Mira Jacob - The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing

“Much better, thanks.”

“You should take it easy for a few days.” He walked to the window, hands in pockets, shoulders rounded, entirely too large for the room. “So your mother tells me you’re dating a boy from here.”

“Yeah. Jamie Anderson.” She paused a moment for the recognition and, getting none, added, “We went to high school together.”

“Mesa?”

Amina nodded. Where else? “He’s a professor at the university. Anthropology.”

“Interesting. Well, tell him I look forward to meeting him next week.”

“Yeah. Wait, what are you talking about?”

“Your mother said he’s coming to dinner.”

“What? No! Jesus! I haven’t even asked him yet. I haven’t even decided to ask him yet. Not that I won’t. I just, you know. Never mind. It’s fine.”

Thomas raised his eyebrows at her.

“It’s fine,” Amina repeated, embarrassed by her outburst. “I should probably just be thankful that she’s over the Anyan George thing.”

“I wouldn’t go that far. You know your mother.”

Amina shook her head. It was amazing, really, how much knowing Kamala didn’t actually help.

“Invite the boy to dinner,” her father suggested. “It will force her to give up.”

This was a lie, the kind Thomas had told Amina often in her teen years, when saying “Nothing can make your mother give up” would have been as unkind as it was true. And Amina nodded, not because she believed him but because she appreciated the sentiment behind the lie, which was simply that her father wanted to help. She grabbed his hand, squeezed it.

“How are you doing?” she asked.

“I’m nervous,” he said, and then looked as startled as she felt that he’d said it out loud. He walked a few paces from the bed, stopping short at the sight of things on the desk. “I always tell my patients, it’s unwise to believe you’ll be the anomaly. Part of a small percentage for whom certain treatments work, maybe, but the anomaly? Not likely.”

“Yeah, but it’s not like you just think you’re getting better. Dr. George said—”

“The tests could be wrong,” he snapped, and she understood suddenly that the look on Anyan George’s face that morning had been fear masquerading as impatience, much as it was on Thomas’s now. “Anyway, I should get going. Monica is waiting.”

“Now?”

“Yes.”

“That was fast,” Amina said, with a twinge of sympathy for her mother.

“Getting the business back up to speed will take a while.”

“Uh-huh.”

“It’s not like the money makes itself in this house!”

“I didn’t say anything. Did I say anything?”

Thomas opened his mouth as if to say something but then checked himself. “I’ll be back in an hour.”

“Okay.”

He nodded once, dismissing himself, and walked toward the bedroom door.

“I thought I saw Akhil last night.”

She had not known that she was going to tell him until she had told him. Thomas stopped at the door, his back squared toward her for several long seconds. He turned around to face her, cheeks pale.

“You what?”

She cleared her throat. “I mean, I didn’t, obviously. I just, you know … I guess I just wanted to tell you that I get it. Why it was hard for you.”

“You saw him here?”

“No. I mean, I thought I did, but—”

“In our yard?”

“No. At Mesa.”

“Which mesa?”

“No, Dad, my old school. Mesa Prep.”

Her father nodded at this, his features held tightly in place, and Amina knew then how wrong she had been to think they’d had something in common, much less felt the same way about it. Thomas did not look like a man reconciling with hallucinations. He looked like someone hearing a phone ring in the next room and willing himself to stay put.

“Did he say anything to you?” her father asked.

Amina stared at him. “He wasn’t real, Dad.”

He nodded, looking away.

“Oh God, I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have told you. It’s not the same thing. I just thought—”

But he was already squeezing her shoulder, walking toward her bedroom door.

“Don’t worry about it,” he said, and let himself out.

They fell into a state of hope. As the last long weeks of summer sighed out across the mesas, as the mornings grew slightly cooler with the promise of September, good and then better news came to the Eapens. The follow-up scan confirmed what the first had hinted: The tumor was indeed shrinking. Thomas took the news with a bowed head and little emotion, but it was obvious in the days that followed that he had turned a corner, suddenly filled with a frantic, zealous energy. He was going to go back to work. To retrieve his patients from the competition. To show them all what was possible. Even as the second round of chemo took its toll, lining his mouth with cold sores that made it impossible to eat and leaving him eight pounds lighter in five days, he rose to meet with Monica, who clutched Amina like a long-lost relative, whispering “It’s a miracle” with such grateful intensity that it seemed she’d gone the way of Kamala.

As for Kamala, she was also getting back to normal, handling her newly free time by pickling a deluge of cucumbers, making Chowpatty corn on the cob, and demanding, along with Mort Hinley, whose radio harangues once again blasted through the kitchen, the fiery repentance of all sinners. Two weeks in, she took the additional step of announcing that she would be perfectly happy to stay home if the rest of the family wanted to take over the chemo rounds. She did all of this so quickly and efficiently that it felt like a wardrobe change in a theater production, and would have been completely believable had Amina not seen the occasional longing look on her mother’s face when she glanced out to the porch.

Was it fair to leave Thomas to himself and his work so quickly? To somehow feel slighted in the wake of his recovery? As much as Amina saw the folly in this, she could not deny that as the weeks went on, the feeling of their being unnecessary to her father’s recovery was both relieving and damning. Monica was there now, sitting through more and more evenings with him, and the hospital staff was everywhere else, flocking around him from the minute Amina walked him into the hospital until they walked back out the doors.

Gone was the tight, needy family unity, the lulls and spaces in which their best conversations grew, supplanted by an optimism so vigorous that it seemed to scrub away all traces of the last months. Other than a few nights in which Thomas had staggered around the fields, insisting that there was a fire closing in around the house despite their protests, his grip on reality seemed strong enough to not need reinforcement.

And that was how Amina found herself sleeping over at Jamie’s house every night. It was a temporary situation, belied by the ticket she booked back to Seattle at the end of September for the show, and yet somehow they fell quickly into a routine that felt — if not permanent — then at least stable. Amina would show up every late afternoon, cut up some vegetables and meat according to Jamie’s specifications, and then head out the back door with her camera, wandering around Hidden Park in the cooling dusk as the lights of the houses popped on around her one by one. And though at first she had been lured by the familiar thrill of capturing unaware occupants, she soon found that what she craved most was finding a recently inhabited but empty room, a kitchen with a mug steaming on the counter, a television blaring away at a vacant armchair. Once, she turned the lens on Jamie’s kitchen, fixated by the way the vegetables waited on the chopping board, and was shocked when his shoulder cut into the frame, filling the space completely.