Sleeping Tigers by Holly Robinson

expecting to find a seductive blonde in a filmy black gown, lounging on the couch with a pearl-tipped cigarette holder until the arrival of her next gentleman caller.
    I was partly right. Louise’s hair was cheesecake yellow and she was dressed in a black rayon gown clasped shut at the neck by a cameo brooch. However, my landlady was no ordinary seductress. Louise lounged, one thick arm spread along the back of the couch, with the sleepy gaze and beefy torso of a Roman emperor reclining after a post-battle feast.
    “Hello, Jordan-My-New-Tenant,” she said. “Need something? Or just couldn’t stand the suspense of not meeting me?”
    “I’m fine, thanks. I just wanted to say hello.”
    She fluttered a hand in my direction. “And now you have.”
    So much for that myth about pathologically friendly Californians. “It’s a nice apartment. I’m really glad you let me sublet it.”
    “I actually thought that nice nurse friend of yours was going to rent it,” Louise said. “It was the old bait-and-switch, as far as I was concerned. I was hoodwinked.”
    “Oh! Sorry,” I fumbled.
    “No worries. You’re only here for three months. How much can you trash the place?”
    “I promise I won’t do that,” I said, taken aback.
    My landlady waved an arm, flesh rippling inside her gauzy sleeves. “That’s fine, then. So long as we understand each other. You have a nice day, now, doing whatever you need to do.”
    I shook my head as I went downstairs, feeling dismissed and irritable. I had left my cell phone on top of the laundry bags; now I saw that the message light was blinking.
    I had two messages. The first was from my mother, anxious about my whereabouts despite the fact that I had called her just a few days ago. The second message, amazingly, was from my brother.
    “Hey!” Cam’s voice blared. “Super sorry it’s taken so long to connect. Let’s do Ocean Beach, all right? Come to our Lie-In! That’s L-i-e, as in lie down.” He snorted. “Sounds weird, but what doesn’t? Anyway, we’re going way early, like 10 o’clock tomorrow morning? Ocean Beach, okay? Be there, or be square.”
    I grinned and played the message again, relieved that my brother had surfaced at last.

Chapter four
     
    T he next morning, I drove through Golden Gate Park, smelling the heady scents of eucalyptus and pine. Ocean Beach was completely fogged in. I heard the water long before I saw it, tall green humps feathered in white as the beast breathed along the shore. The beach was empty except for a few dozen shapes lying on the sand. I thought they were seals at first. Once I’d parked the car and started walking towards them, though, I realized that the shapes were people.
    I walked fast. The sensation was a strange one, walking with the fog hovering all around, the unseen waves grumbling along the shore. The water shone every now and then, glinting like glass whenever an occasional needle of sunlight pierced the fog. I was acutely conscious of the patterns in the sand beneath my feet, where circular ridges rose like tiny mountain peaks, as though I were flying above the earth.
    One of the bulky shapes on the sand turned out to be Cam. Wrapped in a blanket from head to foot, he lay on his side facing the water. He had dug a depression in the sand so that he was cocooned there, nested. My brother’s eyes were closed and he looked just as he had when I last saw him, two years ago at Christmas. He still wore a mustache and the scraggly whisk broom of a beard that made him look like an Amish farmer. His skin gleamed bright pink between the whiskers. He looked so young! But he wasn’t. Almost thirty by now, I reminded myself. Practically middle-aged, like me.
    I nudged his backside with the toe of my sneaker. “Hey. Wake up, Sleeping Beauty.”
    Cameron stretched, but didn’t bother to stand. He squinted at me, his blue eyes bright, and flashed a crooked grin. “Hey yourself. Join me.”
    “Doing what?”
    “Lying