Sleeping Tigers (9 page)

“Maybe I like the world the way it is.”

He looked smug. “Oh, yes? What is it you like about our world, Jordan? The nuclear tests in remote villages in India? The terrorists who strap explosives to their own bodies? The mothers right here in Berkeley who sell their bodies and souls for another pipe?”

I had to struggle to put my thoughts into words; hadn’t I, in fact, just kicked aside the scaffolding of my own life, with the possible exception of knowing that I loved children and teaching? Didn’t I volunteer, too, even if it was only on projects within a ten-mile radius of my home in Massachusetts? Soup kitchens, beach cleanups, recycling drives: okay, I hadn’t traveled to Nepal to save rare tigers and orchids, but I’d always made a point of giving back to my community. Were Jon and I so different, really? Why was I even bothering to argue?

“Those things you’re talking about aren’t the whole world,” I said, my face hot with the frustration of trying to explain my thoughts before I’d had time to fully mull them over. “Just pieces of it gone wrong. Who are you helping by dropping out, besides yourselves?”

There was an uneasy titter from Melody, a warning look from Cam. I ignored them and focused my attention on Domingo, whose head was drooping over his plate. I leaned forward and tapped him on the back of his hand. He jerked awake. “What about you, huh? Are you in the world, or out of it?” I demanded.

Domingo showed me the whites of his eyes. “Me?”

“Yes, you! What do you do, when you’re not busy taking sand naps or eating?”

Cam nudged my foot under the table. “Ease up, Jordan.” He nodded at the rest of the table. “My sister’s always been the motivated one in the family. The big success story. Master’s degree, teaching job, the works. She’s our Go Getter Gal. Jordan hasn’t ever had time to understand the world’s essential truth.”

I fixed him in my sights. “Which is?”

Cam grinned. “Which is that it can take a whole lot of time to drink a cup of coffee.”

The others laughed, and even I had to smile. I wasn’t going to change these people, and that was okay. I was only here because I wanted to be part of my brother’s life again. No point in alienating Cam. I could let the conversation slide for now, and Cam and I would have another chance to talk alone later. I’d see to that.

Jon lit a joint and it went around the table, slowing the talk as Cam’s roommates, sated and stoned, pushed back their chairs. I declined the joint and told them a bit about my teaching, then asked about their lives, keeping myself on a short leash.

This group made the Vienna Boys’ Choir look rowdy. Domingo consulted on occasional software jobs. Melody had a rubber stamp business, designing stamps to order. Val catered vegan meals at private Berkeley parties.

“What we mainly like to do is get high and night skate,” Cam said. “That’s how I met this crew.”

“Night skate?”

“Yeah, there’s a whole gang of us. The Holy Rollers. Everybody here, and maybe another dozen across the Bay. We meet in Golden Gate Park on Tuesday nights and skateboard or bike the hills around Pacific Heights. Fun as hell.”

Domingo was grinning, nodding so hard that his dark hair bounced around his shoulders. “Yeah, suicide is a definite possibility if you don’t count right between lights.”

“Let me get this straight,” I said. “You take your skateboards and bikes into the city at night? On streets with traffic?”

“Not much traffic at night,” Cam pointed out. “And this city’s like one big skate park. We’ve done every hill, ramp, tunnel, you name it. Even Twin Peaks. Man! What a rush. Fifteen of us zooming down that sucker, barely making the corners.”

“Fifteen of you with a suicide wish,” I pointed out.

“It’s a bitchin’ good time,” Cam said. “Funner than fun.”

Fun
. Fun was the point. Cam and his housemates were like those fourth grade kids who refused to wear jackets at recess, even if it meant flying headfirst into walls because they were so cold that they’d pulled their arms inside the sleeves of their t-shirts, as if they were wearing straitjackets. I was torn between wanting to scold Cam for playing Peter Pan and envying his freedom.

