The Opposite of Everyone: A Novel (8 page)

I remembered exactly how sweet and rough Birdwine could be. I remembered the way he would throw my body toward the bed, catch it on the way down, one big hand cradling my head to save it from the headboard. Birdwine was looking back at me, but I couldn’t get a read. He did play a good hand of poker, as I well recalled.

There was a quick double tap on the door—purely perfunctory—and then it swung wide open, and there was Nick. Worse, he had a client in tow. She was a bobbed, preppy forty-something in a prudish floral headband. I didn’t know her, which meant that she was new, or worse, a potential he was trying to land.

Nick was talking as he came in, but he stopped dead in the doorway and went silent when he saw me. The client’s momentum ran her into his shoulder. I jerked my feet down, scattering stacked pillows.

Nick’s mouth unhinged as he took in the scene. There I was, scrambling to sit up with bare legs, bare feet, and my bra on the table, very white against my black jacket. Half the couch’s little cushions were now scattered on the floor, and I could smell the faint electric crackle that had risen in me right there at the end, sexing up the air.

“Good God, Paula,” Nick said, nostrils flaring.

Over his shoulder, the client’s eyes had gone as round and wide as a bush baby’s. Ten to one she was some kind of dedicated Anglican. My luck.

“You’re driving down the wrong track,” I said to Nick, straight up, but his face and his assumptions didn’t change. He should know better. I’d never leave my door unlocked and roll a man around in here like an amateur. Not during business hours.

He was too pre-angry to think it through, especially today, when I’d no-showed at his meeting and we’d lost the client. Now Prudence Headband looked ready to rabbit out in Oakleigh’s footsteps. She put her hand over her mouth and her wedding set alone, heavy with diamonds, told me this was a client Nick would very much want.

Birdwine rose to his feet and came between us.

“Hey, Nick. Ma’am. Please excuse us. Paula’s had some awful news. Her mother died.”

His words hit the room like a second shockwave; I saw the client’s face trying to readjust itself, wobbling toward sympathy, but finally settling on puzzlement. Grief did not a bra on the coffee table explain, and Birdwine, thick and muscular in his workman’s boots and untucked, rumpled shirt, didn’t hit this woman’s demographic.

“Oh. I didn’t know,” Nick said. His voice had gone solicitous, but his gaze on me was chilly. He did know how long Kai and I had been estranged.

“Yes. It was quite a shock,” Birdwine said to Nick. I drooped sadly, letting my body language back his story. “I’m Zach Birdwine, Paula’s investigator. Please excuse my casual dress. I was on a stakeout until ten minutes ago.” He smiled his more formal, closed-mouth smile, stepping forward as he introduced himself to Headband. She relaxed a bit, shaking Birdwine’s hand and mumbling her name and some condolences in my direction.

Nick looked down to straighten the lapel of his jacket, which was beautifully tailored and did not need any straightening. Clearly a dead-mother story of dubious origin wouldn’t poof him out of his justifiable temper.

“I’m not handling it well, Nick,” I said. “I’m sorry.” I meant it, and on more than one level.

“And I’m sorry for your loss. We’ll definitely talk later.” Nick gave me a reckoning stare, unmollified.

“Yes, we should sit down together,” I said. “Maybe Monday? Right now I should go home and see to things.”

Not much he could do with a client in the room. By now she’d bought what Birdwine was selling and was giving me a look full of genuine sympathy.

“Of course,” he said. “Don’t worry. Catherine and I can get along fine without you.” The tone was proper, but he leveled his eyes at me, making the words into a threat. I looked back, and there was a lot of history between us. I’m not sure what he saw in my face, but his mouth softened and he added, “Go home. I believe your calendar is clear. You have a lot on your plate, sounds like, and you need to make some decisions about what you want.” He meant long term, but it sailed right over the client’s headband, as it was meant to.

She said to Nick, sotto voce, “Do you need to drive her? Or call someone? She shouldn’t be alone.”

