The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing

CHAPTER 1

August 29, 1982, was full of promise. Clear and sunny and just a little too warm for the teal corduroys that Amina insisted on wearing, the day swam brightly in front of the car as Akhil pulled down the driveway, beckoning them toward the first day of school. The air smelled sweet and green; the rearview mirror held their mother at a safe distance at last. Amina watched Kamala recede, small and jittery in a pink nightgown that all but swallowed her.

“Do you think she’s going to be okay?” Amina asked. The trees curled in, obscuring the front door.

Akhil frowned, thinking this over. He thought it over the entire length of the driveway, and the dirt road after that, and then the main road. He stopped at the intersection that would lead them to the west mesa, to school.

“Who fucking knows anymore,” he said.

Mesa Preparatory was unquestionably pretentious. Just what pretense it was operating under was not apparent to most of its inhabitants — the progeny of New Mexico’s elite — who, despite their supposedly cosmopolitan upbringings, knew very little about Andover or Exeter or Choate, much less what their brick-building campus, nestled into the west mesa of Albuquerque, was striving toward. What they did know was that they went to the most expensive private school in the state, that the soaring expanse of their green soccer fields drew the envy of other schools choking on dust, and that uttering the word Mesa when pulled over by Albuquerque cops had a beneficial effect on anything from a speeding ticket to a DUI.

“Welcome back to Athens in the desert!” Dean Royce Farber crowed at the morning assembly, releasing a flurry of eye rolling but also a sense of self-importance that defined Mesa students for better and worse.

The summer of 1982 had been about as long and hot as any in New Mexico, and the gymnasium sweated scents of overly chlorinated pool, recently varnished floors, new jeans, pencils, erasers, sneakers, notebooks, and hair shampooed with Vidal Sassoon. Under the darkened scoreboard, administrators and faculty sat erect in their folding chairs, legs crossed and ties knotted. Sports coaches stood behind them, green-and-black tracksuits gleaming like beetle shells.

“No matter where you were this summer,” Farber said, raising his head and pausing, as though weighing the air with the bridge of his nose, “chances are that if you’re a Mesa Preparatory student, you were making a difference.”

Amina stared at the legs of her new cords, already hating everything. Why hadn’t Akhil mentioned that she was supposed to be making a difference this summer? Memorizing the words to every Air Supply song ever written was hardly interesting. Roaming from one end of the Coronado mall to the other while waiting for Dimple to come home from camp in California was borderline pathetic. Even her outings to the Rio Grande with her father’s old Nikon seemed painfully tame for something she had just an hour ago considered adventurous. She scanned the faces framed between upturned collars, the hair side-parted and gelled, the eyes searching out one another’s flaws without ever seeming to leave Dean Farber. She looked for Dimple.

“I know that many of you spent your summer embroiled in activities with your family, taking vacation in a variety of locales, and I imagine it is hard to come back to campus. Nonetheless, I’d like to welcome you back to the Mesa Preparatory family, and introduce a few new members of our faculty and staff.”

Embroiled in activities? There was a beehivey quality to the phrase that made her think of thin limbs working in unison for some greater, sweeter good. As for her own family, Amina couldn’t even remember the last time they had eaten dinner together, much less embroiled themselves in any activity that didn’t involve a television set. Which was not to say there were no family activities at all. In June, for example, she and Akhil had witnessed a spectacular fight that left her parents haunting opposite areas of the house (mother, garden; father, porch). All of July there was father hunting, an activity never mentioned aloud but practiced with alarming diligence, whether it was Kamala staring at the clock at dinner or Amina checking for the balled-up men’s socks left in the bathroom hamper, or Akhil staring furiously down the driveway. By August there were even sessions of group longing, a sort of inverse Quaker meeting, in which all three remaining Eapens sat on the couch and didn’t say a thing about his near-total absence.

Amina looked around the gymnasium to the other dark heads nestled in with the lighter ones. Jules Parker, the black kid, was staring at the scoreboard with an open mouth that suggested hunger. A few rows beneath him, Akhil looked half asleep. It was a blessing, really, the reality of her brother blunted by something as tame as boredom. Akhil had become intensely articulate and demented in puberty. A deadly combination of political conviction, quick temper, thick chub, blooming acne, and antagonistic views he would defend until hysterical had made him nearly impossible to have in the house.

Outside the house was worse. In the previous spring alone, he had become engaged in an “abusive interaction” with the PE coach over the merits of running, a heated exchange with his French teacher over the country’s “limp-wristed approach to democracy,” a locker room fight with four boys who called him Tonto, and a time-intensive protest of Reagan’s nuclear-arms policy, in which he chained himself to a desk at school and had to wait the eight hours it took the superintendent to locate the bolt cutters.

“Those of you entering your freshman year might feel uncertain about your future,” Farber was saying. “Perhaps you’ve heard about the rigorous course load here, or the demanding schedule we keep, or our standards of academic and athletic excellence.”

A derisive murmur came from a few rows behind Amina, followed by a burst of laughter. Amina turned to see Dimple tucked like a chick between the preening bosoms of three sophomore girls who’d apparently decided she was too cool to endure the usual freshman awkwardness.

“I say this to you: There are times that you will be scared. There are times when you will question your ability to take on the day. But I would ask that you remember in those times that more is expected of you at Mesa Preparatory because you are simply capable of more. And now, I’d like you all to rise for the school motto.”

Four hundred Mesa Preparatory students rose to face the flag emblazoned with their school seal. Akhil had at least prepared her for this much. He had even gone so far as to imitate it, face glazed, voice psychotically pleasant.

“Timendi causa est nescire,” the students chorused, and Amina mouthed along the way she sang church hymns, uncommitted to the sound of her own voice. It left her feeling like a traitor, though who she was fooling — God or Dean Farber or herself — was a mystery. Ignorance is the cause of fear, indeed.

“He’s totally been checking me out.” Dimple jostled the load of books in her arms, trying to smooth them into an orderly pile. They were walking back to the freshman building together, Dimple having detangled from the sophomore girls to catch up with Amina.

“Dirk Weyland?” Amina asked.

Dimple’s face slid into the cold look she’d picked up at camp, along with an entirely new vocabulary, bleached hair, loads of string bracelets, a vague disdain for everything but the beach, and familiarity with the bases as applied to the human body (she had been to third twice in July).

“I just didn’t know that you guys had talked or anything,” Amina said.

“We haven’t really, but I’ve seen him watching me. And Mindy said that he’s going to be at David Lewis’s party this weekend. So.”

Mindy. It was strange that a name Amina hadn’t even known until a few weeks earlier could have become a constant pinch in her breathing. Mindy Lujan, the sophomore who’d taken freshman Dimple under her wing; Mindy Lujan with her feathered hair, bullying blue-lined eyes, and potty mouth that rivaled Akhil’s, managing to use fuck as a verb, an adjective, and a noun, often in the same sentence, as in, “Who the fuck does that fucking fuck think she’s fucking with?”

“Doesn’t Dirk have a girlfriend?”

“Ami …” Dimple sighed. “They’ve been seriously breaking up all summer. You know.”

Amina did not know, nor was she under the delusion that she suddenly would know if she were invited out with the volleyball team and given the opportunity to glean the kind of details that passed for currency at Mesa.

The crowd was thicker as they neared the building, everyone trying to squeeze through the glass doors like salmon in a fish run. The tide of students pushed them into the locker bay, where Dimple stopped and fished around in her bag with one hand, pulling a crumpled schedule from it. “What do you have now?”

“English, then photography, and biology. What about you?”

“Bio with Pankeridge?”

Amina looked down at the slip of paper on top of her English book. “Yes.”

“Oh, thank God. We have bio together.”

Amina tried not to smile. Her smiles, she knew, had the opposite effect that they used to on her cousin, placing an unmistakable damper on whatever warmth had summoned the gesture in the first place.

“Did you hear that some girl got kicked out last year for not being able to complete any of her dissection labs? Her life was, like, so over.” Dimple looked smaller suddenly, more like the girl who cried into Amina’s hair before she left for camp.

“That’s not going to happen to you.”

“What if it does?”

“We won’t let it.” Amina said, and was privately elated by the look of relief in Dimple’s eyes. “So I’ll see you at lunch?”

“What? Oh.” Dimple looked back at her schedule, pretending to see something on it. “Maybe. Let’s just see how it goes, yeah?”

“Right,” Amina said, and turned to find her way to her next class on her own.

In the car on the way home, Akhil smoked furiously.

“Fucker. What a fucker. Capable of more! And the worst part is he believes it! They all fucking do.”

Every window in the car was open, Iron Maiden was screaming from the stereo, and still she could hear him perfectly. The mesa rumbled by in a blur of dust. Amina’s hair whipped around her face.

“And you know what the most unbelievable thing is?”

“Can we roll up a window?”

“That he thinks we’re on his side. As though he can dictate the terms of our fucking mental growth!”

