Sleeping Tigers (10 page)

I hated it that Jon knew I was determined to find her, but that was the truth. Nadine had to be that scrawny blonde girl I’d seen across the street from Cam’s house with the baby in the backpack. I drove too fast down Telegraph Avenue, dodging skate boarders, bikes, and scooters until I was close to the University, my knuckles white on the steering wheel, my jaw clenched as I scanned the streets for her.

Cam had acted without thinking, under the influence of whatever substances he was abusing. He had slept with a homeless drug addict, he hadn’t used precautions, and he had fathered a child. I lined these facts up in my head over and over again, until I could accept them all. Still, I was furious that my brother, whose single greatest quality had always been his compassion, would act cowardly instead of assuming responsibility for his actions—and for the new little life he’d brought into the world.

I was also struck by the gross unfairness of this situation. Why had Cam, who had never wanted children, as far as I knew, and who could barely look after himself, managed to produce a child, while I had not?

Shortly after Peter and I were engaged last year, I thought I was pregnant. My period was several days late, my breasts were heavy and sore, my back ached. Peter and I were on a weekend trip to upstate New York when I told him, and he bought me an Amish rocking chair to celebrate. Then we’d come home and, before I could buy a pregnancy kit, I started bleeding.

I was devastated. Peter had comforted me with a series of brotherly pats, saying that we would be better off getting married and buying a house before becoming parents. I had almost believed him. Then I was diagnosed with breast cancer several months later. My first agonizing thought, as the surgeon clipped the mammogram to a light board and used a sharp wooden pointer to outline the defects in my breast, was this: I will die before I ever get to be a mother.

I parked the car on Telegraph Avenue and asked an elderly man in a beret for directions to People’s Park. “Hide your wallet in your sock,” he advised, sketching a map on the back of a tattered envelope.

Another block later, I was swallowed up by a flock of Hari Krishnas flailing under orange robes and rattling tambourines. I slowed to let them swarm around me like migrating Monarch butterflies, my feet moving in time to their chanting, “Hari, Hari!”

By the time I could see clearly again, I’d arrived on restaurant row. In three blocks I traveled from Ethiopia to Mexico. Between these ethnic eateries were head shops, garden pubs, coffee houses and bookstores, all just a backdrop for outdoor vendors whose tables carried everything from Chinese herbs to African jewelry.

Berkeley was caught in a time warp, and this city was all about sensation: heightening it, mellowing it, broadening it, or stamping it out altogether. Oh, there were the MBAs and the cell phones and the kids in Urban Outfitter clothes, but mostly I was aware of people on the street in various states of awareness who had transported themselves back in time by swathing their bodies in psychedelic prints and ethereal gauze, much of it adorned with tinkling bells. Berkeley was a world populated by madmen and angels. Cam definitely belonged here.

When I finally turned off Telegraph, I discovered a student ghetto, a narrow street of shabby houses with porches groaning under the weight of damp furniture, bicycles, and tattered boxes of books. People’s Park was across the street. I wandered its narrow paths, glancing over my shoulder now and then as I threaded my way through dense vegetation.

Eventually I found an encampment of moldy looking tents and sagging cardboard houses, some with shopping carts parked alongside the temporary shelters like minivans in driveways. Laundry was spread over the bushes to dry and the ashes of last night’s fires blew about like black moths. The grass had been trampled down. There was a vegetable garden with lettuces the size of my head and fantastic carrot tops that looked more like feathers than anything edible.

I heard voices over the sound of the breeze through the trees. My heart started pounding and my throat went dry. I should have brought someone with me, Ed or even Karin. What defenses did a suburban East Coast elementary school teacher have in a place like this?

Besides the fact that I probably wouldn’t be able to find Nadine, nobody knew where to look for me if I got mugged or murdered. Who would even know I was missing? Karin might call, or my mother. But it would be days before either of them thought something was wrong. The curse of living alone was that nobody but you knew when you were tucked into bed at night.

Too late for second thoughts. I tracked the voices to another clearing, where smoke rose from a small fire surrounded by people removing their clothes and piling them haphazardly in a casket, shouting, “Off with the Emperor’s Clothes! Off with the Emperor’s Clothes!” while a group of onlookers murmured approval.

For crying out loud. Twice in one day! What was it with Californians and this pressing need to parade around nude?

I sidled up to a broad-shouldered woman who was still dressed. She wore a Hawaiian shirt held together with safety pins. “What’s going on?” I asked.

The woman gestured with one hand; she wore a cuff of bright plastic bracelets. “We’re burying our inhibitions and airing our vulnerabilities,” she answered in the chatty tone of a mother reporting her son’s Little League line-up.

Sure enough, the dozen or so participants now stood around with their inhibitions completely buried, or at least removed. Every crack and dimple of vulnerability exposed, they lowered the casket of clothing into a shallow grave and started chanting.

I waited until the casket was out of view before asking Miss Hawaii if she knew Nadine. The name wasn’t familiar to her, but when I described the blonde teenager and her baby, she nodded with enthusiasm.

“Why, that baby’s just getting out of the pickle stage!” the woman chortled. “Can’t imagine how that girl will keep that tiny peanut away from the fires, now she’s startin’ to crawl.”

Ages and stages. But from pickle to peanut? “Do you know where they are right now? I’m the baby’s aunt, actually.” The words didn’t exactly roll off my tongue, but my admission certainly got results. The woman put two fingers into her mouth and whistled like a football coach. “Yo, Star!”

A man as knobby-kneed and pink as a flamingo left the chanting group around the fire to amble towards us, his penis swinging like a pendulum. “Isn’t this just too cool?” Star asked me, sweeping his arm toward the new grave. “We are totally free. We’ve taken control of our destinies. We are the lucky ones.”

