The Opposite of Everyone: A Novel (21 page)

Julian looked alarmed. “You want me to, like, open all his drawers and look for sheets?”

“The spare set’s in the linen closet. It’s a narrow door halfway down the hall, beside the bathroom. Then his bedroom is at the very end.”

“You know this place real well, huh?” he asked me, his head tilting to the side.

“Julian, please?” I said. “He could pass out any second, and we’ll never get him moved.”

Julian’s mouth scrunched up into a wad that made him look like all those disapproving rabbits on the Internet, but he went.

I looked back at the screen. The former Stella Birdwine, now Martin, was one of those people who said yes to any friend request. She had almost six hundred, making it easy for Birdwine to invent a profile and friend her on the sly. Now he could watch her life like it was television.

“This seems really healthy,” I said to him.

Birdwine nodded, drunk-wry, and the movement almost tipped him from the chair. I felt inclined to let him fall. Let him smash himself up a little more. What was another black eye between friends?

Better question—why was I so pissed that he was mooning over Stella? I didn’t like the implications. Right before he left to go find Hana, I’d realized that he’d once been in love with me. I hadn’t asked myself the natural follow-up. Had I been in love back?

I must have been, at least a little.

I hadn’t noticed. But in retrospect, I could see that I’d gone about systematically killing it. I hadn’t had to think about it. I knew how. I’d had plenty of practice.

I’d fallen for my best friend, William, back in high school. I’d slept with him once. Hell, I’d slept with him first, but I had never followed up. I’d started screwing college fellows, and I’d helped William land the girl of his dreams. The three of us had ended up best friends. In law school, Nick and I had a thing that could have turned out serious. He’d wanted that, at one point. I made it clear that I was nothing like monogamous, telling him stories of my conquests like we were bar buddies. I started acting as his wingman, both in mock trials and when he noticed a girl. The sex petered out, and we ended up business partners.

Then Birdwine. I looked across the table at him, blood-crusted, smelling like roadkill. Ye gods help me, I hadn’t killed whatever was between us. Not all the way. Sure, I’d made him into a colleague and a friend, roles with much longer shelf lives than my lovers got, exactly as I had with William and Nick. But almost without noticing, I’d stopped looking for new men. I’d given up my friendly late-night calls to exes. And I sure as hell hadn’t worked to put other women on his radar.

No matter. Son of a bitch had done a fine job tracking his ex-wife all on his own.

Birdwine’s eye was swollen almost shut. I got up and checked his freezer. Both ice trays were dead empty. There was a bag of store-brand frozen peas, though. I brought them over.

“Hold these,” I told him, smacking the peas against his eye. He grunted, but he managed to get a big paw up and hold them in place. He smelled like old sweat and older bourbon, with the copper tang of blood just under that.

When I tried to turn away, he grabbed my wrist with his free hand. He stared up at me with his one good eye bleary and mumbled out a string of urgent words.

Between the smashed lips and the quarts of liquor, it took me a moment to parse out the meaning, but then I got it:

I don’t give two shits about Stella
.

He held my gaze, and I didn’t think that he was lying.

“Well, what do I care,” I said, but my voice had softened, and all ye gods and little fishes, it sure seemed like I did.

Not in my usual take-it-or-leave-it way, either, though he seemed like my type, on the surface: easygoing, fucked up enough to be forgettable. I hadn’t forgotten him, though, had I? Funny, I’d always told myself he was an expendable convenience, but looking back, my actions told a different story. I’d even stalked his ass to get him back into my orbit. I’d treated him like he was Nick or William: quality stuff.

Now here I was, smacking him in the face with peas, mad to find him looking at his ex on social media. Almost like love were an open option. Almost like I wanted Birdwine to myself, in my life as well as in my bed.

Well, not in my bed tonight. Not drunk and stinking. Not with my little brother hovering, as uncomfortable here in Birdwine’s shithole as he had been in Oakleigh Winkley’s Buckhead mansion.

“Paula?” Julian said, back already. He looked at Birdwine’s grip on my arm, how close our faces were, and upped his disapproval game; he went from rabbit all the way to prim religious auntie. “I think the extra sheets are dirtier than the ones on there.”