Amina started to roll up her window.

“Not right now! I’m trying to think.”

“Can you maybe do it without all the expletives?”

Akhil flipped down the volume, smashed the cigarette between his lips and sucked it, squinting at her. He blew out smoke. “Who do you have for English?”

“Mr. Tipton.”

“Goddamn prick.”

“I thought everybody loved him!”

“Because they’re sheep. Don’t start quoting him unless you want me to leave you on the side of the road.” Akhil accelerated. Spirals of dust blossomed behind them. He jammed in the lighter and opened the glove compartment. “Who else?”

“Messina for photography.”

“I heard she’s okay.”

Mrs. Messina hardly looked okay, with her deathly pale skin and mud-colored lips and smell of patchouli, but Amina nodded. “Gerber for history.”

Akhil shrugged. “Whatever. What about bio?”

“Pankeridge.”

“Ballbuster. Don’t screw up the labs.”

“Great, Dimple’s already freaking out about the whole dissection thing.”

“She should be. She’s fucked if she can’t nail it.”

Amina stared out the window. She was always messing up with Dimple these days. Not being interesting enough, not getting things that were supposed to be obvious. Her cousin hadn’t really wanted to talk about the blurry pictures Amina had taken when she got back from camp, or the ridiculousness of Akhil’s “Mad About Mutually Assured Destruction” campaign. She had scanned Amina’s room like it belonged to someone else’s kid sister, and shrugged at the possibility of walking to the Rio Grande. In fact, the only aspect of Amina’s life that seemed worth commenting on was the seethingly quiet Kamala, whom Dimple had immediately pronounced “a serious mental case.”

“I don’t want to go home,” Amina said.

Akhil took a long drag, flicked the butt out the window. “I’m sure Mom’s fine.”

“All day? Without anyone?”

“Well, maybe she’ll get it together. Maybe that will be a good thing.”

“So she can be more like Monica?”

“I don’t think he meant that.”

The words had haunted them, of course. Never mind that outwardly they reassured each other that the fight in June was just one more skirmish in their parents’ never-ending battle; inwardly they felt damned by the very sight of it, instantly hardened, their hearts crystallized with shock. What on earth could have prepared them for the late-night return from an office party, the car idling in the driveway, lights on, doors flung open, their mother screaming like her back was on fire? The noise alone had brought them running to the front door, and as all children are riveted by the sight of parental demise, what they saw kept them there. They had never seen their mother drunk before (and, in fact, would never see her drunk again), but there she was, lit from the knees down by the car headlights, sari pooling at her feet, screaming, “Go live with your precious Monica in the hospital then!” like she was a soap opera star.

“Drinking like that in front of the people I work with?” Thomas had shouted, pacing the driveway. “What do you think they think of you now?”

“Isn’t that what you yourself told me? ‘Monica this and Monica that and why can’t you be more like Monica?’ ”

“Monica can hold her liquor!”

“Monica is a whore.” Kamala stumbled a little, frowning down at her ankles.

“She is my assistant, Kamala. You will not talk about her that way.”

“Touching you!”

“The Americans do that! It’s their way. You would know if you knew any!”

“Now he’s going to start again about this job business, and I tell you, I will kill him. I will kill him to tiny pieces!”

“We’re not going back, Kamala. You have to at least try to fit in.”

“Yes, because there’s nothing to do here between cleaning up after your children and cooking them meals and making sure they are doing their homework, right?”

“Do something. Volunteer at a shelter. Get a part-time job.”

“And now he thinks I am sitting like some fine Mughal princess, counting up my bangles while the bloody servant girls take care of things! Why not wander around all day in some office and come home and cook the dinner and clean the house like some stupid woman in a perfume commercial?” She started to laugh. “Well, Emperor What’s-His-Name, I refuse.”

“Kamala—”

“I REFUSE.” She glared at him. “You think that changing and changing and changing ourselves to fit in with these people is some good thing?” She tilted her chin up, daring him. “Fine then. You do it. Go away and become some idiot who smiles all the time for no reason because I don’t care anymore! I really don’t.”

The surprise was that he had gone away. As Amina and Akhil stood in the open doorway, their father marched straight back to the car, gunning the engine and roaring back down the driveway. If he saw them standing there, it didn’t stop him. Nor did he return for dinner the usual one to two nights after a fight. For days and then weeks, their father was not seen during waking hours.

Kamala went into angry, gourmet mourning. She made every meal as though it might be Thomas’s last, churning out flaky parathas and paper-thin masala dosas only to watch with fury as they grew limp in his absence. She plucked coriander leaves as Dallas and Dynasty unfolded on the television, sickened and consoled by the sordid love affairs Americans seemed genetically predisposed to partake in. She borrowed Bala Kurian’s Hindi movies and watched them to the exact point where everything fell apart, and then walked around her kitchen, scolding the cupboards.

Amina sighed, tugging against her seat belt. Who knew what they would find when they got home? She knew better than to try to guess. The traffic into the village was at a dead crawl. Akhil sucked his teeth, fiddling with the radio, trying to needle in on the hard-rock station that always faded out as they got closer to home. He sighed and snapped it off. Reached for the glove compartment. Amina kicked her foot up, stopping him.

“We’re too close now. You’ll reek.”

“She won’t even notice.”

“She’s not stupid.”

“No, she’s just too pissed to care.”

Amina sighed. By now she should have been used to the way her mother could perch anywhere in the house, so riddled with fury that she seemed not to see anything in front of her, but it was always disconcerting to walk into the living room and find Kamala smoothing down the same patch of armchair over and over again, or worse, start a conversation in which her mother’s reply was an abrupt departure for another room.

“Do you have any gum?” Akhil asked, and Amina reached into the first pocket of her backpack. Juicy Fruit. She handed him a stick before slipping another out of the foil and into her mouth. Then she turned the radio on and inserted the Iron Maiden tape, taking comfort in the sugar and the screaming as they inched their way home.

CHAPTER 2

“So?” Kamala asked. “How was it?”

Amina and Akhil stared, speechless. It wasn’t just the plasticky-looking jumpsuit, or the hair she had obviously untwisted from a braid to remold into a high ponytail, or even the tennis shoes Kamala wore on her feet, clean and white and laced in place like intergalactic marshmallows. It was her smile. Somehow in the last eight hours, their mother had become chipper. Her eyes and lips glistened with pinks and purples as she leaned against the kitchen counter.

“You like all your teachers?” Kamala nodded.

“Yes,” Amina said, automatically nodding back.

Akhil scowled. “What’s on your face?”

“I went to the makeup counter at Dillard’s.”

“Just like that?”

“What just like that? I need your permission?”

“What are those?” Amina asked.

“Parachuting pants!” Kamala looked down at her own legs like they belonged to an actual skydiver. “They’re the latest things.”

Akhil looked so baffled that his mother laughed, giving curve to her bronzed cheekbones. Her eyelashes fluttered like the blackened wings of an underworld butterfly, and Amina wondered at the evenness of the thick black line under each eye until she realized her mother was looking back at her with increasing alarm.

“You look great,” Amina said, and a spasm of discomfort flitted across Kamala’s features.

“How about your teachers? They’re good?”

“They suck eggs,” Akhil said, glancing around the kitchen as though there might be more changes hiding in the cupboards.

Kamala shrugged amicably. “Oh well, that’s how it goes, right? Win things, lose things.”

Amina nodded. Win things, lose things. Sure. Their mother turned from them to a boiling pot on the kitchen stove. She lifted it to the sink, releasing the muddy smell of hot potatoes, and then opened a drawer, rummaging around for something. “Why don’t you both get started on your homework? Your father is on his way home, so we’ll eat soon.”

“Dad?” Akhil’s eyebrows shot up. “What’s the occasion?”

“First day of school, silly.” She fanned the steam from her face.

“So?”

“So? So he wouldn’t miss it.”

“Since when?”

“Since now, Mr. Curmudgeon!”

“Are you having an identity crisis?” Akhil asked.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Kamala retrieved a potato masher and held it up like a trophy. She smiled. “Now, why don’t you and whatever radical leftist policies go upstairs until dinner?”

Akhil said nothing as he left the kitchen. They listened to him stomp up the stairs. Amina sat down on a chair and watched as her mother moved around the kitchen. It was remarkable really. The shiny pants hugged her hips, and from behind, her mother looked like any other Mesa Prep girl.

“You look so different.”

“Bad?” Kamala looked at her reflection in the microwave.

“No, just different.”

“I wiped off most everything. But I bought myself a lipstick.”

“Can I see?”

Kamala pointed to her purse, and Amina opened it and pulled out the lipstick.

“Berry Delicious?”

“Oh, I don’t know about that,” her mother said with an embarrassed laugh. She opened a drawer and pulled out a knife. “So, you like school?”

“Gina Rodgers is in all of my classes.”

“The knows-it-all.”

“Yes.”