Just then Melody, who had carried a stack of dirty plates into the kitchen, returned to the greenhouse and said, “Cam? She’s here again.”

Melody stood between me and the greenhouse windows on the street side, blocking my view of the driveway. Her back was stiff with tension. Cam immediately disappeared from the room, his bare feet surprisingly soundless on the stairs.

A moment later, the front doorbell rang. Shepherd Jon excused himself to answer it.

“What’s going on?” I asked, trying without success to see out the windows.

Val leaned close to me. She had removed her sunglasses; the whites of her eyes were shot with red around the blue irises. “Cam has a stalker,” she whispered.

“Oh, lighten up, Val,” snapped Melody. She began collecting more plates from the table.

I followed Melody into the kitchen. “Lighten up about what?” I demanded. “Who’s at the door?”

She sighed and started rinsing dishes. “Just this insane girl who’s got some screwed up idea that Cam still wants anything to do with her. She comes around every now and then, makes a scene, and Jon has to scare her off.”

“Oh.” I automatically started lining up the rinsed plates in the dishwasher, conscious that Cam had somehow gotten out of kitchen duty while here I was, ever my mother’s dutiful daughter. “Is it a woman Cam was involved with for a long time?”

“I don’t know. What’s a long time?” With her hands still submerged in bubbles, Melody wiped her forehead with one arm, a gesture I remembered my own mother making at the kitchen sink. She didn’t wait for me to answer her question. “Long enough, I guess,” she said. “But believe me, this girl is nobody for you to feel sorry for. She’s an operator.”

“Why? What does she do?”

Melody rotated her shoulders. Standing this close to her, I could see the fine lines in her skin. She was an attractive woman; I wondered how long she had been pursuing Jon and whether her feelings had ever been reciprocated. For a moment, I felt a kinship. Why did she stay? What was a long time for her to be in a relationship? For any of us? Our lives were going by, one sink full of dishes at a time, and yet we didn’t see the moments, the days, passing.

“The thing is,” Domingo said from the doorway behind us, “there’s a kid involved.”

I whirled around. “
What
?”

“Stay out of it,” Melody warned, turning to face Domingo and scattering droplets of water at him with her damp hands. “This thing is nobody’s business but Cam’s.”

“And mine,” I added. “If there’s a kid, that makes me an aunt.”

I shot out of the kitchen and into the greenhouse again, where Val now sat cross-legged in a square of sunshine at the far end, meditating with palms upturned on her knees. I peered out every window between the plants, but the street was deserted.

I crossed back through the kitchen, this time searching for the stairs leading to Cam’s room. Shepherd Jon was returning from the front door, his footfalls echoing on the wooden floor as decisively as a soldier’s marching to a snare drum. He blocked my path, draped an arm around my waist, and spun me like a dancer away from the door.

“Problem solved,” he said. “Let’s finish our discussion. I was enjoying myself.”

I shook him off. “Where did the girl go?”

“Back where she belongs. People’s Park.”

“What’s that?” I remembered Cam saying he would be living there if not for Jon.

“A place near the University where the homeless camp out.”

“Is this woman homeless?”

“Let’s just say that she’s choosing the street for now.”

“Where’s my brother?”

He sighed heavily. “Don’t blame Cam. None of this is his fault.”

I glared at Jon, barely resisting the urge to grab his beard and give it a good tug. “If Cam’s in trouble, I’d rather hear it from him.”

“Suit yourself. Top of the stairs, turn right. Last room on your left. But don’t expect him to be coherent.”

“Cam doesn’t have to be coherent. He’s my brother.”

“Lucky him,” Jon said.

Chapter
five

U
pstairs, away from the heady scent of the orchids, Jon’s house smelled like every other college house I’d ever been in, of damp towels and rotting food and cranky radiators. The wallpaper was an old woman’s choice, bouquets of roses tied in pink ribbons. The floral carpeting on the stairs had faded to pale blooms.

