The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing

CHAPTER 1

Thomas did not come home the night of his diagnosis. Though he called at regular intervals, assuring them he would be home within hours, he somehow managed to never actually arrive, leaving Kamala and Amina to fall asleep on the couch, each eventually rising to take to her own bed for a few hours, and meet the other back in the kitchen at dawn, mute. Finally, in the morning, he arrived in the middle of breakfast, downed a glass of orange juice, and announced he was going to bed.

Monica called shortly after, hoarse and eerily wordless. We’re taking care of it, she had said, and then wept so softly and steadily that Amina found herself in the odd position of remaining optimistic, as if the ubiquitous movie premise that hope was every bit as important as reality was something she actually believed in; as if she understood which we and which it were being referenced.

But wasn’t there reason to hope? No one had said dying, after all, and Thomas was still scheduled for tests, which meant that whatever had been discovered in Dr. George’s office still held the possibility of being treated. Eight hours later, as her father arose, stood in the kitchen, and delivered a short, detailed plan about going forward (more scans and a biopsy, a temporary hiatus from work, and the immediate start of radiation), Amina found herself thinking that he actually seemed, if not better than before, then clearer somehow, pulled from a murky pool and rinsed clean with purpose.

“Waiting for results can often be trying on families,” he told Kamala and Amina, as if they were the patients. “My advice is to keep yourselves busy, and try not to dwell too much on what-ifs. Eat regularly. Try to get some form of daily exercise.”

Shortly after this speech, Thomas started cleaning out the porch with the zeal of a newly arrived tenant. Several months’ worth of newspapers were hauled out, cords were redoubled and hung in neat rows, three bags of miscellaneous screws, nails, and nuts were parsed into plastic trays, making them useful again.

For her part, Kamala bought an unlikely copy of Mastering the Art of French Cooking and began the even less likely task of following the recipes to the letter, resulting in a beguiling array of foods so layered in cream and butter and flour that she seemed to be baiting a familial heart attack, even as her family shunned the change. (“You’re trying to kill me?” Thomas asked without irony one evening, frowning at a pot of béchamel sauce.)

Even Amina, propelled by the distinct need to do something, shrugged off her career limbo, clearing her new plan with Jane and charming the guests at Nina Vigil’s daughter’s quinceañera with such success that she lined up two more gigs before the night was over. She rifled through her room looking for every last hidden cigarette, flushing them down the toilet as a kind of karmic payment for Thomas’s health. She would quit smoking and he would get better.

Through all of this, the family kept a complicit silence about Thomas’s condition, which itself started to feel oddly progressive as the second week bled into the third. More imaging was done, a month’s worth of patients rescheduled, and then Thomas lost a half-dollar-sized patch of hair to the biopsy. Sure, it felt strange, smuggling him in and out of the hospital and ignoring phone calls (Bala, Sanji, Dimple). It felt especially weird to ignore the two messages from Jamie, or rather, to listen to them five times apiece and never call back, but somehow every time she picked up the phone she found herself putting it right back down. It was too much. Too heavy. It would be better to wait and call everyone after, when she could tie it up into a tidy bundle of the past.

By the third week, their handling of Thomas’s diagnosis actually seemed proactive, as though by refusing to acknowledge the tumor, the Eapens had quarantined it from spreading into their actual lives. More than once over that week and the next, and usually when driving her father to his appointments, Amina found herself looking at their present from a twinkling vantage point in the future, sure that once this stage was over (the details for how it would become over being vague but surely possible), they could return to the life they knew before as unremarkably as tourists reentering their own living room. And so it all went on, cleanups and chicken a l’orange and appointments layered thickly enough to keep fear of what the future might hold from penetrating until exactly four weeks after the original prognosis, when out of the blue, Thomas sat down in his chair on the porch and began a long, gentle, occasionally exasperated conversation with Cousin Itty.

“Still?” Amina asked. Kamala nodded, looking through the screen porch with a frown and crossed arms. A timer set to announce when the beef bourguignon next needed tending ticked quietly behind them.

At least he was no longer sitting down. Something about coming home and finding Thomas prattling away to the empty chair beside him had made the situation seem much more dire than it did now, some nine minutes later, as he wandered around the shop, explaining things.

Amina glanced at her mom. “Does he still think—”

“DON’T TOUCH THAT,” Thomas boomed, springing forward, and both mother and daughter jumped. “You’ll lose a finger! Do you want to lose a finger?”

“Jesus Christ!” Amina hissed.

“No Jesus,” Kamala said.

The worst part was that there seemed to be no stopping the talking. Amina had tried to interrupt when they first came home, and Thomas had just stared at her blankly until she left the porch. Five minutes later, armed with the notion that he couldn’t possibly have lost his grip this suddenly or showily, Amina had confronted him again, only to be completely ignored. He did not answer her questions. He did not acknowledge her at all. He just waited until she ran out of words and continued his tour of the shop.

“To cut boards,” Thomas explained now, tapping the leg of a table saw. “Big ones. Bigger than that.”

He was talking to Itty, no doubt about it. Even though she hadn’t heard it in decades, Thomas’s flat, loud cadence was instantly recognizable, like a foreign language.

“You called Anyan?” Kamala asked.

“I left a message with his service.”

“And what did they say?”

“They said he’d call me back.”

“But what did they say about Thomas?”

“They didn’t say anything about Thomas because I didn’t tell them about Thomas. They are not doctors, they’re operators.”

“So then what? We just sit and wait?”

“What else?”

“Go talk to him.”

“You go talk to him!”

“Chi!” Her mother snorted to cover up the fact that even now, in the midst of illness and disaster, she was unwilling to set foot on the porch. “What nonsense! Leaving your own father to wander around like some yakking idiot?”

“I don’t think we leave him at all, not when we’re not sure if he’s …” Amina watched her father lift a level into the air, reading the fluorescent bubbles like they were measuring something. “Anyway, I think we should keep an eye on him.”

“I am not watching this man like one television! You think I have nothing else to do?”

“Oh, that’s right, you’re busy cooking food that no one likes to eat.”

“I am cooking food that will fatten him up! You want him to waste away to nothing? He needs reserves for radiation!”

“So go back to the kitchen, if that’s where you want to be!”

Kamala gave her a long, cold look. To Amina’s surprise, she threw open the screen door, marching straight onto the porch. It seemed to curl and shrink around her, like wood chips spent by flame, and she paused for a moment, getting her bearings. She thumped through the machinery with her fists clenched, little puffs of sawdust gasping at her heels. “Thomas!”

He took no notice of her, bending to adjust the radial dial.

“Thomas!” Kamala shoved a pointer finger between his shoulder blades.

“Cha!” he yelled, wheeling around to face her. “What!”

“What are you doing?”

Thomas looked around nervously. Whether it was the simple fact that she was on his porch for the first time in fifteen years or that her clenched, fuming face was doubled up on him like a fist, Kamala had him spooked. He took a quick breath before saying, “Talking to Itty.”

“Why!”

Why? Amina blinked from the laundry room. She would not have thought to ask why.

“Because …” Thomas looked behind him, presumably to where Itty stood. “Because he’s here.”

Kamala took this in with a frown, then dodged to the side suddenly, as though she might catch a glimpse of Itty if she were fast enough. She straightened, looking back up at Thomas. “You see him?”

“Yes.”

“Right now?”

Thomas nodded.

“Then tell him to go.”

Thomas looked stricken. He began to tremble visibly, dropping his eyes to the floor.

“Thomas, you hear me? Stop this now.”

Thomas shook his head, lost, it seemed, to the shavings and filings and occasional winking screw or nail.

“Hey!” Kamala barked and he looked up at her. “What are you doing?”

“I … I don’t know.” He swallowed, his eyes filling with tears. He looked behind him and then back at Kamala. Amina watched from behind the screen, her eyes and nose suddenly liquid with grief. He should not go like this. He should not lose his dignity.

Thomas’s shoulders tented up and down with the effort of trying to speak, but Kamala stopped him, squeezing his forearm. She spoke so softly, Amina had to stop breathing to hear her.

“Never mind. Not important. I am going to be in the kitchen cooking. I will not leave unless I tell you first. Come get me if you need. Okay?”

Thomas’s head dropped. Kamala turned and strode back toward Amina, who only now realized that the droning she had heard in the back of her mind was not just some by-product of too much emotion, but the live and urgent trill of the telephone. Anyan George was calling back. Kamala opened the screen door and walked into the kitchen, past the still-ringing phone.

“It’s for you,” she said.

Jamie Anderson had not swept his entryway recently. That afternoon, as Amina rang his doorbell and paced, she almost crushed a tiny cluster of anthills dotting a seam between bricks and had to do a funny hop-skip to right herself. But no, even breathing hard, even disturbed by Anyan George’s lack of help (“Keep an eye on it,” he’d said, as though looking away were an option), she would not destroy another creature’s carefully wrought world. If she were God, she’d be a little fucking kinder.

A few seconds passed. She rang the doorbell again. She had hung up the phone with Anyan George and driven straight there, not admitting to herself that she knew exactly where she was going until she had pulled up behind Jamie’s station wagon.

Could he really be out? Amina banged on the door. She stepped forward, letting her forehead drop against it. If this were a movie, Jamie would open it right now. She’d fall into his arms. They would make love. She wouldn’t know if she had an orgasm because women in movies never touched themselves during sex, and it made her suspicious of their climaxes.

It was not a movie. He really wasn’t home. Amina backed up, willed the pressure in her chest to ease up. It was probably a good thing. What was she doing there, really? She did not know this man. She did not know his temperament, his cleaning habits, and the haste had been a ruse, a trick to keep from thinking clearly. By now her hand had found the doorbell and she rang it over and over again, not for any real hope of summoning Jamie, but to feel the power of her own cause and effect. There was a bubble in her lungs, the kind that happened when she stayed underwater for too long. Air Supply. She gasped with understanding. They really were such a better band than anyone knew.

Without warning, the hair on her arms stood on end, her animal brain understanding a split second before the rest that someone was behind her. Amina turned around to see Jamie stopped on the sidewalk a full house back. His park blanket was tucked under his arm, football-style.

“Hi,” she said. Jamie nodded at her once, the kind of nod you give across a room when you have no intention of getting closer. A neighbor switched on a radio that briefly blared rap before it was turned down and rerouted to NPR.

“You’re here,” he finally said.

“Yeah.”

“You didn’t go back to Seattle?”

“No.”

He waited for her to say more, but she couldn’t, unnerved by the reality of him, his 94 ROCK T-shirt, the wariness on his face.

“Can I come in?” she asked.

“I left you two messages.”

“I know. I’m sorry.”

Jamie’s eyes did not leave her face, and though nothing in them looked vulnerable toward her, she remembered their first kiss, how strange and eager they had both been, like two mutes trying to describe a freak storm.

“I had a funny week,” she said.

This seemed to release him from whatever paralysis he’d fallen under. He walked to his car, opening the hatchback and putting the blanket in, shutting it with a neat slam. She backed up as he made his way to the front door.

“How long have you been here?” He smelled sweet and chlorinated, like a day by a pool.

“Not long.”

“Huh.” Jamie unlocked the door and pushed it open, motioning for her to enter first. She walked through a foyer to a sunny, sunken living room with two couches. Amina walked toward the smaller one as Jamie set his keys down.

“Nice place.”

“Have a seat.”

She had not been so far off about the rugs and fertility sculptures. A huge kilim calicoed the floor, and earthen pots of various sizes nestled in niches. Pillows dotted the sofa, and in one corner a surprisingly ornate wooden desk held neat piles of paper. Other than that, though, it felt like a man’s house, plantless, dusty, and with a barrenness she couldn’t quite place until she realized there was nothing hanging on the walls.

“Nice artwork.”

“Want something to drink?” Jamie ducked through an archway, and she heard the fridge door open. “I’ve got seltzer or beer.”

“Just water is great.”

The soft thud of cabinets turned into a running faucet, and a cheerless, robotic woman’s voice announced three messages. The first beep was followed by a reminder from the dentist’s office. The second was a husky-voiced girl. “Hiii, Professor Anderson, I’m really sorry to have to call you at home, I just have some questions about next semester,” she said, sounding stoned and possibly naked. Jamie hit the fastforward button.

“James Mitchell Anderson,” a laughing voice said after the third beep, and Amina’s stomach lurched with recognition. “Your nieces would like to talk to you. We’ve made up this game with that photo from the Quinns’ party where we draw you new hair every week and tape it on, and this week Cici—”

“Mohonk!” someone clearly little and delighted screamed in the background.

“Yes,” Paige laughed. “You have a Mohawk this week. Green, actually. But I think you’d totally dig it. Anyway, call us back. We’ll be around all afternoon.”

“Paige has kids?” Amina asked as Jamie walked into the room with a glass of water and a Corona.

He tossed her a coaster before sitting on the opposite couch. “Three daughters. The youngest is six months old.”

“Does she live here?”

“Yup.”

