The Opposite of Everyone: A Novel (27 page)

“She has something that will ruin you.”

The tension in the finger eased. His neck elongated. I had his interest.

“Tell me,” he said, “or I am going to shoot you.”

He was going to shoot me anyway. I could see it in the lines of him.

I said, “Footage. You’re right outside a bar. You’re giving Oakleigh footage of yourself, shooting her lawyer.”

It was so hard to look away from the gun’s black eye. But I made myself. I made my eyes cut away over his shoulder, to the kinder gaze of the tiny security camera stationed over the door into McGwiggen’s.

He glanced back, reflexively, a half turn of his head to look where I was looking. As he moved, I moved with him, ducking down and stepping forward. I felt so slow, like I was trying to sink into concrete, trying to get under the gun’s trajectory.

His hand jerked, and I heard a huge roar, so close it deafened me. I was dazzled with the muzzle flash. I didn’t know if I was hit. I couldn’t tell. I didn’t even know if I was living, until I felt the bone-deep jarring when I slammed my heel into his instep.

He screamed, and I heard the champagne pop of a second shot, muffled by the endless echo of the first shot in my ears. Already my knee was coming up. Already my hands were reaching for his eyes.

I heard the clatter of the gun falling away, and then his hands were scrabbling at my throat, grasping for purchase, and we were animals. Animals each trying to be the living one when it was over. My knee connected hard with his balls, and he bent to it. My nails dug into the meat of his pale face. Someone was bellowing, a tearing scream of sound, and I could feel the way the noise ripped at my throat from the inside, so it was me.

His grip released, his body choosing flight for him, his nature rising as surely as mine had. I could feel wetness and skin jammed in my nail beds, and I dug and ripped. He shoved me, his fists double hammers that banged into my chest. I felt my hands tear from his face. I was thrown backward, airborne, into the trash cans. I slammed into them and two of them tipped over and spilled in a great clatter of metal. I fell between them.

I heard my voice still blaring, and when I got my head up, he was scrambling away in a slow staggering run, crouched over his balls. I kept screaming, a banshee’s wail, a howling. I didn’t see how the people inside hadn’t heard me. I should be bouncing back off satellites in space.

Even as I thought it, the smoked glass door burst open, and it was Wes, with his eyes bugging in his broad, young face. Grace was right behind him, too, another bartender. She was a tough girl with almost as much ink as she had skin space. I had to make the unearthly sound coming out of me stop, on purpose, like I was turning off a bad song on the radio. Wes stared wildly around, then took off down the alley after Clark. Clark saw him coming and sped up, still hunched over his balls, running away.

I sprawled between the overturned cans, and my feet were bare. He’d thrown me right out of my shoes. My hands started running up and down my body of their own volition, trying to find out if I had holes in me. I touched my face, my hair, my neck, my chest. Down the alley, I heard a clatter and another scream. Wes had tackled Clark.

My throat hurt inside from the rasping yell, and my chest hurt where his fists had hit me. My whole body hurt where I had smashed into the cans and then the ground. I sat up anyway. The gun was lying near me, shiny as a toy. I saw my shoes there, too, one on its side, one upright. Grace was kneeling by me now, though I hadn’t seen her move.

She said, “Oh my God, Paula, we saw you on the feed. Billy called the cops.” Billy was the bar back.

“Am I bleeding?” I croaked at Grace. “Do I look shot or bleeding?”

“No,” she said. “No, but God, your hair is so fucked up.”

I was in shock, I realized then, because I started laughing.

Grace said, “Who is that? Are you dating him?”

I shook my head, and the world swung all around me. “That was the thousand and first guy.”

Down the alley I could hear Wes yelling, “Stay
down,
asshole!”

Grace helped me up, and we peered down into the dim light. Wes was sitting on Clark’s back, grinding his bleeding face into the pavement. Clark flopped like an angry flounder under Wes’s bulk. Standing deepened the throb in my left hip, but the pain seemed distant and unimportant. An interesting fact that I was noting. Inside me, my blood rushed in circles, every vein part of a racetrack, all my red cells jostling to be first and fastest.

“Are you okay?” Grace asked.

I was better than okay. There were no holes in my good body. I had won. I had seen him running. I was seeing him held down now, right now, the blood in streaks of red all down his face, and oh ye gods and little fishes, it was good.

