The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing

CHAPTER 1

The morning of Akhil’s funeral, the remaining Eapens sat in the car, looking at the glass doors of Love’s truck stop. Outside, an eighteen-wheeler glided by like a cruise ship, and the car rocked gently like they were on water.

“Okay,” Thomas said, a reassurance to no one in particular. “Okay then.”

Amina watched her father open the door and stand up. He shook his legs so that his pants fell smoothly, and when he took out his wallet, she looked away. It wasn’t that she expected the world to stop for the funeral. But certain things, like the country music blaring from the car next to them, or needing gas to get to the church, or having to pay anyone for anything, seemed cruel.

In the passenger seat, Kamala readjusted the pleats on her white sari, smoothing them down with one hand. She leaned her head back into the seat cradle, and Amina watched her through the rearview mirror. The bruise was spectacular. A large purple poppy bloomed over Kamala’s cheek and eye socket, her red-rimmed eye in its center. Strangely, the bruise had the effect of making what was beautiful on her face more so, her nose more patrician and lips more full and the good eye somehow better than it had been before, so that the sum of her parts gave her the air of a harrowed starlet, of glamour all lit up with tragedy.

“These were the biggest they had,” Thomas said as he opened the door and sat down. A cloud of diesel and dust floated in, and he handed the sunglasses to Kamala before shutting the door. Amina watched her open them and pause. The frames were purple and sparkly and as big as tea saucers. Kamala put them on gingerly.

“Let me see,” Thomas said, and she turned her head toward him. He placed his thumb on her chin and rotated her head from one side to the other.

“Fine,” he said, and started the engine.

She would not cry. At the funeral, Amina kept her eyes closed for fear of seeing any one image that would stick too deeply inside, turning the day into something real. She ran her fingers along the edge of the card stock in her hand, digging the corner under her thumbnail. Already she had seen too much of it, the white program with Akhil’s senior photo and the numbers 1965–1983 underneath. Already it had sucked her air out, replaced it with a buzzing numbness. The room, she knew, was thick with Indians, doctors, nurses, patients, parents, teachers, and the throngs from Mesa High, unrecognizably adult in their suits and black dresses. Prom, Amina thought when she first saw them. It was like they were practicing for prom. And in truth, there was something prom-ish in their manner, some terrible mix of dread and cool and hunger for the unknown that washed over their faces like sunlight.

“Two, Samuel, chapter twelve, verse twenty-two to twenty-three,” the minister said. The rustle of opening Bibles sounded like a flock of birds rising through the church. Kamala, face hidden by the sunglasses, did not move.

“While the child was alive, I fasted and wept; for I said, ‘Who can tell whether the Lord will be gracious to me, that the child may live?’ But now he is dead; why should I fast? Can I bring him back again? I shall go to him, but he shall not return to me.” Pastor Kelley exhaled and looked up. “This morning is a difficult morning for you. It is a morning filled with questions and despair, when the young have seen one of their own taken by the hand of the Lord. And so you have come here for comfort and I can only say to you …”

Amina kept her eyes shut as Pastor Kelley went on to deliver a sermon about God’s favorites, apparently believing that Akhil was one of them. She did not see Mrs. Macklin rising to the podium to give, at Kamala’s request, an odd testimony to Akhil’s courage in the face of French. She did not notice how Mindy Lujan looked at the coffin and stifled sobs, surprised and terrified by her own grief; how a group of young Mathletes stared at their just-shined dress shoes, wondering what it felt like to fly over a cliff and exactly how fast Akhil had been going at the moment of impact; how everyone kept looking around for no-show Paige, as if she was supposed to be the North Star of their mourning, something they could fixate on and guide themselves by.

Instead, buffeted by the darkness of her own eyelids, Amina saw her mother’s face so clearly that it seemed for a minute that time had been kind enough to reverse itself. She saw the orange cut of the kitchen light on her mother’s cheekbones, the rise of steam from the idlis and stew, how Kamala’s mouth had softened watching Akhil eat, how in that moment everything extraneous had been erased. Two mouths, one eating, one hiding a smile. She opened her eyes to see her brother sitting on the choir bench.

She blinked. He blinked back. She sucked in, trying to make her mouth move, make anything move. He waved. She couldn’t breathe. She tried to yell or shout or scream or just say anything, but Akhil winked at her and put his finger to his lips, a dodgy smirk rising on them. She shook her head. Up on the podium, Mrs. Macklin leaned in and whispered, “L’esprit est éternel pour les enfants,” and Akhil flipped the woman the bird, kissing his middle finger before raising it high.

“Stop,” Amina said, and a chastened-looking Mrs. Macklin stopped talking.

“He’s right there,” Amina said, but her arm felt suddenly too heavy to lift and no one looked anyway. Dimple’s hand was cool on her wrist.

“He’s there,” Amina said to her mother’s sunglasses, and watched Kamala’s lips curl in until they disappeared completely. Her father’s eyes were stones.

