The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing

CHAPTER 1

That night Thomas and Kamala fought each other from one side of the house to the other. Teeth bared, eyes flashing, they tore into each other with carnivorous gusto, laying bare all the injustices they had suffered at each other’s hands over the last decades, the slights, the missteps, the heartbreaks. It was as if, released from the burden of having to care for each other, they’d found themselves in a pain deficit and were working hard to restore the equilibrium.

They were doing a good job of it, Amina thought from the safety of her bedroom. While the cause of the fight was unknown to her, the accusations of selfishness, martyrdom, ineptitude, and snobbery were staples from her childhood, none too surprising, though all tripped the same old fears, resurrecting a years-old sadness that her parents, at their core, were absolutely wrong for each other. In the midst of everything, she’d forgotten about that. She called Dimple.

“They’re going at it.”

Downstairs, the yelling had switched abruptly into Malayalam. It rumbled up the stairs like an oncoming thunderstorm.

“Sounds like fun.”

“Pretty much. Anyway, how are you?”

“Good! Good. Really good, actually.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. I, um …” Amina heard the opening of the gallery door. “Hold on a sec.” A crinkly paper noise, and when Dimple next spoke, it was through chewing gum. “I’m engaged.”

“What?”

“Sajeev and I are getting married.”

“What?”

“We’re—”

“Since when?”

“Last week. I wanted to tell you, but I didn’t want to, you know, interrupt.”

“Interrupt what? I’m not doing anything out here.”

“You’re dealing with your dad.”

“You’re getting married to Sajeev?”

“Well, you don’t have to say it like that.”

“No, I just mean … was this a, uh. I mean, did you …” Amina swallowed, entirely unsure of what she was trying to ask. “Okay, so wow.”

“You sound freaked out.”

“No! I’m just a little surprised. You just started seeing each other, you know?”

“We’ve known each other our whole lives.”

“Yeah, but not like, known each other.”

“I know plenty,” Dimple said with a telling laugh.

“Right,” Amina said, falling silent until she realized that Dimple was waiting for more, that this was one of those moments they weren’t going to get back. She swallowed and threw her voice an entire octave higher. “Congratulations!”

“Don’t be a dick.”

“No, I’m not! I’m happy for you! I mean, surprised, obviously, but happy!” She was aware that talking in exclamation points was undermining her message but could not stop once she had started. “He seems like a great guy!”

“Well, he is,” Dimple said suspiciously. “And we have more in common than you think. He knows a lot about photography.”

“I know — that day at the Hilltop. He was talking about it nonstop, remember?”

Dimple’s voice changed abruptly, the giddiness returning. “Really?”

“Yes,” Amina said, relieved to finally find her footing in the conversation. “Remember? He had all that stuff to say about Charles White, and it was good, really. And then he knew about my stuff, which, you know—”

“Clearly means he’s well versed,” Dimple finished.

“Exactly.” Amina smiled. “So what happened? Did he do the whole knee thing?”

“Well, no, because we were in bed.”

“Please tell me you didn’t tell your parents that part.”

“I haven’t told them anything yet. I’m thinking of not telling them at all.”

“Oh, c’mon.”

“No, really. We were thinking of eloping the weekend after the show. You know, like, Vegas-style or city hall or something.”

“You can’t do that! What about the family?”

“Oh my God, two months back home and they’ve brainwashed you.”

“No! Well, maybe. I mean, why start things like that? You’ve got your whole lives to disappoint everyone. Weddings are important.”

“Says the woman who captures their most compromising moments.”

“Not fair. And you know what I mean.”

“Yeah, I know.” Dimple was quiet for a long moment, and in that moment Amina realized her parents had stopped yelling. She limped down the hall to Akhil’s room and looked down into the driveway. Both cars were still there.

“I feel like my parents won,” Dimple said.

“Won what?”

“That’s the funny part. I mean, what did they win, really? So I’m going to end up with a Suriani guy. Sajeev, of all people. So what. I just … I don’t want to deal with my mom gloating.”

“She won’t gloat.”

“Amina.”

“Okay, fine, but it’s not like you did it so she would gloat. That would be worse.”

“Do you really think I don’t know him well enough?”

“No, it’s not that. I guess I just didn’t see it coming,” Amina said carefully, knowing she wasn’t quite telling the truth. She paused, thinking about how sometimes a surprise was just the acknowledgment of something you had tried hard to ignore. Of course Dimple was going to marry Sajeev. Amina said, “I guess it makes sense, in a way.”

“I just keep thinking, you know, our parents did it. And they didn’t know each other. And Americans get divorced all the time for, like, no reason. Someone cheats. Someone spends too much money. Someone tells someone they aren’t the person they married, like that’s so fucking unusual. So if you need to just close your eyes and jump …”

“You might as well do it with an Indian.”

“Exactly.”

Amina limped over to her desk, where the items found in the garden were now in the active dust-collecting stage. She ran her finger along the edge of the trophy.

“I think I’m falling for Jamie Anderson,” she said.

“AMINA!” The bedroom door flew open with a loud smack.

“JESUS!” Amina screamed.

Thomas stood in the door frame, his forehead dotted with sweat from the exertion of fending off Kamala.

“What?” Dimple yelled. “What happened?”

He walked into the room, fists clutched around a dinner roll and a bag of ice.

Amina swallowed. “I’ve got to go.”

“What just happened? Are you okay?”

“I’m fine. My dad’s just here.”

“Did you just say you were—”

“Later,” Amina said as her father glared at her feet.

“Okay, but call me back!”

It was not, in fact, a dinner roll, Amina saw as her father uncurled his fist. It was an Ace bandage. Thomas jerked his hand in the direction of the bed. “Sit.”

Amina limped over and sat. Her father pulled up a chair and raised her leg to rest her foot on his knee. His fingers went straight for the spot that hurt the most, pressing it. She gasped.

“How did this happen?” he growled.

“Accident.”

“What kind of accident?”

“I was running in the dark.”

He placed one hand on her heel and the other on her toes, rotating her foot forward too far. She jerked it away.

“That hurts?”

“Yes.”

He pressed his fingers beneath her anklebone. She gritted her teeth and nodded.

“You’ve sprained it. I’m going to wrap it, and then you should keep it elevated and iced.”

“How long will it be sprained?”

“Probably a week or two.” He began to unroll the bandage over her foot, wrapping it around. “Why were you running in the dark?”

“I was robbing a bank.”

The corner of Thomas’s lip twitched, though he was still too wound up to actually crack a smile. Below them, Kamala banged pots and pans. Thomas wrapped the bandage quickly and evenly, putting a nice layer of pressure between Amina and the pain. When he was done he lifted the whole thing and gently helped her swing it onto the bed. He put two pillows under it and then laid the ice over it.

“You’ve taken Advil for the swelling?”

“No.”

He nodded and left, returning shortly with a glass of water, two pills, and two more pillows taken from Akhil’s bed, which he put behind her.

“How’s that?” He backed up, knocking his head against the canopy.

“Much better, thanks.”

“You should take it easy for a few days.” He walked to the window, hands in pockets, shoulders rounded, entirely too large for the room. “So your mother tells me you’re dating a boy from here.”

“Yeah. Jamie Anderson.” She paused a moment for the recognition and, getting none, added, “We went to high school together.”

“Mesa?”

Amina nodded. Where else? “He’s a professor at the university. Anthropology.”

“Interesting. Well, tell him I look forward to meeting him next week.”

“Yeah. Wait, what are you talking about?”

“Your mother said he’s coming to dinner.”

“What? No! Jesus! I haven’t even asked him yet. I haven’t even decided to ask him yet. Not that I won’t. I just, you know. Never mind. It’s fine.”

Thomas raised his eyebrows at her.

“It’s fine,” Amina repeated, embarrassed by her outburst. “I should probably just be thankful that she’s over the Anyan George thing.”

“I wouldn’t go that far. You know your mother.”

Amina shook her head. It was amazing, really, how much knowing Kamala didn’t actually help.

“Invite the boy to dinner,” her father suggested. “It will force her to give up.”

This was a lie, the kind Thomas had told Amina often in her teen years, when saying “Nothing can make your mother give up” would have been as unkind as it was true. And Amina nodded, not because she believed him but because she appreciated the sentiment behind the lie, which was simply that her father wanted to help. She grabbed his hand, squeezed it.

“How are you doing?” she asked.

“I’m nervous,” he said, and then looked as startled as she felt that he’d said it out loud. He walked a few paces from the bed, stopping short at the sight of things on the desk. “I always tell my patients, it’s unwise to believe you’ll be the anomaly. Part of a small percentage for whom certain treatments work, maybe, but the anomaly? Not likely.”

“Yeah, but it’s not like you just think you’re getting better. Dr. George said—”

“The tests could be wrong,” he snapped, and she understood suddenly that the look on Anyan George’s face that morning had been fear masquerading as impatience, much as it was on Thomas’s now. “Anyway, I should get going. Monica is waiting.”

“Now?”

“Yes.”

“That was fast,” Amina said, with a twinge of sympathy for her mother.

“Getting the business back up to speed will take a while.”

“Uh-huh.”

“It’s not like the money makes itself in this house!”

“I didn’t say anything. Did I say anything?”

Thomas opened his mouth as if to say something but then checked himself. “I’ll be back in an hour.”

“Okay.”

He nodded once, dismissing himself, and walked toward the bedroom door.

“I thought I saw Akhil last night.”

She had not known that she was going to tell him until she had told him. Thomas stopped at the door, his back squared toward her for several long seconds. He turned around to face her, cheeks pale.

“You what?”

She cleared her throat. “I mean, I didn’t, obviously. I just, you know … I guess I just wanted to tell you that I get it. Why it was hard for you.”

“You saw him here?”

“No. I mean, I thought I did, but—”

“In our yard?”

“No. At Mesa.”

“Which mesa?”

“No, Dad, my old school. Mesa Prep.”

Her father nodded at this, his features held tightly in place, and Amina knew then how wrong she had been to think they’d had something in common, much less felt the same way about it. Thomas did not look like a man reconciling with hallucinations. He looked like someone hearing a phone ring in the next room and willing himself to stay put.

“Did he say anything to you?” her father asked.

