The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing

CHAPTER 1

“I’ve got to go home Monday to see my folks,” Amina said, sliding into the wooden booth across from her cousin. Even early, it was crowded for a Thursday. She dipped her head to the cool pint Dimple had waiting, and swallowed.

“I’ve been here twenty minutes.”

“I’m sorry. I was talking to my mom.”

Dimple stared coolly at her. “You just went to see your parents last month.”

“Three months ago. And by the way, Bala Auntie wants you to call.”

“Oh for God’s sake, Amina.” Her cousin shook her head, glossy curls bouncing with candlelight. She plucked two cigarettes from the pack on the table and lit them, handing one over. “What now? You need to steam the rugs? Turn the compost?”

The last time Amina had gone home, Kamala had sent her to the roof to clean the leaves out of the rain gutters and for two days straight refused to pass on the phone, telling Dimple only, “She’s on the roof and not coming down.”

“No, it’s not that. Something is wrong.”

“Something is always wrong with your mother. What about you? What about that vacation you said you’d take?”

Amina looked around, avoiding her own reflection in the mirror behind her cousin. She hated seeing her own face right next to Dimple’s — all beak and long chin and awnings for eyebrows, where Dimple’s was a crisp, pert heart.

“Why is it so crowded in here?”

“Because the fucking Internet assholes have found the place and raised the price of everything. What happened to Bali?”

“Something is wrong with my dad.” Amina took a short drag of the cigarette as concern darkened Dimple’s face. Of all the parents, it was Thomas — who had defended her worst high school escapades and protested strenuously against her eleventh-grade exile to reform school — whom Dimple loved best.

“What do you mean? Like, sick? How come my parents haven’t called?”

“No one knows yet.”

“It’s a secret?” Dimple’s eyes widened.

“Of course not.”

“What kind of sick?”

“There’s just some … I don’t know. He’s incoherent or something. My mother says he’s talking all night.”

“Talking?”

“Telling stories.”

Amina’s cousin rolled her eyes, her face slackening. “For the last hundred years, yes. What’s the fly-home emergency?”

“My mom thinks something is wrong.” Amina swiped a stripe of condensation off her pint. “Anyway, I just want to go check in.”

“What does your dad have to say about it?”

“My mom doesn’t want me talking to him about it over the phone.”

“So he hasn’t told you anything is wrong.”

“Yes, but that isn’t the—”

“And when did you last talk to him?”

“Last week.”

“And did he seem normal?”

Amina shrugged. “I mean, it’s my dad.”

Dimple squinted as she exhaled. “It’s a trap.”

“Oh, come on.”

“It’s a way for Kamala to get you back home. Where she can get you married.” She pointed at Amina with her cigarette. “Before your uterus dries up.”

“Oh, Dimple, stop. She hasn’t brought up anyone in over a year.”

“Proof!”

“No, this isn’t that.”

“Why not? Because the idea of your mother making some stupid plan without your permission is unthinkable?”

Amina took a sip of beer so she wouldn’t have to answer. Kamala had set her up with various Syrian Christian men (or, as she called them, “Potentials”) a total of twelve times. Eleven without Amina’s permission.

“Because she wouldn’t try the same bullshit over and over until it worked?”

Amina cleared her throat. “This isn’t that, I swear. And anyway, there aren’t even any good Suriani boys left, remember? She’s given up.”

“There were never any good Suriani boys. We’re a failed culture.” It was one of Dimple’s favorite theories, how thousands of years of obsession with a Christian God in a subcontinent of more dynamic religions had petrified the Syrian Christian community, turning them into what she alternately called “the stalest community on earth” or “India’s WASPs.” Amina braced for a full-on rant, but instead Dimple just blew a sharp plume of smoke from the corner of her mouth.

“I know what you’re saying,” Amina conceded. “But this is too low, even for my mother. She would never pretend that Dad was sick.” Dimple reached across the table to cup Amina’s jaw and leaned in so close that Amina could smell her familiar, flowery perfume over the smoke in the bar. “Fool,” she whispered, not unkindly.

Amina leaned back. The war over her soul and future had raged between Kamala and Dimple for too many years for her to take it personally. The bar was filling up, crammed with baggy pants, fleece jackets, messenger bags, and sneakers. Dimple scanned the room unhappily.

“Do you think it’s really going to last?” she asked. It was the question that came up every time the cousins went out lately, her tone alternating between sarcastic and despondent. No one had been more discouraged by the rise of the Internet than Dimple, whose complaints ranged from having her neighborhood gentrified to having the gallery she ran compromised by what she described in fundamentalist tones as “the corruption of the quality image in the digital age.”

Less vocal, if not actually less pessimistic, Amina was equally worried about the Internet, if only for the fact that it put her on the outside of something she feared might be generationally altering, like the civil rights movement or Woodstock. As “kids” just a few years younger than she flooded the city, scooping up armloads of vintage furniture and spreading through the neighborhoods on scooters, she clutched her trusty Leica, feeling like she was holding on to a wagon wheel in the face of the Industrial Revolution.

“I hate them,” Dimple said before Amina could respond. “I hate what they do, I hate that they make more money than I ever will. Did I tell you someone suggested that part of the gallery be ‘webcast’? What does that even mean?”

The cousins watched as a grinning guy in a baseball hat waved a twenty at the bartender.

“So how are things with Damon?” Amina asked.

“Over.”

“I thought it was going well.”

“He moved back in with his ex.”

“Are you serious?”

“It’s fine,” Dimple said with a shrug. “Honestly, it saved me the trouble of having to get involved.”

Five months older than Amina and therefore “well into age thirty,” Dimple had been quietly moving through Seattle’s supply of eligible men with a carnivorousness that occasionally scared Amina. It wasn’t the number of men her cousin saw that unnerved her (truth be told, Amina had probably slept with more men, more often) but rather the impatience with which Dimple went through them, bringing them to meet Amina at bars and tuning out when they spoke, frowning like she’d ordered the wrong thing from a menu.

While some might interpret this as indifference, Amina knew the opposite to be true. Never mind how many relationships Dimple opened or ended with a shrug; the one thing she really wanted — and had always wanted, even in high school, when she turned scaring boys away into a kind of performance art — was someone worth sticking around for. At this point, the only thing more humiliating than having another relationship fail would be for Amina to openly acknowledge it.

“How about you?” her cousin asked. “Have you managed to have a conversation with anyone you’re sleeping with?”

Amina took another sip of beer. “Why start now?”

An old Van Halen song pumped through the speakers, and half the guys at the bar threw up rocker fingers. The cousins sighed.

“Let’s go,” Amina said.

It was raining lightly as they left the bar, the soft, ceaseless, rhythmic kind of rain that is Seattle’s lullaby. They stood out on the wet street while Dimple shook three cigarettes out of the pack, pressing them into Amina’s hand.

“Thanks.”

“Oh God!” Dimple clapped her hand to her chest. “I almost forgot! I told Sajeev we’d go out with him Saturday night.”

Amina groaned.

“I had to, Ami. He’s called twice since he moved here, and we keep putting him off. My parents are driving me nuts with all the messages they’ve been leaving.” She switched into her mother’s husky Indo-British whisper, and pursed her face into a perfect Bala Auntie. “Dimple dahling, please do take the fine young man out. Mary Roy is calling all the time only. Everyone is wanting to know how he is.”

That their dislike of Sajeev Roy was hardly fair didn’t stop the cousins from dreading him. When they were in kindergarten, it was his vulnerability that marked him, his constant thrashing at the hands of American boys, his eagerness to be part of their tight huddle. The girls had been relieved when his family moved to Wyoming, although their own mothers’ all-too-vocal admiration for his later successes (MIT undergrad, a degree in engineering) still rendered him unappealing.

“Can’t you just go for both of us? I’m really going to be beat.”

Dimple stared at her.

“Fine,” Amina said with a scowl. “But I’m working until at least ten, so it will have to be afterward.”

“Yeah, fine, whatever. You sure you don’t want a ride home?”

“Nah.” They had reached Dimple’s old blue Chevy van, moldering in the parking lot like a wet elephant. Dimple opened the front door and climbed in. She looked ridiculously small in it, like a child playing grown-up. Even with her seat forward as far as it would go, her legs were barely long enough to reach the brakes and clutch.

“Call your mother,” Amina said when her cousin rolled the window down, and Dimple nodded even though they both knew she wouldn’t.

CHAPTER 2

“Thanks for meeting with me,” Amina said, walking into Jane’s office the next day. Jane swiveled around in her chair, perfectly pressed into her black suit, her red pageboy swinging. She pointed to the phone cupped to her head and then to the chair across from her. Amina sat.

“Yes, but it was a bar mitzvah. How do you miss the hora?” she asked irritably. Amina turned her attention to the floor-to-ceiling view of the Puget Sound to keep herself from getting unnerved. It was easy enough to do in Jane’s office, the proportions of which (endless white walls, floor-to-ceiling windows) always made her feel like a gnat suspended in a glass jar.

The person on the other end of the phone was still talking when Jane hung up with a clatter. She frowned, repositioning herself in her seat. “I didn’t realize we had a meeting scheduled.”

“I’m having a family emergency and need to go home.”

“Emergency?”

“My dad’s not well.”

“Sorry to hear that.”

Amina shifted, something about Jane’s relentless efficiency, her plucking gaze, making her feel like a liar. “It should just be a few days.” Jane turned to her computer, her mouth twitching as she read the schedule. She looked back at Amina. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

“No, wait—”

“This is unacceptable.”

“It’s not what you think.”

“Sure, it’s your father. What does he have? Kidney stone? Diabetes? Lung cancer?”

“No, but—”

“You told me you would see this through.” She rapped her desk with her index finger. “If I wanted someone to screw it up, I could have sent in Peter.”

“I’d leave on Monday.”

“Not to mention that I’ve already gotten two messages from Lesley expressing concern about your ability to handle her event.”

“Monday as in after the Beale wedding.”

Jane looked at her, coolly recalibrating.

“Monday through Friday,” Amina said, discreetly wiping her palms on her pants. “That should leave me pretty much clear, except for the Johnsons’ fiftieth-anniversary dinner on Thursday night.”

Jane turned back to her computer, pulling up the next week.

Amina cleared her throat. “Two messages?”