“Bathroom,” Dimple whispered in her ear, and Amina stood up, letting herself be led down the center aisle, past the Indians, past Jamie Anderson, who stood trapped in the middle of his row as she walked by, silent and aggrieved. By the time she thought to look back, Akhil was standing too, stretching at the side of the podium. He waved at her lazily and strolled toward an open window. No one stopped him when he climbed out.

“Ami?” The tips of Dimple’s black shoes pointed into the bathroom stall.

She had asked to be let in before. She would ask again. Through the crack in the stall door, Amina could see the bathroom mirror, the reflection of Dimple’s head pressed to the metal door, listening. Outside, mourners were singing some flat and lousy hymn that managed to make them sound like children and insects all at once.

“Please?” Dimple shifted her weight. Amina leaned forward, slid the lock open. Her cousin came in, locking the door behind her, and Amina scooted over on the tank of the toilet. Dimple climbed on, nervously eyeing the toilet water. When she leaned back, it was Amina who sighed. It was better with Dimple there. They sat next to each other, a pocket of warmth growing between their touching shoulders. Their feet ringed the toilet.

“I’m not crazy,” Amina said after a few minutes.

“I never said you were.” Dimple flicked a piece of lint off her skirt.

Amina flexed her fingers in front of her, counting them silently.

“What did you see?”

Amina shrugged. The bathroom smelled of disgusting pink soap and talcum powder that made the back of her throat itch. Ten. All fingers were accounted for. Dimple splayed her own hands out, raising them to cover Amina’s, squeezing them into tight fists. Amina ducked her head to her chest to keep herself from crying.

“It’s okay,” Dimple said. “No one can see you.”

Amina shook her head. How to explain that she felt like if she cried, if she actually started, she might never stop? That it felt too bottomless, like jumping into one of those cave pools that was the size of a pond but actually thousands of feet deep? No, there was no explaining this to anyone, even Dimple, who held her in a clumsy half hug as the service ended and the mourners rose to leave.

They made an uneasy knot in the kitchen. Long after the reception had ended and the rest of the guests had parted, the Ramakrishnas and the Kurians curled tightly around the kitchen counter, watching Kamala. It had been hours since the burial service, hours since their arrival at the house, whereupon Thomas immediately excused himself for the bedroom and his wife took up a post at the stove. A hissing cloud of ghee billowed across the ceiling, and under it Kamala flipped and folded yet another golden crepe, its thin edges perfectly browned.

“Who’s ready for another?” she asked.

Bala and Sanji shook their heads, while Raj and Chacko exchanged hesitant glances. They had all eaten as much as they could, and certainly more than they wanted. Even Dimple, for once willing to accept anything Kamala had to offer, had stuffed herself beyond reason.

“Amina?” Kamala trilled.

“No, Ma.”

“I’ll take it, Auntie,” Dimple said, shuffling forward.

Kamala nodded curtly, slipping it onto the plate before returning to the batter bowl. She lifted the ladle with a quick hand.

“No! No, Kamala,” Bala said, standing up. “Really, no need. We’re all so full. Make it for yourself only.”

Kamala stared at her through glassy eyes. “I’m not hungry.”

“Of course not. It’s okay. Don’t eat, then. Why don’t you come sit?”

Kamala was silent, considering this. She looked away. “Have you seen the mural?” she asked.

Bala looked desperately at Sanji.

“Kamala, come sit for a moment,” Sanji said.

“Come, I’ll show you,” Kamala said, walking quickly out of the kitchen.

The others looked at one another, too anxious to move.

“You think maybe we should sedate?” Sanji asked Chacko and Raj, but the latter’s eyes flashed nervously toward Amina. They all turned to look at her.

“It’s upstairs,” Amina said. “The mural.”

In the stairwell, the rustling of silk against silk, the thick press of kitchen spices and the day’s stunned sweat. Amina followed her relatives up. It was strange enough to see the Kurians and the Ramakrishnas on the stairs, since they usually just called up when it was time to go, but when they entered Akhil’s room, all eight of them crammed around the bed, Amina felt distinctly ill. She stared at the floor while Kamala flipped the desk lamp up to light the ceiling and the others craned their necks. A sharp silence filled the room.

“It’s the Greats!” she heard her mother say. A flurry of motion dotted the corner of her eye as her mother extended an arm. “You see?”

“Yes,” Sanji Auntie said at last, and the men shuffled in assent.

“Gandhi is the one with the glasses,” Kamala continued. “Gandhiji, Che Guevara, Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela, Rob Halford!”

“Rob Halford?” Chacko asked.

“He’s a singing priest,” Kamala said, and the others nodded quickly. “Akhil admired him very much.”

“I want to go home.”

The voice, soft and shuddering, stopped them. Amina looked up to see Dimple standing in the corner, her elbows cupped in her arms.

