The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing: A Novel (54 page)

Ten minutes and some hobbling later they sped down Corrales Road, the air conditioner blasting dust motes down their tracheas. Amina sat forward, smothered by a film of beer and sex and weed. She cracked a window, leaning toward it like a dog.

“Air conditioner is on,” Kamala snapped.

“I feel funny.”

“Oh, so now you’re sick?”

“Not exactly.”

Her mother looked at her disapprovingly. “I would have woken you at seven, but your father wouldn’t let me.”

“Thank God.”

“No thanking! Here this poor fellow is up all night tossing in bed, and now he has to go to the hospital alone!”

“Ma,” she said in a warning tone, and her mother fell silent, grinding the truck into a lower gear as they approached an intersection.

Amina shifted and the pain shifted with her, moving from her ankle to a small flare of guilt between her ribs. “What do you mean, he thinks something is wrong?”

“He thinks something is wrong! Plain English! He’s getting a scan!”

“Is he feeling something new?”

“How should I know? You think I am sitting there like some Diane Sawyers as he gets ready and goes? No! I am handing him one egg sandwich!” Her mother glanced sidelong at her but then turned, her whole face suddenly looking her up and down.

“What.” Amina glared back.

“Nothing.” On the corner, a few kids waved banners for a car wash, pointing excited sponges their way. “You were out with a boy? This friend from before?”

“Yes.”

Kamala’s gold bracelets clinked against one another as the light turned green, as they motored by the kids. “So bring him to dinner.”

“What?”

“To dinner. At the house.”

Amina looked out the window to the parched west mesa hills. Her feelings from the night before felt like something borrowed from a dream; they might vanish if exposed to scrutiny. “I don’t know.”

“Why not?”

Amina shook her head. “I’m not sure if he’s quite there yet,” she lied.

“Oh,
koche
, you know,” her mother said soothingly, but stopped.

“What?”

“No, no, nothing.”

“No, what were you going to say?”

Her mother looked at her, seeming to see right through her skin to the uncertainty inside. She tucked a strand of hair behind Amina’s ear.

“There’s a brush in my purse,” she said.

Dr. George’s waiting room rang with laughter. The receptionist’s face was in her hands, an older couple clutched each other’s forearms, and a young woman with a buzz cut wiped tears from her eyes, snorting. In the middle of them all, Thomas stood with a frozen expression of surprise on his face.

It was the one-way-street story. Amina had heard it a thousand times before, her father recounting how on his first month in America he had turned down a road where all the cars were coming at him. “In my country, there are no one-ways!” he liked to say, “Only every-which-ways!” It was a favorite he liked to drag out for American strangers, putting them at ease with his accent, his charm, his inability to navigate spaces they had created.

“Amazing country you have here!” Thomas said now, looking comically perplexed, and a new round of laughter pealed forth. He held out an arm and Amina limped into it.

“What’s wrong with your foot?” her father asked.

“Twisted it a little. It’s fine.”

“You must be the daughter,” the woman half of the older couple said, smiling at her too familiarly.

“Yeah.”

“We’ve heard a lot about you.”

“You got the scan?” Kamala asked.

“Amina is a photographer!” Thomas said with a flourish, like she was a rabbit he’d pulled from a hat.

“How wonderful,” the woman said.

“Anyan is running late?” Kamala tried again.

“Dr. George should be here in about five minutes,” the receptionist said, and the room seemed to deflate a little, punctured by the reality of why they were there.

“She’s having a show of her work in Seattle,” Thomas pressed on,
but the others just smiled wanly at Amina. The male half of the older couple stroked his wife’s hand.

“Dr. Eapen.” Anyan George swung through the waiting room door, looking harried. “Hello, sir. Sorry to be late. I have your slides. You ready to come back?”

“Sure, sure.” Thomas winked to the others with the bravado of a mischievous kid slipping into the principal’s office. “Let’s do it.”

Anyan George would not sit down. This would have been unremarkable had he not directed the Eapens into their seats and then sat down himself, only to spring back up seconds later, shoving his chair in. Now he stood at the light board, clutching the envelope in his hands with a strange look. The family watched him for half a minute. Finally Thomas asked, “Everything okay?”

“Yes.” He did not elaborate.

“The scans?” Amina prompted.

“Yes.” He flipped the switch for the light board and began mounting them. Thomas stood up, moved closer. Together, they looked at the scans. Or rather, Thomas looked at the scans, and Dr. George looked at Thomas, a strange, unreadable expression on his face. Her father moved closer to the scan, then farther. He pulled the slide from the light board and read along its edge.

“What.” Amina’s fingers dug into the chair.

“It’s yours,” Dr. George said. “I checked.”

“My God,” Thomas said.

“What’s wrong?” Amina asked.

“I was late because I called Wilker in for a second opinion,” Dr. George said.

“And he said?”

“Yes. By as much as thirty percent.”

“What?” Kamala asked.

No one answered for a long moment. Amina stared at the scan, trying to see whatever they were talking about last time, but it looked the same—the seahorses, the egg, the swirls of cortex.

“Did Lowry take a look?” Thomas asked Dr. George.

“He agreed, though obviously he’s concerned that we might not have gotten the angle right, so the reduction might not be quite so significant.”

“Reduction. Meaning it’s smaller?” Amina asked.

“Yes,” Dr. George confirmed.

“It’s getting smaller?” Her voice rose.

“It looks that way,” Thomas said.

