The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing: A Novel (58 page)

“It’s okay.”

“No it isn’t.”

“Okay, it’s not.”

They held each other for a bit longer, and after that, there didn’t seem to be much more to say, so they put water on to boil and filled the teapot with Red Label.

Bala was the next to come back, chattering loudly all the way in through the porch and then quieting abruptly as she saw Sanji and Amina. She looked over her shoulder, whispering loudly, “It’s the pain of losing a child.”

“No shit,” Amina said, and Sanji smacked her hand lightly, but Bala appeared not to hear.

“They say it’s unlike anything else. A grief so profound it can bring
people closer to the
dying
than the
living
. I saw it on the Ricki Lakes once, a whole family that believed their youngest was still in the garage where she—”

“Oh, shut it,” Sanji snapped.

“No, really! And one of my sisters herself had a stillbirth! She was never okay after that.”

“Ranjana was never okay before,” Chacko announced, walking in from the living room, three lanterns in hand. He held them up for Amina. “These are a fire hazard.”

Amina took them. “Thanks.”

Her uncle looked at her somberly. “Okay,
koche
. So now we know. Next, we need to take action.”

“Yes, but what?” Sanji looked anxiously toward the porch. “You heard them. They’re not doing the chemo until the whole thing is over.”

“Wait, what?” Amina asked. “They haven’t told me this. What’s over?”

“The
visit
has to
end
,” Bala said, pinching the air for emphasis. “He’s only come for a short time, apparently. Thomas said all of the others that have come have gone on their own after a few days, you know, like aliens beamed back into the light, and—”

“He said that? Beamed back into the light?”

“No.” Sanji glared at Bala. “He did not. He said that he’ll start treatment when Akhil is gone, and that Akhil will go when he’s ready.”

“But he hasn’t even talked to him yet!” Bala said. “That was the other thing, no? That Akhil must talk to him, and he hasn’t yet? So he’s waiting for that.”

“Too late,” Chacko declared, rocking from his heels to the balls of his feet and back. “We don’t have any more time to waste. We need to separate them, incapacitate Thomas, and take him in.”

Incapacitate? Amina held the counter as her stomach plummeted.

“Chacko Kurian, have you lost your damn mind?” Sanji exploded. “This isn’t an episode of
Laws & Orders
! We can’t just take him in like he’s a criminal!”

Chacko frowned. “He will thank us later.”

“Really? Like Dimple has thanked you?” Sanji snorted and Bala gasped. “What? You know it’s true! Fifteen years since you sent her away, and still this girl doesn’t come home if she can help it, and now you people think we should try it on Thomas!”

“Well, someone has to do what needs to be done,” Chacko said, stung. “And anyway, I don’t see you making a better suggestion.”

“How about we talk to him like one human? Nah, Ami? Isn’t that better?”

They both looked at Amina expectantly, but she was still stuck on
incapacitate him
, her mind racing with horrible images: Thomas felled like a Serengeti lion, reduced to a mass of sleeping fur, while nimble hands checked tags and teeth; Thomas back in the hospital, prisoner to a staff he once directed.

“Yes,” Amina said. “Let’s talk to him.”

Raj was the last to come in, clearly shaken, cotton stars smashed across the back of his pants where he’d taken a seat on the couch. Unlike the others, he had little to offer in the way of advice and began simply making chapatis to eat Bala’s aloo with, the puffs of flour rising across his face and mapping the occasional tear that streaked down as he rolled the dough into flat rounds. Half an hour later, the Eapens were corraled to the dining room, despite real grumbling from Thomas.

“So can you see Akhil, too?” Bala asked Kamala, passing her the potatoes.

“Bala!” Sanji scolded.

“What? I’m just asking!”

“Nope,” Kamala said. “But did Thomas tell you what he’s wearing?”

“Yes,” Raj said hurriedly, just as Bala said “No” and Sanji looked like she might kill somebody.

“His jeans are
short
and he has paint on his
hands
!”