Amina nodded. “Cool.”

Jamie took a long swig of beer. His gaze bounced toward her and away.

“So how have you been?” she asked.

“Fine.”

“Working a lot?”

“Yup.”

A light-blue sedan pulled up in the driveway of the house across the way, and Amina watched it, breaking into a sweat. Did he want her to leave?

“I’m sorry I didn’t call,” she said. “I had a kind of weird week.”

“No big.” His fingers drummed against the bottle. “Four weeks.”

“We got my dad’s test results back. He has a tumor.” She was too nervous to look right at him but sensed his flinch from her periphery. “In his brain. A brain tumor.”

“When did you find out?”

“The day after I saw you.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

Was he? Amina looked at Jamie’s face for comfort or sympathy and instead saw reticence, like he did not want to catch what she had.

“So anyway, he’s starting treatment next week.” Her voice pinched with an effort to keep calm. She took another sip of water, her hurt blossoming quickly and more substantially than expected, like some stupid sponge toy that grows to five times its original size in water. So this was what it felt like to tell other people the truth. It felt like shit.

“Anyway.” She stood up. “So that’s what has been up with me. What about you? Seen any of your former students? How is Maizy?”

Jamie frowned. “What are you doing?”

She was pacing. Amina shrugged.

“Are you mad at me?” he asked.

“Are you mad at me?”

“A little.”

She stopped. “Wait, really?”

“Yeah.”

“Because I didn’t call? I just told you we found out—”

“I know. I know that.”

“Then what—”

“I don’t know. It’s not like you don’t have a good reason. But you asked if I was mad, and I am, kind of.”

There was something about the reasonableness with which he said this, the entitlement, that made her want to reach over and throttle him. Amina spun on her heel, heading toward the front door.

“Don’t do that.”

“What?” She turned around. “What am I doing?”

“Don’t turn me into some asshole.”

“You’re doing that all on your own.”

Jamie put his beer down. “Sit down.”

“What for?”

“Can you please sit back down?”

Amina wavered in the middle of the room, momentum shooting off to equally impossible outcomes. She wanted to be back in Seattle. She wanted to be in her car already, driving back to Corrales. She wanted to be back to the night in the park, with his collarbone on her tongue. Jamie motioned to the spot next to him on the couch. She walked toward him and sat stiffly. A fresh puff of dust motes flew into the air between them.

“I just thought you had left,” he said after a moment. “And that sucked, but then at least I had something to tell myself. Man, she felt so much she just had to leave.” He laughed self-consciously. “And then it turns out you were here ignoring my messages.”

His face turned toward her like a bruised flower, something sad and too delicate in its dark center, and she shrank a little.

“I didn’t want to talk about it,” she said.

He did not look particularly moved by this information.

“I just … I kept thinking once we knew for sure what we were dealing with, we could just tell everyone at once and get it over with. But every week it seems like we know less, and now it’s just …” She leaned back against the couch, the fight in her replaced with a calmness bordering on exhaustion. “The biopsy showed low-grade cells, but the problem is that might just be that small area of the tumor, and it might be worse somewhere else. My dad thinks it is, anyway. And then he seemed totally fine until this afternoon, and now he’s …” Amina snorted, gesturing into the air. “And honestly? I don’t want to talk about this with you. Not now. This is like the biggest boner killer I could think of.”

She watched a piece of fluff wander through the air in front of her, horribly aware of the silence that descended.

Jamie cleared his throat. “Did you just say boner—”

“Yes. I don’t even know where that came from. Fourth grade.”

“It’s sexy.”

“Really?”

“No. But it’s sweet. That you were thinking about that, I mean.” She pushed her leg against his on the couch, thinking about how saying a small, true thing for the first time felt much scarier than not saying anything at all.

“I don’t know,” Jamie sighed. “It’s not like I’m some expert at this. To be honest, I was a total dick when my mom got sick.” He shook his head. “But I think you go one of two ways with this stuff — you either try to be good to the people around you, or you give yourself a free pass to act however badly you want to, you know?”

Amina nodded. He was right. Even if she hadn’t been appallingly close to his neck, the smell of his skin filling her with relief and arousal, she would have had to cop to that.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

His hand was on her leg. Amina watched as it slid down to her knee and back up, his fingers stroking the inside of her thigh.

“So what happened today to finally get your ass over here?” he asked, and she shook her head. She pulled his hand higher and watched gratefully as it disappeared under her skirt. She would tell him later, when they rose from the couch parched and flushed, ready to guzzle down the entire fridge’s worth of beverages, but for right now, she was ready to stop talking.

The entire household was asleep by the time Amina got home that night, which made the next thing she needed to do infinitely easier. She found Prince Philip curled up against the coolest patch of the dining room floor and tugged at his collar until he stood up.

“Come,” she said. He padded after her, through the living room, kitchen, and laundry room, out onto the porch, where they stopped just long enough to pick up a flashlight. Amina opened the screen door that led to the yard.

“Go,” she said.

She stumbled after him in the dark, trying to stifle the feeling that she was playing the part in the movie where the well-meaning woman gets murdered in her mother’s eggplant patch.

“Stay away from the beans,” she hissed once they were between the rows of vegetables. The dog went down the row that led to the trellis, and she walked down the other row, passing beds of lettuces, cucumbers, and snap peas, as she made her way to the back of the garden. Kamala’s bucket of garden tools waited mid-row, and she picked a small shovel out of it before continuing to the back.

“So what did he say about the jacket?” Jamie had asked as they sat on his kitchen counter that evening, passing a bottle of seltzer back and forth.

“He said that he was sorry.”

“That’s all?”

“What else would he say?”

“Well, why did he put it there in the first place?”

Amina frowned. “Did you hear the part about the tumor?”

“Yes,” Jamie said, squeezing her leg reassuringly. “But that’s medical. The doctors will deal with that. But what was he trying to do? That’s the part you’ve got to figure out.” There was an earnest, Hardy Boy — ish glint on his face that made her uneasy.

“I just told you he won’t talk about it,” Amina said.

Jamie scratched his neck. “Is the jacket the only thing he buried?”

Now, in the dark, she scooped through the damp soil, trying not to think too hard about the snakes that roamed the garden regularly or made temporary houses from sun-warmed spades and bags of blood meal. Her hand brushed something hard, and she recoiled, fumbling for the flashlight.

Glass. Not a shard, but a nice, rounded edge, which when pried loose appeared to be a jar of something. For one horrible moment, she thought she was looking at human organs, but a longer, calmer look revealed nothing more terrifying than Kamala’s homemade mango pickle. She put it down next to her and kept digging. Not ten seconds later she hit a cardboard corner, which turned into a warped copy of Nat King Cole’s Love Is the Thing. Just under that, the gilded cup of Thomas’s BEST DOCTORS IN THE SOUTHWEST 1991 trophy lay on its side. A few minutes later, as she stared at the glittering clump of Thomas’s car keys, Amina shut her eyes, submerged by the panicky feeling that the objects had not been hidden so much as they’d been biding their time, waiting for her to find them. She stood up, feeling sick.

“Fucking fuck,” she said out loud, and across the garden Prince Philip wagged his tail guiltily, sending the bean pods into silvery applause.

“Let’s go,” she said, walking toward the gate with everything jumbled in her hands. Prince Philip did not follow her. She shined the flashlight on him. “Hey, move it.”

He walked toward her reluctantly, one long bean disappearing under the soft curtain of his lip, but stopped, looking dolefully back at the trellis. She did not have patience for this. Amina stalked the twenty feet toward him, grabbed his collar, and wheeled around. A flash of white burst into her line of vision. She gasped. There, waiting politely at the side of the path she had just walked down, was a brand-new pair of white Velcro tennis shoes.

CHAPTER 2

The next morning, the pounding would not stop.

“Hullo? Ami? Hullo?” Fattened through the fish-eye lens, Sanji’s nose had turned into its own island of sorts, as craggy and pockmarked as any dotting the South Pacific in recent millennia. Her eyes, in comparison, were hard, distant stars. She turned her head, blinking rapidly into the peephole, and rang the doorbell again.

“Who is it?” Amina stalled.

“Surely you are not pretending that you haven’t been staring at me for the last half minute?”

Amina opened the door. “Hi, Sanji Auntie.”

Cool, flabby arms squeezed her around the middle hard, more a Heimlich than an actual greeting. She peered behind Amina to the empty hallway. “So? Where are your parents?”

“Running a few errands.”

“Really? Where?”

“I’m not exactly sure. They didn’t tell me.”

Sanji tugged her ear sharply. “Liar!”

“Ow!”

“They are in the hospital itself! Bala called me half an hour ago saying Chacko called her and your parents were checking in for some scans! Are you people going to talk to us or what? Because if you aren’t, we would like to know right now and be done with it!” Sanji breathed hard, dabbing at her upper lip with her chuni.

“Done with it?” Amina asked skeptically, but her aunt’s glare was unrelenting. She shifted tactics. “How did Chacko Uncle know it was a scan?”

“Excuse me?”

Amina raised her eyebrow.

“Well, of course he snooped around!” Sanji bellowed, incredulous. “You think that is some problem? One month and we haven’t heard one word from any of you, and now you want to talk patient-doctor confidentiality nonsense? Really?”

Really, Amina did not. Really, she wanted to shut the door and go back upstairs, to try to get a handle on what she would need to shoot the Lucero wedding that weekend, or maybe just not think about anything at all.

“Well, don’t just stand there looking pathetic,” Sanji ordered. “Give me some tea.”

They walked back to the kitchen. Amina motioned to a counter stool, and Sanji took it, fluffing herself up and resettling like a pigeon in an airshaft.

“Caffeinated okay?” Amina asked.

“Decaf is for children and Americans.”

The cabinet was stocked like a bunker, Typhoos, Red Labels, Darjeelings, and Assams packed tightly. Amina wiggled a box loose. “Dessert?”

“No, thank you.”

“Mom made a crème caramel.”

Sanji sniffed suspiciously at this information. “Just a bit, please.”

Amina found the right Tupperware, spooned a generous amount into a dish, and handed it to her aunt, who was frowning at Amina’s hips.

“Looking too thin, Ami.”

“Am I?” Amina looked down in surprise. “Weird.”

“Weird.” Sanji snorted. “My God, what I would eat with your no-tummy tummy! Pastries! Villages!”

Amina turned toward the stove, adjusting the kettle and watching Sanji eat the crème caramel through the reflection in the microwave oven. It was actually nice to have her in the house, her solid, shouty anger a relief from all the other, undirected craziness.

Milk, sugar, a bowl of mixture, two spoons, two mugs of tea. A minute later Amina set everything on the counter between them and sat down, instantly more jittery, like there was a panic button on her ass. She watched the cream cloud the tea and stirred as slowly as possible.

“Ami?”

She looked up, surprised by the reciprocal nervousness in her aunt’s face. “You’re okay, baby?”

“I just don’t really know how to start.”

“Perhaps the beginning?”

There was a crack in the wall behind Sanji’s head. Amina watched it and said, “Dad has a brain tumor. He’s been undergoing radiation for a few weeks, and now he’s getting another scan to see if it’s helping. He can’t work because he’s seeing things that aren’t there.”

Sanji’s face did not move. The rest of her did not move, either.

“Brain tumor?” she repeated.

Amina nodded.

Sanji clapped a firm hand over her own mouth, but not before a gasp escaped, stabbing the air in a way that made Amina not want to breathe, for fear that the feeling was contagious.

“It’s a glioma,” Amina continued after a moment, partly for clarity and partly to sop up the shocked silence seeping from her aunt. Couldn’t she just say something? Offer some twitch of reassurance? Several seconds slid by, each more damning than the last.

“We’re taking care of it,” Amina added in desperation, and at last her aunt responded.

“Oh, baby! Oh no!” Sanji lunged across the counter toward her and was bounced back by her breasts twice before she jumped out of her seat and just came around. Her hug was swift and brutal, a punch of perfume tinged with slight body odor. She stroked Amina’s back manically. “You poor girl! My gods, and I came here yelling at you!” She pulled back, patting a thick hand over Amina’s face. “Are you okay? Of course you’re not, all alone with this! Oh, why didn’t I just listen? Of course it wouldn’t be some simple-simple thing! Chacko himself said it must be bad, and Raj said no, Thomas would of course tell us, and then Bala said one of her sisters only told her last month itself about some lump in her breast five years ago — can you imagine? But then again, what does one hope to get from a far-away sister in that situation? Not like family in the same city, no? Where we can all take care of each other?” She looked beseechingly at Amina.

“We didn’t want to worry anyone.”

Her aunt was nodding before she could even finish. “Yes, yes, of course. And Mummy? How is she?”

“Hard to tell.”

“Ach.” Sanji squeezed Amina’s elbow. “Must be a terrible shock.”

“I don’t know. I mean, part of me thinks that must be what it is, but after that first day, she hasn’t really talked about it, either. I think she just thinks he’s going to be okay.”