“Both ridiculous. I took care of it. But I need to know you’re on top of this.”

“I am,” Amina said, annoyance creeping into her voice. Jane looked amused.

“Looks like Earl is your best bet for Thursday. Peter is on vacation, and Wanda has an eighth-grade graduation party.”

“Eighth grade? Seriously?”

“I told you she’s hungry.”

Hunger, like loyalty and willingness to work unconventional hours, was a quality Jane valued in her staff. When she started the company ten years earlier, she had worked solo, talking her way into weddings by not charging for her time, just for her prints. It was a strategy that led her to build a devoted base within just a year. Now that Wiley Studios was a twelve-person operation, she was always looking for new growth opportunities. (“God willing,” she’d once murmured to Amina in a rare unguarded moment, “we’ll be shooting every event with candles on this side of the Cascades.”)

Not that Amina needed to prove herself to Jane as much as she had in the early years. If anything, the fact that she’d been given the Beale account was clearly a vote of confidence, even if the reality of dealing with Lesley Beale felt like a demotion.

“So what’s the Beales’ venue?” Jane asked, writing a phone number down on a Post-it.

“The Highlands.”

“Of course. How many times have you been out?”

“Three last week.”

Jane raised an eyebrow. “Nervous?”

“I’m not, I just—”

“Of course you are. Lesley is a legendary bitch. But please her and we become the go-to for the lot of them, and that will please me.” Jane slapped her hands on the desk, signaling the end of the conversation, and Amina stood. “Let me know if you can’t get Earl.”

Coming to work for Jane Wiley hadn’t been Amina’s idea. It was Dimple who had known Jane through mutual friends, Dimple who had gotten Amina the interview at Wiley Studios after her career at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer had derailed, Dimple who had hustled her out of bed and into the shower five years earlier, claiming she had told her about the job interview the week before.

“Who cares if it’s events? You’ve just got to get out there again. Is this black thing your only suit?” her cousin had said while Amina stood under the pounding water, hungover, hating her.

“Out there” was Wiley Studios in Belltown, where Amina arrived that morning with a tightening forehead, her portfolio and résumé in hand. After a ten-minute wait, she was shuffled down the long hallway into Jane’s airy office, where a black notebook lay open in the center of a steel desk with a to-do list that numbered into the fifties. Amina’s name was number 14.

Jane had held out a pale hand. “Let’s see what you’ve got.”

Amina handed over her portfolio and looked away as Jane opened it, feeling, as she always did, that it was a little like watching a needle go into her own arm. Jane’s head bobbed over the pictures.

“What’s this?”

Amina glanced over. A smiling young boy’s face leaned so close, his features were almost blurry. In the background, his older brother sat in a cement stairwell, wearing a Knicks shirt and smoking a cigarette.

“That’s in Brooklyn. For an article on New York’s homeless youth.”

“Is that where you met Dimple? NYU?”

“Yes. I mean, no. Or, well, we met in New Mexico, but then we also went to NYU.”

“And then you followed her here?”

“She followed me here,” Amina said, bristling a little, and Jane looked up at her briefly before moving on. The next was an old woman with a puff of white hair, slumping into her lawn chair.

“Record heat in Queens,” Amina offered.

In the next, a young Asian man in a stained shirt clutched his stomach, his eyes rolled back.

“Bellingham hot-dog-eating champion dethroned.”

“Did I see this in the P-I?”

“Yes.”

The next photo was of a police officer, a mother, and her son. The officer and the young woman faced each other, while the small boy leaned back against his mother, his hands cupping her knees. A dark look hung in the air between the adults, but the boy smiled, gleefully unaware, his mother’s hands slammed over his ears. His T-shirt had chocolate ice cream stains down the front.

“This?” Jane’s voice was pinched.

“The family of the firefighter who died last year.”

“One of the four in the warehouse accident?”

“Yeah.”

Jane lay the portfolio down. “Well, all we need now is a picture of someone actually killing themselves, and we’ll have a real party.”

Amina sat still, her face prickling with heat.

“Why didn’t you include that one?”

“I thought it wouldn’t be … applicable. To this job. Appropriate.”

“And you’d have been right.” Jane set the portfolio on the desk between them, folding it closed. “But then, none of these are really appropriate, are they? For the job?”

“You haven’t seen them all.”

“I don’t need to. They’re not what I’m looking for.”

“But there might be something—”

Jane held up her hand. “Do you have any weddings in here?”

Amina shook her head.

“Birthdays? Anniversaries? Baptisms? Bar mitzvahs?”

“No.”

“Of course not. Because that’s not really what you do, is it?” It didn’t seem like a question she wanted answered as much as said out loud, and Amina shifted as Jane smiled coldly at her. “What you do is get the stuff that people watch despite themselves. Meanwhile, I need someone who can take good portraits, who knows how to find the smiling moment and capture it. Someone who can replace me at the events.” Amina jumped a little as Jane slapped her hand down on the desk in dismissal. “Thanks for coming. And please tell Dimple I send my best.”

Amina did not move. She knew she should get up, say thank you, and head with quiet composure to the nearest bar, but she couldn’t. Moving would lead to home, to the bed she was never far enough from anymore. It would mean she didn’t have anything else to do in her week. And it was better in Jane’s office, better than it had been anywhere else for a long time. She looked at the files and the memos and the calendar separating days into pristine units of time, aware of Jane’s growing irritation the longer she sat.

“I understand your hesitation,” Amina said at last, her voice coming out softer than she wanted. She cleared her throat. “The thing is that I really can do this.”

Jane frowned. “I’m not sure you’re hearing—”

“No, I can do it well.” Her cheeks blazed. “I can. I have great references from the New York Post, and the photo editor at the P-I can vouch for me.”

“Listen.” Jane’s voice dropped an octave. “Your cousin told me you were having a hard time after all the hubbub, and I agreed to meet with you, but I can’t go giving out jobs to people just because they’re having a hard—”

“I wouldn’t expect you to pay me,” Amina blurted out.

Jane blinked. “What?”

“I …” Amina licked her lips and felt the words come out rapidly, hitting her tongue and brain at the same time. “Not until you knew I could do it, of course. Until I proved myself. By shooting a wedding. Or weddings. A month of weddings.”

Jane’s mouth puckered.

“If you let me shoot with one of your other photographers, you’ll see,” Amina continued, breathless, terrified. “I wouldn’t get in the way, and I would show you the finished product. If you like any of my shots, they can be made available to your clients. And if I’m not what you’re looking for, you haven’t lost anything.” She pitched back against her chair.

“That’s ridiculous,” Jane said.

“It’s free.”

Jane looked her over warily.

“Fine,” she said at last. “Get to St. Joe’s on Capitol Hill on Saturday morning. A nice big Irish Catholic wedding.”

Amina rose quietly, quickly putting her portfolio away before Jane could change her mind.

“Thanks,” she whispered on the way out the door.

“Ten o’clock sharp,” Jane replied.

That weekend, when Amina showed up at the Murphy-Patrick wedding, she saw someone she barely recognized. Gone were Jane’s terse manner and the dark suit, replaced by a bubbly woman who gave everyone nicknames and winked like she had a nerve condition.

“Thanks, honeys!” she had shouted, waving a hand to dismiss the bridesmaids. “Now I want one with Snow White and Elvis and the Backup Singers! Yup, in a line, just like that.”

The following Thursday had found Amina back in Jane’s office, contact sheets spread across the light box in the corner. She listened to the silence of Jane’s scrutiny — the woman was unnervingly quiet until she didn’t want to be.

“Oh,” Jane said finally, with some surprise. “This one is good.”

“Which?”

“Bride-fixing-hair-before-ceremony.” She glanced up. “Good angle.”

She moved on to the next sheet. “Not bad. Most of these with the bridesmaids are decent. You need to watch your shadows a little, though, make sure you always cheat to make the bride look better than anyone else.”

“Okay.”

Jane paused again over the shots taken during the ceremony.

“Mother of the bride crying works,” she said. “She’ll think she looks noble.”

Amina squeezed her hands together behind her back in a kind of inverted prayer, surprised by how much she cared. Jane moved quickly through the next sheet and the next. She came to the portraits outside the church.

“Oh.” She sounded disappointed. “Your portraits are off.”

Amina’s stomach fluttered a little. “What?”

“They look uncomfortable.” Jane pushed the loupe toward her. “Look. See how your group look like they’d rather be somewhere else? My guess is you’re coming in late, when the smile gets a little tighter and the shine in the eyes fades. You’ve got to talk between shots to keep them with you.” Amina heard Jane rummaging around next to her. “Look at mine.”

The contact sheet Jane placed down on the light box showed bright-eyed, shiny-cheeked, smiling groomsmen, the Irish Catholic version of the Pips.

“Backup singers,” Amina said.

“Exactly.” Jane took the loupe back, skimming. “Your dance shots are good, but you need to get closer during the toasts.”

“I didn’t want to get in the way.”

“Don’t worry about that. Just be quick.”

She moved on, nodding at several pictures, circling others with a red grease pencil. On the last sheet, her head stopped abruptly.

“What’s this?” she asked.

It was the best picture Amina had taken all night.

“A bridesmaid.”

“Obviously. I can tell by the bouquet and the shoes.”

The shot was a side view of a bathroom stall. The bouquet lay at the base of the toilet bowl like an offering at an altar. Behind it, two taffeta-covered knees pressed to the ground, followed by calves and feet in scuffed satin pumps. And while Amina had known that the bride herself wouldn’t want to see the picture, something — vanity? — had convinced her that Jane would appreciate it compositionally, suddenly understanding the talent she had in her midst.

“What is she doing?” Jane asked.

“Vomiting.”

Jane straightened up and looked at her, the skin on her cheeks mottling. “You clicked a puker.”

“It happened very fast,” Amina said. “She didn’t know I was there.”

“At a wedding. You clicked a wedding puker.”

“It was just a few shots.”

“A bridesmaid, no less. Not someone anonymous enough not to care about.”

“Well, but—”

“Stop talking!” Jane clapped loudly in front of Amina’s face, shutting her up. “Do you have any idea how much trouble that could get us into?”

“I would never have shown those to anyone.”

“Damn right you—those? Are there more?”

