“The tumor was small and contained,” I said. “I had a lumpectomy and the prognosis looks good. The tissue margins were clear all around the affected area after the radiation.”
“Jesus,” he said. “You must have been scared out of your mind. Does Mom know?”
“Of course she knows!” I said, then bit my lip before I could hurl accusations at him about his absence. “Anyway, that was one thing I wanted to talk to you about before you took off. But now we need to think about the baby.”
“The baby?” Cam looked puzzled, as if he didn’t know any babies.
I took a deep breath to tamp down my irritation and said, “Your baby, Cam. She’s at my apartment. Mom’s taking care of her while I’m here with you. Nadine left her with me when she went north to go apple picking. She wants me to adopt her. I’ve been trying to find you to ask what you want to do.”
Cam’s expression became guarded. “Ah. So that’s it. You’re here to ask for the other half of the friendship ring.”
“What?” I said, then remembered: I’d had a friendship ring once, a silver heart broken in half.
That must have been in eighth grade. Cam, still in elementary school, had pleaded with me to let him wear the other half of the ring, but I’d laughed and given it to a girl in my class, a girl I hardly knew but desperately wanted to impress. I couldn’t recall the girl’s name, and I never got the ring back. But I could clearly visualize Cam’s pale face as he sat on the foot of my bed, begging to wear it.
“Why would you want to wear your sister’s ring?” I had snarled, kicking beneath the covers in adolescent fury at Cam until I caught his bony chin on my heel and he started to cry. “What kind of moron does that?” Cam had wept harder then, his nose running. He didn’t ask me for the ring again.
Now, my brother held the other half of something I wanted. But he didn’t say anything more about that. Only fished around beneath the blankets, came up with a pen, and held out his free hand. He did this without meeting my eyes. “Well? Where do I sign on the dotted line? I presume you came armed with the necessary legal documents.”
“What makes you say that?”
“I know you, Jordan.” Cam waved the pen at me like a sword. “You’re such a Girl Scout, always prepared.”
It irked me that he was right. “You’re being awfully cooperative all of a sudden. Why?”
He waved a hand in my direction without speaking, dismissing the question.
It was the gesture of someone in a hurry. I started fuming all over again. How could Cam just lie there and abandon all accountability? He was giving up on his own daughter’s welfare, throwing away her future without a fight! I wanted to slap him.
Instead, I stood up and got busy. I folded the blankets I’d been using, brushed my hair and collected my toiletries kit to take outside. This was a survival tactic I’d learned in so many classrooms with misbehaving kids: act calm, and you create calm.
It would help if I could do something normal, like take a shower. I’d splurged the day before on a bucket of hot water for 20 rupees and lugged it behind the lodge. There, sheltered by a stone wall, I dunked my head and sponged off my body, my skirt spread about me like a tent. It was better than nothing. Afterward, though, my skin still felt encrusted with sweat and dust.
“Are you ready to admit that Paris is your kid?” I asked.
“I always figured she was,” Cam said, his voice still flippant. “I’m willing to admit that, so long as I don’t have to pay the piper for a kid I had no intention of bringing into this fucked up world. She’s my baby, and now she’s yours. Finders, keepers.”
“I wish you wouldn’t talk like that,” I said.
“Like what?”
“Like an eight-year-old.”
My brother lazily rolled his head from side to side. “No need to keep squawking. I’ll sign the papers and you can go home and run the PTO or whatever. You’ll have a baby without the hassle of a control freak husband. And Mom can finally knit those fruity hats for somebody in our own family. Pressure’s off for all concerned.”
I reached over and grabbed a hank of my brother’s greasy hair, pulling Cam’s head back so fast that his eyes snapped open in surprise. “Cut it out!” I hissed. Then, horrified by my own action, I immediately released him.
“Of course we need to make a big deal about this!” I shouted. “This is your kid we’re talking about, Cam. Not some used car. You can’t just sign her over to me without thinking hard about the consequences. Nothing’s ever going to be the same again if we do this. Not for me, not for her, not even for you! How can I know you’re serious about giving her up, if you won’t even look at me when we’re talking?”