Amina stared at him. “He wasn’t real, Dad.”

He nodded, looking away.

“Oh God, I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have told you. It’s not the same thing. I just thought—”

But he was already squeezing her shoulder, walking toward her bedroom door.

“Don’t worry about it,” he said, and let himself out.

CHAPTER 2

They fell into a state of hope. As the last long weeks of summer sighed out across the mesas, as the mornings grew slightly cooler with the promise of September, good and then better news came to the Eapens. The follow-up scan confirmed what the first had hinted: The tumor was indeed shrinking. Thomas took the news with a bowed head and little emotion, but it was obvious in the days that followed that he had turned a corner, suddenly filled with a frantic, zealous energy. He was going to go back to work. To retrieve his patients from the competition. To show them all what was possible. Even as the second round of chemo took its toll, lining his mouth with cold sores that made it impossible to eat and leaving him eight pounds lighter in five days, he rose to meet with Monica, who clutched Amina like a long-lost relative, whispering “It’s a miracle” with such grateful intensity that it seemed she’d gone the way of Kamala.

As for Kamala, she was also getting back to normal, handling her newly free time by pickling a deluge of cucumbers, making Chowpatty corn on the cob, and demanding, along with Mort Hinley, whose radio harangues once again blasted through the kitchen, the fiery repentance of all sinners. Two weeks in, she took the additional step of announcing that she would be perfectly happy to stay home if the rest of the family wanted to take over the chemo rounds. She did all of this so quickly and efficiently that it felt like a wardrobe change in a theater production, and would have been completely believable had Amina not seen the occasional longing look on her mother’s face when she glanced out to the porch.

Was it fair to leave Thomas to himself and his work so quickly? To somehow feel slighted in the wake of his recovery? As much as Amina saw the folly in this, she could not deny that as the weeks went on, the feeling of their being unnecessary to her father’s recovery was both relieving and damning. Monica was there now, sitting through more and more evenings with him, and the hospital staff was everywhere else, flocking around him from the minute Amina walked him into the hospital until they walked back out the doors.

Gone was the tight, needy family unity, the lulls and spaces in which their best conversations grew, supplanted by an optimism so vigorous that it seemed to scrub away all traces of the last months. Other than a few nights in which Thomas had staggered around the fields, insisting that there was a fire closing in around the house despite their protests, his grip on reality seemed strong enough to not need reinforcement.

And that was how Amina found herself sleeping over at Jamie’s house every night. It was a temporary situation, belied by the ticket she booked back to Seattle at the end of September for the show, and yet somehow they fell quickly into a routine that felt — if not permanent — then at least stable. Amina would show up every late afternoon, cut up some vegetables and meat according to Jamie’s specifications, and then head out the back door with her camera, wandering around Hidden Park in the cooling dusk as the lights of the houses popped on around her one by one. And though at first she had been lured by the familiar thrill of capturing unaware occupants, she soon found that what she craved most was finding a recently inhabited but empty room, a kitchen with a mug steaming on the counter, a television blaring away at a vacant armchair. Once, she turned the lens on Jamie’s kitchen, fixated by the way the vegetables waited on the chopping board, and was shocked when his shoulder cut into the frame, filling the space completely.

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

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

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

“What? What’s happened?”

“Thomas has gone!”

“What do you mean? Is he okay?”

“He’s missing.”

“What?”

“Just come!”

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

“Dad.”

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

“Everyone’s looking for you.”

“I’m right here.”

“Yeah, apparently.”

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

“Jesus,” she said.

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

“You knew him?”

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

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

“Thanks, Shirley.”

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

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

“We should get going.”

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

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

“I’m stopping chemo,” he said.

“What?”

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

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

“It’s not that.”

“Then what?”

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

“A while? How long is that?”

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

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

Thomas shrugged, like these were shruggable questions.

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

“No.”

“Then what?”

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

“Dad!”

“Shh! Not so loud!”

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

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

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

“He was in the garden,” Thomas said.

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

“But you saw him, too.”

“No I didn’t.”

“You said!”

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

“How do you know?”

“Because I know.”

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

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

“Because the chemo will keep him from coming.”

Amina shook her head, her words evaporating.

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

“Dad.”

“I want to see my son.”

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

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

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

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

She blinked. “What?”

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

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

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

“Dad, let’s go home.”

He looked at her warily.

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

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

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

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

“Good to see you, Doc.”

Thomas winked. “I’ll be back.”

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

“Didn’t tell her yet.”

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

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

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

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

“What’s wrong?”

“I’ve never seen you eat like that.”

“Like a hungry person?”

“Like a refugee.”

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

“So don’t. Sleep on it.”

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

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

She looked at him blankly.

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

“Oh, shit. I forgot.”

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

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

“And now you’re scaring me.”

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

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

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

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

“Mom?” Amina’s chest tightened.

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

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

“Mom?”

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

“What are you guys doing?”

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

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

Amina shook her head. No.

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

CHAPTER 3

“Where?” Amina asked.

“The garden,” her father said.

Amina turned to walk to the garden.

“No, don’t!” Kamala said.

“Why not?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What are you doing?”

“What do you mean?”

“Do you see him?”

“Of course not!”

“Then why are you pretending?”

“I’m not pretending.”

Amina stared at her mother.

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

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

Her mother shrugged. “I was wrong.”

“But you said—”

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

“But we’re running out of time!”

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

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

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

“Holy shit.”

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

“I wasn’t really worried about dinner.”

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

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

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

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

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

“Dad shouldn’t be moving furniture!”

“I’m fine!” Thomas yelled.

“No you’re not!” Amina yelled back.

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

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

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

“Few days is too long!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Where?”

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

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

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

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

“A light with lights on it.”

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

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

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

“No.”

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

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

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

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

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

“Are you okay? Is your dad okay?”

“Not really. The family is here now.”

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

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

“What?”

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

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

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“That’s not what I mean.”

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

“Wait a sec—”

“Call you later.”

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

“Hey,” Amina said.

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

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

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

“Not living.”

“What?”

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

“In the bloody garden!”

“Right.”

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

Amina chose her words carefully. “I believe they believe it.”

“Unbelievable!” Sanji resumed pacing, drunk on her own dismay. “Just nuts! All of these years they can’t agree on one single thing, and now they are practically singing a duet? And what happened to all Kamala’s big talk of bad spirits and weak souls and doing His righteous work? All that is just gone now?”

“No. She just thinks His righteous work sent us Akhil.”

“Oh, Akhil!” Sanji said, and saying his name aloud seemed to break her a little. She leaned forward against the counter, pinching the bridge of her nose. She looked old.

Amina put a hand on her shoulder, and Sanji turned around and fell into her with such force that it felt like catching a ham more than a human. Her aunt didn’t say anything for a long moment, the small gasps of her trying to steady her breathing the only sound in the kitchen. Her bosom shuddered gelatinously. She whispered something.

“What?” Amina asked.

“It’s like it’s happening all over again,” Sanji repeated.

And there it was, the thing Amina had not been able to find her way toward but felt was unmistakably true. She said nothing, her loosely floating fears suddenly converging around that point like water over a drain. That was it, wasn’t it? In the midst of all of the rest of it, all the tests and the treatments and the fights, they were rushing back to that dark place.

Sanji sighed a heavy, oniony breath. “All these years and they can barely talk about him. Some days, I will remember and I can hardly bear it myself. He was our first, nah? Our baby. That sweet little boy who ran around putting his chubby hands into everything, stealing our shoes when you and Dimple were still drooling? Ach!”

Because really, it didn’t matter whether he was the by-product of Thomas’s tumor or some filament of time slipped through a chink in the universe; it didn’t matter that Kamala and the others could not, would not, would never see him. The very idea that Akhil could be in the garden had brought back his loss, pushing it into every corner until the house bled with it. If she shut her eyes, Amina could feel exactly how gone her brother was, her ability to weigh his absence extra keen, dialed up like a blind person’s ability to hear. Cool air rushed against her cheeks and chest and she realized Sanji was holding her at arm’s length.

“I’ve upset you. Oh, baby, I’m sorry. I don’t know why I keep yelling at you all the time about every new thing.” She kneaded Amina’s forearms. “It’s not your fault.”

“It’s okay.”

“No it isn’t.”

“Okay, it’s not.”

They held each other for a bit longer, and after that, there didn’t seem to be much more to say, so they put water on to boil and filled the teapot with Red Label.

Bala was the next to come back, chattering loudly all the way in through the porch and then quieting abruptly as she saw Sanji and Amina. She looked over her shoulder, whispering loudly, “It’s the pain of losing a child.”

“No shit,” Amina said, and Sanji smacked her hand lightly, but Bala appeared not to hear.

“They say it’s unlike anything else. A grief so profound it can bring people closer to the dying than the living. I saw it on the Ricki Lakes once, a whole family that believed their youngest was still in the garage where she—”

“Oh, shut it,” Sanji snapped.

“No, really! And one of my sisters herself had a stillbirth! She was never okay after that.”

“Ranjana was never okay before,” Chacko announced, walking in from the living room, three lanterns in hand. He held them up for Amina. “These are a fire hazard.”

Amina took them. “Thanks.”

Her uncle looked at her somberly. “Okay, koche. So now we know. Next, we need to take action.”

“Yes, but what?” Sanji looked anxiously toward the porch. “You heard them. They’re not doing the chemo until the whole thing is over.”

“Wait, what?” Amina asked. “They haven’t told me this. What’s over?”

“The visit has to end,” Bala said, pinching the air for emphasis. “He’s only come for a short time, apparently. Thomas said all of the others that have come have gone on their own after a few days, you know, like aliens beamed back into the light, and—”

“He said that? Beamed back into the light?”

“No.” Sanji glared at Bala. “He did not. He said that he’ll start treatment when Akhil is gone, and that Akhil will go when he’s ready.”

“But he hasn’t even talked to him yet!” Bala said. “That was the other thing, no? That Akhil must talk to him, and he hasn’t yet? So he’s waiting for that.”

“Too late,” Chacko declared, rocking from his heels to the balls of his feet and back. “We don’t have any more time to waste. We need to separate them, incapacitate Thomas, and take him in.”

Incapacitate? Amina held the counter as her stomach plummeted.