“I’m taking her home, ma’am. I’ll call her people,” Birdwine said.

My people,
that was a nice touch. My people consisted of friends with a brand-new baby, my pissed-off partners, a sudden brother, and an envelope. Still, that Old South phrase conjured up a vision of concerned aunties with casseroles, clucking neighbors bearing Bundt cake. It put Headband at ease to see the details of death being properly handled by a tall person with a Y chromosome and workingman’s boots. She could bustle right on back to her divorce.

Nick led her off, leaving my door pointedly ajar. He needn’t have bothered. Whatever bit of sex had started rumbling around in me was gone, reburying itself in the deep hole it had died in months ago. As for Birdwine, I wasn’t sure he’d even caught the vibe. His gaze on me was thoughtful, nothing more.

I stood up and put my jacket on, stuffing my bra into the pocket, then dropped my heels to the floor and slipped them on, too. I picked up Julian’s blue folder. I needed to return it to him, sooner rather than later, and I didn’t know when I’d come back to my office. After a second’s thought, I got Kai’s envelope off the shelf as well.

As I took it down, I had a sudden, strong urge to tell Birdwine Kai’s story about Ganesha’s little mouse.
This happened a long time ago. It’s happening now
. I turned the envelope over in my hands, once, twice, and then I understood. I wanted to tell Birdwine because I was living it. I’d been Kai’s mouse, saddled up and bridled, this whole time. When my check came back, I’d felt such relief, to be told that I could finally set her down. So relieved I failed to notice that I hadn’t actually done it. I was still carrying her, and the weight of her was breaking me.

What weight?

Kai and I stopped speaking the day I went away to college. She finished her parole and evacuated Atlanta before I moved back for law school, and yet I’d kept her corpse’s paper effigy sitting on a shelf for five months now. I was neglecting my business and letting my partners down. I was doing endless pro bono hours for young, nonviolent female criminals with bad boyfriends, as if I were the patron saint of dumb-ass girls. I couldn’t remember the last time I got laid, and I had panic attacks over bits of ghost I saw rising in silk skirts and green eyes.

And now Julian existed.

What weight?

I turned to Birdwine. “I don’t know what to do next.”

Those were not words I said a lot. I’m not sure I’d said those words in that order since I was old enough to vote.

“I do,” Birdwine said. He stood up. “Go to Worthy Investigations and beat Julian’s case file out of Tim. Julian’s paid for the information in it a thousand times by now.”

He said it as if assuming I was going to help Julian, and that surprised me. Except for the very few inside my tightest inner circle, most people would put down money that my next move would be to lock my office door and screw Birdwine on the sofa. Or they might wager I’d go ambush Oakleigh Winkley, re-sign her as a client, and take her husband to the cleaners. Either one of those paths fit my reputation. Me helping Julian? It seemed like such a sucker bet that no one, right down to my barista, would be inclined to take it.

I hadn’t known Birdwine saw that far into me. While we shared a bed, or perhaps even before that, in the years when we’d been colleagues, he must have paid attention in his stealthy, watchful way.

I’d seen him as a professional asset, a buddy, and then a convenient bedmate. It was true to say I’d deemed him highly valuable, in all three capacities. After he quit me, I had certainly expended a great deal of irritating effort to get him back into my resource pool. But the whole truth was, I’d also seen him as too damaged to take seriously. A fuckup. Not my equal. And I wouldn’t have been sleeping with him if I saw him any other way.

I couldn’t predict his choices the way he’d just predicted mine; I’d been surprised when he’d stepped up for me in the lobby. It made me feel ashamed, especially since I couldn’t see much difference between us. Not these days. Maybe that was why I moved in closer and talked to him the way I only ever talked to William or my cat.