“I don’t want to look at you,” he said, so quietly that I had to lean forward to catch the words. “Whenever I do, I see what you think of me.”
I studied him for a moment, unable to answer. My brother’s irises were yellow and marbled pink; his breath was foul. He had the look and stink of a dying man. “Oh, Cam,” I said at last. “I’m not your enemy. I’m just trying to help you and the baby.”
“Then why all the fuss?” he said. “I already said yes. I know it’s the right thing to do. And isn’t this what you wanted, Jordy? To get yourself a baby? Pay me for her, if it’ll make you feel better. I could use the dough.”
I started pacing, suddenly unsure. “I don’t know, I don’t know! I love you. And I already love Paris, probably because I can see you and me when I look at her. But I don’t know if this is the right thing! Nadine’s in trouble, but you could be a good father! Can’t you just come home for a little while and give it a shot? You could live with me.”
Not that I had a place to live in anymore, I remembered suddenly. I was going to sublet the studio apartment in San Francisco until the end of August, and after that, what? Peter had the condo and all of my boxes were in my parents’ garage. Did I really want to move back in with my parents? If I didn’t, where would I go? I thought of David and Karin, then, and realized that I didn’t want to go back to the East coast at all.
“No,” Cam was saying. “That’s the one thing I won’t do.”
“Why not live together?” I pleaded. “We’d make a good team. We always have.”
Cam still wasn’t looking at me. His profile was sharp, an older man’s hollow cheeks. “There’s no way I can go back to the States until I know I’m clean for good,” he said.
“Clean? What do you mean?” I asked.
“Nadine and I were using together,” Cam said.
“Oh, so what?” I asked impatiently. “What’s a little pot?”
He laughed. “That’s what you think I was doing?”
“Weren’t you? You always did.”
“Yeah, well, then I stopped the pot and did heroin.”
I suppose that, on some level, I had known this, yet it was still a shock. I put a hand to my throat. “Oh, Cam. Why?”
He brushed away the question. “Once you try smack, I think the bigger question in your mind is why everybody isn’t using,” he said, laughing a ragged little laugh. “It’s bliss, Jordy. You feel this rush at the base of your spine that keeps moving up your body until it explodes like fireworks in your head. Then everything is better, even your dreams—colors, images, sensations. No more anxiety or fear, no guilt or other desire.”
“What made you stop?”
“I don’t know that I have, not entirely,” Cam said. “No, don’t look at me like that. It’s the truth. I quit partly because I was afraid of dying, I guess. On the other hand, even death seems like it could be a good trip when you’re high. Then I met Jon—he saw me lying on a street near the university—and he gave me a place to stay and kept me away from a particular circle of friends in Berkeley. He wanted me to engage in the world instead of sleepwalking through it, is how he put it.” He frowned. “You really didn’t know I was an addict?”
“Jon didn’t tell me any of this.”
“I thought you might have guessed by now.”
“No,” I said, struggling to breathe normally, to look at Cam as my brother, not as a stranger.
“Well. Now you do.” Cam’s smile was crooked, but it was there. “The thing is, Jon was an addict for years, back in New York City. He got away with Hep C and a determination to help other addicts. Domingo, Melody, Val, me: we all owe our lives to him. No methadone, no nothing. Just cold turkey. He locked all of us in our rooms at some point to keep us clean. And that’s why he didn’t want me anywhere near Nadine, because she was a user, too.”
“What about here in Nepal?”
“Heroin’s only available in Kathmandu, really,” Cam said. “Don’t worry.” He held up a hand when he saw the panic in my eyes. “I’m determined to stay in the village, help out in the nursery. That’s the main reason I didn’t go back to Kathmandu when I got sick. I had to be here, away from everything.”
All of it made sense, now: Cam’s lifestyle since college, his poverty. “All right,” I said. “Then I’m proud of you. It was the right decision for you. But what about Paris? I love her, but I’ve never been anybody’s mother. Do you really want me to have her? I might really mess up! I mean, don’t you ever wonder if Dad’s inside us? Have you ever asked yourself that?”