“Chacko Kurian, have you lost your damn mind?” Sanji exploded. “This isn’t an episode of Laws & Orders! We can’t just take him in like he’s a criminal!”

Chacko frowned. “He will thank us later.”

“Really? Like Dimple has thanked you?” Sanji snorted and Bala gasped. “What? You know it’s true! Fifteen years since you sent her away, and still this girl doesn’t come home if she can help it, and now you people think we should try it on Thomas!”

“Well, someone has to do what needs to be done,” Chacko said, stung. “And anyway, I don’t see you making a better suggestion.”

“How about we talk to him like one human? Nah, Ami? Isn’t that better?”

They both looked at Amina expectantly, but she was still stuck on incapacitate him, her mind racing with horrible images: Thomas felled like a Serengeti lion, reduced to a mass of sleeping fur, while nimble hands checked tags and teeth; Thomas back in the hospital, prisoner to a staff he once directed.

“Yes,” Amina said. “Let’s talk to him.”

Raj was the last to come in, clearly shaken, cotton stars smashed across the back of his pants where he’d taken a seat on the couch. Unlike the others, he had little to offer in the way of advice and began simply making chapatis to eat Bala’s aloo with, the puffs of flour rising across his face and mapping the occasional tear that streaked down as he rolled the dough into flat rounds. Half an hour later, the Eapens were corraled to the dining room, despite real grumbling from Thomas.

“So can you see Akhil, too?” Bala asked Kamala, passing her the potatoes.

“Bala!” Sanji scolded.

“What? I’m just asking!”

“Nope,” Kamala said. “But did Thomas tell you what he’s wearing?”

“Yes,” Raj said hurriedly, just as Bala said “No” and Sanji looked like she might kill somebody.

“His jeans are short and he has paint on his hands!”

Sanji looked at Amina, alarmed.

“Everyone comes back looking like they did on their best day,” Amina found herself explaining, hoping that it somehow sounded less crazy coming from her, though from the look on Sanji’s face, it definitely did not.

“And have you ever seen him, Ami?” Bala asked.

Amina felt the heat rise to her face and avoided looking at her father. She shook her head.

Kamala shrugged. “He hasn’t come for us.”

“Thomas, what can I get you?” Raj asked. “You’re not eating. How about just plain rice and curds?”

“Actually, I should probably just get back outside.” Thomas pulled his napkin from his lap. “It’s getting late.”

“But we just sat!”

“You stay and finish. I’ll just be outside.”

“No, wait!” Sanji looked flustered. There was a short silence, a flurry of eye contact between the others. “It’s just we thought we should all talk about, the, uh—”

“YOU HAVE TO GO BACK TO TREAMENT!” Chacko boomed. Amina looked over to find her uncle standing tensely at the end of the table, fists clenched.

Thomas’s eyebrows rose in surprise. He blinked at Chacko a few times before saying, “Of course I will. I told you that.”

“Right now.” Chacko rapped his knuckles on the table. “Tonight.” Thomas laughed a little. “That seems unlikely.”

“This isn’t a joke, Thomas.”

“I’m aware of that.”

“Then quit this now.”

Thomas cocked his head, like a dog hearing a frequency unavailable to human ears, and Amina tensed.

“I’ve already called Presbyterian,” Chacko continued. “They have a bed ready for you in Admitting. Dr. George says you can restart your treatments first thing in the morning.”

Thomas said nothing for a moment, but Amina could feel him taking in all of them through his periphery. She saw the slight tic behind his eyes as he recalibrated.

“It’s not time,” he told Chacko.

“You don’t have more time!”

“We don’t know that.”

“I most certainly do.”

“No,” Thomas said gently. “You don’t. My reaction to the treatment has been anomalous.”

A high, furious blush rose in Chacko’s cheeks, as if he had been slapped. “You know as well as I do that that doesn’t mean a damn—”

“The thing is,” Sanji intervened smoothly, looking at Raj for backup, “it’s not as if recovery is an indefinitely open window, is it? Your health can weaken to the point where it’s irreversible, and then no treatment will help, isn’t it?”

“It’s a calculated risk.”

Chacko snorted. “And what about your family? What are they supposed to do with this nonsense?”

Kamala looked up from her plate in surprise. “Who, me?”

“You’re willing to risk their future too?”

“I’m not risking their—”

“Of course you are!”

“Me?” Kamala repeated.

“They have no problem with this.”

“Eda! What are you talking? You think they don’t—”

“Wait just one minute, Mr. Big Horses!” Kamala yelled at Chacko. “Don’t you sit there yak-yakking for me!”

“And Amina?” Chacko pressed on, ignoring her. “After everything, you’re going to put her through this?”

At last then, something to penetrate the glimmering sea of Thomas’s cheeriness. Amina saw the words sink in, the sharp tug of doubt suddenly creasing an otherwise smooth brow. She could feel her father not looking at her.

“She’ll be fine,” he said, but his voice no longer held the conviction it had before.

“No she won’t! How could she be? A father who would rather die than stay with her?”

A chapati, hurled with significant force, slapped Chacko full across the face. No sooner had it dropped than another replaced it, flung from the surprisingly accurate throwing arm of Kamala.

“Kam! Stop it!” Sanji cried.

Amina watched as her mother took another and chucked it at Chacko for good measure. It smacked into his chest.

“KAMALA,” Thomas said loudly, and her mother looked at him, furious, wild-eyed, shaking with adrenaline. He waited for her to lower her arm before saying softly, “Enough.”

Her parents looked at each other, the air between them twitching with something so raw and intimate that the others had to look away. “Go,” Kamala said. “I will come soon.”

Thomas turned from the table without another word and left. They sat back down and waited in silence, staring down at the tablecloth grease stains and stray bits of potato until the porch door clicked shut. Then they waited some more.

“Kam,” Sanji finally said. “Please.”

Kamala leaned back in her chair and crossed her arms, scowling at them.

“Ma.”

“What?”

“You’re the only one he’ll listen to.”

“Ha! Your father? Ha ha!”

“It’s true. You know it is. He’ll pretend like he’s ignoring you, but in the end, he’ll do whatever you say.”

Kamala snorted.

“So then what?” Sanji asked, frustration raking her voice. “Just sit back and let him die? Is that what you want?”

Kamala stared at her for so long that the air in the room seemed to harden. “You think that is the worst thing that can happen?”

Sanji looked confused.

“Fools.” Kamala hissed the word across the table like a dart, leaned into the silence that followed it. “Idiots. Know-nothings. Coming here with your dry potatoes and idiot demands that he get up tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, and for what? So you can say you did everything you could?”

“Ma, stop. They came because I wanted them.”

“And what about your father? Did you ask what he wants?”

“He doesn’t know what—”

“He wants to see Akhil.”

“A hallucination!” Chacko countered. “A side effect!”

“A miracle.”

“What does it even matter?” Raj cried, his voice high and wavery. “Kamala, don’t you see? He’s losing weight! He’s stopped sleeping! His bones are poking through his clothes!”

“You think I’m blind? That I don’t see?”

“We need to—”

“You think that I don’t know this man I have spent some thirty-five years with? I know him better than anyone — any of you! And you are wrong, Miss Amina Knows Everything, he does not listen to me! He has never listened to me! You think I don’t know what happens next?”

Silence fell over the table, heavy as a net, and in its descent, Amina’s head filled with the high electric keening of the lights, all of the lights, their background noise suddenly amplified. It felt like an invisible audience taking a step forward. It felt personal.

“You think he wants to stay with us more than he wants to go to Akhil?” her mother asked, voice tiny behind all the buzzing, and the truth felt like something small and sharp lodged into Amina’s heart.

The rest of the family was coming apart, Amina could feel it. At one end of the table, Raj had covered his face with his hands, and at the other, Chacko shook his head from side to side, like a dog trying to shake loose a collar. Bala and Sanji sat between them with wide, pooling eyes, Sanji already whispering, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” like she had caused what was to come.

“Then what …?” Chacko barked, his mouth trembling.

A spasm of compassion flickered across Kamala’s face before it smoothed again.

“Go home,” she said.

CHAPTER 4

“I’m coming down,” Dimple said the next day.

Amina shut her eyes. This seemed to be everyone’s solution, as if it would make a difference. Monica had come just that morning, begging Thomas to change his mind and then weeping bitterly in the driveway when he wouldn’t. Son of a bitch, she’d said, and smoked two cigarettes right then and there.

“You can’t,” Amina said.

“Why not?”

It wasn’t that she didn’t want to see Dimple. She just didn’t want to see Dimple seeing what everyone else had. Amina sighed and rolled onto her back, coming face-to-face with the brassy smiles of the Greats.

“The show. It’s in three weeks. You don’t have time.”

“Don’t worry about that. It’s practically done already, and I can do most of the press from there. They want to talk to Jane more than me anyway, at this point.”

“Oh, great.”

“It’s not what you think. She’s saying she likes it.”

“She likes it?”

“No, duh, she fucking hates it. But she’s giving it good press because it’s the smart thing to do. She’s also saying you still work there even though she told me that if either of us set foot in Wiley Studios again, she will shank us.”

“She said shank us?”

“She said kill us.”

“Oh.” Amina tried not to feel upset by this. What did she think was going to happen?

Outside, Prince Philip was barking a low, constant complaint. Amina got up from the bed and ambled over to the window. Her parents were weeding in the garden, despite the afternoon heat.

“What?” Dimple asked.

“What?”

“You just said ‘nuts.’ ”

Amina moved away from the window. “My parents. It’s weird. They go everywhere together now. The garden, the porch, probably the bathroom for all I know. It’s like they’re dating or something.”

“That’s sweet.”

“No it’s not. It’s like having the sun set on the wrong fucking side of the sky.”

Dimple was quiet for a moment. “How are you doing?”

Why did everyone always ask that? “I’m fine.”

“My mom said last night was awful.”

“When are you telling her about Sajeev?”

“What?” Dimple’s voice bowed up in surprise. “I don’t know. I mean, that’s the last thing we need to think about right now, isn’t it?”

“Isn’t it just better to tell everyone and be done with it?”

“God, Ami. Compared to everything else going on? It’s practically a nonissue.”

