Sleeping Tigers (35 page)

I barely refrained from stamping my foot. “Because I was so excited to see you—you know how I feel about you, you must know, after that idiotic phone message I left you a few days ago—but now I can see that you’re here for all of the right reasons, none of which have to do with me.”

He laughed and reached for me, pulling me close to him while I was still sputtering. He kissed me hard on the mouth. I didn’t put my arms around him, but it didn’t matter: it was as if my whole body were being embraced, even absorbed by his. Lips and chests, hips and thighs, even our knees were touching. I felt as if we were surrounded by a vast space, here in the mountains, holding each other in thin air, no gravity necessary.

David pulled back. “How about that? Was that the right reason to come to Nepal?”

I sighed and put my head on his shoulder, finally wrapping my arms around him. “The best,” I said.

When I said goodbye to Cam, he was digging an irrigation trench, a bandana wrapped around his hair. He looked lean, but tan and healthy again.

“You will write to me, and you’ll come home soon,” I said.

“Promise me you’ll tell the baby our stories,” he said.

“Tell her yourself,” I answered, and kissed him.

Cam hugged me briefly, his embrace so rough that it knocked the air out of my body. Then he began digging as if the life of every tree and plant in the nursery depended on how well he determined the course of the snow melt coming off the mountain. He was focused on a future he could control for the moment, and that was a good start.

David was going to stay on in Nepal for another week. His goodbye kiss was deep, and he held onto me for a long time before letting go. “Will you still be in San Francisco when I get back? Or am I going to have to fly to Boston?”

“I’m thinking of staying in California,” I said.

He smiled and kissed me again. “Hurry home, then.”

Jon insisted on accompanying me to Kathmandu, making some vague excuse about the mail. It was early in the morning when we left; the sun was as mild and yellow as a Chinese lantern. I gave Didi my magnetic backgammon set as a goodbye present. She grinned and slipped a turquoise necklace over my head, the beads as big and blue as a robin’s eggs.

Jon and I made the descent to Pokhara on foot, sliding a little on the muddy trails just below the village, where mushrooms had sprung up beneath the trees like entire villages of tiny elf houses. By the time we arrived, sweaty and hot after the jolting crowded bus ride from Pokhara to Kathmandu, it was early evening.

We ate dinner at Marco Polo. There was no sign of Leslie; I wondered if I’d ever see or hear from her again. The pizza tasted unnaturally heavy, after the rice and lentils I’d been living on, and the cheese was as sticky and unpleasant as glue. The incessant restaurant music assaulted my senses, too, after the quiet of the lodge and the mountains.

But the beer was cold, and Jon was good company, pacing the conversation carefully, seeming to sense that I was nervous. Finally I thought to ask him what he planned to do next.

“Never say what you’re planning to do,” Jon reminded me. “That just invites the gods to play with you.” He reached into his pocket and handed me a key. “I want you to have this.”

“What? Your house key?” I asked. “You want me to look in on things, make sure Val’s okay?”

“That, yes. And I want you to have access to the house in case you ever need a place to stay,” Jon explained. “You might not want to go back to the East Coast, with everything you have going on in California, right? And this will at least give you a place to take the baby if you need more space while you figure things out. Your mom is welcome, too.”

I was stunned, holding the key in my hand. “But why not just sell the house? You’d have more cash, fewer hassles.”

Jon shook his head. “Not interested. Besides, you never know. I might need a place to crash. Cam might, too,” he added. “I have a feeling he’ll be home before long.”

By the light of the candle on our table, his balding forehead gleamed like the head of an old man. Seeing the sunburned skin made me think of the retired men who used to sit on the town common across from my childhood home. The men would line up like pigeons in the sun and sit there all afternoon, occasionally bringing out chess boards that they balanced on their knees. Jon wasn’t an old man yet. But you could see the reach of age across his face.

“Thank you.” I took the key and pocketed it. “You might find my entire oddball tribe camped out there when you come home,” I warned. “I seem to be collecting people these days.”

“There are worse things,” he said, and smiled.

When my cab to the airport arrived in front of the restaurant, I kissed Jon on the cheek, glad to have found the goodness in him.

The second leg of our flight, from Hong Kong to San Francisco, was delayed for several hours. I stayed in the waiting area and watched women mud wrestle on television. The women looked as joyous as children flinging mud at each other after a rain.

Three muddy matches later, the airline gave up on getting the plane off the ground and announced that we would have to fly out the next morning. I was bussed along with the other passengers through Hong Kong’s downtown, a smoggy cinematic city of glass towers and bright neon signs, to a posh business hotel, the sort with a phone in the bathroom and a soft white robe laid out on the bed. I made good use of the enormous, sparkling bathtub, then ordered a grilled fish through room service with a bottle of white wine.