Sanji’s eyes filled with worry. “It’s bad?”

“That’s what Dr. George said.”

“Anyan George? That young fellow?”

“Yes,” Amina said, confused about whether this was an accusation of some sort. “And the radiologist.”

“My gods,” Sanji whispered again, shaking her head. “And you, baby? How are you doing?” Amina shrugged, and Sanji kneaded her arms like they were dough. “Pish! What am I saying? Of course you are not okay! All this horrible business and no one to shoulder the burden! And now your mother has gone off and made French foods!”

“It’s fine,” Amina said miserably, and Sanji squeezed harder.

“But I don’t understand why you didn’t just call us. Not wanting to bother? Must have been terrible, all this testing and waiting without anyone else to help! We would have been there!”

“Dad wasn’t up to it, and I just felt …” Amina shook her head, suddenly claustrophobic. She pushed back from Sanji, taking a deep breath. “Anyway, there’s not really much you can do.”

Sanji tugged her own nose, looking perplexed. “And you say he’s seeing things?”

“Yeah.”

“What things?”

“Just, you know.” Amina shifted. “Like, hallucinations.”

“Rabbits?”

“What? No, people. His family in India.”

Sanji’s mouth fell open. “The ones who burned up in the fire?”

“Yes. Although not just them. Apparently he had an incident at the hospital, which is part of the reason he’s not working for right now.” Amina stopped talking, wanting to tell Sanji about the previous night’s findings and yet feeling protective of her father’s standing in the family. What if Raj and Chacko thought less of him? What if Bala couldn’t keep her mouth shut?

Sanji looked at her watch. “So they will be there all morning?”

“Yeah.”

“Good.” She looked around the kitchen and as if checking off an item on a to-do list, shoved one last good bite of crème caramel in. “So I’ll just go sit with them.”

“Wait, now?”

“Of course!”

“But … well … I mean, they don’t know you know. I’m not sure if they want anyone to—”

“Too bad! I’m going. And when the others know, they will come, too. Enough is enough. One more month hiding and you’ll all be mad, no? And then where will we be?”

“But Sanji Auntie—”

“No buting! You really think they will be so upset? Ridiculous!”

“I just think—”

“No thinking! Amina Eapen, you listen to me, okay? We are all we have here. Do you understand? That is it. And we can all talk about old times and Campa Cola and wouldn’t it be nice if we could go back, but none of us ever want to go back. To what? To who? Our own families can’t even stand us for longer than a few days! No, we are home already, like it or not, and that’s how we …” Sanji gulped furiously. “Your parents,” she began again, her voice trembling. “They welcomed us, no? Raj and I, all those one million years ago. Didn’t give one sticky fig who we were or where we came from, just invited us over for samosas and tea, and poof! Instant family. Bond made! And like that we’ll go on, nah?” She turned abruptly and began walking to the door, leaving Amina to follow. “So I will go and call later. And I’ll talk to Raj and Chacko and Bala, and don’t worry, I will tell her to keep her mouth shut for the sake of all involved. You’ve told Dimple?”

“Not yet. I will.”

“Do it today, okay? She should know. It’s not good to shut everyone out this way.”

They had reached the door, and Sanji tugged it open, squinting into the flat midday light. She turned to Amina, folding her into one last hug before making her way down the stairs and back to the car she had left stranded in the middle of the driveway.

Back up in her room, Amina looked out the window to the yard below, acutely aware of how quiet the house had grown. Lately, with Thomas not working and Kamala trying her hand at puff pastry, there was almost always someone around, someone shuffling below and making it feel like even if they weren’t quite in sync, they were a team of sorts, a little tight unit. Now, with Sanji on her way to the hospital, Amina was alone with the unease of having brought the others into the mix. It wasn’t that she doubted their love or intentions, but the weight of that love would be no small thing. What would they do with everyone else’s worry on top of their own? Thomas did not weather other people’s concern well. He was not going to be happy with her.

She missed making her father happy. The realization came to her whole, like an egg dropped into a waiting palm, and she turned it over, surprised and embarrassed by its familiarity. For years, she had banked on being the person her father kept closest, but now, with her parents at the hospital while she hid in the house, she had to admit that this was no longer true. It had been weeks since Thomas had invited her onto the porch, and longer since she had seen him relax in her company. And while she knew he wasn’t petty enough to blame her for his diagnosis, she also knew that getting him to the doctor had tainted her somehow, leaving her outside his confidence. She chafed at the memory of the day before, his sullen look on the porch, the way she had kept hammering questions at him, as though that would have worked. And then Kamala, of all people, doing the right thing.

The phone rang, startling her. She stared at it for a moment before picking it up.

“We need to talk.” It was Dimple, sounding, if not frantic, then breathy, like she had just gone for a jog for the first time in thirty years.

“Hey. Good. Yes.”

“Good?”

“No, not good. I just mean, good that you called. I was going to call you. We need to talk.”

“I know.” Dimple hesitated. “Wait. Do you know?”

The other line beeped. “Shit, can you hold on, Dimple? It’s probably my parents.”

“No, wait—”

“Just a sec.” Amina clicked over. “Hello?”

“YOU LYING SHIT!”

Amina’s heart skittered. “Jane?”

“Are you fucking kidding me?”

Amina’s mind raced, her pulse beating uncomfortably fast. “You don’t like the quinceañera pictures?”

“Don’t be coy with me, sweetheart. It doesn’t suit either of us.”

“Jane, wait, just hold, okay?” Amina swallowed whole words, trying not to sound as scared as she felt. “I’m not sure what — but — can — let me just get off the other line.”

“Don’t you DARE fucking—”

She clicked over, the silence a welcome foxhole.

“Ami?” Dimple asked. “Is that you?”

“Holy crap.”

“What?”

“It’s Jane. She’s pissed. I’ve gotta call you back.”

“NO! Talk to me first.”

“What?”

“We need to talk.”

“Later, Dimple, she’s—” Jane hung up, the sound of her disconnection sending a flare across the murk of Amina’s confusion. “Wait. Why is Jane yelling at me?”

“Well, first of all, Jane needs to calm down and understand that—”

“WHY IS JANE YELLING AT ME?”

“Because she thinks the show is bad for business. Okay. So.” Dimple paused. “I went ahead and had ten of your prints matted and framed. I’m showing them with Charles White.”

“What?”

“Occasional accidental, the everyday tragedy.”

The panic that filled Amina was both swift and unexpected, like stepping in a puddle and getting caught in a riptide. Her legs shook. She looked down at her knees and then up at her hand, which had locked around one of the bedposts.

“Occasional slash accidental colon, documenting the everyday tragedy,” Dimple clarified.

Amina squeezed the bedpost harder. “You …?”

“Stop. Please don’t panic. It’s going to be amazing.”

“You can’t do it.”

“Of course I can.”

“No, you can’t. She’ll kill me. I promised.”

“No you didn’t. Not in writing.”

“What?”

“I checked.”

Checked? Amina’s eyes spun around the bedroom. “Dimple, I told her I wouldn’t even take them. It will kill her business.”

“Oh, c’mon. Is that what she told you?”

“She’s right! People don’t want to see their bad shit memorialized — not by the hired help! What were you thinking? Oh my God, she’s going to sue me.”

“She can’t sue you. I mean, she can, but she won’t win. They’re not her pictures.”

“Yes they are.”

“No, they are not. Jane doesn’t own the rights if the clients have bought their negatives. So as long as the clients sign the release, we’ve done nothing wrong.”

Amina blinked, stunned. “You can’t really believe that.”

“Why wouldn’t I?”

“She took me in, Dimple. She trained me.”

“Oh Jesus. You’re not going to, like, recite the entire script for The Color of Money, are you? Because the whole rookie-screws-the-master thing is played out. She didn’t teach you shit about taking these kinds of pictures. This is what you do. This is what you’ve always done. Jane doesn’t want anyone to see your best work? Fine. That’s her business. But it can’t be yours.”

“They’re her clients. They’ll never use her again if they see them.”

“That’s not what Lesley Beale says.”

It felt like years since Amina had even thought about the Seattle socialite. “What the hell does Lesley have to do with it?”

“I went to your office to see if there were more photographs, and found the one in the manila envelope on your desk. The naked bridesmaid on the coats with Brock Beale? Holy fucking hell. Amazing. The grimace on his face. It might actually be my favorite.”

“Oh my God.” Amina sat on the bed. “What have you done?”

“Stop acting like it’s bad, will you? I’ve gotten the permission to show your work from the clients who own the negatives.”

“You showed Lesley that picture?” Her throat felt hot and vomity. “Yes, obviously. I had to. She loved it, by the way. I mean, are you kidding? And we can talk all day about her art history degree and the ‘truth of vision’ and the ‘integrity of the moment’—which we did, by the way, and which I might actually agree with if agreeing with that woman didn’t make me want to drive a stake through my own heart — but make no mistake: That photo is the best thing that could have ever happened to her claim to the Beale fortune, and she knows it. She wants it up. She wants the whole fucking show up so it doesn’t look like the vendetta it is. Why do you think she’s helping us?”

“Lesley’s getting a divorce?”

“Oh, right, you missed that. Yeah, it’s big news out here. Apparently that douchebag has been screwing half of the—”

“Helping you?”

“Us, Amina, she’s helping us. She’s calling the clients personally. Talking about the value of art, the honor of honesty, the exclusivity of being included, blah blah blah. Honestly, who fucking cares what she’s saying? It’s working. We’ve gotten six out of ten permissions so far. We just need to—”

“No. Stop. I’m not going to do it.”

“Because of Jane?”

“Yes, because of Jane!”

“So take her out of it. What’s she going to do to you?”

“I am not getting fired over this!”

“Amina,” Dimple said, taking a breath. “You’re already fired.”

“That’s not true.” She knew even as she said it that it probably was. Dimple was a bully, not a liar, and more to the point, it felt inevitable. Didn’t she always know Jane was going to find out and fire her? Wasn’t it exactly what she had feared every time she got another print?

“She told her staff,” Dimple said. “Apparently there was some kind of shakedown over there this morning. She’s trying to figure out who else knew.”

Amina hunched over, riding out the fresh wave of guilt that crashed over her. Had Jane sniffed Jose out, found evidence of his prints? “Did she fire anyone else?”

“No idea.”

Her hand hurt. Amina let go of the bedpost, slowly unclenching her fingers. “She’s going to hate me.”

“She might. Then again, she might not, once she calms down. That’s why I’m saying take her out of the equation. A, because you’re already fired, and B, because you don’t actually know this is going to hurt her business. Neither does she. It’s just an assumption. I mean, let’s say this show goes up and absolutely nothing bad happens to the business. Do you still feel like shit?”

“That’s not the point.”

“Fine. Then why did you keep them at all?”

“What?”

“The prints. Why bother?”

“I … I don’t know.”

“Really? You don’t? You don’t know that you’ve been hoarding them in your closet — your closet, by the way, worst metaphor come to life — because you secretly wish other people could see them? Because I know that. It seems pretty obvious, actually. And why wouldn’t you? They’re fucking good. They’re your best work. I mean, listen, you can tell me that isn’t true, and that they were really just for your own viewing pleasure and you want things to go back to the way they were, with you pretending that your life doesn’t suck now that you’ve traded your ambition for America’s belated goddamn moral crisis, and you know what? I will give them back. I really will. I will give them back and you will just have to forgive me at some point in the future, because no matter how right I am, I’m actually not willing to have you hate me over this. Okay? But you have to tell me that that’s really what you want, not just some sad shit you like to play out because you weren’t loved enough as a kid or whatever.”

Amina was silent, lying back on the bed, the phone next to her head. Her cousin’s voice no longer filled her entire ear, just the space near it. It felt much less personal this way; the difference between getting blood drawn and getting a mosquito bite. It also allowed her the distance to admit that something was happening every time Dimple said best work. It felt like eating or fucking or otherwise having the right thing go in the right place. It felt primordially good.

“Who else’s permission did Lesley get?” she asked.

There was a pause, and then the sound of shuffling paper. “Okay, so the Lorbers, obviously. The passed-out grandma reminds me of Snow White in the coffin. Dara Lynn Rose is fine with us using the one where she looks like she’s going to kill her husband with the hairbrush. And Caitlin McCready signed off on her sisters wrestling over the bouquet. She wanted a signed printed copy, too, which is what I’m offering people if they seem hesitant. Um, what else … Oh! Lorraine Spurlock looking up at her father all moon-eyed. Is that as gross as I think it is?”

“It’s her stepfather.”

“Disgusting. But good for us. Lila Ward is fine with the ring bearer wetting his pants, the Abouselmans signed off on sad wheelchair grandpa on the dance floor, the Freedens are pretty close to releasing Dad handing the check to the caterers, and the Murphys haven’t decided on the best man pissing in the corner of the tent.”

“That’s eight.”

“Yeah.” Dimple took a breath. “Jane owns the puking bridesmaid. I thought she might want to share it. It looks better for the business, ultimately, if she’s on board.”

