The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing

CHAPTER 1

Albuquerque greeted Amina with a howling dust storm. Down below the plane, brown coils of sand snaked across the mesas and against the mountains, scattering with the shifting wind currents. They hissed against the windows in the descent, and Amina squinted and held her breath involuntarily as the sky faded from blue to beige. The plane slipped out from under her, and the woman on her side let out a gasp that smelled of white wine. The intercom clicked on.

“Ladies and gentlemen, please check to ensure your seat belts are fastened and your bags are completely under the seat in front of you,” said a calm, cheery voice. “It’s a windy day here in Albuquerque, and we’re going to be hitting a little turbulence on our descent.”

Thirty years before, Kamala and Thomas had arrived in a dust storm. Kamala still told Amina about it whenever she felt thwarted by the desert — when a drought shriveled her tomatoes or the mesas caught fire. Once, during a dry summer that drove bears down from the mountains and onto the freeways, she called at six in the morning: That day we flew in, I looked down and everything everywhere was brown, brown, nothing but brown! I had to walk all the way into the airport with my eyes closed!

Amina looked at the swirling ground outside her window and imagined her parents descending into Albuquerque, their eyes wide open, India’s monsoon season tucked behind them like a shadow. With Amina not yet born and Akhil in Salem for the eight months it would take them to make a home, it was the first time they had been alone in years. She imagined them coming in at sunset, their hands clasped in a way she’d never seen, their cheeks blazing with orange light. They weren’t distant or shy or awkward in her fantasy; they weren’t a few years into a marriage that Ammachy hadn’t approved of. Instead, they were young and in love and racing into a new country at twilight. They had things to whisper to each other as the plane descended.

“Koche! Here!”

Amina looked behind her to find Kamala struggling down the escalator in a pink cotton sari and running shoes, her huge black purse hoisted over one arm, hair hanging down her back in the single black braid she’d worn her entire life. Short, slight-bodied, and bobbing from side to side like a furious metronome, Kamala made her way across the floor, entirely unaware of watchers she left in her wake. Even now, well into her fifties, with a few gray hairs framing the smooth flute of her cheekbones, she looked girlishly pretty.

“I’ve been waiting upstairs ten minutes!” she shouted, grabbing Amina’s arm as though she might try to get away.

“That’s the departure zone, Ma.”

“So?” She looked Amina up and down. “You’re looking too thin. Not eating?”

“I gave it up.”

“What?”

Amina squeezed her shoulder, gently guiding her back toward the escalator. “Of course I’m eating. I just had dinner with Sajeev and Dimple last night.” She silently cursed herself as the information lit up her mother’s face.

“Well, well. And how is Mr. Sajeev?”

“Fine.” Amina stepped onto the escalator, and Kamala followed, springing forward gingerly, like a cat onto a pile of papers.

“He has some big job now, isn’t it? What, exactly?”

“I don’t remember.”

“I think computer programmer.” Kamala smiled.

Outside, the old orange Ford was being pelted on all sides by thick sheets of sand. They watched it for a minute, gathering their breath.

“Okay! Run for your life!” Kamala shouted, and they did, throwing the bag into the back and jumping into the front.

“Hoo! What a business!” she yelled when they’d made it inside, laughing as Amina slammed the door shut. She pulled out from the departure zone, cutting off an approaching car and waving benignly as the driver swerved around them, his middle finger extended. “So the Ramakrishnas want to see you tomorrow. Raj is making jalebis.”

Amina winced. “Why can’t we tell him that I don’t like them?”

“You loved them when you were little!”

It was Akhil who loved them, but saying so would hurt her mother in the way all mentions of Akhil hurt Kamala, the prick of his name silencing her for minutes or sometimes hours. “Well, I really don’t love them now.”

“Raj loves making them for you, and your father loves eating, so no big deals, right?”

Right. “Where is Dad, anyway?”

“Big case. Your skin is looking good. You’ve been using the Pond’s I sent you?”

“Wait, he’s operating?”

“What else would he be doing?”

“I don’t know. Resting?”

“He’s not sick.”

“He’s sick enough for you to ask me to come down.”

“I said he was talking, not sick. You’re the one who decided you needed to come down.”

Amina shook her head but said nothing. Why bother? Once rewritten, Kamala’s history was safer than classified government documents. The wind hit harder as they turned north. A few miles away, the hospitals — part of the only cluster of buildings higher than ten stories in the entire town — rose up into the dirty air. Amina squinted at them.

“How was yesterday? You had a wedding?”

Amina pushed away the memory of Lesley Beale’s face and the coats and the limbs. “It was fine.”

“The bride was a nice girl?”

“Eh.”

“What’s her name?”

“Jessica.”

“Je-see-ca,” her mother repeated, nodding to herself. “How old?”

“Twenty-three.”

“I see,” Kamala said softly, switching lanes. “That’s lucky, no? Mother must be so relieved.”

“I’m sure she is. Poor you, huh?”

“No one is saying that!” Her mother looked over her shoulder. “So Sajeev is seeing someone?”

“Not that I know of.”

Kamala waggled her head from side to side, shaking up and reevaluating the information as it settled. She flexed her fingers against the steering wheel a few times before saying, “So then you and Sajeev could go on a date.”

“No we can’t.”

“Why not?”

“Because he’s not my type.”

“Oh, that,” her mother snorted.

“What that? That’s important, Mom! That’s not a crazy thing to want.”

“No need to yell about it.” Kamala frowned. “I’m just saying is all.”

“Anyway, I’m thirty,” Amina muttered. “You don’t tell a thirty-year-old who to date.”

“Twenty-nine! And your friends don’t tell you? Dimple doesn’t tell you?”

“That’s different.”

“Yes, of course. This brilliant country where the children listen to other children about who to spend their lives with.”

Amina leaned closer to the window. Up ahead on the road, a herd of tumbleweeds skipped toward the truck, their thorny bodies buoyant with wind.

“Take me to the hospital.”

“What?”

“I want to see Dad for a sec.”

“Just wait until he’s home. Besides, he might be in surgery.”

“Then they will tell me that when they page him.”

“But why go at all? Hospital is a horrible place.”

“Ma.”

“Fine, fine,” Kamala sighed, squinting into the rearview mirror and shifting lanes. “But I’m not coming in.”

Within minutes they were idling in front of the ER, where a few brave nurses sucked down cigarettes, palms shielding their eyes.

“You sure you’re going to be okay out here?” Amina asked, pushing a stray lock of hair behind her mother’s cheek.

“Yes. I will be taking one nap. Go fast.”

Amina pushed her door open and ran.

CHAPTER 2

She held her breath. It didn’t matter that the upholstered seats had changed from mauve to green to blue, or that the television had been updated to a more recent model, or that new pay phones stood in place of the ones that had been there when she was a kid; every damn time Amina went into the ER, the fear and hope and worry emanating from the families surrounded her like thick water, filling her lungs with dread.

“AMINAMINAMINA!” Thomas boomed, white curls springing out of his head like daisies as he crossed the linoleum toward her. “I just got the page! What are you doing here?”

“Just wanted to see you,” she gasped as his arms swooped down around her, squeezing her air out like wet from a sponge.

“You’re lucky I wasn’t in the OR!” He pulled back, looking, she thought, no crazier than usual. Graying eyebrows huddled over his eyes like permanent weather, and his dark irises glinted sharply through them. His mustache and beard were as carefully trimmed as ever, outlining his wide, flat lips. “Come, let’s walk.”

“Okay, but I can’t go far. Mom is waiting.”