There were two more. One of the girl washing off her face, taken from the stall Amina had locked herself into, and another of her hanging over the hand dryer as it blew up at her face.

“She didn’t see you?”

“No.”

“How do you know?”

“Because she didn’t. Sometimes people just don’t.”

Jane squinted. “I noticed that about you.”

Amina blushed.

“You realize how disturbing these would be to the client?” Jane asked.

“I do. I mean, I do now.”

“You didn’t then?”

“No, I just didn’t think … it just seemed like another part of the wedding until I saw the contact sheet yesterday, and—”

“It’s unprofessional and asinine.”

Amina waited for a scolding, some kind of advice, but when the silence grew until all she could hear was the sound of her own heart slapping in her chest, she understood that she needed to leave quickly. She packed her things with trembling fingers, sliding all the negatives off the light box and into her portfolio, shamed by the sight of the few pictures she’d gone so far as to print. Jane said nothing, sitting heavily behind her desk.

“Thanks,” Amina said when she was done, not knowing what else to say. She made her way to the door.

“You can never take those pictures again,” Jane said.

Amina stopped, turned around.

“And don’t let me get a call from anyone telling me I sent a goddamn voyeur their way. Weddings are about fantasies — you understand? Your job is to photograph the fantasy, not the reality. Never the reality. If I ever see another picture like that, you’re fired.”

She opened her notebook.

“Does that mean that I’m hired?” Amina asked quietly.

“No. Not until I know you can do good portraits.” Jane moved her finger down the page, scanning the schedule. “I’ve got another wedding coming up the day after tomorrow at the United Lutheran Church up in Queen Anne.”

It was a crash course, a month of weddings, two per weekend. Jane and Amina wound their way through teary parents and tense couples, using a half hour during the week to review Amina’s work. Jane could move through hundreds of shots quickly, critiquing some, dismissing some, scanning for anything out of line. At the last June wedding they worked together, she sneaked two flutes of champagne out behind the garden tent and told Amina she was hired.

“I’ve set you up with six weddings for July, and after those, you’ll need to drum up your own clients quickly if you want to survive,” she had said.

Amina had wanted to thank her but was afraid she’d do something stupid, like cry, or hug her too hard. Jane hadn’t been looking at her anyway.

“Five messages?” Outside Jane’s office with Post-it in hand, Amina stared at the pink slips the receptionist handed her. “I was only in there ten minutes.”

“Four are from the same woman. And Jose came by looking for you, too. He said something about the Lorber print being ready, but didn’t I send those out last week?”

Amina ignored the question and the look that came with it, walking down the hallway and frowning at the tight script that dotted the slips. Lesley Beale, Lesley Beale, Lesley Beale. “He’s in the darkroom?”

“Yes.”

“Thanks.”

Amina continued down the hallway to the darkroom, stepping into the cylindrical door and coming face-to-face with Jose’s rules. Posted on the drum, they specified that there should be no knocking any time, that no one should come in unannounced, or call on the phone between ten and six. While some in the office questioned Jose’s definition of “being at work,” all of the photographers were far too enamored of his prints to ever tell him so.

Amina knocked softly. The metal boomed around her, and she heard something drop on the other side of it, along with a long curl of something mean and Spanish.

“Jose, it’s Amina. I’m sorry,” she whispered.

“Well, don’t fucking whisper now you made me fuck up!” Jose yelled through the door. “What do the rules say? Fuck Jose up, or leave him alone?”

“I know, I know, it’s just I’m going to be leaving in half an hour, so if you have anything for me, I should get it now.”

“Puta! In your office in ten.”

Amina eased out the door and tiptoed into her office down the hall, carefully shutting the door behind her.

Unlike in Jane’s office, where the sorted piles and color-coded Post-its gave the impression of a sort of collective organization, the piles in Amina’s office left no such impression. She had never managed to make good use of the filing cabinet, preferring to leave her paperwork on top of it, while excess napkins and packs of ketchup lined her desk drawer. A single lamp hung over her desk, and she turned it on.

Lesley Beale. The pile of messages joined several others that lived in a heap at the corner of Amina’s desk, and when the phone rang again, she took a deep breath before picking it up.

“Amina!” Kamala shouted. “You’ll never guess what just happened!”

“Ma?”

A tumbling sounded on the other end of the line, and Amina heard her mother screeching, “Give me the phone, Thomas! Let me tell your daughter what the genius surgeon did this morning!”

There were more muffled noises and the sound of Thomas’s footsteps thundering up what could only be the stairs. He breathed hard into the phone. A door slammed.

“Amina-Amina-Amina, I stole the phone!” he shouted, voice echoing like he was in a bat cave. “I’m in the bathroom! Here she comes!”

“Thomas!” Kamala pounded on the door. “Let me talk to her!”

“No!”

“Coward! Tell her!”

“No!”

“Tell me what?” Amina asked.

“Nothing,” Thomas’s voice chimed in with false innocence. “Nothing at all. And how are you this fine summer morning?”

“He lost the car!” Kamala yelled. More pounding. “His own car!”

“You what?”

“Nothing doing!” Thomas yelled. “Don’t fill your daughter’s head with such lies!”

There was a pause as he waited for Kamala’s comeback, which did not come.

“She must be planning a sneak attack,” Thomas whispered into the phone.

“You lost the car?” Amina whispered back.

“Oh, she’s buzzing like one hornet’s nest today, I tell you.”

“What happened?”

“Nothing much, really. Your mother likes to make up stories, what else is new?”

“IN THE SHOPPING MALL!” Kamala yelled into the phone, having found another receiver, and Amina almost dropped hers.

“Bad thing, get off!” Thomas yelled back.

“And guess who had to save him?”

“Oh boy, here it comes. She’s a saint! She’s a saint!”

“Lost it lost it? Like you really didn’t know where it was?” Amina asked.

“And it wasn’t even at Sears like he said, it was at Dillard’s!” Kamala snorted. “And then the best part! Tell her what you were doing there.”

“I was shopping,” Thomas said.

“Bullshits! He was at the hardware store getting keys made because he lost them! First the keys, then the car!”

“Edi, penay.” Thomas cut her off, slipping into Malayalam, in which Amina could only pick out a few words. Something about a goat. Something else about idiots. Amina pulled the receiver away from her ear. After a silence, a squeaky “Amina!” came from the phone.

“Yes.”

“Did you say you’re coming?” It was Kamala.

“My plane comes in Monday afternoon.”

“Hey!” Thomas said, delighted. “You’re coming?”

“She got some time off from work, so she decided to come see us,” Kamala said quickly. “Not like some people’s daughters.”

“How long?” Thomas asked.

“Just five days. I’m coming Monday.”

“Fantastic.”

Amina bit her cuticle. She imagined her father in a pool of unfamiliar cars, windshields blank as shark eyes. Alzheimer’s? Was this how it started? Thomas’s beeper went off, and she heard him fumbling for it.

“Hey, koche, I need—”

“I know, I know, I hear it. Talk to you later.” Amina listened for a few seconds after he hung up. “Is he off?”

“Mm-hm.” Her mother sounded distracted. “My pen’s not working; hold on. What time do you come in?”

“He lost the car?”

Kamala laughed. “I know! Can you believe it?”

“And you’re sure he’s safe working?”

“What do you mean?”

“He’s seeing Ammachy and then he loses the car?”

“What? No! Not at the same time, dummy. He lost the car this morning,” Kamala said, as though that explained everything. “This other thing happens at night.”

“But you don’t think they have any connection to each other?”

“Of course not. Pish, this girl! Always overreacting to simple-simple things!”

“I’m not overreacting! I’m just saying that if he—”

“Your father loses everything twice every month for the last twenty-five years. It’s funny, that’s why we told you. Everyone loses the car in the mall!”

Amina pulled at the phone cord. A knock at the door jerked her head, and Jose’s half-lidded, reptilian eyes slanted her way.

“I have to go,” Amina told her mother.

“You didn’t tell me your flight information,” Kamala said as Jose ducked through the doorway, a flat yellow envelope in his hands, AMINA ONLY written on the front.

“I’ll call you later.”

Kamala banged the phone down. Amina stared at the receiver. Jose cleared his throat.

“Right.” She looked up at him. “Sorry.”

“You okay?” he asked.

“Yeah.”

“You don’t look okay.”

“I’m fine.” She glanced at the envelope. “What’s that?”

“A beauty. Not that you deserve it.” Jose slid the picture onto her desk. They stared down at a white-haired woman laid across a dark tabletop, her arms extending from her sides. The view was from her feet up, her scuffed shoe bottoms giving way to the twisted root of her body. Empty chairs lined either side of her like an invisible audience, and her mouth hung open. The halo around her was barely perceptible, a lightness that made her body rise from the table. A man crouched next to her, his lips pursed.

“Jesus,” Amina said.

“That’s exactly what I thought!” Jose said, his voice betraying his excitement. “I put in a little bit of light just around her head and body. I brought out the detail of the shoes, you know, like that. And I can go heavier on the man’s face in the corner if you want. I just sort of liked it, you know, with her as more of the focus.”

“No, I like him soft.” Amina looked at the woman’s hands, her curled fingers. “The hands are nice, too. This is one of your best.”

“Your best. Man, I don’t know what I’d do around here if you didn’t keep me rolling in a steady supply of nasty. She didn’t die, did she?”

“No, just passed out from excitement. She was fine when I left.” Amina carefully picked up the picture and slid it back into the envelope, then into her bag. “Okay, what kind of filling do you want?”

“Veggie. Also, I need more of the green stuff.”

“Chutney.”

“Whatever.”

Amina wrote the order in her notebook. “My cousin and I are meeting someone in your neighborhood on Sunday, so I can drop them by if that works.”

Two years before, when Jose had gone out of his way to print one of Amina’s shots in an 18 × 20, he had almost gotten her fired. With just the right amount of light and shadow to enhance just-married Janine Trepolo getting cake pummeled into her face by a slightly too forceful groom, Amina had been sure that it was Jane’s version of a pink slip when it arrived in a manila envelope on her desk, AMINA ONLY on the front. She was on her way to her employer’s office when Jose asked if she liked it. Only after confirming that no one else had seen the picture could Amina confess that she loved it, and then, not having anything else to offer, had given him half her lunch. When the next print was ready, Jose asked for more samosas. “Trade for trade,” he had said, a notion that so clearly pleased him that Amina saw no reason to disabuse him of it, never mind that she bought the food from a well-hidden restaurant in Magnolia.