Billy came out the glass door then, eyes wide, mouth panting. He took in the scene, then ran to help Wes.

“Come inside,” Grace said, and tugged me toward the door.

I took one sideways step, a lurch almost, away. I realized I was heading down the alleyway to kick Clark in the head. But Grace put her arm around me, catching me and stopping me. I clutched her, weaving, and my hand left red smears on her shirt. His blood had painted the tips of my fingers.

She took me in and made me sit in the office. A few minutes later, I heard sirens coming, and that sounded good to me as well. It sounded like order, like my old good friend, the law, wailing on a righteous pathway to me, through my city.

M
cGwiggen’s back office was a white-walled, windowless hole that I suspected had begun life as a closet. I was waiting there when Birdwine burst in, wild-eyed and panting. He took in the scene, me sitting in the only chair, a wheeled black cheapo thing in front of an IKEA desk that housed an old computer.

“Hi,” I said, hoarse from that weird bellowing. I’d never been so glad to see him.

“Oh, hi,” Birdwine said, drawing up short. He wavered there, uncertain, then shoved one catcher’s mitt of a hand through his wild hair as he tried to get himself in hand. When he spoke next, it came out elaborately casual. “So, you know, I’m here to rescue you. Ta-da.”

That made me grin, but as soon as I could make myself look serious, I told him, “I’m sorry I called you an asshole.” I wanted to take it back before the building collapsed in on us, or the sun went nova, or some final, tenacious chunk of Skylab fell out of space and killed me. That message I’d left, angry and unforgiving, could not be the last words I ever said to him. He looked puzzled, so I added, “On your voicemail? I called you an asshole.”

“Oh, right.
De nada.
I got your message, maybe fifteen minutes ago. I heard that man talking as you hung up, and there was something in the tone. I knew it had gone all kinds of wrong. I called you back, four times, and it kept going to voicemail. So I came down here, already wound up, and the lot was full of cop cars. People were saying your name, talking about gunshots, an attack. You calling me an asshole has fallen pretty far down on my list.” He looked sick, in fact, recounting it. “Grace told me you were back here, gave me the twenty-second version. Are you really okay?”

“You should see the other guy,” I said.

“I’d like that very much,” Birdwine said darkly.

I slid my feet into the neon-orange Crocs Grace had loaned me from her locker. The cops had bagged my shoes. Then I stood up, wincing, and we looked awkwardly across the small space at each other. “Do your rescuing services extend to an escort home?”

That set him back. He looked at me, eyebrows beetling suspiciously, trying to get a read on me. All at once, he was so wary that it broke my heart for him. But all he said was “You can leave?”

“Yeah, I was waiting for a uniform to drive me,” I said.

An EMT had cleaned my scrapes and looked me over, but I didn’t let him get too handsy. I was fine, barring a spectacular set of deepening bruises from landing in the trash cans. A tech had collected samples from under my nails, while a detective named Martinez took an abbreviated statement, probably because I had been drinking. He wanted me to come down to the station tomorrow to give a longer one, and so they could get more pictures. They had a better witness in the tapes anyway. The hallway’s camera showed Clark following me out. The alley camera got most of the fight, and they’d retrieved the gun, too.

By then I’d calmed down a bit, and my lawyer brain was parsing all the ways I was going to screw Clark Winkley to the wall. Try to shoot me dead, would he? That opening salvo of a settlement agreement I had written earlier was looking like a kindness. I could fix that. Ye gods, how a jury would love this, though I doubted his lawyer would let this stinker go before a judge, much less a jury. They’d settle, fast, so Clark could focus on his criminal case, and my inevitable civil suit against him.

Birdwine said, “My car is in the deck across the road.”

“I’d rather walk,” I told him. “Work the kinks out.”

That made him draw back even farther, not sure how literal I was being.

We had to exit through the big front room, since the back alley was blocked off as a crime scene. I thanked Grace, Wes, and Billy, and I let Martinez know I didn’t need the ride after all.

Then Birdwine and I walked out into the night together. My adrenaline rush had long faded, but I hadn’t crashed. I felt only peaceful. I liked the feel of walking toward home as if I owned this night, as if I’d already run off everything in it that could hurt me. The sidewalk was cracked and jagged in spots, but so bright with yellow streetlights that it wasn’t hard to navigate. Traffic zoomed past, busy and impersonal, setting the hot air of late summer into gusty motion.