“Fine, fine.” Thomas kept one arm over her shoulder as they walked, and she was filled with the smell of him — deodorant and aftershave and the slight masala that always came out of his pores like incense. “So how was your trip?”

“Turbulent.”

“I’ll bet! A lot of pish and hizoom out there, isn’t it?”

“Yeah.” A nurse passed them and waved. Thomas nodded at her. “So how are you?”

“Excellent!”

“Yeah?” Amina fought a brief urge to pull back, to study his face like a cop or a shrink or someone else who was paid to know when people were lying.

“Yup. Come, I told Monica I’d bring you to her.”

Amina stifled her shiver of repulsion. Over the twenty years Monica had worked as Thomas’s physician’s assistant, she’d gone from calling herself Amina’s “aunt” to her “older sister” to her “buddy,” each claim of increasing closeness causing Amina to feel its corollary in claustrophobia. Still, no one spent more time with Thomas. Monica would know if something was really wrong.

They walked down the twists and turns of the hospital corridor, puddles of light guiding them like lines on the road. (“How do you know where you’re going?” Amina had asked once, when she was five, and Thomas had tapped his skull and answered, “It’s in here,” so that now when she thought of his brain, it was a bright linoleum maze, the dead and the dying hidden in corners, waiting for release.)

“Anyan, you still here?” Thomas bellowed at a man approaching them from the far end of the hall. “I thought you would have left hours ago!”

“Dr. Eapen.” Small and dark and tucked into his white coat like a check in an envelope, the man came to an abrupt stop when he reached them, smiling with a precision that suggested military training or a sociological disorder. “Is this your daughter, then?”

“This is Amina! Amina, Dr. George.”

“Hi,” Amina extended her hand. His grip was cold and soft.

“Nice to meet you.” His turn back to Thomas was a swift though not unkind dismissal. “You didn’t by chance get a moment to look at Mrs. Naveen’s MRI, did you?”

“I did.”

Amina listened as they exchanged the same words that embroidered her childhood with their unknown specificities—decompressive, craniotomy, extracerebral. She studied Dr. George’s face for hints of wariness or disbelief, but he seemed to swallow Thomas’s opinion whole, nodding at the right points.

“Heyyyyyyy, Amina!”

Down the hall, the steel doors of the ICU swinging shut behind her, Monica came barreling toward them, linebacker thick and squinting from under a pouf of blond hair.

“Amina, nice to meet you,” she heard Dr. George say before she was swept up into Monica’s embrace.

“How are you, hon? How’s Seattle? Things?”

The pens from Monica’s lab coat stabbed her left breast. “Great.”

“I’ll let you two catch up,” Thomas said, squeezing Amina’s shoulder. “Ami, just say bye before you go.”

“Yeah, okay.”

He hit a button on the wall, and the steel doors flew open again, the rich darkness behind them unsettling.

“And Dimple?” Monica’s mouth was pursed around a breath mint, and cool, sugary air blew over Amina’s face. “You guys still close?”

“Yeah, of course. What about you? Things here?”

“Oh, fine, you know. Same shit, another week. You just here for a visit?”

“Yes, until the end of the week.”

“Your dad is so excited. You should get him out for some fun. He could use a break.”

“What do you mean?”

“Maybe take him to Cochiti Lake for a few days or something. His Thursday and Friday are light.”

Amina nodded as two men with stethoscopes rounded the corner, walking toward them. “Is there something wrong?”

“What?”

“Is there a reason he needs a break?”

“No!” Monica bugged her eyes out at Amina with a funny smile as the men passed. “He just, you know, loves to fish with you.”

Amina cocked her head, frowning. Thomas did not love to fish with her. Was this some kind of weird code, or just one of Monica’s not-that-great-memory moments? Amina was trying to figure out a way to ask when Monica’s beeper went off, startling both of them.

She unclipped it, wrinkling her nose. “Crap, I need to take this. You gonna be here for a little while? We should get a coffee in the cafeteria.”

“Actually, Mom’s waiting in the car.”

“Damn. Well, can we get margaritas this week? Have some girl time? I want to hear all about the love life.”

The internal shiver was coming back, the repulsion harder to fend off now that Monica was actually in front of her, all hair and nosiness.

“Perfect, call you tomorrow,” Amina said, and went to find her dad.

“Over there,” the nurse on duty whispered when she entered the ICU, and Amina followed her pointing finger to the far end of the room, where Thomas’s feet were visible under a white curtain.

“Hey, Dad?” she whispered when she was just outside it. “I gotta get going.”

Thomas peeked out of the curtain, then motioned for her to enter, and she did, suddenly finding herself in a space heavy with the stale breath of a patient. Her father moved aside, and she looked down to find a tangle of silvery hair that fanned out across the pillow like fishing net. The woman was older, maybe in her eighties, her skin thin and tanned and waxy-looking.

“Infection is getting worse,” Thomas said, writing something down on her chart. “She won’t make it through the night.”

“Should you just say it like that?”

“Hmm?”

“You know, in front of her like that.”

Her father looked up from his clipboard and smiled at her sweetly, as though she had asked if the Tooth Fairy was making enough money in dental collection. “I’m sure she already knows.”

It took three rounds of knocks to wake Kamala up. Amina hopped in the wind, the dust replaced by a cold blast of northern air. She pounded on the windows and, when that didn’t work, kicked the doors. Finally, one loud thump sent Kamala shooting up in a puff of sari, her face tattooed with the checked imprint of the truck seat. She looked at Amina and frowned.

“I’ll drive,” Amina said, and Kamala scooted over wordlessly, unlocking the driver’s side. Amina climbed in.

“Put it into gear.”

“I remember how to drive, Ma.”

Kamala leaned away, resting her forehead against the window. She was quiet as they pulled away from the hospital, quiet as they got back onto the highway, but when Amina checked to see if she’d fallen back asleep, her eyes were wide open, staring out at the service road that ran alongside them.

“He’s so happy you’ve come,” she said.

They were heading out of the city fast, into the barren stretches of the Indian reservations, where dried hands of sagebrush crisped in the summer heat. Albuquerque’s June sat flat and brown around them, the whole desert parched and waiting like an open mouth for the relief of July’s afternoon rains.

Up ahead was the exit to the village of Corrales, where a descent into the valley would bring air that was sweeter and clearer with every passing mile. The road would grow wide, the sagebrush replaced by locoweed and prairie grass, and soon Amina would see the soft line of bosque cottonwoods that enveloped either side of the Rio Grande. She held the wheel loosely, letting it ride out the familiar curves of the road home.

CHAPTER 3

That afternoon Kamala went on a cooking rampage. Revitalized by her nap and the discovery of perfectly ripe rhubarb in her garden, she sat at the kitchen counter elbow-deep in red pulp, churning out a gory chutney while several pots steamed and hissed on the stove at her side.

“GO YE INTO ALL THE WORLD AND PREACH THE GOSPEL TO EVERY CREATURE!” Mort Hinley extolled from the radio.

“Okay!” Kamala shouted, snapping the food processor lid in place.

“RISE UP AND TELL THEM THE TRUTH!”

“Why not!”

“RETICENCE WILL NOT WIN THE WAR OF MORALITY AND TRUTH IN AMERICA! ONLY THE FEARLESSNESS OF GOD’S SOLDIERS WILL DO IT! STAND UP AGAINST THE DEVIL IN HIS MANY FORMS! STAND UP!”

“Standing!!”