“You and Dimple are going out in my ’hood? And I’m not invited?”

“Yes, actually.”

“Man, when you going to introduce us? Five years you’ve been here, and I still don’t know that girl.”

“You’re married,” Amina reminded him.

“We have an agreement.”

“So you say.”

“You don’t believe me?”

“I believe you’d tell me a lot of things to get to Dimple.”

“Dimple,” Jose said, licking his bottom lip, “is a human samosa.”

“Stop.”

He smiled wide, his short, flat teeth making him look like a gremlin. “Go on, gimme that lecture on sexism-racism-ismism now, you know you’re dying to.”

The phone rang, and Amina shooed him toward the door with a hand. “Give yourself that lecture. I have work to do.”

CHAPTER 3

There are small blessings, tiny ones that come unbidden and make a hard day one sigh lighter. The weather that greeted Amina on the ride up to the Highlands neighborhood for the Beale wedding on Saturday afternoon was just that kind of blessing. Yes, it was a bit cooler than it should have been in June, but the sky was scattered with a few pale clouds — perfect for everlasting union. The Commodores sang “Easy” on the radio, and she sang with them, Why would anybody put chains on me sounding existentially good. She was easy. She could make Lesley Beale happy. At ten minutes before two, she pulled into the Seattle Golf Club parking lot, where one of the many green-clad groundskeepers waved her around to the back entrance.

“She had some trees rushed in this morning for the long hall,” Dick, the bean-shaped grounds manager, explained, pressing a linen handkerchief to his upper lip as Amina passed through the doorway. “No one can go in for the next hour or so.”

“Is she here yet?”

“She’s been setting up the women’s lounge for the girls since ten. Eunice is back there, too.”

“What happened to the library?”

“Changed her mind, changed her mind,” Dick said, then turned abruptly to answer the question of a woman holding an armload of lilies.

Of course she had changed her mind. Changing her mind was a kind of sport for Lesley, whose clipped charm, equine good looks, and marriage to the heir of the Beale department store fortune had long ago turned her into the exact kind of person whose mind did not worry over how much each change changed. A fleet of handsome catering staff passed Amina as she made her way down the hall.

“Hello?” Amina walked into the lounge.

“Oh, good, I was just starting to wonder about you.” Lesley, in a crisp and flawless origami of white linen, watched as an older woman placed a crystal vase in front of each mirror. “To the left, Rosa. More. A little more. Good.”

Amina set her bag down, quickly glancing around. The room was a riot of competing pinks. Rose curtains, walls, and carpet glowed under chandeliers. Eight mirrors were ringed with baby-pink Hollywood lights, a peachy wingback chair sitting in front of each like a misplaced cockatoo.

“You’ll need to put your stuff in the coat check,” Lesley said.

“No problem. Just let me get set up.”

“Good idea.” Eunice, the perpetually startled-looking wedding planner, stood up from where she’d been squatting on the floor, one hand clutching a spool of white ribbon. “The girls finished at the salon early and are on their way.”

Amina nodded calmly, pulled out a light meter, and started taking readings from around the room.

“Where are the lilies, Eunice?” Lesley asked.

“Excuse me?”

“For the vases. They need to be in place before the girls come.”

“Right. I just don’t, ah, I think because we were going to be in the library and you decided the textures would compete?”

“But we’re in the women’s lounge.”

“Of course! Let me …” Eunice’s fast walk out the door was a blur in the corner of Amina’s increasingly worried eye. Low, pink light. She needed to fix low, pink light before everyone came out looking like fried chicken under a heat lamp.

“Amina, can you put your things down the hall at the coat check? They’re cluttering up the room.”

“Yup, one sec.”

“More to the left, Rosa.”

Amina walked to the wall and flipped the few remaining switches up until the place blazed like a flaming tutu. Good God, the mirrors. She might as well be shooting in a funhouse.

“Mom?” The whoosh of the dressing room door revealed the bride-to-be, cutely diminutive in an oversized man’s shirt and capri pants.

“Jessica!” Lesley smiled carnivorously. “You’re early!”

“Yeah. The other bride was half an hour late, so they took our party first. I felt bad for her, but I mean, whatev, right?”

“Whatev,” Lesley echoed with a goofy grin. “So let’s see.”

Jessica twirled around and Amina ran for her camera just as the door opened again and in came the rest of the girls — tan-limbed, smooth-haired, piled high with bags upon bags, plastic-wrapped dresses, several shoe boxes, a portable CD player. Accessories spread out over countertops. Jackie, the maid of honor, announced that she’d burned a special “love”-themed compilation for the occasion. Amina stepped frantically onto a chair to get a bird’s-eye view of the commotion as Madonna filled the air.

“Did anyone bring an extra razor?”

“I did.” Jackie held it up like a trophy, which would have been a great shot, but taking the picture sent a blaze of flash through all the mirrors, and Amina’s pulse went rabbity.

“Amina, your bag?”

There was a loud knock at the door, accompanied by a deep “Is everybody decent?” Brock Beale shoved through it half a second later, steel-haired and pug-nosed, his buttery gaze falling over the girls. “And how are my favorite ladies today?”

Lesley and Jessica, busy with the clasp of a pearl bracelet, barely looked up, but Jackie turned around with a sweet smile. “Wow, Brock. You look great in a tux.”

“You think?” He looked at his profile in the mirror, patting a toned midsection. “I can never quite get comfortable.”

This was a lie, a charming one, as there was absolutely no doubt in Amina’s mind that Brock Beale was just as comfortable in his tux as he was in pajamas, but it served the purpose of making Jackie all the more adamant in her reassurances, which in turn made him look all the more comfortable. The flash, when it went off this time, made both of them wince.

“Amina, the coat check,” Lesley repeated.

“I just need to get a few more shots.”

Lesley stepped in front of her camera. “Now would be great.”

Amina swallowed a flash of irritation, intently panning across the room, but all the girls had grown too aware of her suddenly, their limbs stiff with the nothing noise of smoothing on deodorants and hairspray.

“Go,” Lesley said. “You could use a break.”

Cooler air hit Amina’s face as she walked out of the women’s lounge and back down the hallway. She shivered a little as she turned the corner and headed toward the ballroom, cluttering bags in tow. Lesley’s trees stood sentry on either side of her, mummified in plastic. A few men measured the space between them.

“Coatrack?” Amina asked them, not stopping.

“Keep going back,” one of them said, and Amina walked faster, past the ballroom, past the kitchen, to the back of the greeting hall. She found the coat check — a few open racks just to the side of a back door — and snatched the first hanger she could.

“Can I help you, miss?” A teenage boy with a blond buzz cut and a face like a ferret seemed to materialize out of nowhere, tugging on the shirt cuffs that peeked out from a short burgundy jacket.

“I’m just hanging my suit.”

“I’ll do it.”

“I already did it.”

“Get your number?”

Amina stared at him, not comprehending until the kid reached for the ticket hanging from the neck of the hanger, tearing it off and giving it to her.

“Thanks.”

The kid smiled a funny smile at her, like they were on the inside of someone else’s joke. “I’m Evan.”

“Amina.”

He looked past her to the reception hall. “This one is going to be a pain in the ass, isn’t it?”

“Pretty much.”

“Good luck.”

“You too.”

Lesley had been right. It both chafed and relieved Amina to admit this to herself, but somehow, the walk to the coat check had reset her. When she returned to the women’s lounge, she had found the right perspective, which ended up being right next to any of the mirrors, cheating slightly away from the center of the room.

Now, four hours later, she swayed in the middle of the dance floor. Couples shuffled around her in huddled pairs, smiling at her through the lens. The room was thick with the smell of celebration — lilies, men’s cologne, wine, and warm skin.

With the ceremony over and dinner under way, the bride had relaxed into the groom’s body, her small frame folded in his tuxedoed arms like a dove between palms. Jessica looked younger and softer than she had during the ceremony, and when she turned her face up to her new husband’s for a kiss, Amina knew she had gotten the picture they wanted more than any other.

The shots from the day would be to Lesley’s liking, showcasing the Beale style, taste, extravagance. Lesley really had thought of every last detail, from the fruit and champagne and truffle bar to the silkribboned seating cards to special games for the kids and the tiny silver Space Needle favors. And while Brock had thrown a stiff arm around his wife for the family photos, holding her as though she were a minifridge, the rest of the bridal party was carelessly, casually pretty, the guys tall and just beginning to put on the weight that would make them spread into their fathers, the girls toned and groomed and glossy.

On the dance floor, Amina turned to find Lesley and an older man waltzing slowly beside her, and she moved in step beside them to get a better angle. They bent their heads together.

“We’ll be cutting the cake in about fifteen minutes,” Lesley said through her teeth. “If you want to take a break or eat something, do it now, okay?”

She was not hungry for anything but air and space. Out in the hallway, caterers walked by with trays full of stacked plates and empty glasses. It was brighter and cooler in the hall, golden light bouncing from cream walls down to burgundy carpet. Amina passed the kitchen with its muted clatterings, its smell of gravy and dishwater.

Lesley had also been right about bringing in the trees. Unwrapped, they proved to be very tall shrubs, pruned to perfect cones as if they’d been uprooted from a gnome’s forest. The effect was strangely magical. Amina ran her palm against the bristles of one, then stepped behind it and peeked out to take a picture of the whole row, slant after slant after slant after slant.

The band in the ballroom announced the cover of a special request, and after a pause, the woman’s voice sang out the breathy first line of Etta James’s “At Last.” Chairs barked as guests rose to greet the champion of all wedding songs, the one that always brought indifferent or fighting or estranged couples to the dance floor for momentary reconciliation. If she hadn’t already taken too many dance shots, Amina would have headed back, but instead she kept walking, My lonely days are over following her down the hall like a forlorn ghost.

The coatracks were filled now, Amina saw as she walked toward them. The arm of her jacket stuck out from the mostly black coats like a drowning victim, and she looked at it longingly. How nice it would be to walk the twenty feet across the carpet, to pull it out and put it on and leave. She nearly screamed when it moved.