We walked from pool to pool of warm light. We had eight inches between us, and I couldn’t breach it. Julian, direct and sweet, would have already reached across it, and I wished then that I was more like him. I could feel that Birdwine was full of a sharp energy. Too much to contain, it leaked from his big body, prickling in the space that separated us. His feet banged down as if the earth itself had done something to piss him off. He was silent, and I wasn’t good at this. I didn’t know how to tell Birdwine how little knowing the worst of him had mattered in the face of a real ending.

Finally he spoke, and his voice was calmer, more under control, than his body language. “I
am
an asshole. But I’m not bad at my job.”

“I don’t think you’re bad at y—”

“Yeah, you do,” he said. “You must. You’ve seen my house. You know I’m always strapped. But I work my program, and when I’m on it, I’m very good. People hire me, Paula. People who don’t even want to sleep with me hire me.”

“Okay, okay,” I said, laughing a little. “You’re good at a lot of things.”

He got serious again. “I’m broke all the time because about a third of my income goes into a trust fund. For the kid. My son. For college or an emergency—whatever he might need. Not because of a court order. I decided I would do it, and I’ve stuck with it, ten years now. I’m not a shitty person.” He gave me a sideways glance and then amended, “I’m kind of a shitty person. But I’m not as thoroughly shitty as you think I am.”

We turned right, and we were walking toward my building now. When that gun was pointed into my left eye, I’d forgiven his past choices and accepted all his deep-scarred imperfections, whole. But him putting aside that money laid bare all I knew that was best in him. Some people might not have been touched by this, the sacrifice of money, but they had likely always had enough—and they definitely had not seen his house. I knew what it was to want. Kai and I had lived next door to homeless when I was little. I’d waitressed my way through junior college until I could get some scholarships. It mattered to me, that he’d done this.

“I don’t think you’re shitty,” I said. “You don’t owe me an explanation. You don’t owe me anything. Whatever happened with your kid, however that played out, it’s terrible and sad. You don’t live easy with it, though. That’s obvious. You did the best you could, at the time. You’re still doing the best you can with it. I know that without you saying, because I know you.”

He wouldn’t look at me then. Not at all. He reached across the space between us, though. He grabbed my hand, squeezing until my bones compressed, just shy of pain.

I had spent my whole life hungry for forgiveness. It had not come, so I didn’t know firsthand what he was feeling. But I had imagined it, over and over. I’d wanted it so bad. I’d wanted Kai—or anyone, anyone who knew the worst in me—to say that I was still dear, and good, and worthy.

I gave him this thing that I had always wanted, and it made him turn his face away from me. I saw his reflection in the glass wall of the building we were passing. The shadows made his eyes into black pits, and his mouth was twisting down. Then he put his head down, silent, and we walked on, our hands clasped tight together, for almost a block.

“His name is Caleb. He doesn’t know I exist,” Birdwine finally said, picking his way along the broken concrete in the streetlight’s yellow glow. “I didn’t know about him until he was three. I mean, I did. I knew she was pregnant when she left me. She told me, straight up, that it wasn’t mine. I even let her hurry the divorce, so she could marry that Martin guy before the baby came. It’s his name on the birth certificate.”

That rocked me. Martin was the legal father then; in Georgia, his rights hugely outweighed Birdwine’s.

I swallowed, and said quietly, “Well, she lied. You pretty much cloned yourself. The guy she married, he knows?”

“Unless he’s stupid. He knows what I look like. I met him a couple of times back when he was screwing my wife.” To his credit, it was only slightly bitter.

Had Martin married Stella blind, knowing the baby might not be his? Not a gamble so much as a decision; he would love, no matter how the coin fell. Maybe that’s what true love looked like, at its best. It looked like this to Julian, an adopted kid who talked to me of teams and rescues. He was already on an apartment hunt, putting in transfer applications, changing his life for the sake of a lost girl who was a coin spinning in midair. Tonight, I wanted to be a little more like him. I didn’t mean to blind myself to how hard and hateful the world was; sweetness was hard to find and harder still to keep. I only meant to reach for it, anyway.