The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing: A Novel (57 page)

“No, don’t!” Kamala said.

“Why not?”

“He’ll come when he’s ready,” Thomas explained. “We just need to wait.”

“We don’t want to scare him off,” Kamala added.

Amina looked at her parents, at their upturned faces, bright and sweet and solemn.

“I couldn’t scare Akhil if I wanted to,” she said.

Kamala squawked after her, but neither of her parents actually tried to stop her, which was a relief. Unlike the last time she’d wandered out to the garden in the middle of the night with a bobbling flashlight and someone else’s hunch, the path was well lit now, the determination her own. Still, as Amina neared the gates, she felt herself
standing at the edge of a longing so old and deep and clear that she could barely keep her steps steady. She opened the garden gate and walked in.

It was cooler inside, heavy with dark green shadows. Amina looked out over the dark rows of vegetables, the peppers hanging in waxy clumps, the cucumbers huddled together on the ground. In the back, the bean trellis stood like a soft and furry giant. She walked slowly forward, past the tomato plants, the eggplants, the place where the pumpkins would rise up in the fall. She walked all the way back to the mound that Thomas had buried everything in.

“Akhil?” she whispered. She closed her eyes and felt a light breeze coming off the ditch, bringing her the smell of carp and algae and wet stones but not her brother. She opened her eyes and did a slow 360 just to be sure and then felt the embarrassment of doing a 360 in her mother’s vegetable garden in the dark. She walked back to the house.

“I need to talk to you,” she said to Kamala, not looking at Thomas and not stopping. She went to the porch and waited.

Kamala banged through the screen door less than a minute later, hastily arranging her sari. “What is it?”

“What are you doing?”

“What do you mean?”

“Do you see him?”

“Of course not!”

“Then why are you pretending?”

“I’m not pretending.”

Amina stared at her mother.

“He’s come back to see
your father
,” Kamala explained. “This is Thomas’s miracle.”

Amina’s brain shook a little with this new piece of information, a train car rattling down a track with too many thoughts inside, but one kept jostling up above the others. Chemo. They had to get him back to chemo. They had to be on the same side if they were going to get him back to chemo. “Bad spirits,” she said. “Evil.”

Her mother shrugged. “I was wrong.”

“But you said—”

“No,” Kamala said firmly, even though Amina had not actually asked her anything. “No, no, no.”

“But we’re running out of time!”

Kamala’s eyes snapped shut. They stayed shut as her mouth trembled and then stopped, as she found her hands and clasped them tightly in front of her. When she finally looked at Amina a few moments later, her eyes were shining with a sharp edge of belief that Amina had never been able to bend.

“I’m going back outside to your father,” Kamala said, and then turned and did exactly that.

The next morning Amina called Jamie, told him what had happened, and canceled dinner.

“Holy shit.”

“I know. It’s uh … anyway, just give me a few days. I’ll get things straightened out and we’ll have you over, I promise.”

“I wasn’t really worried about dinner.”

“Three days,” Amina said. “Or, like, four.”

But over the next four days, the house got worse, not better. Hallways became a collection of light and dust. Never mind that after she’d hung up with Jamie, she’d scrubbed the entire bottom floor from one end to the other and returned all the lamps to their previous spots in the house—by that very evening a moist line of garden soil ran from the porch to the master bedroom, and by night the lamps were back, buzzing like locusts and covering everything with thick, electric light.

Things began to move. The first few days they were little enough—an odd pack of lightbulbs lying abandoned in the courtyard, two pillows from her parents’ bed stuffed into the lawn chairs, but on the third night, as Amina dreamt about a ship cratering against an iceberg, Kamala and Thomas somehow found a way to slide the living room couch down the hall, and in the morning, when Amina rose, it was floating in the middle of the field, her parents atop it like two stray penguins.

“What the hell are you doing?” Amina called down from her open
bedroom window, and her parents looked in five other directions before turning their gaze upward.