The food processor roared to life between her hands, and Kamala threw her head back a bit too rapturously, as though the Kingdom of Heaven itself were cracking through the kitchen ceiling. Amina watched from the safety of the courtyard until something soft and wet nuzzled her. She looked down to see Prince Philip, an old Labrador with a younger dog’s fetching addiction, staring at the stick he had left on her foot.

“Jesus H.,” she said, and threw it for him.

It should have been comforting enough that her mother had finally left the Trinity Baptist Church a good three years earlier, shunning their attempts to bring her back into the fold with a haughty disdain that confounded them. It should have been comforting to know that Mort Hinley was just another in a long line of preachers Kamala would love for a day, a week, a series of months, until she had decided (as she had with the Trinity Baptist Church, Oral Roberts, Benny Hinn, and a series of others) that he was getting between her and Jesus. But still, the Jesus-loving version of her mother took some getting used to. And watching Kamala raising her palm to the air above the churning food processor still sent a bolt of nausea up Amina’s spine, visions of Heil Hitler—ing masses running in black and white through her head.

“Everyone has a personal Jesus,” a newly saved Kamala had explained when Amina was in high school, believing, apparently, that Amina would greet this news with as much excitement as she would everyone having a personal Porsche. The following week she had forced her to come to a service at Trinity Baptist Church, where the congregants seemed to revel in the fact that Kamala was a saved Indian, a sort of born-again Bengal Tiger in their midst. Never mind that the Eapens were already Christians; Pastor Wilbur Walton had explained Amina’s presence as a sign of the Lord’s work being done. “Back in India,” he said, “these folks were following blue-skinned gods.”

“You think Jesus cares who got there first?” Kamala had asked when Amina fumed over it on the car ride home.

“But we were Christians while they were still praying to goddamn Odin!”

“Doesn’t matter! Jesus loves all equally! And quit quoting your father, you sound like an idiot.”

“Mom’s a lunatic,” Amina told Prince Philip when he returned with the stick, dropping it next to her ankle. The dog looked unimpressed.

Thomas came home a little early, and soon enough Kamala called them for dinner, which comprised not one but all of Amina’s favorite dishes — lamb vindaloo and bhindi baingan and chicken korma steaming quietly from the copper pots.

“You made too much, Ma,” Amina said, mouth watering.

“Speak for yourself,” Thomas said. “When you’re not here, she starves me.”

“Yeah, you look starved.”

Kamala put out several little jars of pickle. “This one Bala made; it’s lime but a little too salty. Raj gave us the mango. It’s dry. I made the garlic. That’s all you’re taking for vegetable?”

“I’ll get seconds.”

“You need the cabbage to keep you from slouching, and the okra will help with your lips.”

“What’s wrong with my lips?”

“They’re getting blackish.”

“They are?” Amina looked at her reflection in the microwave. Her entire face looked back at her in different shades of blackish.

“They’re fine,” Thomas said, helping himself to the food on the stove. “Stop giving her complexes.”

“Who’s giving anything? Not so much of ghee, Mr. Hardening Arteries.”

Thomas put the ghee spoon down with a sigh and set his plate on the table. “Amina, can I get you something to drink? Should we open a bottle of wine?”

“No thanks,” Amina said, sitting. “Just water for me.”

“Poosh. Party pooper.” Thomas grabbed a beer for himself from the fridge.

They ate. The lamb and rice were tender and pungent in Amina’s mouth, instantly settling whatever the turbulence had ruffled. Amina sighed deeply, chewing. Her lips buzzed with numbness from the heat. “So good, Ma. Thanks.”

“Thanking a mother for cooking is nonsense,” Kamala huffed, looking pleased. “Anyway. Did I tell you my friend Julie’s daughter is getting married this weekend?”

Amina gave her father a pained look.

“No talk of marriage,” Thomas said.

“Who’s talking marriage?” her mother asked. “I’m talking business. I told Julie you would have been happy to take pictures, but you’re leaving. Unless you can stay?”

“I can’t. I work weekends, remember?”

“This is work!”

“Anyhow, I’m sure Julie’s daughter has had a photographer picked out for months. That’s how it works, you know.”

“I know that, silly, I just told her that you were a better photographer is all.”

“You don’t know that.”

“Of course I do,” Kamala said, and despite herself, Amina filled with a sudden stab of love, like a breath she hadn’t counted on taking. She reached for the jar of garlic pickle, putting a generous portion on her plate.

“You don’t need that much,” Kamala said.

“I like it,” Amina said, and her mother ducked her head to hide her smile.

Evening escape was always necessary. After leaving Monica a message, Amina took a stale cigarette from an empty cassette-tape case hidden in her old desk and wandered down to the ditch just outside the gate at the back of the house. The magic of the smoke and the high altitude sent her head swimming, but when she exhaled, she had one clear thought: Dad is fine. The notion surprised Amina with its assuredness, and she turned it over in the coming dark, unsure if she was having a genuine moment of insight or her fear was conspiring to tell her what she most needed to hear.

Coming back to the house, she saw that her father was already waiting for their nightly conversation, the deep yellow of his porch light beckoning like a fire. She walked toward it, wondering once again how anyone could insist on calling the burgeoning mayhem on the back of the house a “porch.” Sure, it had started out as a verandah some twenty years earlier, but time and Thomas’s endless additions — platforms, nooks, shelves, newspapers, tools, inventions — left it floating in the backyard like a junk barge.

Large, darkened outlines grew clearer as Amina drew closer, turning from monsters to machinery — a router table, two planers, table saw, and drill press. Clamps of varying sizes hung across the back wall, along with several lassos of extension cord, three levels, and two wall-mounted shelves of tiny boxes that held everything from safety pins to masonry drill bits. Three headlamps, a hard hat, a cowboy hat, and a felt touk dotted the wall above a coatrack, on which a lab coat, a yellow rubberized suit, and a flame-retardant jumper were draped. The only actual furniture in the room consisted of two wingback chairs — one made of cracked leather and permanently empty, save for the times Amina filled it, and the other a patchy red velvet, in which Thomas was currently sitting. He shifted, looking vaguely impatient, as she came closer.

“I don’t think so,” he said.

“You don’t think what?”

A lone moth cast a hand-sized shadow across the wall behind him, and he turned to it. He frowned and looked at his watch.

“Dad?”

His eyes zeroed in on her. “Hey, Amina! There you are! I was waiting.”

“Sorry. I needed a walk after all the food.”

She made her way in, skirting a sawhorse strangled by surgical tubing.

“Where did you go?”

“Just now? Just to the ditch.”

“You should be careful out there. High school kids park there now. A whole lot of them are in gangs.”

“Like the Crips and the Bloods?” Amina joked.

“Lots of them,” Thomas said. “Ty Hanson lost his son last month in a shoot-out in the mall.”

“Oh my God, really?” She had known Mr. Hanson in the loose way she knew a handful of her father’s patients — more a flash of features and a diagnosis than any real connection. He had a beard of some sort, a recurring meningioma, and a towheaded toddler. “That little kid?”

“Derrick. He had just turned seventeen in April.” Thomas’s face hollowed with a grief they both knew had nothing to do with Ty or Derrick Hanson, and Amina looked down, her breathing gone tight. The bin at her feet held the double-headed snakes of jumper cables, and she studied their copper jaws until she heard her father standing up.

“You want a drink?” He walked across the porch to rattle around in the old hospital lockers that lined the back wall. “This is the good stuff. Old ER nurse sent it. You remember Romero?”

