The Opposite of Everyone: A Novel (16 page)

I got the forms and went to the door, where my jacket and shoes were waiting, glad that I’d gone full-court bitch this morning, after all. I could be ready to walk in three minutes. Julian followed me.

“It should be interesting,” I told him as I got back into uniform. “At the very least, we’ll learn the proper shade of nail polish for a police interview.”

He smiled, a little bit uncertain. Well, he hadn’t spent quality time with Oakleigh Winkley. An hour with her, and he would get the joke.

“I’m glad. I was so interested in the pictures, you know, I got distracted,” he said.

“From?” I said, smoothing down my skirt.

“Hana,” Julian said, like it was obvious.

I shot him an irked look. “I told you. Birdwine—”

“Is finding her, I know,” Julian said. “That’s great, but then, what happens after that?”

I was grabbing my bag, turning toward the door, but his question froze me in my tracks. Everything after
find her
was a blank, and her present was distorted by the lens of my own past. Thoughts of Hana sent me back in time, back to when I’d been the lost girl.

I found that I could not imagine an after. How could I? Hana was suspended in the now, like Schrödinger’s cat. She was both alive and dead, safe and scared, hungry and well fed, sleeping easy and crying in the dark. I’d been blind to even the idea of Hana’s future. I’d only seen her teetering in an uncertain present.

Julian’s simple question set me reeling, and I understood that Hana and I, we were not the same. I’d been a Gotmama, a loved girl with a lifeline. When my mother was taken, it was only off to jail. I’d had total faith that Kai would come for me. What faith could Hana have, once Kai was dead and gone? Hana was stuck wherever Kai had left her, with whatever brain-addled arrangement Kai had made—or failed to make.

Hana didn’t know that I existed, much less that I was looking for her. She didn’t know that anyone was looking. Hana wasn’t like me. She was like Candace, Shar, Karice—every lost girl in the world who felt herself unvalued and unsought. She had no way to know that somewhere in the world, right now, her name was being called.

CHAPTER 7

A long time ago, this happened, and it’s happening now. Raktabija, the Red Seed Demon, arose against the Earth. He came to burn it and warm his great red feet among the cinders.

The armies of the Earth rose up, swords lifted to protect their mother. They ran at him, and they cut him in a thousand places, all at once. The Red Seed fell, and the army cheered.

But even as the armies celebrated, the Red Seed’s blood was soaking into the earth, and the earth is such a fertile mother. From every place even a drop had touched down, another Raktabija sprang up, full grown, swords drawn, so that the thousand cuts became a thousand demons. The armies of the Earth fell back, with a host of Red Seeds now assailing them.

They fought so bravely, all Earth’s sons, but it did no good. Each time they cut a demon down, the blood would spatter. Each drop would spawn another from the soil, and another, and another, until the armies of the Earth were outnumbered. Their bodies lay in heaps upon the ground, and soon they would all be destroyed.

It was then that Kali came. She came not because she had been called by men; all human beings call out to their gods, and very few get answers. Kali came because the heart of Earth herself was groaning.

The demons were afraid when they saw Kali, until they realized she had no swords. Only bells. How they laughed and pointed, to see a champion so armed. She had tiny bells tinging on her fingers, larger ones chiming on her wrists and ankles, and great, deep bells roaring as they hung in a cinch around her waist.

They laughed, but they did not laugh long. Kali began dancing to the music of her bells, and as she danced, she let her long tongue unfurl from her mouth. It snapped like a whip, keeping time. It whirled like a dervish. Her tongue did its own dance to the tintinnabulation of the bells, and it was redder and faster than all the legion of the Great Red Seed.

The armies of the Earth rallied, and began to cut the demons down. Kali danced among them, whipping and whirling her red tongue, lapping blood from the air before it could fall. She licked up every drop, so by the time each demon died, he was a husk, as empty and transparent as a plastic bag. The drained bodies of the Red Seed were so light, so empty, that they flurried in the air as Kali’s feet danced through them. Earth’s armies reaped and mowed, and Kali drank and drank, until all the Great Red Seed was only dandelion fluff, riding the winds in swirls and eddies.

“Bitch, get off the phone,” a female voice says on the other end of the line, so loud it crackles.

Joya and I startle at the interruption. We are huddled side by side on the floor of the pantry with the old phone set to speaker, our heads cocked to listen to my mother’s story.

We look at each other wide-eyed, and then Kai is back.

“It’s okay. Rhonda’s talking to that rude woman about manners. Oh, wait—one more second.”

We hear muffled, angry conversation through the speaker.

Joya hugs herself and whispers, “Shit, your mama can tell a good story.”

“Yeah,” I agree.

My mother’s stories do not have a Disney version; if they’re spooky, then she tells them deep-down spooky. Maybe too spooky if she is going to be this far away, fighting about phone time with a mean-voiced lady who might be dangerous.