“Let me guess how that went over.”

“Mmm.”

“And the other?”

“Bobby McCloud.”

“No.”

“Yes. It’s the reference point. The catalyst. It makes everything that follows make sense.”

“But it’s not even a wedding photo.”

“No, it’s a Microsoft party-boat photo. It works, trust me. I will make it work.” Dimple shut what sounded like a filing cabinet. “Listen, we are going to retell that story, okay? Do you get that? This is your chance to set the record straight.”

She had switched tones again, imbuing her voice with the kind of self-importance that had served her well in the gallery community, those trusted to be the arbitrators of meaning when the artists behind the work had lost track of their own narratives. A pulse beat between Amina’s eyes. She eased it with her thumb.

“Ami? You there?”

“Kind of.”

“I’m sorry I didn’t call you this week,” Dimple said after a moment. “I got your messages and all this stuff was going down and I just wanted to get some of it sorted before I talked to you. Anyway, how are things? When are you coming home?”

It seemed impossible now to have a conversation about anything else. Amina took a deep breath, trying to gear up. She turned her head slightly, her father’s trophy sneaking into the periphery of her vision, and waited for the news to find its way out of her.

CHAPTER 3

“I think,” Jamie said that evening, his heart thundering under her ear, “you just raped me.”

They were on the floor in between the foyer and the living room. Overhead, ceiling fans spun in lazy circles.

Amina rolled off of him, onto the tile, where her underwear found her ankle and clung to it. “Really? You seemed like a willing participant.”

“No ma’am.” Jamie let his hand fall against her belly. “I swear to God, I just answered the door.”

Amina laughed. She hadn’t meant to come at him that way, so fast, so grabby. She turned her head to look at him. Dots of sweat lined his upper lip and hairline. He looked a little overwhelmed.

“Was it … too much?”

“No way. I just wasn’t expecting you.”

She sat up, found her shirt, and slipped it over her head. “So you want me to go? Maybe come back later?”

He cupped her calf, squeezed it. “Don’t be a freak.”

Amina smiled to show him she was not a freak. She stood up and stepped over him, walking toward the kitchen.

“Can I get you something to drink?” she asked. “You have seltzer and beer.”

“I don’t have beer, actually. We drank it all last night.”

“Do you have seltzer?”

“Yeah. You hungry? I could make us something.”

She did not want to eat, possibly for months, but Amina made the appropriate noises of enthusiasm. Ever since her parents had returned from the hospital, shrunken like old apples and unable to say anything beyond the fact that the results weren’t looking great, she had felt weirdly high. Not stoned, but toxic — the kind of high you get on gas fumes in your own garage.

Jamie walked down the hall toward his bedroom, taking off his shirt. “Just let me jump into the shower real quick.”

Amina got herself a glass of water and sat down at his kitchen table, an old red Formica job from the late sixties, red with a slightly lighter harlequin print. A single paper napkin lay on it, and she folded over an edge.

“So how have you been?” Jamie called from the bathroom, peeing. She shuddered. Pee talkers baffled her. How could they do that? Give you no opportunity to not listen?

“Fine. You?”

“Fine. Good, actually.”

He had a good view of the park from his kitchen, the tops of the trees, the lush, interlaced branches that seemed to hold the darkening sky up behind them. Amina tore a bit of the napkin off, listening to the screech of the shower turning on, and wondering what it meant about their future that Jamie showered with the door open. She was a closed-door showerer, a hoarder of steam and privacy, and for a minute it seemed like that meant something, then the sweet, rich smell of deodorant soap wafted down the hallway, filling her with a satisfaction so complete that even ripping up the napkin felt rewarding. Jamie turned off the shower and went to his room. A few minutes later he emerged, wearing the same shorts but otherwise clean in a way that made her want to get him dirty again.

“You’re getting tan.” She tapped the bridge of his nose, where the contrail left by sunglasses made his eyes look greener.

“I was out at the pool all day.”

“Oh, yeah? What pool do you go to?”

“Paige’s. She’d love to see you sometime, by the way.”

“Yeah.” She looked back down at the napkin, folding the remains into a tidy square. When she looked up, Jamie was studying her with a funny look.

“Is that weird or something?”

“Not, it’s not that, just that I’m …” There was no good finish to the sentence, Amina realized, uncomfortable, and nervous, and scared to see Paige as a grown-up not being feelings she wanted to share. “Hungry. I’m hungry. You’re making dinner?”

Jamie nodded slowly, as though unwilling to break from his thought. “Actually, I was thinking in the shower — what do you think about going to the Frontier instead?”

“I think you’re a genius.”

Of all the things Amina loved about the Frontier Restaurant (its tacky faux-barn exterior, the walls jumbled with bad desert paintings, the tortilla maker spouting fat gobs of flour like something out of a Mexican Willy Wonka’s), she loved the orange vinyl booths in the front the best. Right across from the ordering counter, they offered a steady view of the kitchen and the clientele of doctors and gallery owners and car salesmen and students and junkies who came in all day, every day.

“Who do you think gets the bigger socioeconomic cross section of Albuquerque: this place or the DMV?” she asked, stealing an onion ring off Jamie’s plate.

“Here for sure. You sure you don’t want to get more to eat?”

“I’m not that hungry.”

“You ate your dinner and half of mine.”

“I did not!”

“A third. Definitely a third.”

“Wow. Territorial. Did you count the actual onion rings I took?”

“Ninety-seven.” Under the table, Jamie’s knee brushed against hers; it felt hairy and slightly damp and strangely not off-putting. “So you’re going to do it?”

“I guess so.”

“You haven’t decided?”

“No, I’ve decided. I just feel funny about it.”

Jamie grabbed a stray onion ring and dragged it through ketchup. “When is the opening?”

“September.”

“Huh.”

“Yeah. Hopefully I can go.” She tried not to think of her parents’ faces as they emerged from the car that afternoon. They hadn’t been mad about Sanji showing up, or at least they hadn’t said as much to Amina, but then they hadn’t said much at all.

“How’s your dad doing?” Jamie asked.

Amina shook her head, not trusting herself to talk about it without getting upset.

“Any word on the prognosis?”

She shook her head again.

“So you don’t want to talk about it.”

“I just don’t have a lot to say about it.”

Jamie took a sip of soda. “Just using me for the sex, huh?”

“That’s not true,” Amina said, realizing too late that a serious answer turned it into a serious question. Jamie said nothing, rattling the ice around in his cup.

She took a breath. “It’s just my whole life, you know, I just thought doctors knew things the rest of us didn’t. Like they were privy to some metaphysical library or something.”

“Metaphysical library?”

“Just go with me here.”

“Are the books there written in invisible ink?”

“No, dummy, ghost blood.”

Jamie looked at her appreciatively. “Go on.”

“And now, I’m just so, uh”—she laughed to cover up the way her eyes had begun to tear up—“I’m just so fucking disappointed right now. I mean, seriously? Nobody knows anything. It’s all just tests and results and more tests, but where’s the part where they take you into a room and say He has two months to live or That was a close call, but it looks like he’s going to make it? Where is the part where I stop making deals with the universe like it’s some karmic pawnshop that will let him get well if I’m a better person?”

Jamie handed her a napkin, and she pressed it over her face, willing herself to pull it together.

“Shit,” she said. “I’m sorry. Are we making a scene?”

“Nope. Just you.”

She laughed and crumpled the napkin into a ball. “You were right, by the way. There were other things in the garden besides the jacket.”

“Yeah?”

She told him, careful to keep her tone even but watching his face like it was an emergency weather report. The keys, she explained, had been lost right before she came back home. She had no idea about the mango pickle. But the rest of the items were definitely for members of her family — the trophy for Ammachy (Thomas had always joked that he should have sent it to her), the album for Sunil, the shoes for Itty, and of course the jacket for Akhil.

“Wow,” Jamie said, looking more impressed than concerned. “So he’s seeing your brother, too.”

“I guess so. I don’t know. It’s sad.”

“Is it? Whoa, don’t give me that look, I’m just saying that it could be worse. At least he’s seeing people he loved.”

Amina looked at him. Really looked at him, at the light skein of wrinkles at the corners of his eyes and the little patch of stubble he’d missed by his sideburns and the unnerving way he was squinting at her like she was the one who had somehow overlooked the central truth about what was really happening. “Jamie Anderson, how did you of all people become such a Pollyanna?”

He picked up an onion ring, shoved it into his mouth whole. “Must have been the divorce.”

The family descended the next day. First came Raj, hurrying up the steps with pale blue rings stamped under his eyes and a cardboard box that smelled several kinds of delicious, then Sanji, huffing under a bright red cooler.

“Hello, baby,” she said, sticking out a cheek for Amina to kiss.

Bala came next, looking nervous and slightly corrosive in a bright yellow-green sari. She handed Amina a pack of store-bought cookies as Chacko parked the car.

“His brain? You’re sure about this?” She said it as though it were a bad decision Amina was in the middle of contemplating: You’re sure you want to drop out of college? You’re sure you want to give your father a tumor in his brain? “Because Sanji said she saw them yesterday and he seems fine, but then of course she said he’s been seeing things, so he must have been putting on a good show for her benefit, isn’t it?”

“He’s in the kitchen.” Amina motioned to the doorway. “Go see for yourself.”

Chacko inspected his way across the driveway, taking note of the encroaching yard like it was a traffic violation. He marched up the stairs and squeezed her shoulder before stepping inside.

In the kitchen, Kamala and Thomas pulled dish after dish out of Raj’s box, snapping and unsnapping lids.

“Chapati and beef and appam and stew?” Kamala frowned. “It’s too much. We don’t need.”

“Speak for yourself, woman.” Thomas pulled a chapati straight from the warming dish. “Between all your truffles and trifles, I haven’t had a normal meal in weeks.”

“You’ve had some nausea from the radiation?” Bala asked.

“Surprisingly little,” Thomas said.

“I’ll get you some beef.” Raj motioned to Amina for a spoon. “You can also have the stew, of course. I just thought the beef would be nice and rich in irons. I also made a tomato carrot salad, for vitamin C. It helps with the absorption, isn’t it?”

Thomas popped open another container. “My God! Samosas, too? You must have been cooking all night, Raj.”

“No, no, I just made a few things. I also brought a little homemade yogurt in case you’re having indigestion. Sanji says you’re thinking of starting chemotherapy?”

“Looking into it. Just spoon some salad, too, nah?”

“Excellent, yes, absolutely. Sanji, can you look in the cooler for the kichadi?”

“Ho ho!” Thomas looked more genuinely excited than Amina had seen him in weeks. “Yes, please, and thank you!”

“He should be eating only bland foods,” Chacko announced from the other side of the kitchen counter, where he had settled in. “Bland foods are better for nausea. Rice and curds, maybe a bit of dahl.”

“Kichadi!” Sanji held up a Tupperware.

“Actually, though, what you can eat differs from person to person.” Bala hovered uneasily in the doorway of the laundry room. “My sister with the breast cancer told me that everyone will say one thing or another about what you can eat and what you can do and how you will feel, but really it’s the individual body.”

“You have more plates?” Raj asked just as Amina was reaching for more. “Oh, good. Maybe get some bowls too, for the payasam.”

“Payasam!” Thomas crowed, and even Kamala had to smile.

Half an hour later they sat around the living room with plates that had been filled and emptied twice, the ladies and Chacko perched on the couches while Amina, Thomas, and Raj tucked themselves against stray couch cushions. Poor Raj. Coming down from whatever high had enabled him to cook thirteen separate dishes, he looked particularly spent, the crepey skin under his eyes pouching. Sanji squeezed his shoulder and leaned back into the couch.

“So then, I suppose we should all just take turns at the hospital?” she said.

“Hmm?” Bala fiddled with her bangles.

“I was just thinking one of us should always be with him.”

“I’ll be with him,” Kamala said.

“Of course, of course,” Sanji said. “I’m just saying that one of us should be there for you, too.”

“What me? Nothing is wrong with me!”

“Just to help,” Amina said, nodding to Sanji. “I think it’s a good idea, Ma. And you and I should take turns going, too.”

“And you like this Anyan George?” Chacko asked Thomas.

“Yes. Bright kid.”

“Never mind all that, can he handle this? I was a little surprised that you went with him over Rotter or Dugal.”

Thomas’s jaw tightened slightly. “I’ve shown my slides to Rotter as well; he agrees with everything Anyan has said and done so far.”

“And what about here?” Sanji asked. “At home? Things are manageable?”

There was a long silence as the Eapens took pains not to look at one another.

“We just mean if there’s something we can do—” Raj started.

“We’re fine,” Kamala said.

“And what about these hallucinations?” Chacko asked. “Are you having them regularly?”

Thomas hesitated, then nodded.

“And they’re primarily auditory or visual?”

Amina watched her father shift on the floor, as if something was poking into his back. “They are both.”

