Mira Jacob - The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing

“What else?” Amina asked breathlessly, feeling suddenly important.

“Do we have a steak?” her father asked.

“Lamb only,” Kamala said.

“Get me the lamb.”

“I’ll get it,” Akhil said.

Kamala flinched as the cotton ball was pulled away, her cheekbone swelling fast into a bulbous arc. Her eye jerked in its socket, red and bloody-looking. Amina gasped.

“It’s okay,” her father said. “There are some broken blood vessels, so it just looks bad. Can you see my fingers?” He held up two and cupped his hand over her mother’s other eye.

Kamala nodded.

“How many?”

“Two.”

“Good.”

Akhil returned, lamb in hand. When his mother’s bloody eye fixed on him, he began to cry.

“Can you sit up?” Thomas asked gently. “We need to check your head.”

She sat up. She held her head in her hands like a bowl full of something that might spill easily, while Thomas felt up and down her neck and around the back of her skull.

“You’ve got a small bump here,” Thomas said, pressing, and she let out a little cry. “I want you to follow my fingers with your eyes.”

The checks turned up nothing. Kamala’s vision was fine. She did not appear disoriented, or even upset, really, just deeply, deeply quiet. She sat on the couch, head buffeted between ice and meat, eyes closed. Akhil sat with her. He still could not look at her without his mouth trembling, so he sat with his face turned away. For their part, Amina and her father kept busy by cleaning up the kitchen, finding Tupperware to match the leftovers and scraping the turmeric stains from the stove and countertops. They stacked and lined the dishes up by the sink, and while Thomas swept the floor, Amina filled the basin with hot, lemony soap-water.

“I’ll do it,” her father said, setting the broom to the side.

“It’s okay, Dad, I’ll—”

“Sit.”

It was hard to tell from his tone whether he meant it as an act of kindness or punishment, but she knew better than to argue. Amina looked at the couch and knew she did not want to sit in the pained current between her mother and brother. She walked instead to her book bag, still resting on the kitchen counter where she had set it earlier, and pulled her camera out.

Would Thomas even appear with all the bright light bouncing off the tiles in front of him? Amina had no idea, so she adjusted the settings a few times, hoping she would catch the S-shaped shadow curling up his back as he washed dishes, the few suds that rose in the air like bits of dander. She turned around, walking into the dining room to take a picture of the splattered and stained tablecloth. From that distance, she took a few shots of her mother and brother on the couch, faces flashing blue with the changing television screen. She pulled her focus tighter and saw that Akhil’s mouth was moving. Then Kamala’s. Then Akhil’s again. Who knew what exactly it was that he was saying, or what Kamala replied, or why, ten seconds later, they looked at each other and laughed a little before settling back into silence. All Amina knew was that by the time her father was done with the dishes, they had turned to Hill Street Blues and were watching it side by side, the bright brass of the keys held safely in her mother’s hands. Thomas stood in front of them, wiping his hands dry on a dish towel.

“I see you’ve come around,” he said to Akhil, who said nothing back, his gaze hardening. Amina took the picture.

“I understand it’s very difficult, these moments,” Thomas continued a little too loudly, as though he was being recorded for posterity. “Nobody likes these things life hands us. But part of becoming a man is understanding how to face them head on instead of running all the time. It’s time you knew how to do that.”

Why is it that fathers so often ensure the outcome they are trying to avoid? Is their need to dominate so much stronger than their instinct to protect? Did Thomas know, Amina wondered as she watched him, that he had just done the human equivalent of a lion sinking his teeth into his own cub?

Akhil’s gaze broke away from his father’s, shifting to the driveway in one beat. His mouth pursed, as if sucking on a secret, and with a flash of clarity, Amina knew what it was. It popped into her head cleanly, like a blade so sharp she couldn’t even feel the cut. She stood, the camera pressed to her face. Akhil looked at her through the viewfinder, fury swirling around him like invisible wind, daring her to say anything. She shut her eyes and took the picture.

The next afternoon, Amina stood in the space between the door to her room and Akhil’s, clenching and unclenching her fists. She couldn’t take it anymore. It was a horrible sound, and its showing no sign of stopping in the ten minutes she’d waited outside made her brave enough to just go in.

Akhil was crying in his bed. Really crying. Crying in a way that she hadn’t seen since they were kids and he’d accidentally dropped his Star Wars light saber out the car window, all that would-be heroism shattering into plastic junk on the highway.

“Get out,” he said, but even this was whimpered so weakly that she couldn’t take it seriously. She sat at the bottom of his bed, not knowing what to say. The Greats smiled down at them maniacally.

“Paige is going to dump me.”

“What? She said that?”

“She will when she finds out.”

“What do you mean? You didn’t tell her?”

Her brother took a sticky breath, trying to swallow before he said, “Not really. I can’t. There is no treatment that works. I looked it up today; it’s all just a bunch of shit they try on you and almost none of it changes anything.”

Could that be true? Amina thought of their medicine cabinet, all the pills and candy-colored syrups. “Well, maybe Dad knows of something that will—”

“Dad can’t do shit about this! It’s a disease!”

“But …” Amina licked her lips nervously. “I mean, you don’t even know that you have it for sure.”

“You’re the one that said it! I fall asleep all the time for no reason, right?”

Amina found a cuticle and bit it, wishing she’d never said anything to anyone ever as Akhil started crying again. “Well—”

“Well, nothing! Don’t you see, you stupid kid?” he gasped. “It’s never going to change for us! It doesn’t matter how much we grow, or change, or try to become like everyone else, in the end, we’re fucking deformed, and they will know it. We’re too fucked up to love.”

Amina thought of her father standing in front of the sink, of Kamala’s uneaten pot roast, of Akhil’s twitching face during the Big Sleep, of the Salem house that kept getting taller, story by slanting story, in her dreams. She thought of the moment she could have grabbed Jamie’s hand but didn’t.

“It’s going to be okay,” she said loudly, mainly to stop the thinking.

Akhil didn’t say anything.

“She’ll still love you,” she told him, her voice strong in the place of any real conviction, and when he still didn’t say anything she realized he’d probably fallen asleep again. Great. Another failure on top of a failure. She looked up at the Greats. You bastards , she thought. Do something for him already .

“You think?” Akhil asked softly, startling her. “You think she’ll still want me?”

“Of course she will,” Amina said, relieved. “Just tell her.”

Thank God for Saturday mornings. A reprieve from the familiar, a day unworn by routines. Anything was possible. The week might still be redeemed. Amina made her way down to the kitchen, surprised but not unhappy to see her father staring into the cupboards.