Mira Jacob - The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing

She was right about the crying. When it came, it seemed like it would never stop. Amina lay shaking on Akhil’s bed, whispering Please, please, please, God, please , because she hadn’t asked God for help yet, and now it seemed like the only thing left to do. Please, God . It had been too long now. Akhil had been gone for three months, and if those first days were hard because remembering things about him hurt, these days, the days of forgetting things about him, actually hurt worse.

But wouldn’t he come back? It seemed impossible that he wouldn’t. There was still the smell of him in his room — a pungent combination of dank socks, cigarettes, marijuana, and Vaseline. There were his shoes in the closet, looking like they could be stepped into at any moment, and his bathrobe hanging in their shared bathroom. His car keys, left on his desk by Kamala the day of the funeral. Surely he could not just be gone. Maybe it would take a season or a year, but Amina felt sure she would see her brother again.

She wasn’t entirely wrong about that. For almost a year after his death, she caught glimpses of her brother everywhere. Once, he had disappeared into the back room of the post office just as she walked in. Another time, he sat with a group of migrant workers in the chile fields on the edges of Corrales as the car whizzed by. Later, when she was standing in the ethnic-foods aisle at Safeway, she saw him strolling by the dairy section, his body dark against all those jugs of milk. And once, just once, she had woken up to the sharp smell of cigarette smoke floating over her bed, the air living with someone else’s breath.

Thomas did not come home the night of his diagnosis. Though he called at regular intervals, assuring them he would be home within hours, he somehow managed to never actually arrive, leaving Kamala and Amina to fall asleep on the couch, each eventually rising to take to her own bed for a few hours, and meet the other back in the kitchen at dawn, mute. Finally, in the morning, he arrived in the middle of breakfast, downed a glass of orange juice, and announced he was going to bed.

Monica called shortly after, hoarse and eerily wordless. We’re taking care of it , she had said, and then wept so softly and steadily that Amina found herself in the odd position of remaining optimistic, as if the ubiquitous movie premise that hope was every bit as important as reality was something she actually believed in; as if she understood which we and which it were being referenced.

But wasn’t there reason to hope? No one had said dying , after all, and Thomas was still scheduled for tests, which meant that whatever had been discovered in Dr. George’s office still held the possibility of being treated. Eight hours later, as her father arose, stood in the kitchen, and delivered a short, detailed plan about going forward (more scans and a biopsy, a temporary hiatus from work, and the immediate start of radiation), Amina found herself thinking that he actually seemed, if not better than before, then clearer somehow, pulled from a murky pool and rinsed clean with purpose.

“Waiting for results can often be trying on families,” he told Kamala and Amina, as if they were the patients. “My advice is to keep yourselves busy, and try not to dwell too much on what-ifs. Eat regularly. Try to get some form of daily exercise.”

Shortly after this speech, Thomas started cleaning out the porch with the zeal of a newly arrived tenant. Several months’ worth of newspapers were hauled out, cords were redoubled and hung in neat rows, three bags of miscellaneous screws, nails, and nuts were parsed into plastic trays, making them useful again.

For her part, Kamala bought an unlikely copy of Mastering the Art of French Cooking and began the even less likely task of following the recipes to the letter, resulting in a beguiling array of foods so layered in cream and butter and flour that she seemed to be baiting a familial heart attack, even as her family shunned the change. (“You’re trying to kill me?” Thomas asked without irony one evening, frowning at a pot of béchamel sauce.)

Even Amina, propelled by the distinct need to do something , shrugged off her career limbo, clearing her new plan with Jane and charming the guests at Nina Vigil’s daughter’s quinceañera with such success that she lined up two more gigs before the night was over. She rifled through her room looking for every last hidden cigarette, flushing them down the toilet as a kind of karmic payment for Thomas’s health. She would quit smoking and he would get better.

Through all of this, the family kept a complicit silence about Thomas’s condition, which itself started to feel oddly progressive as the second week bled into the third. More imaging was done, a month’s worth of patients rescheduled, and then Thomas lost a half-dollar-sized patch of hair to the biopsy. Sure, it felt strange, smuggling him in and out of the hospital and ignoring phone calls (Bala, Sanji, Dimple). It felt especially weird to ignore the two messages from Jamie, or rather, to listen to them five times apiece and never call back, but somehow every time she picked up the phone she found herself putting it right back down. It was too much. Too heavy. It would be better to wait and call everyone after, when she could tie it up into a tidy bundle of the past .

By the third week, their handling of Thomas’s diagnosis actually seemed proactive, as though by refusing to acknowledge the tumor, the Eapens had quarantined it from spreading into their actual lives. More than once over that week and the next, and usually when driving her father to his appointments, Amina found herself looking at their present from a twinkling vantage point in the future, sure that once this stage was over (the details for how it would become over being vague but surely possible), they could return to the life they knew before as unremarkably as tourists reentering their own living room. And so it all went on, cleanups and chicken a l’orange and appointments layered thickly enough to keep fear of what the future might hold from penetrating until exactly four weeks after the original prognosis, when out of the blue, Thomas sat down in his chair on the porch and began a long, gentle, occasionally exasperated conversation with Cousin Itty.

“Still?” Amina asked. Kamala nodded, looking through the screen porch with a frown and crossed arms. A timer set to announce when the beef bourguignon next needed tending ticked quietly behind them.

At least he was no longer sitting down. Something about coming home and finding Thomas prattling away to the empty chair beside him had made the situation seem much more dire than it did now, some nine minutes later, as he wandered around the shop, explaining things.

Amina glanced at her mom. “Does he still think—”

“DON’T TOUCH THAT,” Thomas boomed, springing forward, and both mother and daughter jumped. “You’ll lose a finger! Do you want to lose a finger?”

“Jesus Christ!” Amina hissed.

“No Jesus,” Kamala said.

The worst part was that there seemed to be no stopping the talking. Amina had tried to interrupt when they first came home, and Thomas had just stared at her blankly until she left the porch. Five minutes later, armed with the notion that he couldn’t possibly have lost his grip this suddenly or showily, Amina had confronted him again, only to be completely ignored. He did not answer her questions. He did not acknowledge her at all. He just waited until she ran out of words and continued his tour of the shop.

“To cut boards,” Thomas explained now, tapping the leg of a table saw. “Big ones. Bigger than that.”