The Opposite of Everyone: A Novel (18 page)

“Is it legal to not mention that I let kittens play in his clothes?”

“We’re not going to bring it up if they don’t ask. And they won’t ask that,” I said, distracted.

So Clark wasn’t robbing her. He was gaslighting, moving and ruining all her favorite things strictly to drive her nuts. I was now quite keen to meet this shoe-drowning, lipstick-defiling fellow and see what he looked like unembellished. The sheer, personal vitriol of his small-minded attacks put him at least as high up the crazy stairs as she was. Also, he had a secret way in and out of the house, and he knew down to the minute when she left home.

I said, “He’s got eyes on you. You get that, yes? His break-ins happen fast, immediately after you leave.”

“You think he’s been watching me?” It honestly hadn’t occurred to her. This supported my theory that she was only exceptionally bitchy rather than a criminal mastermind plotting the perfect murder via adorable baby animals. But it also resparked the ugly rage I’d seen earlier. “That bastard!”

“We’ll report this to the cops, but I want to get my own PI in here to sweep your house for bugs.”

“You think Clark’s filming me?” Oakleigh shrieked, with such instant panic that it set me wondering who she was screwing. I’d need to prepare if there was a chance Clark had a sex tape to spring on us in mediation.

“I don’t think so. Calm down. If he had video in here, he’d have seen what you did with the kittens.”

She didn’t calm at all, stalking back and forth in a lather. “So he has somebody following me?”

“Maybe,” I said. He could well be watching her himself.

I needed Birdwine, but I wouldn’t pull him off Hana’s trail for Oakleigh Winkley. Not even if Oakleigh were on fire and he had the world’s last extinguisher tucked in his front pocket. I wished instead that I had extra Birdwines, three or four, at least. Amazing to me that some people staggered through their lives with none. I would have to use Nick’s guys to do a bug sweep and figure out how he was getting past her security system.

“How is he getting in?” Julian said. Bright boy, he had followed my same chain of thought.

“I don’t know,” I said. “But we’ll find it. Then we can either close it down or put some cameras—”

“Screw that. Leave it open. Let him come. I am going to shoot him so much,” Oakleigh interrupted, whirling to face us. “This is still America. I can shoot anyone who breaks in, right?”

Julian went very still, but I rolled my eyes.

“Please don’t plot murders in front of me, Oakleigh. It will make it morally quite sticky if you do kill him and need me to defend you.” I spoke in a bored tone that told Julian I wasn’t taking her threat seriously. My firm passed the very ugliest of dissolutions to me, so death threats were de rigueur. I’d heard them by the hundreds, and I’d never had a client make good on one. Not yet, anyway.

“It’s not funny,” she said, very screechy. As she spoke, she was stomping across the room, heading for the entertainment center. “We have two guns, one in the bedroom and one down here.” She jerked open a large drawer near the bottom and began pulling out old remotes and rolls of cable, dumping them haphazardly on the floor. Then she grabbed a wooden box out of the back. “Clark got them for me, in case anyone broke in when he was traveling. Well, it would serve him right if—” Her voice cut out abruptly as she opened the gun box. It was empty. Her face went ashen and her eyes bulged like a pug dog’s. Love betrayed was the ugliest thing alive, and as we watched, she devolved into its lowest common denominator. When she spoke again, her face twisted and froze in a rictus of loathing, genuinely deadly. “That bastard. That bastard. He stole my guns!”

We were now steps past regular, even for my cases. I rose and put propitiating hands out. “Okay, let’s calm down. Close that up. Pack the things back in the drawer. The police will be along any—”

She wasn’t listening. She was already running to the foyer. We heard her boot heels thundering up the stairs, no doubt going to check for the other gun. After another minute we heard her unleash a bloodcurdling string of curses, so it was missing, too.

“Holy crap!” Julian whispered. “Is she—”

I waved it away. “This is a bit much, with the kittens and the urine and the missing guns. But I’ve seen worse.”

I wasn’t sure I had, though, and I also wasn’t sure I would have spoken in such a reassuring way to, say, Verona. But Julian looked so worried, and he wasn’t truly an employee. He was something else.

“She said she’d shoot him,” he said, still fretting.

We could hear Oakleigh stomping back and forth upstairs, doing what sounded like primal scream therapy while wrecking a dresser with a hand ax.

