Mira Jacob - The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing

“How wonderful,” the woman said.

“Anyan is running late?” Kamala tried again.

“Dr. George should be here in about five minutes,” the receptionist said, and the room seemed to deflate a little, punctured by the reality of why they were there.

“She’s having a show of her work in Seattle,” Thomas pressed on, but the others just smiled wanly at Amina. The male half of the older couple stroked his wife’s hand.

“Dr. Eapen.” Anyan George swung through the waiting room door, looking harried. “Hello, sir. Sorry to be late. I have your slides. You ready to come back?”

“Sure, sure.” Thomas winked to the others with the bravado of a mischievous kid slipping into the principal’s office. “Let’s do it.”

Anyan George would not sit down. This would have been unremarkable had he not directed the Eapens into their seats and then sat down himself, only to spring back up seconds later, shoving his chair in. Now he stood at the light board, clutching the envelope in his hands with a strange look. The family watched him for half a minute. Finally Thomas asked, “Everything okay?”

“Yes.” He did not elaborate.

“The scans?” Amina prompted.

“Yes.” He flipped the switch for the light board and began mounting them. Thomas stood up, moved closer. Together, they looked at the scans. Or rather, Thomas looked at the scans, and Dr. George looked at Thomas, a strange, unreadable expression on his face. Her father moved closer to the scan, then farther. He pulled the slide from the light board and read along its edge.

“What.” Amina’s fingers dug into the chair.

“It’s yours,” Dr. George said. “I checked.”

“My God,” Thomas said.

“What’s wrong?” Amina asked.

“I was late because I called Wilker in for a second opinion,” Dr. George said.

“And he said?”

“Yes. By as much as thirty percent.”

“What?” Kamala asked.

No one answered for a long moment. Amina stared at the scan, trying to see whatever they were talking about last time, but it looked the same — the seahorses, the egg, the swirls of cortex.

“Did Lowry take a look?” Thomas asked Dr. George.

“He agreed, though obviously he’s concerned that we might not have gotten the angle right, so the reduction might not be quite so significant.”

“Reduction. Meaning it’s smaller?” Amina asked.

“Yes,” Dr. George confirmed.

“It’s getting smaller?” Her voice rose.

“It looks that way,” Thomas said.

“Ha!” Kamala shouted, jumping to her feet like a tiny, sari-clad swordsman. “Ha, ha, ha!”

Amina looked from her father’s perplexed face to Anyan’s. Her ankle throbbed dangerously. “That’s good, right?”

“It’s unusual.” Thomas looked at Anyan. “Did you talk to MD Anderson?”

“We’re sending the scans to Dr. Salki today.”

“Have they seen regression of this sort before?”

“No.”

“Is that bad?” Amina asked, hating how her lack of medical understanding left her with a five-year-old’s sense of nuance: good/bad, light/dark, nice/scary.

“No, not at all,” Dr. George said. “Just unusual. We haven’t seen a regression of this sort before, so we’re cautious about putting too much faith in it until we know more about what could have caused—”

“A miracle,” Kamala cut in. “It’s a miracle, isn’t it?”

Dr. George looked flustered. “I’m hesitant to call it anything at this point. I think it’s important that we temper our hope with—”

“Of course you are!” Kamala scoffed. “You doctors are always hesitant, isn’t it? Experts at poking around in the body but unable to accept real healing when it comes from God himself?”

“It came from the chemo, Ma,” Amina pointed out, but her father shook his head.

“That’s unlikely. I’ve only gone through one full course. It would be highly unusual for that to have any effect, much less a sizeable one.”

“What about your symptoms? Have you noticed any change?” Dr. George asked.

“Yes, actually. The hallucinations have lessened significantly.”

“In intensity or frequency?”

“Both. I don’t see them as much. I don’t hear them talking. Although lately …” Thomas shook his head. “I don’t know.”

“What?”

“I’ve been smelling something burning for the past few days. At first it was faint enough that I thought it was just one of our neighbors clearing brush a few houses away, but—”

“That’s all in his mind,” Kamala said to Dr. George, as though this needed explaining. “No one in the village is dumb enough to start fires in June.”

“Seizing,” Dr. George said.

Thomas nodded. “I thought it might be.”

“What?” Amina asked, looking from Thomas to Kamala. “You thought you were having a seizure last night?”

“That’s why I wanted a scan,” Thomas said.

“The good news is that it appears you weren’t,” Dr. George said in a calming voice that seemed to trigger his bedside manner. He looked from Kamala to Amina to Thomas, reassurance settling over his features, and took a seat, motioning for Thomas to do the same. “Thomas and I are trained to be skeptical of a sudden shift like this, especially when it has no predecessor, but it is obviously a welcome development. The best option now is to proceed with the exact same treatment over the next month and see how things go.”

“Yes,” Thomas said, nodding along. “Yes.”

“So what,” Kamala said. “We do more of everything? Chemo, radiation, everything?”

“Yes. Stick to the course. We’ll need to keep an eye out for symptoms, erratic behavior, anything new or unusual. Amina, you’ll be in town?”

“Yes. Mostly. I mean, I might travel for a day or so, or a weekend, but yes.”

“Amina’s having a show!” Thomas burst out, glad to finally have somewhere to put his hopefulness.

Dr. George wrote down something on a prescription pad, handing it to Thomas.

“Very high, prestigious show of work.” Kamala nodded, nudging Amina. “An honor of her artsmanship by the authorities of Seattle.”

“It’s a favor for a friend,” Amina corrected, glaring at her mother, but Dr. George seemed to take no notice either way, standing up abruptly.

“So then, barring any changes, I’ll see you all back here next week?”

He ushered them out of his office brusquely, his eyes guarded, as if the hope of living was somehow harder to deliver than the threat of death.

Outside, in the bright slam of midmorning light, the Eapens stood stunned on the sidewalk. Amina shifted her weight carefully, but even her ankle felt deceivingly better, and she stood on it gingerly. Nobody knew quite what to say, though there was a palpable relief between them, a collective cord that seemed to have slackened, leaving them both more independent and more connected than they had been entering the office.

“Well,” Kamala said, and Amina turned to find her mother’s face frozen in a pained, happy grimace, as though her cheeks were trying to detach from the worry that had taken it over for the last months. Thomas saw it, too, and put out his hand, wiggling his fingers like you would for a child until she took it. He squeezed her hand, blinking the wet out of his own eyes.

“Well,” he repeated.

That night Thomas and Kamala fought each other from one side of the house to the other. Teeth bared, eyes flashing, they tore into each other with carnivorous gusto, laying bare all the injustices they had suffered at each other’s hands over the last decades, the slights, the missteps, the heartbreaks. It was as if, released from the burden of having to care for each other, they’d found themselves in a pain deficit and were working hard to restore the equilibrium.