“I want to go home,” her cousin repeated, her lip trembling. Her face scrunched into a ball and she held herself tighter as tears leaked out of her eyes. Bala Auntie moved quickly across the room, putting one arm around Dimple and the other forward, as if to stop anyone who tried to interfere with their swift turn toward the door.

“We should take her home,” she told Kamala, who nodded mutely, the light in her own face suddenly leaden.

“We’ll stay,” Sanji said, but Kamala shook her head.

“No, you go,” she said. “We’re fine.”

“Call us. You need anything, nah? Just please call.” Sanji Auntie wrung her hands in the driveway, looking at Amina and her mother as if to absorb their pain with her eyes alone. Kamala nodded, already walking back into the house. The doorway faced them, its squared light empty.

“Amina baby, you hear?” Sanji Auntie asked, cupping Amina’s chin in her hand. “Call me when you’re missing him, okay? Call me when you miss him too much.”

Amina nodded, felt Sanji’s fingers slip from her face, replaced by two wet kisses on either cheek. She turned and walked through the front door, shutting it.

CHAPTER 2

As it turned out, it was not Akhil whom she missed in those first weeks so much as her family, or the family they had been before. As her mother slept straight through dinner and her father wandered through the house like a horse that had slipped into an aquarium, Amina warmed bland casseroles, doused them in Tabasco, and turned on the news even though she had no intention of watching it. A few times she even took the stairs back up to her room, shutting her eyes and listening to Tom Brokaw through the floorboards and pretending that nothing had happened at all. It was amazing how easy it was to do, how utterly convincing. Oh, she wasn’t so dumb as to pretend it had all been good then, with Thomas at the hospital and her mother talking to the television for company and Akhil and Paige dreaming up a better world while Amina watched the empty driveway. But they were better. That much she was sure of.

She had forgotten about the picture entirely. It was only after arranging all her barrettes in order of size, turning her bedspread over to the plain white side instead of the tiny-flowered side, and placing her rolled-up Air Supply poster in the trash as some sort of peace offering to Akhil, that Amina remembered. Her book bag, unopened now for more than two weeks, lay under her desk chair. She tugged it out.

Schoolbooks. They spilled out of her bag like old friends from a town she’d moved away from. The hardbacks of algebra and biology slid out first, cheerfully jacketed in green and yellow, followed by two spiral notebooks, the copy of On the Road that Mr. Tipton had recommended she pick up, and a pencil case. And there it was at the back, her white photography binder, photos held in plastic sheets. Amina pulled it out and sat on her bed.

She steeled herself as she flipped it open, blurred her vision by almost crossing her eyes. Yes, these were Akhil. She would not really look, she would not see. She flipped quickly, turning past more of him, then her mother and Sanji Auntie, some dark shadows she knew for sure were her attempt to make a still life out of her mother’s perfume bottles, then Dimple blowing a bubble, then a study of her own foot. Fast, fast, fast, she stopped only when she saw the picture that looked almost pure black. She focused. There it was. She pulled it out.

It would be another few hours until dawn and another few after that until Kamala rose from her dirty bed to take a shower, or rather, sit in the shower, black hair matting against her breasts and the yellow tile until Amina handed her a towel. But Thomas, the night owl, had to be around. The TV was on mute in the kitchen, bright color flashing over the empty couch.

“Dad?”

Her father’s slippers were paired in perfect position in front of the couch, as if being worn by an invisible man. Sections of newspaper slid from the table to the floor.

“Hello?”

The refrigerator door shut behind her, and Amina spun around, guts in her throat.

“Jesus, Dad!”

Thomas blinked at her from behind a tumbler of scotch. “Amina? What time is it?”

She looked at the clock on the microwave. “It’s three. Well, three-fifteen.”

“What’s going on?” There was an edge of panic in his voice, one that had been growing since the funeral. He put his drink down. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah, I just …” Amina stepped back, a little unnerved by the fear and worry and protectiveness spreading out of him and diffusing through the kitchen. “I just wanted to show you a picture.”

“Picture?”

“Photograph.”

Thomas looked at her like she was speaking dolphin. Amina waved the sheet in her hand.

“Oh,” he said. “You mean a photograph.”

“Right.”

He found a steady look of interest and managed to hold on to it. “Let’s see it.”

Just like that? She hadn’t thought this through. She should have warned him, maybe, prepared him for it a little bit. Amina looked at her father, pants hanging loosely from his body, beard and hair fanning out from his face. He did not smell good. What if it scared him? Gave him a heart attack? Amina saw herself and Kamala growing old alone in the house together, the trees swallowing up the driveway. She put a hand on Thomas’s arm, and he swayed a little.

“The thing is, I took it a while ago, like, after Ammachy died?”

She paused. Thomas seemed to understand a second too late that something was required of him. “M’okay.”

“So. It was kind of this thing for me, and then I forgot about it, and then I remembered. Just now.”

“Uhn.”

“And the thing is, Dad, this wasn’t even in a single photograph, it was two, you know? I mean, I used two negatives. So I probably couldn’t even print it again. But it came out this way.”