Chacko’s mouth puckered like he’d tasted something sour.

“What’s wrong with that?” Amina asked.

“It’s unusual to have both,” Chacko said. “The tumor is in the occipital lobe. As such, visual hallucinations are more common, but hearing things is highly unusual, unless it has spread to the—”

“We’re looking into that,” Thomas said quickly.

“It might also be bad spirits,” Kamala said. “What? It happens. Oh, don’t you look at me like that, Sanji Ramakrishna, this is a true and documented fact. You think all those monks in the sixteenth century were lying? Sometimes a toll in the body can be a portal to unwelcome forces.”

Amina sighed. “It’s a tumor, Ma. You saw the scan yourself.”

“No one is saying there is no tumor! I’m just saying that it is entirely possible that he’s being taken advantage of by dark forces pretending to be family. Why else would they be coming to see him? It’s not like they saw each other so much in real life.”

Thomas stood up, walking out of the room. “Anyone want something to drink?”

“Perhaps I was unclear.” Chacko frowned. “I did not mean to suggest that hallucinations are uncommon at all, Kamala, I merely mean that seeing and hearing things at the same time is unusual, although if the brain is seizing—”

“My sister had hallucinations!” Bala said, nodding earnestly. “Every night, she would dream of an old ayah we had when we were girls, the nasty one with the crooked fingers who used to pinch us.”

“That’s a dream, not a hallucination,” Kamala fumed.

“Can we get back to matters at hand?” Sanji bounced a little on the couch. “I think we should set up some sort of a schedule.”

The others did not hear the latch of the front door clicking open, nor did they notice, as Amina did, how the floor in the dining room lightened with a sweep of sun. She rose and muttered “Bathroom,” as if anyone was listening, and headed for the hall.

The front door was wide open, and through it, she could see her father standing in the driveway, looking down the tunnel of trees that rose up on either side of it like hands clasped in prayer. He looked small there, arms hanging loosely at his sides. He did not turn around as she approached, and for a moment she thought he might be seeing them again — Itty or Sunil or Akhil or whoever else might show up late on a Saturday afternoon, wanting to take a tour of the house. She reached for his dangling hand, surprised by the strength with which he grasped her back, the surety. He pulled her to him, his fingers entwining around her own until it hurt.

CHAPTER 4

“Hello, handsome. How are you doing?”

Thomas smiled at the dark-haired nurse who parted the curtains. “Maryann!”

“I tried to get out of working today when they told me you were coming.” She smiled, her full Hopi cheeks growing fuller, and kissed Thomas on the cheek before taking a look at the IV. “So what’s on the menu today? You started with Decadron?”

“Yup.”

“And how’d it go?”

“Fine. Slight head rush in the first thirty seconds or so, but I normalized.”

One week later, and at Thomas’s insistence, they were starting chemo. A few experimental case studies at MD Anderson had left him convinced that it might work, and although Anyan George had been insistent about the low probability of that, he’d ultimately given in.

The nurse looked at Amina. “Dad’s a real favorite around here, you know.”

Amina knew. In the two hours since they’d checked in, at least half a dozen nurses and a handful of doctors had already stopped by with enthusiastic smiles and far too many questions about the presumably safe subject of Amina’s life.

Maryann wrote something on her clipboard. “How is that arm feeling?”

“Good.”

“Cold?”

Thomas hesitated, then nodded.

She patted Thomas’s leg affectionately, sad under her smile in a way that made Amina both trust and fear her more than the others. “I’m going to get you a thermal pack. You nauseated yet?”

“It’s my first day, you goose.”

“Just testing.” She slipped back out of the curtain with a wink. “She’s one of the good ones,” Thomas said.

Amina nodded. He had said this about every nurse who stopped by.

Outside, the sharp incline of Central showed Albuquerque in strata: parking lots, billboards, apartment buildings, mountains.

“Is it weird being back here?” Amina asked. “At the hospital?”

“No. Not really. I thought it might be, but it’s nice actually.”

“Familiar?”

He smiled sadly. “It’s funny, you do something your whole life … and then just the other day I thought, What if I’ve touched my last brain? You get so used to it, you know, using your hands in a certain way.” He looked down at his own hands and flexed them, as if testing to see if they were really his. “How about you? How is work?”

“Oh, you know.” Amina shrugged. She hadn’t brought herself to tell either of her parents about Jane, though whether it was out of guilt or nervousness, she didn’t quite know. “It’s fine. Glad I’m finding work out here.”

“When is your next event?”

“Saturday. The Luceros’ son is getting married.”

“My God, that’s right. Am I supposed to go?”

“Only if you’re feeling up to it.”

Thomas nodded, looking down at the IV in his arm. He rubbed his shoulder and winced a little.

“Numbness,” he said before she could ask. “It’s normal. I’ll probably lose some sensation in my arms and legs.”

Amina stood up and walked to the window so he wouldn’t see her face. It was getting harder not to spiral these days, to hear one thing and think of the next and the next, until all that was left was a closet of her father’s sweaters and shoes.

“Are you in pain?” she asked.

“Not really. I’ve been lucky that way.”

“Right.” Small, furious tears sprang into the corners of her eyes.

“Come sit down, koche.”

She turned from the window and walked back to the bed. What was it about hospital beds that made everyone look like puppet versions of themselves? She knew her father wasn’t actually smaller than he’d been before the diagnosis, yet in the bed his diminishing felt palpable, like a sun setting without the beauty or relief. He put a hand on her arm. His fingers felt like ice.

“You doing okay?” he asked.

She nodded quickly.

“It can be hard, you know. The worrying.”

“Dad, please.”

“I’m just saying—”

“Can we talk about something else?” She sounded like a child and she knew it. Next to them, the drip beeped a few times.

Thomas took a breath. “How do you know when to take a picture?”

“What?”

“I always wonder. My pictures are terrible.”

Amina smiled. He was right. His pictures were the worst, full of missing limbs, double chins, and grimaces.

“It’s just practice.”

“No, not true. I spent one whole month practicing, and they got worse, not better.”

“What were you taking pictures of?”

“Your mother.”

“Well, that’s your problem. No one can get a good shot of Mom. She’s a pretty woman who makes ugly faces.”

“My God.” Thomas looked both dumbstruck and relieved. “You’re absolutely right.”

Amina rubbed his cold hands with her own. His palms were peeling.

“Do you ever think about moving back here?” he asked.

“Yeah, sure,” she said.

Thomas nodded, looking away so quickly that it took her a minute to understand that this had moved him, his mouth twitching as if he might cry.

“Okay, honey, let’s get this on you,” Maryann said, coming back through the curtain with the thermal pack and an extra blanket. Amina stood up, listening to the nurse coo at and cajole her father, expert at soothing the body’s indignities.

“Your father is too sick to come,” Kamala said the following Saturday. She stood by the doorway in Amina’s room looking a little sick herself, her hands smoothing and resmoothing the crimson-and-purple sari she had put on for the Lucero wedding.

“Is he throwing up again?” Amina asked.

“Nothing to throw up! He won’t eat!”

“That’s normal.” Amina had read the flyer the nurses had sent them home with so many times, she felt sure she could quote paragraphs at random. “He might not have an appetite for a week or so.”

“He’ll starve to death!”

“What about chicken broth?”

“Do you know how many chapatis your father can eat in one sitting?” Kamala looked around the room, as if daring the furniture to guess before announcing, “Eight!”

Amina counted rolls of film, packing them into her backpack. These midday weddings would kill her with their too bright, too flat light. Kamala took a step into the room.

“And now he’s yelling at me to go. Telling me all the hovering is making him nervous. What else should I do? Not check on him? Not bring him food when he hasn’t eaten for one whole day?”

“Maybe the smell of it is making him sicker.”

“The everything is making him sicker! What are we supposed to do about it? Should have just stuck to the radiation!”

Amina took a deep breath. “Give it time.”

“What is all this?” Kamala was looking at the things from the garden, which were still lined up on the desk and looking dustier by the day.

Amina sighed. “Yeah, I’ve been meaning to tell you. I found them in the garden. Near where the jacket had been. They were buried in the same bed. I dug it all up.”

Kamala moved forward slowly, leaning down to look at the jar of mango pickle, then the album. She touched the shoes briefly before picking up the bunch of keys. “He told me he’d lost those.”

Amina shrugged. “He probably thought he had.”

She flinched as her mother dropped the keys and cried out as if she had been cut, understanding too late that it was too much, and that some measure of refuge had been sought out and not found in Amina’s company. She moved hastily toward Kamala, hugging her rigid shoulders until she was gently rebuffed.

“You go,” Kamala said. “I’ll stay here with him.”

“No, Ma, come. He wants you to. And I have to. And it’s just down the road.”

“But someone should stay.”

“Prince Philip will stay.”

Her mother shook her head at this but smiled a little.

“It’s just for a few hours,” Amina said, suddenly feeling hopeful, like getting out of the house would somehow change what was going on inside it. “And he can call us if he needs us, right? Let’s just go.”

“Fine,” Kamala sighed, as if this was a war they had been waging for weeks instead of minutes. “Let’s go.”

The next morning Amina woke to a note.

Your father needs to eat.

It was written in her mother’s tiny, curly script and taped to the upstairs bathroom mirror with no further instruction. Amina went downstairs. Her parents’ room was empty, blinds raised, bed made.

“Dad?” she called. “Prince Philip?”

The kitchen was also empty, as was the living room. Amina poured herself a large glass of water and gulped it down, walking back to the laundry room. She found her father and the dog on a cot on the porch. Thomas lay like a plank, and over his lower legs, Prince Philip was trying valiantly to curl himself into a neat ball, his paws sliding over the edges. Sunlight streamed in, bleaching the walls and the tools and the piles of newspaper. The dog wagged its tail as Amina approached.

“Dad?”

Thomas’s eyes rolled slowly in his sockets, resting on her. He hadn’t been asleep.

“Hey.” She turned a chair around to face the cot, sat in it. “What’s up?”

He shrugged.

“You just wake up?” she asked.

Thomas shifted, prompting Prince Philip to rise and wobble off the cot.

“You want breakfast?” she asked.

Her father rolled onto one side, facing the wall opposite her. Prince Philip turned his head slightly, looking from father to daughter with canine nervousness. Poor dogs. All that intuition and no recourse.

“Dad?”

Thomas shook his head, muttering something. She leaned in closer. “What?”

“I did not ask you to come.”

“I know that. Mom left me a note.”

Thomas threw an arm over his head, blocking his ears. Prince Philip leaned in to sniff his armpit, and Thomas sprang up, grabbing his muzzle and shoving him away hard.

“Dad, stop! What are you—”

“I DON’T WANT YOU HERE!” Thomas shouted, rising up with his teeth bared, and Amina shot out of her chair, backing away fast. But Thomas was not looking at her. He was looking at the coatrack.

“Dad?”

“GET OUT.”

“Who are you talking to?”

Thomas stared furiously at the coats, dragging his eyes from them to Amina as if they were conspiring together.

“Dad? Daddy?”

Thomas flinched. Dropped his head in his hands. Rocked back and forth with his arms wound tight around him. When Amina touched his shoulder, he shuddered.

“What can I do?” Amina asked, trying to hold his rounded shoulders, his flinching spine. “What helps?”

Her father shook his head.

Two nights later, lured by the scent of coriander and ginger, Thomas walked into the kitchen looking slightly puffy but determined. Curls matted around his head in tufts, and his raggy blue robe exposed two knees that looked only slightly larger than another man’s Adam’s apple.

“Kam—” he began, and his wife set a plate of chicken curry in front of him before he could finish. Two chapatis, one nice drumstick, and a little bit of curds later, he motioned for seconds.

“You going to eat?” he asked Amina between bites.

“Not yet.”

It was only six-thirty. She watched her father gnaw the flesh from the bone, the recent loss of weight making him look more like an animal. Human bones devouring chicken bones. Meat eating meat.

Kamala set down a plate in front of her. She had another plate for herself and a foreboding look on her face, as if the only thing standing between Thomas and starvation was everybody eating chicken curry at once. Amina picked up a chapati without a word, and for the first time since the diagnosis, the Eapens enjoyed a regular dinner alone together, parsing the meat and the bread into smaller and smaller portions until they were sweeping their fingers over clean porcelain.

“Maybe I’ll take a shower,” Thomas said, but he made no move to leave the kitchen. He looked around with the heady gaze of a man stumbling home from a walkabout. “So what’s been going on? Any news?”

You’ve been sick. You thought the coatrack was a person. Amina shrugged. “Not much.”

“The Luceros’ son got married,” Kamala offered.

“Ah, yes, how was it?”

“Awful. Food was terrible. Bride was fat.”

“Ma!”

“What? It’s true.”

“She was pregnant!”

“Well, she was fat, too,” Kamala said, licking the pads of her fingers clean like a cat, and Thomas looked amused.

“What else?” he asked.

“I’m having a show,” Amina said, and watched as the surprise prismed both her parents’ faces. “Or, well, Dimple is. Dimple’s gallery is showing my work.”