Clearly, this part of the house hadn’t been touched since Jon’s parents died. I had a brief image of Jon as a boy, towheaded and energetic, running up these stairs ahead of me, his green eyes snapping a challenge: catch me if you can!

All of the bedroom doors were open but one, and nobody had bothered to make a bed. Untamed plants hung in the windows, some with dead brown tendrils mixed among the green. Several of the bedrooms had clothes scattered over the pine floors, arms and legs spiraled outward.

Two of the bedrooms were further crowded by bicycles standing like horses in dim stalls. The upstairs bathroom was painted a garish purple; it had a claw-foot tub with a clear shower curtain gone green with mold around the edges.

I knocked on the only closed bedroom door. “Hey. Can I come in?”

Cam didn’t answer.

“Open up! Come on, Cam. I’m not going away until you do.”

Still nothing. I nudged the door open with my foot.

My brother was sprawled on his back across the double bed, staring at the ceiling. “Don’t,” he said, but his voice was toneless, drained of energy.

“Too late.”

Cam covered his face with both hands. I surveyed the room from the doorway. One side of the ceiling slanted down above a desk heaped with books and papers. The headboard of the bed was pine and an old pine bureau stood in one corner. Both pieces of furniture were heavily scarred, as if they’d not only been dragged upstairs, but across town, too.

I couldn’t help myself. “Palatial abode you’ve got here.”

“I’ve always lived in shit holes. What makes you think now would be any different?”

Truthfully, I had expected just what I saw here, knowing my brother as well as I did. There was nothing on the walls to liven up the peeling yellow paint. My brother’s dirty laundry was heaped in a plastic hamper with a cracked rim.

The only thing in the room I recognized was the blue terrycloth bathrobe flung over the foot of the bed. My mother had bought that robe. I knew this because she had given me the same robe, crowing later about the 2-for-1 sale and how I wouldn’t mind a man’s robe, would I?

Two years ago, the last Christmas that Cam and I had both spent at home, Mom called us down to breakfast. We stepped out of our bedrooms at exactly the same time and happened to glance at each other as we tied on our identical robes. This mirror image caused us to laugh so hard that we collapsed on the stair landing.

And then suddenly Cam and I were sliding feet-first down the stairs the way we had as children, as if we were riding down a waterfall. We landed in a tangle at the bottom, hooting, where Mom stood over us, shaking her head. “You two,” she said.

I nudged Cam’s leg with my knee to get him to make room on the bed. “So what gives?” I asked, plopping down beside him and giving him a good bounce. “I can comfort you with platitudes until I break you. Smile and the world smiles with you! That which does not kill you makes you stronger!”

A glimmer of a smile. “That which does not kill me only postpones the inevitable.”

“The harder you try, the more likely you are to succeed!”

“The harder I try, the dumber I look,” he moaned.

“Ah, but it’s always darkest before the dawn.”

“It’s always darkest before it’s pitch black.” Cam grimaced. “Things are really that bad, Jordan. Black, black, black. Things are fucked. I’m fucked. Like, completely.”

“Please, my virgin ears. What things? With this woman?”

“You saw her?” His voice was suddenly anxious.

“No. She never made it past the front door. Why didn’t you talk to her yourself, instead of letting Jon do your dirty work?”

“Jon’s better at dirty work than I am.”

“I’ll bet.”

“Don’t say it like that. You don’t know what he’s done for me.” Cam plucked at the bedspread. “Jon says he’s going have her arrested for harassment if she keeps coming here.”

“Is that true? Is this girl harassing you?”

“No idea what to call this, except to rule it out as fun,” Cam said. “I’m betting the cops wouldn’t do jack shit anyway. It’s not something cops take seriously, a woman stalking a man. Even in the People’s Republic of Berkeley.”

“But nobody should be allowed to do this to you, Cam. My God! You’re up here cowering like a child.”

“Wish I was a kid again. Things were easier.”