“Ach. Poor thing. No one will ever marry her.”

“Mom! She’s my age.”

“Not now, dummy, later. I had a friend like this in college, Ranjini Mukerjee. Such a pill, that girl! And no one wanted to marry her.”

“Um-hm.”

Queen Victoria, a fat German shepherd with a permanently unimpressed bearing, wandered into the kitchen, sniffing in the direction of the parachute pants before settling on the floor.

“But it’s a pretty school, no?” asked Kamala. “So big!”

“It’s okay.”

“What does Dimple think?”

“I have no idea.”

“No classes together?”

“Just biology.”

“Well, that’s probably a good thing, no?”

Amina sighed. “If you say so.”

“Oh, Ami, don’t be so tragic. You just need some time apart to grow into your own people.” She sliced the top and bottom off an onion and then whacked it in half. She placed the flat side down and cut the rest into colorless rainbows, tears pooling in her eyes. “People need to grow apart sometimes to grow back together, you know.”

How did everyone know? Was it so obvious? Amina’s throat grew tight, as though someone were turning a bolt in her voice box.

Her mother wiped her eyes with the back of her hand, cursing at the onions. “Anyway, that girl is a little wonky in the head. Comes from Bala’s side of the family, you know, delusions of grandeur, excessive vanity. All the women have it. Why do you think they gave her some ridiculous film-star name?”

“Why did you give me a ridiculous Muslim name?”

“Not ridiculous, well behaved! Amina and Akhil are names of good children!”

Amina slid off the stool. “I’ll be upstairs.”

It was good in her bed. It was soft, warm, and, even smelling of too much Jean Naté, comforting. Amina rolled over onto her back. Her Air Supply poster was deftly wedged between the second and third bar of the canopy, hidden from the disdainful gazes of Akhil and Dimple. Amina loved Air Supply. She loved the album The One That You Love, with its hot-air balloon hovering in a ringing blue sky; she loved singing “Lost in Love” even though she had been told repeatedly not to; she loved the way the lead singers, Russell Hitchcock and Graham Russell, shared a name and quavering, teary voices, like they had been shattered in the middle of the desert, like they, too, had lost their whole world to a long, hot summer.

“I’m all out of love,” she whispered to them now. And then that thing happened that had been happening to her all summer — the hollow ache at the back of her throat went away as she thought of her camera. Her camera! Where was it? And where was her assignment for the week? Half a minute later she had dug both out of her bag, laying them side by side on her bedspread.

Assignment 1: PLACES, SPACES, THINGS

Take this week to show us your world, specifically the places you inhabit, whether that is a classroom, bedroom, or some other place you feel at home. THIS ASSIGNMENT IS NOT ABOUT PEOPLE, rather the rooms and spaces that you move through. Think about the light in each space, and the way it contributes to the mood of the picture. Think about how much honesty can lie in a collection of THINGS. Experiment with shutter speed and aperture (see booklet for details).

Amina picked up the camera and panned around her room. The wall color had been a mistake. Lavender had been in that year, rolling off the tongues of the other fourth-grade girls like a foreign language, and she had mistaken it for her own. The dresser and the desk, bought at two separate garage sales, sat next to each other. Ponytail holders, barrettes, bobby pins, and several Jean Naté products crowded the surface of the dresser, while next to it the desk was empty of everything down to its flat, shiny surface. On the shelves: Indian dolls, records, Rubik’s Cubes permanently locked in mismatched colors, the sorrowful plastic gazes of stuffed animals she no longer loved but could not bear to throw away. Clearly, she could not take a picture of anything in her entire room.

“What are you doing?”

She panned suddenly to the doorway, where Akhil stood. “Learning how to use this thing.”

“Oh.” He leaned into the room, picking up a barrette from her dresser. “Well, you can take pictures of me if you want.”

“The assignment is about things, not people.”

“What things?”

“The things that make you, you know, yourself. Your things.”

“That’s retarded.”

“No it isn’t. It’s honest.” She zoomed in on Akhil’s face.

“So you’re going to take pictures of that gay Air Supply poster?”

“You’re breaking out again.” She squeezed the shutter.

Akhil frowned. “So what’s the deal with Marie Osmond down there?”

“I think she looks nice.”

“She looks fake.”

“Jeez, Akhil, she put on some makeup. No big deal.” She fiddled with the focus until he was just a blur of skin and light.

“The commodification of beauty is an economic trap designed to enslave the modern woman.”

Amina shifted two f-stops. The shutter clicked. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

The light swirled where his eye should have been. “Of course you don’t.”

A few hours later, they sat at the top of the stairs, looking down to the light in the hallway below. The lack of noise from the kitchen assured them that their mother had long since finished cooking, but previous attempts to start eating dinner had been quickly dismissed by Kamala’s overly cheerful insistence that their father would arrive any minute! Forty-seven more passed. They were ready to eat their pillows.

“I think we should just go down,” Amina whispered.

Akhil looked at his watch and sighed.

“Do you think we should go down?” she asked.

“I think he should have been here an hour ago.”

“Yeah, I know, but—”

“Mom, can we please eat?” Akhil shouted, cutting her off.

There was no reply.

“Mom! Can we—”

“Sure! Let’s eat!” she called back.

Downstairs, the kitchen table had been set with the good china while the crystal water pitcher sweated into a cloth placemat. Silverware gleamed from napkins.

“What is this?” Akhil asked.

“Pot roasts and mashed potato!” Kamala said proudly.

Amina sat down. She picked up a serving fork and poked at the mass of brown. It smelled insistently of American restaurants, of heavy meat undelighted by real spices. She felt her mother watching her and smiled. “Looks good.”

Kamala nodded to the main dish. “Try it, you’ll like it.”

Amina took a stab at the meat. It resisted.

“I won’t like it,” Akhil said, pushing his plate away. “Can I just have chicken curry?”

“I didn’t make Indian tonight.”

“What about for Dad?”

“Nope.”

Amina and Akhil glanced at each other. It was a point of pride for their mother, always making Indian for their father, regardless of the occasional new dish she might try for the children.

Akhil tried to scoop a spoonful of mashed potatoes, which stretched and thinned as he lifted, as though unwilling to let the spoon go.

“What happened to these?” he asked.

“They’re mashed potatoes.”

“They’re gummy.”

“And wait until you try them!” Kamala looked pleased. “I added an extra stick of butter.”

Akhil looked at Amina, and she shook her head slightly. Say nothing. Kamala walked back to the kitchen.

“Aren’t you going to eat?” Akhil called after her.

“No, no. I’ll wait.”

They ate while she waited. Rather, they tried to eat while the food tried not to be eaten. The pot roast held its shape through vigorous chewing, while attempts to swallow the mashed potatoes left their tongues sealed to the roofs of their mouths. In nonverbal desperation, they split the entire bowl of salad, careful not to alert their mother, who was busily scrubbing the already clean stove and counters. They took advantage of her brief trip to the bathroom to stuff most of what was on their plates into paper towels and bury them in the trash, hurrying back to the table with empty plates as the toilet flushed. When Kamala returned to the kitchen, her hair was freshly slicked back, her lipstick reapplied. She walked to the sink, filled the tin cup she kept by it, and tilted her head back, letting the water fall into her mouth in a thick stream. Her shoulders dropped a little as she set it down.

“How’s the food?” she asked, not turning around.

“Good,” Akhil said, and Amina murmured in agreement.

“We’ll do the dishes,” Amina offered.

“No, no. You go upstairs. You both must be tired.”

They cleared the table. Akhil set aside a plate of food for their father, while Amina ran a sponge over the white countertops. When they were done, they walked cautiously to the living room, settling down on either side of their mother to watch an episode of Hill Street Blues and the ten o’clock news. From the corners of eyes determined not to look directly, they saw the buoyancy leak out of her, first in mood, then in posture. By eleven, she was fast asleep on the couch, ponytail askew, mouth open in a slack grimace.

“Should we wake her?” Amina whispered.

“He should fucking wake her,” Akhil said.

Amina leaned over, squeezed her mother’s hand. The purple lids fluttered open.

“What’s happening?” Kamala sat up, her breath sour with sleep.

“You should go to bed.”

Her mother looked around the living room, lingering on the empty armchair.

“What time it is?” she asked.

“Late,” Akhil said.

They made a strange processional walking down the hallway, Akhil leading the way, Kamala semi-sleepwalking behind him, Amina following, trying to guide her mother without exhibiting the kind of tenderness that would draw a flinch. Queen Victoria sniffed the floors in their wake. Akhil opened their parents’ bedroom door, and Kamala glided through it like an errant canoe.

“Good night, Ma.” Akhil shut the door quietly behind her.

Amina looked at him. “Do you think one of us should stay with—”

“No,” Akhil said quietly, definitively. “I don’t.”

Should she go down? Amina lay in bed, blinking into the dark, listening to the screen door open and shut. Thomas was home. He was just sitting down for his nightly drink, she knew by the opening and closing of the cupboards. He would not want company.