“I’m sure she would, if he were right in front of her this second, and she had that gun. They all mean it in the moment. But the moment passes, a thousand times out of a thousand and one.”

“What about the thousand and first time?” he asked.

“You read about those cases in the paper.”

“Should we—should you go up there?”

I shook my head and sat down by Julian to wait comfortably and billably on the sofa until Oakleigh wore out her fit upstairs. The cops did not concern me. I had yet to meet the Atlanta cop who’d spend more than five minutes on any assault charge where the weapon was a kitty cat. When they came, I’d file a report about the break-ins to have them on the record. Especially the guns. I didn’t like the guns. I liked them even less in Clark Winkley’s hands. A divorce this volatile, having either of them armed was a bad idea. There was always that thousand and first case. But at least the upstairs noises were abating.

“See? She’s calming down.”

“People don’t act like this,” he said.

“Sure they do,” I told him, and was relieved that my protectiveness for the kid stretched only so far. I didn’t want him genuinely frightened, but I also couldn’t let his rosy worldview stand unchallenged. “All people have it in them. Don’t ever get divorced, Julian.”

He chuckled, a nervous noise, releasing tension. “I’m not even married.”

“That’s the only surefire way to avoid it,” I said. And then, because he’d asked me the impossible—what
we
would do when Hana was found—I added, “Making a family is a dangerous business.”

He looked up from the kittens at me, clear-eyed. “If you mean us, it’s not the same thing as this. Not at all. We’re looking for a little kid.”

Damn, but the boy was direct. I considered him, poker-faced. Hana would be nothing like the blank slate of a baby, nor would she be a television ten-year-old. Real, live preteen girls were time-consuming, irksome, and difficult at best. I knew, because I’d been one. The specific one we sought had a complicated history. Did he think she would run and hurl herself into our arms, as delighted as a rescue dog? We weren’t Kai. We weren’t anything to Hana. I was invested because I saw myself, my own childhood, in her, but she wouldn’t see herself in me. She wouldn’t have a thing in common with sweet, sheltered Julian. I had a hard time imagining what his childhood would have looked like, and I was an adult.

“When you were growing up, did you have family dinner?” I asked him.

His eyebrows knit. “Well, we had dinner.”

“At a table?” I said. “With all three of you there, and you talked about your day or your plans for tomorrow?”

“Yeah, but it’s normal to have family dinner.”

“Mm-hm. What did you do after?” I asked.

“After dinner? I don’t know,” he said. “We read or watched TV. Me and my mom liked board games. What? That’s not weird.”

“Do you think that’s what we’ll be like? You and me and Hana? Tuna casserole and Pictionary after?”

“No,” he said, but then he added, “Not at first.”

In those three words, I saw a whole imaginary future, cheery, tinged with pink, unfurling in his imagination. It bore no resemblance to what was forming in my mind: a lurching Frankenstein’s family, cobbled from dead pieces. The kid hadn’t seen a lot of ugly—his reactions to Oakleigh’s fit proved that. He was not prepped for Hana, or for
After,
for a
We.
To be fair, I wasn’t either, but at least I had a realistic grasp on
Now
.

“Julian, we might not find her at all. Even if we do, she’s not going to be some Brady kid in pigtails. She—”

“I know,” he interrupted, sparking to my tone. “I wasn’t raised by Care Bears, Paula.”

“Okay, okay,” I said, light, trying to head off his temper. “But I’m guessing little birds show up to clean your dishes?”

“No, they don’t,” he said, even madder. “And my mom doesn’t wear pearls to do the dusting, and”—he faltered, and his eyes got all glossy—“Didn’t, I mean. She didn’t wear pearls. We were just regular.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. It was a bad line of questioning for a kid who’d lost his mother so recently. Kai had chosen good parents—they might even have been great ones, if they hadn’t gone and died on him. “I don’t mean to upset you, but what you’re calling
regular
is actually lovely and quite rare.”

My words were meant to soothe him, but they had the opposite effect. A fat tear spilled down one cheek, and he set the kittens off his lap.

“You think I can’t handle this? You think I’m too soft? Or too dumb? What?” His voice was thick and loud.

I had no idea how the conversation had gotten so out of my control, so fast.

“I think my client’s right upstairs, and I shouldn’t have opened the topic here,” I said, firm.

