The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing: A Novel (51 page)

“The everything is making him sicker! What are we supposed to do about it? Should have just stuck to the radiation!”

Amina took a deep breath. “Give it time.”

“What is all this?” Kamala was looking at the things from the garden, which were still lined up on the desk and looking dustier by the day.

Amina sighed. “Yeah, I’ve been meaning to tell you. I found them in the garden. Near where the jacket had been. They were buried in the same bed. I dug it all up.”

Kamala moved forward slowly, leaning down to look at the jar of mango pickle, then the album. She touched the shoes briefly before picking up the bunch of keys. “He told me he’d lost those.”

Amina shrugged. “He probably thought he had.”

She flinched as her mother dropped the keys and cried out as if she had been cut, understanding too late that it was too much, and that some measure of refuge had been sought out and not found in Amina’s company. She moved hastily toward Kamala, hugging her rigid shoulders until she was gently rebuffed.

“You go,” Kamala said. “I’ll stay here with him.”

“No, Ma, come. He wants you to. And I have to. And it’s just down the road.”

“But someone should stay.”

“Prince Philip will stay.”

Her mother shook her head at this but smiled a little.

“It’s just for a few hours,” Amina said, suddenly feeling hopeful, like getting out of the house would somehow change what was going on inside it. “And he can call us if he needs us, right? Let’s just go.”

“Fine,” Kamala sighed, as if this was a war they had been waging for weeks instead of minutes. “Let’s go.”

The next morning Amina woke to a note.

Your father needs to eat
.

It was written in her mother’s tiny, curly script and taped to the upstairs bathroom mirror with no further instruction. Amina went downstairs. Her parents’ room was empty, blinds raised, bed made.

“Dad?” she called. “Prince Philip?”

The kitchen was also empty, as was the living room. Amina poured herself a large glass of water and gulped it down, walking back to the laundry room. She found her father and the dog on a cot on the porch. Thomas lay like a plank, and over his lower legs, Prince Philip was trying valiantly to curl himself into a neat ball, his paws sliding over the edges. Sunlight streamed in, bleaching the walls and the tools and the piles of newspaper. The dog wagged its tail as Amina approached.

“Dad?”

Thomas’s eyes rolled slowly in his sockets, resting on her. He hadn’t been asleep.

“Hey.” She turned a chair around to face the cot, sat in it. “What’s up?”

He shrugged.

“You just wake up?” she asked.

Thomas shifted, prompting Prince Philip to rise and wobble off the cot.

“You want breakfast?” she asked.

Her father rolled onto one side, facing the wall opposite her. Prince Philip turned his head slightly, looking from father to daughter with canine nervousness. Poor dogs. All that intuition and no recourse.

“Dad?”

Thomas shook his head, muttering something. She leaned in closer. “What?”

“I did not ask you to come.”

“I know that. Mom left me a note.”

Thomas threw an arm over his head, blocking his ears. Prince Philip leaned in to sniff his armpit, and Thomas sprang up, grabbing his muzzle and shoving him away hard.

“Dad, stop! What are you—”

“I DON’T WANT YOU HERE!” Thomas shouted, rising up with his teeth bared, and Amina shot out of her chair, backing away fast. But Thomas was not looking at her. He was looking at the coatrack.

“Dad?”

“GET OUT.”

“Who are you talking to?”

Thomas stared furiously at the coats, dragging his eyes from them to Amina as if they were conspiring together.

“Dad? Daddy?”

Thomas flinched. Dropped his head in his hands. Rocked back and forth with his arms wound tight around him. When Amina touched his shoulder, he shuddered.

“What can I do?” Amina asked, trying to hold his rounded shoulders, his flinching spine. “What helps?”

Her father shook his head.

Two nights later, lured by the scent of coriander and ginger, Thomas walked into the kitchen looking slightly puffy but determined. Curls matted around his head in tufts, and his raggy blue robe exposed two knees that looked only slightly larger than another man’s Adam’s apple.

“Kam—” he began, and his wife set a plate of chicken curry in front of him before he could finish. Two chapatis, one nice drumstick, and a little bit of curds later, he motioned for seconds.

“You going to eat?” he asked Amina between bites.

“Not yet.”

