Mira Jacob - The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing

“Turbulent.”

“I’ll bet! A lot of pish and hizoom out there, isn’t it?”

“Yeah.” A nurse passed them and waved. Thomas nodded at her. “So how are you?”

“Excellent!”

“Yeah?” Amina fought a brief urge to pull back, to study his face like a cop or a shrink or someone else who was paid to know when people were lying.

“Yup. Come, I told Monica I’d bring you to her.”

Amina stifled her shiver of repulsion. Over the twenty years Monica had worked as Thomas’s physician’s assistant, she’d gone from calling herself Amina’s “aunt” to her “older sister” to her “buddy,” each claim of increasing closeness causing Amina to feel its corollary in claustrophobia. Still, no one spent more time with Thomas. Monica would know if something was really wrong.

They walked down the twists and turns of the hospital corridor, puddles of light guiding them like lines on the road. (“How do you know where you’re going?” Amina had asked once, when she was five, and Thomas had tapped his skull and answered, “It’s in here,” so that now when she thought of his brain, it was a bright linoleum maze, the dead and the dying hidden in corners, waiting for release.)

“Anyan, you still here?” Thomas bellowed at a man approaching them from the far end of the hall. “I thought you would have left hours ago!”

“Dr. Eapen.” Small and dark and tucked into his white coat like a check in an envelope, the man came to an abrupt stop when he reached them, smiling with a precision that suggested military training or a sociological disorder. “Is this your daughter, then?”

“This is Amina! Amina, Dr. George.”

“Hi,” Amina extended her hand. His grip was cold and soft.

“Nice to meet you.” His turn back to Thomas was a swift though not unkind dismissal. “You didn’t by chance get a moment to look at Mrs. Naveen’s MRI, did you?”

“I did.”

Amina listened as they exchanged the same words that embroidered her childhood with their unknown specificities— decompressive, craniotomy, extracerebral . She studied Dr. George’s face for hints of wariness or disbelief, but he seemed to swallow Thomas’s opinion whole, nodding at the right points.

“Heyyyyyyy, Amina!”

Down the hall, the steel doors of the ICU swinging shut behind her, Monica came barreling toward them, linebacker thick and squinting from under a pouf of blond hair.

“Amina, nice to meet you,” she heard Dr. George say before she was swept up into Monica’s embrace.

“How are you, hon? How’s Seattle? Things?”

The pens from Monica’s lab coat stabbed her left breast. “Great.”

“I’ll let you two catch up,” Thomas said, squeezing Amina’s shoulder. “Ami, just say bye before you go.”

“Yeah, okay.”

He hit a button on the wall, and the steel doors flew open again, the rich darkness behind them unsettling.

“And Dimple?” Monica’s mouth was pursed around a breath mint, and cool, sugary air blew over Amina’s face. “You guys still close?”

“Yeah, of course. What about you? Things here?”

“Oh, fine, you know. Same shit, another week. You just here for a visit?”

“Yes, until the end of the week.”

“Your dad is so excited. You should get him out for some fun. He could use a break.”

“What do you mean?”

“Maybe take him to Cochiti Lake for a few days or something. His Thursday and Friday are light.”

Amina nodded as two men with stethoscopes rounded the corner, walking toward them. “Is there something wrong?”

“What?”

“Is there a reason he needs a break?”

“No!” Monica bugged her eyes out at Amina with a funny smile as the men passed. “He just, you know, loves to fish with you.”

Amina cocked her head, frowning. Thomas did not love to fish with her. Was this some kind of weird code, or just one of Monica’s not-that-great-memory moments? Amina was trying to figure out a way to ask when Monica’s beeper went off, startling both of them.

She unclipped it, wrinkling her nose. “Crap, I need to take this. You gonna be here for a little while? We should get a coffee in the cafeteria.”

“Actually, Mom’s waiting in the car.”

“Damn. Well, can we get margaritas this week? Have some girl time? I want to hear all about the love life.”

The internal shiver was coming back, the repulsion harder to fend off now that Monica was actually in front of her, all hair and nosiness.

“Perfect, call you tomorrow,” Amina said, and went to find her dad.

“Over there,” the nurse on duty whispered when she entered the ICU, and Amina followed her pointing finger to the far end of the room, where Thomas’s feet were visible under a white curtain.

“Hey, Dad?” she whispered when she was just outside it. “I gotta get going.”

Thomas peeked out of the curtain, then motioned for her to enter, and she did, suddenly finding herself in a space heavy with the stale breath of a patient. Her father moved aside, and she looked down to find a tangle of silvery hair that fanned out across the pillow like fishing net. The woman was older, maybe in her eighties, her skin thin and tanned and waxy-looking.

“Infection is getting worse,” Thomas said, writing something down on her chart. “She won’t make it through the night.”

“Should you just say it like that?”

“Hmm?”

“You know, in front of her like that.”

Her father looked up from his clipboard and smiled at her sweetly, as though she had asked if the Tooth Fairy was making enough money in dental collection. “I’m sure she already knows.”

It took three rounds of knocks to wake Kamala up. Amina hopped in the wind, the dust replaced by a cold blast of northern air. She pounded on the windows and, when that didn’t work, kicked the doors. Finally, one loud thump sent Kamala shooting up in a puff of sari, her face tattooed with the checked imprint of the truck seat. She looked at Amina and frowned.

“I’ll drive,” Amina said, and Kamala scooted over wordlessly, unlocking the driver’s side. Amina climbed in.

“Put it into gear.”

“I remember how to drive, Ma.”

Kamala leaned away, resting her forehead against the window. She was quiet as they pulled away from the hospital, quiet as they got back onto the highway, but when Amina checked to see if she’d fallen back asleep, her eyes were wide open, staring out at the service road that ran alongside them.

“He’s so happy you’ve come,” she said.

They were heading out of the city fast, into the barren stretches of the Indian reservations, where dried hands of sagebrush crisped in the summer heat. Albuquerque’s June sat flat and brown around them, the whole desert parched and waiting like an open mouth for the relief of July’s afternoon rains.

Up ahead was the exit to the village of Corrales, where a descent into the valley would bring air that was sweeter and clearer with every passing mile. The road would grow wide, the sagebrush replaced by locoweed and prairie grass, and soon Amina would see the soft line of bosque cottonwoods that enveloped either side of the Rio Grande. She held the wheel loosely, letting it ride out the familiar curves of the road home.

That afternoon Kamala went on a cooking rampage. Revitalized by her nap and the discovery of perfectly ripe rhubarb in her garden, she sat at the kitchen counter elbow-deep in red pulp, churning out a gory chutney while several pots steamed and hissed on the stove at her side.

“GO YE INTO ALL THE WORLD AND PREACH THE GOSPEL TO EVERY CREATURE!” Mort Hinley extolled from the radio.

“Okay!” Kamala shouted, snapping the food processor lid in place.