The Opposite of Everyone: A Novel (22 page)

I blinked, knocked off my high horse. Damn, but the truth had such a ring to it.

Julian was right, again. I should take it as given that he had a better handle on the personal than I did. I couldn’t resurrect my mother, make her marry Hana’s mystery father the day before she was conceived, set them up in a cottage by a balmy sea. But we could find her. We could make sure she was safe and fed and cared for, because it was the least that she deserved. It was the least that any kid deserved.

“All right. I hear you, but you need to hear me, too. Any plan we make assumes too much. You’re assuming we will find her. We’re assuming Kai is dead, and Hana isn’t. Also, she’s ten. She may already be embarked on some mad self-rescue of her own, bonding with someone, making herself a place. We can’t plan a damn thing from a base of total ignorance.” My words rang true enough to match his.

“Okay. That means we have to focus on what we do have.” I nodded, thinking he meant the file, just as he added. “You and me. I think we’re starting to really be a team.” I stopped mid-nod, but he was already beaming at me, glowing like a piece of Muppet-headed living sunshine. This kid! He was so inclined toward nesting—and so sweet in the core of him. I couldn’t help but smile back, pleased he understood that I’d been genuinely trying.

I broke eye contact before it turned into a love-in, though, flipping through more pages of interview notes. I skimmed, hoping something would leap out at me that could put us back on Hana’s trail. Near the bottom of the stack, I found the map.

Time stopped.

“What?” Julian said. I couldn’t answer. I was breathing so hard it was like I had been sprinting. I rummaged through my bag to pull my envelope out again, reread Kai’s final note.

I am going on a journey, Kali. I am going back to my beginning.

Tenderhearted Julian instantly came back to stand beside me, one hand on my shoulder, asking me, “Are you okay?”

I wasn’t. Birdwine had drawn their route in highlighters, a bright orange line of color squiggling through the South. I ran my finger along the line, tracing Kai’s trajectory. Was every mystic-ass, pretentious line of Kai’s note literal? When had Kai ever been literal?

“Look,” I said, though it was meaningless to Julian.

“At the map? Why? Do you know where Hana is?” he asked, now with an urgency that matched mine.

I looked up and into those eyes he had, my mother’s own.

“She’s in my life,” I told him. “Hana’s somewhere in the middle of my life.”

CHAPTER 9

I
t’s better this way, I think, as the door shuts behind Joya. I’m not crying. What I feel is so far past crying that I can’t move, or it will get out of me and be a sound, and I don’t know what that sound is. I lie on the bed unmoving, but inside my skin, every atom is seething with a single thought: I want my mother. I want my mother blindly, like a newborn mouse. Inside the quiet shell of me, I churn and shudder. My body so badly wants to root and seek, attach, be warm and full.

I hear Mrs. Mack and Shar, Karice, and Kim talking and banging the door as they get back from dinner. I don’t hear Candace, but that’s normal. She’ll be mincing along behind them, quiet. If she comes in this room right now, if she so much as looks at me with her wet eyes, I am not responsible for what I do to her.

Then come all the happy sounds of Joya’s mama arriving. I listen, lying stiff and still, as Joya’s things are loaded up. I hear the thump of the bags and the grown-lady voices of Mrs. Mack and Joya’s mama talking. If I stand up, I’ll be able to see them from the window. Our room faces the drive. But I stay rigid on my bed, even when the car doors close. I don’t cry or move as I hear the engine start, when I hear them drive off, when she is gone away with her own mother.

It’s long past midnight when I finally crack. Alone in my bed in the darkest part of night, I wake to find I am already weeping. My body bucks and rocks, and I have to smother the loud brays that I feel rising. I turn to the wall and push them down deep into my pillow. I hug my cool pillow to me, and it does not hug me back. I gulp and weep into the cloth anyway, biting at it, pressing close until I’m gagging on it.

I roll away from the wall, sick, and find Candace’s bug eyes looking at me, six inches away. She’s peeping up over the edge of my bed, alligator style. I jerk back so fast it feels like I left all my skin behind, and a scream bangs its way up my throat. I snap my mouth shut, trapping it behind my teeth. I sit up and glare at her, letting the scream out as a long hiss of breath. I’ve been startled out of puking.

Candace doesn’t move, still crouching on her knees by my bed. I can see the whites of her eyes gleaming in the dim light from our clock.

“You’re whoopin’ in your pillow so loud that I can’t sleep.”

She says
can’t
so redneck. It sounds like
ain’t
with a
c
on the front. I don’t speak her brand of English any more than I spoke Joya’s. No one here speaks like me and Kai. No one wears colorful scarves or admits to playing the tambourine. Kai’s people eat sardines tinned in mustard and talk about
The Tao of Pooh
. They are all art-farts and petty criminals—light-fingered musicians, stoned painters, writers penning novels and bad checks. Even Tick, that racist asshole, was a poet. Kai’s tribe owns water pipes and finger bells the way regular Americans own coasters. We are gypsies among other gypsies, shifting in and out of love, towns, names, constantly in flux, reinvented by and for each other.