“In Kai’s old campfire stories, there were twenty-eight hells that roiled around in space south of the Earth. Very south, down at the bottom of the universe. Sometimes one broke loose from the pack, and it always made a beeline for Earth. I think I have at least four of those hells up my ass right now, Birdwine,” I said. My voice was low and shaking. I was scared and tired and I didn’t try to hide it. It felt like a relief, not to hide it. “I want to do right by this kid, but how can I? He’s looking for his mother.”

“Not just his mother. He did come here to meet you,” Birdwine said.

I made a scoffing noise. “So I can offer him an about-to-be-unemployed half sister with a bitch reputation and a fast-developing panic disorder.”

“When you put it that way . . .” Birdwine said, chuckling. “So find Kai.”

“She’s dead,” I said, sharp.

“I know, Paula,” Birdwine said, in a tone used for humoring lunatics. “I can tell by all the wheezing and shaking that you’re perfectly happy to leave it at that.” That made me smile. “Find out when she died and where she’s buried. You’ll feel better, and the kid’s a citizen. He’ll like having a place to plant Thank You for Giving Me Life daisies.” I nodded. That sounded like the least that Julian would want. Birdwine went on, “So, to bright-side it, it looks to me like Nick thinks you need some time off. I say we hit Worthy Investigations in the morning.”

That word,
we,
washed over me. In my own way, I had asked him for help twice now. This was Birdwine saying yes. He was offering something like a friendship, and all ye gods and little fishes, I could use a friend right now. His offer was a living thing between us, so new and pink and blinking that it made me nervous. I nodded, accepting it, and all at once Birdwine seemed as uncomfortable as I was.

“Pass me a legal pad,” he said. “The kid’s contact info is in the file, but give me a little time before you set a meet. I’ll take his Social down and do a quick background for you—just in case.” I got him one from my desk, and he spent a moment bent over the blue folder, jotting a few things down. Then he headed for the door, pausing in the doorway to look back. “Want me to pick you up tomorrow?”

I shook my head no. “Your car smells like a gym sock. I’ll get you. Nine o’clock?”

“Ten,” he said. “What are we, savages?” He closed the door behind him.

The workday was hours from being over. I should go find Nick and try to get right with him, or at least give the afternoon’s hours to a live file, doing something billable. I stood as if wavering, but I knew I was only delaying the inevitable. The double panic attack had left me too wrung out to concentrate on breaking up the fat estates of angry strangers.

So I gathered up my laptop, the note from Kai inside my returned envelope, and the blue file that Julian had abandoned, and I went home. I wanted to find out everything I could about my brand-new brother. After all, he’d just inherited the largest debt of my life.

CHAPTER 4

I
incur my debt in Paulding County, Georgia, on a sweet spring night as my mother plays her mandolin and sings campfire songs. I am huddled and sunk into one of the ancient beanbag chairs on Dwayne’s covered porch. I have one of Kai’s sketchbooks open on my lap. I’m trying to copy the way she draws eyes, but it’s gotten too dark. The porch light is dead, so Kai has lit candles. I can’t concentrate, anyway.

I squinch my eyes to peer across the small yard, hemmed in by heaps of kudzu. It’s dirt and weeds, mostly, dotted with lightning bugs. They are all looking for true love, flicking their tails on and off in the gathering dusk. It’s hard to see past the candlelight, but it seems to me that someone is moving in the kudzu. Maybe it is only a deer. They come sometimes, hoping to eat some tender baby pot plants.

Is it a deer? I can’t tell if I want it to be a deer or not. I’ve been sick and scared down in my very pit for days now.

Kai, oblivious, is draped on the sagging back-porch sofa, her wrap skirt bunched up almost to her hips. She has her long legs draped across Dwayne’s lap, which makes her play her beat-up mandolin at an odd angle. The bug zapper backs her up with its irregular percussion. She’s not a great player, but her fat, lazy alto usually melts me into sleepiness. Not tonight.

Dwayne leans over her legs, digging in the ashtray to find the second half of a joint. He lights it with his Zippo, then holds it for Kai. She pauses the song long enough to pull in smoke and hold it.

