Sleeping Tigers (23 page)

“Take that gross thing out of your mouth,” I said. The baby giggled and started race-crawling around the bedroom. I hoped there wasn’t anything nasty on the rug, took a deep breath, and finished reading the page.

There were just three more lines:
Jordan wants me to join the pitiful polluted stagnant reservoir of humanity, but I’m ready to roar over the rocks, cleanse my soul, change the world, leave my troubles behind. In Nepal we’ll be on the rooftop of the world, where the gods walk among us mere mortals. Everything will become clear at the Hotel Everest, all will manifest itself in its own way, if only Jordan…

And there the sentence ended, as if Cam had drifted off to sleep, my name the final grace note to my brother’s escape from his known world.

Three nights later, I lay on my bed between Paris’s crib and my mother’s air mattress, unable to sleep. To my right, Paris snored softly, her tiny body humped beneath the crib blankets. To my left, Mom reclined on the wheezing mattress like a fallen garden statue, her nose pointed straight up at the ceiling.

Mom was probably awake, too. We had been arguing since visiting Val about the best course of action to take, now that we definitely knew that Cam’s destination had been the Hotel Everest in Kathmandu. The words of our disagreement hovered above us like moths, spinning in the dim glow of moonlight filtering in through the foggy veil hanging outside the French doors.

The gist of the argument was simple: I wanted to travel to Nepal to find Cam and convince him to come home and help me raise Paris. If he absolutely refused, I hoped to have him sign papers giving me legal guardianship. I had seen a lawyer, a friend of Karin’s, to get the necessary documents drawn up. Then I had made a reservation to fly to Kathmandu.

My mother didn’t want me to go. “You’ll get lost,” she had argued. “You don’t speak the language and Nepal isn’t safe to begin with.”

She cited every scary story she must have found on the Internet about tourist rapes, muggings, kidnappings, and murders in Asia. “Plus, Cam probably isn’t even there anymore. Or, if he is, he’s not going to want to have anything to do with the baby. We have to just take care of Paris and wait for Cam to come to his senses.”

I reminded her that I had called the Hotel Everest and discovered that Cam was registered there. What’s more, I had phoned the American Embassy in Kathmandu, where an official had checked through passport records and told me that Cam was definitely in Nepal.

“Even if your brother doesn’t stay at that hotel, you could probably catch up with him at the American Express Office,” the clerk said kindly. “Kathmandu is a small town. Not like San Francisco. Everyone walks the same streets here.”

I didn’t believe my mother’s theory that Cam would return to California on his own steam if we waited him out. If Cam had gone to this much trouble to put distance between himself and his life here, he meant this action to count for something.

I felt confident that I could locate my brother. I had different fears entirely about this trip. The first was that Cam might refuse to not only come home, but to sign the guardianship papers putting Paris in my custody. Doing so would mean admitting that he’d fathered a child. If he didn’t sign those papers, I’d have no control over what happened to the baby if Nadine changed her mind about wanting me to raise her.

The second fear was more complicated: if Cam did sign the papers, what would happen if I adopted Paris, only to discover I wasn’t really ready for motherhood?

My mother sighed suddenly and sat up. “This is no good. We might as well give up on sleep and talk,” she said. “I can hear your wheels turning.”

“What makes you think we’d get anywhere with this conversation in the middle of the night?” I sputtered. “We’ve been going in circles for hours.”

“There’s one solution we haven’t considered yet.”

“What’s that?”

“We could both go to Nepal and take Paris with us instead of me staying here with her.”

I toyed with this idea for a moment, if only for the satisfaction it gave me to imagine my brother’s face when he saw our mother waltz into a Kathmandu hotel, giant flight bag in one hand, his baby in the other.

“You know we can’t do that,” I said. “It’s too dangerous. The death rate for kids under five in Nepal is phenomenal. There’s malaria, typhoid, hepatitis…”

“Shush, Jordy! You sound like your father, all gloom and doom!”

“My father, who you will call tomorrow, right?”

“I don’t know. I’m still thinking that one over. Maybe after I go out for breakfast with Louise.”

“You’re going out with her again this morning?” I asked.

She nodded, smiling slightly. “It’s the most fun I’ve had in years.”

“How did you meet Louise, anyway? I don’t remember introducing you.”

“Remember that morning you went to the market with Ed? Well, I was having such a terrible time with the baby in the bath that Louise heard the racket. She came downstairs like the house was on fire. At first I did think she was a bit odd.”

“A bit,” I agreed.

“Still, she was wonderful with the baby,” Mom said. “Played peekaboo with a washcloth until I had that child clean as a whistle, then helped me dress her. So we got to talking, you know, about me and my situation.”

“What do you mean? What situation?” I swallowed hard. What had I missed?

The air mattress squeaked beneath her as Mom swiveled around to face me. I’d offered her my bed when she first arrived, but of course she wouldn’t hear of putting me on the floor.

“The thing is, I’m tired of living such a pale little life, Jordan,” she said. “I want a life in living color! Coming to see you was the first step.”