He stood abruptly and walked past me to the mess Oakleigh had made. Blackie jumped off the sofa, following with Whitey in his wake. Julian knelt and began rerolling the cables with his back to me. I thought he was getting himself together, but then he turned to me and more tears were running down his face. His eyes looked so much older than the rest of him. He spoke again, low and quick, but with a great deal of intensity.

“I’m tougher than I look, you know. Maybe not a year ago. But now? After my dad was gone, there was only me. It was only me with my mother, those last weeks. It was . . .” He paused, the unspooled cable shaking in his trembling hands, seeking a word, but he couldn’t find it. He changed directions, saying, “I changed her diaper. Near the end, in hospice. There was a male orderly that day. Always before, it was these three girl ones in rotation, and I stayed out of the way. But that day, the regular girl was sick or something, and this guy was working. He was an old guy, too, like, near her age.”

As he spoke, his shaking hands kept winding up the cable. Blackie pounced at the moving end, cute and thoroughly unhelpful. I looked at him instead of at my brother’s shaking hands as he talked on, unstoppable.

“I could smell it, you know? That she needed— I could smell it. I was going to get that orderly, and she started crying. Mostly she was out of it, but not that afternoon. She shook and made this awful clacking gulp noise, and I hated it, and I knew that she was crying, so I leaned over her and I said, ‘What is it, Mama? What?’ My mom and dad were high school sweethearts. No other man had ever seen her without clothes on, she said. She’d always gone to women doctors, even. She was so skinny then, like this little dried-up scrap of mother, and her skin was so loose on her it hung down in floppy creases.”

Oakleigh was right upstairs, and now the kid was weeping openly. I was paralyzed in the face of all this naked loneliness and sorrow, and, worse, I couldn’t help wondering—had Kai been so frail and helpless, at her end? Had anyone been with her? I didn’t want to hear any more, but he kept on, relentless.

“She looked up at the ceiling, and she cried, and I talked about our old bird-watching log we used to keep when I was little, and I cleaned her up. I made myself not gag because I didn’t want her to hear and feel bad. It was terrible, but I did it, because she was my mother. That’s what a family is, Paula. That’s what family does, except Hana doesn’t have any.

“So that’s what we have to be. I want us to make something good for her. We have to, and I don’t know why you have to be so fucking scary. I’m trying to be friends with you, but every other minute I feel like you’re laughing at me or that you hate me. You’re what I got, though. And we’re what Hana’s got. We’re the only things at all—”

His voice had risen at the end, but then it cracked and he dropped his head and wept his guts out. After six fraught seconds, he turned his back and began stuffing the remotes and the rerolled cable back into the drawer, pushing gently at the kittens. He was still weeping as they both tried to climb into the drawer in a fluffy bother. He got the drawer shut, then scrubbed at his face with his palms.

“I don’t hate you,” I said quietly. “For what it’s worth, you’re pretty fucking scary, too.”

He only hunched his shoulders, snuffling and gulping. I had no idea what to do with a crying man-boy in the middle of my awful client’s house, especially one who was telling me what a mother looked like when she was sick and slowly dying.

One thing was clear: Hana had hit him like biology, too. I’d miscalculated both his depths and his investment. I wondered if he heard it as a heartbeat:
find her, find her, find her.

Meanwhile, upstairs, it had gone dangerously quiet. Oakleigh could come back at any second. I realized my discomfort was more on Julian’s behalf. I didn’t want Oakleigh’s disdainful eyes to see my brother, tearstained and flayed open. I walked over and handed him my keys.

“I’m sorry,” I told him in the gentlest voice I owned. “I’m very bad at this. Go wait in the car, okay? I’ll finish here, fast as I can, and then we’ll talk.”

He took the keys without looking at me, and he made his own way out.

Damn, but I’d mishandled Julian, and misunderstood him, too, on several levels. I had to make a room for him, as well as Hana. Metaphorically, at least. But not right this second. I took a long, slow exhale and thanked the gods that I knew how to compartmentalize.

I called the offices of Clark’s lawyer, Dean Macon, from my cell. I left a voicemail notifying him that I now represented Oakleigh. She came down when the cops rang the doorbell a few minutes later. The rest of the afternoon was simple, professionally speaking. Police interest in The Kittening was cursory, and we got our countercomplaints on the record. Afterward, Oakleigh swanned upstairs to take a bath, leaving me to call Nick’s PI firm. I asked them to send a fellow over ASAP to bug sweep and find Clark’s way in.