She went downstairs anyway. “Dad?”

From the back, she could only see his head rising above the wicker chair like a fuzzy sun on the horizon. When he didn’t say anything, she opened the door, stepping gingerly onto the porch. “Dad?”

Her father was sitting in his surgery scrubs, a scotch bottle between his legs. “Did I wake you?”

“No.” Amina stood on one foot, not wanting to move or breathe or do anything that might make him tell her to go to bed. She looked around discreetly for something to sit on. Queen Victoria pressed her wet nose to the screen, inhaled deeply, and sneezed.

“Let her in,” her father said.

Amina did, and the dog ran straight to Thomas, sticking her face in his belly. He folded over her, rocking. He stayed down for so long that Amina thought he had fallen asleep.

“Why are you awake?” he said into Queen Victoria’s neck.

“I …” Amina looked at his feet, the dress shoes wrapped with blue booties. “I was just up. Couldn’t sleep.”

Thomas sat up. “Bad habit. Don’t get used to it.”

Amina nodded and her father reached next to his chair, to a jelly jar filled with ice. He placed it between his knees and held the scotch bottle up to the light before pouring. He took a long sip. Queen Victoria backed herself into his legs and sat against them, staring tiredly at Amina.

It felt dangerous to see her father so close. For months, he had been a blur coming or going to the hospital. Amina shifted her weight from one buttock to the other, trying to seem at ease.

“So, what’s going on with you?” he asked.

“Nothing. First day of school.”

“Today?”

“Yes.”

Her father clamped his eyes shut, shook his head. “Shit.”

The pouches under his eyes were darker than usual, liver-purple and puckered.

“So summer is over,” he said, after a few minutes.

“Yeah.”

He looked down at his knees. “How was it? School?”

“It was fine,” Amina said. “I mean, you know, Mesa. It didn’t seem totally horrible, anyway.”

“What subjects are you taking?”

“English, history, French, algebra, bio, photography. You can take photography this year if you took regular art in mid school.”

“You like art?”

Amina nodded. Her father fell silent. He stretched his legs out in front of himself.

“What’s it like?” Amina pointed to the scotch.

Thomas held up the glass, looking at the ice cubes from underneath. “How old are you?”

“Fourteen.” She wanted to add that she had tried beer with Dimple already, and an occasional Baileys Irish Cream with Sanji Auntie, but she didn’t.

“Hmm.” He swirled the glass. “You want to try some?”

She did. He leaned forward, handing her the glass. It was freezing. She looked down, shivered. From the top the scotch looked beautiful, the cracked ice lit up the color of a clean sunrise, the liquid smoking between fissures.

“Hold your breath.”

She tilted it to her mouth. Gulped, swallowed. The first hit tasted like sour air, like the hard metallic tang left in her mouth after a visit to the dentist. A warmth spread deliciously from her cheeks to her forehead. When she exhaled, fire rushed up and through her. It moved from belly to brain, out her mouth in a gasp. She swallowed. Breathed again. Her cheeks were numb. She drew a shaky breath and forced her limbs to be still.

Her father smiled. “You like it?”

Amina handed the glass back. “No.”

He laughed, startling her. It was a good, deep laugh that rang off the porch and into the night, making the slouching Queen Victoria stand upright, suddenly alert.

“So you like your new school, huh?” He threw one leg over the other, and Amina nodded, not wanting to botch the moment. Her father looked pleased. “What do you like about it?”

She looked around the porch, at the moths’ shadows inking the walls. “The campus is nice, I guess. Big. Brick. My teachers seem pretty cool.”

“That’s good. Wow, high school. You’re really getting to be big, huh?”

“Thomas?” The soft voice from the door made them look. Kamala’s face was pinched, groggy. “What are you doing?”

The smile fell from his face. “Nothing much. Sitting here.”

“Amina, why are you awake?”

Amina shrugged her shoulders.

Her mother sighed.

“I’m sorry I missed dinner,” her father said at last. “A young boy came in. They sent him from Grants. Subdural hematoma.”

Shuffling, silence.

“Don’t give me that look. Kam, I told you I would try, I didn’t promise.”

Her mother gave a thin laugh. “You never promise.”

“What do you want me to say?”

“I told the kids you would come.”

“Then I will tell the kids I am sorry.”

“When?”

“When? When I feel like it. Don’t make a big deal out of it.”

“It is a big deal.”

“Kamala, enough. I’ve had a long day.”

Kamala looked at him, the pain on her face so vivid that it was hard to understand how it erased itself so quickly moments later, her features flattening into regular, everyday disappointment. Her mother turned without another word and walked away, her body disappearing into the dark. Amina stood up.

“Good night,” Thomas said as she left, and she waved halfheartedly, not wanting to see his sad face or show him her own.

CHAPTER 3

“What makes someone a good man?” Mr. Tipton asked, placing his copy of Hamlet on the desk behind him.

Gina Rodgers raised her hand, triggering a class-wide bristle. Everyone wanted to impress Mr. Tipton, but it was Gina who always raised her hand first, like he was going to fall in love with her for her 4.3 GPA or something.

“Trace,” Mr. Tipton called.

“Huh?” Trace McCourt looked up from the F-15 he was drawing across his notebook in exacting detail.

“What makes a good man?”

Trace stared at the gunmetal-gray divot in his finger, then at his pencil. “Someone who stands up for what he believes in. Does his duty.”

“What’s his duty?”

“To defend his country. And his family.” He sniffed like this was something he’d done himself. “His honor.”

“What about a man who doesn’t have any of those things?”

“Everyone has a country.”

“Not necessarily,” Gina Rodgers said, her eyes locked on Mr. Tipton. “There are dissidents. And expatriates. And the classic firstgeneration immigrant caught between the country left behind and the new land. There’s—”

“Amina, what do you think?” Mr. Tipton asked.

“What?”

“How would you define a good man?”

Amina chewed the inside of her cheek, all her answers trapped inside a swirl of thinking so thick she had trouble making any words at all. Hands rose on all sides of the room like tulips blooming for the sun. The bell rang.

“You know, you’re going to have to speak eventually,” Mr. Tipton said as she was packing her stuff to go. “It’s English class. Speaking is important.”

“I know.”

“Don’t tell me you’re bored with Hamlet already.” He smiled.

“No. It’s just … I don’t know. One person’s good man is another person’s, you know, dad.” She flushed. “Or ghost or whatever.”

“See, now, why didn’t you say that? That’s exactly what Hamlet is about — the complexities of sincerity, the relevance of sanity. In fact, there are debates about whether or not Hamlet is crazy or just pretending to be crazy. I’d be interested to know what you think.”

Amina nodded, like Sure, yeah, I’ll do that, but really, she would have been interested to know what she thought, too.

At least she had her art. Downstairs forty minutes later in the photo room, everyone stared at the board with nervous excitement. It was a thrill, the last twenty minutes of class devoted to critique, the curiosity about what others had come up with and how you measured against it. There was a rule, of course, to look at all the pictures for at least two minutes before talking. Amina’s eyes flashed quickly over the others but returned to her own, fascinated by the angle, by the cut of her own face. When had her jaw gotten so sharp? She had done much better with the self-portrait assignment than she had with the last. Part of it was getting more familiar with the printing process; the dodging helped where her own knowledge of the camera fell short. And really, she had gotten the perfect picture, setting her desk lamp at a ninety-degree angle to her body so that most everything around her was blanketed with darkness while the side of her face pressed into the light. She hadn’t even bothered to print the more mundane shots — this, she knew, was rare perfection.

“Well?” Mrs. Messina asked. “What do we think?”

“I like Sarah’s,” someone in back of Amina said, and she turned. Tommy Hargrow, the oldest of seven Mormon kids. While Amina wasn’t totally sure exactly what being Mormon entailed, it was always the first thing said about Tommy, the second being that he had six siblings. He studied the board. “I think there’s something interesting about it.”

Amina looked back at Sarah’s picture. It showed her teeth glistening with a goofy smile, her hair weightlessly suspended around her face, like she was underwater.

“I was on the trampoline,” Sarah offered.

“We don’t talk about our own images unless we’re asked a question,” Mrs. Messina reminded her. She looked at the photo. “It is interesting to me that Sarah decided to edit out the trampoline, though. Class, what do you make of that?”

Amina made nothing of it. The image was silly, too stagy, too juvenile. She studied her hands.

“I like that there’s no, you know, background or whatever,” someone said.

“Context,” Mrs. Messina said. “What you’re talking about is context. We can’t place Sarah, exactly, though we know she’s joyous. I see at least four pictures on the wall that do the same thing. Take a look at Amina’s.”

Amina looked down, trying not to smile. There was a long silence.

“Where are the rest?” Mrs. Messina asked.

“I don’t have any others.”

“You only took one picture of yourself?”

“I didn’t like the others.”