She handed him the photograph. Thomas flipped it over, and they were looking at him six months earlier, newspapers scattered around his ankles, a white bulb glowing in the corner of the porch. Her father’s eyes skidded all over the frame, bouncing from light to shadow.

“What is it?”

“It’s you.” She put her finger on his figure in the chair. “See?”

He raked his fingers deep into his beard. After a pause he looked back at Amina. “It’s very nice work. Lovely.”

“Do you see her?”

“Who?”

“Ammachy.” She tapped the figure in the picture. “Look behind the chair.”

Thomas stared at her, confused.

“Here,” Amina said, pointing again. “In the picture.”

But he was not looking at the picture. He was looking at her face. Curiously, repulsed, as though she were a bug that had found its way into his shower.

Amina’s pulse quickened. “I know. I mean, I know it’s weird, but you know, maybe she knew you were sad, maybe she just came to be—”

Thomas let the picture drop out of his hands. He was trembling. Amina tensed with dread, suddenly understanding how large her father was, how quickly he could knock her to the ground. He lurched at her. He clutched her head so tightly to his chest that her ears were flattened and she could hear his heart crashing against his ribs like rough waters against a dock. To her horror he began to sob. He was trying to say something.

“What?” Amina asked, muffled by his shirt. She pushed her head back for a pocket of air. “What did you say?”

“S-s-sorry.”

“What?”

He pushed her back, hands clamped hard around her biceps. Tears swam down his cheeks. “I’m sorry, Amina. It shouldn’t … shouldn’t have happened. I should have s-seen it. Coming. I should have been h-h-here, I know.”

“What are you saying?” She was scared. “Why are you saying that?”

“You can be mad. I don’t expect you to forgive me right now. I don— … I don— … I really don’t.” Thomas tried to compose his face but instead succumbed to a new round of choking and gasping.

“I’m not mad at you!” Amina’s voice broke and now she was crying, too. She pushed him away. “I’m just showing you, I thought you would … I thought it would make you happy, or something.”

“It’s okay if you need to hate me right now, I understand that it might—”

“No, wait! Stop!” Amina swooped down to the floor, picking the photograph up and thrusting it at him. “Here,” she said, pointing to her grandmother’s sari. “That’s her body! That’s her head. See?”

Thomas shut his eyes, face quivering. He inhaled deeply, exhaled a night’s worth of scotch. When he opened his eyes, they were dull, focused. “There’s nothing there, Amina.”

“You’re not even looking!”

“There is no reason to look. There is nothing in the picture.”

“But we saw her in my class! We saw her and my teacher said—”

But he had closed in on her again, smothering her into a hug so tight that her voice box crushed against his shoulder. He was saying sorry again, whispering it desperately like a man at confessional and adding to the indignity by rocking her from side to side like she was some kind of baby.

“They don’t come back, koche,” he murmured into her ear. “I’m so sorry, they don’t come back.”

“Don’t!” She pushed him and his arms dropped instantly to his sides. His face was a jag of despair. She wiped the wet off her face with her sleeve.

“Ami, please—”

“Jesus, just forget it, okay? Forget it!” She left the kitchen, pounding up the stairs as loudly as possible. Who cared? Her mother would never wake up, and her father was a scotch zombie. Back in her room, she shoved the books off the bed with one hand, letting the photography binder crack open as it hit the floor. She turned on her desk lamp, slid the picture under it, and looked.

Yes. She was still there. Right there. Ammachy’s teeth and eyes were the only bit of white in that corner, but the happiness that radiated out of them pushed up from the photograph like starlight. Well, then. Amina placed her thumbs on the top edge of the picture and ripped it clean down the middle. She stacked the halves and ripped them again, and then one more time, until they were inch-big scraps on the desk table. She picked up her trash can and swept the whole pile in, piece by piece. When she was done, she pulled out her Air Supply poster.

Back at school a week later, the whispers were everywhere. They followed her from English to biology, moving from the back of her neck to the space behind her ears as she opened her locker. A few of the kids in her class had tried to talk to her on the first couple of days back but soon gave up with an air that suggested they had just been doing her a favor in the first place. Crowds parted as she walked through them, heads ducked fast to homework when she entered classrooms without teachers. Kids whose brothers and sisters were in Akhil’s class talked to everyone else like they had extra insight.

“What?” she had shouted at Hank Franken that Friday, when he was staring at her. He dropped his pen and Dimple had also glared at him then, but later, sitting on the deserted track field with Amina, she looked uncomfortable.

“No one is trying to make you feel bad, you know. They just don’t know what to say. That’s what they tell me, anyway.”

“Why are you even talking about it?”

“What?”

“Don’t ever talk about my family with anyone again.”

Dimple blinked, looked confused. “Right. Okay. Listen, I only say anything when people tell me that they’re sorry or something, and even then I barely say—”

“What are they sorry to you for? You aren’t even really related to us.”

