Sleeping Tigers

by Robinson, Holly

  David’s glasses had fogged over. He removed them and wiped the lenses on the tail of his flannel shirt. “Everyone thinks that when their kids have croup. And sometimes it can be very serious, if there’s a complete obstruction of the airway. Most of the time, though, croup is something that a little hot steam can fix at home.”

  “But what is croup, exactly?”

  An infection, he explained, of the voice box, windpipe, and bronchial tubes, usually viral, though there was a bacterial croup, too. Very rare.

  “Typically, a child has a cold first, but not always, and the first night of croup is always the worst,” he said. “She’ll wheeze for a few more hours, maybe, but it’ll ease up. See? She’s already breathing better. You did a great job of keeping her calm.”

  “Are you kidding? I didn’t do anything but panic! It’s just dumb luck that you’re a neighbor and Karin gave me your home phone. And I’m not her mother,” I added, blowing my nose on a scrap of toilet paper.

  David raised a bushy eyebrow above his glasses, but his lenses had fogged up again and I couldn’t read his expression. “Really? She looks just like you.”

  “She’s my niece. My brother’s child. A long story,” I apologized. “I didn’t even know I had a niece in San Francisco, or anywhere else, for that matter. This is a recent development.”

  “A nice surprise, I hope?”

  “An ongoing saga. Look, aren’t you on call, or something? I feel awful now, getting you out of bed for nothing.”

  “Don’t. It’s my night off. I don’t have anywhere I need to be.”

  “Oh, God. I got you out of bed on the one night you could have slept? I’m so sorry! I just didn’t know who else to call. I don’t know anyone here except Karin and my brother, and neither of them answered their phones.”

  “It’s really okay.” David grinned, his foggy lenses glinting in the flourescent light. His hair had curled into tight ringlets in the steam. “I’m glad you called. I wanted to see you again. I tried to say goodbye to you at Karin’s party, but you’d left the porch and I couldn’t find you. I was planning to call Karin to find out your status.”

  “You make it sound like I’m a plane about to leave and you’re a late check-in.”

  He rolled his eyes. “The story of my life.”

  I smiled and stroked Paris’s hair, which clung to her head in damp yellow threads. The baby was really getting into the Popsicle, and the Popsicle was getting all over me. I pulled a washcloth off the rack and started swabbing the sticky orange goo off one thigh. That’s when I realized what I was wearing: a tattered blue t-shirt and faded red bikini underwear. When would this guy ever see me in normal clothes?

  “Oh, no,” I moaned. “I forgot to get dressed!”

  David laughed. “Where’s the rule that says you’ve got to be dressed in your own bathroom? Besides, it’s a hundred degrees in here. You’re the smart one. It’s time I joined you.”

  He stood up and pulled off his sandals, jeans, and flannel shirt, dropping each item into an untidy heap at my feet. I couldn’t help but compare his hasty, comic performance to Ed’s carefully choreographed striptease, and David’s slim, wiry frame to Ed’s muscular bulk. I grinned.

  “What?” he asked.

  “Not fair. You’re wearing boxers. And in San Francisco that pretty much passes for clothing.”

  “Yeah, but I’m also wearing socks. That definitely gives you the fashion edge. How attractive is a man in underwear and socks?” David perched on the edge of the tub again, his hairy knees bumping against my own smooth ones.

  I giggled. “Why keep them on, then?”

  “Didn’t want to give you the wrong idea. I’m not easy, you know. I’m a highly trained professional. Tell me about your niece.”

  Paris’s coughing had stopped, and her hoarse breathing had settled into a slight rattle deep in her chest. She was asleep. I shifted her weight to one arm and took David’s glasses off with my free hand. “If I’m going to bare my soul as well as my legs, I want to see your eyes.” I laid the glasses on the edge of the sink.

  David blinked at me. Beneath his mop of curls, his dark eyes were sleepy and long-lashed, warm.

  He’s beautiful, I thought, and started telling David everything.

  “You slept with David?” Karin shrieked.

  I held the phone away from my ear until she’d calmed down. “Yeah, but that’s it,” I said then. “We slept together. As in sawing logs. Triple Z’s.”