“Next time, bring them.” Mrs. Messina turned to the class. “Listen, you need to keep in mind that we want to see a good sampling of your work. What you like at this point isn’t really important because you haven’t figured out your own eye yet. This, for example, makes Amina look pretty, and maybe like she belongs on an album cover, but beyond that, I’m not really seeing her at all. Her other photographs might have shown me something different. Now let’s take a look at Tommy’s.” Amina sat very still, suddenly aware of how little she was breathing. How dare Mrs. Messina single her out? Sure, she only had one photo up, but at least it wasn’t total crap like the ones Missy Folgers had taken, placing all of her horse-riding ribbons in the shape of a horseshoe around her head.

She looked at Tommy’s pictures. Three showed him on an abandoned baseball dugout. The last four were of him at dinner, sitting very still while his parents and six siblings swirled around him, in varying degrees of sharpness.

“I love them,” someone said.

“Value judgments are useless here. What do you love about them?”

“They’re good.”

Mrs. Messina sighed. “Why?”

“They make me sad,” Missy Folgers said.

Mrs. Messina nodded. “Good. How so?”

No one said anything. Amina stared at the last photograph. It was the loneliness. It was the way Tommy seemed to be talking to the camera because there was no one else to talk to. She stared at the floor miserably, barely aware of the assignment for the next week landing in her hands until Mrs. Messina started reading from it.

“Over the last weeks, you did a portrait of yourselves. Over the next two, I want you to turn the camera on your family. We’re learning to tell stories here, so think about action. Okay?”

People were collecting their pictures from the blackboard, and Amina hurried up with them, snapping hers down. She stuffed it into her backpack, not caring as the paper bent and creased under her hand.

CHAPTER 4

“Overpopulation. Truncal obesity. An excess of body hair. This is what we offer the world,” Akhil announced the following Saturday. Amina and Dimple sat on rusty lawn chairs on the Stoop, the tiny corner of roof accessible through Akhil’s bedroom window, while Akhil himself paced, chain-smoking with one nervous eye on the locked bedroom door. Downstairs, a chorus of parents’ voices rumbled with post-meal chatter.

“Speak for yourself, dude.” Dimple frowned, pulled at her split ends. “I’m not the fat one.”

“Hit puberty and we’ll talk.”

“Oh, is that what happened? Good to know.”

Amina kicked Dimple’s ankle.

“Ow. Like it’s my fault he’s fat and angry about it,” Dimple said.

Akhil exhaled a cloud of smoke. “At least I’m not trying to be white.”

“I’m not trying to be anything,” Dimple sighed, rolling her eyes. “I just am.”

“Whatever.”

“Whatever.” Dimple looked up at the sky. “So how long does this take anyway?”

Akhil and Amina were waiting for the annual migration of the snow geese, as they always did in the fall, scanning the sky for the first wave of some twenty thousand birds that made their journey from Canada to Mexico.

“They said on the news that they were in Santa Fe yesterday,” Amina said.

“Well, how long is that?”

“You have somewhere better to be?” Akhil asked.

Amina turned the lens on her cousin’s ear, the recently pierced cartilage swollen under three silver hoops. She pulled the focus tight. “I think you’ve got an ear infection, Dimp.”

“No I don’t,” Dimple said.

“It’s gross,” Akhil said. “Better not let Dirk see it.”

“He doesn’t give a shit,” Dimple said.

“About you? Or about anything not in the immediate proximity of a soccer ball?”

“What is wrong with him?” Dimple asked, head swiveling from Akhil to Amina and back again. “What is wrong with you?”

“Ben Kingsley is playing Gandhi,” Amina said, replacing one sore subject with another. She watched her brother’s face cloud over. The news, if it could even be called that, had hit Akhil hard. No one had even seen Gandhi yet, and wouldn’t for three months, but Akhil was already tracking its progress with the nervous scrutiny of a jealous stepbrother, both too close and too distant from its subject matter to be easy with its coming.

“So?” Dimple asked.

“Ben Kingsley is half British.” Amina panned down, focusing on her brother’s shoes.

“He was raised in England,” Akhil said, sulking.

“So he’s not Indian at all?”

“Barely.”

“He’s half Indian,” Amina corrected.

“Oh, for the love of …” Dimple rolled her eyes. “Seriously, man, holding on to a grudge over colonization? Naming the dog after British royalty? You have so got to mellow.”

“Is she speaking English?” Akhil asked Amina.

“Whatever,” Dimple sighed.

“Whatever. Right. Never mind the hypocrisy, the insanity, not to mention the corruption of the introduction of our culture to the American mainstream! Mark my words, this movie is going to affect the way every single one of them sees us for the next decade. They’ll be looking at you, but they’ll be seeing Mahatma!”

Dimple slapped her own forehead.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Akhil asked.

“It’s not supposed to mean anything.”

“It’s supposed to mean something.”

A heavy banging on the door startled all of them, and Akhil looked around the Stoop frantically. Dimple reached under her chair for the bottle of Wonder Bubbles, and Amina under hers for the Stetson cologne. Akhil spritzed wildly as she crawled back into his room through the open window.

“Who is it?”

“Are you going to let me in or what, baby?”

“It’s just Sanji Auntie,” she told the others, unlocking the door. Sanji entered Akhil’s room, fanning her scowling face as she walked across it.

“My Gods, who put on an entire bottle of cologne? Akhil, was that you? You think it’s covering up the devil stink of your cancer sticks?”

“We told him. He doesn’t believe us.” Amina wiggled past her aunt to climb back out the window, and Sanji leaned through it, wrinkling her nose.

“It smells like a bloody billiards hall in here! Really, your parents don’t know? Daddy used to be a cigarette smoker, nah? He’ll sniff it out.”

“That would take him actually being in the house.”

“He’s in the house now!” Sanji peered around the roof. “Where’s the ashtray?”

Dimple held up the jar of Wonder Bubbles.

“Well, if that isn’t the height of corruption.” Sanji motioned for a cigarette. Akhil gave her one and then cupped the flame on the lighter as Sanji leaned farther out the window, her hot-pink chuni fluttering in the breeze. She exhaled, muttering, “Oh, goddamn lovely thing,” and inhaled again. After three drags, she handed it back to Akhil. “So? What’s the hot topic on the roof these days? How is the new school year?”

“It’s awesome,” said Dimple.

Sanji smiled. “I hear you’ve been invited to Homecoming?”

“You have?” Amina looked at her cousin.

“Yeah.” Dimple pinched a stray hair from her sweater and released it into the breeze. “I’m going with Nick Feets.”

“Nick Feets?” Akhil asked.

“What about it?” Dimple glared.

“So what’s he like?” Sanji asked.

“I don’t know. I mean, whatever, he’s nice I guess. He’s a friend of Mindy’s.”

Amina swallowed, feeling vaguely stabbed all over.

“Fantastic!” Sanji cheered. “Our Dimple is going to her first-ever Homecoming dance! Bala said you were wearing a sari!”

“She what?”

“Kathi silk and all that, nah?” Sanji winked at the others. “Hair plaited with jasmine?”

Dimple’s face was smothered with horror. “Oh my God, what if?”

“It would be social suicide,” Akhil said. “Everyone would know you’re Indian, and the next thing you know, you’ll be asked to make samosas for the whole school.”

“Anyway,” Sanji said, clapping her hands together, “I think it will be fantastic, whatever you decide to wear. How I always wish that I had grown up with these American traditions — homecomings, proms, clambakes! You must tell Mummy to take pictures for all of us to see.”

Already, Amina could see the pictures: Dimple in some satiny dress with stick-necked Nick Feets, Dimple with the entire girls’ volleyball team, curling their arms to show off taut little biceps, Dimple with a corsage bigger than her face. She stared at the top of her camera, slowly shifting from f-stop to f-stop.

“What about you, Ami? Do you have someone you’re keen on?” Sanji asked, and Amina looked up, speechless and aggrieved. She pulled the camera to her face.

Sanji Auntie’s breasts lapped over the window frame, the soft folds in her neck streaked with baby powder. Amina panned up to the bleached fur above her aunt’s upper lip, and over to the ruby-and-sapphire earring dangling from one fat lobe. Her aunt looked over her shoulder at the door, sighing. “I suppose I should get back before they get suspicious.”

“No,” all three of them chorused, and Sanji looked pleased.

“I must, I must. Chacko and Raj will pop each other’s eyeballs out over this trickle-down theory, and there’s only so much good humor Thomas can provide.” She looked around the roof. “Where’s the horrible cologne?”

Amina reached under the chair and handed her the Stetson.

Sanji sniffed at it gingerly and winced. “Chi! Bug spray! Is that the only one?”

“I have some Jean Naté on my dresser,” Amina offered.

“That’s my girl.”

They watched her thump across the room, listening through the door like they had taught her and then opening it quickly, locking it behind her.