The rack moaned. Amina’s gut bunched up into her chest as a head rose up from the middle of the coatrack and sank down again.

“Fuck,” she heard someone say. She ducked behind the tree to her left.

The rack was moving now, the coats shivering as if cold. The head rose up again, and Amina pulled the camera up to her face, her heart beating staccatos into her fingers. The head bobbed lower, then turned suddenly, roughly, facing her. Amina froze, waiting to be spotted, but the maid of honor’s eyes were closed, and stayed closed as Amina zoomed in. Her pink mouth hung in an O, lips wet. The girl’s head moved in beats, rising and lowering, and Amina focused in tight on Jackie’s face, holding her breath to press the shutter. She pressed the shutter again as the girl reached out to steady herself, one manicured hand wrapping around the wire neck of the hangers, her head dipping to the side. When she moaned again, a man’s hand covered her mouth. She leaned forward into it. The coatrack disappeared in a thunder.

Through Amina’s lens, they were beautiful — pinned like sea creatures on a tide of black coats, limbs flailing against each other in fantastic spasm, white against the dark. The girl lay facedown, the flowers in her hair smashed to pulp. Under her, two ankles bound by pants ran in place, trying to find some footing in the mounds of material. Amina was swallowed by a clean calmness, fingers and eyes and lens suspended in the air twitching, twitching. She watched as two large hands grasped Jackie by the waist, throwing her roughly to the side. Underneath, Mr. Beale clutched his thigh, the whites of his eyes shining as Amina pressed the shutter again.

Jackie moaned.

“Get up,” Mr. Beale barked, but the girl did not move. Her breasts dangled out of her dress, and she fumbled, trying to pull the material back up.

“Oh my God,” she said.

“Get up now,” Mr. Beale said again, pushing her shoulder.

The swishing noise just behind Amina sent the camera to her waist, her lungs cinching. She turned to see the coat checker hurrying down the hallway toward them, eyes stuck on the scene in front of him. Amina followed behind him, slinging her camera around her back. Mr. Beale frowned as they approached, and Amina looked away as he stood and yanked his pants up.

“I’ll, um … take-take-take care of the coats, sir,” the coat checker stuttered, and Mr. Beale stepped off of them.

“Jackie, get up,” Mr. Beale said again, calmly this time, like he was talking to a toddler, but she didn’t stir. She was looking behind him, behind all of them. Amina turned around to see the grounds manager in the hallway, with Lesley and a few guests trailing behind him.

“What’s your name, son?” Mr. Beale asked the coat checker.

“Ev-Evan.”

“Evan, let’s you and me see if we can lift this thing.” Mr. Beale motioned to the coatrack. The folly of this was evident by what was on top of the coatrack, namely, Jackie, hands smashed over the bodice of her dress. Amina looked at Mr. Beale, who looked at the grounds manager, who looked at the coat checker, giving him a sharp nod, so it was the coat checker who bent down to the girl, hoisting her up clumsily while the guests looked on. Underneath her, Amina spotted her own crumpled coat.

“Too much to drink,” Mr. Beale announced loudly as the help heaved the coatrack up off the floor. “No big deal.”

He gave the guests in the hall a knowing wink, and Jackie’s face filled with color.

“I’m so sorry about this, Mr. Beale,” the grounds manager offered quickly. “Evan is new here and doesn’t know—”

But Mr. Beale waved away the rest of this sentence, walking to where Lesley stood with the hollow-eyed look of a cat ready to spring. He put his arm around his wife. “Let’s all just go back inside, shall we?”

And how did it happen, the calm turning around, as if there were nothing to actually see besides Brock Beale’s unfortunate explanation? Amina could not quite fathom it, and she couldn’t look at Lesley again, so she stood still in the wake of receding people, her hand clutching her camera as if it were in danger of being swept away with the easily swayed current.

“You’ve got to be shitting me.” Dimple stood in the back doorway of the gallery, paint fumes and blindingly white walls leaking into the alley where Amina stood. “So you just left your coat there? They’d better goddamn reimburse you.”

“Yeah. That’s their first priority, I’m sure.”

“Well, at least it was ugly anyway.”

“It was?”

“Did she know? I mean, she must have known.”

“No idea.”

They walked to the car, Seattle’s Saturday-night Pioneer Square crowd milling drunkenly around them. A few recently emptied beer bottles had been added to the truck bed, and Amina tossed them out, opening the door for Dimple, who ducked her head in and sniffed around suspiciously. “What fucking masala bomb went off in here?”

“It’s samosas. We’ve got to drop them off at Jose’s on the way.”

“They’re on my seat! I can’t sit there now.”

“Come on. We’re running late.”

“Great, so I’m going to have curry stink.”

“Sajeev’s Indian. He won’t care.”

“I’m Indian. I care.”

“You’ve got issues.”

Dimple put the bag of samosas on the floor and climbed in gingerly. She cracked her window and reached under the seat to scoot it up, then stopped. She pulled out Jose’s manila envelope.

“ ‘Amina only’?”

“It’s just wedding stuff.” Amina reached for the envelope. “Gimme.”

Dimple pulled away, opening the flap.

“Wait, don’t!”

But it was too late. Dimple was already sliding the picture out, her face lighting up like she’d swallowed a sunset whole. “Holy Christ, what happened to her?”

“Nothing!”

“She OD’d?”

“She’s a grandmother!”

“So they can’t OD?”

“Dimple, give it!”

“Someone wanted a copy of this?”

“It’s not — yes. They did. Can you just—”

“Who made the print? Nice work.”

“Jesus, Dimple, it’s confidential! For a client! Can you not stick your nose into everything for, like, five seconds?”

Dimple looked at her heavily, as if to crush more information out of her, then, when it wasn’t forthcoming, shrugged and lit a cigarette. They rode in silence, smoke hovering between them.

“So what—”

“Dimple.”

“I was just going to ask what you think Sajeev’s going to be like this time, you freak.”

“Oh.” Amina’s shoulders dropped a tick. She tried to picture the skinny boy they had avoided as kids, the teenager they’d seen twice. “I dunno. The same. Quiet. Bucktoothed. Too small for his nose.”

Dimple laughed. “That’s mean.”

“It’s true. So, which bar?”

“The Hilltop,” Dimple said, and Amina groaned. The Hilltop was frequented by the kind of people who sized one another up by their shoes. “I know, I know, I tried to get him down to the Mecca. It wasn’t happening. He insisted on a place where he could get us dinner.”

“He’s getting us dinner? Isn’t it kind of … formal?”

“Dinner is nice.”

“But for us?”

“Listen, the whole conversation kind of threw me. One minute I was trying to figure out how to negotiate drinks down to coffee, and the next I was saying ‘Sure, yeah, dinner on you, great.’ ”

Amina looked at her cousin. “Are we going on a date with Sajeev?”

“Not even in his fantasies. There’s a space.”

The Hilltop was bustling, filled with polished faces of women who looked like the “after” images on a magazine makeover page, and men who looked for women who looked like that. Amina smoothed a hand over her own peach-colored dress, part of the wedding-ready work wardrobe that Dimple insisted on calling “Cadbury Couture.”

“Holy shit,” Dimple said, and Amina’s eyes homed in on the long arm waving to them across the bar, the dark eyes and smile just beneath it.

“Holy shit,” she agreed.

Sajeev had grown into his nose.

Truthfully, Sajeev Roy had grown in almost every way, and half an hour into the dinner conversation, Amina could not stop shifting her eyes from his overly white teeth (still slightly bucked) to his toned forearms, squinting like he was made of sun. Strangely, the years since high school had turned him pretty, the femininity of his thickly lashed eyes offering strange friction to his button-down shirt, jeans, and tennis shoes just nice enough to let you know they cost more than Italian leather. Something charged with vetiver and sandalwood escaped from the neck of his shirt every time he leaned over, leaving her aroused and suspicious. What kind of a guy wore cologne to dinner with family friends? Certainly not the Sajeev she had imagined they would be meeting. As he detailed where he lived (a few blocks away), what he was doing (programming centered on artificial intelligence), how he liked Seattle (all good but the rain), Amina slipped quietly into a dazed, oversaturated place. Dimple, for her part, was in rare form, her eyes and teeth and fork winking like flashbulbs as she gave him a three-minute life update for both of them.

“And what kind of work do you show at the gallery?” he asked.

He didn’t know Dimple well enough to catch the slight flare in her nostril, the disdain for what she often called an “art for beginners” question, but she humored him, saying, “I like all kinds, but what we look for at John Niemen is actually the dialogue between works. We always feature two photographers in every show, and I look specifically for what the works will lend one another. It’s a conversation of sorts.”

“Is it a conversation other people understand?”

“Just the smart ones.”

Sajeev leaned back in the booth, one long arm draped across it. His mouth had a funny way of twisting into a little bow in the corner when he wasn’t talking, and Amina wondered idly if he could lift Dimple with one hand. There was certainly enough in the glances over his beer that made her think he wouldn’t mind trying. “So who’s up next, then? Anyone I’d know?”

Dimple stabbed a tomato wedge on her plate, trying, and failing, not to look self-important. “Are you familiar with Charles White?”

“The guy who makes everything look like a bad acid trip?”

Amina laughed as her cousin set her fork down. Charles White’s work had been a revelation for both of them in college. His most recent photographs, a series taken at a women’s shelter and featured in Art in America, had stayed open on Amina’s bed stand for months, its pointed article about the male gaze much less interesting than the photographs themselves — lushly colored, taken at angles stark enough to make the shelter look like Wonderland, its inhabitants modern-day Alices.

Dimple rearranged her napkin in her lap. “I find his work pretty remarkable, actually.”

“Oh, no doubt! Absolutely remarkable.” Sajeev stuffed a French fry into his mouth. “And so who will Charles White be, ahhhh, conversing with?”

“I don’t know yet. I had someone who didn’t work out.” Stress rose on Dimple’s shoulders, pulling them toward her ears. She’d been in a quiet panic for weeks now, trying and failing to find the right fit.

“Wow. That’s got to suck.” Sajeev leaned in, smiling. “I mean, you don’t want to get anything too domestic, right? That would make Charles White’s stuff seem forced, maybe even mean. But anything too esoteric and you risk mounting a big surrealist in-joke, right?”