It shouldn’t have felt good to see the naked hurt in Dimple’s eyes, but it did. It felt like sunlight on cold fingers. Amina leaned into the air and felt something snap between them. She watched Dimple’s mouth tremble.

“Maybe you should sit alone if you need to cry,” she suggested.

Dimple jumped up, and she was yards away before Amina stopped smiling. She watched until Dimple turned and walked across the parking lot, taking a seat on the low wall there. And for the first time since his death, Amina felt the urgent need to talk to Akhil.

A few nights later the doorbell rang. Up on the Stoop, Amina dropped her cigarette across the laces of her Adidases, which began to smoke immediately.

“Shit!” She whacked at them.

The whole smoking thing was not going well. Despite diligent practice every evening, she was no better at inhaling than she had been in the spring, and she was actually worse at holding the damn things. Why did they always insist on jumping out of her hands? What was she doing wrong?

Fucking Akhil, she thought, climbing in through his window. It was another new habit, always thinking fucking before Akhil. Fucking Akhil should have taught me how to smoke, and how to do fucking trig, and how to pack a fucking bowl. Now I am fucked by everything I don’t fucking know.

Amina walked down the hallway, flipping on lights and trying to wipe the smell of smoke off her hands. Sanji would not care, of course, but if it was Raj or Bala, or worse, Chacko, she was sure to get a kind-but-stern talking-to that the others seemed determined to give her, as if to reassure her and themselves that there were still rules worth following. The doorbell rang again.

“Coming!” she yelled loudly, passing her parents’ bedroom door and halfheartedly hoping Kamala would come out with some level of concern about who was at the door or why. But no, of course not. Charles Manson could be ringing with the entire Family and a bag of knives, and Kamala would probably just wait in bed for them to dismember her. Amina opened the door.

“Hey.”

It was not the Manson family. It was not any member of the Ramakrishna or Kurian family either. It was Paige Anderson, looking beautiful and out of place, like a deer at the edge of a paved road. Amina stared at her, every normal-sounding greeting drying up in her throat. It wasn’t so much that she hadn’t seen Paige since the accident (she had, alone at school, sitting with various books plastered over her face), but somehow the reality of her — bob grown past her shoulders, body tucked into a somber navy dress, cheeks still permanently flushed — felt disconcerting. She was so real, standing there, so fraught and insistent and alive. It was like looking at a bare, beating heart.

“Can I come in?” Paige asked.

Here? Amina thought. To this house? But her body moved to the side like it was some normal thing, and Paige walked in. Behind her, Amina caught a glimpse of a figure in the passenger seat of the Andersons’ Volvo in the driveway.

“Is that Jamie?”

“What?” Paige looked anxiously over her shoulder. “Oh, yeah. He didn’t want me to come alone.”

“Does he want to come in?”

“Oh, no. He’s just keeping me company. I, uh …” She cleared her throat. “I was hoping I might talk to your parents.”

Amina shut the front door. “My parents?”

“Your dad?”

“He’s still at work.”

“What about your mom?”

“My mom?” Amina said, face hot from catching what felt like some sort of repeating disease, one in which you were doomed to echo someone else’s bad ideas instead of strenuously objecting to them. “She’s in bed.”

Instantly, whatever had been powering the light in Paige’s face — nervousness, anticipation, bravery — was snuffed out. Her shoulders dropped and she looked lost, the foyer rising up around her. When her eyes moved from the stairs to the darkened landing above them, Amina felt sorry for her.

“You want to go up?”

“What?”

“To his room. It’s upstairs.”

“Oh …” Paige blinked several times, considering it. She took a deep breath and looked at Amina. “Okay. Yes.”

If it was strange to have the Ramakrishnas and the Kurians upstairs, it was doubly strange to have Paige there, staring at the row of Akhil’s school pictures in the hall with the intensity of someone trying to find the you ARE HERE stamp on a mall map. She studied his younger photos (third grade, buckteeth; fifth grade, buckteeth and mustache) before stopping at his senior picture, the one taken after he’d woken from the Big Sleep and before he’d met her. Her forehead pleated.

“He never invited me over here,” she said, and then looked at Amina like that fact was important somehow, like it was a mark against her instead of the Eapens.

Amina motioned to Akhil’s room. “You can go in if you want.”

Paige nodded, walking past her quickly, but when she entered the room, she stopped suddenly, as though she’d hit an invisible wall.

“Oh,” she said, covering her face with her hand.

It was not an oh of disappointment or an oh of surprise but an oh that Amina had never heard before, scraped raw with an emotion Amina would not know herself until years later, when she understood what it was to long for someone, to ache for their smell and taste on you, to imagine the weight of their hips pinning yours so precisely that you crane up to meet your own invisible desire. She watched as Paige crossed Akhil’s room, undistracted by all the usual things that stopped people — the Greats, his desk, the leather jacket hanging from his chair — and moved straight for his hamper, which she opened up, pulling out a forgotten T-shirt and crushing it into her face. “Oh,” she said again, muffled. Oh. And even if Amina didn’t yet know what it was to love like that, to burn until your spine has no choice but to try to wind itself around an empty shirt, she understood for sure that the people who said it was better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all were a bunch of dicks.

