her cigarette across the laces of her Adidases, which began to smoke immediately.

“Shit!” She whacked at them.

The whole smoking thing was not going well. Despite diligent practice every evening, she was no better at inhaling than she had been in the spring, and she was actually worse at holding the damn things. Why did they always insist on jumping out of her hands? What was she doing wrong?

Fucking Akhil,
she thought, climbing in through his window. It was another new habit, always thinking
fucking
before
Akhil. Fucking Akhil should have taught me how to smoke, and how to do fucking trig, and how to pack a fucking bowl. Now I am fucked by everything I don’t fucking know
.

Amina walked down the hallway, flipping on lights and trying to wipe the smell of smoke off her hands. Sanji would not care, of course, but if it was Raj or Bala, or worse, Chacko, she was sure to get a kind-but-stern talking-to that the others seemed determined to give her, as if to reassure her and themselves that there were still rules worth following. The doorbell rang again.

“Coming!” she yelled loudly, passing her parents’ bedroom door and halfheartedly hoping Kamala would come out with some level of concern about who was at the door or why. But no, of course not. Charles Manson could be ringing with the entire Family and a bag of knives, and Kamala would probably just wait in bed for them to dismember her. Amina opened the door.

“Hey.”

It was not the Manson family. It was not any member of the Ramakrishna or Kurian family either. It was Paige Anderson, looking beautiful and out of place, like a deer at the edge of a paved road. Amina stared at her, every normal-sounding greeting drying up in her throat. It wasn’t so much that she hadn’t seen Paige since the accident (she had, alone at school, sitting with various books plastered over her face), but somehow the reality of her—bob grown past her shoulders, body tucked into a somber navy dress, cheeks still permanently flushed—felt disconcerting. She was so real, standing there, so fraught and insistent and
alive
. It was like looking at a bare, beating heart.

“Can I come in?” Paige asked.

Here?
Amina thought.
To this house?
But her body moved to the side like it was some normal thing, and Paige walked in. Behind her, Amina caught a glimpse of a figure in the passenger seat of the Andersons’ Volvo in the driveway.

“Is that Jamie?”

“What?” Paige looked anxiously over her shoulder. “Oh, yeah. He didn’t want me to come alone.”

“Does he want to come in?”

“Oh, no. He’s just keeping me company. I, uh …” She cleared her throat. “I was hoping I might talk to your parents.”

Amina shut the front door. “My parents?”

“Your dad?”

“He’s still at work.”

“What about your mom?”

“My mom?” Amina said, face hot from catching what felt like some sort of repeating disease, one in which you were doomed to echo someone else’s bad ideas instead of strenuously objecting to them. “She’s in bed.”

Instantly, whatever had been powering the light in Paige’s face—nervousness, anticipation, bravery—was snuffed out. Her shoulders dropped and she looked lost, the foyer rising up around her. When her eyes moved from the stairs to the darkened landing above them, Amina felt sorry for her.

“You want to go up?”

“What?”

“To his room. It’s upstairs.”

“Oh …” Paige blinked several times, considering it. She took a deep breath and looked at Amina. “Okay. Yes.”

If it was strange to have the Ramakrishnas and the Kurians upstairs, it was doubly strange to have Paige there, staring at the row of Akhil’s school pictures in the hall with the intensity of someone trying to find the you
ARE HERE
stamp on a mall map. She studied his younger photos (third grade, buckteeth; fifth grade, buckteeth and mustache) before stopping at his senior picture, the one taken after he’d woken from the Big Sleep and before he’d met her. Her forehead pleated.

“He never invited me over here,” she said, and then looked at Amina like that fact was important somehow, like it was a mark against her instead of the Eapens.

Amina motioned to Akhil’s room. “You can go in if you want.”

Paige nodded, walking past her quickly, but when she entered the room, she stopped suddenly, as though she’d hit an invisible wall.

“Oh,” she said, covering her face with her hand.

It was not an oh of disappointment or an oh of surprise but an oh that Amina had never heard before, scraped raw with an emotion Amina would not know herself until years later, when she understood what it was to long for someone, to ache for their smell and taste on you, to imagine the weight of their hips pinning yours so precisely that you crane up to meet your own invisible desire. She watched as Paige crossed Akhil’s room, undistracted by all the usual things that stopped people—the Greats, his desk, the leather jacket hanging from his chair—and moved straight for his hamper, which she opened up, pulling out a forgotten T-shirt and crushing it into her face. “Oh,” she said again, muffled.
Oh
. And even if Amina didn’t yet know what it was to love like that, to burn until your spine has no choice but to try to wind itself around an empty shirt, she understood for sure that the people who said it was better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all were a bunch of dicks.

“Amina?”

How had she not even heard Kamala coming up the stairs? Amina turned around to find her mother walking down the same hall Paige had just stood in, yesterday’s nightie bunched around her knees. She looked at the open door to Akhil’s room, and her face darkened.

“What are you doing in there?”

“N-nothing,” Amina stammered, willing Paige to put down the shirt and step away from the hamper, but it was too late for that now, Kamala was already pushing past her and into the bedroom, suspicion pressed deep into her face. Paige turned, her face filling with panic before she seemed to get ahold of herself. She placed the shirt on the bed, smoothed her dress down, and stood tall.

“You must be Kamala,” she said, offering a hand to shake, and Amina flinched. “I’m Paige.”

Kamala looked at her hand, confused.

Paige swallowed, tried again. “I’m … I was … I’m Akhil’s girlfriend.”

Kamala looked at Amina.

“The one he was going to prom with,” Amina said.

At this, Kamala stiffened a little, the needle of connection between prom and everything that had followed pricking some corner of her mind.