Amina looked at him, understanding a little too late that Sajeev knew, and possibly cared about, photography. She saw a flash of confusion cross her cousin’s face, but before either of them could respond, he settled back farther in the booth, waving a hand at them.

“So you”—and here he indicated Amina—“take pictures, and you”—his hand brushed Dimple’s forearm—“put them up. So when is Amina’s stuff going to go up?”

A pungent silence fell across the table. Amina took a sip of beer, watching Sajeev over the rim of her glass. Had he really turned into one of those men who thought asking the uncomfortable question proved something about his integrity?

“I’ve asked,” Dimple said, just as Amina said, “I don’t have anything to show.”

Sajeev looked surprised.

“You would if you tried,” Dimple said.

“Stop,” Amina warned. She looked at Sajeev. “I don’t take the kinds of pictures Dimple needs. I’m a wedding photographer.”

His mouth puckered like he had tasted something off. “Wait, really? I thought you were some hotshot photojournalist.”

“No.”

“Because my mom used to keep your stuff, you know, clippings Kamala Auntie sent. And didn’t that one with the guy — what was his name?”

“Bobby McCloud,” Amina said softly, eyes darting around the room.

“That’s right! That was huge, no?”

Amina nodded, the slow creep of dread filling her lungs.

“And you just stopped? Just like that? I mean, you were really talented.”

“Jesus, Sajeev, she’s still talented!” Dimple snapped. “It’s just a fucking hiatus. You don’t need to make it sound like she’s dead or something.”

Sajeev flushed deeply, looking unsure of himself for the first time all evening. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it like that.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Amina said, and turned with relief to the waitress who was fast approaching their table.

“How are you guys doing over here? Does anyone need a refill?”

“Please,” Amina said. She had no idea.

He walked them to the truck. Amina tried not to laugh out loud about this, a little embarrassed by the chivalry of it all, but Sajeev hadn’t asked or offered, he’d just strolled out beside them, turning in the direction Amina pointed to when he asked where they were parked.

“So, cool,” he said when they reached it. “You’re sure you’re good to drive?”

Amina rolled her eyes. “I’m fine. Dimple’s the lightweight.”

“I am not! I’m just small!”

“Because my mother would kill me if anything happened to either of you,” Sajeev said. “And then Sanji Auntie would kill me again.”

Amina smiled. “Fair enough.”

He had been distinctly nicer since Dimple’s cut-down, the little whiff of vulnerability on him making Amina remember him as a kid.

“How is she doing anyway? God, I don’t even think I asked about the New Mexico clan. How is everyone?”

“Well, let’s see …” Dimple held out a hand, ticking off six fingers. “Sanji is probably knee-deep in the annual Indian Association Benefit planning, Raj is cooking himself into an early heart attack, Kamala is inducing guilt wherever possible, Thomas is telling himself stories, and my father is probably frowning at my mother’s choice of outfit at this very moment.”

Sajeev laughed a deep, appreciative rumble, and Amina watched Dimple grow a little tipsier from it. They reached the truck.

“So, I live here now,” he said. “I mean, obviously, I uh … but anyway, would love to hang out sometime.”

Dimple opened the door, slid in, and rolled down the window. “Amina’s leaving for the week. You’re lucky we even got her out at all. She’s like a ghost during wedding season, always stuck at everyone else’s party.”

“Where you going?” Sajeev asked Amina.

“Home. Short visit.”

“Nice. Well, tell everyone hi for me. And Dimple, maybe I’ll stop by the gallery sometime this week? I work right around Pioneer Square.”

“Oh yeah?” Dimple asked, a little more excited than she would have let herself be sober.

“Yeah.” He bent down, looking her square in the eye for a moment before thumping the door twice, backing up and walking away.

“Now that,” Amina said, waiting until he was out of earshot, “is definitely a date.”

It was late by the time Amina arrived home, later still by the time she got the truck unpacked. The film and the camera came out first, along with her light meter, and then she went back to pull Jose’s envelope from under the seat, holding it flat under her arm. The rain had cleared just enough to let some moonlight into the apartment, and she kept the lights out inside, peeling the dress off and letting it slide to the floor. She put the kettle on for tea.

In her bedroom, she felt around the floor for her sweats, sliding one leg then the other into the sensible black fleece and then looking at herself in the dark, in the mirror. She looked like she had come to rob her own house. In the kitchen, the kettle screamed.

Mint. Always mint, always the red mug. She grabbed the envelope with the photo in it on her way back to her room.

A whiff of cedar rushed out as she opened the closet. She tugged the light on, walked in. Boots and shoes lined either side of her like cobblestones, and she made a path through them, reaching for the pile of coats in the back. She lifted them.

And there it was, smooth and small as a child’s coffin. The russet wood glided under her hand; the tiny brass handles were cool on her fingertips. In Montana, the woman who sold her the antique flat file laughed at the two hundred dollars Amina had offered, telling her she could never accept that much for “drawers that won’t hold a damn thing.” When Amina told her they were for pictures, the woman laughed again, and took the money.

One by one Amina opened the drawers, pulling out the contents in order. She moved methodically, careful not to look down. It was important not to look down. It was important to be ready.

When every drawer was empty she walked out of the closet and back to the window seat, and placed the picture from Jose on top. She looked at it again for a long minute, staring at the scuffs in Grandmother Lorber’s shoes before flipping it over.

Underneath was Dara Lynn Rose, on the morning of her second wedding, her hand wielding a large hairbrush. She was screaming, her teeth bared like a tiger’s, thin strands of spittle hanging from them. Seconds later she had chucked the brush at her husband-to-be as he fled the room. (“I’m superstitious,” she had explained to Amina later. “My first husband had a heart attack chasing a black cat off the lawn.”)

The next was Loraine Spurlock, looking up at her stepfather with adoring eyes. He bent to kiss her, his mouth open, his tongue lying in it like a wet animal.

Then came the McDonald sisters, Jeanie and Frances, their four hands gripping a just-thrown bouquet, splitting the baby’s breath with determined fingers. They smiled through jaws hard with determination.

Amina moved on to Justin Gregory, the five-year-old ring bearer who had been told he couldn’t leave once the ceremony started. He stood behind the bride and groom, staring up at them with a tiny pillow in his hands, a wet stain spread down the front of his crotch. A puddle shimmered at his feet.

Wide-lipped Angela Friedman and her new son-in-law greeted Amina in the next shot, her fingers digging into his neck as he kissed a bridesmaid on the cheek. Then it was the gray coil of Grandpa Abouselman, legs folded like newspaper against his wheelchair while couples danced in the background.

Amina lifted picture after picture, soothed by the rise of a lip, the splay of fingers, the stillness of passing disasters. She knew them well. She felt images rise off the page, the lines of one bleeding into the next until hands turned into flowers and veils became windows. Her heart unbuckled for the familiar faces, their familiar pains. She shuffled through them slowly until at last she was looking at the satin-covered knees pressing the ground next to a toilet, the bouquet on the tile floor. She stared at this one for long seconds, her fingers pressing against the edge. And then the stall turned into the underside of a bridge, the bouquet into a falling man. She was looking at Bobby McCloud.

CHAPTER 4

The George Washington Memorial Bridge, more commonly known as the Aurora Bridge, has been an anomaly in Seattle since its construction in 1932. In a city where eight-lane highways have been avoided in favor of two-lane roads that break for the rise of drawbridges between sweetly named neighborhoods — Fremont, Queen Anne, Ballard — it has always been violently off scale, looking from below like some terrible, sky-slung hammock. Touted as the final link in the Pacific Highway, it became the destination of choice for Seattle’s suicidal before it was even completed. The first person to jump off the bridge did so in 1932, one month before its opening to commemorate George Washington’s birthday. The 176th person arrived on August 26, 1992.

August in Seattle: an eternity of dusk that hints at Greek mythology, a sun setting so slowly over the Puget Sound that everyone looks like immortal versions of themselves. On August 26, 1992, it made them want their picture taken.

“Just one quick one, okay?” The Korean guy standing in front of Amina was too small for his cargo pants.

She looked at her camera apologetically. “I’m actually on assignment for the Post-Intelligencer.”

“Great.” He smiled and threw his arms around the two women at his sides. “Cheese!”

Amina did a quick calculation in her head (time explaining job versus time taking picture) and hit the shutter release. Fine. Done. She avoided eye contact with anyone else as she walked across the deck of the Crystal Blue, fighting the claustrophobia that crept into her lungs when on a yacht.

This particular yacht was teeming with the young programmers and developers of Microsoft. If it was jarring to see other kids just out of college having their success celebrated with an evening of play on the Puget Sound, it was downright annoying not to understand them. What on earth was a Linux? The very idea that something called C++ existed made her want to drink, but she was not there to drink, she was there to capture Seattle’s newest elite, their hoodied shoulders and chipper smiles.

“Give us a feel of the event,” the photo editor’s new assistant at the P-I had said, as though Amina would be attending a cashmere sweater. She had wandered around overwhelmed. She hadn’t found her shot yet, and now, crawling through the locks and canals on the way back to Lake Washington, she could feel her need to get off the boat as sharply as a full bladder.

“So fucking cool, right?” a guy with orange shorts said to his friend, pointing at the Aurora Bridge in front of them. “I can never get over how cool that looks. It’s so, like, Legoland, right?”

“Totally,” the friend agreed. “Majorly Legoland.”

Amina had slipped behind them, trying to get the right angle on their beers raised in toast to the cantilevered spine, when she saw the man. He was standing in the middle of the bridge, dressed in yellow with white on his face. A clown. This is what she thought at first. She zoomed in and saw a feathered headdress. She took the picture.

The guy in the orange shorts turned around. “Hey, didn’t see you. We should turn around, no?” He flashed her a smile.

“No … I …” She pointed at the bridge. “I was taking a picture of that guy.”

Orange Shorts followed her finger. “The guy cleaning the bridge?”

“I don’t think he’s cleaning it.”

“He’s wearing a uniform.”

“He’s wearing feathers,” Amina said.

“What?”

The Crystal Blue was slipping through the water at a steady pace, gliding closer to the bridge and the man, and now Amina could see him clearly through her viewfinder, his headdress shivering in the breeze.