Amina did not remember Romero. She nodded to avoid being given a full explanation of Romero. A minute or so later, Thomas crossed the porch, holding out one of two jelly jars.

“Cheers,” Thomas said, and they toasted without clinking. Amina took a deep swallow. The good stuff tasted like a campfire.

“You don’t like it?”

She exhaled. “I don’t know yet.”

Thomas looked amused, wandering back to his chair and gesturing for her to do the same. “So how is Seattle?”

“Oh, you know. Pretty much the same.”

“You’re still liking your job?”

She smiled tightly, strangely comforted by how little Thomas understood about her career derailment. “It’s fine.”

“Do you like the weddings?”

“Yeah,” Amina surprised herself by saying, “I guess I do.”

“That’s nice. Lucky, right?” It wasn’t a real question, more an affirmation of what Thomas had taken upon himself as his most important life lesson for Amina — to have a job she felt passionate about. “It’s such a crucial business, this liking what you do. Americans get into this idea that you do one thing to make money and then live like royalty when you are away from it — such a strange way to live. Makes you”—his fingers danced around his head—“imbalanced!”

“You never felt that way about work?”

“Never. I had bad days — who doesn’t have bad days? But still I look forward to going in every day. Excited and whatnot.” His face brightened as he talked, ramping up for his favorite revelation. “I wasn’t a good medical student, you know.”

“No?” Amina said, like this was a surprise.

Thomas shook his head vigorously. “Terrible, actually. I was such a troublemaker, and Ammachy … But going to medical school was a fluke, really. I had the grades, you see, but not the ambitions.”

Amina took another long pull of scotch, watching his features soften in the giddy, distant way that fathers in movies did when remembering how they fell in love with their wives.

“Dr. Carter?” she prompted.

“Yes! Exactly. I had never touched a live brain before he came to Vellore, can you imagine? And then the exposition! The surgery! We must have stood for eleven hours that first day alone. People always say time stands still, and it really is that, you know. You find the thing you love the most, and time will stop for you to love it.”

He looked at her, clearly pleased with his recounting, and Amina felt a pinch in her heart. She swallowed the rest of her scotch with a gulp. He stood up and motioned for her glass. Prince Philip made a halfhearted attempt to stand, then slid back into position on the floor.

“Oh, I don’t know about that,” Thomas said, shuffling toward the lockers.

“Know about what?” Amina watched him, body pulsing lightly with heat. The good stuff was apparently a little bit stronger than the regular stuff. Or maybe she was just becoming a lightweight.

“What, Ami?”

“Did you just say something?”

“Nope.” He opened the locker. “It’s nice to have you here. So you just came home because you had some time off?”

Something about his tone made Amina look up. He held his body still, the bottle poised in midair for her answer.

“More or less.” She waited until he was back and had handed her the glass to say, “Mom was a little worried about you, too.”

“Worried about what?”

“That maybe something’s not quite right with you.”

“Pssht.” Thomas waved a large hand. “She’s thought that forever, no?” Amina conceded with a small shrug, and Thomas’s frown deepened. “Anyway, your mother has always been afraid of anything she can’t control.”

“Maybe she just read the situation wrong.”

“Yes, she’s quite good at that, too.” Thomas cleared his throat. “Did she tell you she sent two thousand dollars to some radio preacher?”

“What? No! When?”

“Last month itself.”

“Oh, God. What did you do?”

“Nothing! What to do? She never spends money on herself, now she wants to give it to some quack? Her business.” He looked out across the yard for a long time. “I think”—he swirled the liquid around his glass—“she’s having a spiritual crisis.”

“Really? Mom?”

He nodded, not looking at her. “This business of not belonging to a church, of not having a place for all her beliefs. I think it’s affecting her. Making her see evil and whatnot where it isn’t.” He looked at her, his nose wrinkling with a What can you do? shrug. Amina looked hard at him, at his assured posture, his sharp eyes. There were rings around his irises, the pale harbingers of age.

“You’re fine,” she said out loud. Thomas nodded. She let her head sink into the back of her chair. “Of course you are.”

“You really thought something was wrong?”

“I don’t know. I mean, it did sound crazy. She said you were out here all night talking to Ammachy or something.”

She expected him to laugh, as he usually did when they had weathered another bout of Kamala’s insanity, but when she looked at him, his mouth was puckered.

“What?”

“You believed her,” he said.

“I didn’t know what to think.”

“Sure,” he said, clearly hurt.

“Dad.”

He looked away and she slid her feet across the floor until her sneakers rested on top of his black work shoes. She nudged him, and after a moment he nudged back. Prince Philip shifted in his sleep, rolling until he was all belly and genitals, his canines sharp under a sagging lip.

“Oh, hey!” Thomas jumped up, startling her. He walked toward one of the shelves. “Have I told you about this yet?”

Amina watched as he rummaged in the dark, flipping on one light switch and then another. He pulled out two large spoons tied together and waved them.

“What is that?”

“Come. I’ll show you.”

“What? Where?”

Thomas nodded to the fields. “You’ll love it.”

Ten minutes later, Amina stood back in the dark yard with her father, staring into the truck bed.

“And what, exactly, does it do?” she asked.

“Stuns them a bit, when done at close proximity and with soft produce,” Thomas said. They had moved Kamala’s truck from the driveway to the very back of the field. Two cords of surgical tubing hung between the spoons that were bolted into each side of the bed. In between was a pillow-sized square of leather. Thomas picked it up and pulled it back.

“Holy shit,” Amina said.

“Holy Raccooner!” Thomas corrected.

The slingshot, if it could still be called that at such enormous proportions, took up the better length of the truck bed when stretched fully backward. Thomas pulled it tight, explaining to Amina, “Thing is, you need to find what works best. We’ve been doing experiments. Tomatoes, potatoes, that kind of thing.”

“We?”

“Raj and Chacko and me. I thought the tomato was something else, but then Raj went and baked an eggplant whole and brought it over and pshoom! You’ve never seen anything like it!”

“You’re going to kill raccoons with an eggplant?”

“Not kill! Stun. Stun is what we’re aiming for. It’s actually a twofer.” In the world of inventions, Thomas held the greatest respect for the twofer. A suit made of naturally deodorizing fabric? A bath sponge shaped like a headrest? Wonderful. His lips now twitched with anticipation, giving her a full three seconds to come up with it before bursting out, “It will provide a meal and a deterrent at the same time!”

Amina looked at the spoons. “You’re shooting them with dinner?”

“You make it sound so sinister. It keeps them from getting into the trash. And by keeping it in the truck, we can move when they do.”

“How do you know it won’t do real damage? I bet a potato could hurt.”

“I wouldn’t fire a whole, uncooked potato,” Thomas said, scoffing. “And stewed tomato barely hurts, really.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I do, actually. Chacko lost the bet and had to stand target. He took two tomatoes in the back.”

“Jesus! And?”

“Nothing much,” Thomas said, sounding vaguely disappointed. “Nice stain and all, but he said that it wasn’t so bad, though he smelled a bit afterward.”

Thomas carefully laid the slingshot down and sat on the back of the truck. He motioned for the scotch she had been holding for him, and they toasted silently. The noise of crickets grew slightly louder around her, pressing in with the night.

“If you want, I’ll take you to the driving range tomorrow. We made one by the dump,” Thomas said. “Those guys let us do it out there, and now we all compete, using each other as targets. Raj thinks we could turn it into a new sport even.”

“Raccooning?” Amina asked.

“Exactly,” her father said.

It’s the altitude, she thought.