“I’m back. We have a few more minutes,” Kai says.

Joya asks Kai, “Is that the end of the story?”

“No,” Kai says, at the same time I say, “Yes.”

I don’t want my mother to gain a mortal enemy because I kept her talking. I want her safe. Also, I like it when the Red Seed tale ends here. If it were nighttime, and Kai were tucking me in bed, she would now say,
Each of those demon-dandelion tufts is a wish for you. Close your eyes and make them.
I’d be fast asleep before I ever finished wishing.

I don’t like Kai’s favorite end, where Kali, drunk on demon blood, cannot stop dancing. She’s so wild and mighty she begins to crack the earth itself. She cannot be stopped. The armies quail, and all seems lost, until her lover comes. He lies down directly in her path, and when her bare foot touches his chest, she stops at once.
Lest she crush his precious heart,
Kai says in that version, and that’s my cue to make a puking noise.

“Do you have time to finish?” Joya asks, ignoring me.

I shoot Joya an irked look. She’s supposed to be sitting outside, guarding against Candace’s big ears. But then Kai started to tell “The Red Seed,” and I invited her in. I thought Joya should hear it, especially since a new kid has moved into our cabin. Kim is a hulking girl with heavy, scowly eyebrows, and she’s posse’d up with Shar and Karice. The odds have shifted against the Gotmamas. Shar is giving Joya stink eye every time their paths cross. Shar still owes Joya plenty for her earlobes, and Joya’s mama has completed rehab and moved into a halfway house. Shar is running out of time to pay her back.

There is power in my mother’s tales, and this story is a mighty call to rally; I wanted Joya to have a share. “The Red Seed” is the story I hoped for the day those Paulding County white girls named me Fatty-Fatty Ass-Fat. If Kai had told it that day, I might have gone back to school with bells on my wrists, ready to take on the world. Instead, Kai told “Ganesha’s Mouse,” and I called 911.

“She needs to get off the phone, before she gets in trouble,” I tell Joya, loud enough for Kai to hear me plain.

“But I want to hear the end,” Joya says.

“Every story has a thousand ends,” Kai says. She sounds calm, or maybe she’s just tired. “I could tell you an end that even Paula doesn’t know.”

“Oh, please?” says Joya, and now my interest is piqued. I like to stop when Kali wins the battle, but Kai likes romance. There is no third ending that I know.

“Long ago, right now,” Kai begins, “Kali has a newborn boy—”

“Wait, she what?” I say.

I’ve never heard a tale where Kali is a mother. She’s The Mother, sure, the one who burns the ancient forests down. After, from the charred ground, the new grass grows in sweeter and greener than ever before. But I can’t imagine Kali as some mommy, using two of her many hands to change a diaper while the human bones tied to her wrists rustle and scrape.

“She said Kali had a baby. Shut it,” Joya says, and Kai begins again.

Long ago, right now, Kali has a newborn boy. But Kali is drunk on the Red Seed’s blood. She dances her victory so violently against the earth that the big bells at her waist sound like artillery. Her finger bells ting so high they hurt the ears, and the bells on her wrists bark and clang. She dances so hard, the world begins to crack at its foundation. The cities shake. The oceans churn and foam.

The bravest soldier snatches up her tiny son and brings him to the battlefield. He creeps as close to Kali as he dares and sets the baby gently on a pile of Earth’s fallen soldiers. Then he runs. The bodies are cold, and the baby is naked. He is unhappy to find himself alone and so chilled. He opens up his tiny mouth and wails, a bare scrap of sound.

But Kali hears. She stops dancing, and her bells fall still. In the silence, everyone can hear the baby cry. She goes to him, running quick and light. The oceans calm, and the Earth shivers back together, knitting at the seams. She lifts the baby up and sits down on the heap of corpses. She begins to nurse him, rocking and singing. The bells chime sweet and quiet with her gentle movements. All around her, the white chaff of the demons begins to settle, landing in drifts like new snow. It blankets the carnage until all the world is covered, remade fresh and faultless. The only colors come from Kali and her son, nestled together on a white hilltop.

Kai stops speaking, and it is very quiet. This is the right way to end the story for the Gotmamas. This is the end where you are cold and all alone, and your mother comes and gathers you up. Even Joya’s eyes have pinked. She breathes out a sigh, and then, outside the pantry, we hear a muffled sniffle.

I recognize the sound; it’s that damn Candace, come to steal more of my conversations. Her allergies have betrayed her. Either that, or she’s feeling some emotion that she has no right to feel. Joya is up in a flash, leaping out of the pantry with murder writ large on her face. I hear Candace retreating at full gallop, hollering, “Wait, wait, wait, wait, no, no, no!” and the pounding of their feet as they race across the rec room.

I take the phone off speaker, and in the quiet, I can hear Kai’s breathing has constricted.

