Mira Jacob - The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing

Their lives had become routine suddenly, the future just another thing that would unfold as it needed to. And while they had never talked again about what happened at Mesa, Amina found solace in the idea that some things could just fade gently away instead of being analyzed and rationalized and validated. Sometimes, things could just get better. So she was surprised one afternoon to hear Jamie answer the phone in the living room and then come and find her, his face dented with concern.

“It’s your aunt,” he said, and she wiped her hands on her jeans, grabbing the receiver.

“You have to come now!” Sanji shouted, and Amina heard yelling in the background.

“What? What’s happened?”

“Thomas has gone!”

“What do you mean? Is he okay?”

“He’s missing .”

“What?”

“Just come!”

She found him easily. Not that Sanji and Anyan George and the nurses who had been called into the hospital-wide hunt hadn’t tried hard enough, but for Amina, the circuitous path to the ICU lit up before her like a plane runway, the only obvious way forward, and when she stepped into that cool, dark room, one raised eyebrow from the familiar-looking nurse on duty told her she was right. Amina headed back to the bed that her father stood at, so still he could have been an IV pole.

“Dad.”

Her father looked over, a small smile spreading across his face. “What are you doing here?”

“Everyone’s looking for you.”

“I’m right here.”

“Yeah, apparently.”

The man in the bed was a sandy blond, the kind that made Amina think of California and beach campfires and athletic ability. Something had mangled his legs, leaving one wrapped in a cast and a bandage and the other missing below the knee.

“Jesus,” she said.

Her father confirmed this with a nod. “Doesn’t look good.”

“You knew him?”

“No.” Thomas took a short breath, like he was going to explain something, but they were interrupted by the approaching nurse.

“Hey, Doc,” she said when she reached them. “Just talked to Maggie in chemo. She said they could hold your spot for another twenty minutes if you want to run down.”

“Thanks, Shirley.”

“Sure thing.” She shot Amina a look as she walked away.

Thomas watched her go. “They’re a funny breed.”

“We should get going.”

“Different than other nurses, in some ways. Very anal, very focused. Very loyal to their patients. Detail-oriented. Sometimes they miss the big picture.”

“Huh.” Amina turned to leave the ICU. Thomas didn’t.

“I’m stopping chemo,” he said.

“What?”

“Just for a little while.” He nodded as he said this, as if agreeing with someone beside himself.

“What do you mean? What’s wrong?” Amina tried to catch his eye, but his focus was wholly on the man on the bed. “Are you feeling too sick today? They said that would happen, remember? Especially this round, they said you might feel especially depleted.”

“It’s not that.”

“Then what?”

“I just think I should hold off for a while.”

“A while? How long is that?”

“I don’t know. Maybe just a few days, weeks.”

“ Weeks? You can’t! I mean, you — Dr. George said — we agreed you’d stay the course, right? We should just keep doing what we’ve been doing, right?”

Thomas shrugged, like these were shruggable questions.

“Do you think the tumor is already gone? Are you feeling what you felt before?”

“No.”

“Then what?”

He was staring at the patient’s hand, the fingers that twitched spasmodically.

“Dad!”

“Shh! Not so loud!”

“Why are you stopping the chemo?” Amina hissed.

Thomas blinked a few times, finally looking over at her. “I saw Akhil in the yard a few nights ago.”

The information fractured through Amina’s brain, offering several fleeting images — Akhil on the Stoop, Akhil in the driveway, Akhil behind the bleachers at Mesa.

“He was in the garden,” Thomas said.

“Dad.” Amina looked at him steadily. “He’s not real.”

“But you saw him, too.”

“No I didn’t.”

“You said!”

“No. I had a weird tired moment that was stupid and that I shouldn’t have told you about. It’s not the same thing.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I know.”

“Well, I don’t.” He looked at her defiantly, daring her to contradict him.

“Okay,” she said. “Fine. But why do you have to stop the treatment?”

“Because the chemo will keep him from coming.”

Amina shook her head, her words evaporating.

“It’s true. I told you before, I don’t see them as much with the chemo.”

“Dad.”

“I want to see my son.”

He said it like this was something not only possible but reasonable. I want to eat something. I want to take a quick shower . It made sense. It made sense. It did not make sense.

Thomas scratched the back of his hand, studying the loose skin and veins before saying, “Itty asked about you, by the way. That horrible nickname he had for you. What was it? Mittack! He was a funny kid, wasn’t he?”

No, Amina wanted to say, no, he really wasn’t funny at all, but she felt swimmy suddenly, her limbs untethered from gravity.

“And Sunil told me he should have been a dancer,” Thomas said.

She blinked. “What?”

“He said it was the one thing that made him really happy. That if I had come back to India like I was supposed to, if he wouldn’t have been left to take care of everything on his own, he would have been a dancer.”

A cold weight pressed into Amina’s chest. The memory of Sunil waltzing in the Salem living room fluttered into her mind, clear and sharp behind the gauzy curtain of time.

“Can you imagine what all might have changed with that one silly thing? Maybe they would all still be here. Maybe your mother would be happy. Maybe Akhil …” A grimace surfaced on Thomas’s face, and he fought it back. “And you know the funny thing? It was a relief to hear him say that it was my fault. A relief . All these years, imagining how he must have hated me, cursed me, and now finally it’s done, over, kaput. Now I move on, right?” Thomas smiled at her, but he did not look relieved. He looked exhausted.

“Dad, let’s go home.”

He looked at her warily.

“You’re just tired. It’s fine. We’ll skip it today.”

Thomas turned back to the man on the bed. “I’m tired every day.”

“I know.” She slid her hand down his arm, reaching for the fingers that clutched the guardrail of the patient’s bed, loosening them slowly.

He walked with her down the rows and rows of patients, saluting Shirley on his way out.

“Good to see you, Doc.”

Thomas winked. “I’ll be back.”

“So what did your mom say?” Jamie asked when she got back. He was doing something violent to the tomatoes in the saucepot. Steam fanned up and around his head in a garlicky cloud.

“Didn’t tell her yet.”

“No?” He glanced over his shoulder, surprised.

“I just wanted to come back here for a second. You know, catch my breath.”

Jamie reached for the bag of spaghetti, cracking the noodles in half and throwing them into boiling water. He stirred them slightly with a fork, put it down, and walked over to her. He tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. “Set the table.”

There were people who couldn’t eat in the face of their stress. They picked at their food distractedly, too worried to do anything but worry. Amina indulged the opposite instinct. The mere whiff of things being unstable had made her ravenous, and that evening she plowed through an entire mop of spaghetti as if trying to prepare her body for a long and brutal winter. It was a good five minutes before she even noticed that Jamie was no longer eating but watching her, his fork suspended midair. She dabbed at her face.