“Do you think she’d be as cool if she had kids?” Dimple asked.

“No,” Akhil said. “No one is.”

Amina leaned back in her chair, reaching behind her for the camera case and her notebook. She flipped open to a new page and wrote down the film speed, exposures, and time of day. She paused at the column she had titled “light quality.” She looked up at the sky and wrote down “spitty.”

“So what’s the deal with your dad, anyway?” Dimple asked.

Akhil scratched his cheek. “Nothing.”

“You just told Sanji Auntie he isn’t around.”

“He isn’t.”

“Yeah, but why not?”

“Because he isn’t,” Akhil said. “It’s no big deal.”

“Then why are you so pissed at him?”

“Who says I’m pissed at him?”

Dimple rolled her eyes. “Clearly you’re pissed at him.”

“He’s not around enough for me to be pissed at him.”

“Okay, but it’s not like he’s off, like, gallivanting around the world or having some great romance, right? He’s just working.”

“It’s fine,” Amina said. “Akhil was exaggerating. Dad is here a lot. At night, mostly.”

“Bullshit,” Akhil said. “He got mad at her and he left us.”

“What?” Dimple asked.

“Nothing,” Amina said quickly, glaring Akhil into silence. “He did nothing.”

Dimple looked from one of them to the other, her eyes hard. She leaned back in her chair. “I am so glad I don’t have a sibling.”

After everyone left, Akhil and Amina returned to the roof and sat, looking up at the disappointing sky. It had darkened to an unimaginative gray, a color so bland that it almost seemed clear, except for the faint and loosening seam drawn by a vanished airplane. Amina thought of the smell of pipe smoke that lingered in the downstairs bathroom even when her father had been gone for days, the dinner plate that sat in the kitchen sink every morning, thin and dry as a bone sucked clean.

“Do you think he’d ever really leave?” Amina asked.

“What?”

“Dad. Us.”

Akhil shrugged. “Indians don’t leave. They’re into the whole live-forever-in-misery thing.”

Amina considered this. “You think he’s miserable?”

“I think he’s a product of his race and time.”

She frowned. “You really think he’s miserable?”

“Aren’t we all?”

“Not really.”

“Whatever. I’m just saying, there are things you can’t avoid,” Akhil said. “It’s in the genes — good teeth, bad skin, bad body. Lives of indentured gratitude.”

“In-whatered what?”

“You know, bowing and scraping all the time because we’re so goddamn thankful just to be in the country. Acting like anyone who talks to us is doing us some big favor.”

“When are you bowing and scraping?”

“When am I not? Jesus! Did you know Mom actually thanked Mrs. Macklin for kicking me out of French last year?”

“She thanked her for teaching you a lesson.”

“She thanked her for being an asshole. I’m surprised she didn’t invite her over for dinner afterward. Oh yes, I make the most wonderful biryani, have you tried?” He laid the accent on thick, wobbling his head from side to side.

“Shh.” Amina pointed toward the sky. She had heard it — the scratchy honk that could only emanate from a trumpet-thin throat, the slightly higher note that it ended on, as though asking a question. She looked up. The wails grew louder, raspy, doubling on one another, rising up into mini-crescendos and bouncing off the cottonwoods and the adobe wall behind their heads. The first goose appeared, piercing the clean wipe of sky above them. The black hull of its wings pitched against the wind, and it floated there, seemingly unmoving, tethered to the clouds. Amina held her breath. Another goose appeared, and another. Each angled behind the next so that they formed an undulating V. Sharp cries hollowed in timbre and grew louder in the meat of Amina’s heart. Akhil smiled. The birds reeled in wide circles above them.

“Wingspans big as a man,” Amina said.

“A lucky man,” Akhil corrected. A rare look of unmitigated longing crossed his face. She pressed the camera back up to her face quickly.

“You’ll grow,” she said.

CHAPTER 5

Why did she decide to photograph an empty classroom the next day? Amina had no idea, just the hope that the empty desks would somehow say something to someone about anything at all. Instead, all it did was make her late to English class.

“Nice of you to join us.” Mr. Tipton didn’t even look up when she entered the class, while Gina Rodgers, mid-sentence, glared at her over an open mouth. Amina crossed the room hastily, sitting down in her chair. “Act two, scene five. Go on, Gina.”

“I just mean that his father was a real leader, so Hamlet has to respect his wishes,” Gina said.

Amina stared at the page, catching her breath.

“What do you think, Amina?” Mr. Tipton asked.

“Of Hamlet’s father?” she stalled.

“Yes.”

“In general?”

“In specific.”

“Oh. Uh …” She stared at Akhil’s scribbling in the margin. “I don’t think he’s real.”

“Of course he’s not real,” Gina said. “He’s a ghost.”

“I know that,” Amina said, feeling her face flush brightly. “But I don’t think he’s even a real ghost. I think he’s, you know, a figment of imagination or something.”

“But the guards see him,” Gina said.

“A figment of whose imagination?” Mr. Tipton asked. His tone had changed to one of encouragement.

Akhil had written it in bold letters. “Denmark’s.”

Mr. Tipton smiled. “Say it again. I want everyone to hear.”

Amina felt the gaze of the class upon her, and she looked at her book to not lose her nerve. She said it again. Mr. Tipton’s eyes crinkled like she’d discovered a lost page of the Bible.

“So you mean a collective conscience?” he asked.

“Kind of, or maybe more like—”

Someone was knocking on the classroom door. Mr. Tipton moved to the door and threw it open with one smooth movement, nodding to encourage her, but Amina’s words died in her throat. Akhil stood in the doorway picking at his face, belly pooling over his jeans.

“I need my sister,” he said.

“I was afraid you were going to say that,” Mr. Tipton sighed. “We were on a roll.”

Amina rose, lifting her backpack from the floor. She walked out the door and Mr. Tipton followed.

“Everything okay?” he asked.

“No. I mean, I don’t know.” He handed the teacher a note, which was read, refolded, and slipped into a lavender shirt pocket.

“Okay then.” Mr. Tipton turned to Amina and squeezed her shoulder. “We’ll continue our conversation later.”

They flew down Coors Boulevard, music off, windows sealed shut.

“What did the message say?” Amina asked again.

“To get you and to come home.”

“That’s all?”

“That’s all.”

Amina nodded. They were on a mission. She would be brave. It was exciting, actually, leaving school in the middle of the day, zipping back through the empty roads.

“Maybe they are getting a divorce,” Akhil said, passing one of the gated residential neighborhoods.

“What?”

“You know, like they’re separating.”

Amina dropped her hand. “I thought you said they would never—”

“What do I know? I don’t know squat.”

“But …” Amina searched for something to abate the swiftly growing panic in her. “But why would they make us come home from school to tell us that?”

“Maybe he’s moving out today.”

Amina’s stomach lurched. “No.”

“Well, what else could it be?”

Her eyes filled with tears. “You really think so?”

Akhil looked over at her. “Don’t fucking cry about it, kid. God, I just told you I have no idea. I’m just saying maybe.”

“But I thought you said that Indians—”

“Don’t you know everything can always change and it always will, probably for the worse?” Akhil shook his head. “I mean, that’s basic, Amina. Please tell me you know that.”

Amina’s nose was filling with snot. She tried to breathe and found she could not. Outside, neighborhood cul-de-sacs spiraled away from them like galaxies, infinitely repeating fractals of driveways and front doors and welcome mats. Could her father do that? Could he really leave them?

“What if he’s hurt?” she asked.

“He’s not.”

“Like, dead or something?” Amina swiped at her nose with her hand. “What if he was in an accident? You know how he drives. What if the car flipped over? Heart attack?” Her voice was edging into hysterical territory.

“That didn’t happen,” Akhil said, but visibly paled. He opened his mouth as if to say something else but then bit his lip and slipped a tape into the deck.

Twenty minutes later they sat in the driveway, listening to Judas Priest growl out “Breaking the Law” and staring at the cars. Cars because there were two, their mother’s hatchback and their father’s sedan, neither with any visible damage.

“We should go in,” Amina said as the song ended.

Akhil slipped the key out of the ignition, and they walked to the door slowly, taking their time to cross the driveway, to step around mounds of yellow leaves instead of right through them, as though being careful might grant them a reprieve from whatever was waiting behind the front door. When he reached it, Akhil waited for Amina to catch up before reaching for the handle. It opened without them. Their mother looked at them, her eyes and nose soggy shades of pink. They waited for her to say something.

“The Salem house burned down.”

“What?” Amina was the first to get her bearings.

It had been three years since they left Salem that horrible morning, but Ammachy’s house lived on in her mind, the Wall as irrefutable as the Himalayas.

Kamala nodded. “A few hours ago. We just got word.”

“Burned down?” Akhil asked. “Like, it’s gone?”

Kamala’s face trembled a little.

“But how did it—” Akhil started, and his mother waved him silent. A horrible grimace kept penetrating the surface of her face and then getting sucked back in, as if through sheer force of will. Amina watched this happen a few times before her head seared open with a terrible clarity.

