Mira Jacob - The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing

“Come,” she said. He padded after her, through the living room, kitchen, and laundry room, out onto the porch, where they stopped just long enough to pick up a flashlight. Amina opened the screen door that led to the yard.

“Go,” she said.

She stumbled after him in the dark, trying to stifle the feeling that she was playing the part in the movie where the well-meaning woman gets murdered in her mother’s eggplant patch.

“Stay away from the beans,” she hissed once they were between the rows of vegetables. The dog went down the row that led to the trellis, and she walked down the other row, passing beds of lettuces, cucumbers, and snap peas, as she made her way to the back of the garden. Kamala’s bucket of garden tools waited mid-row, and she picked a small shovel out of it before continuing to the back.

“So what did he say about the jacket?” Jamie had asked as they sat on his kitchen counter that evening, passing a bottle of seltzer back and forth.

“He said that he was sorry.”

“That’s all?”

“What else would he say?”

“Well, why did he put it there in the first place?”

Amina frowned. “Did you hear the part about the tumor?”

“Yes,” Jamie said, squeezing her leg reassuringly. “But that’s medical. The doctors will deal with that. But what was he trying to do? That’s the part you’ve got to figure out.” There was an earnest, Hardy Boy — ish glint on his face that made her uneasy.

“I just told you he won’t talk about it,” Amina said.

Jamie scratched his neck. “Is the jacket the only thing he buried?”

Now, in the dark, she scooped through the damp soil, trying not to think too hard about the snakes that roamed the garden regularly or made temporary houses from sun-warmed spades and bags of blood meal. Her hand brushed something hard, and she recoiled, fumbling for the flashlight.

Glass. Not a shard, but a nice, rounded edge, which when pried loose appeared to be a jar of something. For one horrible moment, she thought she was looking at human organs, but a longer, calmer look revealed nothing more terrifying than Kamala’s homemade mango pickle. She put it down next to her and kept digging. Not ten seconds later she hit a cardboard corner, which turned into a warped copy of Nat King Cole’s Love Is the Thing . Just under that, the gilded cup of Thomas’s BEST DOCTORS IN THE SOUTHWEST 1991 trophy lay on its side. A few minutes later, as she stared at the glittering clump of Thomas’s car keys, Amina shut her eyes, submerged by the panicky feeling that the objects had not been hidden so much as they’d been biding their time, waiting for her to find them. She stood up, feeling sick.

“Fucking fuck ,” she said out loud, and across the garden Prince Philip wagged his tail guiltily, sending the bean pods into silvery applause.

“Let’s go,” she said, walking toward the gate with everything jumbled in her hands. Prince Philip did not follow her. She shined the flashlight on him. “Hey, move it.”

He walked toward her reluctantly, one long bean disappearing under the soft curtain of his lip, but stopped, looking dolefully back at the trellis. She did not have patience for this. Amina stalked the twenty feet toward him, grabbed his collar, and wheeled around. A flash of white burst into her line of vision. She gasped. There, waiting politely at the side of the path she had just walked down, was a brand-new pair of white Velcro tennis shoes.

The next morning, the pounding would not stop.

“Hullo? Ami? Hullo?” Fattened through the fish-eye lens, Sanji’s nose had turned into its own island of sorts, as craggy and pockmarked as any dotting the South Pacific in recent millennia. Her eyes, in comparison, were hard, distant stars. She turned her head, blinking rapidly into the peephole, and rang the doorbell again.

“Who is it?” Amina stalled.

“Surely you are not pretending that you haven’t been staring at me for the last half minute?”

Amina opened the door. “Hi, Sanji Auntie.”

Cool, flabby arms squeezed her around the middle hard, more a Heimlich than an actual greeting. She peered behind Amina to the empty hallway. “So? Where are your parents?”

“Running a few errands.”

“Really? Where?”

“I’m not exactly sure. They didn’t tell me.”

Sanji tugged her ear sharply. “Liar!”

“Ow!”

“They are in the hospital itself! Bala called me half an hour ago saying Chacko called her and your parents were checking in for some scans! Are you people going to talk to us or what? Because if you aren’t, we would like to know right now and be done with it!” Sanji breathed hard, dabbing at her upper lip with her chuni.

“Done with it?” Amina asked skeptically, but her aunt’s glare was unrelenting. She shifted tactics. “How did Chacko Uncle know it was a scan?”

“Excuse me?”

Amina raised her eyebrow.

“Well, of course he snooped around!” Sanji bellowed, incredulous. “You think that is some problem? One month and we haven’t heard one word from any of you, and now you want to talk patient-doctor confidentiality nonsense? Really?”

Really, Amina did not. Really, she wanted to shut the door and go back upstairs, to try to get a handle on what she would need to shoot the Lucero wedding that weekend, or maybe just not think about anything at all.

“Well, don’t just stand there looking pathetic,” Sanji ordered. “Give me some tea.”

They walked back to the kitchen. Amina motioned to a counter stool, and Sanji took it, fluffing herself up and resettling like a pigeon in an airshaft.

“Caffeinated okay?” Amina asked.

“Decaf is for children and Americans.”

The cabinet was stocked like a bunker, Typhoos, Red Labels, Darjeelings, and Assams packed tightly. Amina wiggled a box loose. “Dessert?”

“No, thank you.”

“Mom made a crème caramel.”

Sanji sniffed suspiciously at this information. “Just a bit, please.”

Amina found the right Tupperware, spooned a generous amount into a dish, and handed it to her aunt, who was frowning at Amina’s hips.

“Looking too thin, Ami.”

“Am I?” Amina looked down in surprise. “Weird.”

“Weird.” Sanji snorted. “My God, what I would eat with your no-tummy tummy! Pastries! Villages!”

Amina turned toward the stove, adjusting the kettle and watching Sanji eat the crème caramel through the reflection in the microwave oven. It was actually nice to have her in the house, her solid, shouty anger a relief from all the other, undirected craziness.

Milk, sugar, a bowl of mixture, two spoons, two mugs of tea. A minute later Amina set everything on the counter between them and sat down, instantly more jittery, like there was a panic button on her ass. She watched the cream cloud the tea and stirred as slowly as possible.

“Ami?”

She looked up, surprised by the reciprocal nervousness in her aunt’s face. “You’re okay, baby?”

“I just don’t really know how to start.”

“Perhaps the beginning?”

There was a crack in the wall behind Sanji’s head. Amina watched it and said, “Dad has a brain tumor. He’s been undergoing radiation for a few weeks, and now he’s getting another scan to see if it’s helping. He can’t work because he’s seeing things that aren’t there.”

Sanji’s face did not move. The rest of her did not move, either.

“Brain tumor?” she repeated.

Amina nodded.

Sanji clapped a firm hand over her own mouth, but not before a gasp escaped, stabbing the air in a way that made Amina not want to breathe, for fear that the feeling was contagious.

“It’s a glioma,” Amina continued after a moment, partly for clarity and partly to sop up the shocked silence seeping from her aunt. Couldn’t she just say something? Offer some twitch of reassurance? Several seconds slid by, each more damning than the last.