Upstairs an hour later, Amina clutched the side of her bed. Her eyes slid dizzyingly around the room, but shutting them was worse, the darkness thick as meat, her head swelling with the sound of the dog barking and the wind through the trees and what might be her father’s voice talking under all of it. She sat up, placing her feet squarely on the floor.

In the bathroom she leaned over the sink, staring at her reflection. Her hair was flat and her pupils were wide. She splashed water over her face.

The tiniest bit of light winked from the glass-covered frames that guided her down the hall, and she moved past them like a plane down an abandoned runway. They were pictures, school pictures, hers and Akhil’s, each leading to their bedroom doors. Even in the dark she knew which she was passing with every step, her braces in fourth grade, his light mustache in seventh. When she got to the bedroom doors, she turned to his instead of her own. The cool wood pressed her forehead, which she lifted twice and knocked, as if that was a good idea with all the spinning, as if he might have surprised her with an answer. Nothing came, but she was comforted anyway, holding on to the doorknob like it was somebody’s hand.

“Hey you,” she said.

CHAPTER 4

“Look at this girl!” Sanji Ramakrishna screamed. She threw the door open in a blue silken whirl and streaked down the steps toward Amina, cackling like a fat devil. Pinching hands landed on Amina’s shoulders, her cheeks, and Sanji bellowed at the door, “Hey! Fools! Get off your rusty rumps and come and greet our baby! It’s taken her all of three days to face us!”

“One day, Sanji Auntie,” Amina protested, but her words were lost to the thrum of voices that moved from the kitchen to the entryway, bursting out of the door with the rest of them: Raj Ramakrishna (led by a spatula), Bala and Chacko Kurian (in one of their many silent fights, from the looks of things), and Thomas, whiskey in hand.

Raj greeted her first, the loose girth of him swaddled in stylishly rumpled linen. Plump, cultured, and the wearer of a docile smile that was rumored to have wooed legions of older women in his youth, he double-pecked each of Amina’s cheeks before whispering, “There’s pani puri and jalebis in the kitchen.”

“You really shouldn’t have gone through all that trouble.”

“Tell me about it!” Sanji said. “All night this one! Clucking about in the kitchen like some mad hen because tamarind chutney wouldn’t thicken and how to get done by the time Amina-baby gets here!”

“Come in, come in,” Bala Kurian coaxed from her perch on the step, arms clenched in front of her like a tiny prizefighter. Known throughout the Indian community in Albuquerque for her steady supply of gossip, outlandish outfits, and baffling non sequiturs, Dimple’s mother was in fine form tonight, glittering under several heavy chains and a saffron-colored, midriff-baring lehenga. (Straight from Bom! she would brag over dinner. Like a dancing girl dipped in ghee! Kamala would mutter under her breath.)

“Goodness, Ami! But what’s happened to you? You’re looking so fair!”

“She uses the Pond’s every night!” called Kamala, heaving up the driveway with an enormous bowl of rasmalai. “I sent her from Walgreens myself!”

“Or it could be the whole no-sun thing,” Amina said, ignoring her mother’s look.

“Come, let me see.” Chacko Kurian, who had been waiting by the door, now swept the women aside to grip Amina’s shoulders with gnarled hands. “You’re fairer?”

“Hi. Not really.”

He looked down his nose at her as though reading the face of a watch, his eyes glittering from somewhere deep behind heavy brows. “Too old for marrying anyway — why worry about it now?”

“Chackoji, don’t start,” Sanji warned.

“What start? It’s not a conversation, just the plain truth.”

Delivered at least twelve times in every get-together, Chacko Kurian’s plain truths could have stamped the joy out of any festivity if anyone were to take him seriously. Springing from lost dreams (to pioneer heart surgery with a fleet of like-minded sons) and found realities (a daughter who was as uninterested in his line of work as she was in trying to make him happy), his edicts were always promptly dismissed by the others, giving him the air of a king ruling the wrong kingdom.

“So what all is happening in Seattle?” he asked, clearing his throat. “Your father says you’ve been busy-busy.”

“Yes, well, it’s the wedding season.”

“How many weddings do you do in one weekend?”

“Depends. Usually two, but sometimes four. Once I even—”

“And Dimple?” His jaw flexed as he asked. “I don’t suppose she’s given up this silly art business?”

“She’s doing great. I saw her right before I left.”

“We heard that’s not all you saw!” Bala beamed. “What’s this about you going on a date with Sajeev?”

“Oh, for the love of God. Dimple and I met him for a meal.”

“Dimple went on a date with Sajeev?” Bala looked even more thrilled.

“It wasn’t a date. It was dinner.”

“A dinner date?”

“Always, I knew that boy would go far,” Chacko announced.

“Who cares about that little stick-necked thing?” Sanji asked. “What other news of our girl? And when will she come home? It’s been two years already.”

“She’s really stressed about work right now,” Amina said, making the kind of excuses she always had for Dimple, whose teen stint in reform school had gone badly enough to keep her from coming back to see her father, even all these years later. “There’s a big show coming up.”

“Ach,” Sanji sniffed. “Too successful, what to do?”

“Listen, at least she isn’t working in a strip club,” Bala said, her tone dropping into decibels reserved for gossip-tragedy. “Did you hear about the Patels’ daughter Seema? Seems she’s in Houston living with an American boy and owning some topless bar where you can only order small dishes of Spanish food! Mother herself told me!”

While the others choked on disbelief (“Seema? The National Merit Finalist?”), Sanji Auntie put a firm hand on Amina’s arm, guiding her away.

“You’re thirsty, darling? Let’s get you a drink.”

Amina let herself be whisked up the step and down the green-tiled hall. It was quiet and cooler in the living room, where the bar and the puja table competed for attention on opposite sides of the room.

“You need a gin, love? Or are we being good for the parents?”

“No, thanks.” Amina took a seat on a leather stool, inhaling the sharp mix of sandalwood and rosewater. The mirrored wall behind the bar showed her pallor. “I’m still feeling the whiskey I drank last night.”

“Hair of the dog it is.”

“No! God, please.”

“Poor baby. Ginger ale? Just sit here and catch your breath.” Amina watched Sanji waddle behind the bar, where she grabbed a tumbler and filled it with ice. Of all the family, it was Sanji Ramakrishna who Amina still loved the most, her thick, meatish body, deep, rumbling laugh, mottled nose, ruddy cheeks, ability to weave equally between the men’s and women’s conversations, total inability to cook. And then there was the Ramakrishnas’ marriage, a subject of continual fascination for Amina and Dimple, having occurred in their unthinkable thirties as Ph.D. students at Cambridge. (A love marriage, their own mothers called it, shaking sad heads at the lack of children, though to Amina, that fact itself was unspeakably romantic, as though real love was the substitute for progeny, and vice versa.)

She took the bubbly tumbler from Sanji’s extended hands. “Thanks.”

Sanji smiled. “So things are fine with you? We didn’t know you were coming, you know.”

Amina took a sip. “I had some time off.”

“Nothing else?”

She put the glass down, took a breath. “I need to ask you about something.”

Sanji studied Amina’s face for a moment, then leaned in. “It’s okay. I know.”

“You do?”

“Because Mummy has been so worried, you know. Said you were losing hope about not meeting anyone and needed to come home for a bit to build up confidences. Which is fine, nah? We’re always so happy to see you. I just wish it wasn’t because you were feeling so down.”

Amina frowned. “That’s not why I’m here.”

“No?” Sanji’s concern dipped slightly toward disbelief.

“No! I came home because of Dad.”

“What about Dad?”

