Mira Jacob - The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing

She made her way in, skirting a sawhorse strangled by surgical tubing.

“Where did you go?”

“Just now? Just to the ditch.”

“You should be careful out there. High school kids park there now. A whole lot of them are in gangs.”

“Like the Crips and the Bloods?” Amina joked.

“Lots of them,” Thomas said. “Ty Hanson lost his son last month in a shoot-out in the mall.”

“Oh my God, really?” She had known Mr. Hanson in the loose way she knew a handful of her father’s patients — more a flash of features and a diagnosis than any real connection. He had a beard of some sort, a recurring meningioma, and a towheaded toddler. “That little kid?”

“Derrick. He had just turned seventeen in April.” Thomas’s face hollowed with a grief they both knew had nothing to do with Ty or Derrick Hanson, and Amina looked down, her breathing gone tight. The bin at her feet held the double-headed snakes of jumper cables, and she studied their copper jaws until she heard her father standing up.

“You want a drink?” He walked across the porch to rattle around in the old hospital lockers that lined the back wall. “This is the good stuff. Old ER nurse sent it. You remember Romero?”

Amina did not remember Romero. She nodded to avoid being given a full explanation of Romero. A minute or so later, Thomas crossed the porch, holding out one of two jelly jars.

“Cheers,” Thomas said, and they toasted without clinking. Amina took a deep swallow. The good stuff tasted like a campfire.

“You don’t like it?”

She exhaled. “I don’t know yet.”

Thomas looked amused, wandering back to his chair and gesturing for her to do the same. “So how is Seattle?”

“Oh, you know. Pretty much the same.”

“You’re still liking your job?”

She smiled tightly, strangely comforted by how little Thomas understood about her career derailment. “It’s fine.”

“Do you like the weddings?”

“Yeah,” Amina surprised herself by saying, “I guess I do.”

“That’s nice. Lucky, right?” It wasn’t a real question, more an affirmation of what Thomas had taken upon himself as his most important life lesson for Amina — to have a job she felt passionate about. “It’s such a crucial business, this liking what you do. Americans get into this idea that you do one thing to make money and then live like royalty when you are away from it — such a strange way to live. Makes you”—his fingers danced around his head—“imbalanced!”

“You never felt that way about work?”

“Never. I had bad days — who doesn’t have bad days? But still I look forward to going in every day. Excited and whatnot.” His face brightened as he talked, ramping up for his favorite revelation. “I wasn’t a good medical student, you know.”

“No?” Amina said, like this was a surprise.

Thomas shook his head vigorously. “Terrible, actually. I was such a troublemaker, and Ammachy … But going to medical school was a fluke, really. I had the grades, you see, but not the ambitions.”

Amina took another long pull of scotch, watching his features soften in the giddy, distant way that fathers in movies did when remembering how they fell in love with their wives.

“Dr. Carter?” she prompted.

“Yes! Exactly. I had never touched a live brain before he came to Vellore, can you imagine? And then the exposition! The surgery! We must have stood for eleven hours that first day alone. People always say time stands still, and it really is that, you know. You find the thing you love the most, and time will stop for you to love it.”

He looked at her, clearly pleased with his recounting, and Amina felt a pinch in her heart. She swallowed the rest of her scotch with a gulp. He stood up and motioned for her glass. Prince Philip made a halfhearted attempt to stand, then slid back into position on the floor.

“Oh, I don’t know about that,” Thomas said, shuffling toward the lockers.

“Know about what?” Amina watched him, body pulsing lightly with heat. The good stuff was apparently a little bit stronger than the regular stuff. Or maybe she was just becoming a lightweight.

“What, Ami?”

“Did you just say something?”

“Nope.” He opened the locker. “It’s nice to have you here. So you just came home because you had some time off?”

Something about his tone made Amina look up. He held his body still, the bottle poised in midair for her answer.

“More or less.” She waited until he was back and had handed her the glass to say, “Mom was a little worried about you, too.”

“Worried about what?”

“That maybe something’s not quite right with you.”

“Pssht.” Thomas waved a large hand. “She’s thought that forever, no?” Amina conceded with a small shrug, and Thomas’s frown deepened. “Anyway, your mother has always been afraid of anything she can’t control.”

“Maybe she just read the situation wrong.”

“Yes, she’s quite good at that, too.” Thomas cleared his throat. “Did she tell you she sent two thousand dollars to some radio preacher?”

“What? No! When?”

“Last month itself.”

“Oh, God. What did you do?”

“Nothing! What to do? She never spends money on herself, now she wants to give it to some quack? Her business.” He looked out across the yard for a long time. “I think”—he swirled the liquid around his glass—“she’s having a spiritual crisis.”

“Really? Mom?”

He nodded, not looking at her. “This business of not belonging to a church, of not having a place for all her beliefs. I think it’s affecting her. Making her see evil and whatnot where it isn’t.” He looked at her, his nose wrinkling with a What can you do? shrug. Amina looked hard at him, at his assured posture, his sharp eyes. There were rings around his irises, the pale harbingers of age.

“You’re fine,” she said out loud. Thomas nodded. She let her head sink into the back of her chair. “Of course you are.”

“You really thought something was wrong?”

“I don’t know. I mean, it did sound crazy. She said you were out here all night talking to Ammachy or something.”

She expected him to laugh, as he usually did when they had weathered another bout of Kamala’s insanity, but when she looked at him, his mouth was puckered.

“What?”

“You believed her,” he said.

“I didn’t know what to think.”

“Sure,” he said, clearly hurt.

“Dad.”

He looked away and she slid her feet across the floor until her sneakers rested on top of his black work shoes. She nudged him, and after a moment he nudged back. Prince Philip shifted in his sleep, rolling until he was all belly and genitals, his canines sharp under a sagging lip.

“Oh, hey!” Thomas jumped up, startling her. He walked toward one of the shelves. “Have I told you about this yet?”

Amina watched as he rummaged in the dark, flipping on one light switch and then another. He pulled out two large spoons tied together and waved them.

“What is that?”

“Come. I’ll show you.”

“What? Where?”

Thomas nodded to the fields. “You’ll love it.”

Ten minutes later, Amina stood back in the dark yard with her father, staring into the truck bed.

“And what, exactly, does it do?” she asked.

“Stuns them a bit, when done at close proximity and with soft produce,” Thomas said. They had moved Kamala’s truck from the driveway to the very back of the field. Two cords of surgical tubing hung between the spoons that were bolted into each side of the bed. In between was a pillow-sized square of leather. Thomas picked it up and pulled it back.

“Holy shit,” Amina said.