  It was late morning, and Paris was asleep again after getting up briefly to eat a bowl of oatmeal. I was sitting on the floor of my bathroom, my new home away from home, the phone cradled against my ear while I folded laundry. Lots of laundry. Thank God baby clothes were small enough to wash in the sink. Paris went through more costume changes than Lady Gaga.

  Karin was still laughing. “Are you positive we’re talking about the same guy? You actually had a one-night stand with David Goldstein?”

  “It wasn’t a one-night stand in the biblical sense. We just happened to fall asleep together…”

  “…in the same bed…”

  “…in the same bed, yes, but for only three hours, and with a baby in the same room. That hardly counts as a one-night stand.” I sighed. “He’s amazing, Karin. Heroic and kind. And he has beautiful eyes.”

  “Oh boy. You must be punchy from lack of sleep. David’s a great doctor and a nice guy, but within an hour of being in his company, most people want to give away their dirty money and join the Peace Corps.”

  “I think he’s sexy,” I insisted, then held the phone away from my ear again while Karin howled in disbelief. When she’d finished, I added, “Anyway, I’m glad that I had his number. Thank you for that. Paris probably would have been okay, but it sure felt like an emergency.”

  I smiled, staring down at the tiny cotton t-shirt in my hands. The baby had fallen asleep on my shoulder after finishing her orange popsicle, and David helped me sponge the worst of the syrupy mess off my legs and her face before we transferred her to the bed. Then the two of us sat at my kitchen counter, and I told him the whole Cam story while we ate cheese sandwiches and drank what was left of a bottle of tequila. David had started to leave, but I convinced him to stay with me after we both realized he had to be in the clinic in just three hours. Besides, I felt safer with him there, in case Paris had a relapse.

  Spooning on my bed, David behind me with an arm about my waist, we had fallen into a deep, comforting sleep. When the alarm on David’s watch went off, he had dressed and stroked my hair as he whispered goodbye. Almost as good as an orgasm, that caress. But Karin would only laugh if I told her that.

  “I just don’t get it,” she was saying now. “I thought you were done with nice guys and ready to just have some fun.”

  “I guess I lied.”

  She sighed. “Okay, go ahead and pursue things with David. For all I know, the man could be a smoking volcano in the sack. When are you seeing him again?”

  “Today. I’m taking Paris into the clinic for her shots. Pretty romantic, huh? Then I’m going to Berkeley to find Cam.”

  Karin offered to take the baby while I went to Berkeley. “Babies almost always run a fever after those shots.”

  “Think you can cope?”

  She snorted. “Don’t forget that I’m a trained professional.”

  “Just promise that you won’t make Paris wear leather pants and high-heeled boots to the playground.”

  It was a couple of miles to the clinic, but I put Paris in the stroller rather than try strapping her into the car seat. As we walked, the neighborhoods got progressively less chic until we were in a part of San Francisco you never saw in the movies. The buildings were crooked multistory tenements in washed out colors. Men stood around cars shipwrecked on cement blocks. Women chased small children through dusty yards or sat on the front steps of buildings, their haunches broad and shiny in rayon dresses. Broken glass sparkled like the sea.

  Paris clung to my neck in the dreary ce
ment building that housed the clinic. I was the only non-Hispanic woman in the waiting room. I was also the only woman with a single child.

  One woman, her legs as solid as tree trunks beneath her stained pink cotton dress, had brought along four. When she sat down on one of the orange plastic chairs, the children fought for space on her lap. The woman brought a box of doughnut holes out of her enormous cloth bag and handed them around. The children’s faces puffed like hamsters hoarding seeds, their mouths soon sticky white rings.

  I waited for an hour before a male nurse called my name. By then, the waiting room had taken on the companionable, chaotic atmosphere of a ferry crossing choppy water, one where nervous passengers make the best of a bad trip. Two of the mothers offered Paris graham crackers and handfuls of cereal; of course I hadn’t thought to bring snacks.

  The nurse, a dark-skinned man with a gold stud in his nose and black hair slicked back from his high forehead, wore a name tag that read “Enrique.” He wrestled with Paris to get her to lie on a baby scale. The scale looked too much like a car seat for Paris; she thrashed about as if she were being stuck with pins.