“There’s a hole in the middle of the sea,” Kai chokes out on the exhale, smoke streaming, and Dwayne laughs. He joins her when her breath is back. “There’s a frog on the bump on the log in the hole in the middle of the sea . . .”

She acts like this is just another chapter in our endlessly mutable story, Kai towing me as she moves from man to man. I never fought or even questioned it, because of the truth at the root of our shared life: Kai doesn’t love me like she loves the boyfriends.

Boyfriend love is the light on a bug’s back end, flicking on and off across a lawn. It begins with lies and kissing. It devolves into fighting and boredom. It ends with hasty packing and sometimes robbery. It is easily replaced by fresher love.

Me and Kai were always more than that. Me and Kai have been a single unit, made out of only us. I liked it fine, until Asheville. I had a life there, separate from hers, the way she had a separate life with Hervé. When Hervé called me a little shit, my heart sank because I knew his days were numbered. Within a month, it had cost him his girlfriend, his pill stash, his old Mazda, and all the cash in the house.

Here, Kai has us, and she also has Dwayne. I have us, and a school where I am Fatty-Fatty Ass-Fat. I get that we’ve burned Asheville, but I can’t stay here, in this place. I told her so. I tried, at least, but all she did was tell me a Ganesha tale. Now I am sick with waiting. My body is a twisted ball of rubber bands, each pulled tight and straining against the others. The deer that might not be a deer moves in the kudzu, and he has friends now. I sense them more than see them, a gathering of motion in the darkened woods around us.

“There’s a—” Kai pauses, mid-song. “I forget what’s on the frog.”

“Wart!” says Dwayne, cheerful and definitive and dead wrong.

Kai shakes her head no at him and looks to me. “What’s on the frog?”

It’s a fly. But I stay silent, hunched up, sitting as stiff as a person can sit in a saggy beanbag chair. I peer into the darkness, seeking movement in the kudzu. Wind or deer or my deliverance?

“Wart! Wart! Warrrrrr!” Dwayne barks, wolf style, losing the final
t
on the end howl. He’s been drinking room-temp beer all afternoon, and he didn’t eat any of the hot dogs.

“Okay, weirdo,” Kai says, laughing, and starts up again, giving a wart the fly’s rightful place in the order of things. She leans her head back as she sings, and her deadfall of dark hair spills over the tall arm of the sofa. I stop studying the kudzu to look at her. Her body is a ribbon made of elegant muscle, small breasted, with a richly curved back end. Her bare legs stretch and flex across Dwayne’s lap, the skin as pale and smooth as porcelain.

I slump lower. I am shaggy-headed and squashy.
Fatty-Fatty Ass-Fat
. I take my globby stomach in my hands and squeeze. Kai sees me doing it as she finishes the verse. She sets the mandolin aside and smiles and sighs at the same time.

“Quit worrying at your puppy tummy. I had one exactly like it when I was your age. Very soon, you’re going to use that tum to make yourself some cute little boobies and a girl butt. You’ll like that puppy fat, as soon as it moves to the right places.” I scowl and let go of my gut, wrapping my arms around it instead. She’s clued in I’m unhappy, but she has the reason wrong. She didn’t listen. “Oh, the puppy’s mad because I talked about it getting boobies!” Kai says. She stands and holds her arms out to me. “Come here, Puppy-puppy.”

Her smile is stoned and kind and warm. Maybe the weaving motion in the kudzu is only deer. With my pretty mother smiling at me, holding out her hands, I want it to be deer. Mostly.

I go to her, and she tucks me close, enveloping me in her familiar scent, but the tension wrapping my bones does not uncoil. I keep my shoulders hunched against her hug, keep my arms wrapped around my own soft middle. I told her not to send me back. I told her.

