Mira Jacob - The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing

“What’s wrong?”

“I’ve never seen you eat like that.”

“Like a hungry person?”

“Like a refugee.”

Out the window behind him, the park tripped into dusky blue. Amina sighed. “I don’t want to do this right now. Talk to his doctor. Talk to my mother. Talk to the family.”

“So don’t. Sleep on it.”

“I wish.” She stood up and took her plate to the sink. “Dr. George is calling tomorrow morning to discuss our options. I need to tell my mom before that.”

“Damn. So I guess I’ll see you guys tomorrow night.”

She looked at him blankly.

“I’m coming to your house for dinner?”

“Oh, shit. I forgot.”

Jamie raised his eyebrows. “Wow, you’re a regular charm school tonight.”

“I’m sorry. It’s great. Totally great.” Amina nodded enthusiastically. “It will be fun.”

“And now you’re scaring me.”

Amina walked back to the table, bent down, and kissed his cheek. “We’re going to eat you alive.”

She had to tell Kamala immediately. Amina realized this somewhere between the interstate and the descent into the valley, worry settling in. Hopefully Thomas hadn’t broken the news already. It would be worse, somehow, coming from him. Amina felt sure of this, though she was unsure exactly how. Would it be back to the old charge of devilry ? On to something new? Would she yell? Stop speaking? Move to another room in the house? Anything seemed possible.

Anxious, Amina sped up. There was, of course, the extremely rare possibility that her mother might have already fixed things. Maybe, if Thomas really had been dumb enough to say something, she had already beat him back into chemo. Amina barely noticed the odd glow at the end of the driveway until she rolled right into it.

The house was ablaze with light. Amina stared at it for a good few seconds before opening her door and standing up, the brightness heating her cheeks like actual sunlight. Every single light, inside and out, was on. Lights she had never even known about were on. Porch lights, lamplights, closet lights, lights in the china cabinet. All three sets of hallway lights. Amina walked by a pair of lanterns huddled together on the living room floor, while above them, a muted television threw color into the air. An extension cord snaked out the living room window and into the courtyard, where a halogen lamp made quick and smokey work of curious moths. On the kitchen stove, a lone pot of chicken curry hissed its last liquid into the desert air, the masala brackish. A cooking spoon lay on the floor.

“Mom?” Amina’s chest tightened.

Prince Philip whined from the laundry room, nose pressed to the screen. How long had he been sitting there? His tail thumped as she approached, and he darted onto the porch as she opened the door. Every light in the shop was on as well, even those that had not been on in so long that they were bearded with spiderwebs. Twinkling pools of Christmas lights lay around the empty porch chairs. The door to the backyard was open. Prince Philip raced through it, and she followed.

It was their shadows she found first, conjoined and stretching out across the lawn like an impossibly thin giant. They were sitting in lawn chairs. No. Amina blinked. They were sitting in one lawn chair. Kamala perched on the edge of Thomas’s knees, staring intently into the yard.

“Mom?”

Her father was holding on to her mother’s braid tightly. It was hard to make this out from far away, but as Amina walked closer, she saw the dark coil wrapped around her father’s hand like a leash, Kamala leaning forward like a cat tethered from chasing prey.

“What are you guys doing?”

Her parents turned to look at her, and Amina’s breath caught in her throat. They were luminous. Pieces of moon fallen from the sky, still reflecting every bit of light from the known universe. Smiling at her across the yard in a way she hadn’t seen in years, may have never seen. Amina walked forward, the ground uneven beneath her feet. Her mother waited until she was right next to them, and then found her hand, held it.

“He’s here,” she said. “He’s come back.”

Amina shook her head. No .

“Yes,” her mother said, smiling into the fields. “Yes.”

“Where?” Amina asked.

“The garden,” her father said.

Amina turned to walk to the garden.

“No, don’t!” Kamala said.

“Why not?”

“He’ll come when he’s ready,” Thomas explained. “We just need to wait.”

“We don’t want to scare him off,” Kamala added.

Amina looked at her parents, at their upturned faces, bright and sweet and solemn.

“I couldn’t scare Akhil if I wanted to,” she said.

Kamala squawked after her, but neither of her parents actually tried to stop her, which was a relief. Unlike the last time she’d wandered out to the garden in the middle of the night with a bobbling flashlight and someone else’s hunch, the path was well lit now, the determination her own. Still, as Amina neared the gates, she felt herself standing at the edge of a longing so old and deep and clear that she could barely keep her steps steady. She opened the garden gate and walked in.

It was cooler inside, heavy with dark green shadows. Amina looked out over the dark rows of vegetables, the peppers hanging in waxy clumps, the cucumbers huddled together on the ground. In the back, the bean trellis stood like a soft and furry giant. She walked slowly forward, past the tomato plants, the eggplants, the place where the pumpkins would rise up in the fall. She walked all the way back to the mound that Thomas had buried everything in.

“Akhil?” she whispered. She closed her eyes and felt a light breeze coming off the ditch, bringing her the smell of carp and algae and wet stones but not her brother. She opened her eyes and did a slow 360 just to be sure and then felt the embarrassment of doing a 360 in her mother’s vegetable garden in the dark. She walked back to the house.

“I need to talk to you,” she said to Kamala, not looking at Thomas and not stopping. She went to the porch and waited.

Kamala banged through the screen door less than a minute later, hastily arranging her sari. “What is it?”

“What are you doing?”

“What do you mean?”

“Do you see him?”

“Of course not!”

“Then why are you pretending?”

“I’m not pretending.”

Amina stared at her mother.

“He’s come back to see your father ,” Kamala explained. “This is Thomas’s miracle.”

Amina’s brain shook a little with this new piece of information, a train car rattling down a track with too many thoughts inside, but one kept jostling up above the others. Chemo. They had to get him back to chemo. They had to be on the same side if they were going to get him back to chemo. “Bad spirits,” she said. “Evil.”

Her mother shrugged. “I was wrong.”

“But you said—”

“No,” Kamala said firmly, even though Amina had not actually asked her anything. “No, no, no.”

“But we’re running out of time!”

Kamala’s eyes snapped shut. They stayed shut as her mouth trembled and then stopped, as she found her hands and clasped them tightly in front of her. When she finally looked at Amina a few moments later, her eyes were shining with a sharp edge of belief that Amina had never been able to bend.

“I’m going back outside to your father,” Kamala said, and then turned and did exactly that.

The next morning Amina called Jamie, told him what had happened, and canceled dinner.

“Holy shit.”

“I know. It’s uh … anyway, just give me a few days. I’ll get things straightened out and we’ll have you over, I promise.”