Mira Jacob - The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing

The rack moaned. Amina’s gut bunched up into her chest as a head rose up from the middle of the coatrack and sank down again.

“Fuck,” she heard someone say. She ducked behind the tree to her left.

The rack was moving now, the coats shivering as if cold. The head rose up again, and Amina pulled the camera up to her face, her heart beating staccatos into her fingers. The head bobbed lower, then turned suddenly, roughly, facing her. Amina froze, waiting to be spotted, but the maid of honor’s eyes were closed, and stayed closed as Amina zoomed in. Her pink mouth hung in an O , lips wet. The girl’s head moved in beats, rising and lowering, and Amina focused in tight on Jackie’s face, holding her breath to press the shutter. She pressed the shutter again as the girl reached out to steady herself, one manicured hand wrapping around the wire neck of the hangers, her head dipping to the side. When she moaned again, a man’s hand covered her mouth. She leaned forward into it. The coatrack disappeared in a thunder.

Through Amina’s lens, they were beautiful — pinned like sea creatures on a tide of black coats, limbs flailing against each other in fantastic spasm, white against the dark. The girl lay facedown, the flowers in her hair smashed to pulp. Under her, two ankles bound by pants ran in place, trying to find some footing in the mounds of material. Amina was swallowed by a clean calmness, fingers and eyes and lens suspended in the air twitching, twitching. She watched as two large hands grasped Jackie by the waist, throwing her roughly to the side. Underneath, Mr. Beale clutched his thigh, the whites of his eyes shining as Amina pressed the shutter again.

Jackie moaned.

“Get up,” Mr. Beale barked, but the girl did not move. Her breasts dangled out of her dress, and she fumbled, trying to pull the material back up.

“Oh my God,” she said.

“Get up now ,” Mr. Beale said again, pushing her shoulder.

The swishing noise just behind Amina sent the camera to her waist, her lungs cinching. She turned to see the coat checker hurrying down the hallway toward them, eyes stuck on the scene in front of him. Amina followed behind him, slinging her camera around her back. Mr. Beale frowned as they approached, and Amina looked away as he stood and yanked his pants up.

“I’ll, um … take-take-take care of the coats, sir,” the coat checker stuttered, and Mr. Beale stepped off of them.

“Jackie, get up,” Mr. Beale said again, calmly this time, like he was talking to a toddler, but she didn’t stir. She was looking behind him, behind all of them. Amina turned around to see the grounds manager in the hallway, with Lesley and a few guests trailing behind him.

“What’s your name, son?” Mr. Beale asked the coat checker.

“Ev-Evan.”

“Evan, let’s you and me see if we can lift this thing.” Mr. Beale motioned to the coatrack. The folly of this was evident by what was on top of the coatrack, namely, Jackie, hands smashed over the bodice of her dress. Amina looked at Mr. Beale, who looked at the grounds manager, who looked at the coat checker, giving him a sharp nod, so it was the coat checker who bent down to the girl, hoisting her up clumsily while the guests looked on. Underneath her, Amina spotted her own crumpled coat.

“Too much to drink,” Mr. Beale announced loudly as the help heaved the coatrack up off the floor. “No big deal.”

He gave the guests in the hall a knowing wink, and Jackie’s face filled with color.

“I’m so sorry about this, Mr. Beale,” the grounds manager offered quickly. “Evan is new here and doesn’t know—”

But Mr. Beale waved away the rest of this sentence, walking to where Lesley stood with the hollow-eyed look of a cat ready to spring. He put his arm around his wife. “Let’s all just go back inside, shall we?”

And how did it happen, the calm turning around, as if there were nothing to actually see besides Brock Beale’s unfortunate explanation? Amina could not quite fathom it, and she couldn’t look at Lesley again, so she stood still in the wake of receding people, her hand clutching her camera as if it were in danger of being swept away with the easily swayed current.

“You’ve got to be shitting me.” Dimple stood in the back doorway of the gallery, paint fumes and blindingly white walls leaking into the alley where Amina stood. “So you just left your coat there? They’d better goddamn reimburse you.”

“Yeah. That’s their first priority, I’m sure.”

“Well, at least it was ugly anyway.”

“It was?”

“Did she know? I mean, she must have known.”

“No idea.”

They walked to the car, Seattle’s Saturday-night Pioneer Square crowd milling drunkenly around them. A few recently emptied beer bottles had been added to the truck bed, and Amina tossed them out, opening the door for Dimple, who ducked her head in and sniffed around suspiciously. “What fucking masala bomb went off in here?”

“It’s samosas. We’ve got to drop them off at Jose’s on the way.”

“They’re on my seat! I can’t sit there now.”

“Come on. We’re running late.”

“Great, so I’m going to have curry stink.”

“Sajeev’s Indian. He won’t care.”

“I’m Indian. I care.”

“You’ve got issues.”

Dimple put the bag of samosas on the floor and climbed in gingerly. She cracked her window and reached under the seat to scoot it up, then stopped. She pulled out Jose’s manila envelope.

“ ‘Amina only’?”

“It’s just wedding stuff.” Amina reached for the envelope. “Gimme.”

Dimple pulled away, opening the flap.

“Wait, don’t!”

But it was too late. Dimple was already sliding the picture out, her face lighting up like she’d swallowed a sunset whole. “Holy Christ, what happened to her?”

“Nothing!”

“She OD’d?”

“She’s a grandmother!”

“So they can’t OD?”

“Dimple, give it!”

“Someone wanted a copy of this ?”

“It’s not — yes. They did. Can you just—”

“Who made the print? Nice work.”

“Jesus, Dimple, it’s confidential! For a client! Can you not stick your nose into everything for, like, five seconds?”

Dimple looked at her heavily, as if to crush more information out of her, then, when it wasn’t forthcoming, shrugged and lit a cigarette. They rode in silence, smoke hovering between them.

“So what—”

“Dimple.”

“I was just going to ask what you think Sajeev’s going to be like this time, you freak.”

“Oh.” Amina’s shoulders dropped a tick. She tried to picture the skinny boy they had avoided as kids, the teenager they’d seen twice. “I dunno. The same. Quiet. Bucktoothed. Too small for his nose.”

Dimple laughed. “That’s mean.”

“It’s true. So, which bar?”

“The Hilltop,” Dimple said, and Amina groaned. The Hilltop was frequented by the kind of people who sized one another up by their shoes. “I know, I know, I tried to get him down to the Mecca. It wasn’t happening. He insisted on a place where he could get us dinner.”

“He’s getting us dinner? Isn’t it kind of … formal?”

“Dinner is nice.”

“But for us?”

“Listen, the whole conversation kind of threw me. One minute I was trying to figure out how to negotiate drinks down to coffee, and the next I was saying ‘Sure, yeah, dinner on you, great.’ ”

Amina looked at her cousin. “Are we going on a date with Sajeev?”

“Not even in his fantasies. There’s a space.”

The Hilltop was bustling, filled with polished faces of women who looked like the “after” images on a magazine makeover page, and men who looked for women who looked like that. Amina smoothed a hand over her own peach-colored dress, part of the wedding-ready work wardrobe that Dimple insisted on calling “Cadbury Couture.”