“I mean, especially if you’re still planning on eloping after the show.” Amina paced around the room. “Because a wedding might be nice, you know. For everyone to think about.”

“What, like a distraction?”

“No,” Amina said, even though that was exactly what she meant. Was it really so bad to want something to look forward to? She opened up Akhil’s armoire and saw a grimy version of her own tired face staring back at her. “When do you get in?”

“Midnight tonight. We’ll come over in the morning. Who is that?”

“What?”

“Ami, seriously? Have your ears melted? Your doorbell just rang.”

It rang again. Prince Philip began barking like his back was on fire.

“Shit.” Amina looked down. She wasn’t wearing a bra, and her damp armpits smelled mildly like coffee. She looked around the floor for her bedroom slippers.

“Do you want me to call back?”

“No, I’ll just see you tomorrow.” She dropped the phone in the cradle and hurried down the stairs just as the ringing switched to knocking.

“Coming!” she shouted as she approached the door, and this unleashed a torrent of disapproval from Prince Philip, who seemed to be auditioning for the role of ferocious guard dog on the other side of it.

“Thank God,” Jamie said when she opened it, eyes looking back at the bared teeth. “Your dog is about to go Cujo on me.”

“Oh!” Amina crossed her arms over her chest. “Hey!”

“Can you help me out here?”

“SHUT IT, PRINCE!” Amina shouted, and the dog looked immediately sheepish, tail wagging. He sniffed Jamie’s pants.

“Prince like the singer?” Jamie watched him nervously.

“Like Prince Philip of England.”

“Ah.”

The dog wandered away, and Jamie looked at her expectantly.

“You look great,” Amina said.

Actually, he looked like a banker on a business-casual day — chinos, checked shirt, and good leather shoes, face the kind of clean-shaven that felt rubbery — but still.

“Yeah? Cool. I wanted to look nice to meet your parents.”

“Ha!” Amina tried to tamp down the flare of panic between her ribs. “Of course. Yes. And they want to meet you, too! We all do. I mean, not me, but you know, have you meet them. The thing is, though, it’s just not really a good time.”

“Yeah, I figured,” Jamie said. He took a step back, glancing at his car as if he were going to get back in it, and for a moment Amina thought it would be that easy. Then he shrugged. “I mean, I get it. I really do. Which is why yesterday when we got off the phone I just thought, You know what? It might never be a good time. So I might as well just go over.”

She was nodding like one of those nodding dolls, the ones that go from cute to stupid in about a second. She stopped. “Weird.”

Jamie frowned.

She shook her head, tried again. “We are weird right now. And the house. It’s …” She looked down at the good leather shoes. The good leather shoes were not going to like what was passing for normalcy behind the front door. Amina sighed. “It’s fucked.”

“Amina.”

It seemed like a bad idea, looking right at him. It seemed like the inevitable first step toward some tedious, emotional conversation about how bad things were getting, how shakily she’d handled them, how long it had been since she’d showered. But when she looked up, there was something sympathetic and a little amused in his eyes, and she found herself backing up. Jamie walked inside. He looked around slowly, lingering on the windowsills, the furniture, the chair with the clocks. Overnight, Christmas lights had been laid on the floor on either side of the hallway so that it lit up like a merry runway.

Amina pushed her hair behind her ear. “It doesn’t always look like this.”

“Okay.”

“Do you want some tea or something?”

“Sure.”

It was funny to have him walking behind her, his height out of context in her house. She felt like she needed to point out lighting fixtures, doorways, to push the walls a little farther apart. They went into the kitchen, where Thomas had crammed the countertop with candles of all shapes and sizes that morning, despite Kamala’s vocal disapproval. Amina turned the kettle on and retrieved a paper bag, opening it with an efficient snap. She began dropping the candles into it.

“Pretty house,” Jamie said.

Amina gave him a look.

“No, really. It’s obviously not, you know, in its best state right now, but it’s still nice. The trees are huge.” He looked into the courtyard. “Is that …?”

“A halogen lamp wrapped in Christmas lights. Yes. It’s funny how that’s the one that gets people. What kind of tea do you want?”

“Anything. Actually, decaf if you have it.”

She finished with the candles and rolled the paper bag tight, setting it down on the floor. At the back of the cabinet, she found an old herbal sampler and pulled out a bag of chamomile for him and a Red Label for herself. She turned on the kettle. “You hungry?”

“Nope.”

She walked a few paces toward and away from the stove. She could feel him watching her.

“I’m fine,” she said preemptively. “I mean, I haven’t showered in a while. Or slept, really. And I keep worrying about my parents doing something crazier than they already have, but that’s just, you know. Fine.”

“Crazier?”

“You know, like pushing the fridge into the garden. Or burning the house down.” She laughed self-consciously, and sat. There was something sticky on the countertop, and she scraped her nail against it, aware that Jamie was still watching but unable to stop.

“So how is he?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe fine? Maybe metastasizing?”

“I’m sorry.”

“So am I,” she said, and felt a little pop in her chest when he reached across the counter and held her hand. The water heated with a quiet roar. “Was it like this with your mom?”

“Not really.”

“Just the part where she covered the whole house in lights?”

Jamie squeezed her hand.

When the teakettle screamed, Amina poured water into both cups, thinking of all the other things she had assumed would kill Thomas one day. The smoking. The scotch. Some kind of extremely rare blood-borne disease that he’d get but save the rest of the hospital from with a final heroic act.

“I guess I just didn’t think it would be like this,” she said out loud.

“Yeah.”

“No, I mean … it’s not like I never thought about how we would die. When I was a kid that’s all I thought about for a while — when it would happen and who would be next and how it would feel. I was sure one of them would disintegrate just from having to get up every day and take a shower. That part is the worst. But we made it past that, you know? I just thought we were in the clear.”

She heard Jamie get up and come around the counter, and jumped a little as his hands settled on her shoulders. She did not want to cry, so she didn’t, she just kept her chin tucked to her neck and let Jamie pull her into a backward hug, his long arms folding around her, his newly smooth chin pressing into her neck.

“And half the time, I don’t even know what’s real anymore,” she said, quieter now because it felt like the kind of secret you keep. “All these days start feeling like one really long day, like there’s no difference between being awake and asleep, and nothing will ever make it end, except that it’s ending, and I know that, and I don’t know what the fuck I’m supposed to do about it.”

“I love you,” Jamie said.

“Your face feels like a girl’s.”

His hands folded around either side of her rib cage, holding it in place, and a bolt of relief moved through Amina, leaving her acutely aware of how fragile and strange and necessary breathing was. She leaned back into him.

“I was just caught off guard yesterday,” he said. “Over the phone. I’m bad on the phone.”

“Yeah. Why is that?”

“I don’t know. I think it’s because I grew up thinking the government might be listening in. It makes me paranoid now.”

“Because the government doesn’t want you to love me?”

“Something like that.”

The front door opened, the jangling of Kamala’s bangles sending them apart.

“Hello?” Amina called out, straightening her shirt. “Ma?”

“It’s me,” her mother said. “Someone came?”

“It’s my friend Jamie.”

The soft thud of Kamala’s feet hurried down the hall, and then suddenly she popped through the kitchen doorway, all sari and tennis shoes and braid and scrutiny.

“Hi.” Jamie stuck out his hand. “Jamie Anderson.”

Kamala looked at his hand but didn’t take it. “What are you doing?”

“Ma!”

“What? I’m just asking if he wants to stay for dinner!”

“No, no,” Amina said quickly. “He just dropped by.”

“Dinner sounds great,” Jamie said.

“What?” Amina turned around.

He squeezed her arm gently, saying to her mother, “I’d love to have dinner, Mrs. Eapen, as long as I don’t put you out.”

“Not out! In. I’m cooking.” She turned to Amina. “He likes fish or chicken?”

“I like both,” Jamie said. “And actually, I love to cook, if you don’t mind having me in the kitchen.”

Kamala wrinkled her nose, squinting from his shoes to his shoulders. “We’ll see.”

CHAPTER 5

They made a feast. Or rather, Kamala made a feast, instructing Jamie on how exactly to cut each vegetable before she threw it into one of many pots, and answering “some” every time he had a question about how much spice she was adding. How they’d managed to make so much in just over two hours was inconceivable, even with Jamie helping, but there it was, sprawled along the dining table like edible treasure, two kinds of curry (chicken and fish), four sides of vegetables (cabbage, carrots, beets, and cauliflower), pooris, lime rice, regular rice, salad, raita, and an entire array of glossy chutneys.

Thomas insisted on not leaving sight of the garden, so he and Amina made a hasty table from plywood planks and sawhorses, and half an hour later all four of them floated in the darkening green grass between the house and the tomato plants.

“So tell me,” Jamie asked, letting Kamala serve him thirds of everything, “why is it that South Indian food is so much better than North? Is it the spices? The rice-based thing?”

Kamala leaned in to expound on her favorite subject, and Amina sat back. At first, it had been strange to see everyone sitting at the same table — like watching a play where she knew too much about all the actors to believe anything they said. But as the day melted around them, as the early-evening sun poured gold into the fields and Jamie kept asking the kind of questions her parents enjoyed answering, she felt herself enjoying the meal, or at least not worrying through every second of it. It helped that they had put the table in the middle of the field, giving Thomas a clear view of the garden. He seemed calm and focused, albeit with two pairs of binoculars (regular and night-vision) on the table beside him.

“And we live better, too,” Kamala said, finishing up a small diatribe that pinpointed reasons as varied as better cows (for finer paneers and ghees) and better genetic makeup (“far superior” Dravidian taste buds). “What laughing? No jokes! Thomas, tell him! Everything is better when you’re not constantly worried about the cold and the dust and the crazy Mughals slaughtering everyone!”

“Kamala has always been an excellent cook,” Thomas said, adeptly sidestepping the historical assertions. “First time she cooked for me, I thought I had died and gone to heaven.”

“And when was that?”

“Nineteen sixty-four. We were just married, staying at my mother’s house for one month before we got our own flat.” Thomas scraped his plate with the pads of his fingers. “You remember, Kam? How Amma had to bribe Mary-the-Cook to leave the kitchen to you?”

“What leaving? She stood there huffing and puffing over everything I did, telling me I am cutting onions wrong and too much of cloves and the biryani will be too wet!”