“I was—I am so sorry to not come to the funeral,” Paige said, hand lowered, cheeks burning with pink circles. “That’s why I’m here. I wanted … I just … I wanted to come by to see you both. You and Thomas. To tell you how much I loved your son.”

Kamala looked at her for a long time, gaze brewing with something Amina couldn’t quite place, until she said, “Loved?”

The word was spoken neutrally, but one look at her face was enough for Amina, who reached for Paige’s elbow.

“Yes.” Paige brushed Amina away, looking puzzled. “Yes, of course.”

Kamala laughed once, hard, like a shovel hitting cement.

“Paige,” Amina said evenly. “Let me walk you down.”

Paige straightened at this suggestion, taller than either of them.
She looked from one to the other, her face suddenly ripening with an expression Amina had seen her give Akhil a thousand times before. It was a look of hope, of compassion, of—God forbid—love.

“Amina, I’d like to speak with your mother alone.”

“I really don’t think that’s a good—”

But it didn’t really matter what Amina thought because Paige was already saying, “I loved your son more than I’ve ever loved anyone,” in a low and steady voice, one sweet with the belief that there was something left for her to hold on to in this house, that two people in pain could find common ground. It was an opinion that was probably welcome across the Anderson dinner table, or at least taken seriously, but it was not welcome in this room, where Kamala’s rigid face slammed away every word and Amina turned silently and fled, going back down the hallway, down the stairs, and through the front door like a shot. She shut the door behind her with a thump.

Fucking Paige. Fucking Kamala. Fucking Akhil
.

“Hey,” she heard from her side, and she nearly screamed. Jamie waved from her periphery. He was standing awkwardly next to one of the planters, his face drawn with worry.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

She was not okay. Amina knew this for sure as she charged toward him, shaking like a comet and ready to flatten him, so she was surprised by how easily he caught her, his arms opening just enough for her to fit between them, his shoulder landing firmly under her chin. Warm. He was warm. His heart thumped against her chest, and Amina shut her eyes, wanting to keep pushing forward until she somehow disappeared all the way into him.

Why wasn’t it weird to be held by Jamie Anderson? It’s not like she had ever been held by anyone not related to her before, and none of them felt even a bit like Jamie, who was exactly her size and skinny, with skin hotter than she would have thought healthy. But it wasn’t weird, even if she was half stepping on one of his feet and his Afro was scratching against her ear. It wasn’t even weird when he said, “How’s it going?” like they weren’t already plastered together.

“It’s horrible,” she said.

He hugged her tighter and whispered something. It sounded like
I’m sorry
, but it also sounded like
I’m worried
, and she wanted to ask which he meant, because it seemed like a pretty big distinction, but just then the door opened and Paige came flying through it, eyes wet, mouth trembling.

“Go,” Paige said to Jamie as they sprang apart. “Go, go, go!”

“What?” Jamie asked as she stumbled down the steps. “Wait!”

But Paige was not waiting. She was running toward the Andersons’ Volvo, her dress flapping at the backs of her knees. Jamie looked at Amina, his face clouding.

Well, what did they think was going to happen? Where did they think they were?

“You shouldn’t have come,” Amina said, and watched as this registered with Jamie’s slight flinch, a tic behind his gaze that then turned into his backing away from her and running after his sister.

Long after their taillights had disappeared into the darkening trees and the traces of Jamie’s heat had evaporated from her skin, Amina stood on the porch, trying not to think about what Jamie probably thought of her now, or how good it had felt to be hugged, or how Paige hadn’t even looked at her on the way out. Her feet felt heavy going upstairs, and heavier still as she walked down the hallway toward the slight stir of air and light that came from Akhil’s room.

Inside, Kamala was praying. This is what Amina thought at first when she saw the unlikely Pietà of her mother sitting on Akhil’s bed, the T-shirt strewn weakly across her lap. Kamala’s head was bent over it, and something about this—not being able to see her face—made Amina realize suddenly how much she missed her mother. She missed Kamala banging the cupboards in the kitchen. She missed her shouting “Hey, dummies! Rise and shines!” from the bottom of the stairs in the morning. She missed her saying “Oh, really?” when Queen Victoria burped too loudly, like they were having an actual conversation, and how sometimes she would come up and squeeze Amina’s shoulder out of the blue, which used to feel like a poor excuse for a hug but now, in memory, felt like sitting in front of a blazing fire with a world of snow falling outside.

“Ma?” She took a step into the room.

Her mother’s head snapped up, and with a stab of fear Amina realized
her mistake. This was no noble sorrow, no reverential Mary. Kamala glared at her like a tiger hunkered over a fresh kill, and Amina found herself thinking,
She will kill me now, too
. Not that Kamala had killed Akhil. No one had—not Kamala, not Thomas, not Akhil himself, not even Amina. Except that standing there, looking at her mother, Amina suddenly understood that they all had, in some way. They all had.

Kamala opened her mouth, dark eyes glinting.

“Shut the door,” she said.

It got better after the Andersons’ visit. Not better in that anything actually good happened, but better in that Amina stopped waiting for it to. It was as though a punctuation mark had been put on the event of Akhil’s death, giving it an exact shape for her to size up. She stopped waiting to feel normal. She stopped expecting anyone to understand. She stopped keeping an eye out for Paige at school, and when Jamie talked in class, she looked right through him, daring herself to feel less and less for either of the Andersons until finally they slipped back into the Mesa masses, their bodies moving in a steady line down the hallway, avoiding her without even trying.

“Amina?” Her father opened her bedroom door on the last school night of the year. “Can I come in?”

Why do fathers always look ungainly in their daughter’s bedrooms? Like mythical beasts wandered in from the forest of another world? Thomas made an effort to steer clear of Amina’s piles of clothes, of the desk and bookshelves, but he still managed to rattle everything on the surface of the dresser and knock his head on the canopy over the bed.