No one here talks like me or gets my references or knows the songs I know. I don’t look like any of them. Even my bond with Joya was based on not belonging here.

I scrub at my face with my hands, and all at once anything is better than being alone. I scoot back, making room for Candace. She rises up enough to rest her pointy chin on the bed’s edge, suspicious of the offer. It’s unprecedented. She’s always had to wheedle or bribe her way in.

I press my back against the wall and say, “I’ll sleep better with you taking up seventy percent of my mattress than creeping around on the floor and goggling at me.” I try to say it tough like Joya would, but my throat is full of snot and my voice is trembly.

Candace thinks about it, then slithers in under my covers. She lies on her back, looking straight up at the ceiling. “Yesterday, you wouldn’t’ve peed on me if I was on fire. You’re just crying over Joya.”

“I’m not crying over Joya,” I said, and it’s true enough to sound true.

“Well, why then?”

I am not going to tell Candace, of all people, that I miss my mother.

“Maybe because I’m going to get my ass kicked in the morning.” Candace’s eyes gleam, full of questions in the dark. “Shar, Karice, and Kim. They never got Joya. Now that she’s gone, they’ll come after me.” Just to be mean I add, “They’ll probably whip the shit out of you, too.”

Candace swallows audibly, then whispers, “Do you think they’ll come in here and get us while we’re sleeping?”

This is the last place they will start it. Mrs. Mack’s suite is exactly under our room. But Candace isn’t a fighter, and she doesn’t think strategically. She is staring at the door, big-eyed. I soften and I add, very exaggerated, so she’ll get it, “They could burst in any second and kill us all. If I were you, I’d sleep under the bed.”

She makes a tittering sound and relaxes. “They wouldn’t mess with me nohow,” she says, “excepting Kim.”

“Kim’s big, but Shar’s the one you have to watch for.”

I may not be crying about the fight, but it
is
coming. It’s nice having a living body, even Candace’s, between me and the door. Or maybe, tonight, it’s simply nice to have a living body close.

“Are you really scared?” Candace whispers, as if the idea I might feel human things like fear is new to her.

“Who wants to get the shit beat out of ’em?” I ask instead of answering.

“I could help you,” Candace says, almost truculent. “If you wanted to make friends with me.”

I snort at that. Candace cringes at the sight of any lifted hand. I can’t wave at the girl without her shivering and crawling backward like a beaten dog, except a dog is at least a vertebrate. Candace is as spineless as a bag of jam.

“I’d like to see you be my friend in front of Shar,” I say.

“You never wanted me to before,” she says, sulky. “I can’t hardly even come in my own room. All Joya ever said to me was
Get out,
and you let her.”

“Well, Joya’s a bitch. I don’t want to hear her name again,” I say, too loud. To my surprise, I start to cry again. “I mean it. I don’t want to hear her name.” I am crying so hard now that I’m not sure Candace understands me.

She must though, because she says, “Well, you ain’t got no one, then, huh?”

I don’t answer, and Candace’s mouth turns downward, thoughtful. After another minute, she squirms over closer and wraps her weirdly spongy arms around me.

“There, now,” she says, patting at me awkwardly, like I’m a tiny baby. “There, now, don’t be sad. There, now.”

I spin in place, turning my wet face to the wall, and I can’t imagine I will ever stop. I will lie here and weep for my mother—my best, first love—until I am a husk, as dry and light as dandelion fluff. The wind will lift me up and blow me away, and Candace can make a wish on me.

She scoots in even closer, spooning, her knees tucked into my knees, her belly pressed against my back. She rocks and coos and squeezes me, saying it over and over.
There, now. There, now
. We stay like that until at last, the crying stops. I stare at the wall, hitching and gulping until I catch my breath. As soon as I am quiet, Candace falls into a boneless sleep, untroubled. Eventually I sleep, too, uneasy. In my dreams, I run down bare and endless hallways, seeking something lost. There are no hiding spots, and none of the empty hallways brings me to it.

I was still looking. Sometimes the lost thing was Kai, sometimes a little girl with a cloud of dark curls and crescent-moon eyes. Sometimes I didn’t know what it was. I only knew I had to find it. I ran, my footsteps echoing off the bare walls. Then I thought that it might be above me, in the world that was awake. I found myself rising toward the surface of my sleep. I felt another body, soothing me with breath, easing me with heartbeat. A living warmth, a proof against the darkness. I tried to ask,
Is that you?
and my own voice woke me up.

I jerked my gummy eyes open, disoriented. I smelled ripe dog, and my throat was sour and dry from remembered, ancient crying. It took me a moment to orient. I recognized the ugly wall of plaid in front of me; my face was crammed up against the back of Birdwine’s wide sofa. The body pressed against my back was Looper’s. I glared at him over my shoulder. He thumped his tail at me, and his giant mouth gaped open in a stretch just inches from my face.

“Ugh, your yawn smells terrible,” I told him, and struggled to get myself around him and up. He stretched and rolled onto his back into my warm space. I said, “Honestly, dogs,” and gave his belly a scratch.