“It was perfect,” Thomas said, shutting his eyes like he could still taste it. “Best I’ve ever had.”

“And what year did you come here?” Jamie took a sip of beer.

“Nineteen sixty-eight. JFK to St. Louis airport to here,” Kamala said, plotting the points across her plate with her middle finger. “I was just pregnant with Amina. We went back to get Akhil a few months later.”

“Wow. Albuquerque must have been so small back then.”

“You don’t know! One tiny speck of city in so much of brown!”

Thomas’s eyes snapped open. He squinted at the garden. Sat up a little.

“Had you always wanted to be a brain surgeon?” Jamie asked him. Thomas did not answer. Amina prodded him with her foot.

“No,” Thomas said, dragging his eyes from the garden to Jamie with some effort. “When I was young, I wanted to be a pilot.”

“What about you?” Kamala said, spooning a little more rice onto Jamie’s plate. “You always wanted to go into teaching?”

“Not at all. I just really enjoyed the field studies I was doing, and this is one way to keep doing them.”

“Amina said you’re in archeology?” Thomas asked. “Anthropology.”

“Anthropology,” Thomas repeated. “So do you just teach all day, or—”

“No, actually, my tenure-track status is pursuant to a study I’m conducting, so I spend a portion of my week out in the field. Or, well, at casinos.”

“Like the Sandia Casino?” Kamala asked.

“Actually, that’s the one I’m looking at right now.”

“Chi!” she shook her head. “Horrible place! So dark inside! And not one thing to eat at the all-you-can-eat!”

“Not even the chicken fingers?”

Kamala looked aghast. “Who eats chicken’s fingers?”

“So Amina must have told you about all that terrible business with her picture,” Thomas said. “The Puyallup Indians and all that.”

“Uh, no, actually,” Amina said. “Can someone pass me the beets?”

“What picture?” Jamie asked.

“Nothing.” Amina shook her head dismissively. “Another time.”

“The Indian man jumping from a bridge!” Kamala said excitedly. “Not Indian our Indian, Indian feathers on the head. It’s famous! She didn’t tell you?”

“Wait, not the one from a couple of years ago. In Seattle? The chief?”

“Community leader,” Amina corrected with a wince.

“You took that picture?”

“You know it?” Kamala nudged Thomas, who was back to looking at the garden, jittery. “He knows it.”

“You took that?” Jamie looked impressed.

“Yes! And after, she became a wedding photographer,” Kamala said, nodding. “And now she might be starting her own highly successful events-photography business out here.”

“Ma.”

“What? You might! Did she at least tell you there will be one show of her work in a Seattle gallery in a few weeks?”

“Yes, that I know.”

“Be right back,” Thomas said, rising from his chair and making a beeline for the garden.

“Mrs. Eapen, would you mind if I had one more poori?”

“Have, have!” Kamala handed Jamie two more, and they fell into a discussion on pooris and why (in Kamala’s opinion) they were superior to fry bread and why hers (just ask anyone) were better than most. Amina turned around and watched as her father walked rigidly out to the garden, stopping at the gate. He leaned over it. Said something. Waited. Said it again. Then he turned around to come back, his face drum tight.

“Oh, hey, Dimple’s coming tomorrow,” Amina said, suddenly remembering. “Well, today, actually, but she’ll come over here tomorrow morning.”

Kamala frowned. “Why?”

“She wants to see Dad.”

“Pish. She should be so concerned about her own parents. Bala worries for her all the time only.”

Thomas returned to the table, sitting heavily.

Amina leaned forward, trying to catch his eye. “So, I was just telling Mom that Dimple is coming to see you tomorrow. Sometime in the morning.”

“Dimple is Amina’s old friend from school,” Kamala explained to Jamie. “Not much in common anymore, but what can you do?”

“Yeah, I remember her from school.”

“Oh!” Kamala’s face lit up. “You went to Mesa Preparatory? I didn’t realize! No one said!”

“It’s not some huge deal, Ma.”

“But then he will know everyone you know! All the kids and everyone who is out here. You’re in touch? Lots of socializing?”

“Uh, kind of.”

Amina looked away, distracted by Thomas. His eyes pinged from side to side, like he was trying to remember where he’d put something important. Amina nudged him with her foot again.

Kamala chewed her food a little, swallowing before asking, “So you knew Akhil, too?”

“Yes. Actually, he dated my sister, Paige.”

Kamala blinked rapidly, mouth moving slightly, as if she was finishing the rest of the sentence without sound, and Thomas’s gaze snapped from the garden to Jamie. “You’re Paige’s brother?”

“Yes.”

He leaned forward. “From high school? That girl he dated?”

“Paige Anderson.”

“Paige Anderson,” Kamala repeated softly, like a lyric to a song she’d been trying to remember.

“The girl.” Thomas looked at Amina for confirmation. “The one.”

“She came here once, I think,” Kamala said, and Jamie nodded. “Unbelievable!” Thomas howled, and slapped the table.

“Yeah,” Jamie started. “Kind of a strange coincidence, I guess.” Thomas laughed loudly, and Jamie smiled despite the strangeness of the situation, because who could resist Thomas’s sudden burst of joy, his smile growing by the second like he’d won some sort of cosmic lottery?

“Did you hear that?” Thomas called out to the garden. “Paige Anderson’s brother is here!”

Amina shot Kamala an alarmed look.

“Here!” her father shouted, a little louder. He pointed at Jamie. “Right here!”

“Pa,” Kamala said, touching his arm softly, but he shooed her away, fumbling for his binoculars.

“Hold on, I want to see his face.”

Kamala bent her head to his ear, slipping into a heated whisper of Malayalam that Thomas did not even pretend to listen to.

“He’s ignoring me. Pretending he can’t hear me again.”

Amina tugged Jamie’s arm, but he was riveted, his mouth slightly open, like he was watching a movie.

“YOU HEAR ME?” Thomas yelled, a thread of frustration in his voice making them jump. He was growing agitated, one hand holding the binoculars while the other clenched and unclenched. His arm shook as he motioned to the garden. “See how he does that? Acts like he’s not listening but he’s listening? I used to do the same thing. Drove my mother nuts.” Amina looked helplessly at the garden, the blue evening spreading out around it like water.

“Me too,” Jamie said.

Thomas turned to him.

“My mother hated it,” Jamie continued, a flush rising to his cheeks. “Told me I’d regret it someday.”

Thomas looked at him for several long seconds before sitting back down slowly. “And did you?”

“Yeah. I did, actually.”

“And are you close now?”

“She died a few years ago. Breast cancer.”

“And were you with her when she died?”

“Yes.”

“In the room? Right there?”

“Dad!” Amina said, but Jamie was already nodding, a sad, surprised smile on his face, like he’d just caught an unexpected glimpse of a place he missed, and this seemed to mean something to Thomas, who leaned back in his chair, shutting his eyes.

“You have nothing to regret,” he said.

After dinner, she led Jamie up to her room and went down the hall to take a shower. When she came back, he was lying awkwardly across her bed, entirely too large for it, staring at the canopy.

“So this is what girls like?” He motioned upward, the lines in his face carved deep with thought. “Looking up at tiny flowers all day and night?”

“When they’re, like, seven.” She sat down.

“Can we talk about Air Supply?”

“Nope.”

“Damn.” He wiped a drop of water from her shoulder. “I knew you’d say that.”

He looked exhausted, bags the color of bruises under his eyes. Amina bent over and kissed his cheek, then his forehead. “We wore you out.”

“I sleep better with you in the bed.”

Amina smiled, her eyes moving from his mouth to his neck to the button she most wanted to undo on his shirt. She leaned over him, letting the towel unfold.

“Whoa. Wait, no.” Jamie sat up, pushing it closed with both hands. “Not happening. Not in here.”

“Seriously? They won’t even know.”

“Yes they will. Your father will know. And then he will come up here and he will kill me with his freakishly large thumbs.”

“Jamie.”

“And there’s no way I’m getting turned on in this bed. And frankly, you should question the moral fiber of any guy who does.”

Amina looked at the bedroom door, perplexed. “My dad has large thumbs?”

“How do you not know that?”

She lay back on the bed. “So you survived dinner.”

He grunted.

“I’m sorry about that whole thing. Your mom.”

“It’s fine,” he said, and when she looked at him, he looked fine, the plates in his face shifted to seal off whatever had pierced through when he was talking to Thomas. “Anyway, they’re way nicer than you said.”

“Last month my mother wouldn’t have even talked to you.”

“Yes she would have.”

“You don’t know my mother!”

“Okay, fine. She would have thrown chutneys at my head. So what, now she’s too worried about your dad to bother?”

“No, she’s in love,” Amina said, understanding it was true as she said it. She thought of her mother’s face that night at the table, waiting to laugh at some story Thomas had told a thousand times, and her chest tightened like she’d swallowed a pocket of wind.

“Love is good,” Jamie muttered, his eyelids heavy.

Amina watched his breathing, the little flickering pulse at the base of his neck. Just when she thought he had fallen asleep, he said, “So that picture. That was the one, huh?”

“Yeah.”

His eyes fluttered open. “Do you like it?”

“It’s horrific.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

It was a funny question because no one had ever asked her before, and because she wasn’t sure she knew the answer until she felt herself nodding, and then she knew it absolutely. Jamie’s eyes slid shut.

“I’d like to see it,” he said.

“Really?”

“Yeah, of course.”

Amina chewed at her cuticle, watching him. “You want to fly out with me for the opening?”

“Drive.”

“What?”

“Let’s drive.”

“That’s a long way to drive,” she said, but he was already drifting away, the knot between his eyebrows smoothing.

Amina rolled onto her back, staring up at the canopy. She reached out, pinching a corner of his T-shirt between two fingers, feeling it rise and fall with his breaths. She imagined them driving north and west, the aspen, the Tetons, the ragged coast of Oregon. Jamie’s profile against a blur of landscape. They slept.

CHAPTER 6

How had she forgotten about Dimple’s beauty? And could it have actually increased in her absence? The next morning Amina stared, trying not to be thrown by the surreality of her cousin’s overlarge cheekbones and liquid eyes, the way her skin glowed like a baby’s butt in a diaper commercial.