My heart hurt, hearing this admission. It dawned on me then that one of the toughest things about being an adult was realizing that your parents were in pain, and you didn’t ever know it. Though I suppose that Cam and I had, on some pale level, which is why we always steered clear of emotional interactions with either of our parents.

“Well, Mom,” I said, “like you used to tell me, you have to make a plan and follow it through.”

“I told you that?” Mom snorted. “No wonder you and Cam left home. Huh. Now I would tell you two something completely different.”

“Like what?” I held my breath, waiting.

My mother’s voice was so soft that I had to strain to hear her. “Follow what you know is true, and you’ll have fewer regrets than I did, Jordy. And by the way? You need to start doing that right this minute.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, isn’t there somebody you ought to visit before you leave for Nepal?” My mother fell back onto her air mattress and pulled the blanket up to her chin. “Since you’ve got a built-in babysitter and all.”

I stared at her for a minute, then climbed out of bed and slipped into a t-shirt and jeans. I squatted by the mattress to kiss my mother’s cheek. Paris had shrugged off her blankets again and flopped onto her back like a sunbather, arms straight along her sides. I stooped to pull the baby’s blankets up again before heading for the door.

“Jordan?” Mom called softly.

I stopped and turned, waiting for what I expected my mother to say, as she had every day of my childhood:
Be careful
.

But Mom didn’t say any such thing. “Have fun,” she said, then added, “Mind if I take you up on that offer and crawl into your bed for a few hours? My back’s killing me.”

David was home. I could hear a jazz saxophone blaring against background piano even from the bottom of David’s hill. I wound my way through the hibiscus-scented dark to the top of the street, my arms swinging in time to the music.

Every other house and apartment was dark at this hour, but lights blazed in David’s windows. Was he having a party? So much the better. I could casually slip inside, say I was just passing by. Oh, and by the way, looks like I’m going to Nepal. Got any tourist tips on temples and yaks?

The blinds were drawn. There could be two people inside his house or twenty. I hesitated on the front step, wondering how to make my entrance. I didn’t have long to ponder my approach: his dog started yapping, its shadow leaping and twirling behind the window shade like a marionette dancing the Tarantella. So much for the subtle approach.

I rang the bell. The dog grabbed the bottom of the door blind in its teeth. The blind snapped and rolled up, the dog dangling from its edge as David crossed the living room to open the door.

David looked at me a moment too long. The dog released the shade and shot out the door like a cobra to grip my jeans between its jaws. “Just thought I’d drop by and see what you’ve been up to,” I said, giving my foot a little shake. The dog hung tight. “How’s it going?”

“Fine,” David mumbled, then bent down to detach the dog. “Hang on. I’ll just stick Jack in his crate.”

I hovered on the porch like a Jehovah’s Witness. From the sounds of Jack’s shrill yapping and David’s ineffectual shushing noises, he was clearly a better pediatrician than dog handler. At last a door closed somewhere in the far reaches of the house. The dog was still barking, but at least now the sound was muffled.

“What are you doing, walking the streets alone at this hour?” David demanded when he returned. “Or did you get your car back?”

“About that day you stopped by to give me a ride…” I began, but David held up a hand to stop me.

“Wait. Didn’t mean to be rude. Sorry. Come in, come in. Hold on while I turn down the music.” He left me again.

I hovered in the living room, craning my neck for clues to David’s existence. If he did have a woman here, she was hiding. This was bachelor heaven. The furniture cushions were brown corduroy, the gold plaid curtains looked as though they’d been inherited from someone’s basement. and an iguana lurked in an aquarium.

“I haven’t done much housecleaning in the past few days,” David apologized, following my glance as he returned a few minutes later. “It’s good to see you, Jordan.”

“Really? Even though I had to hunt you down? You’ve been avoiding my calls.”

“Busy,” David said. “You? How are things?”

He was wearing baggy red cotton pajama pants dotted with penguins and a black t-shirt. He was barefoot. I couldn’t decide if he looked ridiculous or sexy as I sank onto the couch.

“Things are good,” I said. “Mostly.” I tried to breathe deeply and relax against the couch, only to spring forward again as something hard and thorny squeaked beneath me.

“Sorry!” David said. He fished a plastic cactus chew toy out of the cushion, shying away from any actual contact with my hip.

“That’s some watchdog you’ve got.”

“Yeah, Jack has even bitten me,” he admitted. “I rescued him from an abandoned house near the clinic and can’t give him to a shelter because he’s so nasty.”

“So he wasn’t having a particularly bad reaction to me?”

“No, no,” David promised. “In fact, I think Jack took a real shine to you. He went after your jeans without taking a piece of your ankle.”

I sat back against the couch again. My face felt hot. I took a deep breath and said, “Look, I know you don’t want to hear this, but I came to explain what happened the other day when you saw me with Ed.”

“You don’t owe me an explanation,” he said hastily. “I should have called before coming by your place.”

We weren’t getting anywhere this way. David’s eyes were dark with apprehension. Even his curls looked anxious, bobbing about in tight ringlets above his glasses.