“Not always.” I searched the room, looking for proof of this, and spotted Cam’s flip-flops. Beach shoes. “Remember the time we went to the beach with Mom and you cut your foot on that bottle? You were just a kid then, maybe ten years old, and it was awful.” I shuddered, remembering how the glass had shattered on the boardwalk, spraying Cam’s blood onto the splintery weathered boards.

“Sure.” Cam had thrown an arm across his face; his voice was muffled. “Mom about fainted. You were the one who carried me all the way to the car. I still don’t know how you did it. I was almost as tall as you were by then.”

“Yeah, but you only weighed about five pounds.” I laughed. “You were one skinny kid.”

Still, I remembered the discomfort of it, how it was so hot that the asphalt parking lot sank like a sticky sponge beneath my feet as I half-carried, half-dragged Cam to the car. We bundled Cam’s foot in beach towels and drove him to the emergency room to have the fragments of glass removed.

As the doctor numbed Cam’s foot with needles, my brother asked to hold my hand. He acted as if our mother wasn’t even there. That hadn’t surprised me, though; whenever Cam was frightened, he sought me out for comfort, not Mom, since wherever Mom might be, Dad was likely to follow. And Dad was unpredictable back then.

“You looked like a spirit, all wrapped in white,” I told Cam now. “I imagined you rising right up off the table, like Jesus after the resurrection.”

My brother smiled. “You really are a warp job. They never should have let the nuns near you. You’re scarred for life. Completely delusional.”

I was relieved to see him lighten up a little. “Hey, you’re the one who thought God was like the Boogeyman under the bed, ready to grab you by the ankles and set you on fire any time you touched your willy.”

“I still think that sometimes.”

I poked his side. “Tell me what’s going on,” I said. “I’m your big sister! I carried you with superhuman strength over blazing asphalt when you were bleeding to death! Who’s that woman out there, harassing you?”

“She’s not a woman, exactly. More like a girl.”

“What! How old is she?”

“I don’t know. She never told me. Well, she told me, but I don’t believe her.”

A chill ran up my spine. “What did she tell you?”

“Eighteen. But, after things heated up, it was pretty obvious she wasn’t more than sixteen.” Cam lowered his arm and studied my face for a reaction.

He got one. “Christ, Cameron! You’re almost twice her age! What were you thinking?”

Cam rubbed his face. “I don’t suppose I was.” He sat up and thumped the back of his head against the wall. “You know me! I’m no expert on women. Completely clueless, in fact. And that girl came on to me like somebody who knows the score.”

“No sixteen-year-old girl knows the score, even if it’s printed on her forehead!”

Cam’s face was closed; it was the same expression he used to wear during Dad’s drunken tirades. I took a deep breath. If I slammed him too hard about this, I’d get nothing.

“Okay,” I said. “I’m sure you didn’t intend to hurt this girl. How did you meet her?”

“At a party.” About a year and a half ago, Cam explained, one of the San Francisco night skaters held a three-day party in the Fillmore. “Music all day, all night. He rubbed his temples. “And this girl was there, high as a kite and dancing like a demon.”

“Does she have a name, your dancing demon?” I kept my voice light. “And were you high, too?”

“Nadine. And yes. That was before Jon helped me clean up my act.”

“And what’s this about a child? Is that true? Is it yours?”

Cam mumbled something that I couldn’t quite catch.

“What?” I poked him again. “Is it or not?”

“Probably.”

It felt as if someone were squeezing my temples, my head was pounding that hard. How could my brilliant brother be this incredibly stupid? If that girl was really only sixteen, he could be charged with statutory rape, never mind the issue of child support. Part of me wanted to pick him up and shake him. Another part wanted to smooth back Cam’s hair and tell him that everything would be fine. Except, of course, that would be a lie.

“How did this happen?” I asked. “Didn’t you use protection?”

