Mira Jacob - The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing

If there was an upside to the disaster, Amina supposed it would have to be the way her parents suddenly united in the face of it. As the hours wore into days, Kamala and Thomas seemed to Siamese-twin, becoming an unrecognizable age (older? younger?) as they shared a child’s grief borne by an adult body. As the days wore on, Akhil and Amina felt the strangeness of their own presence in the house, their superfluousness to everything: the phone calls from India, the childhood stories whispered in Malayalam, the ticket bought, the suitcase packed, their parents, turning and returning to the dining room table to huddle over the old photo albums like caged parrots clutching at a shared axis. On the rare occasion that Amina met her father’s gaze, she looked away quickly, shamed by the disappointment she saw there — though what exactly he was disappointed in (her accent? her jeans?) felt as mysterious as it did unfair.

Three days after the news, Akhil and Amina stood together in the driveway as their parents prepared to leave for the airport. Kamala pressed money for McDonald’s into Akhil’s hand in case she was not back before dinnertime, and their father nodded goodbye, looking right through them like they were the credits of a movie. Amina stepped forward and wrapped her arms around his waist, surprised by the force with which he hugged her back. His beard scratched her head when he kissed it. He pushed her away.

“We should get going,” he said, and with that both parents got into the car, driving into the cool October afternoon.

The phone rang a few nights later, just as Amina was drifting toward the heavy blanket of sleep. Her eyes flickered open to the green glow of the digital clock: 11:15. Even Dimple knew not to call after ten. She slid over to the side of her bed and pulled the phone out of the cradle.

“… so hot, my God. Every night. I can barely sleep,” her father was saying.

“Mmmm.” Her mother’s voice was milky with sleep. “Sounds awful.”

“And those theaters! They added three more! Can you imagine? Hindi films, Tamil films, Malayalam films. Nobody in my dreams understands anybody else.”

Her mother laughed at this, a soft laugh that was echoed at the other end of the line by her father. A silence followed, punctuated by the wiggling squeals and blips of distance.

“I think I’m going nuts,” Thomas said at last.

“You’re not,” Kamala soothed. “You’re just tired. Pavum .”

Thomas was silent for another long time, and Amina herself was growing drowsy when she heard him say, “The papers are calling him the Sleepwalking Killer.”

Suddenly, she was awake, blinking furiously into the dark. Killer?

“Ach,” her mother said.

“I guess Mary and the girls talked to reporters before I came, filled them with some nonsense about how he was asleep when he set the fire, how he never would have done it awake. But how do you lock the doors in your sleep? How do you douse the whole house in petrol?”

Kamala’s expulsion of breath was swift, as if trying to blow the words, their meaning, far away from herself, but the images bloomed in Amina’s mind. Petrol? Fire? Locked doors?

“And now it’s all the sensation over here, you wouldn’t believe. In the Dinamalar and the Janmabhumi Daily and someone even told me there was a mention in the Hindu Times . I can never come back here again.”

“Chi!” Kamala scoffed. “What are you saying? Of course you can.”

“They blame me.”

“Who cares what Mary and the girls think? Their opinions are hardly—”

“Not just Mary and the rest of the bloody servants! The town! All of Salem! My mother’s old patients. Divya’s parents. I saw Chandy Abraham at the funeral, and he could barely look at me.”

“People are just sad for you!”

“Bullshit. They are saying it’s my fault.”

“It is not your fault.” Kamala’s voice was angry. “You didn’t do this! Sunil was unhappy! Nothing could have made him happy.”

“Couldn’t it have?” Thomas’s voice broke. “You know, he wasn’t like this when we were young. He was sweet then. This little fat ball, always following me with a grin. Trying to go wherever I went, pedaling his bike with his cheeks puffing as I rode away. I never waited for him. Did you know that? I don’t know why, I just didn’t.”

“You were a boy.”

“I was his brother!”

“Oh, Thomas.” Kamala made a tiny noise on the end of the line, and Amina realized her mother was crying. “ Pavum . This isn’t going to help.”

There was a rustling. Thomas blew his nose, swallowed. “I want to come home.”

“Come home,” her mother said. “We’re waiting.”

“Class, any reaction?”

Of course the results of her family-in-action photographs were awful, which meant that Mrs. Messina wanted to talk about them first. Amina stared at the pictures that she had taped up on the blackboard with everyone else’s. Why hadn’t she realized that she had taken so many close-ups of body parts? Her mother’s sneakers (the sole surviving remnant of the Dillard’s excursion) curtained by a sari. Sanji Auntie’s powdered neck craning upward as she exhaled smoke. Dimple’s nostrils flaring. Akhil cupping a flame for Sanji Auntie.

“I like the one with the sneakers,” someone said.

“Say more.”

“I think it works.”

“More.”

“Well, like the symbolism,” Missy Folgers offered. “The whole Indian American thing. I totally get it.”

Amina fought the urge to stare down Missy and whatever she thought she got.

“Tell us about the composition of this one,” Mrs. Messina said.

“That’s my dad,” Amina said.

She had taken the picture the day after he had come back from India, too scared to actually go sit on the porch with him though she had wanted to see him, to make sure he was okay. “I should check on my patients,” he had said after dinner, and Amina watched her mother straighten in her chair, whatever part of her had been tenderized by compassion slowly stiffening again. But then he never actually made it to the car. She had watched him drink straight from the bottle for fifteen minutes before setting up the shot. If he noticed her at all, he hadn’t said anything.

“It’s psycho,” someone said.

Why had she superimposed the empty-classroom picture against the back wall? She didn’t know. She hadn’t even thought that the pictures she took of the classroom were good at all, but somehow, when she was printing, she had reached for the negative, carefully working it into the frame. She had thought it would work on some symbolic level, making it look like her father had been trapped in the hard lines of desks and chairs. Instead, it just mucked up the wall behind him.

“Anyone have anything intelligent to say?” Mrs. Messina asked.

No one said anything.

Mrs. Messina sighed, crossing over to the photograph in three long strides. “C’mon, people. What do you guys feel when you look at this?”

“Scared,” said Missy Folgers. People laughed.

“Why are you laughing? She’s right,” Mrs. Messina said. “It is scary. Why, Missy?”

“I don’t know. The way he’s sitting, like he doesn’t notice anything else going on around him. Like he’s in another world.”

“A bad world,” someone said, and Amina stiffened.

“Exactly. And that’s what makes it beautiful,” Mrs. Messina said. “We’re looking at figures that seem isolated somehow, cut off from the rest of the world. What else gives you that feeling?”

“The porch light,” Tommy Hargrow said. “It looks too bright somehow. Which makes everything else look dark.”

Amina looked at the bubble of porch light, the shadows tucked around it.