“Mom said he was acting funny for the last three weeks, so I came back.”

“Funny? Funny how?”

“Talking on the porch all night,” Amina said, and when her aunt continued to look unimpressed, added, “to his dead mother.”

Sanji raised an eyebrow. “Kamala brought you home for this?”

“Well, yeah.”

“Oh, I wish you would have just asked me about it, Ami. I could have saved you the trouble.”

“You know about it?”

“Of course I know! Raj himself barely sleeps four hours a night anymore — always chattering away like one damn BBC interview. He talks to his father, his uncle, his grandfather. No, really, I’m telling you, it’s true! And if your mother would ever just talk to me about anything other than this Jesus business, I would tell her! It’s just an old man’s disease. Nothing more.”

“I don’t know. It seemed bad when she called.”

“And now?”

“Now he seems fine,” Amina admitted.

“Because he is fine. Pish, Kamala. She’s just missing you is all. Speaking of which”—Sanji stood, motioning for Amina to do the same—“we need to get you back there before those fools accuse me of hogging.”

In the kitchen, under a cloud of protest and frying mustard seed, plates of pani puri were being passed around.

“It’s only appetizer!”

“Amina, come get a plate!”

“I better get more than this!” This came from Thomas, looking down at his portion. “I didn’t come all this way to starve.”

“Who starves you?” Kamala asked indignantly.

“We’re trying something a little different tonight, Amina,” Raj explained. “Appetizers and dessert only are Indian. The main meal is Mongolian hot pot!”

“It’s a fancy way of saying he didn’t cook anything.” Sanji pointed to the dining table in the room next to them, where small hills of raw meat and tofu and vegetables surrounded a steaming cauldron. “I told you they wouldn’t like it.”

“Oh,” Amina said. “Wow.”

“Wow is right,” Chacko said. “Salmonella. E. coli. Could be our last supper.”

“You Suriani bores!” Raj huffed. “So averse to change, all of you! Remember how you loved the fondue night?”

At this there was a general murmur of agreement, heads nodding over Yes the fondue was quite good, who knew all that cheese and chocolate but still.

“Do we get to use the long skinny forks again?” Bala asked hopefully.

“Even better,” Raj said, smiling. “We get to use chopsticks.”

The chopsticks, for the most part, were abandoned after five minutes. Most found their way back to the kitchen, although one poked out of Kamala’s braid, placed there by a frustrated Thomas and either forgotten by its wearer or just tolerated. By mid-meal, three forks had also been lost to the bubbling broth, covered by chunks of meat, cabbage, snow peas, and tofu, and there was a bit of chest puffery from the men over who had made the best dipping sauce.

Bala nudged Chacko. “Tell them about the nurse in the OR!”

“Which?” Thomas asked.

“Sandy Freeland,” Chacko said. “You remember how she left suddenly for those three weeks?”

“Yes.”

“Turns out she went to find out if her husband, the pilot, was cheating on her.”

“And?” Kamala asked, trying unsuccessfully to drag a too-cooked piece of tofu from the pot with a lone chopstick.

Chacko passed her his fork. “She found him in Dubai with not just another woman, but two sons!”

“No! My God!” The gasps came from every side of the table.

“Americans!” Kamala said.

“Not just Americans!” Bala fanned her hands out. “My God, Madras has become a hotbed.”

“Ahno?” Kamala motioned for the soy sauce. “Who says?”

“My sister only! She was telling me of one Lalitha Varghese—”

“Lalitha from MCC?”

“Yes, yes! That Lalitha!” Bala said. “Anyway, her husband, the ob-gyn, goes and has an affair with a patient … and then moves her into the house!”

Around the table: hisses, nose tuggings, head shakings.

“Poor thing.” Sanji tsked. “What did she do?”

Bala held her hands up. “She started shooting the drugs!”

Amina choked on her rice.

Thomas thumped her back. “Heroin?”

“Demerol. She took it from his office only.”

“Pathetic!” Sanji shook her head. “I would have started shooting the both of them dead and gone to Mahabilipuram on beach holiday.”

“Of course you would, darling,” Raj said, holding up a plate. “Now, who wants more tofu?”

“No more ’fu!” Thomas said, standing up rather dramatically. He scanned the table, taking a moment to locate his glass before plucking it up and heading out.

“So, Ami, what’s this big show Dimple is working on then?” Sanji asked.

“It’s Charles White.”

They all looked at her blankly.

“He’s huge. It’s a big deal that she got him.”

“So does that mean that if we go to the gallery, someone besides Dimple might actually be standing in it?” Chacko grumbled.

“Chackoji, please don’t make me bring out the after-dinner muzzle.” Sanji reached for her drink.

“I will never understand what it is she gets paid money to do. Hang pictures on the wall? And this one, with the weddings! What fool can’t grab a camera and take some snaps of his own wedding?”

“Ami, baby, a spot of gin?” Sanji said, waving her glass helpfully.

“Yup.” Amina snatched it on her way out the door.

“I’m just telling the plain truth; if these girls don’t want to hear it—”

“I know, I know, it will be our own undoing.” Amina followed after her father as Sanji asked in her loudest, most determined-to-change-the-subject voice, “Now, Bala, darling, where did this golden getup come from? You look positively radioactive.”

Out in the cool hallway, it felt good to breathe. These dinners with the family could get so stuffy, what with everyone sitting on top of her like she might hatch. A quick peek in the kitchen confirmed that it was the kind of wreck that Raj was prone to making and Sanji was doomed to clean up, being, as she put it, “bad in all other feminine arts.” In the living room, Thomas was pouring another drink with a scowl-darkened face.

“Hey, Dad.”

“Now, that is just not true.”

“What’s not?” Amina walked up behind him.

“Stop it,” he said.

“What?”

Thomas turned around with a start. “Amina!”

“Who were you talking to?”

He blinked a few times before saying, “I wasn’t.”

“I heard you.”

“Really? I must have been talking to myself.”

Amina gauged the fumes coming off him. He said nothing as she made her way around the bar, getting a gin and soda for Sanji. “How many have you had?”

Thomas shrugged. “I don’t know. Two.”

She doubled the number. “I’ll drive your car home.”

“You don’t need to do that.”

“I do.”

“Whatever,” Thomas said, sulking as he always did when she pointed out his drinking, but later, as dinner was finally declared over and everyone stood out in the driveway under the pocketed haze of street lamps, he bragged to the others that his “chauffeur” would be taking him back to his home in the country.

“So you’re leaving Friday?” Sanji asked, walking them to the car.

“Yes. Afternoon.” Amina unlocked the doors and slid in. She rolled down the window, and Sanji leaned through it.

“How about if I come Friday morning. You’ll be around?”

“Like there’s anywhere else for me to be?”

Sanji gave her a fat kiss on the forehead. “Good girl.” She peered over Amina’s shoulder to where Thomas was already settling in for the long ride home, sweater bunched into a pillowish mass behind his head, seat back reclined, large, sock-covered feet on the dash. “Good night, Thomasji. Try not to drive this one too nuts before Friday, nah?”

“Can’t drive a nuts nuts!” Thomas said cheerfully, not quite opening his eyes.

Amina slid the car into gear, and her aunt backed up, waving. Soon Raj and Chacko and Bala joined her, their hands raised into the light and flickering like moth wings in the rearview mirror as Amina drove away.

CHAPTER 5

In the garden the next day, Amina and her mother weeded and watered, while dragonflies buzzed overhead and Prince Philip snored into an anthill.

