Mira Jacob - The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing

The talking started sometime after midnight. Amina knew because it didn’t seem like that long since she’d fallen asleep, and then suddenly there was Thomas’s voice in the dark, as sonorous and insistent as a ringing phone, dragging her back from her dreams. She sat up in bed. Made her way to the window.

The wedding lanterns were still on, casting a faint golden glow into the fields and defining the back ridge of the sofa and the light smudge of Thomas’s head, so that when the breeze parted the grass he looked like a rafter awash in a green-black sea. His words floated up in patches. Amina leaned forward. What was he saying? Nothing she could make sense of so far away. She went downstairs.

The kitchen was dark, drying china spread out on every countertop like the bones of some prehistoric animal. She walked carefully past them, through the laundry room and onto the dark back porch. She pressed her face to the screen door.

“The bow and arrow,” Thomas said. “For concentration.”

Next to him in the grass, Prince Philip’s tail thumped in reply.

“Hey, Dad—” Amina yelped as a hand slammed over her mouth.

“No!” Kamala hissed, dragging her backward and down. “No talking!”

“Mmph!” Amina tried to stand straight, but Kamala clung to her, eyes gleaming like a feral monkey’s until Amina forced herself to take a deep breath and nod at her mother to signify she understood. Yes. Fine. No talking . Kamala slowly loosened her grip. Outside, Thomas rocked back and forth in his seat, excited about something.

“You’re right,” he said. “You’re absolutely right.”

“Is it—?” Amina started, but she didn’t need to finish. There was really no one else it could be.

It was an outpouring, a monsoon. The entire night and into the dawn, Thomas sat on the couch, a deluge falling from his lips. While much of what he said to Akhil was spoken too softly to be understood from their spot on the porch, the tiny bits that Amina could make sense of — how a shunt works, why cricket games could last so long and still be exciting, what it was like to bring Akhil home from the hospital as a baby — seemed to be equally unrelated and urgent, as if there was a list of subjects he’d sworn to cover before the day was over.

By midmorning he showed no signs of slowing down, and Kamala made tea and toast, stepping around a disapproving Amina to deliver it to him.

“I thought you said no talking.”

“What talking, dummy? This is eating .”

Amina followed her mother out to the couch, where her father greeted both of them with a preemptively raised hand, as though he was on a phone call.

“Tea!” Kamala announced. “Toast!”

“But he won the Oscar,” Thomas said, motioning for her to leave the tray. “And the Padma Shri! You think the Indian government goes around giving honors to people who insult the integrity of the country?”

“Ben Kingsley?” Amina couldn’t help asking, and her father nodded irritably, shooing her away.

By the late afternoon they were back, taking turns sitting on the couch with him. Kamala darned socks for the better part of an hour, while Amina shot three rolls of close-ups. It wasn’t that she needed to know what he was saying, Amina told herself, taking a picture of Thomas’s much thinned profile, but rather that the rambling was renewing in some way, the rat-tat-tat-tat of a soft summer rain on a tin roof, washing off the heat and misery they had endured.

Her father was finally happy. It was not hard to see this. Joy blossomed across his face, filling his cheeks and eyes with an intensity not seen since he had performed his last surgery. His hands flew around as if reaping the air for sentences. He laughed on occasion. Once, he even turned and winked at her, making her feel like she was in on an elaborate, goofy conspiracy.

“Maybe it’s healing him?” Raj asked when he arrived the next morning to retrieve his dishes, and the hope in his voice nipped at Amina’s heart even before he went to sit on the couch himself, listening and nodding along.

That afternoon, the family came in shifts, first Sanji, then Bala, and at last Chacko, who surprised everyone by showing remarkable endurance for the natter, sitting for an eight-hour stretch before dismissing himself to go home and sleep.

“Still?” Jamie asked that night.

“Still,” Amina confirmed. She held the phone close to her bedroom window, where Thomas’s voice droned in like a swarm of bees. “You hear that?”

“Nope.”

“Oh. Well, he’s still there.”

It wasn’t until the fourth day, when Thomas stopped eating, that she began to really worry. Sanji, Kamala, and Amina sat in the kitchen, staring at the rejected bowl of chicken and rice like it was a bowl of snakes.

“Nothing for breakfast either?” Sanji asked, and Amina pointed to the toast she’d left on the counter hopefully, as though he might come look for it.

“Probably just queasy or something,” Sanji said, but called Chacko at the office anyway.

“Eda,” Chacko said that evening, kneeling in front of Thomas so he’d be forced to make eye contact, to stop talking. “You have to eat.”

“Later,” Thomas said.

Chacko patted his leg. “You need your strength. You’re getting depleted.”

“Later,” he repeated, ignoring further entreaties from everyone, including Raj, who brought down a box of every single one of Thomas’s favorite foods by dinnertime. That night the family sat in the kitchen, the uneasy silence between them emphasized by Thomas’s increasingly frenetic chatter. Contrary to what Chacko had warned, he was growing more animated than ever, jumping breathlessly from subject to subject like a man auctioning off entire areas of thought.

“The exodus is subsiding,” he said.

“You mother didn’t think so.”

“Slingshots!”

On the sixth morning, he skipped his tea and juice.

“You have to drink,” Amina said, bringing him a plain glass of water, just in case that was the problem.

“But some narcolepsy responds to norepinephrine reuptake inhibitors,” Thomas said, and a tendril of panic curled around her lungs.

“Dad, you’re getting dehydrated.”

Thomas looked up. His pupils dilated and retracted, finding her for the first time in days.

“I’m coming to your show,” he said.

“What?”

“I don’t know why we didn’t think of it earlier.” His breath was sweet and rotten, like bread fermenting in a bag. “Your mother will love it.”

She found Kamala in the laundry room washing bedsheets.

“Yes,” her mother said after she’d been dragged to the porch to look at him. “I see.”

“So what now?” Amina clenched and unclenched her hands, wiping them on her jeans. How would they get him all the way out to the car? They needed to get him into the car. Chacko and Raj would both have to come down to help — there was no other way to manage.

“What do you mean?”

“We’ve got to get him to the hospital,” Amina repeated, annoyed. Had Kamala gone soft, too? Taken tranquilizers? Her mother’s eyelashes beat slowly in consideration, butterfly wings testing the wind.

“Not yet,” she said.

But when? That day, as Thomas’s voice went from hoarse to ragged, as his lips dried into twin strips of beef jerky and the sun dawdled across the sky, Amina paced the field, unable to sit next to her father or to let him out of her sight. He was still talking, or at least trying to talk, his voice a low, droning motor. It looked painful now, his tongue dry and dark in his mouth, the corners of his lips crusted with white. He grimaced as he shifted, and Amina realized that he must have been skipping his pain medication, too.