Mira Jacob - The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing

“What?”

“I always wonder. My pictures are terrible.”

Amina smiled. He was right. His pictures were the worst, full of missing limbs, double chins, and grimaces.

“It’s just practice.”

“No, not true. I spent one whole month practicing, and they got worse, not better.”

“What were you taking pictures of?”

“Your mother.”

“Well, that’s your problem. No one can get a good shot of Mom. She’s a pretty woman who makes ugly faces.”

“My God.” Thomas looked both dumbstruck and relieved. “You’re absolutely right.”

Amina rubbed his cold hands with her own. His palms were peeling.

“Do you ever think about moving back here?” he asked.

“Yeah, sure,” she said.

Thomas nodded, looking away so quickly that it took her a minute to understand that this had moved him, his mouth twitching as if he might cry.

“Okay, honey, let’s get this on you,” Maryann said, coming back through the curtain with the thermal pack and an extra blanket. Amina stood up, listening to the nurse coo at and cajole her father, expert at soothing the body’s indignities.

“Your father is too sick to come,” Kamala said the following Saturday. She stood by the doorway in Amina’s room looking a little sick herself, her hands smoothing and resmoothing the crimson-and-purple sari she had put on for the Lucero wedding.

“Is he throwing up again?” Amina asked.

“Nothing to throw up! He won’t eat!”

“That’s normal.” Amina had read the flyer the nurses had sent them home with so many times, she felt sure she could quote paragraphs at random. “He might not have an appetite for a week or so.”

“He’ll starve to death!”

“What about chicken broth?”

“Do you know how many chapatis your father can eat in one sitting?” Kamala looked around the room, as if daring the furniture to guess before announcing, “Eight!”

Amina counted rolls of film, packing them into her backpack. These midday weddings would kill her with their too bright, too flat light. Kamala took a step into the room.

“And now he’s yelling at me to go. Telling me all the hovering is making him nervous. What else should I do? Not check on him? Not bring him food when he hasn’t eaten for one whole day?”

“Maybe the smell of it is making him sicker.”

“The everything is making him sicker! What are we supposed to do about it? Should have just stuck to the radiation!”

Amina took a deep breath. “Give it time.”

“What is all this?” Kamala was looking at the things from the garden, which were still lined up on the desk and looking dustier by the day.

Amina sighed. “Yeah, I’ve been meaning to tell you. I found them in the garden. Near where the jacket had been. They were buried in the same bed. I dug it all up.”

Kamala moved forward slowly, leaning down to look at the jar of mango pickle, then the album. She touched the shoes briefly before picking up the bunch of keys. “He told me he’d lost those.”

Amina shrugged. “He probably thought he had.”

She flinched as her mother dropped the keys and cried out as if she had been cut, understanding too late that it was too much, and that some measure of refuge had been sought out and not found in Amina’s company. She moved hastily toward Kamala, hugging her rigid shoulders until she was gently rebuffed.

“You go,” Kamala said. “I’ll stay here with him.”

“No, Ma, come. He wants you to. And I have to. And it’s just down the road.”

“But someone should stay.”

“Prince Philip will stay.”

Her mother shook her head at this but smiled a little.

“It’s just for a few hours,” Amina said, suddenly feeling hopeful, like getting out of the house would somehow change what was going on inside it. “And he can call us if he needs us, right? Let’s just go.”

“Fine,” Kamala sighed, as if this was a war they had been waging for weeks instead of minutes. “Let’s go.”

The next morning Amina woke to a note.

Your father needs to eat .

It was written in her mother’s tiny, curly script and taped to the upstairs bathroom mirror with no further instruction. Amina went downstairs. Her parents’ room was empty, blinds raised, bed made.

“Dad?” she called. “Prince Philip?”

The kitchen was also empty, as was the living room. Amina poured herself a large glass of water and gulped it down, walking back to the laundry room. She found her father and the dog on a cot on the porch. Thomas lay like a plank, and over his lower legs, Prince Philip was trying valiantly to curl himself into a neat ball, his paws sliding over the edges. Sunlight streamed in, bleaching the walls and the tools and the piles of newspaper. The dog wagged its tail as Amina approached.

“Dad?”

Thomas’s eyes rolled slowly in his sockets, resting on her. He hadn’t been asleep.

“Hey.” She turned a chair around to face the cot, sat in it. “What’s up?”

He shrugged.

“You just wake up?” she asked.

Thomas shifted, prompting Prince Philip to rise and wobble off the cot.

“You want breakfast?” she asked.

Her father rolled onto one side, facing the wall opposite her. Prince Philip turned his head slightly, looking from father to daughter with canine nervousness. Poor dogs. All that intuition and no recourse.

“Dad?”

Thomas shook his head, muttering something. She leaned in closer. “What?”

“I did not ask you to come.”

“I know that. Mom left me a note.”

Thomas threw an arm over his head, blocking his ears. Prince Philip leaned in to sniff his armpit, and Thomas sprang up, grabbing his muzzle and shoving him away hard.

“Dad, stop! What are you—”

“I DON’T WANT YOU HERE!” Thomas shouted, rising up with his teeth bared, and Amina shot out of her chair, backing away fast. But Thomas was not looking at her. He was looking at the coatrack.

“Dad?”

“GET OUT.”

“Who are you talking to?”

Thomas stared furiously at the coats, dragging his eyes from them to Amina as if they were conspiring together.

“Dad? Daddy?”

Thomas flinched. Dropped his head in his hands. Rocked back and forth with his arms wound tight around him. When Amina touched his shoulder, he shuddered.

“What can I do?” Amina asked, trying to hold his rounded shoulders, his flinching spine. “What helps?”

Her father shook his head.

Two nights later, lured by the scent of coriander and ginger, Thomas walked into the kitchen looking slightly puffy but determined. Curls matted around his head in tufts, and his raggy blue robe exposed two knees that looked only slightly larger than another man’s Adam’s apple.

“Kam—” he began, and his wife set a plate of chicken curry in front of him before he could finish. Two chapatis, one nice drumstick, and a little bit of curds later, he motioned for seconds.

“You going to eat?” he asked Amina between bites.

“Not yet.”

It was only six-thirty. She watched her father gnaw the flesh from the bone, the recent loss of weight making him look more like an animal. Human bones devouring chicken bones. Meat eating meat.

Kamala set down a plate in front of her. She had another plate for herself and a foreboding look on her face, as if the only thing standing between Thomas and starvation was everybody eating chicken curry at once. Amina picked up a chapati without a word, and for the first time since the diagnosis, the Eapens enjoyed a regular dinner alone together, parsing the meat and the bread into smaller and smaller portions until they were sweeping their fingers over clean porcelain.

“Maybe I’ll take a shower,” Thomas said, but he made no move to leave the kitchen. He looked around with the heady gaze of a man stumbling home from a walkabout. “So what’s been going on? Any news?”