I straightened up and shrugged off Birdwine’s hand. Changing the sheets had been busywork, anyway. Birdwine was so foul we’d likely need to burn the whole bed in the morning. Even so, I couldn’t help remembering that back when Birdwine and I were a thing, he always had clean sheets around. He’d had good motivation, then. So was he sleeping by himself these days? I didn’t like how fiercely glad the idea made me.

I started levering Birdwine to his feet. “Give me a hand?”

Julian came and braced his other side, and we walked down the hall, toward the bedroom. It was a familiar path for me with Birdwine. I’d never once thought I would walk down it with an overly protective baby brother along.

Birdwine leaned on us heavily, favoring one leg.

“Birdwine, where’s the Hana file?” I asked him.

He slurred out a few words not even I could translate and shifted his arm down, resting his hand companionably on my ass.

“Don’t even think about it,” I said, and he cackled that weird drunk laugh again.

“Issa dammmmm goodass,” Birdwine said.

Julian’s mouth set in an even tighter line.

“I know,” I said, and left his hand where it was. If Kai’s picture could be believed, I’d have this ass for quite a few years yet, but it had been underappreciated of late.

We helped him maneuver through the door, aiming right at the bed.

“Dump him facedown, in case he pukes,” I told Julian, who did not react. He might be naive, but he had been to college.

We timbered Birdwine over, and he crashed onto the mattress. He spoke into the pillow, saying the clearest thing he’d said so far. “Get in with me.”

Julian looked appalled, but I grinned outright to see there was a living ember down in Birdwine, sparking to me still.

“Not even a little tempted,” I told him. “But try me again after you roll around in bleach.” I meant it, too, though he might not remember in the morning. On his end, this could all be nothing more than drunk.

I looked at his wrecked eye. The corner of his bloody, swollen mouth. All the damage he had taken, walking his face into some other guy’s fist, repeatedly, while his own rough hands were as blameless and unbruised as any baby’s. I thought then,
No, he’s still in love with me
. When it came to love, I was the walking incarnation of fists, served in a convenient female package with a nice ass. He’d meant it just as much as I had.

I pulled the blanket out from under his feet and draped it over him. Julian waited behind me, his discomfort so thick that I felt it rolling off him in waves.

Birdwine’s breathing had changed to deep and stentorian. The sound of it called Looper, who came jingling in to leap up into the bed. He flopped at the foot.

“Oh, now you show, you worthless sack of fur,” I said, and gave his ears a rumple.

We backed out, Julian with his head down, peeking at me from under his flop of forehead curls.

“What?” I said.

He blushed and cut his eyes away. All he said was “Did you understand him? Where’s the Hana file?”

“We’ll have to hunt for it. I’ll check the computer, but it could be a real file, made of paper. Birdwine kicks it old school. Why don’t you dig around?”

We were back in the den now, and Julian said, “You want me to ransack a huge, crazy, drunk guy’s house.”

I waved a hand at the shattered chair, the overturned table. “You think he’s going to know?”

“Point taken,” Julian said.

That made me smile. It was something I would say, and he’d used my inflections. I took him by the shoulders and aimed him at Birdwine’s desk in the corner.

“Start there,” I said, and headed for the kitchen.

I sat back down with the craptop and swirled the mouse to wake up the screen. Stella Martin’s Facebook page reappeared. It was still open to a shot of the whole family, posed on the deck of the beach house. My breath caught. Now that I wasn’t focused so wholly on his ex-wife, I saw it instantly.

Which one of these things is not like the other?

Blond Stella held hands with her weedy, ginger-headed hubs. I saw how their features and their colors blended in the three little girls. The boy towered in the middle, dark and barrel-chested.

I clicked back two pics, to one where the boy stood tall and thick and sturdy in the surf, the littlest girl climbing up him like he was her own pet tree. I leaned in, studying his face. He had big brown eyes with heavy lids. His hair was thick and wiry, and his skin was olive. He was tanned, while the rest of the family was in various phases of turning pink and peeling. His teeth were very straight, but the front two had a gap in them.

I knew that gap. I’d always liked it on Zach Birdwine.

I did the math. The boy was big, but he had no hair yet on his chest, barely any on his legs, and he still had a round-cheeked baby softness to his face. As old as fifteen, maybe as young as twelve. Either way, before my time. Either way, his life span overlapped with Birdwine’s marriage.