“He’s so skinny,” Dimple said, watching Kamala and Thomas garden through the screen door on the porch. She had come over before the others, claiming she’d wanted some time alone with Thomas, but now that she was there, she seemed stuck somehow, unable to actually go into the yard.

“The meds kill his appetite,” Amina explained.

“Isn’t there something you can do about that? Like a permanent IV or something?”

“Not really.”

“Or, like, fatty foods? Can he just eat really fatty things?”

“He can’t keep them down.”

“Fuck.” Dimple’s chin trembled and she quickly rubbed it.

“You want me to go out with you?” Amina asked.

Dimple shook her head, her face shadowed with nervousness. She watched Thomas bend down, biting her cuticle.

“Do you want to go have a smoke on the Stoop?”

“Yes. I mean, no.” She took a sharp breath. “I just … I think some part of me really believed that it was an exaggeration. Like maybe he was doing better than everyone thought, or maybe everyone had been here too long to see things clearly.” She swept a fingertip under her left eye, quickly ridding it of the tear that threatened to spill over. “The fucking height of narcissism, right?”

Amina shrugged. “It’s hard to get it unless you see it.”

Outside, Thomas rose slowly, his legs shaking until Kamala rose too, wedging herself under his arm. Dimple turned away, her eyelashes shivering over the shop, the piles of lights, the parched mound of what had been Akhil’s jacket. “So is there anything I should know? Anything I shouldn’t, you know, talk about?”

“Oh, you know. Treatment. Tumors, medications, prognoses. Eating, sleeping. Akhil, but I guess that was always the case, although now if you talk about him, you’ll hear all sorts of stuff.”

“Like everyone comes back looking like they did on their best day?”

“Like clocks make it harder to see them.”

“Wow.”

They watched Thomas and Kamala walk away from the tomato plants, toward the back of the garden.

“You know what I don’t get?” Dimple said. “How do you know what your best day is? I mean, aren’t some of them tied?”

Amina smiled, nudging her cousin gently. “So are you going to do this or what?”

Dimple nodded but didn’t move.

“He’s the same person,” Amina lied, unsure if it was cruel to do so, but distinctly thankful as Dimple finally pushed the screen door open, stepping into the sunlight. Thomas looked over as it banged shut, his dark face lightening into a blur of teeth.

“Dimpledimpledimple!” he called, and held his arms open as she ran to him.

“Lunacy!” Chacko shouted an hour later, finger jammed into the air. “Idiocy!”

“Who is asking him?” Thomas shouted back. “Did anyone ask him?”

That afternoon, while the rest of the family cringed and Kamala shelled peas like she was being timed for an Olympic event, Thomas and Chacko went at it in the living room with renewed gusto, as if they’d been doing nothing but storing up counterarguments for the last five days.

“Even a child knows this, Thomas! My own daughter has come home to beg you to just—”

“Do I come in his house and yell at him over his decisions? No, I do not! Why? Because it’s HIS HOUSE.”

“Ho!” Sanji flapped around them like an anxious parrot. “Hey! Indoor voices! Let’s be discussing this like adults, no?”

“Well, if I was acting like you, I’d hope you’d be MAN ENOUGH to come to my house and face me!”

“Sit,” Raj pleaded. “Let’s all just—”

“Oh no, let him keep going, please! Perhaps Chacko can kill me himself with his superiority complex!”

“Please!” Bala cried. “The girls!”

It took a moment, but this appeared to be the right tactic as the two men backed away from each other, hunch-shouldered, razor-eyed. Thomas lowered himself shakily into one of the few remaining chairs, and Chacko backed himself into an actual corner, his shoulders squeezed in by the walls. Sanji, Bala, and Raj hovered over the spot of carpet where the couch used to be. Kamala shelled peas.

“Christ.” Dimple’s voice shook. “Is this how you guys have been the whole time? No wonder everyone looks like shit.”

“No Christ, no shit!” Kamala snapped, not looking up.

“You haven’t been here,” Chacko sulked. “You don’t know.”

“Know what? That yelling at Thomas Uncle isn’t going to change his mind? Yeah, Dad, I’m pretty clear on that one. And if you guys can’t talk about something else, then maybe you should just go home and not see each other for a while.”

“Okay, okay.” Sanji waggled her head. “No need to go for extremes.”

“No, this girl is right!” Chacko said. “If we’re not here to be honest, then why be here at all? What else is there to talk about?”

“Chackoji,” Raj said, the please inherent in his voice. “Let’s just settle down for a moment.”

No one said anything for a long time. Raj looked at Sanji, Bala looked at Dimple, and Amina dropped her eyes to the floor, both irritated and amazed by the steady plink! plink! of the peas hitting the metal bowl. So this was it? Thirty years of no one getting a word in edgewise, and they’d run out of things to say?

“I’m getting married,” Dimple said.

Amina’s mouth dropped open.

“What?” Chacko’s face fell.

“To Sajeev.”

“What?” Bala whispered, like saying anything louder might trigger a bomb that would detonate the entire future.

“Sajeev and I are getting married.”

Kamala made a strangling noise from the floor, her hands frozen in midair.

“OH MY GOD!” Sanji jumped up, her arms swinging through the air until they pinioned Dimple, swung her from side to side. “You see? You see? All this time I’ve been telling you to be patient and you will find the right one and have your babies before your uterus dries up like one Turkish apricot, and look! It’s happened!”

“Sajeev Roy?” Bala asked, trembling.

“Yes, Mom. God, what other Sajeev do we know?”

“He knows?” Kamala frowned. “He is wanting this?”

“Ma.” Amina rolled her eyes. “He asked her.”

“SAJEEV ROY?” Bala screamed, and then began jumping up and down, bangles and sari and face a blur of green and gold, and everyone went nuts. Thomas bellowed. Kamala muttered. Raj and Sanji hugged each other and the girls, while Chacko blinked with the stunned disorientation of a man who’d gone to sleep in one country and woken up in another.

“Come here, you little rat!” Thomas shouted, and Dimple went to him, bending down so he could hug her.

“All this time!” Sanji scolded the rest of them. “All this time you people are worried about how will Dimple ever find someone you like and here this girl picks Sajeev Roy himself!”

“You’re getting married?” Chacko asked.

“Oh, Dimple, he’s going to cry,” Thomas said, nudging her toward him. “Look what you’ve done to your poor father’s heart!”

“We will have to go to Mumbai to get the proper lehenga and jewelry!” Bala yelled at nobody in particular. “Three outfits at least!”

“No, wait, Mom, we’re not—”

“What time of year? Winter? Summer? Then only we’ll know the right gown, nah? Someone call the Roys!”

“Not yet! Sajeev should tell them first, okay? But listen, we’re not—”

“They will want to do the engagement party in Wyoming, nah? Fine with me, right, Chacko? Party at the groom’s, wedding at the bride’s?”

“No!” Dimple yelled. “Stop!”

Bala frowned. “Wedding in Seattle?”

“No wedding! We’re eloping.”

Bala blinked, bludgeoned with confusion.

“We’ve already planned it,” Dimple explained. “We’re going to the courthouse in Seattle in three weeks, just the two of us. You know, keep it simple.”

The family catapulted into silence. They did not know. Bala especially did not know, her eyes pinging around the room feverishly like there was a punch line to be found somewhere.

“But not even us?” Sanji’s face was rigid with dismay.

“We already planned it,” Dimple repeated, looking to Amina for help. “It’s really not that big of a deal. People do it all the time.”

“Who?” Sanji demanded. “Americans? Orphans?”

“It will just be so much simpler. And cheap! Cheap, Dad. Don’t pretend you’re not excited about that.”

“No wedding?” Chacko asked sadly. And then, even more sadly, “No father-daughter dance?”

“You want a father-daughter dance?”

“Of course he wants!” Thomas huffed. “What’s wrong with you?”

“Mad,” Sanji said, wagging a finger. “Absolutely bonkers nutso. Fine-fine not coming home and all, busy girl with a busy life, but a wedding? Without family? Might as well have a zoo without animals!” Dimple gave Amina a pleading look as Bala’s crying filled the room, soft and pervasive as humidity.

“What about a simple court ceremony and a small-small reception of only one hundred?” Raj waggled his head from side to side like this was really no different from eloping.

“No,” Dimple sighed. “That’s going to take too much planning. We just want to do this and—”

“I can plan!” Bala said, seizing on this like a lifesaver thrown into an ocean. “All the details only, okay? Flowers and dresses and guest list and food and cake — nothing will be left to you, nah?”

“No, that’s not — listen, Mom, it’s a nice offer, but I don’t want to.”

“But a dress!” Bala whimpered. “Surely you want something beautiful? We don’t even have to go ourselves, I can have my sister order one simple neemzari lehenga and it can be here in just six weeks and—”

“NO. It’s not happening, okay? I’m not waiting six goddamn weeks and inviting a hundred people to sit around and squeeze me! And I’m definitely not wearing some hoochie ghagra choli stomach-baring atrocity!”

Sanji squinted hard at her. “You’re pregnant.”

“Oh my God,” Amina said, finally moving to jump in. “Seriously, you guys, it’s not like it’s some huge surprise, is it? This is Dimple. And anyway, she’s still marrying Sajeev, so it’s still a great thing, right?”

“I’m pregnant,” Dimple said.

“Ho!” Kamala shouted as Chacko’s face paled to gray. “Ho, ho, ho! Now we see!”

“See what?” Dimple glared.

“Choo!” Sanji stared at the floor, looking awfully surprised for having been so prescient just moments before. She thumped her palms against her sides, as if resurrecting circulation. “So there it is. So now we know.”

“Pregnant?” Amina asked.

“I’m sorry.” Dimple looked at her, wide-eyed. “I wanted to tell you first. I should have told you first. I tried, on the porch this morning. I just couldn’t.”

“Do the Roys know?” Kamala asked.

“Ma.”

“What? Just asking!”

“Oh my God,” Bala moaned, clutching her bangles as if to protect them. “It’s a scandal. We will be scandalized.”

“Oh, come on.” Dimple rolled her eyes. “Do you even know what a scandal is? I’m in love and I’m having a kid and we’re getting married. Big deal.”