“Oh, hey,” Kamala said with a wave. “Sitting! Come down.”

“Dad shouldn’t be moving furniture!”

“I’m fine!” Thomas yelled.

“No you’re not!” Amina yelled back.

And he wasn’t. This was verified readily by Anyan George, and then Monica, and Chacko, who called from the hospital the fourth day because it was his turn to sit through the chemo and there was no Thomas to sit with.

“He’s not thinking rationally right now,” Chacko explained to Amina, as though it needed explaining. “You’re just going to have to bring him in.”

“I’m working on it. I think in a few days—”

“Few days is too long!”

“What am I supposed to do? Bind and gag him?”

Chacko was silent, and for a moment Amina feared he’d taken her seriously.

“But what about your mother?” he asked. “Surely she can make him go?”

Amina looked out the kitchen window, to where Kamala was busy attaching a surge protector to a cable cord. Her tennis shoes and sari hem were brown with garden soil. Thomas squatted next to her, attaching one headlamp to another.

Amina sighed. She had to tell Chacko, of course, tell all the family how Kamala had risen to this occasion as she always did in the face of disaster, standing staunchly beside Thomas and even helping him do all the things he insisted would put Akhil more at ease (although she had drawn the line at leaving cooked food in the garden). But it seemed cruel somehow, exposing this new collaboration between her parents to scrutiny. She watched through the window as Thomas said something to Kamala, and then quickly, fiercely kissed her cheek, making her mother laugh like a girl.

“What are you guys doing tonight?” Amina asked, and then before Chacko could answer, said, “Because I think you should get the others and come down.”

They arrived all at once, rolling up in the early-evening light, smashed into the Ramakrishnas’ Camry like circus clowns. Sanji, Raj, and Chacko burst out immediately, looking formal and uncomfortable in their American work clothes, while Bala, relatively subdued in an orange-and-gold sari, struggled with a pot of potatoes in the back of the car. Amina led them into the house and back to the porch, ignoring the horrified looks they exchanged as they made their way through the house.

“Where’s the couch?” Bala asked. “Are those
clocks
?”

“Where?”

Her aunt pointed to an armchair, to where every clock in the house sat in a pile, cords bundled tightly over their faces.

“Oh.” Amina blinked. “Yeah, I guess they are. Huh.”

She shuffled toward the kitchen, Sanji hot on her heels.

“Ami baby, what on earth—he did this? Thomas did all this in just a few days? And what is
that
?” Sanji stared into the courtyard, where the halogen lamp had been mummified in Christmas lights.

“A light with lights on it.”

“Good gods!” Sanji cried, and the others filed silently into the kitchen. Amina looked from uncle to aunt to uncle to aunt, their familiar faces riddled with concern, discomfort, love. Good God, the love. It was hard to have that much love looking at you in the face at one time and not feel like an asshole.

“My parents are outside,” she started to say, but just then the door to the back porch clicked open and their faces panned away from her, toward the laundry room. A few seconds later, Kamala walked out of it, still in the same sari but her hair now unbraided, hanging down in loose waves. She stopped short, a beautiful, dirty apparition.

“What’s all this?” She frowned. Amina chewed her lip, unable to answer. Her mother squinted as though she had, and crossed her arms. “And did you tell them?”

“No.”

Kamala nodded again, then reached abruptly for Sanji’s arm.

“Come,” she said, motioning for Bala and Chacko and Raj to follow. “Come see.”

And what did they see? The couch, pilled with puffs of cotton dander from the shedding trees, the cushions streaked with mud; Prince Philip, in the dog heaven of no longer being on the wrong side of every door; Thomas staring into the garden with binoculars. Amina watched from the porch as the family made their way to the couch, calling to Thomas until he put the binoculars down. He turned his head, smiling when he saw them. He said something Amina couldn’t quite hear.

“What?” she heard Sanji ask loudly, and both Eapens began speaking at once, gesticulating toward the empty garden. Amina walked back to the kitchen.

