The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing: A Novel by Mira Jacob Read Free Book Online Page B

not been given?”
    Kamala fumed at the floor. “Nobody is talking about that.”
    “Is it the house? It’s not big enough? You don’t like your car?”
    “Don’t be a silly.”
    “You want to come back here, is that it? After all these years, after everything we have built for ourselves there, after all that I have tried to give you, you want to uproot the kids from their entire lives and just move back here?”
    Kamala’s lips clamped shut.
    “What can you have here that you can’t at home?” Thomas took a step forward. “Really, tell me! You sit here like some pained mermaid longing for her sea, but what is it, really, that you don’t have back in the States? Your sisters who live in all different towns here anyway? Your independence? Enough help around the house? Someone to—”
    “Myself,”
Kamala said.
    Thomas swayed a little bit, as if slapped.
    “Myself,” Kamala said again, her eyes filling with tears she wiped away hastily, and Thomas’s arms dropped in their sockets. They did not look at each other then, but at the floor. A moment later Thomas turned and left the room, shoes heavy on the steps. Amina leaned over the verandah’s edge a few seconds later, watching him cross the yard, heading back to the gate. Akhil tugged her arm.
    C’mon
, he mouthed.
    The lock screeched open again, letting Thomas back out to the street, and Kamala sat on the bed. Something round and hard movedfrom Amina’s throat to her gut, making it difficult to breathe. Akhil frowned at her.
    “Let’s go, stupid,” he hissed, and she turned and followed him back inside, glad to have somewhere to go.
    What was it that woke her? Late that night, Amina found herself awake, blinking into the dark. Scraping footsteps. The settling of weight. She stared at the fan cutting the air above her for several seconds before rising out of bed. The verandah was empty, but the tar on the roof was still warm from the day’s sun as Amina took the path back up to the top. The high, warbling songs of newfound Tamilian love rose from the movie theater down the street, along with smoke from the beggars’ fires and the bidi Thomas smoked, his back slumped into a yellow chair, beer between his feet. He glanced over his shoulder as she approached.
    “Hi, Dad.”
    “Ami.” He looked neither surprised nor unhappy to see her, and though the night was too hot and she was a little too big for it, she climbed into his lap, shoving her forehead against his jaw.
    “You should be asleep,” he told her, his breath burning her eyes.
    “You should be asleep,” she said, and he grunted.
    “Are you having a good time?”
    “Sure,” she lied. “Are you?”
    He nodded once, heavily. He sighed and she sighed with him, feeling his belly rise and fall at her back, his heart thumping behind hers.
    “She’s never satisfied,” he said.
    Kamala? Ammachy? Amina was scared to ask.
    “Where did you go?” she asked instead.
    He shrugged.
    “Are we still going to the beach?”
    His stubble scratched her forehead as he nodded.
    Amina closed her eyes. The pool. Tomorrow she would be crawling through the clear turquoise while light dappled the walls around her. Until her ears hurt. Until her fingers pruned. Maybe there wouldeven be a slide, one of those long ones that curled like a giant’s tongue and spat you into the cool water.
    “How is your brother?”
    Why was he asking her? Amina opened her eyes to the muggy dark. “Mean.”
    Thomas laughed.
    “No, it’s true, Dad! He’s worse here than at home.”
    “That’s because it’s hard for him here.”
    “It’s hard for me, too!”
    “Not the same way,
koche
. He was born here. He remembers more.”
    This seemed like one of those things that her father had wrong, like the time he said that being famous would be terrible. Why would it be harder to be somewhere you remember
more
? What about when you didn’t remember anything if you’d ever even known it in the first place and everyone was always