Mira Jacob - The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing

“No, she’s in love,” Amina said, understanding it was true as she said it. She thought of her mother’s face that night at the table, waiting to laugh at some story Thomas had told a thousand times, and her chest tightened like she’d swallowed a pocket of wind.

“Love is good,” Jamie muttered, his eyelids heavy.

Amina watched his breathing, the little flickering pulse at the base of his neck. Just when she thought he had fallen asleep, he said, “So that picture. That was the one, huh?”

“Yeah.”

His eyes fluttered open. “Do you like it?”

“It’s horrific.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

It was a funny question because no one had ever asked her before, and because she wasn’t sure she knew the answer until she felt herself nodding, and then she knew it absolutely. Jamie’s eyes slid shut.

“I’d like to see it,” he said.

“Really?”

“Yeah, of course.”

Amina chewed at her cuticle, watching him. “You want to fly out with me for the opening?”

“Drive.”

“What?”

“Let’s drive.”

“That’s a long way to drive,” she said, but he was already drifting away, the knot between his eyebrows smoothing.

Amina rolled onto her back, staring up at the canopy. She reached out, pinching a corner of his T-shirt between two fingers, feeling it rise and fall with his breaths. She imagined them driving north and west, the aspen, the Tetons, the ragged coast of Oregon. Jamie’s profile against a blur of landscape. They slept.

How had she forgotten about Dimple’s beauty? And could it have actually increased in her absence? The next morning Amina stared, trying not to be thrown by the surreality of her cousin’s overlarge cheekbones and liquid eyes, the way her skin glowed like a baby’s butt in a diaper commercial.

“He’s so skinny,” Dimple said, watching Kamala and Thomas garden through the screen door on the porch. She had come over before the others, claiming she’d wanted some time alone with Thomas, but now that she was there, she seemed stuck somehow, unable to actually go into the yard.

“The meds kill his appetite,” Amina explained.

“Isn’t there something you can do about that? Like a permanent IV or something?”

“Not really.”

“Or, like, fatty foods? Can he just eat really fatty things?”

“He can’t keep them down.”

“Fuck.” Dimple’s chin trembled and she quickly rubbed it.

“You want me to go out with you?” Amina asked.

Dimple shook her head, her face shadowed with nervousness. She watched Thomas bend down, biting her cuticle.

“Do you want to go have a smoke on the Stoop?”

“Yes. I mean, no.” She took a sharp breath. “I just … I think some part of me really believed that it was an exaggeration. Like maybe he was doing better than everyone thought, or maybe everyone had been here too long to see things clearly.” She swept a fingertip under her left eye, quickly ridding it of the tear that threatened to spill over. “The fucking height of narcissism, right?”

Amina shrugged. “It’s hard to get it unless you see it.”

Outside, Thomas rose slowly, his legs shaking until Kamala rose too, wedging herself under his arm. Dimple turned away, her eyelashes shivering over the shop, the piles of lights, the parched mound of what had been Akhil’s jacket. “So is there anything I should know? Anything I shouldn’t, you know, talk about?”

“Oh, you know. Treatment. Tumors, medications, prognoses. Eating, sleeping. Akhil, but I guess that was always the case, although now if you talk about him, you’ll hear all sorts of stuff.”

“Like everyone comes back looking like they did on their best day?”

“Like clocks make it harder to see them.”

“Wow.”

They watched Thomas and Kamala walk away from the tomato plants, toward the back of the garden.

“You know what I don’t get?” Dimple said. “How do you know what your best day is? I mean, aren’t some of them tied?”

Amina smiled, nudging her cousin gently. “So are you going to do this or what?”

Dimple nodded but didn’t move.

“He’s the same person,” Amina lied, unsure if it was cruel to do so, but distinctly thankful as Dimple finally pushed the screen door open, stepping into the sunlight. Thomas looked over as it banged shut, his dark face lightening into a blur of teeth.

“Dimpledimpledimple!” he called, and held his arms open as she ran to him.

“Lunacy!” Chacko shouted an hour later, finger jammed into the air. “Idiocy!”

“Who is asking him?” Thomas shouted back. “Did anyone ask him?”

That afternoon, while the rest of the family cringed and Kamala shelled peas like she was being timed for an Olympic event, Thomas and Chacko went at it in the living room with renewed gusto, as if they’d been doing nothing but storing up counterarguments for the last five days.

“Even a child knows this, Thomas! My own daughter has come home to beg you to just—”

“Do I come in his house and yell at him over his decisions? No, I do not! Why? Because it’s HIS HOUSE.”

“Ho!” Sanji flapped around them like an anxious parrot. “Hey! Indoor voices! Let’s be discussing this like adults, no?”

“Well, if I was acting like you, I’d hope you’d be MAN ENOUGH to come to my house and face me!”

“Sit,” Raj pleaded. “Let’s all just—”

“Oh no, let him keep going, please! Perhaps Chacko can kill me himself with his superiority complex!”

“Please!” Bala cried. “The girls!”

It took a moment, but this appeared to be the right tactic as the two men backed away from each other, hunch-shouldered, razor-eyed. Thomas lowered himself shakily into one of the few remaining chairs, and Chacko backed himself into an actual corner, his shoulders squeezed in by the walls. Sanji, Bala, and Raj hovered over the spot of carpet where the couch used to be. Kamala shelled peas.

“Christ.” Dimple’s voice shook. “Is this how you guys have been the whole time? No wonder everyone looks like shit.”

“No Christ, no shit!” Kamala snapped, not looking up.

“You haven’t been here,” Chacko sulked. “You don’t know.”

“Know what? That yelling at Thomas Uncle isn’t going to change his mind? Yeah, Dad, I’m pretty clear on that one. And if you guys can’t talk about something else, then maybe you should just go home and not see each other for a while.”

“Okay, okay.” Sanji waggled her head. “No need to go for extremes.”

“No, this girl is right!” Chacko said. “If we’re not here to be honest, then why be here at all? What else is there to talk about?”

“Chackoji,” Raj said, the please inherent in his voice. “Let’s just settle down for a moment.”

No one said anything for a long time. Raj looked at Sanji, Bala looked at Dimple, and Amina dropped her eyes to the floor, both irritated and amazed by the steady plink! plink! of the peas hitting the metal bowl. So this was it? Thirty years of no one getting a word in edgewise, and they’d run out of things to say?

“I’m getting married,” Dimple said.

Amina’s mouth dropped open.

“What?” Chacko’s face fell.

“To Sajeev.”

“What?” Bala whispered, like saying anything louder might trigger a bomb that would detonate the entire future.

“Sajeev and I are getting married.”

Kamala made a strangling noise from the floor, her hands frozen in midair.

“OH MY GOD!” Sanji jumped up, her arms swinging through the air until they pinioned Dimple, swung her from side to side. “You see? You see? All this time I’ve been telling you to be patient and you will find the right one and have your babies before your uterus dries up like one Turkish apricot, and look! It’s happened!”