She feels the stiffness in my body and drops a kiss onto my hair. “Grumpy puppy. There’s fun parts to growing older. Come inside and pick a color, and I’ll paint you on some grown-up lady toes, for practice.” She starts to sing again as we stand up, but not the campfire song. “Jai Kali, Jai Kalika!” Her smoky voice, singing my old baby name, is warm and sweet against my ear.

Here in the West,
Kai has told me many times,
we think of Kali as a dark goddess.
But the name I gave you—Kali Jai—it literally means “Hail to the Mother.”

I let her tow me toward the door as she sings my theme song in her fat, low voice, and it occurs to me that even if I discount the blue skin and the long red tongue, the skirt of human hands and all the weaponry, it’s still a strange damn name to give your baby. Hail to the Mother?

Kai is the mother. The translation of my given name is actually something close to “Yay for Kai.”

I glance over my shoulder as Kai fumbles open the back door. The deer in the kudzu have wound themselves all the way around us. The movement in the leaves is now enough to draw Dwayne’s attention.

“Hey, hush there a sec, babe,” he says. He is too late.

They come out of the blue darkness in a swarm. I am surprised by how many of them there are, how fast they move. They are large, real men, bulky in their vests. I can’t tell what is them and what is only the moving dark around them. Their long, black-clad arms are made longer by the guns they hold, and they yell in an untidy chorus, telling us to be still, to get down, to be on the ground.

My heart swells. I am frozen, both jubilant and sick with dizzy terror. I willed them to come, and they did. I willed a way out, and the way came creeping up from behind us, through the woods, past the rusty shed. They came as Kai sang, “Jai Kali, Jai Kalika!” as if my own name was the signal.

We will have to move, now. I have a vague idea that the police get to keep crime houses for themselves. Too bad on Dwayne, but River’s dad took a bust for pot, and he only got six months. Dwayne’s done two years before, for B and E, and before that he did some stints in juvie. Six months is nothing—but it’s very long in Kai time. She’s rarely single for half that, and by the time he’s out, we’ll be other people and long gone.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa!” Dwayne is yelling, his hands up.

“Get down,” yells the closest cop.

Dwayne is sliding off the sofa to the ground, but Kai clutches me and screams something so close to my ear that the word is lost in the outsize, blasting sound of it. She jerks me backward, into the house. Outside I hear the cops yelling in protest. She locks the door, then runs for the master bedroom, pulling me along.

“Stop,” I say, but she keeps pulling.

This isn’t how it’s supposed to go. Tick got arrested once in the Dairy Queen, and that was the end of Kai and Tick. When the cops came in, she put her hands flat on the table, one on each side of her Peanut Buster Parfait.

She said, “Keep still, they don’t want us,” to me, and she was right.

But now she slams the bedroom door and locks it. She runs to the bedside table and pulls the stash of Hervé’s pills out of the drawer. I forgot about the pills she stole, still tucked in her bedside table. Her fingerprints are all over the Baggie.

“I don’t think you should—” I say, but she’s already running for the bathroom.

I stand rooted, listening to a fearsome banging, then a crash; someone has kicked down the back door. In the bathroom, I hear the toilet flushing. Kai is going to get in trouble. I run to the window. It is dark in here, but light has flooded the back porch, and I can see Dwayne has been rolled to his belly. His hands are bound in silver. I hear my black army crashing around inside the house, men moving from room to room, yelling “Clear!” in firm, decisive voices.

The toilet is flushing again, and I hear Kai cussing at it. I hear wood splintering, and I back up, away from the window, away from the locked door. I press myself against the wall. Kai runs out of the bathroom to me, wraps her arm around me.

“It’s okay,” she says, but it isn’t.

The door is forced open. Men run at us, armed and yelling. Now hands are pulling us apart. A man shoves Kai to the ground, and this is wrong. I am being pulled back, away from my mother. I resist, dig in my heels, and I find myself lifted. I become a podgy sack of thrashing, mad potatoes.

