Mira Jacob - The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing

“I wasn’t really worried about dinner.”

“Three days,” Amina said. “Or, like, four.”

But over the next four days, the house got worse, not better. Hallways became a collection of light and dust. Never mind that after she’d hung up with Jamie, she’d scrubbed the entire bottom floor from one end to the other and returned all the lamps to their previous spots in the house — by that very evening a moist line of garden soil ran from the porch to the master bedroom, and by night the lamps were back, buzzing like locusts and covering everything with thick, electric light.

Things began to move. The first few days they were little enough — an odd pack of lightbulbs lying abandoned in the courtyard, two pillows from her parents’ bed stuffed into the lawn chairs, but on the third night, as Amina dreamt about a ship cratering against an iceberg, Kamala and Thomas somehow found a way to slide the living room couch down the hall, and in the morning, when Amina rose, it was floating in the middle of the field, her parents atop it like two stray penguins.

“What the hell are you doing?” Amina called down from her open bedroom window, and her parents looked in five other directions before turning their gaze upward.

“Oh, hey,” Kamala said with a wave. “Sitting! Come down.”

“Dad shouldn’t be moving furniture!”

“I’m fine!” Thomas yelled.

“No you’re not!” Amina yelled back.

And he wasn’t. This was verified readily by Anyan George, and then Monica, and Chacko, who called from the hospital the fourth day because it was his turn to sit through the chemo and there was no Thomas to sit with.

“He’s not thinking rationally right now,” Chacko explained to Amina, as though it needed explaining. “You’re just going to have to bring him in.”

“I’m working on it. I think in a few days—”

“Few days is too long!”

“What am I supposed to do? Bind and gag him?”

Chacko was silent, and for a moment Amina feared he’d taken her seriously.

“But what about your mother?” he asked. “Surely she can make him go?”

Amina looked out the kitchen window, to where Kamala was busy attaching a surge protector to a cable cord. Her tennis shoes and sari hem were brown with garden soil. Thomas squatted next to her, attaching one headlamp to another.

Amina sighed. She had to tell Chacko, of course, tell all the family how Kamala had risen to this occasion as she always did in the face of disaster, standing staunchly beside Thomas and even helping him do all the things he insisted would put Akhil more at ease (although she had drawn the line at leaving cooked food in the garden). But it seemed cruel somehow, exposing this new collaboration between her parents to scrutiny. She watched through the window as Thomas said something to Kamala, and then quickly, fiercely kissed her cheek, making her mother laugh like a girl.

“What are you guys doing tonight?” Amina asked, and then before Chacko could answer, said, “Because I think you should get the others and come down.”

They arrived all at once, rolling up in the early-evening light, smashed into the Ramakrishnas’ Camry like circus clowns. Sanji, Raj, and Chacko burst out immediately, looking formal and uncomfortable in their American work clothes, while Bala, relatively subdued in an orange-and-gold sari, struggled with a pot of potatoes in the back of the car. Amina led them into the house and back to the porch, ignoring the horrified looks they exchanged as they made their way through the house.

“Where’s the couch?” Bala asked. “Are those clocks ?”

“Where?”

Her aunt pointed to an armchair, to where every clock in the house sat in a pile, cords bundled tightly over their faces.

“Oh.” Amina blinked. “Yeah, I guess they are. Huh.”

She shuffled toward the kitchen, Sanji hot on her heels.

“Ami baby, what on earth — he did this? Thomas did all this in just a few days? And what is that ?” Sanji stared into the courtyard, where the halogen lamp had been mummified in Christmas lights.

“A light with lights on it.”

“Good gods!” Sanji cried, and the others filed silently into the kitchen. Amina looked from uncle to aunt to uncle to aunt, their familiar faces riddled with concern, discomfort, love. Good God, the love. It was hard to have that much love looking at you in the face at one time and not feel like an asshole.

“My parents are outside,” she started to say, but just then the door to the back porch clicked open and their faces panned away from her, toward the laundry room. A few seconds later, Kamala walked out of it, still in the same sari but her hair now unbraided, hanging down in loose waves. She stopped short, a beautiful, dirty apparition.

“What’s all this?” She frowned. Amina chewed her lip, unable to answer. Her mother squinted as though she had, and crossed her arms. “And did you tell them?”

“No.”

Kamala nodded again, then reached abruptly for Sanji’s arm.

“Come,” she said, motioning for Bala and Chacko and Raj to follow. “Come see.”

And what did they see? The couch, pilled with puffs of cotton dander from the shedding trees, the cushions streaked with mud; Prince Philip, in the dog heaven of no longer being on the wrong side of every door; Thomas staring into the garden with binoculars. Amina watched from the porch as the family made their way to the couch, calling to Thomas until he put the binoculars down. He turned his head, smiling when he saw them. He said something Amina couldn’t quite hear.

“What?” she heard Sanji ask loudly, and both Eapens began speaking at once, gesticulating toward the empty garden. Amina walked back to the kitchen.

“Hey,” she said when Jamie answered the phone. “Sorry I haven’t called.”

“Are you okay? Is your dad okay?”

“Not really. The family is here now.”

“I’ll come down tomorrow,” Jamie said. Behind him she could hear the faint noise of the Violent Femmes rattling like gravel in a box. “I’ve got the day free.”

“No! No, I mean, don’t worry about it. We’re fine. You should go have a good time.”

“What?”

“Go out somewhere or something. Do something fun.”

“Amina, what the hell is going on? You sound weird.”

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“That’s not what I mean.”

“I love you.” Her head pounded in the sharp silence that followed this, Eight, eight, I forgot what eight was for , filling up the phone line while her face got hot. Someone was running back toward the house, footsteps heavy on the ground. “Anyway, I should get going.”

“Wait a sec—”

“Call you later.”

She hung up just in time to see Sanji burst in from the porch like a wild boar, scuttling into the kitchen and bouncing roundly off the edge of a counter. She grabbed Amina’s arm and shouted, “What the shit?”

“Hey,” Amina said.

“Gods!” Sanji was breathing hard, flushed. “Bloody hell!”

Amina smiled nervously. “I know,” she said. “It’s weird.”

“Weird? WEIRD? Weird is French foods! Weird is making some contraption that throws bad tomatoes at Chacko for the fun of it! This is really happening? They think he’s living in the garden ? That all the damn lights will make him stay?”

“Not living.”

“What?”

“Well, not technically. I mean, they don’t think he’s not dead. They just think Dad can see him.”

“In the bloody garden!”

“Right.”

Sanji turned, looked at her sharply. “Amina Eapen, please tell me you don’t believe this, too.”