“Did Ammachy die?” she asked.

Her mother nodded.

“What about Sunil Uncle?” Akhil asked.

Kamala nodded again.

“Divya?” Amina asked, wishing her mother would stop nodding. “Itty?”

Kamala exhaled a shaky breath. “Gone.”

Gone. Amina turned around and looked at the car and then back at her mother, whose shoulders trembled as if it were cold outside. Mittack.

“Fuck,” Akhil said.

Kamala pulled back the door farther to reveal Thomas curled over the dining room table like a question mark, his head in his hands.

“Go,” she urged.

They walked to their father. Even from a distance they could see the grief radiating from him. He was thumbing through an old photo album, the one that held the pictures of him and Sunil Uncle when they were kids. Amina knew the album by heart: her father as a fat baby with a thin string tied around his waist; Sunil riding a three-wheel bicycle around a pomegranate tree barely bigger than she; Ammachy and Appachen, two years before her grandfather’s heart attack, standing in front of the curving hood of an old Ambassador; Ammachy standing alone on the verandah, smiling in a way Amina had never seen in real life. It was this photo that he stopped at, working it gently from the yellowed corners that held it to the page. He lifted it close to his face.

“Hey,” Akhil said. Thomas looked up, his eyes riddled with pink. Amina couldn’t recall the last time she had seen her father in daylight hours, but here he was, clutching at the dining table with his enormous grief and aching face.

“Sorry,” Akhil said. Amina repeated the word, which felt stupid and scary at the same time, too adult, too full of nothing.

“You don’t remember that day.” Thomas looked back at the photo.

“No.” Akhil breathed tight, feathery breaths, his lower lip glistening with spit.

Their father’s face contorted, as though this were a new tragedy.

“What day was that, Thomas?” Kamala asked in the tone she used when the children were injured or sick.

“The first day the clinic opened. She was just thirty-three.”

Ammachy wore a sari, probably colored, but starkly black in the picture. She also wore pearl earrings, gold bracelets, and a braid wound with jasmine, but none of her adornments measured up to the wide arc of her lips, the even edges of her teeth hinting at a full smile like the glow of light before sunrise. Behind her, the Salem house rose up gloriously. The verandah gleamed, its walls as white as new paper. A tiny trail of light in the hallway led back to what would later become Itty’s room.

Itty’s room. Amina’s eyes fixed on the dark hallway. Was Itty in his room when it happened? Had he heard the fire coming for him? Had he tried to escape?

She must have made a noise. Kamala came up, hugging her from behind.

“Burned?” Amina said, the word aloud unhinging whatever it is in humans that keeps them standing upright and balanced. She chattered and tilted to the side a little. “Are you sure?”

“Koche!” Kamala squeezed hard. A warning.

Amina twisted her head around to look at her mother. “Itty was on fire?”

“Chi! Amina!” Kamala grabbed her face, squeezed her mouth shut. “Don’t say such things!”

Akhil swayed a little on his feet, pale. He took a step toward the stairs. “I need to go lie down.”

“Yes. Fine,” Kamala said, pushing Amina after him. “Both of you go. We will call you for dinner.”

Akhil headed immediately upstairs, but Amina could not move. The roof, hot with tar. The smell of the cows, street fires. Itty, crying on the lawn, clutching his bare feet. She looked at Thomas. He did not look back at her, or even at the picture in front of him, but into the boundless middle distance, a flat plane that did not intersect with any other member of the family.

“Are you going to go back?” she asked, and he flinched.

“Of course he’s going back,” their mother said, and with this, Thomas’s chin began to tremble in a way that made Amina look up and down, anywhere else, so she sensed, rather than saw, how Kamala drew closer, how some part of her must have touched him to release a jag of sobs. When Amina finally looked over, her father’s arms were wrapped tightly around her mother’s waist, his head pressed deeply into her belly.

The stairs. She had found her way to the stairs. She walked up them needing to stop the flood of images her mind seemed intent on retrieving. The halo of peeling paint around the dining room chandelier. The record spinning on the turntable. Sunil’s wrists floating in air as he danced. Mittack. Mittack. Mittack.

“Akhil?”

Her brother’s door was closed. Amina put her ear to the wood, listening. Was he crying? He would kill her if she opened the door and he was. She twisted the handle and looked inside.

Akhil was on the bed, facedown. He hadn’t even bothered to take off his Adidases.

“Hey,” she said. When her brother did not answer, she tiptoed into the room. She stood by the bed, watching his back rise and fall in a deep, steady rhythm.

“You’re asleep?” she asked, ignoring the obvious.

She didn’t want to be alone. She didn’t want to sit in her room or even shut her eyes. How could he sleep right now? How could he just turn off like that? Amina stood over her brother, fury rising. Something was wrong with him. She undersood this suddenly, with the same conviction she would understand other strange truths later in life — that Dimple needed her more than she needed Dimple, that her parents’ fight was about America, not Monica. Sure, Akhil could talk about whether or not Indians were second-class citizens in the Western world, and how big government was the only recourse for marginalized people, but when something big happened, something so big that neither of them would ever be able to think of India without their own hearts splintering, he bailed. Left. Went out like a fucking light.

“Wake up, asshole,” she said, crying now because there was no one left to talk her away from the conversation that had started in her mind, the one that she had imagined she would have had the next time she saw Itty, which wasn’t much of a conversation anyway, just some sort of weird shared understanding of how it was to always be outside of everything, even your own family, waiting to be seen. She sat on Akhil’s bed and put her head between her knees as blood and the roar of what had been lost filled her ears.

If there was an upside to the disaster, Amina supposed it would have to be the way her parents suddenly united in the face of it. As the hours wore into days, Kamala and Thomas seemed to Siamese-twin, becoming an unrecognizable age (older? younger?) as they shared a child’s grief borne by an adult body. As the days wore on, Akhil and Amina felt the strangeness of their own presence in the house, their superfluousness to everything: the phone calls from India, the childhood stories whispered in Malayalam, the ticket bought, the suitcase packed, their parents, turning and returning to the dining room table to huddle over the old photo albums like caged parrots clutching at a shared axis. On the rare occasion that Amina met her father’s gaze, she looked away quickly, shamed by the disappointment she saw there — though what exactly he was disappointed in (her accent? her jeans?) felt as mysterious as it did unfair.

Three days after the news, Akhil and Amina stood together in the driveway as their parents prepared to leave for the airport. Kamala pressed money for McDonald’s into Akhil’s hand in case she was not back before dinnertime, and their father nodded goodbye, looking right through them like they were the credits of a movie. Amina stepped forward and wrapped her arms around his waist, surprised by the force with which he hugged her back. His beard scratched her head when he kissed it. He pushed her away.

“We should get going,” he said, and with that both parents got into the car, driving into the cool October afternoon.

The phone rang a few nights later, just as Amina was drifting toward the heavy blanket of sleep. Her eyes flickered open to the green glow of the digital clock: 11:15. Even Dimple knew not to call after ten. She slid over to the side of her bed and pulled the phone out of the cradle.

“… so hot, my God. Every night. I can barely sleep,” her father was saying.

“Mmmm.” Her mother’s voice was milky with sleep. “Sounds awful.”

“And those theaters! They added three more! Can you imagine? Hindi films, Tamil films, Malayalam films. Nobody in my dreams understands anybody else.”

Her mother laughed at this, a soft laugh that was echoed at the other end of the line by her father. A silence followed, punctuated by the wiggling squeals and blips of distance.

“I think I’m going nuts,” Thomas said at last.

“You’re not,” Kamala soothed. “You’re just tired. Pavum.”

Thomas was silent for another long time, and Amina herself was growing drowsy when she heard him say, “The papers are calling him the Sleepwalking Killer.”

Suddenly, she was awake, blinking furiously into the dark. Killer?

“Ach,” her mother said.

“I guess Mary and the girls talked to reporters before I came, filled them with some nonsense about how he was asleep when he set the fire, how he never would have done it awake. But how do you lock the doors in your sleep? How do you douse the whole house in petrol?”

Kamala’s expulsion of breath was swift, as if trying to blow the words, their meaning, far away from herself, but the images bloomed in Amina’s mind. Petrol? Fire? Locked doors?

“And now it’s all the sensation over here, you wouldn’t believe. In the Dinamalar and the Janmabhumi Daily and someone even told me there was a mention in the Hindu Times. I can never come back here again.”

“Chi!” Kamala scoffed. “What are you saying? Of course you can.”

“They blame me.”

“Who cares what Mary and the girls think? Their opinions are hardly—”

“Not just Mary and the rest of the bloody servants! The town! All of Salem! My mother’s old patients. Divya’s parents. I saw Chandy Abraham at the funeral, and he could barely look at me.”

“People are just sad for you!”

“Bullshit. They are saying it’s my fault.”