“Hey,” she said when Jamie answered the phone. “Sorry I haven’t called.”

“Are you okay? Is your dad okay?”

“Not really. The family is here now.”

“I’ll come down tomorrow,” Jamie said. Behind him she could hear the faint noise of the Violent Femmes rattling like gravel in a box. “I’ve got the day free.”

“No! No, I mean, don’t worry about it. We’re fine. You should go have a good time.”

“What?”

“Go out somewhere or something. Do something fun.”

“Amina, what the hell is going on? You sound weird.”

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“That’s not what I mean.”

“I love you.” Her head pounded in the sharp silence that followed this,
Eight, eight, I forgot what eight was for
, filling up the phone line while her face got hot. Someone was running back toward the house, footsteps heavy on the ground. “Anyway, I should get going.”

“Wait a sec—”

“Call you later.”

She hung up just in time to see Sanji burst in from the porch like a wild boar, scuttling into the kitchen and bouncing roundly off the edge of a counter. She grabbed Amina’s arm and shouted,
“What the shit?”

“Hey,” Amina said.

“Gods!” Sanji was breathing hard, flushed. “Bloody hell!”

Amina smiled nervously. “I know,” she said. “It’s weird.”

“Weird? WEIRD? Weird is French foods! Weird is making some contraption that throws bad tomatoes at Chacko for the fun of it! This is really happening? They think he’s
living
in the
garden
? That all the damn lights will make him stay?”

“Not living.”

“What?”

“Well, not technically. I mean, they don’t think he’s not dead. They just think Dad can see him.”

“In the bloody garden!”

“Right.”

Sanji turned, looked at her sharply. “Amina Eapen, please tell me you don’t believe this, too.”

Amina chose her words carefully. “I believe they believe it.”

“Unbelievable!” Sanji resumed pacing, drunk on her own dismay. “Just nuts! All of these years they can’t agree on one single thing, and now they are practically singing a duet? And what happened to all Kamala’s big talk of bad spirits and weak souls and doing
His righteous work
? All that is just gone now?”

“No. She just thinks His righteous work sent us Akhil.”

“Oh, Akhil!” Sanji said, and saying his name aloud seemed to break her a little. She leaned forward against the counter, pinching the bridge of her nose. She looked old.

Amina put a hand on her shoulder, and Sanji turned around and fell into her with such force that it felt like catching a ham more than a human. Her aunt didn’t say anything for a long moment, the small gasps of her trying to steady her breathing the only sound in the kitchen. Her bosom shuddered gelatinously. She whispered something.

“What?” Amina asked.

“It’s like it’s happening all over again,” Sanji repeated.

And there it was, the thing Amina had not been able to find her way toward but felt was unmistakably true. She said nothing, her
loosely floating fears suddenly converging around that point like water over a drain. That was it, wasn’t it? In the midst of all of the rest of it, all the tests and the treatments and the fights, they were rushing back to that dark place.

Sanji sighed a heavy, oniony breath. “All these years and they can barely talk about him. Some days, I will remember and I can hardly bear it myself. He was our first, nah? Our baby. That sweet little boy who ran around putting his chubby hands into everything, stealing our shoes when you and Dimple were still drooling? Ach!”

Because really, it didn’t matter whether he was the by-product of Thomas’s tumor or some filament of time slipped through a chink in the universe; it didn’t matter that Kamala and the others could not, would not, would never see him. The very idea that Akhil could be in the garden had brought back his loss, pushing it into every corner until the house bled with it. If she shut her eyes, Amina could feel exactly how gone her brother was, her ability to weigh his absence extra keen, dialed up like a blind person’s ability to hear. Cool air rushed against her cheeks and chest and she realized Sanji was holding her at arm’s length.

“I’ve upset you. Oh, baby, I’m sorry. I don’t know why I keep yelling at you all the time about every new thing.” She kneaded Amina’s forearms. “It’s not your fault.”