“Ha!” Kamala shouted, jumping to her feet like a tiny, sari-clad swordsman. “Ha, ha, ha!”

Amina looked from her father’s perplexed face to Anyan’s. Her ankle throbbed dangerously. “That’s good, right?”

“It’s unusual.” Thomas looked at Anyan. “Did you talk to MD Anderson?”

“We’re sending the scans to Dr. Salki today.”

“Have they seen regression of this sort before?”

“No.”

“Is that bad?” Amina asked, hating how her lack of medical understanding left her with a five-year-old’s sense of nuance: good/bad, light/dark, nice/scary.

“No, not at all,” Dr. George said. “Just unusual. We haven’t seen a regression of this sort before, so we’re cautious about putting too much faith in it until we know more about what could have caused—”

“A miracle,” Kamala cut in. “It’s a miracle, isn’t it?”

Dr. George looked flustered. “I’m hesitant to call it anything at this point. I think it’s important that we temper our hope with—”

“Of course you are!” Kamala scoffed. “You doctors are always hesitant, isn’t it? Experts at poking around in the body but unable to accept real healing when it comes from God himself?”

“It came from the chemo, Ma,” Amina pointed out, but her father shook his head.

“That’s unlikely. I’ve only gone through one full course. It would be highly unusual for that to have any effect, much less a sizeable one.”

“What about your symptoms? Have you noticed any change?” Dr. George asked.

“Yes, actually. The hallucinations have lessened significantly.”

“In intensity or frequency?”

“Both. I don’t see them as much. I don’t hear them talking. Although lately …” Thomas shook his head. “I don’t know.”

“What?”

“I’ve been smelling something burning for the past few days. At first it was faint enough that I thought it was just one of our neighbors clearing brush a few houses away, but—”

“That’s all in his mind,” Kamala said to Dr. George, as though this needed explaining. “No one in the village is dumb enough to start fires in June.”

“Seizing,” Dr. George said.

Thomas nodded. “I thought it might be.”

“What?” Amina asked, looking from Thomas to Kamala. “You thought you were having a seizure last night?”

“That’s why I wanted a scan,” Thomas said.

“The good news is that it appears you weren’t,” Dr. George said in a calming voice that seemed to trigger his bedside manner. He looked from Kamala to Amina to Thomas, reassurance settling over his features, and took a seat, motioning for Thomas to do the same. “Thomas and I are trained to be skeptical of a sudden shift like this, especially when it has no predecessor, but it is obviously a welcome development. The best option now is to proceed with the exact same treatment over the next month and see how things go.”

“Yes,” Thomas said, nodding along. “Yes.”

“So what,” Kamala said. “We do more of everything? Chemo, radiation, everything?”

“Yes. Stick to the course. We’ll need to keep an eye out for symptoms, erratic behavior, anything new or unusual. Amina, you’ll be in town?”

“Yes. Mostly. I mean, I might travel for a day or so, or a weekend, but yes.”

“Amina’s having a show!” Thomas burst out, glad to finally have somewhere to put his hopefulness.

Dr. George wrote down something on a prescription pad, handing it to Thomas.

“Very high, prestigious show of work.” Kamala nodded, nudging Amina. “An honor of her artsmanship by the authorities of Seattle.”

“It’s a favor for a friend,” Amina corrected, glaring at her mother, but Dr. George seemed to take no notice either way, standing up abruptly.

“So then, barring any changes, I’ll see you all back here next week?”

He ushered them out of his office brusquely, his eyes guarded, as if the hope of living was somehow harder to deliver than the threat of death.

Outside, in the bright slam of midmorning light, the Eapens stood stunned on the sidewalk. Amina shifted her weight carefully, but even her ankle felt deceivingly better, and she stood on it gingerly. Nobody knew quite what to say, though there was a palpable relief between them, a collective cord that seemed to have slackened, leaving them both more independent and more connected than they had been entering the office.

“Well,” Kamala said, and Amina turned to find her mother’s face frozen in a pained, happy grimace, as though her cheeks were trying to detach from the worry that had taken it over for the last months. Thomas saw it, too, and put out his hand, wiggling his fingers like you would for a child until she took it. He squeezed her hand, blinking the wet out of his own eyes.

“Well,” he repeated.

BOOK 11
A STATE OF HOPE

ALBUQUERQUE, AUGUST 1998

CHAPTER 1

T
hat night Thomas and Kamala fought each other from one side of the house to the other. Teeth bared, eyes flashing, they tore into each other with carnivorous gusto, laying bare all the injustices they had suffered at each other’s hands over the last decades, the slights, the missteps, the heartbreaks. It was as if, released from the burden of having to care for each other, they’d found themselves in a pain deficit and were working hard to restore the equilibrium.

They were doing a good job of it, Amina thought from the safety of her bedroom. While the cause of the fight was unknown to her, the accusations of selfishness, martyrdom, ineptitude, and snobbery were staples from her childhood, none too surprising, though all tripped the same old fears, resurrecting a years-old sadness that her parents, at their core, were absolutely wrong for each other. In the midst of everything, she’d forgotten about that. She called Dimple.

“They’re going at it.”

Downstairs, the yelling had switched abruptly into Malayalam. It rumbled up the stairs like an oncoming thunderstorm.

“Sounds like fun.”

“Pretty much. Anyway, how are you?”

“Good! Good. Really good, actually.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. I, um …” Amina heard the opening of the gallery door. “Hold on a sec.” A crinkly paper noise, and when Dimple next spoke, it was through chewing gum. “I’m engaged.”