“It is not your fault.” Kamala’s voice was angry. “You didn’t do this! Sunil was unhappy! Nothing could have made him happy.”

“Couldn’t it have?” Thomas’s voice broke. “You know, he wasn’t like this when we were young. He was sweet then. This little fat ball, always following me with a grin. Trying to go wherever I went, pedaling his bike with his cheeks puffing as I rode away. I never waited for him. Did you know that? I don’t know why, I just didn’t.”

“You were a boy.”

“I was his brother!”

“Oh, Thomas.” Kamala made a tiny noise on the end of the line, and Amina realized her mother was crying. “Pavum. This isn’t going to help.”

There was a rustling. Thomas blew his nose, swallowed. “I want to come home.”

“Come home,” her mother said. “We’re waiting.”

“Class, any reaction?”

Of course the results of her family-in-action photographs were awful, which meant that Mrs. Messina wanted to talk about them first. Amina stared at the pictures that she had taped up on the blackboard with everyone else’s. Why hadn’t she realized that she had taken so many close-ups of body parts? Her mother’s sneakers (the sole surviving remnant of the Dillard’s excursion) curtained by a sari. Sanji Auntie’s powdered neck craning upward as she exhaled smoke. Dimple’s nostrils flaring. Akhil cupping a flame for Sanji Auntie.

“I like the one with the sneakers,” someone said.

“Say more.”

“I think it works.”

“More.”

“Well, like the symbolism,” Missy Folgers offered. “The whole Indian American thing. I totally get it.”

Amina fought the urge to stare down Missy and whatever she thought she got.

“Tell us about the composition of this one,” Mrs. Messina said.

“That’s my dad,” Amina said.

She had taken the picture the day after he had come back from India, too scared to actually go sit on the porch with him though she had wanted to see him, to make sure he was okay. “I should check on my patients,” he had said after dinner, and Amina watched her mother straighten in her chair, whatever part of her had been tenderized by compassion slowly stiffening again. But then he never actually made it to the car. She had watched him drink straight from the bottle for fifteen minutes before setting up the shot. If he noticed her at all, he hadn’t said anything.

“It’s psycho,” someone said.

Why had she superimposed the empty-classroom picture against the back wall? She didn’t know. She hadn’t even thought that the pictures she took of the classroom were good at all, but somehow, when she was printing, she had reached for the negative, carefully working it into the frame. She had thought it would work on some symbolic level, making it look like her father had been trapped in the hard lines of desks and chairs. Instead, it just mucked up the wall behind him.

“Anyone have anything intelligent to say?” Mrs. Messina asked.

No one said anything.

Mrs. Messina sighed, crossing over to the photograph in three long strides. “C’mon, people. What do you guys feel when you look at this?”

“Scared,” said Missy Folgers. People laughed.

“Why are you laughing? She’s right,” Mrs. Messina said. “It is scary. Why, Missy?”

“I don’t know. The way he’s sitting, like he doesn’t notice anything else going on around him. Like he’s in another world.”

“A bad world,” someone said, and Amina stiffened.

“Exactly. And that’s what makes it beautiful,” Mrs. Messina said. “We’re looking at figures that seem isolated somehow, cut off from the rest of the world. What else gives you that feeling?”

“The porch light,” Tommy Hargrow said. “It looks too bright somehow. Which makes everything else look dark.”

Amina looked at the bubble of porch light, the shadows tucked around it.

“Exactly. Which, by the way, Amina, is why your mother isn’t quite in focus.” Mrs. Messina pointed at the blurred corner. “You probably would have gotten her if you had had just a little more light. My guess is she moved.”

Her mother? Amina leaned forward, squinted at the portion Mrs. Messina had motioned toward. There was nothing there. She scanned the newspapers on the floor, the door leading to the laundry room, the vigas, the fuzzy lines of classroom behind her father. Then suddenly, sharply, as though the figure itself were rising from the paper, she saw the woman. She was standing in the corner, just behind her father. Amina saw the braid, the jasmine, the sari, the smile buried in her face, and knew she was not looking at her mother at all. She was looking at her grandmother at age thirty-three.

She had to show someone. Not her father. Or her mother. Definitely not Dimple. Amina paced the yellow lines of the parking lot, placing heel to toe to heel very carefully, waiting for Akhil. She was sweating. She looked at her watch. Half an hour late. She opened the notebook and peeked inside, both relieved and doubly nervous to find the picture exactly the same.

Maybe they could tell Thomas together. Or maybe they could tell Kamala first, and all three of them could show the picture to Thomas. And what would he make of it? Would he be relieved? Scared? Would he come home more or less?

Fifteen minutes later Amina sat on the hood of the car, watching a thin film of cloud traverse the southeast edge of the mountains. The windshield was hard against her back, the notebook warm on her lap. She turned toward the approaching footsteps. Akhil’s forehead creased like a Chinese dumpling.

“It’s about time,” Amina said.

Akhil looked up at her, eyes glassy, face puckered.

“Are you crying?” She slid off the hood.

“No.”

She looked for the telltale bruises. “Did those guys beat you up again?”

“No! Jesus.” Akhil hunched his shoulders. He dug the keys out of his pocket, flung the door open, ducked inside, and slammed it shut. Amina watched him through the window. His mouth was twisting nervously. His nose was gleaming and viscous. He wiped a shiny trail across the back of his hand and unlocked her door. She sat down.

“I fell asleep and missed all my afternoon classes,” he said finally, his voice sticking in his throat. “Farber said if I did it one more time, I’d be suspended.”

“Suspended? For falling asleep once?”

“It’s been more than once.”

“Oh. Like, how much more?”

Akhil stared at his lap, and another tear worked its way out of his eye, falling onto his chinos. He brushed his cheek angrily. “He thinks I’m doing it on purpose. He said that if I thought he wouldn’t expel a National Merit Finalist, I was wrong. Motherfuck!” He was really crying now, his round shoulders shaking under his powder jacket, his head down on the wheel. He lifted it up just to ram it back down. The car keys slid out of his hand and landed on the floor mat with a soft clink.

“It’s okay,” Amina said lamely.

“On purpose? He thinks I’d …? Doesn’t he know that the only thing that’s going to make anything better is if I get the fuck out of here?”

“You won’t get kicked out.”

“FUCK!” He kicked the floor. The car shook. “FUCK! FUCK! FUCK!”

“Akhil, stop! It’s not going to happen! It’s …” She looked around the car, as though some piece of clear logic could be found on the dashboard. “He’s just trying to scare you. You know that. It’s a Farber power trip, man — don’t fall for that stuff!” The words felt ridiculous in her mouth, like she was telling a joke with a punch line she didn’t understand, and Akhil wouldn’t even look at her as he reversed and peeled out of the parking lot.

He was driving too fast for being on school property, but Amina knew better than to say anything about it, so instead she said a little prayer that they wouldn’t get spotted by Farber or, worse, his secretary, who loved reporting traffic violations. They caught air over the speed bump and landed with a thump that sent up a little cloud of ash from the ashtray. Akhil screeched to a stop at the gate.

“It’s going to be okay,” Amina said again, trying to sound a little more official this time, but all this did was make Akhil drop his head to his chest with a sticky gasp. From far away, the dotted line of oncoming traffic swooped toward them like a fleet of planes.

“I mean, you’ve got, like, a four-point-o,” she rushed on, not wanting to see him cry. “You never skip school. Besides, Cheney Jarnet got busted smoking weed in the baseball dugout last year, and he didn’t get kicked out, right?”

Akhil said nothing, but let the car inch slowly toward the road.

“Akhil,” Amina said.

Silence.

“Hey!” She pushed his shoulder, and when he fell heavily against the wheel, her heart shot up like it was trying to knock her brain out. Little bits of static floated everywhere. The wheel, she thought, turn the wheel, but when she grabbed for it, the seat belt smacked her back. They continued to slide forward, the cars bearing down on them now, metal grilles gleaming like dog teeth. And everything around Amina felt slippery then, the cool metal of the seat belt clasp in her hand, the rubber mat under her feet, the white line on the road they were heading toward nose-first, like a puppy pushing its way onto a horse track. For one brilliant moment she saw how it would happen, how the cars would crack through Akhil’s door and send them up into the sky, how the world would flash through the windows, how the metal and glass would explode into a thousand spears launched from a Lilliputian army. And then the seat belt popped open and she was slamming her foot down hard on top of Akhil’s, bringing the car to a lurching stop just as the cars went by them, swerving and honking and releasing the smell of burning tires.

“Jesus fucking Christ!” she yelled, pulling the emergency brake with shaking hands and then scrambling back into her seat. “What the fuck is wrong with you?”

Across from her, Akhil was still, body wedged awkwardly over the wheel. Fear filled her lungs. She lunged at him, pushing him back hard until he hit the seat heavily. She put her hands on his face, his lips. Breathing. He was breathing. And sound asleep.