I sat back. It could not be so. I’d worked with Birdwine for almost a decade. We’d been lovers for more than half a year. Now we were supposedly friends. This was a large and toothy chunk of history to leave out.

At a glance, his boy had landed in a good place, with books and beach vacations and a wild pack of adoring little sisters. The Hubs’s arm looked both possessive and comfortable, resting on the boy’s shoulder. The whole family had good body language in their pictures, actually, leaning in and turning slightly toward each other. They looked like a regulation happy family. On Facebook, at least.

Was this why Birdwine had abandoned him? If so, it was a cop-out. The kid wouldn’t see it like that. Kind as Mrs. Mack had been, I hadn’t felt relieved or grateful when the state of Georgia spared me from the company of my mother.

Julian appeared in the doorway, his face set in stress lines, holding a manila folder. “It was in his car.”

As he brought it to me, I minimized the browser. Pissed as I was, I wouldn’t sell out Birdwine by opening up his private life to Julian, who already didn’t like him. Also, I didn’t want to look at a happy family, posting happy stories that might even be true. I was here with some jagged ends from families that hadn’t worked.

There were more of us. The world was full of us, the leftovers and the leavers, the bereaved and the broken.

I said, “Good job,” and took the folder. Julian hovered over me, hands twisting.

The top pages were Birdwine’s interview notes, scrawled in his dark, side-slanted writing. First up, an interview with Tolliver, Kai’s Austin boyfriend. Her sudden disappearance in the dead of night had baffled him. She hadn’t even told him she was sick, though by his account they’d been deeply in love. Sure they had.

I glanced up at Julian, but he wasn’t reading. He was still twisting his hands, looking at me.

“What’s eating you?” I asked.

“I didn’t realize you two were a thing. You and Birdwine,” Julian said.

“We’re not a thing,” I said, flipping another page.

“Oh. Okay,” he said, with exaggerated disbelief.

“Julian, stop hovering. We’re not a thing,” I told him, and the last sentence came out raw and angry. Mostly because bare minutes before I saw Birdwine’s cuckoo bird, dropped into some other fellow’s nest and left behind, I’d been considering him. Considering us, even.

He moved to sit across from me and folded his hands on the table. “Well, good. Because he’s a scary guy. And he clearly has some kind of substance problem.”

“Oh, you think,” I said, flicking blindly through four more pages. “Drop it. It isn’t relevant.”

“It will be, though,” Julian said. “When we find Hana. That guy, he isn’t— He doesn’t seem like he’d be good for a kid.”

I felt a lightning stab of blue-bright anger. If he’d said it half an hour ago, I would have called him on it, hard. I would’ve snapped,
Try not to be a privileged little shit.
But between my embarrassing Goodnight-Sweet-Prince tableau at Birdwine’s bedside and this moment, I’d gone through a sea change.

One look at Birdwine’s son, ditched down in Florida, and my loyalties had shifted, from history to blood. Julian, after all, was desperately trying. He was chock-f of hopeful plans, wanting to make a family for Hana. Birdwine had so thoroughly abandoned his own child that the boy didn’t even live in Birdwine’s conversation.

Part of me wanted to take the folder right now, walk out, hand the whole damn thing over to a fresh PI. One I’d never met before. Preferably female.

Even so, I couldn’t let Julian’s starry-eyed statement stand. I spoke as kindly as I could. “You think Birdwine’s not our kind. I get it. But, Julian, there is no
our
kind for you and me. Sure, as it turns out, Birdwine is an asshole. But that is my kind. This girl we’re looking for? She’s going to be my kind, too. You think this”—I waved my hand around, encompassing the wrecked house, the sketchy neighborhood, the feeling of unfriendly eyes on us outside—“would offend her tender sensibilities? Baby, you grew up with Little League and meals made off the food pyramid, but Hana comes from here, where people ditch other people, or use them, or eat them whole.”

Julian got redder and redder as I talked, and so I shut up before he lost his temper.

“I know,” he said, and he didn’t sound angry at all. “But isn’t that the point of a rescue? You take somebody out of where it’s bad. You bring them someplace better. Not perfect. No place is perfect. You bring them to the best place that you can.”