Mira Jacob - The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing

It was instantly worse without her there. They weren’t out of the parking lot before Amina felt the silence slam down swiftly between them, smooth and relentless as concrete. Kamala shifted the car into gear, and Amina watched her father through the passenger seat mirror. Strangely, he looked normal to her now — calm and fatigued, as he always did when he came back from work, but okay. She could not see her mother’s face.

“We need to call Chacko and Bala,” he said as they got on the highway.

“Sanji will.”

“We should call them ourselves.”

“You call.”

Outside, the cars passed blurrily, buffeting against them with a pop of wind before breaking away into the horizon. Kamala moved into the left lane.

“Where are you going?” Thomas asked.

Amina looked out the window and saw they were headed up I-40.

“The car,” Amina’s mother said.

“Later, Kamala. We’ll see it later. They haven’t gotten it off the mountain yet.”

“Today.”

Amina felt her father’s gaze through the rearview mirror. He leaned over her mother and whispered something to her in Malayalam, but she shoved his head away.

“So? She’ll stay in the car. So what.”

“I need you to stay in the car,” her father was saying. He had opened the backseat door and was kneeling next to her, looking into her eyes. “I need you to stay here, okay? Can you do that, Ami? Will you do that for me?”

The car was parked at the side of the road. Outside, the mountain air smelled like pinions and rock and gas and ashes, and Amina nodded. She watched as he turned and ran to catch up with her mother, who was already stalking up the bend toward the guardrail, her black braid bouncing against her back.

Watching her parents through the window, Amina was sure they were in the wrong spot. The road looked much too itself, the same twisted vein of asphalt they always rode to the peak, the same low guardrails that held the tops of the evergreens at bay. Two white pickup trucks and men in orange jackets greeted her parents, pointing below with gloved hands. Her parents turned and looked.

What was it that they saw that day? What had happened to Akhil’s car that rooted her father to the spot as her mother turned around, first walking toward the road, then carefully kneeling on it, her eyes flickering shut? And were they forever lost to each other in that moment, completing the severing that had begun on the last trip to Salem, or did their connection fray more slowly, as the everyday weight of what had happened came to bear down on them? Amina would never know, but for days she could not close her eyes without seeing her parents as they had been right before they looked down, the tips of the evergreens spread out before them like waves, the New Mexico sky blank and white as eternity.

Getting Kamala out of the garden and into bed was no easy feat. The shock of finding Akhil’s jacket buried among the vegetables was one thing. The mud, another. She had been covered in it — streaks drying on her forehead, black lining her fingernails, clumps falling from her sari as she followed Amina back to the house like a zombie. In the end there was nothing to do but strip her to her underskirt and blouse and hose her down while Thomas slunk off to find her some Valium. Dried and dosed, she had fallen into bed without a word, turning her head away on the pillow when Amina asked if she was okay. Amina lowered the blinds and closed the bedroom door.

Outside, Thomas was waiting, his hands clamped in front of him. “Well?”

Amina put a finger to her lips, guiding him into the kitchen. She left him on one side of the counter and crossed to the other, needing the hard slab of white between them.

“How did she seem?” Thomas asked.

“Tired.”

“Good.” Her father paused. “Your mother is very strong, you know.”

“So you put the jacket there?”

Thomas nodded once.

“Why?”

“I apologized to your mother. I apologize to you. It was inappropriate.”

“But I don’t understand why you would do that.” She was starting to shake and trying to stop shaking because it felt stupid to be so undone, so upset over a goddamn piece of clothing. She crossed her arms trying to shore herself up.

“Hey, koche ,” Thomas soothed. “It’s not some huge thing. I had a bad night. I’ve been working a little too much. I might need to slow down for a bit.”

Amina looked at him, his glasses tucked into the front pocket of his overalls, and for a moment his explanation felt like it was not only true but right, like a newly paved road or a toothpaste-commercial smile or a horoscope you really wanted to believe in.

“Go get yourself a glass of water,” her father was saying, “and drink it slowly.”

“What happened in the ER with Derrick Hanson?”

She watched his face move quickly from surprise to something else, the skin around his mouth tightening. His eyes grew sharp, and Amina felt a flush spread from her throat to her scalp.

“That’s not your concern,” he said.

“If something is wrong, then I should know. To help.”

“I don’t need your help.”

“Or get you to the right doctor.”

“Goddamn it, Amina, there’s nothing medically wrong with me!” Thomas shouted suddenly, and Amina’s heart clattered around her rib cage.

“B-but how do you know that?”

“Because I do!”

“But did you talk to someone afterward? Did you get tests done? Are you taking medication? Dr. George said he tried to get you to come in and—”

“You talked to Anyan about this?”

“I … it … yes. But—”

“You talked to a co-worker of mine?”

“Yes, I just thought if—”

“Do you have any idea what you’ve done?” Thomas’s face drained of blood. “No, of course not! Why think through anything when you and your mother can sit here wringing hands and pointing the blame at me? Haven’t you grown tired of that yet?”

Amina’s eyes filled with tears. It was a distinctly feminine humiliation, the kind daughters close to their fathers go to great pains to avoid, as betraying of their fragility as a stain on the back of a skirt.

“Oh, stop it.” Her father plucked two napkins from the holder on the counter and shoved them at her. Amina breathed into the napkin, aware of the pressure gathering against her skull like beads of condensation. She blew her nose. It did not help.

“I think it’s time for you to go back to Seattle,” her father said.

She squeezed the napkin into a damp ball.

“Your patients,” she said.

There was a moment, a snap between them, and then a long corridor of silence with Thomas’s stricken face at one end of it. Amina put the crumpled napkin on the counter.

“I’m calling Dr. George tomorrow.” She took a quick breath and exhaled. “You are going in to see him, and whomever else you need to see. If you don’t, I will go and tell the board at Presbyterian what is going on myself.”

Then she walked out of the kitchen, through the porch, and out the screen door to the garden, to where Akhil’s jacket still lay in a clump, pill bugs racing through its ruined folds.

At least he was right about Kamala’s resilience. As the next morning dragged itself over the Sandias, sky gray and faded as an old nightgown, as Thomas headed to work and Amina sat groggily in the kitchen, Kamala rose, cracked a coconut in the kitchen sink, and shrugged off any questions with a steaming batch of hoppers and chutney. Afterward, she cleaned the dishes, organized her spice cabinet, and pickled a batch of limes.