“But everyone will know when the baby comes! What will the Roys think of us? Ach!”

“Who cares what they think!” Chacko snarled, finally recovering. “What do we think? What kind of a family does this? I’m going to have a talk with this boy! Set him straight!”

“Dad, stop. This isn’t the 1950s.”

But wasn’t it always the 1950s for Chacko? And not even the American 1950s, but the Indian 1950s, in which a pregnant unmarried daughter in her thirties was as inconceivable as a unicorn in heat? His face sweltered with the indignity of it.

“Hey,” Thomas said, trying to catch Chacko’s eye. “She’s right, you know. It’s not so bad.”

“What do you know about it?” Chacko glared.

“So then, let’s just do it as soon as possible,” Sanji said, as though coming to the end of a conversation with herself. “Right, Dimple? That’s why you wanted it alone, nah? Not because you don’t want us there, but to get it done fast?”

“I don’t … I mean, mostly, yes.”

“So how about this weekend?”

“What?”

“In four days’ time! You are staying until Sunday anyway. That is enough for us to make the party. Wedding is just a party, nah? We make parties all the time.”

“Yes!” Raj clapped. “It’s a good idea, actually. So simple for us to pull something together, right, Bala?”

Dimple looked nervously around the room. “We don’t need to do that. I mean, Thomas Uncle has plenty to deal with right now, we don’t need to—”

“Judge Montano is an old patient; he can perform the ceremony! And the backyard is so nice at this time of year, no?” Thomas said. “And if you do it here, I won’t have to travel, which would be so wonderful. And the Roys can come down easily from Wyoming, and Kamala can cook!”

“I can?”

“We’ll both cook,” Raj said, nodding eagerly.

“What do you think?” Amina asked Dimple quietly, as though the others weren’t listening, and her cousin instinctively patted her pockets, looking for the assurance of a cigarette pack before remembering why it was gone.

She chewed her nail. “I mean, Sajeev would have to agree, obviously.”

“So call him already!” Sanji said. “What else do you need?”

What else did she need? Dimple turned to Chacko, her face disconcertingly blank, a vault holding in three decades of disappointment. From her periphery, Amina could see Bala nodding, willing him to concede, to not make the breach between them any more permanent than it already was.

“Hey,” Thomas said softly, and this time Chacko looked at him. “You will see your daughter married. You will know her children. Isn’t that enough?”

His question hung in the air, a gentle missive. And then what was it that Chacko said, what did he do to bring the soft collapse of relief to the room? Amina did not know because she was no longer looking at her uncle but at the empty spot of floor where the couch used to be, the full weight of the future she was losing with Thomas falling through her like a rock. The air current shifted, the family swishing and dipping and spooling toward one another, Dimple heading to the phone while the rest started making the kinds of plans they loved to make, where everyone had something to deliver. Amina held her breath, rigid, waiting for the worst to pass. She, Kamala, and Raj would handle the food. Bala would take care of decorations. Sanji would keep a running list of everything that needed to get done and make all the trips to the store. Thomas’s hand clasped the back of Amina’s neck, warm and dry. She looked over, surprised to find him standing, to have him so close. How much strength had it cost him to shuffle over? He pulled her to him, and she pressed her hot face into his shoulder, relieved to have a place to hide it.

CHAPTER 7

“Tell me again,” Jamie puffed, hoisting an enormous chandelier made of at least twenty round white paper lanterns into the sturdy branches of a cottonwood, “why this is a good idea?”

“Because if we put these up, we can get rid of most of the other lights and the house will stop looking like a Broadway show mental ward.”

“So there’s a light quota?”

“Apparently, yes.”

He grunted and dug his heels into the foldout linoleum dance floor Thomas had dug up from some corner of the porch. Poor Jamie. They had really put him to work once they realized the advantage of his size, making him Thomas’s proxy. So far he had repositioned the couch in the field, added another length to the dining table, handed Kamala every single dish from the top shelves of her cabinets, and emptied the truck of bags of sod (not a wedding duty per se, but something Kamala and Thomas had been so excited about, he couldn’t really say no). Amina zoomed in on his hands on the rope, then lowered the camera, looking at the instant replica of him in the viewfinder.

“Is that high enough?” he asked, panting.

She looked up. “Maybe like a foot more?”

“You’re insane.”

“I mean, can you believe this?” She turned the camera toward him, showing him the tiny picture of his own hands.

The digital camera was a present from Sajeev, who had arrived the day before to a flurry of cheek pinchings from the women and handshakes from the men (with the exception of Chacko, who nodded stiffly at him and then left to walk the perimeter of the yard, as though checking for intruders). Amina had promised to familiarize herself with the new camera before the wedding though Dimple was adamant that she not use it.

“Oh my God!” her cousin said now, coming around the side of the house with two potted plants. “Is that the light thing? That one we’re standing under?”

“You like it?” Jamie asked, his arms shaking. They hadn’t exactly been fast friends, Jamie and Dimple, sniffing around each other with a fair amount of suspicion, but they were making an effort, more enthusiastic with each other than they’d ever been alone with Amina.

“It’s amazing! How did you get it to do that? All those clusters?”

“Don’t ask,” he grunted, tying the end of the rope to the stake. “Or not unless you want to hear Amina’s dad talk about it for a really, really long time.”

“Speaking of,” Dimple said, looking over her shoulder. “Someone should really get him out of the kitchen before Raj and your mother kill him. And then someone should get Raj out, too.”

“That bad?” Amina pulled the lens tight on her cousin’s face, liking how the marigolds threw ochre at her cheeks and chin. She showed Dimple the result.

“Ugh! Stop with that. It’s so annoying.”

“It’s instant gratification!”

“Gratification should be delayed.”

“Whatever, single mom.”

“Shht!” Dimple glanced over her shoulder for the Roys, who had flown in that morning, befuddled but well mannered as ever, and who, the family had decided, did not actually need to know about Dimple’s pregnancy until the wedding was over and everyone was safely back in their separate states. (“And even then,” Bala had said over dinner the night before, “babies come early all the time, no? Who’s to say this one didn’t?”)

“I thought your mom had the Roys working on the flower garlands,” Amina said.

“She did. And like most normal people, Sajeev’s dad decided he’d rather shoot himself. Last I saw him, he was looking at some weird sign in the back with a cat on it.”

“Raccoon,” Amina said. “It’s the Raccooner.”

“Okay,” Jamie said, wiping his hands across his shirt and checking the raw marks on them. “Should we try it out?”

Amina began backing into the field, camera pressed to her face. “Go.” He bent over, head down, and suddenly the lanterns blazed above him, circles upon circles of light bouncing off one another. Jamie and Dimple stood under it, heads turned up. They looked like a fairy tale, a giant, an imp, and a bubbling moon hovering over them.

“Come here. You’ve got to see this.”

“Who?” Dimple asked.

“Both of you,” Amina said, and they came, picking their way across the grass, turning around to look back.

It was not the most beautiful wedding she had ever photographed. For one, the potted marigolds didn’t hold quite the same amount of romance as other, traditional bouquets, say, calla lilies or white roses. For another, the mismatched tablecloths, folding dining chairs, and rainbow of napkins made the dinner setup look like a deranged child’s tea party. But that evening, as Dimple and Sajeev said their vows under Thomas’s constellation, as Sanji fanned her face hard enough to keep her dry-eyed, and all the other adults (save Kamala) gave in to a quiet weep, Amina understood that these pictures would be the ones she would never tire of looking at.

Dimple, standing in Amina’s bedroom in a towel, bony-shouldered and frazzled with excitement. Bala running down the driveway with flowers so that the Roys would not enter the property without something of beauty to welcome them. Thomas and Chacko, heads bent over the fuse box, trying to figure out what had tripped the outage in the back half of the house. Kamala sprinkling more chili powder into Raj’s sambar while he looked in the fridge. Sanji, sneaking a cigarette out on the Stoop because “What are you girls, if not my very own heart growing up once and for all?”

Later, there would be the arrival of the Roys, Sajeev shaking hands with Chacko at last, the fumbling of rings, the dinner. Prince Philip would make off with a leg of tandoori, Chacko and Dimple would have the pined-for father-daughter dance, and Amina and Thomas would join in at the end, at the beckoning of the others.

At nine o’clock, just when it looked like the Roys were getting ready to announce their departure for their hotel, Amina put on “At Last” and waited for it to work its magic. It did not disappoint. Couple by couple went to the dance floor until all five were dancing. Sanji and Raj clung to each other, exhausted, while the Roys floated by. Dimple and Sajeev swayed, her head tucked firmly under his chin. Bala kept talking to everyone, no matter which way Chacko turned her. Kamala and Thomas barely moved, foreheads pressed together, hands clasped around each other’s waist. Amina stepped onto a dining chair to get a shot of everyone, while Jamie steadied her hips.

The talking started sometime after midnight. Amina knew because it didn’t seem like that long since she’d fallen asleep, and then suddenly there was Thomas’s voice in the dark, as sonorous and insistent as a ringing phone, dragging her back from her dreams. She sat up in bed. Made her way to the window.

The wedding lanterns were still on, casting a faint golden glow into the fields and defining the back ridge of the sofa and the light smudge of Thomas’s head, so that when the breeze parted the grass he looked like a rafter awash in a green-black sea. His words floated up in patches. Amina leaned forward. What was he saying? Nothing she could make sense of so far away. She went downstairs.

The kitchen was dark, drying china spread out on every countertop like the bones of some prehistoric animal. She walked carefully past them, through the laundry room and onto the dark back porch. She pressed her face to the screen door.

“The bow and arrow,” Thomas said. “For concentration.”

Next to him in the grass, Prince Philip’s tail thumped in reply.

“Hey, Dad—” Amina yelped as a hand slammed over her mouth.

“No!” Kamala hissed, dragging her backward and down. “No talking!”

“Mmph!” Amina tried to stand straight, but Kamala clung to her, eyes gleaming like a feral monkey’s until Amina forced herself to take a deep breath and nod at her mother to signify she understood. Yes. Fine. No talking. Kamala slowly loosened her grip. Outside, Thomas rocked back and forth in his seat, excited about something.

“You’re right,” he said. “You’re absolutely right.”