It was only six-thirty. She watched her father gnaw the flesh from the bone, the recent loss of weight making him look more like an animal. Human bones devouring chicken bones. Meat eating meat.

Kamala set down a plate in front of her. She had another plate for herself and a foreboding look on her face, as if the only thing standing between Thomas and starvation was everybody eating chicken curry at once. Amina picked up a chapati without a word, and for the first time since the diagnosis, the Eapens enjoyed a regular dinner alone together, parsing the meat and the bread into smaller and smaller portions until they were sweeping their fingers over clean porcelain.

“Maybe I’ll take a shower,” Thomas said, but he made no move to leave the kitchen. He looked around with the heady gaze of a man
stumbling home from a walkabout. “So what’s been going on? Any news?”

You’ve been sick. You thought the coatrack was a person.
Amina shrugged.
“Not much.”

“The Luceros’ son got married,” Kamala offered.

“Ah, yes, how was it?”

“Awful. Food was terrible. Bride was fat.”

“Ma!”

“What? It’s true.”

“She was pregnant!”

“Well, she was fat, too,” Kamala said, licking the pads of her fingers clean like a cat, and Thomas looked amused.

“What else?” he asked.

“I’m having a show,” Amina said, and watched as the surprise prismed both her parents’ faces. “Or, well, Dimple is. Dimple’s gallery is showing my work.”

“Wow!” Thomas smiled weakly. “Will people see it?”

“That’s the idea.”

“When?” Kamala asked.

“It’s in September. I’ll probably head back for the weekend or something.”

“Good for you. Excellent, excellent.” Thomas squinted at her like he was seeing her in the future, when she’d finally become the person he always knew she’d be. “What photos? Any we’ve seen?”

“Not really, no. Some newer stuff. Mostly weird moments at weddings.”

“Jane must be so proud.”

Amina nodded.
Sure. Why not?

Thomas stood up, uncurling his spine slowly, and picked up his plate.

“I’ve got it.” Kamala reached for it. “You go take that shower. I put a stool inside in case you need it.”

“Pshht! I’m not an invalid, woman.”

“I know that. It’s only for just in cases.” She smiled shyly at him, sweetly, Amina thought, filled with an eagerness to reassure him that there was no frailty she couldn’t forget, no action she couldn’t rewrite,
and it occurred to Amina that there was never going to be a good time to talk about what was going on.

“I found a bunch of your things in the garden,” she said.

“You want rasmalai for dessert?” Kamala asked, shooting her a look.

“What things?” Thomas asked.

Amina told him, feeling bad about the way his eyes dropped to the brick floor, the way he reached for the counter, looking newly nauseated. He sat back down heavily.

“You don’t remember putting them there?” Amina asked.

“No.”

“Doesn’t matter,” Kamala said. “Nobody cares anyway.”

“None of it?”

He looked at her uneasily. “Not really.”

“I thought you had maybe left the shoes for Itty.”

“Don’t be an idiot!” Kamala huffed. She snatched Amina’s plate away, taking it back to the sink. Thomas looked at her carefully. “That’s who you were seeing the other, day, right?” Amina asked. Her father’s brow knotted, as if he was trying to locate his own memory. After a long moment, he nodded.

“And the trophy was for Ammachy?”

“Amina,” Kamala called over her shoulder. “Leave it.”

“I just, I don’t want you to feel like you can’t talk about it,” Amina said. “You’re seeing things. You can’t help it. I don’t know why we have to be so weird about it.”

“No one is being weird! Who is being weird?”

“You are, Ma.”

With surprising force, Kamala lifted a plate above her head and threw it. It shattered in the sink, releasing a live, buzzing silence. Amina watched her mother’s small body hunch over, hands clutching the edges of the sink like she would lift the whole thing and slam it down if she could.

“Itty asked, so I gave them,” Thomas said.

Amina nodded calmly, trying to keep her face from registering any hint of worry, but something in her chest bunched up on itself, like a cat being cornered. From her periphery, she saw Kamala bend
into the sink and begin picking up the pieces, which scritched against one another like beetle shells.

“Did Ammachy ask for the trophy?”

“No,” Thomas said, looking uncomfortable. “I just thought she would like it.”