Mighty lucky Berkeley doesn’t have mosquitoes, I thought.

“Star, honey, you seen that little blondie girl with the little bitty baby?” Miss Hawaii asked.

Star nodded. “She’s at the playground now, seeing as there’s a bonfire today in the garden.” He shook his head dolefully. “Can’t keep no babies around no fires.”

They pointed me in the direction of the playground. I followed another path, this one more overgrown, until I reached another clearing.

There, standing next to a battered metal swing set that looked as though it had been thrown out of a truck, was the blonde teenager I’d seen across the street from Cam’s. She was holding the baby that might be my niece. From this distance, the baby looked like any other baby: bald as a cue ball, a halo of blonde fuzz standing out from her ears and forehead.

I approached them slowly. I could tell by the way the girl stared hard at me that the recognition was mutual. “Are you Nadine?” I asked, stopping several feet away from her.

“Who wants to know?”

Nadine was as narrow-hipped as a boy and wore low-slung jeans. Her stained t-shirt hung on her bony shoulders and her blonde hair stood out in sporadic clumps around her head. Nadine screwed up her face at me, defiant and and frightened all at once. Cam was right. No way was this girl more than sixteen. Fifteen, even. How could I have such a clueless moron for a brother?

“My name is Jordan. I’ve been looking for you.”

“Let me guess. You came to piss me off too, right?”

“Why would I want to do that?”

“You tell me.” Nadine gestured with her little ferret chin at the baby, who she clutched close to her bony chest. The infant was dressed in a faded t-shirt and diaper. Her little toes were as black and round as dried beans. As Nadine lowered the baby into the infant swing, I saw that the child’s diaper was so full that it hung like Gandhi’s dhoti between her legs. Nadine wrapped a flannel shirt around the baby’s scrawny torso to wedge her into place and gave the swing an unenthusiastic push.

“I really don’t know what you’re talking about,” I prodded. I wanted to see what she’d tell me on her own.

Nadine shrugged her narrow shoulders. “You’re tight with that bastard Cam now. I seen you at his house. Ask him.”

“That bastard Cam’s my brother.”

She glanced at me sharply. “Okay. I can see that,” she admitted.

Nadine bent down to retrieve a can of generic cola out of a tattered canvas backpack. Next she fished out a baby bottle encrusted with the dried remains of formula and filled it with cola. She stood up and handed the bottle to the baby, then plopped down on an enormous boulder while the baby dangled in the swing beside her like a puppet.

“So you know the score,” Nadine said, noisily chugging down what was left in the can.

“I’d rather hear your side of the story.” I deliberately avoided looking at the baby with her crusty cola bottle, for fear I’d snatch the bottle away.

She laughed. “That’s a new one. What do you want to know?”

“Well, for starters, are you really sure this is my brother’s child?”

“Shit, yeah.”

I finally took a good look at the child. Up close, the baby’s resemblance to Cam, and to me, was uncanny. Our gene pool might be funky, as Cam said, but it was powerful. The child’s blue eyes were tipped at the corners, and one of them was flecked with a brown spot like mine. She had the same long, narrow nose we did. Even her hands, broad but long-fingered, were tiny copies of mine and Cam’s.

Looking at this baby, I felt dizzy with recognition, slightly sick, as if someone had socked me in the stomach. This child was family. The next generation. And yet, here she was, guzzling soda out of a baby bottle, smelling like a sheep barn, and carrying a month’s worth of grime between her toes.

I blinked back tears. “So what are you going to do, Nadine? Sue my brother for support? You can do that if he’s the baby’s father. Have you talked to a lawyer?”

Nadine squawked at this idea. “Do I look like the type a fucking lawyer would take on?” She tossed her oily hair. Along Nadine’s cheeks and narrow jaw ran rows of festering sores. It didn’t look like an adolescent’s ordinary acne. Was it something to do with drugs? Nadine certainly had an addict’s rolling eyes and edginess.

“Anybody can see a lawyer,” I told her. “There are probably free legal centers right here in Berkeley. Or you could get a lawyer who would get paid later, out of your back child support.”

“Oh, right. Like Cam has fucking shit for money.” Nadine scratched at the bumps on her face. She was missing one of her bottom front teeth and her gums were tinged green. I thought of the moldy shower curtain in Cam’s house. “Nah. If Cam won’t play, screw him. We’ll get by. Right, Girlie?” She tweaked her daughter’s toe.

“What’s the baby’s name?”

“Paris.” Nadine tossed the cola can into the bushes and pulled a cube of chewing gum out of her jeans pocket. The gum was purple; she chewed with her mouth open, exhaling grape. “I always wanted to go there.”

“She’s a pretty baby.”

Nadine shrugged. “She’s butt ugly. A little monkey face. But look who she has to take after.” She glanced my way. “No offense.”

“Look,” I said, exasperated, “you can’t just live out here in the park with a child. It’s dangerous! Don’t give up on Cam. Keep after him until he helps you.”

“Fuck that!” she flared. “I’m done with Cam and his house of freaks. Me and The Admiral, we’re going to Oregon to pick apples. Make some real money, fast.”

She was a fine one to call my brother a freak. I said, “You can’t take a baby with you to pick apples.”

“Oh, I’ll figure out something.” Nadine cut a sidelong look at me. “Course, it’s hard to think straight when I’ve been up three nights straight with the baby. Something’s wrong with her. Barks like a seal at night.” Nadine tapped the baby’s foot again.

Paris had been dozing with her bottle in the swing; now she started and her face wrinkled up. She did look a little like a monkey. I wondered if something serious really was wrong with her, if her mother had been doing drugs all through her pregnancy.