“I don’t know where to plant these ones,” Kamala grumbled, squinting down at the plastic trays filled with cubed earth. Just a few were beginning to sprout, the thin curls of green reaching out like greedy fingers.

“Can’t you put them next to me?”

“No, that’s for pumpkins.”

“What about back there?” Amina pointed to the fresh mound at the back of the garden. “You’ve already tilled the soil.”

“That dumb dog did it. I gave him a lamb bone the other night, and next thing I know, he’s built the pyramid of Giza for it.” She picked up the hose, moving it to the bean trellis and releasing the wet, sugary green smell of snow peas and hot soil. Amina breathed deep.

“Nothing smells like the desert.” Kamala smiled. “We went to Texas, remember, for the wedding of that Telegu girl in your high school?”

“Syama?”

“Yes, she married some Houston boy, father arranged the whole thing, but I tell you what about Houston: too much of smell! I was so happy to come home. Nice, dry air, everything crisp in the morning.” She bent over the eggplant. “What about Seattle? You have a garden there?”

“You know I don’t.”

“How can you stay in that place? No yard?”

“I don’t want a yard.”

“Everybody wants a yard!” Kamala knelt to pull a few weeds that were springing up next to the peppers. “Oh, by the way, don’t make plans for tomorrow night. I’m making you appam and stew.”

“Oh, Ma, you don’t need to do all that for me.”

“What all that? It’s nothing. And anyway, Anyan is coming for dinner and it’s his favorite.”

“Who?”

“Thomas said you met him at the hospital — the neurologist? He has a son, so he’ll bring him, too.”

“Oh, right. Dr. George. How old is his kid?”

“Eight.”

“Cute. What’s his wife like?”

“Foo! Horrible.” She pushed a strand of loose hair behind her ear. “I met her last year at some hospital fund-raiser something or other, but then she left him! Can you believe? She’s living in Nob Hill with some Afghani now.”

Amina stopped weeding. “Wait, what?”

“I know, poor Anyan! Can you imagine? I’m sure he’ll meet someone though, hot commodity in the hospital and all that. The nurses are probably plotting over him now.”

Amina looked up at the sky, taking pains to breathe evenly. “No. I’m not doing it.”

“Doing what?”

“I’m not doing this.” Her voice rose slightly as she stood. “You are not doing this to me.”

“Having dinner?”

Amina took off the gardening gloves and dropped them in the dust. She turned to leave the garden, willing herself to stay calm until she was in her room.

“Where are you going?” Kamala asked. “We’re not done planting!”

“You know, Dimple said this. She warned me you would do this, and I — God! — I didn’t believe her. I thought it was too low. Even for you. You’re trying to set me up with Dr. George?”

“It’s dinner, koche, not some formal thing where you have to make a decision and—”

“Make a decision?”

“Amina, listen, it’s no big deals. I just thought you might like to—”

“Oh my God,” Amina laughed, shaking her head. “Is Dad even sick?”

Kamala looked at her for a long moment before saying, “I never said he was sick. You said he was sick.”

Right. Of course. “So then what was the plan, Ma? You get me back here and Anyan George and I make a decision and what? He gets a wife and his son gets a mother and I get a family you can brag about?”

“What’s wrong with a family?”

“I don’t want one!”

“Yes you do. You need someone, koche. Everyone sees it.”

It was a soft hit, an unexpected knock that cut Amina’s breath short.

“You never try to meet anyone because you think that something is wrong with you,” her mother said like it was a simple fact, like she might have been saying It’s a quarter to noon or Water the radishes. “I know, we all know. Sanji and Bala and even Dimple says you haven’t acted like yourself since you took the picture of that man on the bridge, and—”

“Dimple says nothing! Dimple doesn’t even talk to you!”

“She talks to Bala.”

“Bullshit! When?”

“When she’s worried about something, dummy.” Kamala tugged nervously at the bottom of her shirt, and Amina knew it was true suddenly, a thought that made her queasy with shame.

“I’m going,” Amina said.

“Oh, Ami.”

“No, I mean, I’m leaving. Tomorrow. I’m going back to Seattle and going back to my work and my life, and I’m sorry if it doesn’t seem like it’s enough to you, but it is for me, okay?”

“Hey, koche …”

Amina unhinged the garden gate and opened it, walking quickly toward the house. Her mother was still calling after her as the screen door behind her banged shut.

That night she could not sleep. At three in the morning, she officially gave up, getting out of bed and walking across to Akhil’s room.

It was a different room now — still his, but also all of theirs, claimed bit by bit as the years had passed. His bed and desk and dresser had stayed put, but certain things — the orange beanbag, the chair covered with heavy-metal stickers — had been taken out at some point, coming to what end, Amina did not know. There were also additions to the room — clothes and newspapers and house detritus (an empty water glass, an aluminum-foil-covered flashlight, a December 1991 issue of American Photo) — that marked the rest of the family’s comings and goings as steadily as a logbook. Akhil’s leather jacket — ferried from one holding spot to the next like a paralytic cat — was folded up on his desk. Amina picked it up, sniffing the collar before putting it on.

Thomas had been in last, according to the indent in the bed and the surgical booties curled up like pill bugs under it. Amina lowered herself into his impression like it was a snow angel. She looked up.

There they were, still smiling down at her after all these years. Gandhi still looked like a baby with reading glasses, while Martin Luther King, Jr., and Che Guevara seemed to be connected by the hair. All of their painted faces glowed electrically, a dicey mixture of reality and aspiration. Amina shut her eyes, seeing the coral mouths of the Greats tattooed in pale green across her eyelids.

CHAPTER 6

“Whoa,” Monica said the next morning, stopping abruptly in Thomas’s office and sniffing like a hound. “What are you doing here?”

Amina looked up from a pile of brain parts, twirling the hippocampus in her fingers. The rest of the model was strewn across her father’s desk like a dismembered animal. “Waiting for Dad to give me a ride to the airport.”

“I thought you were leaving Friday?”

“She’s fleeing the state,” Thomas said, not looking up from his computer. “Fight with her mother.”

Monica sat on the arm of the couch, looking more stunned than was really necessary. “Really? I was hoping we’d have that girl time tonight. Didn’t your mother tell you I called? I called three times.”

“Shockingly, she did not,” Amina said, ignoring the dark look Thomas shot her. Was it her problem Kamala selectively deleted messages when they came from people she did not like? No, it was not. Monica looked down at her watch. “Well, what time is your flight?”

“Around two.”

“I’ll give you a lift.”

“You have time?” Thomas asked.

“What?” Amina said, surprised. “Dad, I thought you—”

“Great! It will be fun,” Monica said, smiling. “We can sit at Garduño’s and have guac and beer until your flight comes. You wanna? I’ll bring the car around.”

Amina did not wanna, actually, but Monica was already going out the office door fast. Well, then. Amina stood up and looked around the office, feeling let down. She had wanted the drive to the airport with her father, but he had already turned back to his work, his eyes scanning the folder in front of him.

“Well, that’s lucky isn’t it?” he asked, and Amina nodded, embarrassed by the sudden tears that provoked her eyes. What were they for? Not her father’s constant distraction. Not Kamala’s predictable meddling. No, this was the feeling that always arose when she left, an unmet urgency, as though she hadn’t really done whatever it was she was supposed to do to make home feel like home again.

Thomas’s face fell. “Oh, koche. Don’t be upset about your mother.”

“I’m not,” she said unconvincingly, and he came around his desk. He rubbed his chin on the top of her head and pulled her into a tight hug.