  “She’s a real little wildcat,” Nurse Enrique pronounced, and helped me pin her down on the table so that he could measure her height. Then he left the room, saying the doctor would be right in.

  Finally, David appeared. He was dressed in the same clothes he’d been wearing when he left my apartment, but he’d thrown on a white lab coat. He greeted me with a nod and played with Paris, moving her limbs around like a doll’s and encouraging her to crawl on the table. Then he had me sit the baby on my lap while he examined the curve of her spine.

  Why didn’t he look at me, I wondered, or make conversation? I didn’t get it. David was even more reticent here than he’d been at Karin’s party. Was he embarrassed about sleeping with me? Was he involved with someone else, and didn’t know how to bring up the subject? Or was he just being professional? I wondered how to put him at ease.

  Nurse Enrique returned and threw a loving arm around David’s shoulders. “You gonna come play with us tonight, Doc?”

  “Wouldn’t miss it,” David said.

  Enrique giggled. “Watch this guy, guapa. Doc’s got himself some fast hands. And rhythm! Ooh la la.”

  I felt like I’d had the wind knocked out of me. David couldn’t be gay, could he?

  “Is your nurse a close friend?” I asked David casually, once Enrique left us alone again.

  “Very,” David said, then glanced at his watch and got down to business. Paris was thin, but we couldn’t determine where her weight fell on the growth curve, he told me, since we had no actual birth date or previous medical history. But there was good news, too: her heart, lungs, muscle tone and reflexes all seemed normal.

  “We’ll start catching her up on immunizations today, and we’ll keep an eye on her weight gain over the next few weeks,” he explained. “We want to make sure that her failure to thrive has been the result of poor nutrition and nothing more.”

  “Thank you,” I said. Hearing the phrase “failure to thrive” made me feel sick with anxiety.

  On top of that, I now felt confused about David. Was sleeping with me last night just another good deed for him? A California sort of welcome? A favor for Karin? And how was it possible that I had once again fallen for a guy who found me as desirable as plywood?

  David flashed a smile, softening his professional cool. “Hey, want to join us tonight? A bunch of us are going to play at a club called Aunt Mary’s. It’s near your house. Can you get a sitter?”

  “You want me to go with you?” I asked. “I thought you were going with Enrique.”

  David studied me over his glasses, drawing his bushy eyebrows together in a slight frown. “Sure, Enrique will be there, too, but so will a lot of other people. You know where Mary’s is? Near the Bart station on 24th?”

  Right in my neighborhood, but definitely not right up my alley. I didn’t really think David was gay. But I couldn’t imagine myself competing for David’s attention among a group of swinging singles as hip as Enrique, me in my khaki pants with a baby on my lap. “Sounds fun, but I can’t,” I said. “I’m going to Berkeley to talk things over with my brother.”

  “You sure?”

  Did David look disappointed? No way to know. I reached out to shake his hand. “I’m sure. Maybe I’ll go out with you and your friends another time,” I said. “Thank you for everything.”

  David patted my arm awkwardly. “Okay. We’ll be there until pretty late if you change your mind. Enrique will come in to give Paris her shots in just a minute. Good luck with Cam.”

  Paris was running a slight fever after her vaccinations, so I took Karin up on her offer to watch the baby while I drove to Berkeley that afternoon. I should have been relieved to be driving without a screaming banshee in the back seat, but instead I felt bereft, as if part of me were missing.

  I reminded myself that I was looking for Cam not just for my sake, but for Paris’s, too. Even so, by the time I crossed the Bay Bridge and saw how the fog was wrapping itself around San Francisco like a moist towel, I had to fight the urge to turn the car around. I was exhausted on top of everything else; who knew that babies were this tiring?

  It was easy to find the outdoor food vendors near the main campus gate on Telegraph. There were salad carts and fruit carts, hot dog stands and fruit smoothie trucks, pretzel vendors and one enormous stand that specialized in Chinese food. Among this cornucopia of student cuisine, I spotted The Falafel Man truck.