“Amina?”

How had she not even heard Kamala coming up the stairs? Amina turned around to find her mother walking down the same hall Paige had just stood in, yesterday’s nightie bunched around her knees. She looked at the open door to Akhil’s room, and her face darkened.

“What are you doing in there?”

“N-nothing,” Amina stammered, willing Paige to put down the shirt and step away from the hamper, but it was too late for that now, Kamala was already pushing past her and into the bedroom, suspicion pressed deep into her face. Paige turned, her face filling with panic before she seemed to get ahold of herself. She placed the shirt on the bed, smoothed her dress down, and stood tall.

“You must be Kamala,” she said, offering a hand to shake, and Amina flinched. “I’m Paige.”

Kamala looked at her hand, confused.

Paige swallowed, tried again. “I’m … I was … I’m Akhil’s girlfriend.”

Kamala looked at Amina.

“The one he was going to prom with,” Amina said.

At this, Kamala stiffened a little, the needle of connection between prom and everything that had followed pricking some corner of her mind.

“I was — I am so sorry to not come to the funeral,” Paige said, hand lowered, cheeks burning with pink circles. “That’s why I’m here. I wanted … I just … I wanted to come by to see you both. You and Thomas. To tell you how much I loved your son.”

Kamala looked at her for a long time, gaze brewing with something Amina couldn’t quite place, until she said, “Loved?”

The word was spoken neutrally, but one look at her face was enough for Amina, who reached for Paige’s elbow.

“Yes.” Paige brushed Amina away, looking puzzled. “Yes, of course.”

Kamala laughed once, hard, like a shovel hitting cement.

“Paige,” Amina said evenly. “Let me walk you down.”

Paige straightened at this suggestion, taller than either of them. She looked from one to the other, her face suddenly ripening with an expression Amina had seen her give Akhil a thousand times before. It was a look of hope, of compassion, of — God forbid — love.

“Amina, I’d like to speak with your mother alone.”

“I really don’t think that’s a good—”

But it didn’t really matter what Amina thought because Paige was already saying, “I loved your son more than I’ve ever loved anyone,” in a low and steady voice, one sweet with the belief that there was something left for her to hold on to in this house, that two people in pain could find common ground. It was an opinion that was probably welcome across the Anderson dinner table, or at least taken seriously, but it was not welcome in this room, where Kamala’s rigid face slammed away every word and Amina turned silently and fled, going back down the hallway, down the stairs, and through the front door like a shot. She shut the door behind her with a thump.

Fucking Paige. Fucking Kamala. Fucking Akhil.

“Hey,” she heard from her side, and she nearly screamed. Jamie waved from her periphery. He was standing awkwardly next to one of the planters, his face drawn with worry.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

She was not okay. Amina knew this for sure as she charged toward him, shaking like a comet and ready to flatten him, so she was surprised by how easily he caught her, his arms opening just enough for her to fit between them, his shoulder landing firmly under her chin. Warm. He was warm. His heart thumped against her chest, and Amina shut her eyes, wanting to keep pushing forward until she somehow disappeared all the way into him.

Why wasn’t it weird to be held by Jamie Anderson? It’s not like she had ever been held by anyone not related to her before, and none of them felt even a bit like Jamie, who was exactly her size and skinny, with skin hotter than she would have thought healthy. But it wasn’t weird, even if she was half stepping on one of his feet and his Afro was scratching against her ear. It wasn’t even weird when he said, “How’s it going?” like they weren’t already plastered together.

“It’s horrible,” she said.

He hugged her tighter and whispered something. It sounded like I’m sorry, but it also sounded like I’m worried, and she wanted to ask which he meant, because it seemed like a pretty big distinction, but just then the door opened and Paige came flying through it, eyes wet, mouth trembling.

“Go,” Paige said to Jamie as they sprang apart. “Go, go, go!”

“What?” Jamie asked as she stumbled down the steps. “Wait!”

But Paige was not waiting. She was running toward the Andersons’ Volvo, her dress flapping at the backs of her knees. Jamie looked at Amina, his face clouding.

Well, what did they think was going to happen? Where did they think they were?

“You shouldn’t have come,” Amina said, and watched as this registered with Jamie’s slight flinch, a tic behind his gaze that then turned into his backing away from her and running after his sister.

Long after their taillights had disappeared into the darkening trees and the traces of Jamie’s heat had evaporated from her skin, Amina stood on the porch, trying not to think about what Jamie probably thought of her now, or how good it had felt to be hugged, or how Paige hadn’t even looked at her on the way out. Her feet felt heavy going upstairs, and heavier still as she walked down the hallway toward the slight stir of air and light that came from Akhil’s room.