They are doing it wrong. When I biked down to the Dandy Mart and called 911 from the pay phone, I told the operator to leave us out of it.
What is your emergency?
she asked, and I told her the emergency was Dwayne.
My mom’s new boyfriend grows so much pot. Thirty-two Laraby Lane, in Paulding. He tends it, and he sells it for his job. Him, not us. My mom and me only just moved here.
These men don’t seem to know that. They only know Kai ran when they said stop. As I am carried bodily from the room, I see my mother crying. She is being handcuffed, and I did this. I made this be.

I yell “No! No!” to an army that is by all rights mine, but the army doesn’t listen. They don’t know I was named for the blue-skinned goddess of destruction. They don’t know I am the force that set them into motion. No one knows. They see only the shortest girl in sixth grade, a roly-poly, too small to be taken seriously.

“Baby?” Kai is yelling. She does not know, either. “Don’t worry. Just go with them. Baby? It’s okay.”

I go limp and am toted off to my own roach spray–smelling bedroom. It is not okay. I called them, and now they are taking my mother. I have split the planet called Me and Kai in two, when I only ever wanted a way out of here, for both of us, together.

A lady policeman sits with me, waiting for DFCS. At eleven, I don’t understand the difference between River’s dad, who had pet plants named Lydia and Jilly, and Dwayne, a longtime petty criminal with a basement greenhouse full of seedlings and mature plants growing tall back in our woods.

The yard outside my window is a sea of red and blue lights. I called them, and they came and took my mother. Kai is fingerprinted and regressed back into Karen Vauss, a girl from Alabama with a juvie sheet and no visible employment history. She is charged with obstruction and destroying evidence.

I am taken to a temporary shelter. It is loud and even scarier than middle school. My hands are fists. I keep them fists, in case.

“Why did you run?” I ask Kai, crying on the phone.

“I was surprised,” she says.

I wonder if that means she was
not
surprised when the cops came for Tick at Dairy Queen. Did Kai make a 911 call of her own? For one wild second I am full of hope. I could confess, and she would understand because she’d done it, too. But the words die in my throat. Tick started sweet, but he got meaner, especially toward me. If she got him busted, it was for both of us, not her alone.

DFCS contacts my grandparents, but they won’t come and get me. Kai hasn’t spoken to them since I was three or four, when she traded blond Joe for Eddie, a guy she’d known in high school. Eddie was mixed race: black and something Asian with a dash of Cherokee. My grandparents told Kai to dump him or get out. We got out. My only memory of them is dim and sour, anyway: Gramma staring at me as we toted bags to Eddie’s car, calling after Kai,
You’ll end up with another just like this one.

Maybe Gramma meant it literally, but that didn’t matter. When they arrested Kai, I had no idea where Eddie was, and though he’d been nice enough, he’d never acted like a father. I didn’t give his name to my caseworker, and I guess Kai didn’t, either.

I ended up in a group home in east Atlanta, while Kai pled guilty in exchange for a reduced sentence. Twenty-two months, with time served, short enough so that DFCS didn’t bother to start the paperwork to terminate parental rights.

It was also more than twice the length of pregnancy. I hadn’t known until today that she took my nascent baby brother with her off to prison. I’d cost Kai a life with her second child.

The day I called 911, I was a child myself, unable to predict the consequences. Dwayne and Kai were the adults, and they both regularly indulged themselves in felonies and misdemeanors. They’d both done time before, and their choices made it likely they’d do more, some day or another. Yet that intellectual understanding didn’t change the way I felt, when I thought of how our lives unfolded, after. Had Kai known she was pregnant when she took that deal?

The answer was likely in Julian’s folder, currently sitting closed on my onyx dining table. Through the wall of windows, I could see Atlanta’s skyline reaching up toward blue, untroubled skies. It was a solid ninety degrees outside, and my open loft was hard to over-air-condition, but I could not stop shivering. I changed into a hoodie and a pair of jeans so old and faded they were as soft as pajamas. Then I went downstairs to breach the file.