I was creased and rumpled, covered in golden-brown Looper hair that showed on both my black skirt and my white shell. Great. Julian was dead asleep in the baggy leather Barcalounger. I offered to drive him back to his car last night, but he wouldn’t go. He knew I’d drive straight back here.

So we’d both stayed. I’d booted up my own laptop and gone into my cloud account. I cross-referenced my personal files with Birdwine’s paper one, drawing new routes, taking notes, cussing at Birdwine’s poky Internet connection. Julian alternated between checking my progress and cleaning up. He’d swept up the plaster and other debris and put Birdwine’s furniture back in order. He’d even done the dishes. Now he slept like happy babies do, on his back in the Barcalounger with his arms thrown up around his head.

I edged closer and ruffled his hair, softer than I’d scratched at Looper, but the same in spirit. He leaned into the touch in his sleep, the way a flower turns its face unthinking to the sunlight. I stopped before he woke up, marveling at the way Julian, even unconscious Julian, assumed that any hand on him reached out in kindness. His eyes moved behind his closed lids, dreaming easy. I let him sleep on.

I had no more gentleness inside me, not this morning. I’d woken full of thunderstorms, with a strong desire to aim them all at Birdwine. I could hear water running in the bathroom down the hall, so he was up. And bathing, which indicated a certain readiness to come back to the sober world.

He wasn’t ready for me, though. I wanted to barge in while he was vulnerable, wet and naked, and ask him,
What the hell?
He’d never so much as hinted that he had a boy, even back when we were lovers. The only clue had been how invested he’d been in the hunt for Hana. He’d been alarmed and overanxious from the first. In my office, when I told him Kai had reinvented herself as a person with no daughter, he had been so cryptic and emphatic, saying
, A parent can’t just do that.

Well, he had. So how complicated could it be?

And to think last night I’d stood over him all sweet-mouthed and sugar-hearted, almost yearning. I remembered how sad he’d seemed, telling me I had broken his heart. Sure I had. His heart, and probably some unicorns; I was apparently quite hard on mythological creatures.

Now I wanted to put my face in his face, let him see how done with him I was. Then I’d show him my notes and the new lines and dots I’d filled in on his map, and tell him to get off his bruised ass and find my sister. After that, he was free to go his merry way. All the way to hell. I’d give him a map for that, too, if he needed it.

Birdwine’s file was sitting on the coffee table. I picked it up, and it was shaking too hard for me to read it. It took me a full second to understand the shaking was coming from my hands.

I had to pull myself together. I was furious and rumpled, and I’d woken up missing my mother, or maybe missing the feel of any human body in the bed beside me. Well, that second part was fixable.

The shower was still running, and Julian was out cold, so I had a moment. I went to the kitchen and got some coffee started. My mouth felt like this whole filthy house had crawled inside and died there. Last night, I’d searched the bathroom and come up with a toothbrush I was pretty sure was mine. I’d brought it to the kitchen and washed it with some dish soap, just in case. I used it again, now.

Then I got Birdwine’s duct tape from the junk drawer and pulled most of the hair off my skirt and blouse. That felt so much better. More like me. I put my shoes on and shrugged back into my jacket. My blowout was failing, so I slicked my wild hair back and secured it at the nape of my neck. I did the two-minute version of full war paint: matte skin, dark striped eyes, a mean red mouth.

I checked myself in my compact’s mirror and was heartened to find a reasonable approximation of my hardest self. Good enough to break a piece off in Birdwine. Even good enough to go straight to work from here. One advantage of my endless sleek black suits was that only Verona would realize I was wearing yesterday’s. She had a good eye for cut and label, combined with a twenty-something’s interest in other people’s walks of shame. She’d be so disappointed in me if she saw the hairy drooler who had shared my sofa. From here on out, I would do better. The best way to get the dregs of Birdwine right out of my system was to get some other body into it.

By then the shower sounds had stopped. His laptop was still open on the kitchen table. I woke it up and turned it toward the doorway, so he’d see it when he came in. As he came up the hall, I poured coffee into two of his random coffee mugs, one plain green and one with happy daisies that said
TEACHER OF THE YEAR
. If only he’d had a
FATHER OF THE YEAR
or
WORLD’S BEST DAD
mug. I was up for a little ugly irony.

He limped around the corner in an old T-shirt and some Levi’s that looked even older. His dark hair was wet and brushed back off his face, giving me a good view of his bruises. The swelling had gone down a bit around his eye, thanks to the cold peas, but the colors were coming in: black and violet and a spectacular deep plum. He gave me a wholly fake sheepish look; the real expression in his eyes was wary.

He did not apologize for last night. He’d once told me he never did, for drunk. Sorry implied a promise to stop, and he’d sorry’d about it endlessly at Stella. He could no longer muster the required faith to form the words, lifetime-level tired of watching himself fail to mean it.

Then he saw the picture open on his laptop’s screen. I’d left the browser open to the best close-up of his son, standing shoulder to shoulder with the Hubs. The boy’s head was already even with the man’s.