Inside, Kamala was praying. This is what Amina thought at first when she saw the unlikely Pietà of her mother sitting on Akhil’s bed, the T-shirt strewn weakly across her lap. Kamala’s head was bent over it, and something about this — not being able to see her face — made Amina realize suddenly how much she missed her mother. She missed Kamala banging the cupboards in the kitchen. She missed her shouting “Hey, dummies! Rise and shines!” from the bottom of the stairs in the morning. She missed her saying “Oh, really?” when Queen Victoria burped too loudly, like they were having an actual conversation, and how sometimes she would come up and squeeze Amina’s shoulder out of the blue, which used to feel like a poor excuse for a hug but now, in memory, felt like sitting in front of a blazing fire with a world of snow falling outside.

“Ma?” She took a step into the room.

Her mother’s head snapped up, and with a stab of fear Amina realized her mistake. This was no noble sorrow, no reverential Mary. Kamala glared at her like a tiger hunkered over a fresh kill, and Amina found herself thinking, She will kill me now, too. Not that Kamala had killed Akhil. No one had — not Kamala, not Thomas, not Akhil himself, not even Amina. Except that standing there, looking at her mother, Amina suddenly understood that they all had, in some way. They all had.

Kamala opened her mouth, dark eyes glinting.

“Shut the door,” she said.

It got better after the Andersons’ visit. Not better in that anything actually good happened, but better in that Amina stopped waiting for it to. It was as though a punctuation mark had been put on the event of Akhil’s death, giving it an exact shape for her to size up. She stopped waiting to feel normal. She stopped expecting anyone to understand. She stopped keeping an eye out for Paige at school, and when Jamie talked in class, she looked right through him, daring herself to feel less and less for either of the Andersons until finally they slipped back into the Mesa masses, their bodies moving in a steady line down the hallway, avoiding her without even trying.

“Amina?” Her father opened her bedroom door on the last school night of the year. “Can I come in?”

Why do fathers always look ungainly in their daughter’s bedrooms? Like mythical beasts wandered in from the forest of another world? Thomas made an effort to steer clear of Amina’s piles of clothes, of the desk and bookshelves, but he still managed to rattle everything on the surface of the dresser and knock his head on the canopy over the bed.

“Hello,” he said, peering under it.

“Hey.”

She had been lying there since she had come home, looking at the picture she’d taken of Akhil on the couch the night of the fight over the keys and playing the reverse time game. It was a simple game; all it required was her imagining how far she would go back to change what had happened. How many days would she live over — minute by minute, not making any choices that would mess with the order of the universe the way they did in Star Trek—to change that one? Would she go back to seeing her parents fighting in the driveway over the summer? Easy. Back to Dimple on her first day home from camp? It wasn’t even a question. Back to breaking her arm in sixth grade, to being called a nigger by all the boys in her class in fourth? Harder. But yes. She was in third grade, during the class where she’d laughed so hard she accidently wet her pants, when Thomas had knocked.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

She shrugged.

He sat on the bed, the weight of him tilting it dramatically to one side. He was all knees and shoulders, too low to the floor. “How are you?”

“Fine.”

When she had done it all, when she had relived every moment without changing a thing, she would get to come back to that night. It was the best part of the game. That night, she would go through minute by minute, slowing everything down to remember exactly how it happened. She would talk to Akhil in his room. Go down to dinner. Eat the idlis and sambar. She would watch her father grow sad at the sink without interruption. She would know exactly when to go — after the fight, while Kamala and Akhil watched TV and Thomas cleaned the kitchen. She would do it perfectly, silently slinking out the back door, across the driveway. She would lower herself down under the car, letting the gravel dig into her knees. The air would be thick with the smell of tires and oil as her hand reached under the wheel hub, fingers searching until she felt the metal at their tips. She would empty the hide-a-key box.

Thomas’s eyes slid to the picture on her lap and then away. “I thought maybe you’d like to do something.”

“Like what?”

“Like go to a movie.”

“Tomorrow’s the last day of school.”

“Ah. Right. What if we go get dessert somewhere?”

“Dessert?”

“Yes. Heidi Pies. You like Heidi Pies, right?”

“I’m not hungry.” She saw his face drop and felt a pang of guilt. “Thanks anyway.”

Thomas opened his hands, read his palms as though there was a pamphlet resting on them. “You need to get up now.”

“What?”

“You can’t do this, koche.”

“Do what?”

“Amina.” He leaned over and squeezed her leg awkwardly. “I know you miss him. I miss him, too. We won’t … we won’t ever …” He cleared his throat. “But you cannot sit in bed for hours like this. It’s not right.”

“Me? Mom is the one who is in bed all day!”

“Mom will do what Mom wants to do. She will get up, too. Soon. But you are too young for this.”

“What about you? You’ve just been sitting around all night on your porch doing nothing but drinking scotch!”

“Not true.”

She glared at him.

“Drinking scotch, yes,” he corrected. “Doing nothing, no. I am very much doing something.”

“Yeah, right.”