“It’s all going to work out.”

“Yeah, I know,” she said, giving him one final squeeze before she picked up her bag and walked out of his office, to where Monica’s idling car waited.

The woman could not have driven more slowly. On the highway, cars shot by like comets, an occasionally curious head staring back, looking for signs of engine trouble or a flat. Monica flipped open the glove box, removing an emerald pack of menthols.

“What are you doing?” Amina asked.

“What does it look like?”

“I thought you quit years ago.”

“Did you quit?” Monica looked at her with a strange, flat gaze.

Amina flushed, and Monica thrust the pack at her with shaking hands. The car lighter popped out. Plumes of smoke filled the car. They were heading down the wrong exit ramp now, the blinker ticking wildly. Monica took a right at the end of it and then another right. She parked outside a Village Inn.

In front of them, the restaurant window showed two worlds laid one atop the other like splices of film: diners hunched into burgundy booths with cheap, brassy chandeliers hanging overhead, and the blank windshields of empty cars fading in and out.

“Your dad tried to save a dead kid,” Monica said.

Amina stared at the silhouettes, turning the sentence over in her head, trying to bend it into something that made sense. It did not. Monica cracked a window and pushed in the car lighter again.

“What?”

“Your dad. A few weeks ago.” She picked a stray piece of tobacco off her tongue, flicking it out the window. “In the ER.”

“A dead kid?”

The lighter popped out and Monica handed it to her. “Massive head trauma. There was a shoot-out in the mall.”

“Wait, Ty Hanson’s kid?”

“You should light that. Damn thing works for exactly three seconds.”

Amina pressed her cigarette into the fading orange coils.

Monica nodded. “He told you about it?”

“He told me Derrick had died.”

“Did he tell you what happened in the ER?”

Amina shook her head, and Monica looked out the window on her side.

“We were making rounds when we got the call that they were coming into the ER. Two kids. So we went rushing down to the emergency bay, and he just …” She shook her head. “I don’t know.”

“What?”

“He went to the wrong kid,” she said softly, sounding surprised. “The other kid was right there, the team already working on him, and Thomas just ignored him and went to Derrick instead.”

“But … well … he knew Derrick and not the other one, right?” Amina asked. “I mean, why is that such a big—”

“He was talking really loudly. Telling Derrick to calm down, that everything was going to be okay. Telling me to restrain him. And at first I just thought he was seeing something everyone else hadn’t noticed, like maybe — who knows — the kid is still alive? Stranger shit has happened in that ER, believe me. But then I see the kid’s eyes and he’s really gone and Thomas is on top of him, pushing him down like he’s fighting to get up, yelling at me to quit just standing there and help restrain him.” She looked at Amina apologetically. “I didn’t know what to do. I mean … I tried to tell him the kid was dead, and he got really angry. He asked another one of the nurses for help. She told him the same thing. He was furious, screaming at everyone. It took us a few minutes to get through.”

A few minutes? “Shit.”

The blur in the corner of her eye was Monica nodding.

“Have you seen that happen before?”

“You mean in a patient or in your dad?”

“Both. Either.”

Monica rolled a pocket of smoke around her mouth. “Sure, if someone is delusional. If he has, say, post-traumatic stress disorder or is taking hallucinogens or something.”

“You think he has PTSD?”

“Honestly, Amina, I don’t know what to think. There could have been any number of things that factored in. Did he eat enough that day? Had he slept well? Were there other things we didn’t know about?”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know. You know, something like this happens, you revisit a lot of things, wonder if you should have seen … I mean, but even that is not particularly useful. I have my theories, but they’re just that — a bunch of thoughts, not a medical diagnosis.”

“Like what?”

“Oh, Amina, I don’t think we should get into—”

“Like what?”

“I think he had a psychotic break.”

Amina looked down at her lap feeling like she had once when she was swimming in the ocean and something large had brushed against her leg. “What’s that?”

“It’s a loss of contact with reality.”

Heat flared between Amina’s fingertips, and she looked down to a solid inch of ash. She lifted the cigarette carefully to the window, tipping the spent end over and watching the ashes scatter through the glass. “He’s psychotic?”

“No, he’s not fucking psychotic, God.”

“Well, I don’t know!”

Monica glared at the steering wheel for a few moments before sighing, “Sorry. I just mean people can have psychotic breaks without harming themselves or anyone else, okay? He wouldn’t have hurt anyone. I’ve told them that.”

“Them?”

“The board.”

Amina’s mouth fell open. “They know?”

“They heard about it, obviously.”

“From who?”

Monica smiled sadly. “Amina, it’s a small hospital. I’m sure they heard it from a few people.”

Amina’s mind went to the white hospital corridors, the pools of light, the nurses’ faces as she and Thomas walked past. Did they know? Had the ICU nurse known? Had Dr. George? She flipped the air vents on the dash open and shut. “And was there, I don’t know, disciplinary action?”

“He was talked to. He’s knows he’s being watched.”

“Does my mom know?”

“I tried to tell her.”

“And?”

“She hung up before I could get it out.”

“Great.”

“I know, but what did I expect? No love lost there. And anyway, I’m not sure what we need to do at this point, besides get him to talk to someone.”

“Like a shrink?”

“Well, that would be great, but barring that, I mean, anyone.” Monica looked at her. “Someone he’d be honest with. You.”

Amina thought of her father on the porch, the tumbler in his hands. Your mother has always been afraid of anything she can’t control.

“Are you okay?” Monica asked, and Amina realized she was gripping her knees, her breath light and shallow.

She gave a quick, reassuring nod. It seemed important to be okay, suddenly. To be a part of Team Okay. “Yes, of course. It’s just a lot.”

“Yeah. That’s why I was trying tell you earlier in the week.”

They sat in silence, the sun settling on them like a hot, heavy sheet. The car seemed to grow smaller, the space between them suddenly filled with a thousand twitching anxieties.

“So now what?”

Monica shrugged, dropped her butt out the window. “I don’t know. I guess we just have to take what we know and go from there.”

“And what do we know?” Amina’s voice sounded small.

“We know that your dad had a delusional episode of some sort. We know that this isn’t typical behavior for him, and could even be an isolated incident. We know that typically, late spring is a hard time for him emotionally, and that the kid who died was the same age as, you know”—she took a short, sharp breath—“your brother.”

“You think this is about Akhil?”

“Honey, I have no idea what this is about.” Monica paused. “Why did you ask me if he was okay the other day?”

“What?”

“At the ICU. You asked me if something was wrong.”

“Oh, I … just thought he seemed off or something.” It wasn’t that Amina wanted to lie to Monica so much as she wanted to buy time, to think through things, to sit somewhere alone until she could put all the pieces together and come up with a plan. “I mean, has he seemed fine to you? Other than this?”

“It’s hard to tell. Mainly he just seems really exhausted. A little withdrawn. He sure doesn’t laugh as much.”

“Has he had any more episodes?”

“Not as far as I know.” Monica leaned back and ran her thumb under the seat belt still strapped over her chest. “I mean, look, thirty years with the same hospital, no one wants this to be a lasting mark against him. But he’s not there to fix bunions, you know?”

Amina nodded, wanting to get out of the car, to walk around the parking lot until her head came back together.

“Okay,” Monica said after a moment, like they had come to some kind of resolution. “Well, so, you hungry?”

“Huh?”

Monica tipped her chin at the restaurant. “I mean, I know it’s no Garduño’s, but if you want some pancakes or something, we have the time.”

Amina shook her head. “I think you’d better just take me home.”