“Is it—?” Amina started, but she didn’t need to finish. There was really no one else it could be.

It was an outpouring, a monsoon. The entire night and into the dawn, Thomas sat on the couch, a deluge falling from his lips. While much of what he said to Akhil was spoken too softly to be understood from their spot on the porch, the tiny bits that Amina could make sense of — how a shunt works, why cricket games could last so long and still be exciting, what it was like to bring Akhil home from the hospital as a baby — seemed to be equally unrelated and urgent, as if there was a list of subjects he’d sworn to cover before the day was over.

By midmorning he showed no signs of slowing down, and Kamala made tea and toast, stepping around a disapproving Amina to deliver it to him.

“I thought you said no talking.”

“What talking, dummy? This is eating.”

Amina followed her mother out to the couch, where her father greeted both of them with a preemptively raised hand, as though he was on a phone call.

“Tea!” Kamala announced. “Toast!”

“But he won the Oscar,” Thomas said, motioning for her to leave the tray. “And the Padma Shri! You think the Indian government goes around giving honors to people who insult the integrity of the country?”

“Ben Kingsley?” Amina couldn’t help asking, and her father nodded irritably, shooing her away.

By the late afternoon they were back, taking turns sitting on the couch with him. Kamala darned socks for the better part of an hour, while Amina shot three rolls of close-ups. It wasn’t that she needed to know what he was saying, Amina told herself, taking a picture of Thomas’s much thinned profile, but rather that the rambling was renewing in some way, the rat-tat-tat-tat of a soft summer rain on a tin roof, washing off the heat and misery they had endured.

Her father was finally happy. It was not hard to see this. Joy blossomed across his face, filling his cheeks and eyes with an intensity not seen since he had performed his last surgery. His hands flew around as if reaping the air for sentences. He laughed on occasion. Once, he even turned and winked at her, making her feel like she was in on an elaborate, goofy conspiracy.

“Maybe it’s healing him?” Raj asked when he arrived the next morning to retrieve his dishes, and the hope in his voice nipped at Amina’s heart even before he went to sit on the couch himself, listening and nodding along.

That afternoon, the family came in shifts, first Sanji, then Bala, and at last Chacko, who surprised everyone by showing remarkable endurance for the natter, sitting for an eight-hour stretch before dismissing himself to go home and sleep.

“Still?” Jamie asked that night.

“Still,” Amina confirmed. She held the phone close to her bedroom window, where Thomas’s voice droned in like a swarm of bees. “You hear that?”

“Nope.”

“Oh. Well, he’s still there.”

It wasn’t until the fourth day, when Thomas stopped eating, that she began to really worry. Sanji, Kamala, and Amina sat in the kitchen, staring at the rejected bowl of chicken and rice like it was a bowl of snakes.

“Nothing for breakfast either?” Sanji asked, and Amina pointed to the toast she’d left on the counter hopefully, as though he might come look for it.

“Probably just queasy or something,” Sanji said, but called Chacko at the office anyway.

“Eda,” Chacko said that evening, kneeling in front of Thomas so he’d be forced to make eye contact, to stop talking. “You have to eat.”

“Later,” Thomas said.

Chacko patted his leg. “You need your strength. You’re getting depleted.”

“Later,” he repeated, ignoring further entreaties from everyone, including Raj, who brought down a box of every single one of Thomas’s favorite foods by dinnertime. That night the family sat in the kitchen, the uneasy silence between them emphasized by Thomas’s increasingly frenetic chatter. Contrary to what Chacko had warned, he was growing more animated than ever, jumping breathlessly from subject to subject like a man auctioning off entire areas of thought.

“The exodus is subsiding,” he said.

“You mother didn’t think so.”

“Slingshots!”

On the sixth morning, he skipped his tea and juice.

“You have to drink,” Amina said, bringing him a plain glass of water, just in case that was the problem.

“But some narcolepsy responds to norepinephrine reuptake inhibitors,” Thomas said, and a tendril of panic curled around her lungs.

“Dad, you’re getting dehydrated.”

Thomas looked up. His pupils dilated and retracted, finding her for the first time in days.

“I’m coming to your show,” he said.

“What?”

“I don’t know why we didn’t think of it earlier.” His breath was sweet and rotten, like bread fermenting in a bag. “Your mother will love it.”

She found Kamala in the laundry room washing bedsheets.

“Yes,” her mother said after she’d been dragged to the porch to look at him. “I see.”

“So what now?” Amina clenched and unclenched her hands, wiping them on her jeans. How would they get him all the way out to the car? They needed to get him into the car. Chacko and Raj would both have to come down to help — there was no other way to manage.

“What do you mean?”

“We’ve got to get him to the hospital,” Amina repeated, annoyed. Had Kamala gone soft, too? Taken tranquilizers? Her mother’s eyelashes beat slowly in consideration, butterfly wings testing the wind.

“Not yet,” she said.

But when? That day, as Thomas’s voice went from hoarse to ragged, as his lips dried into twin strips of beef jerky and the sun dawdled across the sky, Amina paced the field, unable to sit next to her father or to let him out of her sight. He was still talking, or at least trying to talk, his voice a low, droning motor. It looked painful now, his tongue dry and dark in his mouth, the corners of his lips crusted with white. He grimaced as he shifted, and Amina realized that he must have been skipping his pain medication, too.

“Please,” she said, sitting down next to him with the pills, and when he didn’t even acknowledge her, a voice that must have been hers screamed, “PLEASE! PLEASE! PLEASE!”

“Amina?” Kamala came running from the house. “What is it? What happened?”

“He’s not drinking!” Amina said, her voice breaking, and her mother sat next to her on the couch, taking the pills and water from her hand.

“Go,” she told Amina. “Sleep.”

That night, Thomas’s words crawled like insects into Amina’s dreams, filling them with a low, humming buzz that kept her tossing and did not fade as she woke up. It was the seventh day. Her brain hurt. If Thomas were Creation, he’d be making Man by now. Amina got up and looked out the window. He was still on the couch.

Kamala was plucking coriander leaves from the stems when she entered the kitchen.

“Did he drink anything?” Amina asked, and when her mother shook her head, it came to her finally, something so obvious and unimaginable that it clattered through her body, rearranging her bones to make space for a grief so large it felt like a new organ. She clutched the counter, panting.

Kamala was standing in front of her, saying her name, pushing her hair behind her ear. Koche, she was saying. Baby. My girl. She kissed Amina’s hands, one by one, and then each cheek, her eyes blazing. “You’re going to be okay,” she said.

But could this be Kamala? Could this be the same mother that Amina had grown up with, the unwilling immigrant, the dubious participant, the damned and damning loner? That afternoon, as Monica’s big blue sedan rolled into the driveway, Amina watched her mother hug the woman she’d barely talked to over the last twenty years, then take her by the hand and lead her into the house and down the hall.

“Thanks for calling me,” Monica said as Kamala opened the porch door.

“He’ll be so glad to see you,” Kamala said.

Whether Thomas registered Monica at all was debatable, his voice reduced to an occasional grunt, but Amina watched through the window as her father’s physician’s assistant wept, holding on to his hand, kissing his forehead as she stood up. Outside in the driveway, she handed Amina a vial of morphine.

“If he needs it,” she said, and barreled into her car and down the driveway before Amina could think of what to say.

The next to come was Anyan George, who didn’t stay long or sit at all but said some very nice things nonetheless, his hands tugging at his shirt cuffs, his eyes focused on the space above Thomas’s head.

At the end of the day Kamala led the family out to him. Bala knelt and touched his feet. Sanji kissed his cheeks and forehead. Raj whispered something sweet and rushed into his ear before fleeing back to the car. Chacko held his face between his hands like he was trying to carve it into his own memory, and Thomas looked at him, blinking. He grunted.

“What?” Chacko asked, leaning in. “What is it?”

“Later,” Thomas whispered.

EPILOGUE

Jamie hated flying. Not that he was copping to it, or even hinting at it, but it was obvious from the way he fidgeted in his seat as the plane taxied down the runway, flipping open the flight safety cards and the long-defunct ashtrays like they might contain an escape hatch.

“You want to leave?” Amina asked. “Should we just call it quits right now so you can get out while you can?”

“Yes.” Jamie closed and opened the window shade with a wince in either direction. “You know me so well.”

He lifted her hand to his face, inhaling her wrist like it was a calming agent, and Amina turned to look out the window to the shimmering runway, the barren stretch of mesa spreading out behind it for miles. It seemed ridiculous to be leaving so soon after the funeral.

“What ridiculous?” Sanji had asked when she’d said as much the night before, both of them watching Kamala scrub the courtyard bricks from the kitchen window. “You can’t miss your own show, dummy. And you’ll be back in a few days. The grief will still be here; your mother will still be here. The mess might even still be here if that bloody woman doesn’t quit driving us fifty kinds of crazy!”

Why Thomas’s departure had unleashed a cleaning frenzy in Kamala was anyone’s guess, but in the days since, she had been terrorizing every room in the house and the family right along with them. So far Raj and Chacko had beaten twenty-odd rugs while Sanji cleaned the pantry and Bala took on the fridge. And while all of them complained to Amina about being “forced into slave labor” (Sanji’s words), they also seemed to be strangely happy doing it, their hands and heads fully occupied with the work. Kamala, for her part, stalked from room to room, zealous and tyrannical. At night she slept on Thomas’s side of the bed, clutching a couch cushion like it was a flotation device.

“This is it, right?” Jamie said as the plane gathered speed. “It’s happening now?”

“Jesus, have you ever been on a plane?” Amina wrapped her hand over his clenched one.

Outside, the mesa blurred into a line of beige and the air pressed hard against them, slamming them into their seats as the plane ascended. Jamie looked pale and a little sick, his eyes shut tight as the plane banked north.

They were turning now, panning past the Sandias, the deep black-green crags and rocky faces, the ribbon of road leading to the white crest. Amina looked down on Albuquerque, the light bouncing off the sprawling tile of houses and pools, the cars running along the highways like busy insects. She imagined all of it gone, undone, erased back to 1968, when the city was nothing but eighty miles of hope huddling in a dust storm. She imagined Kamala on the tarmac, walking toward a life in the desert, her body pulled forward by faith and dirty wind.