“Wow!” Thomas smiled weakly. “Will people see it?”

“That’s the idea.”

“When?” Kamala asked.

“It’s in September. I’ll probably head back for the weekend or something.”

“Good for you. Excellent, excellent.” Thomas squinted at her like he was seeing her in the future, when she’d finally become the person he always knew she’d be. “What photos? Any we’ve seen?”

“Not really, no. Some newer stuff. Mostly weird moments at weddings.”

“Jane must be so proud.”

Amina nodded. Sure. Why not?

Thomas stood up, uncurling his spine slowly, and picked up his plate.

“I’ve got it.” Kamala reached for it. “You go take that shower. I put a stool inside in case you need it.”

“Pshht! I’m not an invalid, woman.”

“I know that. It’s only for just in cases.” She smiled shyly at him, sweetly, Amina thought, filled with an eagerness to reassure him that there was no frailty she couldn’t forget, no action she couldn’t rewrite, and it occurred to Amina that there was never going to be a good time to talk about what was going on.

“I found a bunch of your things in the garden,” she said.

“You want rasmalai for dessert?” Kamala asked, shooting her a look.

“What things?” Thomas asked.

Amina told him, feeling bad about the way his eyes dropped to the brick floor, the way he reached for the counter, looking newly nauseated. He sat back down heavily.

“You don’t remember putting them there?” Amina asked.

“No.”

“Doesn’t matter,” Kamala said. “Nobody cares anyway.”

“None of it?”

He looked at her uneasily. “Not really.”

“I thought you had maybe left the shoes for Itty.”

“Don’t be an idiot!” Kamala huffed. She snatched Amina’s plate away, taking it back to the sink. Thomas looked at her carefully. “That’s who you were seeing the other, day, right?” Amina asked. Her father’s brow knotted, as if he was trying to locate his own memory. After a long moment, he nodded.

“And the trophy was for Ammachy?”

“Amina,” Kamala called over her shoulder. “Leave it.”

“I just, I don’t want you to feel like you can’t talk about it,” Amina said. “You’re seeing things. You can’t help it. I don’t know why we have to be so weird about it.”

“No one is being weird! Who is being weird?”

“You are, Ma.”

With surprising force, Kamala lifted a plate above her head and threw it. It shattered in the sink, releasing a live, buzzing silence. Amina watched her mother’s small body hunch over, hands clutching the edges of the sink like she would lift the whole thing and slam it down if she could.

“Itty asked, so I gave them,” Thomas said.

Amina nodded calmly, trying to keep her face from registering any hint of worry, but something in her chest bunched up on itself, like a cat being cornered. From her periphery, she saw Kamala bend into the sink and begin picking up the pieces, which scritched against one another like beetle shells.

“Did Ammachy ask for the trophy?”

“No,” Thomas said, looking uncomfortable. “I just thought she would like it.”

“And the album?”

“That was for Sunil when he …” Thomas looked helplessly at the counter.

“He what?”

“He wanted to hear it.”

It wasn’t stupid to think that talking would make things better. Weren’t there entire schools of psychology dedicated to that premise? Wasn’t the television talk show confessional born from it? Still, as Thomas leaned in and told Amina about his last few months (haltingly at first, but then faster and more freely, as if each word were water carving out a bigger channel from brain to mouth), as he spoke about not only a brief encounter with Derrick Hanson, but whole weeks of Itty, Sunil, Ammachy, and even Divya (“My God, was she always such a hand wringer?”), she found herself feeling distinctly worse.

Everyone was exactly as they had been before, her father said, no kinder, no better, no more enlightened. They only came to him one at a time. They mostly wanted to see things, like the house or the tools or the supermarket. They looked like they had on the best day of their life.

“Like the best they’ve ever looked?”

“No. Exactly how they looked on their favorite day. Same age. Same clothes.”

But how could there be one favorite day in a whole lifetime? Amina did not ask, but her father shrugged anyway, as if to say, Who knows how these things work? And for a minute she felt the pull of that logic as keenly as a hand.

“Enough,” Kamala said from the back of the kitchen, her face striped with tears.

“Ma.”

“Don’t you ‘Ma’ me. You stop this talk right now.”

“I just think we should—”

“You’ll bring the devil into this home!”

“We’re just talking about what’s happening. There’s nothing wrong with that.”

“Yes, yes, of course, Miss Psychology Degree! Miss Freudian Lips! Because you know what’s best, right? Yes, let’s dig it all up, get it out in the opening!”

“Okay,” Thomas said quietly. “It’s fine. Let’s just—”

“Idiots! You don’t meddle with these things! You don’t bring them in the house. You don’t think they wait for tumors and cancers and whatever else? Of course they do! Weak minds are always the target!” Amina glared at her mother. “Like yours?”

“Hey!” Thomas barked, but it was too late. Kamala covered her mouth with her hand and then turned and left the kitchen. A few seconds later the master bedroom door slammed, sending a quiver through the house.

Amina looked back at her father, who had slumped over the counter. “She didn’t mean that, Dad. She’s just—”

“Don’t you ever talk to your mother that way.”

Her face flared hotly. “I was just trying to—”

“This is hard on her.”

“It’s hard on everyone!”

“She’s your mother.”

Amina looked down at the counter, sullen and flustered. She never knew what would trigger Thomas’s loyalty toward Kamala, but whenever it happened, it was unshakeable, as if all his mishandlings could be vindicated in one act of allegiance.

“Fine,” she said.

Her father’s shoulders dropped a little. He looked unhappily at the kitchen counter.

“What about the jacket?” Amina asked.

Thomas did not say anything. The lines in his face deepened into shadows.

“Did Akhil want it?”

“No.”

“Did you just give it to him?”

“I haven’t seen him.”

Amina idled into silence, surprised by the answer and the sudden blow of disappointment that came with it. “But then why did you—”

“I have no idea.”

“But it was in the garden with the rest!”

“I know.”

“Then why—”

“Amina, I don’t know.” He was angry — angry about the way she’d spoken to Kamala, but now also about this, as if Amina had betrayed him by even thinking any of it meant anything. And hadn’t she? Amina watched her father across the white countertop, pained by her own transparency, her need for the fog that was closing in around them to mean something.

Thomas laid his head down on the counter, his pate shining through a corona of curls. He breathed slowly and deeply, and Amina reached out, pressing her fingers to the stubbly spot where the hair from his biopsy was growing back in. How far were they from the tumor? She’d always had a healthy skepticism about shamans and the like, but lately, the conviction that she might somehow will the cancer away with the right amount of desire and supplication was hard to shake.

“They’re going, anyway,” her father said, his voice soft, begrudging.

“What?”

“The visions. With the chemo. I see them less.”

“Really?”

He nodded, his head bobbing under her hand, and Amina said nothing, afraid of her own hope, of leaning too hard on any hint that he might be getting better. Instead she laid her head next to his on the counter, sliding forward until they were skull to skull.

CHAPTER 5

That night Jamie and Amina sipped wine at a new place in the Northeast Heights. Dark and cavernous, it boasted stools that looked like slabs of ice, an impressively large wine list, and an inversely diminutive bartender (“Let me know if I can help,” she’d offered, with a face that said she couldn’t possibly). On either side of them, Albuquerque’s moneyed set watched one another’s jewelry catch the light. The bar menus, rich cream card stock embossed with a font so modern it looked like a digital sneeze, suggested things like “rice paper crab” and “foam of duck.”

“What are we doing here again?” Amina asked, trying and failing to sit comfortably.

“Risking everything to save innocent lives.” Jamie handed her an errant flyer — a lone misstep of cheap pink Kinko’s paper. Come see us for happy hour! it read. Watch the sun set in a symphony of color! “I don’t know, I thought maybe we should mix it up with people our age.”

“These people are our age?”

“Does that make you feel old?”

“It makes me feel poor.”

The bartender came by again, a smile taped to her face. “Any questions?”

“What’s a symphony of color?” Jamie asked. He held up the flyer.

She didn’t even look at it. “We have a really nice sunset.”

“Ah, thanks. Do you also have Budweiser?”

“We only have Sierra Nevada on tap.”

“We’ll take two,” Amina said.

An hour and two beers apiece later, they were grinning. They were also talking too loudly. Amina knew this from the way the bartender was pointedly avoiding them. But who cared? She was on a date with Jamie Anderson. He smelled like something she wanted to eat.

“So I went to Mesa Prep today,” Amina said.

“Oh yeah? What for?”

“I don’t know. I wanted to take pictures of it. Anyway, I couldn’t get in.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean they literally wouldn’t let me in. The guard outside.”

“Guard? Wait, that little booth at the gate is actually manned by someone?”

“Yeah!”

“No way!” Jamie said. “I’ve passed it a couple of times. I just thought it was for, I don’t know, show or something. They have real guards?”

“Ninjas.” Amina spat out the word.

Jamie laughed and took a long tug of beer.

“No, really. That’s what they’re called. Ninja Security. That’s what the guy’s pocket said. There are, like, twenty-five of them on campus. Apparently they will stop anyone who doesn’t have an appointment or a press pass.”

Jamie choked a little. “Wait, he asked if you had a press pass?”

“Yes. Because I had my camera.”

“But you were a student!”

“That’s what I said!”

“That’s bullshit! It’s not like you’re some … some”—Jamie’s hand gestured furiously in the air—“delinquent!”

“Sha!”

“I mean, you paid to go to school there for, like, years! And they treat you like a criminal?”

“Insulting.” Amina nodded. “Criminal.”

“So did you complain to someone?”

“I couldn’t get in to complain to anyone!”

“Fascists!” He hit the bar with a force. The bartender made a face at another one of the patrons. “I mean, what, so now it’s some kind of dictatorship? Ninjas?”

“Ninjas,” Amina said.

“Fuck them.” He set his beer down on the bar. “We’re going in.”

“Totally.”

Jamie waved to the bartender. “Hey, can we settle up?”

“Wait, now? You want to drive all the way to Mesa now?”

“We can hop that fence in, like, two seconds. And then we’ll pretty much be on the mesa in the dark until we get to the buildings.”

Amina imagined them storming across the marble-floored admissions office and threw her head back, laughing. The bartender smacked down their bill.

“I’m fucking serious!” Jamie glanced at it and set two twenties down. “We’re going to take our school back.”

Amina did not move.

“What, you’re scared of the ninjas?”

She nodded. She was totally scared of the ninjas, whom she had imagined as short and quick and Japanese despite Albuquerque’s notably small Asian population.

“Come on, that campus is huge! Forty acres, and most of it just barren mesa! How many of them can there be?”

“Twenty-five.”

“So we cut in through a random section of the fence across from that Chinese place — what’s it called? — the Great Wall. Yeah. And we stay away from the booth entirely. Then we’re golden.”

“Jamie.” She put a hand on his arm.

“Amina.” He pulled it to his chest.

“This isn’t a good idea.”

“It’s the best idea.”

“What if we get caught?”

“Then we explain to them that we used to go there and decided to take a harmless walk and I guaran-fucking-tee you they will not want to press charges against their own alumni, no matter how they deal with people at the gate. I mean, c’mon. I’m a UNM professor. They want to mess with that?”

“Oooh,” Amina laughed despite her misgivings. “Are you going to bring the full wrath of your department down on them?”

“I might.” Jamie dropped his voice a notch. “Or I could just bring the wrath of my department down on you.”

“What does that even mean?”

“No idea. Finish your beer already.”

She didn’t have to go. She knew this. But there was something really lovely about the smell of hops rising in the air, about Jamie’s wincing smile and yellow T-shirt, about how close her hand was to his heart.

She took a last gulp and slid off the bar stool. “Let’s go.”

Twenty minutes later they sat in Jamie’s car, under the yellow glow of the Great Wall.

“Okay,” he whispered, like they were already inside the Mesa Prep gates. He pointed to the far north section of the fence. “So I’m thinking we head to the north corner, hop over that big brick thing, and run through the mesa until we hit the parking lots.”

“Run through all that mesa? In the dark?”

“Thing is, we’ve got to avoid the security house and the spot where traffic slows, so I think the only way to do this is take the natural route.”

“Cactus,” Amina reminded him. “Rattlesnakes.”

Jamie leaned over her, opening the glove box with a smile. “Flashlight,” he said, handing her the cold metal. “I’ve got two. And I’ve got a first-aid kit in the car.”

“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.”

“What?”

“The amount of stuff you keep in your car! It’s got to mean something. Savior complex? Abandonment issues?”

“Quit stalling.”

Amina opened her door, popping out into the night. Jamie followed. They looked across the street. The wall seemed a little sturdier without the remove of the windshield, a little meaner. It was a combination of iron railing and thick brick posts, the kind of thing well suited to military schools and southern graveyards. Amina started doing jumping jacks.

“What are you doing?”

“Warming up.”

“Oh. Right.” Jamie followed her lead. They did twenty together and stopped, breathing hard.