By the time I’d finished the fish I had somehow emptied the bottle as well, watching Seinfeld reruns dubbed in Chinese. My messages to my mother and Karin were long and slurred as I vented my frustration about never being able to reach anyone by phone.

“San Francisco might have been swallowed up in an earthquake, and how would I even know, since nobody ever answers my texts or calls?” I said as I recorded my new arrival time on Karin’s machine.

The next day, I tried hard to recollect exactly what I’d said in my phone messages as the pilot on my flight out of Hong Kong announced that he, too, was having trouble getting us across the ocean.

“We seem to be hitting some severe turbulence,” the pilot carefully explained, first in Chinese, then in French, and finally in English. The man’s tone was rational, even chatty, the sort of tone anyone would use during an emergency to keep others from panicking.

The sort of tone designed to send everyone into a panic, I realized, as the plane fell silent and the tiny Chinese businesswoman beside me pulled a string of rosary beads out of her briefcase and ran them through her immaculate fingers.

We were so far into the flight that we must have been hovering somewhere over the deepest canyons of the Pacific. But I didn’t panic or pray, either. I stared out of the window as the the plane lurched, sank, recovered, and sank again.

We were flying above the clouds, a bouncy pink, wooly mat, and the wings of the plane were tipping this way and that. The tiny flaps on the wings opened and closed like fish gasping out of water. We might crash, or we might not. It wasn’t up to me.

There was no way to know if this was another tiger sharpening its claws, ready to spring for my life, or whether the beast would once again yawn and go back to sleep until next time. For there would be a next time. That was one truth we all had in common.

I rested my head against the seat and pictured the pair of egrets that Cam and I had startled out of the tall yellow grass near the hot springs. If the plane crashed, that was how I wanted to imagine my soul fleeing my body, freed at last to circle the heads, the lives, of everyone I’d ever loved. I would watch over them all.

But we didn’t crash. There was a cackling sound over the loudspeaker, something in Chinese, and then in French, and then, more jubilantly still, in English, as the captain announced, “Our small difficulties have been resolved.”

The rest of the journey was uneventful. I slept, ate, and read a pile of magazines, catching up on world news. San Francisco, it seemed, was still there.

After the sprawling chaos of Hong Kong, San Francisco looked like a toy town from the air, with its rows of neat colorful houses lining the hills. When I was finally walking down the long airport hallway to customs, I felt as though I were floating. That out-of-body sensation stayed with me until I was through the gate and into the terminal.

Then, when no one appeared to greet me, I felt just how solidly my feet were on the ground, how heavy my backpack was on my shoulders. I struggled out of its straps and rested the pack beside me. I was too tired to walk another step.

Instead of moving forward, I stepped to the side of the hallway out of the crowd, dragging the pack with me, and rested my back against the wall. I would wait a few minutes and then get a taxi home. Obviously, none of my messages had made sense to anyone; either that, or I’d gotten the arrival time wrong. It could even be a different day entirely. I had completely lost track of the calendar.

I closed my eyes and took a deep breath, trying to create space in front of me, a field instead of a crowd, a stream instead of a hallway. It didn’t work. I was too keyed up.

I opened my eyes again and let in the crowd, the noise, the close smell of too many bodies in one place, everyone rushing to be somewhere else.

I saw them before they saw me. Karin came first, her mass of dark curls flying as she walked, pulling Ed by the hand. He was talking, trying to calm her down, his eyes on her back.

Then my mother appeared, just a few steps behind them, her bulk dividing the crowd like a rowboat separating weeds, her blue eyes alight, her step quick behind the baby stroller. Paris was in the stroller, her feathery tufts of blonde hair caught up in a pink ribbon.

Their eyes searched for me everywhere, until I stepped into view and held my arms open to them all.

Acknowledgments

E
very writer needs a muse. I am lucky to have so many. Nobody has taught me more about independence and perseverance than my elegant, clever mother. My husband Dan, too, has taught me a great deal—about the nature of creativity and the value of luxuriating in love between bouts of hard work. It’s amazing, really, what software engineers and writers have in common.

Our children—Drew, Blaise, Taylor, Maya, and Aidan—have shown me that there really is such a thing as unconditional love. They are all passionate, creative, intelligent, witty people who ought to be the poster children for anyone wondering whether parenthood is worthwhile.

Richard Parks, my gallant and loyal agent through many years, submitted this novel to publishing houses in its original form many years ago. His belief in the book, and in me as a writer, gave me the courage to revise this book and publish it on my own, and to publish other books in more traditional formats.

And, finally, my wise and loving LIW—Elisabeth Brink, Terri Giuliano Long, Ginnie Smith, and Susan Straight—thank you, thank you, for always being there, whether I wanted to fix a sentence, whine over a rejection, or celebrate a publication.

If you want to be a writer, open your heart to the muses who surround you, and the words will flow.