“Only about a million times,” Cam said. “I never like the answer.” He tugged a bandanna out of his pocket and coughed into it, his shoulders shuddering, then balled up the cloth in one fist and tossed it into a pile of dirty clothes across the room. “Remember Dad’s birthday cake?”
“Of course.” My face was wet, but I didn’t know when I’d started crying. Cam and I were seated across from one another, cross-legged, the way we’d always done on the floor of my bedroom closet whenever Dad was drinking. Maybe that’s what had made Cam mention it, because we’d sat just this way inside my closet, hiding after Dad’s birthday dinner all those years ago.
Dad had come home from work via the Town Tavern. Mom had made his favorite dinner, roast beef and Yorkshire pudding. But Dad was too drunk to manage himself at the table. He sent his dinner plate skidding onto the floor and only laughed at the muck splashed on the rug, the table legs, his knit pants. Mom made us sing anyway as she brought in his birthday cake.
Then Dad blew out the candles. As he did, the candles sputtered and he threw up onto the rich swirls of frosting.
My mother had tossed out not just the cake, but the crystal plate it was on, too, snapping the plate in half against the kitchen counter before tenderly wrapping it in a brown paper bag. “So the garbage men won’t cut themselves on the glass,” she’d explained, adding that the plate had been a wedding present from her mother.
“On that birthday, Dad was the same age I am now,” I said. “Isn’t that a weird thought?”
Cam looked at me blearily, his forehead suddenly beaded with sweat. His fever must be on the rise again. “Dad might have been your age then, but he never evolved past junior high. Want to know why I dropped out of college?”
I nodded and pulled a clean bandana out of my pocket for him. “I figured it had something to do with your girlfriend. You slid off the family radar screen right when you two broke up.”
“Right.” Cam mopped his forehead. “That day I had my last blow-out party at home? The one with the band? That girlfriend was trying to get it on with Dad in the garage. Had him up against the wall, doing some squirrely dance in her coin skirt.”
“What!” I rocked back on my heels.
“Yeah,” he said. “She’d gotten her hands on some acid, then all that booze. She was the one who took my hand and led me into the thorny woods of pleasure chemicals, come to think of it. Anyway, I made the mistake of telling her she was acting just like my old man on a bender, so she decided to get back at me. Birds of a feather should fuck together, is what she said when I found them.”
“But that doesn’t explain why you were so pissed off at Dad,” I said.
“Doesn’t make sense to me now either,” Cam said. “I guess I was ticked off that Dad didn’t try to stop her. Just stood there like an old ram tangled in a thorn bush.”
“Dad probably didn’t know what the hell to do,” I said, before realizing that Cam had broken down. The tears came fast, but without a sound. “Oh, no,” I said softly. “Here I am defending him again instead of you, huh?”
“Doesn’t matter,” he said, wiping his face on the back of one arm. “Not your fault that I’m cracking up, Jordy.” He wiped his face again. “I still don’t feel right. I’d better lie down again. Here. Give me the papers. Let’s take care of business so I can catch some sleep.”
“You sure?”
“Absolutely.” Cam blew his nose on the bandana and took a deep breath.
I slid the papers out of the plastic pouch in my backpack and handed them to him, biting my lip as Cam signed his name without bothering to read anything first. “We can always tear these up later if you change your mind,” I said, as Cam handed the papers back to me with his tiny scrawled signature.
“No way. If I die up here, I don’t want anyone raising my kid but you.”
“Jesus, Cam. Don’t say that, not even as a joke!” I stood up and supported his shoulders as he eased himself to the floor again. “You need a blanket? Anything else?”
My brother shook his head, curling his body so that his bony knees nearly touched his chin. I could see the ridges of Cam’s spine beneath the thin t-shirt. Soon his breath was regular, punctuated only by a slight, wheezing cough.
“Don’t you dare die,” I whispered, folding the papers and putting them in the plastic pouch for safekeeping. “Not when I just found you again.”