“She said she was on the Pill. And, she wasn’t just with me, Jordan.” Cam was pleading with me now, but I wasn’t sure for what. Understanding? Forgiveness? He’d have to wait a while.

“So how do you know the baby is yours?”

“If you saw her, you’d know.”

“
What
?” I stared at him, incredulous.

“It’s true. She looks just like me, that baby. I didn’t even go for a paternity test.” Cam scrubbed his face with both hands.

“Isn’t there some way you can work with the mother, maybe help her out a little so that she can raise the baby?”

“I’m not talking to her. She’s a cranked up meth addict, Jordan! Easy come, easy go.”

I caught my breath. “I’ll assume you had an AIDS test.”

Cam paled. “Yes. Two tests, both negative. I was lucky.” His eyes looked wild. “Nadine’s a fucking drug addict, Jordan. A street person!” He barked a laugh.

“Yeah? Well, like you said, without Jon, you’d be a street person, too,” I said, hating myself for lashing back, but still wanting to knock some sense into my idiot brother. “Cam, you can’t just duck out of this one. You have to face up to the fact that you have a child.”

Cam’s face had broken out in a sweat. “Why should I? It wasn’t my choice to bring a kid into this crap life, with deadbeat parents like us,” he said. “Nadine’s crafty. She probably scoped this place out and got pregnant just to score child support. I was honest with her from day one. When Nadine told me she was pregnant, I told her no way did I want a kid. I would’ve paid for an abortion. Or, if she wanted to have the baby, I could have hooked her up with an adoption agency. White babies are easy to place, right? Nadine could maybe even make some money on the deal. But she gives me this total bullshit about not being able to kill it or give it away. Kill what? Give away what? She was, like, two months along. It was a thimble full of cells, and she talked like it was headed for kindergarten!”

I was silent during this rant, dizzy and panicked. My brother was a father. I was an aunt. I had a niece. None of these sentences made any sense. I wanted to lie down beside Cam head-to-toe the way we used to do during thunderstorms, when he’d sneak into my room because our parents wouldn’t let us come into theirs no matter how scared we were.

“Did you kick Nadine out of the house?”

“I wouldn’t do that.” Cam sat up. “Nadine took off before the kid was born, probably hooking to score some shit because I kept trying to get her to clean herself up while she was pregnant. I didn’t see her again until a couple of weeks ago.” He scrubbed his face in his hands. “It’s so fucking unfair, having her lay this on me.”

I stared at my brother, at this mangy, skinny, wild-eyed man, and fury rose in a tight ring around my temples. “You selfish bastard,” I shook my head. “Tell me this isn’t you talking, Cam. Tell me you do feel a drop of compassion for this girl.”

He narrowed his eyes. “Fuck you!” he yelled, springing to his feet with surprising speed. “I didn’t ask you to come here and mess with my head!” He grabbed my arm, yanked me off the bed, spun me towards the bedroom door, and shoved me through it. He slammed the door between us and I heard the lock turn.

I hammered on the door with my fist. “Me, mess with your head?” I yelled. “Come on, Cam! You’ve done that all by yourself!”

I heard footsteps behind me and wheeled around. Shepherd Jon stood there, leaning against the wall. His green eyes were serene but I could see a muscle twitch in his jaw. “So that went well.”

“You’re encouraging my brother to act like an idiot and ditch his responsibility!”

Jon shook his head, his expression still calm, his voice placating. “Your brother was a terrible mess when I met him, Jordan. I’m trying to give him solid ground to stand on so that he can own up to his mistakes. He’s just not strong enough yet. And the girl is, as he told you, crafty. Don’t let her fool you into thinking she’s vulnerable.”

“I don’t even know her,” I said. “How could she fool me?”

He cocked an eyebrow. “Aren’t you going after her now? I was sure that would be your next move.”

I pushed past him and ran down the stairs. “Tell Cam I’ll be back!” I yelled, hoping that my brother would hear me and know it was true.