Sanji looked at Amina, alarmed.

“Everyone comes back looking like they did on their best day,”
Amina found herself explaining, hoping that it somehow sounded less crazy coming from her, though from the look on Sanji’s face, it definitely did not.

“And have you ever seen him, Ami?” Bala asked.

Amina felt the heat rise to her face and avoided looking at her father. She shook her head.

Kamala shrugged. “He hasn’t come for us.”

“Thomas, what can I get you?” Raj asked. “You’re not eating. How about just plain rice and curds?”

“Actually, I should probably just get back outside.” Thomas pulled his napkin from his lap. “It’s getting late.”

“But we just sat!”

“You stay and finish. I’ll just be outside.”

“No, wait!” Sanji looked flustered. There was a short silence, a flurry of eye contact between the others. “It’s just we thought we should all talk about, the, uh—”

“YOU HAVE TO GO BACK TO TREAMENT!” Chacko boomed. Amina looked over to find her uncle standing tensely at the end of the table, fists clenched.

Thomas’s eyebrows rose in surprise. He blinked at Chacko a few times before saying, “Of course I will. I told you that.”

“Right now.” Chacko rapped his knuckles on the table. “Tonight.” Thomas laughed a little. “That seems unlikely.”

“This isn’t a joke, Thomas.”

“I’m aware of that.”

“Then quit this now.”

Thomas cocked his head, like a dog hearing a frequency unavailable to human ears, and Amina tensed.

“I’ve already called Presbyterian,” Chacko continued. “They have a bed ready for you in Admitting. Dr. George says you can restart your treatments first thing in the morning.”

Thomas said nothing for a moment, but Amina could feel him taking in all of them through his periphery. She saw the slight tic behind his eyes as he recalibrated.

“It’s not time,” he told Chacko.

“You don’t have more time!”

“We don’t know that.”

“I most certainly do.”

“No,” Thomas said gently. “You don’t. My reaction to the treatment has been anomalous.”

A high, furious blush rose in Chacko’s cheeks, as if he had been slapped. “You know as well as I do that that doesn’t mean a damn—”

“The thing is,” Sanji intervened smoothly, looking at Raj for backup, “it’s not as if recovery is an indefinitely open window, is it? Your health can weaken to the point where it’s irreversible, and then no treatment will help, isn’t it?”

“It’s a calculated risk.”

Chacko snorted. “And what about your family? What are they supposed to do with this nonsense?”

Kamala looked up from her plate in surprise. “Who, me?”

“You’re willing to risk their future too?”

“I’m not risking their—”

“Of course you are!”

“Me?”
Kamala repeated.

“They have no problem with this.”

“
Eda!
What are you talking? You think they don’t—”

“Wait just one minute, Mr. Big Horses!” Kamala yelled at Chacko. “Don’t you sit there yak-yakking for me!”

“And Amina?” Chacko pressed on, ignoring her. “After everything, you’re going to put her through this?”

At last then, something to penetrate the glimmering sea of Thomas’s cheeriness. Amina saw the words sink in, the sharp tug of doubt suddenly creasing an otherwise smooth brow. She could feel her father not looking at her.

“She’ll be fine,” he said, but his voice no longer held the conviction it had before.

“No she won’t! How could she be? A father who would rather die than stay with her?”

A chapati, hurled with significant force, slapped Chacko full across the face. No sooner had it dropped than another replaced it, flung from the surprisingly accurate throwing arm of Kamala.

“Kam! Stop it!” Sanji cried.

Amina watched as her mother took another and chucked it at Chacko for good measure. It smacked into his chest.

“KAMALA,” Thomas said loudly, and her mother looked at him, furious, wild-eyed, shaking with adrenaline. He waited for her to lower her arm before saying softly, “Enough.”

Her parents looked at each other, the air between them twitching with something so raw and intimate that the others had to look away. “Go,” Kamala said. “I will come soon.”