“I’ll show you.” He stood up, banging his head on the canopy. He wiggled his fingers for her. “Come.”

Once she had emptied the hide-a-key box, Amina would let herself open her eyes. Akhil is in his room, she would think. And maybe a noise would happen, a hollow tap across the hall, the click of what could be the light going on in the bathroom, and her gut would shimmy and she’d think, I’ve done it. I’ve fucking done it. I’ve brought him back.

“Come with me,” her father said.

“What is it?”

“What does it look like?”

“A garbage bag.”

Thomas smiled. “Exactly. Except this one, I made.”

This was obvious from the pile of deflated garbage bags all over the porch.

Amina looked at him. “You’ve been making garbage bags?”

“Special garbage bags. Here, take it.” Thomas handed her the one he held in his hands.

She took it. It was not particularly special, except that he had cut slits in the top, and run a long piece of more garbage bag in and out of the slits.

“Wait.” He looked around the porch and grabbed a pile of newspaper, a soda can, a bottle. “Ready?”

She held the bag open and he dropped everything inside. She looked in after them. Nothing happened. She looked back at her father.

“Pull the ties!”

“What?”

“The things on the side! The handles!”

She held the bag away from her. Yes, there were long loops on either side. She pulled them, and the bag cinched at the top, the opening shrinking to a small O.

“You’ve made a garbage bag with handles?”

“I’ve made a garbage bag that closes easily! Ties shut! And then watch.” He motioned for the bag, and she handed it to him. “It’s a handle. So you can carry it. See?” He walked across the porch with a bit of jaunt to his step, the star of his own infomercial. He put the bag down and leaned back, hands on hips, like he was surveying the frontier ahead instead of just the screen door.

There was a moment, a longish moment, actually, where Amina imagined walking straight out of the house and down the dirt road to the main road, where she’d thumb a ride into town and show up at Raj and Sanji’s with a full suitcase and clear instructions to adopt her. She could become their daughter, their instant joy, the crucial part of a family that had suddenly expanded instead of contracted. Would she be happier in the long run? It was impossible to predict. But what Amina did know, what she was suddenly quite sure of, was that, unlike Raj and Sanji, her parents from this point on would need her to be more than she had ever been, and along with their need would come her inability to fill it. Even in her best moments, she could only be a reminder of what they had lost, the stain of her missing brother all but blotting out her own features, and really, what was it to be the object of affection for such permanently disfigured hearts? What would be left of her own shape? Then she realized that Thomas was looking at her with a face so full of hurt and hope that there was nothing to do but ask, “What else have you made?”

It was the beginning of something. The projects that she and her father would work on together, obviously, but also of Thomas’s return home. Not to the car, or the hospital for days on end, or even the porch, but the house, where he would eat dinner almost every night, or barring that, wake her up for an early breakfast. And though at first he asked too many questions about her schedule and interests and teachers, soon enough they settled into the work, remastering everyday objects into something new. They installed a heel-operated fan in a tennis shoe, created rubber grips for toothbrushes, and, inspired by sprayable cheese, tried to make an aerosol face cream.

When Kamala woke up, went to the mall, and found Jesus through the scalding proclamations of the Trinity Baptists, they built a receptacle to catch rainwater and funnel it into her garden. When she began to cook dinner again, they attached magnets to her most frequently used spices and stuck them to a metal sheet just next to the stove. When she turned the radio on to WEXD, Exodus in the Southwest, and stood on the kitchen table one Sunday morning, shouting, “He will rise again!” with desperate rapture on her face, they slipped into the fields, taking measurements of tree trunks to decide which might be most suitable for a family of hammocks.

She was right about the crying. When it came, it seemed like it would never stop. Amina lay shaking on Akhil’s bed, whispering Please, please, please, God, please, because she hadn’t asked God for help yet, and now it seemed like the only thing left to do. Please, God. It had been too long now. Akhil had been gone for three months, and if those first days were hard because remembering things about him hurt, these days, the days of forgetting things about him, actually hurt worse.

But wouldn’t he come back? It seemed impossible that he wouldn’t. There was still the smell of him in his room — a pungent combination of dank socks, cigarettes, marijuana, and Vaseline. There were his shoes in the closet, looking like they could be stepped into at any moment, and his bathrobe hanging in their shared bathroom. His car keys, left on his desk by Kamala the day of the funeral. Surely he could not just be gone. Maybe it would take a season or a year, but Amina felt sure she would see her brother again.

She wasn’t entirely wrong about that. For almost a year after his death, she caught glimpses of her brother everywhere. Once, he had disappeared into the back room of the post office just as she walked in. Another time, he sat with a group of migrant workers in the chile fields on the edges of Corrales as the car whizzed by. Later, when she was standing in the ethnic-foods aisle at Safeway, she saw him strolling by the dairy section, his body dark against all those jugs of milk. And once, just once, she had woken up to the sharp smell of cigarette smoke floating over her bed, the air living with someone else’s breath.