“Hey, did they arrange for a bungee jumper?” Orange Shorts called out, pointing at the bridge. Heads turned up. The words buzzed over the lips of the crowd.

“Bungee jumper!” Someone yelled. A whoop went up from the boat.

This seemed to startle the man in the headdress, and he wobbled on the bridge uncertainly, eliciting a collective gasp. Amina moved to the edge of the prow, steadying herself against the railing.

The high wail of sirens seeped toward them, growing louder. Police cars were coming down Aurora in a steady line, and an ambulance followed, lights flashing. The whole boat seemed to swell with recognition: Look! Police! It’s a jumper! People were pressing in on her sides now, and Amina nudged them away, ignoring a disgruntled huff in her ear. She pulled her lens wide to get a better read on the cars, and this is what she was doing when Bobby McCloud decided to take a step forward. Not that she knew his name, or anything else about him at the time — all of those details would come later, as she scoured every last article she could find.

For weeks, months, she would wonder what made her ratchet up the aperture so suddenly, what guided her finger to the shutter release so that when Bobby McCloud flew past her lens, she would capture him. And yet she had done it. She’d gotten the impossible shot. In the photograph that appeared next to the article, her first ever and only to run on a front page, Bobby McCloud would appear forever suspended between the arching underside of the Aurora Bridge and the flat screen of the water, his headdress folding against the air like wings in prayer, his arms flung wide.

“Spectacular,” the photo editor had said before rushing the picture to print.

He had pulled a few other pictures from her roll (“Where are the afters?” he had asked, looking fleetingly disappointed when she shook her head) and now turned his attention to the televisions in the far corner of the room. All three local stations were covering the story in as much depth as the few hours allowed, taking statements from eyewitnesses and panning again and again to the railing on the bridge.

Amina watched, wishing she felt sick, or distraught, or anything other than coolly relieved. Even the Microsoft crowd had the decency to be rattled — telling and retelling the last twenty minutes of the ride in shaky voices, as if there were some clue between seeing the man and watching him fall that would reverse the motion. One woman just bawled and bawled until two female colleagues hoisted her to the lower-deck bathroom.

Amina left the office, driving immediately to Linda’s Tavern. Forty minutes later, snug in the peaty blur of three beers, she ordered a fourth. When the door opened to reveal a young man wearing a jacket that looked like the one Akhil died in, her hands began to shake.

It was the money that killed him. That’s what the papers said, first the P-I and The Seattle Times, then the San Francisco Chronicle, The Washington Post, and The New York Times as the story went national. The $162 million settlement for the Puyallup Tribe of Tacoma Indians — the second-largest in history between the Native Americans and the U.S. government — had come for Bobby McCloud like it had for his brother, his cousin, and his uncle before that.

In the library, hunched over the microfiche reader in a sour-smelling sweatshirt, Amina followed the previous years’ news. The tribe’s decision to give up their claim to the land along the Tacoma basin had been contentious from the start. The land—18,000 acres that were allotted to them in the Treaty of Medicine Creek in 1854 and then slowly poached in a series of “negotiations” that left them on about 33 acres by 1934—was their birthright. Taking money for it was a direct refutation of that right, and of everything their ancestors had stood for. It would only bring harm, even if it did give every member of the tribe twenty thousand dollars right away.

Blood money, Amina heard Akhil saying so clearly that for a minute it seemed the past nine years had not actually occurred. She looked up from the hum of the microfiche, but the only other person in that dank corner of the library was an old man who looked half-asleep. She read on.

Opinions on taking the settlement varied widely within the tribe, as did the imagined uses of the twenty thousand dollars. People said they’d get food, winter clothes, but some expressed misgivings.

“I’m just trying to make sure I don’t blow it,” Raydene Feaks, a thirty-four-year-old recovering crack addict at the tribal treatment center, said (PUYALLUP TRIBE PREPARES FOR WINDFALL, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, February 23, 1990).

“The twenty thousand is not the point,” Bobby McCloud maintained. “The one hundred thirty-eight million in social programs, and business start-up money, and land — that’s going to be the end to our poverty.”

Bobby McCloud did not drink. He did not smoke, and he did not allow smoking in his office at the Tribal Center, where pictures of him with Jesse Jackson and Bill Clinton hung on the walls, along with his diploma from the University of Washington. At age thirty-six, Bobby McCloud was one of the very few in the tribe who had managed to dodge every statistic coming at him, from the eight-thousand-dollar median income to the ninth-grade level of education to the 50 percent chance of becoming dependent on alcohol or drugs by the time he was sixteen.

“Everyone is saying our birthright is the land. Our birthright is to live! It’s to succeed, and grow, and watch our children grow,” Bobby McCloud said.

A-fucking-men, Red Man.

She must have PTSD. Or maybe it was just run-of-the-mill drunkenness. Or simply the obvious reaction to stumbling into the exact kind of story that would have infuriated her brother. The second time Amina heard Akhil, she was in bed, photocopies of Bobby McCloud articles scattered in piles around her. She blinked down the dark hallway that cut through the center of her railroad apartment. It was empty. She got up and shut the bedroom door.

When the phone rang, jolting her out of a midafternoon nap, Amina knocked over the glass of water on her bedside table. “Shit.”

“They are calling because you own the rights,” Dimple said. “You’ve got to do something.”

The water spilled over the edge and began pattering down on the last shirt she’d worn outside of the house three days earlier. Amina added a few stray socks to the pile to soak it up. A mostly full bottle of whiskey stood sentry on the nightstand, watching.

“Amina, are you listening to me?”

“Yeah.”

It had been a mistake to tell Dimple about the calls. Of course she was going to want to “take advantage” of the offers coming in from agencies wanting the picture. Of course she would see this as an opportunity for them to “cut their teeth” (an expression that always brought the image of a horse bit into Amina’s mind) in the world of agencies.

“We’ve got an open window now,” Dimple was saying. “Right now. Not forever and maybe not even tomorrow. All we need to do is make some calls. I guess I just really don’t understand what the fucking problem is here.”

Stop the presses. Dimple doesn’t understand something.

“Shut up,” Amina said.

“What?”

Amina pressed her eyelids until circles popped in their meaty darkness. “I just … I think the P-I might own the rights.”

“No. They. Don’t.” Dimple took pains to enunciate. “Remember when we went back and forth before you signed the contract? That was about owning the rights to your pictures. The P-I is allowed to use the picture because technically you were on assignment for them, but after that the rights revert to you. Anyone who wants the picture needs to deal with you.”

“What if I don’t want to be dealt with?”

“That’s why I’m saying I’ll do it for you.”

Surely all that was required was a yes, thank you, a quick disconnection. A roll back under the covers, back to dreams riddled with Akhil. But it was coming again, the cold grip that had arrived with the previous day’s paper, the name Bobby McCloud, the stunned grief of the people who loved him clenching over her entire body like some big fist. What could they have felt when they saw that picture? What had she made them see? Amina shivered.

“Ami, are you there?”

“They’re never going to be able to unsee it.”

“What?”

“He had kids. Did you know he had kids?”

There was a long silence on the other end of the line.

“I’m coming over,” Dimple said.

Bad idea.

“Don’t!” Amina cast a quick eye at the piles of chaos around her room, the bottles, the butts, the newspapers. “You’ll get in trouble at work.”

“Just to bring you lunch, okay? We don’t even have to talk about it if you don’t want to.”

“Dimple, I’m fine.”

“Yeah, okay. See you in ten.”

“No! Stop! Jesus, just give me a moment. I was asleep when you called. I just need to get my bearings and — it’s fine, okay? Do it. You should do it. Negotiate it with the agencies or whatever. Go for it.”

“Oh, God, I don’t fucking care about that now. I wasn’t thinking, okay? I know this is about Akhil. Just let me come.”

“It’s not …” Amina heard her voice cracking and swallowed. “Can you just please just take care of the agencies? That would really help.”

She held her breath, waiting for Dimple’s conscience to wrestle through the moment.

“Really?” her cousin asked after a few seconds.

Amina exhaled. “Yes.”

“Okay, but I’m coming right after work.”

“I’ve got plans that might go late,” Amina lied. “I’ll call you.”

After, when the phone was back in the cradle and Dimple was safely held at bay, Amina leaned off the bed, needing to put something between herself and the afternoon light slipping under the shades. And though it was not her style, really, though it reeked of women’s television dramas and asking-for-it from some damning God, though it was overblown and overdramatic and more than a little bit disgusting, she pulled the bottle off the nightstand and took a sip, gagging as it hit her gut.

Cheers, kid.

He had underestimated the power of the money. Not the $138 million — Bobby McCloud was right about that portion — which, wisely invested in the Emerald Queen Casino and the Chief Leschi Schools, really would pull the tribe out of permanent poverty. But the effects of the $20,000 settlement checks on individual members of the tribe — that he had misjudged entirely.

“Bobby used his smarts and his place in the tribe to give us away wholesale today,” his brother Joseph “Jo-Jo” McCloud told reporters on the Tacoma Sheraton steps immediately after the signing ceremony (TRIBE TRADES LAND FOR FUTURE, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, March 24, 1990). “If our parents were alive, they’d be weeping.”

From May 1990 to the beginning of 1991, the Puyallup Indians lived what one anonymous tribal member referred to as “a big eight months of the American dream.” Cashing a single check worth more money than many made in two years, they bought cars (Firebirds, Z28’s, fourth-hand BMWs, a team of pickup trucks), vacations (Disneyland, SeaWorld, Vegas), necessities (diapers, gas, food, heaters, tires, clothes), and nonnecessities (family portraits, dinners out, drugs).

By June 1991, a year and a half after the checks were cut, an estimated 75 percent of those who had received the money had spent it all.

Well, there’s a fucking shocker.

“It’s understandable,” Amina said, folding the paper in half.

No one said it wasn’t understandable.

“Don’t believe that romantic BS about when you don’t have money, you don’t realize what you’re missing. When you’re hungry and broke, you feel plenty bad,” said tribal member Gladys Johns (ONE YEAR LATER: THE PUYALLUP TRIBE LOOKS BACK, The Seattle Times, March 23, 1991). “But when you have money and it goes? Then it feels worse.”

