Sleeping Tigers by Holly Robinson Page A

down.”
    “Doesn’t sound like much fun.” I hovered over him, uncertain. Now that Cam was actually there in front of me, I realized how little I knew about how his life had gone for the past two years.
    “Uh, Jordan? The fog’s breaking up and you’re blocking my rays.”
    “Sun’s bad for you.”
    “Don’t believe everything you read. Here.” He nodded towards his backpack. “Look in there. I brought you a blanket so you can try this.”
    “Try what?”
    “Dig a sand bed. Make yourself a little sand pillow, wrap yourself in the blanket and lie down. Give yourself over to the rhythms of the planet. You’ll love it.”
    “The rhythms of the planet?” I repeated. My brother really had been in California too long. “Oh, come on. Get up!” I nudged him again, harder. “Let’s go for coffee.”
    The shapes around us stirred. Cam shushed me. “Later! Lie down. You’re disturbing the moment.”
    “Forget it. I didn’t travel 3,000 miles to take a nap with you. I want to talk. You’ve been a real jerk, not calling. We’ve all been worried sick.” I bent down and tugged at his blanket.
    Cam caught my wrist. “You didn’t come to San Francisco just for me. And it’s been two years. What’s another few minutes?”
    We glared at each other. My brother’s hand around my wrist reminded me of how Cam used to challenge me to an arm wrestling match almost daily when he was in seventh grade and I was in tenth. He didn’t beat me until three years later; he kept trying until he succeeded.
    “You’ve made your point,” I said now.
    Cam let go. “Fine. Don’t lie down. Don’t relax. Don’t do anything!” His voice drifted and he closed his eyes again. “But let me do my thing.”
    I couldn’t very well lift him up and carry him off the beach. “Oh, all right,” I grumbled. “As long as we can talk later.”
    That grin again, and then my brother’s face went still, all expression extinguished.
    I tugged the extra blanket out of the backpack and followed Cam’s instructions. It was surprisingly comfortable. I soon fell asleep, lulled by the sound of the ocean and the warmth of the sun and sand.
    I woke to the smell of baking bread. Only it wasn’t bread I smelled; it was me. The sand, my cotton blanket, the sweat trickling down between my breasts: the smells were a combination of sweet, musky, and yeasty. The fog had lifted and the sun-drenched beach was so noisy now with surfers and families, joggers and dogs, that I could scarcely hear the waves. I sat up, shook my hair free of sand and looked around. Cam was still asleep.
    I studied his peaceful silhouette. Who, after all this time, had my brother become? My firsthand knowledge of him stopped, really, after Cam’s senior year of college, when he had invited friends to our house for a blow-out college weekend party that had included a live band.
    Cam’s girlfriend at the time had appeared in an outfit she’d made herself by drilling holes into nickels and stringing them together. She writhed and shimmered to the music like a shiny fish just pulled from the lake.
    Dad had whistled appreciatively at the sight of her. “That little girl’s the one damn thing Cameron has ever done right in his piss poor life,” he said, and my mother ran out of the house at that point to ply the girl with coffee.
    Later that night, there was an argument in the garage. Cam, drunk as I’d ever seen him, struck my father, clipped him hard enough on the jaw to send Dad reeling backwards into the neat row of rakes, shovels, and push brooms hanging along the far wall. It wasn’t the first time that Cam, cornered, had lashed out at Dad. Nothing extraordinary, other than the fact that this particular time it was Cam who was drunk, not our father, who had finally sobered up five years before that.
    The event had stayed with me as some sort of turning point. After that night, Cam really “managed to drop off the family radar screen,” as he put it the next Christmas.