Jamie leaned into a lunge. “Remember to stretch your hams and quads.”

Amina nodded, lunging. “And we should do our shoulders after this.”

Thirty seconds later Jamie was chicken winging his arms with vigor, while Amina pulled her elbows across her chest.

“You ready?” Jamie asked.

Amina looked across the road to the darkened mesa surrounding the school. “Absolutely.”

Ten minutes later they panted outside the gate, hands and forearms and shins surprisingly banged up for what was supposed to be an easy hurdle. Amina spat to the side while Jamie paced and coughed.

“Okay,” Jamie said, frowning down at his scratched palms. “Okay, so maybe not? Maybe we just quit while we’re ahead?”

Amina shook her head. No, they would not be giver-uppers in the face of Mesa Preparatory. Now she wanted this.

“I mean, it’s bigger than we thought, right?” he said, motioning to the gate. “Definitely bigger than what you see from the road. So there’s that.”

“You are simply capable of more,” she told Jamie, putting a foot at the base of the ironwork. “Here, give me a boost.”

Jamie held his hand out.

“No, dummy, like …” Amina wove her fingers together, hunched down.

“What am I, a mind reader?” Jamie leaned down.

“I mean, it’s a boost. People know how to give a boost.” Amina shoved up and over, holding on unsteadily to the iron railing. And then suddenly she was falling, the spade points receding. She landed on her ass with a thud.

Jamie smiled at her through the fence. “Nice.”

“At least I got over.”

“Hold on.” He followed her lead, looking decidedly nervous as his groin skimmed the iron points. He lowered himself with shaking biceps and grinned at her.

“We’re in.”

Amina looked at the blank expanse of mesa in front of them, the wooly darkness tinged brown by the edges of sagebrush catching light from the road.

“Don’t worry. If there are any snakes here, they’ve heard us and they’re moving out,” Jamie assured her.

“You’re not going to lay any bullshit on me about them being more scared of us than we are of them, are you? Because I know for a fact that I’m the scaredest animal out here.”

Jamie squeezed her hand and they walked forward. On their right, the campus was clearly visible, rows of lights blazing down the cement walkways and bricked arches. On their left lay the football field, ringed by the track and bordered on one side by a small mound of built-in stadium stands.

“Where are we going?”

“Stadium.” Jamie pointed.

“What about the ninjas?”

“I mean, it’s a football field. What is anyone really going to do to it? Besides, the lights aren’t on, so it’s not like we’d be so easy to see.”

They walked forward for what seemed like fifteen minutes, though of course it could not have been. She followed Jamie, trying to avoid the darkest shadows, until he stopped suddenly, grabbing her arm.

“Shh!”

“What?”

Amina froze, listening. Far away, a car honked at another. Beside her Jamie slowly squatted, holding his finger over his lips. She followed, her heart pounding.

“I thought I heard someone,” Jamie whispered after a moment.

“A ninja?” Amina looked around, eyes wide.

“I don’t know. What do ninjas sound like?”

“Padded footsteps. Chinese stars.”

“It was totally a ninja.”

She laughed silently, terrified of the ninjas and of pissing herself. Jamie waited a few moments, then rose slowly to standing and put out his hand, pulling her up. They looked across the road to the stadium, which rose into the black night like a temple, the empty metal benches watching nothing.

“Beautiful,” Jamie said.

They split a joint on the grass, staring up at the place the stars would have been if there wasn’t a weird, brownish haze clouding the night. The grass was itchier than Amina would have liked, and she needed to pee, but other than that, the campus was bizarrely peaceful, full of the hypnotic symmetry found on campuses everywhere — trees and lampposts and benches evenly spaced. She exhaled a tiny cloud, and it seemed to float right up into the pollution, where it would join gaseous and particle pollutants and come back down as acid rain in some northwestern lake, if that’s how that worked. Was that how that worked?

“Who did you have for chemistry?” She handed the joint back.

“Brazier. Who did you have?”

“Wills.”

“Huh.” Jamie took a long pull. “Why?”

Amina shrugged, not quite sure what she had asked, much less why. She looked over at Jamie, trying to gauge if it was important, but there was a little black seed of something caught in his teeth. She wanted to tell him, but it felt like too much work.

“Remember that night at the dance?” he asked. “You looked so hot.”

Amina smiled in the dark, deeply pleased in a way that made it seem like feminism had never existed. “Yeah, right.”

“I was dying to do this with you.”

“Get me high?”

“No, dummy. Get you next to me.”

“Bullshit. You barely looked at me.”

“That was just part of my moves, man. Play it cool.” Jamie sucked his teeth. “I went to that stupid dance looking for you.”

“You did?” Amina sat up, steadying herself. She peered down at him, trying to see if he was fucking with her. “Are you fucking with me?”

“You think I wanted to be there?”

“Aw, Jamie,” she said, more touched than she knew what to do with. She rubbed his forehead, the little patch between the edge of his eyebrow and hairline that she’d grown especially fond of, and his hand slid under her shirt.

“Hold on a sec.” She stood up and waited for the world to recalibrate so she could walk properly.

“Where are you going?”

“Behind the bleachers to pee.”

Jamie raised his head, assessing the dark hill that held the built-in bleachers. “All the way over there? Just squat here.”

“I’m not peeing in front of you.”

“It’s not a huge deal or something.”

“Yes it is. It’s a commitment.”

“What?” Jamie laughed. “What are you talking about?”

“You’ve been married.”

“What does that have to do with it?”

She did not know, really, but she knew it had something to do with peeing while talking, and showering with the door open, and being optimistic in a way she had never been. Maybe someday his easiness would rub off on her. Maybe someday she’d even become the kind of woman who could hunker down in front of him, but today was not that day. “Be right back.”

She walked across the grass and then the track and then to a little side path that led to the dirt parking lot behind the bleachers. As she rounded the corner and the field disappeared behind her, her skin tingled. It was all patches of light and dark back there. A shaggy ring of piñon trees mostly sheltered her from the bright lights of the parking lot, but the occasional patch of ground glowed eerily, like sun dappling the bottom of a lake. Amina stopped, dropped her pants, and squatted.

Hank Franken. Every time she pissed in the open air, she thought about the boy’s weird, freckled face, teeth that seemed to always be gnashing. Senior year, Hank Franken had sat on a cactus trying to take a shit at a mesa kegger. They had heard his screams from far away, and then the cries with each step as he finally emerged into the ring of taillights, pants mid-thigh, dick cupped in his hand, begging someone to pull the needles out. Had someone pulled the needles out? Amina stood up, pulled up her pants.

Someone was smoking a cigarette. It took a moment for Amina to realize this, and another to realize that that was a scary thing, the hair on her arms and neck rising all at once. Whoever it was, was close. Amina’s eyes zigzagged through the dark, straining. Was it a ninja? Was he watching her? She heard a small click behind her and turned around slowly, her heart seizing as an orange ember moved through the air a few feet back. Her throat went dry. Just as she felt herself tipping into a quiet, annihilating panic, the smoker took a drag of the cigarette, and the orange halo of light revealed a face so familiar that the night itself seemed to suck in sharply around her, every bit of oxygen rushing toward the flame.

He looked the same. The exact same, his cheekbones stretched into the wide arcs that had risen after the Big Sleep. The glow from the cigarette faded, leaving a light-green smudge against the night.

He was walking toward her. Amina understood this in some paralyzed corner of her brain, the same part that had watched countless glasses slip through her hands, plates shatter on the floor, car crashes occur in neighboring lanes, and just as she had held still in all of those instances, convinced that the damage was too obvious to actually happen, she held still now. Patches of light caught his jeans, his T-shirt, and then he was walking past her, toward the trees.

Amina turned around, hot and chattering. Wait.

She could not speak. He did not wait. Akhil parted the branches and walked toward the bright lights of the main campus.

CHAPTER 6

They were running fast across the mesa, sand flooding into their shoes, sagebrush and ditchweed tearing at their calves and ankles.

“Hold on!” Jamie yelled after her.

Amina felt his hand grasping for her shoulder and jerked away. He hadn’t said a word as she’d come bolting back from the bleachers. By the time she’d hit the main road out of the campus, he was sprinting alongside her, his long strides keeping pace with her frantic ones.

“Amina, hold the fuck on!” He grabbed her hard this time, yanking her to a stop. “We’re safe. No one’s following us, I swear.”

Amina wriggled away from him. Up in the distance, the spaded tips of the iron fence had just come into view, and she juddered toward it, loosely aware that something was not right with her ankle. She was shaking.

“Hey.” Jamie touched her shoulder again lightly. “Hey, are you okay?”

She was not okay. Her ankle felt like it had a pencil lodged in it. Amina stopped.

“What happened? Was it a ninja?” Jamie asked.

Amina shook her head, her brother’s face rushing to her like wind through an open door. She covered her face with her hands. A rasping noise came from her throat, and Jamie circled her in his arms, scrunching down to mitigate his height. He was smoothing her hair back in small repetitive movements, the kind designed to soothe cats and babies.

“What happened?”

She shook her head. She wiped her face on her arm, embarrassed and desperately in need of a tissue. “Let’s just go.”

The drive home was silent. Jamie had insisted on driving her there, on helping her get her car the next day, but now, as the quiet stretched out between them, Amina regretted letting him. To be fair, he had tried to start several conversations, even trying to joke, but her inability to offer back a single word had sapped him, and they sat next to each other in the car like stones thrown together at the bottom of a pond. The car plummeted from the mesa into the valley, city blocks disappearing into the dark, smooth acreage of farmland. Soon they were winding down Corrales Road, signs for horse riders and cattle crossings flashing past them.

“Here,” she said, and Jamie turned off of the main road onto a shorter road. She directed him over the ditch, to the dirt road.

“Can you drive to the end?” she asked.

“What?”

“Of this road. Please drive to the end.”

They cruised past the entrance to her driveway, the road lit yellow and dusty in front of them. Jamie rolled to a stop at the dead end. He switched off the engine but kept the lights on, and they watched grasshoppers comet in and out of the dark. His shoulders had hitched up high around his ears like he was bracing against a blow.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“Are you okay?”

She nodded but her eyes burned.

“What happened?”

“I think I just got too high.”

The wall of ditchweed wavered in front of them, a dark curtain of fronds and bugs that led to the water.

“Sure,” he said, sounding unconvinced. She reached for him. She surprised him and his head reared back slightly as her fingers moved to the corner of his mouth, the meat of his lip.

“Listen,” he started, in the gentle voice of easy letdowns, and she leaned forward, feeling his mouth warm and still against hers. She kissed his top lip, and then, when he did not respond, his lower lip, sucking it gently. Jamie did not kiss her back, but he did not stop her either, and Amina leaned in a little more, a flash of pain slicing in her ankle as she tasted the beer and salt on him. He pulled away.

She kissed his jaw. Her fingers found the back of his neck, and she pressed it toward her, scared that he would stop her. She did not want to be stopped. Her hand ran along his thigh, his crotch, the warm Braille of his inseam, and she was surprised by how suddenly he moved then, one hand clamping against her neck, the other finding her nipple with a sureness that pulled the air from her lungs. He shifted, coming at her now, his back rising up. Amina reached for the door handle behind her. She stepped out into the swampy air, her legs jittering as she walked to the back of the car and opened the hatchback.

“Come on.”

He did not move.

“Please,” she said.

His door opened and she slid into the car, kicking off her shoes in the dark. He slid in next to her, and the car bounced lightly with his weight. She scooted down, lifting his shirt to kiss the hairless patch of skin above his hip bone. She pulled the edge of his boxers and inhaled the root-deep smell of him.

“Wait.”

She did not want to wait. His cock was a lovely weight, warm and solid and as reassuring in the dark as a flashlight.

“Amina, wait.”

She put it in her mouth.

“Fuck.” His hands were in her hair, cradling her skull, pushing her down farther as his hips rocked forward. He tasted like the beach, like relief.

She rolled over to pull her shirt off, wriggling out of her shorts and underwear in the dark. She could feel his eyes on her as she straddled him, ignoring the burst of pain in her knees. His eyes were glassy slits as she rose in the dark and sank down again. One of his hands grabbed her collarbone; the other moved between her legs. She leaned into him until she could not breathe.

“Come,” he said, and she did, easy like that, like she was a bomb waiting to go off.

Afterward, she lay her head against the tight pillow of his biceps, the little beats of aftershock pulsing through her.

“You scared me,” Jamie finally said with a soft laugh. Her forehead pressed against his throat so that his words hummed through her brain. “You came running out of there so fast, I thought, Someone is trying to fucking kill her. Like I was going to have to fight.”

He rolled over a little bit, and Amina’s ear flattened against his shoulder. For a minute she imagined telling him that she’d seen Akhil behind the bleachers, that he looked like he did after the Big Sleep, but Jamie’s hand found her cheek, rubbing it lightly in a way that felt both proprietary and absent, and she realized that what had started as an effort to reclaim him, to bring the night back snug around the two of them and huddle under it like a blanket, was not working.