Thomas turned from the table without another word and left. They sat back down and waited in silence, staring down at the tablecloth grease stains and stray bits of potato until the porch door clicked shut. Then they waited some more.

“Kam,” Sanji finally said. “Please.”

Kamala leaned back in her chair and crossed her arms, scowling at them.

“Ma.”

“What?”

“You’re the only one he’ll listen to.”

“Ha! Your father? Ha
ha
!”

“It’s true. You know it is. He’ll pretend like he’s ignoring you, but in the end, he’ll do whatever you say.”

Kamala snorted.

“So then what?” Sanji asked, frustration raking her voice. “Just sit back and let him die? Is that what you want?”

Kamala stared at her for so long that the air in the room seemed to harden. “You think that is the worst thing that can happen?”

Sanji looked confused.

“Fools.”
Kamala hissed the word across the table like a dart, leaned into the silence that followed it. “
Idiots. Know-nothings
. Coming here with your dry potatoes and idiot demands that he get up tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, and for what? So you can say you did everything you could?”

“Ma, stop. They came because I wanted them.”

“And what about your father? Did you ask what he wants?”

“He doesn’t know what—”

“He wants to see Akhil.”

“A hallucination!” Chacko countered. “A side effect!”

“A miracle.”

“What does it even matter?” Raj cried, his voice high and wavery. “Kamala, don’t you see? He’s losing weight! He’s stopped sleeping! His bones are poking through his clothes!”

“You think I’m blind? That I don’t see?”

“We need to—”

“You think that I don’t know this man I have spent some thirty-five years with? I know him better than anyone—any of you! And you are wrong, Miss Amina Knows Everything, he does not listen to me! He has never listened to me! You think
I
don’t know what happens next?”

Silence fell over the table, heavy as a net, and in its descent, Amina’s head filled with the high electric keening of the lights, all of the lights, their background noise suddenly amplified. It felt like an invisible audience taking a step forward. It felt personal.

“You think he wants to stay with us more than he wants to go to Akhil?” her mother asked, voice tiny behind all the buzzing, and the truth felt like something small and sharp lodged into Amina’s heart.

The rest of the family was coming apart, Amina could feel it. At one end of the table, Raj had covered his face with his hands, and at the other, Chacko shook his head from side to side, like a dog trying to shake loose a collar. Bala and Sanji sat between them with wide, pooling eyes, Sanji already whispering, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” like she had caused what was to come.

“Then what …?” Chacko barked, his mouth trembling.

A spasm of compassion flickered across Kamala’s face before it smoothed again.

“Go home,” she said.

CHAPTER 4

“I
’m coming down,” Dimple said the next day.

Amina shut her eyes. This seemed to be everyone’s solution, as if it would make a difference. Monica had come just that morning, begging Thomas to change his mind and then weeping bitterly in the driveway when he wouldn’t.
Son of a bitch
, she’d said, and smoked two cigarettes right then and there.

“You can’t,” Amina said.

“Why not?”

It wasn’t that she didn’t want to see Dimple. She just didn’t want to see Dimple seeing what everyone else had. Amina sighed and rolled onto her back, coming face-to-face with the brassy smiles of the Greats.

“The show. It’s in three weeks. You don’t have time.”

“Don’t worry about that. It’s practically done already, and I can do most of the press from there. They want to talk to Jane more than me anyway, at this point.”

“Oh, great.”

“It’s not what you think. She’s saying she likes it.”

“She likes it?”

“No, duh, she fucking hates it. But she’s giving it good press because it’s the smart thing to do. She’s also saying you still work there even though she told me that if either of us set foot in Wiley Studios again, she will shank us.”

“She said shank us?”

“She said kill us.”

“Oh.” Amina tried not to feel upset by this. What did she think was going to happen?

Outside, Prince Philip was barking a low, constant complaint. Amina got up from the bed and ambled over to the window. Her parents were weeding in the garden, despite the afternoon heat.

“What?” Dimple asked.