“Mama?” I say. I rarely call her Mama anymore. Not since she was with Hervé, and I got used to saying Kai. I wouldn’t have called her by that name if there was a chance in hell that Candace was nearby to hear. It is a sacred word to me and Joya. “Mama, are you crying?”

“No, baby,” my mother lies. She’s good at it, but no one’s that good. There is a pause, and I clutch the phone hard, leaning into it. I am so attuned to her breathing, to the quality of her silence, that I can sense her bringing herself in hand. Miles apart, I feel my mother’s spine straightening, and it straightens my own. I feel her sad mouth willfully re-form into a smile. When she speaks again, her voice is brisk and cheery. “Baby-mine, my phone time’s more than up. I love you. Take care of yourself, and I will see you soon. So soon. These last few months will go by in a blink.” A lie, but such a good one. In that moment, she makes herself sound so sure, we both believe it.

I hadn’t seen my mother for a year and a half. I’d had a birthday, grown three inches, and started my period. She had shrunk, emptied of my brother. Ganesh was truly gone by this time, already remade into a Julian.

Had she seen the baby? Held him? Nursed him? When they took him from her body, did they have to say he was a boy, or had she already known it, the way she knew I was a girl?

You had such a female energy,
she always said.

Odd to think of myself that way, small and blind and tethered to her. In that time before memory, everything I touched was hers. I heard her voice from the inside, with no idea that she was a separate person. Back then, she had simply been the world.

This boy sitting in my passenger seat began his life there, too, in my abandoned room. When Kai told the new ending to “The Red Seed,” had he been the baby she imagined? I didn’t think so. By the time she told that story, she’d already sent him to the parents she had chosen, carefully, using Kai-centric criteria.

The Bouchards had been solidly middle class—a kindergarten teacher and an insurance agent—because Kai didn’t trust the rich. In love, because Kai was big on love. A mother with a medical condition that precluded bio kids and pushed their name down on adoption waiting lists, so Kai’s boy would likely be their only, the single son that they revolved around. I glanced over at him, earnestly reading in the passenger seat. I took in his smooth pink cheeks and his curls. His eyes were wide and bright. He looked like the poster boy you’d pick to represent whole milk, or organic peaches. No baby had ever been set down in a place less like a battlefield.

We came abreast of a southern-style colonial McMansion, and my GPS announced we were at Oakleigh’s. I pulled in, glad to see my car was the only one in the long drive. The cops weren’t here yet, and it was a good thing, too. I needed to get my game face on. All the way to Oakleigh’s, watching my half brother trying to decipher the mud-thick legalese of the internship agreement, I’d been thinking of Hana and of Kai’s story of the Red Seed.

That baby on Kai’s battlefield was me. In reality, I’d been all gangly limbs and bitchiness, with a rash of pimples on my forehead and my hip near permanently cocked at an insolent angle. But to Kai, I had been the beloved thing heard crying on a heap of corpses, tiny and cold. She had signed away the baby in her belly; I was all the baby she had left. She wanted to come for me and save me. I would fill her empty mother’s arms, saving her right back.

I’d never understood that story fully, not until the boy she lost asked me what I’d do with Hana when I found her. Julian, wise in the ways of the nuclear family, had seen the situation from angles that did not exist for me. What the hell
would
I do?

My half brother stole a nervous peek at me as he flipped to the last page. I didn’t have his frame of reference, especially for the word
family
. When I was a kid, family meant me and Kai, freewheeling through a revolving cast of lovers and friends who ultimately did not matter. I hadn’t owned baby dolls or Barbies, but sometimes, when I was small, I had played house with Kai. I would be the mommy and feed her with my spoon. I must have thought that one day I would be a mother. Then I made the 911 call that put a crack in us. The crack spread and widened until my family fell into two parts, me alone, and her. I’d never tried to make another.

I was halfway through my thirties, and biology had yet to trouble me with even a mild urge to reproduce. I couldn’t imagine that it would. I’d always joked that if my biological clock went off, I’d skip the snooze button and yank my whole alarm system out by the roots.

But the need to find Hana had hit me like biology. It was that basic, and that unreasonable. I wanted to find her in the same way that a starving person wants a sandwich, or a person underwater swims straight upward toward the air. All I had to do was think her name, and the world reversed. I’d know what it meant to be the lost girl, swamped in a wash of feeling much too strong to be mere memory. My heart would race, beating out the call to
find her, find her, find her.

It was hard to see past it, because urges to breathe or eat or nurse the crying baby yell too loud for logic. They come from deep down in the most primitive portions of the brain. Julian had jerked me right into reality simply by asking the question. When Hana was found, what the hell was I going to do with her?

Raising kids was not remotely in my wheelhouse. Hell, I didn’t even have a place to put her; I lived in a radically open space specifically designed for single residents. The lack of walls declared I was a loner louder than a thousand closed doors could. I had no room in my life, literally, no den or extra bedroom, that would allow for any kind of family.