She did not feel closer to Jamie now. She did not feel the slaking she had come to associate with having sex with him, that full-body release. Instead, she felt like a traitor. The car’s windows pressed in around them like eyes, and Amina had the distinct feeling of being watched as she lay there, of being judged. The Akhil sighting (which, as her high wore off, was starting to feel less like a visit from the supernatural and more like a kick from her own subconscious) had thrown a door open, allowing for a world in which she could be found disloyal by some version of her brother that had stayed stuck at Mesa Preparatory for all eternity, while the rest of them — Paige, Jamie, Amina — sauntered off into a bright, mortal future.

“I don’t know if I can see Paige yet,” Amina said.

Jamie stayed silent for so long, she would have thought he hadn’t heard her if his breathing had not suddenly grown shallow.

“So don’t,” he finally said.

“I mean, what am I even supposed to say to her?”

“Jesus, Amina.” Her head slid to the scratchy carpet as he sat up. “Can we not talk about my sister right now?”

“I thought you wanted to talk,” she said, embarrassed by the feminine needle in her voice. She looked at the upholstered ceiling, while he shoved his legs back into his boxers.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I just thought it was important, maybe, to tell you.”

“Where are my shorts?”

“Here.” She lifted her leg, dug them out from under her.

“Thanks.” He put them on awkwardly, rolling on one ass cheek, then the other. Amina sat up. “I can walk home from here, if you want.”

“That’s not what I want.” He looked around, finding his sneakers and shoving his feet into them. “You always do this. You get quiet and then pick a fight with me and then try to leave.”

“Always?” Her face prickled with heat. “Define always.”

“I mean, what is this shit? Is it so hard to just tell people what’s going on? ‘Jamie, I’m sad.’ ‘Jamie, going to Mesa was the worst idea ever.’ ‘Jamie, the Paige and Akhil thing is still weird for me.’ Is that so hard?”

“Jamie, you’re being a dick.”

His face tightened into a scowl.

Amina watched him carefully, her heart rabbiting around. “It isn’t weird for you?”

“Honestly, I don’t think about it that much anymore. All of that stuff happened a really long time ago. They were just kids.”

Amina nodded, his words turning over in her head like foreign currency, valuable someplace else. Just kids. Akhil was only ever a kid, she wanted to say; he would never be anything but a kid, but the grief behind this felt too obvious to let out, too tidal and self-indulgent.

“What happened to you back there?” Jamie asked, not unkindly.

Amina’s face burned. “I don’t know.”

He took her hand, placing it in the damp patch of hair between his ribs, the one that reminded her of dogs and loyalty and protection, and she understood suddenly that she was falling in love with him. He was good, that seemed obvious enough, but there was more there, too, the way in which he felt uniquely hers, cut rough from some long-ago place and brought to her, something that she hadn’t allowed herself to miss until it had come back. And now what? Now what was she supposed to do with it? She felt his heart tapping lightly against the back of her hand and shut her eyes until that tiny pulse filled the space between them.

CHAPTER 7

Something was wrong with her ankle. The next morning, as Kamala unceremoniously banged open her bedroom door, raised the blinds, and pulled down the blanket, Amina let out a fractured gasp.

“No,” she groaned.

“Yes.” Kamala opened the dresser and threw a clean pair of underwear at her head. “And hurry up. Your father thinks something is wrong. He’s getting a scan this morning.”

Amina sat up gingerly, staring at the bulbous knob attached to her foot. “What?”

“He wants us to meet him at Anyan’s.”

Ten minutes and some hobbling later they sped down Corrales Road, the air conditioner blasting dust motes down their tracheas. Amina sat forward, smothered by a film of beer and sex and weed. She cracked a window, leaning toward it like a dog.

“Air conditioner is on,” Kamala snapped.

“I feel funny.”

“Oh, so now you’re sick?”

“Not exactly.”

Her mother looked at her disapprovingly. “I would have woken you at seven, but your father wouldn’t let me.”

“Thank God.”

“No thanking! Here this poor fellow is up all night tossing in bed, and now he has to go to the hospital alone!”

“Ma,” she said in a warning tone, and her mother fell silent, grinding the truck into a lower gear as they approached an intersection.

Amina shifted and the pain shifted with her, moving from her ankle to a small flare of guilt between her ribs. “What do you mean, he thinks something is wrong?”

“He thinks something is wrong! Plain English! He’s getting a scan!”

“Is he feeling something new?”

“How should I know? You think I am sitting there like some Diane Sawyers as he gets ready and goes? No! I am handing him one egg sandwich!” Her mother glanced sidelong at her but then turned, her whole face suddenly looking her up and down.

“What.” Amina glared back.

“Nothing.” On the corner, a few kids waved banners for a car wash, pointing excited sponges their way. “You were out with a boy? This friend from before?”

“Yes.”

Kamala’s gold bracelets clinked against one another as the light turned green, as they motored by the kids. “So bring him to dinner.”

“What?”

“To dinner. At the house.”

Amina looked out the window to the parched west mesa hills. Her feelings from the night before felt like something borrowed from a dream; they might vanish if exposed to scrutiny. “I don’t know.”

“Why not?”

Amina shook her head. “I’m not sure if he’s quite there yet,” she lied.

“Oh, koche, you know,” her mother said soothingly, but stopped.

“What?”

“No, no, nothing.”

“No, what were you going to say?”

Her mother looked at her, seeming to see right through her skin to the uncertainty inside. She tucked a strand of hair behind Amina’s ear.

“There’s a brush in my purse,” she said.

Dr. George’s waiting room rang with laughter. The receptionist’s face was in her hands, an older couple clutched each other’s forearms, and a young woman with a buzz cut wiped tears from her eyes, snorting. In the middle of them all, Thomas stood with a frozen expression of surprise on his face.

It was the one-way-street story. Amina had heard it a thousand times before, her father recounting how on his first month in America he had turned down a road where all the cars were coming at him. “In my country, there are no one-ways!” he liked to say, “Only every-which-ways!” It was a favorite he liked to drag out for American strangers, putting them at ease with his accent, his charm, his inability to navigate spaces they had created.

“Amazing country you have here!” Thomas said now, looking comically perplexed, and a new round of laughter pealed forth. He held out an arm and Amina limped into it.

“What’s wrong with your foot?” her father asked.

“Twisted it a little. It’s fine.”

“You must be the daughter,” the woman half of the older couple said, smiling at her too familiarly.

“Yeah.”

“We’ve heard a lot about you.”

“You got the scan?” Kamala asked.

“Amina is a photographer!” Thomas said with a flourish, like she was a rabbit he’d pulled from a hat.

“How wonderful,” the woman said.

“Anyan is running late?” Kamala tried again.

“Dr. George should be here in about five minutes,” the receptionist said, and the room seemed to deflate a little, punctured by the reality of why they were there.

“She’s having a show of her work in Seattle,” Thomas pressed on, but the others just smiled wanly at Amina. The male half of the older couple stroked his wife’s hand.

“Dr. Eapen.” Anyan George swung through the waiting room door, looking harried. “Hello, sir. Sorry to be late. I have your slides. You ready to come back?”

“Sure, sure.” Thomas winked to the others with the bravado of a mischievous kid slipping into the principal’s office. “Let’s do it.”

Anyan George would not sit down. This would have been unremarkable had he not directed the Eapens into their seats and then sat down himself, only to spring back up seconds later, shoving his chair in. Now he stood at the light board, clutching the envelope in his hands with a strange look. The family watched him for half a minute. Finally Thomas asked, “Everything okay?”

“Yes.” He did not elaborate.

“The scans?” Amina prompted.

“Yes.” He flipped the switch for the light board and began mounting them. Thomas stood up, moved closer. Together, they looked at the scans. Or rather, Thomas looked at the scans, and Dr. George looked at Thomas, a strange, unreadable expression on his face. Her father moved closer to the scan, then farther. He pulled the slide from the light board and read along its edge.

“What.” Amina’s fingers dug into the chair.

“It’s yours,” Dr. George said. “I checked.”

“My God,” Thomas said.

“What’s wrong?” Amina asked.

“I was late because I called Wilker in for a second opinion,” Dr. George said.

“And he said?”

“Yes. By as much as thirty percent.”

“What?” Kamala asked.

No one answered for a long moment. Amina stared at the scan, trying to see whatever they were talking about last time, but it looked the same — the seahorses, the egg, the swirls of cortex.

“Did Lowry take a look?” Thomas asked Dr. George.

“He agreed, though obviously he’s concerned that we might not have gotten the angle right, so the reduction might not be quite so significant.”

“Reduction. Meaning it’s smaller?” Amina asked.

“Yes,” Dr. George confirmed.

“It’s getting smaller?” Her voice rose.

“It looks that way,” Thomas said.

“Ha!” Kamala shouted, jumping to her feet like a tiny, sari-clad swordsman. “Ha, ha, ha!”

Amina looked from her father’s perplexed face to Anyan’s. Her ankle throbbed dangerously. “That’s good, right?”

“It’s unusual.” Thomas looked at Anyan. “Did you talk to MD Anderson?”

“We’re sending the scans to Dr. Salki today.”

“Have they seen regression of this sort before?”

“No.”

“Is that bad?” Amina asked, hating how her lack of medical understanding left her with a five-year-old’s sense of nuance: good/bad, light/dark, nice/scary.

“No, not at all,” Dr. George said. “Just unusual. We haven’t seen a regression of this sort before, so we’re cautious about putting too much faith in it until we know more about what could have caused—”

“A miracle,” Kamala cut in. “It’s a miracle, isn’t it?”

Dr. George looked flustered. “I’m hesitant to call it anything at this point. I think it’s important that we temper our hope with—”

“Of course you are!” Kamala scoffed. “You doctors are always hesitant, isn’t it? Experts at poking around in the body but unable to accept real healing when it comes from God himself?”

“It came from the chemo, Ma,” Amina pointed out, but her father shook his head.

“That’s unlikely. I’ve only gone through one full course. It would be highly unusual for that to have any effect, much less a sizeable one.”

“What about your symptoms? Have you noticed any change?” Dr. George asked.

“Yes, actually. The hallucinations have lessened significantly.”

“In intensity or frequency?”

“Both. I don’t see them as much. I don’t hear them talking. Although lately …” Thomas shook his head. “I don’t know.”

“What?”

“I’ve been smelling something burning for the past few days. At first it was faint enough that I thought it was just one of our neighbors clearing brush a few houses away, but—”

“That’s all in his mind,” Kamala said to Dr. George, as though this needed explaining. “No one in the village is dumb enough to start fires in June.”

“Seizing,” Dr. George said.

Thomas nodded. “I thought it might be.”

“What?” Amina asked, looking from Thomas to Kamala. “You thought you were having a seizure last night?”

“That’s why I wanted a scan,” Thomas said.

“The good news is that it appears you weren’t,” Dr. George said in a calming voice that seemed to trigger his bedside manner. He looked from Kamala to Amina to Thomas, reassurance settling over his features, and took a seat, motioning for Thomas to do the same. “Thomas and I are trained to be skeptical of a sudden shift like this, especially when it has no predecessor, but it is obviously a welcome development. The best option now is to proceed with the exact same treatment over the next month and see how things go.”

“Yes,” Thomas said, nodding along. “Yes.”

“So what,” Kamala said. “We do more of everything? Chemo, radiation, everything?”

“Yes. Stick to the course. We’ll need to keep an eye out for symptoms, erratic behavior, anything new or unusual. Amina, you’ll be in town?”

“Yes. Mostly. I mean, I might travel for a day or so, or a weekend, but yes.”

“Amina’s having a show!” Thomas burst out, glad to finally have somewhere to put his hopefulness.

Dr. George wrote down something on a prescription pad, handing it to Thomas.

“Very high, prestigious show of work.” Kamala nodded, nudging Amina. “An honor of her artsmanship by the authorities of Seattle.”

“It’s a favor for a friend,” Amina corrected, glaring at her mother, but Dr. George seemed to take no notice either way, standing up abruptly.

“So then, barring any changes, I’ll see you all back here next week?”

He ushered them out of his office brusquely, his eyes guarded, as if the hope of living was somehow harder to deliver than the threat of death.

Outside, in the bright slam of midmorning light, the Eapens stood stunned on the sidewalk. Amina shifted her weight carefully, but even her ankle felt deceivingly better, and she stood on it gingerly. Nobody knew quite what to say, though there was a palpable relief between them, a collective cord that seemed to have slackened, leaving them both more independent and more connected than they had been entering the office.

“Well,” Kamala said, and Amina turned to find her mother’s face frozen in a pained, happy grimace, as though her cheeks were trying to detach from the worry that had taken it over for the last months. Thomas saw it, too, and put out his hand, wiggling his fingers like you would for a child until she took it. He squeezed her hand, blinking the wet out of his own eyes.

“Well,” he repeated.