“And the album?”

“That was for Sunil when he …” Thomas looked helplessly at the counter.

“He what?”

“He wanted to hear it.”

It wasn’t stupid to think that talking would make things better. Weren’t there entire schools of psychology dedicated to that premise? Wasn’t the television talk show confessional born from it? Still, as Thomas leaned in and told Amina about his last few months (haltingly at first, but then faster and more freely, as if each word were water carving out a bigger channel from brain to mouth), as he spoke about not only a brief encounter with Derrick Hanson, but whole weeks of Itty, Sunil, Ammachy, and even Divya (“My God, was she always such a hand wringer?”), she found herself feeling distinctly worse.

Everyone was exactly as they had been before, her father said, no kinder, no better, no more enlightened. They only came to him one at a time. They mostly wanted to see things, like the house or the tools or the supermarket. They looked like they had on the best day of their life.

“Like the best they’ve ever looked?”

“No. Exactly how they looked on their favorite day. Same age. Same clothes.”

But how could there be one favorite day in a whole lifetime? Amina did not ask, but her father shrugged anyway, as if to say,
Who knows how these things work?
And for a minute she felt the pull of that logic as keenly as a hand.

“Enough,” Kamala said from the back of the kitchen, her face striped with tears.

“Ma.”

“Don’t you ‘Ma’ me. You stop this talk right now.”

“I just think we should—”

“You’ll bring the devil into this home!”

“We’re just talking about what’s happening. There’s nothing wrong with that.”

“Yes, yes, of course, Miss Psychology Degree! Miss Freudian Lips! Because you know what’s best, right? Yes, let’s dig it all up, get it out in the opening!”

“Okay,” Thomas said quietly. “It’s fine. Let’s just—”

“Idiots! You don’t meddle with these things! You don’t
bring them in the house
. You don’t think they wait for tumors and cancers and whatever else? Of course they do! Weak minds are always the target!” Amina glared at her mother. “Like yours?”

“Hey!” Thomas barked, but it was too late. Kamala covered her mouth with her hand and then turned and left the kitchen. A few seconds later the master bedroom door slammed, sending a quiver through the house.

Amina looked back at her father, who had slumped over the counter. “She didn’t mean that, Dad. She’s just—”

“Don’t you
ever
talk to your mother that way.”

Her face flared hotly. “I was just trying to—”

“This is hard on her.”

“It’s hard on everyone!”

“She’s your mother.”

Amina looked down at the counter, sullen and flustered. She never knew what would trigger Thomas’s loyalty toward Kamala, but whenever it happened, it was unshakeable, as if all his mishandlings could be vindicated in one act of allegiance.

“Fine,” she said.

Her father’s shoulders dropped a little. He looked unhappily at the kitchen counter.

“What about the jacket?” Amina asked.

Thomas did not say anything. The lines in his face deepened into shadows.

“Did Akhil want it?”

“No.”

“Did you just give it to him?”

“I haven’t seen him.”

Amina idled into silence, surprised by the answer and the sudden blow of disappointment that came with it. “But then why did you—”

“I have no idea.”

“But it was in the garden with the rest!”

“I know.”

“Then why—”

“Amina,
I don’t know
.” He was angry—angry about the way she’d spoken to Kamala, but now also about this, as if Amina had betrayed him by even thinking any of it meant anything. And hadn’t she? Amina watched her father across the white countertop, pained by her own transparency, her need for the fog that was closing in around them to mean something.

Thomas laid his head down on the counter, his pate shining through a corona of curls. He breathed slowly and deeply, and Amina reached out, pressing her fingers to the stubbly spot where the hair from his biopsy was growing back in. How far were they from the tumor? She’d always had a healthy skepticism about shamans and the like, but lately, the conviction that she might somehow will the cancer away with the right amount of desire and supplication was hard to shake.

“They’re going, anyway,” her father said, his voice soft, begrudging.

“What?”

“The visions. With the chemo. I see them less.”

“Really?”

He nodded, his head bobbing under her hand, and Amina said nothing, afraid of her own hope, of leaning too hard on any hint that he might be getting better. Instead she laid her head next to his on the counter, sliding forward until they were skull to skull.

CHAPTER 5