Vacations became a series of photographs. Houses swallowed down payments and spat out inhabitants. Cars were repossessed so regularly that coming out of a bar to find that someone had “stolen your horse” was less embarrassing than it was inconvenient.

“It was killing Bobby,” childhood friend and tribal member Sherilee Bean told The New York Times Magazine (“Buying Off the American Conscience,” October 12, 1992). “All of us, but Bobby especially. Everyone was hit so hard when the money dried up. Even those of us who spent it wisely or invested, we still had to watch our brothers and sisters crash.”

In January 1992, Uncle Ronnie McCloud was found in a Las Vegas hotel room, dead from a ten-day alcoholic binge. In March, cousin Michael John was paralyzed from the neck down in a truck crash. In May, brother Jo-Jo McCloud swallowed two bottles of aspirin. He died on May 15, 1992, after spending three days in a coma.

“Aminaminamina!” Thomas crowed into the answering machine. “Wake up, fuzz head! Shake off the day! Rise and shine! Tell us all about it! Your mother’s head is already swelling like a balloon, and we haven’t even gotten to—”

“But why can’t you be telling us anything, koche?” Kamala sounded bitterly pleased. “Bala herself says Dimple says some picture of yours is on the front papers and everyone wants it, and now that Queen of Sheba is calling and telling Sanji and Raj and God-knows-who-else like it’s her daughter who—”

“And she said something about in The New York Times Magazine itself?” Thomas asked. “You must send a copy!”

There was a brief pause while Amina’s parents, spent, breathed silent elation into the phone line. Then they hung up, Thomas first, Kamala next, and only after reminding Amina to send the picture and also to please rub the coconut oil into her hair once a week to make it blacker.

In the late afternoon of August 26, 1992, Bobby McCloud parked in the parking lot in the back of the Still Life Café and walked up Fremont Avenue to Sally’s Party Supply. There he bought the “Cherokee Male” costume for children ages fourteen and up. Seven minutes later, having changed into the yellow plastic fringed shirt and pants in the employee bathroom, he headed out of the store.

The first check of several that would arrive throughout the year was more than Amina made in three months. It was certainly more than she would make in September and October, seeing as how she had all but stopped working. She set the check on the kitchen counter and watched as a patch of sunlight moved over it, half expecting it to turn to ash, and lighting another cigarette when it didn’t.

Blood money for blood money, huh?

“Fuck off.”

She tried to always keep a cigarette lit now. Knowing that she would burn down the apartment if she slept kept her in a dull panic, ensuring that she stay awake. Sleep was to be avoided, if possible. She had begun to have dreams, and they were obvious, and the obviousness of them infuriated her. Bobby McCloud war-painting himself with batches of tempera. Bobby McCloud reading her the entry for the Spanish-American War from the 1979 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Bobby McCloud standing in high branches of a cottonwood tree, showing her the wingspan of a full-grown man.

The protestors were the first nonpublication to use the picture. They marched across the Aurora Bridge, each wearing a single feather, poster boards proclaiming OUR BIRTHRIGHT IS TO LIVE raised high.

Then came the counterprotestors (THE SINS OF OUR FATHERS, AGAIN, The Wall Street Journal, September 19, 1992).

Then came the liberal hand wringing (PROBLEMATIC PATRIOTISM, The New York Times, October 10, 1992).

But what was there to do, really? What was there to do in a town that had itself been wrested from the Duwamish Tribe, where liberalism was cherished but most of the black population lived behind a Wonder Bread sign, where there were rumors that the university had been built on sacred burial grounds? As debate over the meaning of Bobby McCloud’s death built momentum, his figure leapt out of the photograph and onto the silkscreen, showing up like a Rorschach blot on everything from T-shirts to mugs to pins. NEVER FORGET, these items said, and THE CHOICE IS YOURS, and BEGGARS CAN’T BE BOOZERS (this last put forward by the Students for Deliberate Misinformation, a group whose “consciously confusing message” was part of a mission to “expose the unreliability of the media”).

Amina had wondered briefly at the irony of receiving the message with a morning beer in her hand before she unplugged the television and placed it on the stoop to be stolen. She had had enough. It would stop now.

And it would have stopped then had it not been for the op-ed piece written by Bobby McCloud’s aunt Susan, a comparative literature professor at UC Berkeley. It ran three weeks later in The Seattle Times for all to see:

That we even have this image says a lot about our ability to disassociate from the pain of others around us. It takes a certain lack of feeling, an internal coldness, to capture a shot like this. That it was taken by a photographer covering a Microsoft gathering is a perfect, if horribly sad, metaphor for how quickly we will trade in our humanity for financial gain.

“I’m sorry, but this passes for intellectual discourse?” Dimple fumed, raising the blinds with a rattle. “Blame the fucking photographer? Ridiculous.”

Amina watched her cousin swoop across the bedroom to the other window, hair pulled into a tight bun, swaddled and cinched into a black drapey dress that made her look like a vampire bat.

“I mean, it’s a stupid fucking argument, you know that, right? A free press depends on photojournalists providing an unblinking account of what’s out there.”

Of course she goes straight to censorship.

“And what’s Professor Genius going to demand next?” She grabbed the ashtray on the sill and emptied it into a trash can, sending up a puff of gray. “That we put pictures of puppies and kittens on the front page so no one gets their feelings hurt?”

Jesus. She hasn’t changed a bit, has she?

“Not really.” Amina’s voice was a scratchy whisper.

Dimple wrinkled her nose at the mound of clothes by the side of the bed. “I mean, listen, is it a shocking photo? Yes. But it wasn’t taken for shock value. And it wasn’t orchestrated, for fuck’s sake! The whole idea that somehow you’re lacking empathy or even thriving on this is so—” She picked up the half-empty tumbler on the nightstand, sniffing at it. She frowned. “Wait. Really?”

Amina shrugged. “Our dads drink whiskey.”

“Exactly.” Dimple laughed uneasily. “So what, you’re going to take up the Suriani habit of drinking yourself into a nasty middle age?”

Still hating on the race, huh?

“More or less.”

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“No, what did you say?”

“I’m not talking to you.”

Her cousin’s eyes blazed with some combination of anger and concern, and for a minute Amina felt the hot shame of causing it. She shut her eyes. She did not need to look around the room to see it as Dimple must have — graffitied with clothes, bottles, ashtrays, plates of uneaten food lying across the dresser.

“Ami, what the fuck? What’s happening to you?”

What does it look like?

Amina shook her head, the prick of guilt between her ribs redirecting into disdain with surprising alacrity. Because really, wasn’t it easy to be Dimple? To be able to talk about what was and what wasn’t appropriate, to sell it regardless, to live on what you made without thinking twice? To be floating in such a steady stream of self-righteousness that you never had to face the muck under you?

“I took the picture,” Amina said.

“So what?”

Don’t say it.

“I knew what I was doing.”

“Because you’re a photographer. Because it’s what you do.”

“Because I wanted it. That’s why my fingers tweaked the settings before anything even happened.”

“Amina, you didn’t make Bobby McCloud kill himself.”

“Because it would make a good picture,” she explained. “I thought the man falling would make a good picture, that it would be beautiful, like that was the important thing?” She laughed to cover up the way her mouth had begun trembling. “Can you imagine? Like he was some bird for the National Geographic, some fucking animal, some—”

“Ami, stop it.”

“Because I needed to see it. After all these years, I needed to see what it looks like to fall that far down!”

“No.”

“And did I tell you I didn’t look afterward? I didn’t even look! I heard the noise of the hit and turned and walked away because I’d already gotten what I needed.”

“Stop it!” Dimple grabbed her arm. “Enough! Stop with this shit and listen to me! You did not make this happen. It was a beautiful picture. It was a horrible moment. Both.”

Amina began to cry.

“Both, Ami.” Dimple’s nails dug into her wrist. “That’s what you have to live with. Okay? That.”

Amina pushed her away. “Get off me.”

“Are you the photographer?”

“Who is this?” This was not good. The woman on the phone had already said her name twice. Identified the publication she was working for. The Times? The Chronicle? Why was the phone in her hand? Amina stared at the receiver. The little black dots looked like poppy seeds. They cooed.

“What?” she asked them.

Careful, kid.

“Careful yourself!”

“Excuse me?”

“Hi.”

“Am I speaking to Amina Eapen?”

Amina put the receiver back to her head. “You are.”

“Do you have a response to the charge that the picture you took exhibits a lack of humanity?”

Oh for the love of — it all lacks humanity! Fucking HUMANITY lacks humanity!

Amina thought about this for a while. About humanity, but also about hubris, that weird word that made her think of a compost made of human souls.

“The checks keep coming, though,” she said.

“The checks?” the woman on the phone asked.

“And I keep cashing them!” Amina said, her voice registering her surprise. “So that’s something, I guess.”

“You are talking about the reprinting fee for the picture you took of Bobby McCloud?” Amina heard the chattering of a keyboard in the background. Robots. Computers were turning humans into robots. The tongue was connected to the fingers to the keyboard. “Do you feel implicated by the money you are making from this?”

YES.

Amina looked around. She found some water, gulped half of it down. “I knew what I was doing.”

“Ms. Eapen?”

“I knew he would go.”

“What do you mean?”

What did she mean? She saw the high school parking lot, the spray of late-afternoon sun, Akhil walking toward the station wagon, his shoulders hunched under his leather jacket. The words formed loosely in her head and then rolled out her mouth like pebbles. “Hide-a-key.”

“Excuse me?”

“I was the only one who knew about him. Really knew. I’m the only one who could have stopped it. I guess I just … fell asleep at the wheel, you know?” It was a horrible pun. The hideous noise, the laughter, was coming from between her throat and her heart, some place that if stepped on would paralyze her instantly and forever.

Hang up, Ami.

“Did you have dealings with Bobby McCloud prior to his suicide on Wednesday?” the woman on the phone was asking. “Did you know him before this encounter?”

“But are you supposed to believe everything he says? Ben Kingsley, for the love of God!”

“Excuse me?”

Hang up NOW.

“Ben Motherfucking Kingsley,” she gasped, her shoulders shaking.

“Ms. Eapen, did you or did you not know Bobby McCloud before his death on August twenty-sixth?”

Amina laughed and laughed and laughed. She needed to hang up the phone, and she did, but not before whispering, “I’ve known him all my life.”