  Cam wasn’t there. A tiny brunette, maybe twenty years old, stood alone in the cart. The tattoos on her neck and arms were so vivid that at first I thought she was wearing a long-sleeved shirt beneath her halter top.

  “What’s your pleasure?” the woman lisped around a silver tongue stud the size of a June bug.

  “I’m looking for Cameron O’Malley. Do you know him?”

  The woman dug her hands into the front pockets of her jeans. “Cam, he’s the man,” she said, flashing a mouthful of silver.

  A tongue stud and braces? With this much hardware, the woman could receive her favorite radio stations. I asked her if Cam was working today, but she squinted at the question, suddenly suspicious, and didn’t answer. She just stood there, her metal bits sparking in the sunshine.

  “I’m his sister,” I explained. “I was just passing by, and thought I’d say hello.”

  “I haven’t seen you before,” she said.

  “I haven’t been living in the area.” I smiled, playing the polite guest at a dinner party. “I just moved here from Boston. That’s where Cam and I are from.”

  “I knew that.”

  She did? Now it was my turn to look suspicious. “How long have you known Cam?”

  The woman shrugged and dug her hands deeper into her pockets, safeguarding whatever secrets she kept in there. Not that much would fit. Those jeans had to be a size 0. “Oh, me and Cam, we go way back,” she said. “Since right after him and that Nadine split.”

  “You knew Nadine?”

  “Yeah, she hung out. Cam, he was always good to her. Gave her free falafels. Sometimes she had the humus plate, though,” she added judiciously.

  “My brother’s a generous man,” I agreed.

  A young Asian man stepped up to the counter and rapped on it with his knuckles. “You got the Falafel Special today?”

  “Every day,” the woman replied.

  “Okay, then. I need one of those specials and a large lemonade.”

  The woman got busy. She was surprisingly efficient. After the man had walked off with his meal, she swiveled towards me, chatty again. “Cam’s like, my main squeeze. Or he was,” she amended. “That was like, ancient history. A month ago.”

  I nodded, trying to look sympathetic. Boy, Cam really knew how to pick them. What was wrong with him, that he couldn’t date a woman his own age? Or his own IQ, for that matter. I asked when she’d last seen my brother.

  “We usually tried worki
ng the same shifts so we could hang out,” she said. “Then, two days ago, Cam suddenly turns on me, says I’ve been this major drag. ‘So go,’ I says to him. And he did. Just like that! Said something about there being a journey within himself, and he could only go it alone. I couldn’t tell him what to do anymore, he says. Huh. Like he ever fucking listened to me anyway.” She plucked a piece of lettuce out of one of the metal bins and munched on it.

  Two days ago? Cam must have broken up with this woman right after getting my message saying I wanted him to come see me in San Francisco. “He hasn’t been to work since then?” I asked.

  “Nope. And I’ve been swamped.”

  I glanced at the empty counter. Well, all things were relative.

  The woman was still talking. “Boss says we gotta replace Cam, but Cam always knew when to order inventory and stuff. Nobody else can do that. So I told the boss to hold off on firing him. Your brother’s done runners before. He always comes back. Only this time he can kiss my ass.” She pouted, perhaps in anticipation.

  “Any idea where he went?”

  The woman began haphazardly swabbing down the counters with a gray rag. “No. All he told me was this job was his ball and chain.” She scrubbed harder.

  If this job was Cam’s ball and chain, Nadine must have felt like a dungeon. “Look,” I said finally. “If you see my brother around, tell him that his sister needs him. Say it’s urgent, okay?”

  The woman’s gaze drifted in my direction. She had clearly lost interest. “Yeah,” she said. “Okay. Real urgent.”

  I drove back to Cam’s street and parked a block away from the house so that he wouldn’t spot my car. If I entered through the greenhouse, nobody could spot me and warn him that I was coming.

  The plan was nearly perfect, except for the high metal fence separating Jon’s back yard from the yard next door. I hadn’t counted on that. Years of playground duty paid off, however: I got a toe hold in the wire and climbed the fence, swinging myself over the top and landing with a soft thud in the mossy shade of a rhododendron bush.