The Opposite of Everyone: A Novel (28 page)

“How did you find out?” I asked Birdwine. He wanted to talk, and he had carried this by himself so long. I needed him to know we could talk, after all.

“Some asshole friend of Stella’s who knew us both back in the day. Bridesmaid in our wedding. She sent me a letter, saying she’d waffled and prayed, and she’d decided that I had the right to know. That was about ten years ago,” he said, and now he did sound bitter, a thousand times blacker and more caffeinated than when he spoke of his wife’s affair.

The timeline made sense to me, though. Ten years ago, Birdwine had walked into his first AA meeting. “And that’s when you saw Caleb?”

“Yeah. They’d moved to Florida by then. I drove down and staked them out. For more than a week, but they never saw me. You know how I am. Damn, Paula, they looked good. They looked happy. I would know, because I didn’t want them to be happy. I was hoping for a reason to storm in. But their first girl had just started toddling, and my kid, Caleb, I heard him telling the ice cream booth guy that he was a big brother. He couldn’t say
th
’s. He said it like,
brudder,
and he sounded so proud. Every other word he said was
Daddy
. ‘Daddy, look at me.’ ‘Daddy, pick me up.’ And Martin would pick him up. Stella carried the baby, while Martin rode my son around on his shoulders.”

“Shit,” I said. The bridesmaid had taken her sweet time growing a conscience. She’d waited three years after Stella’d made a judgment call, choosing Martin before the birth, when biology would give its testimony. There was no clearer way to tell a man you didn’t think that he was good enough for your kid, but I asked anyway, because he had to know that I would listen, and that the story would change nothing. “When Stella told you she was pregnant, you didn’t wonder? You didn’t do the math?”

His shook his head, a huge, shaking no that started in his shoulders and reverberated down through our clasped hands. It was a lie he told with his whole body, or maybe it was just denial, because the words that he spoke next were true:

“I wanted to believe her. I guess I decided to believe her. I was really, really busy drinking. It was a relief, when she said she was sure.”

Birdwine lifted his free hand in a
whatcha gonna do
gesture that said he didn’t blame her.

Maybe I couldn’t, either. I imagined Stella, pregnant thirteen years ago. Married to the ruin I’d seen when he was bingeing. He’d been drinking every day back then, hanging on to his job by a thread. She’d met another man, reliable and sober. She’d cared enough about Martin to break her marriage vows. When she realized she was pregnant, she’d had the luxury of choosing. I’d seen Birdwine at his worst, so I got it. And really, what would I have done in her shoes?

It was the wrong question. I knew my stupid answer: I’d have chucked the steady ginger and rolled my dice with this one.

“Do you think you’ll ever meet him? Caleb. Maybe when he’s grown?” I asked. I wasn’t sure if that was right, but I didn’t see a clear right. We were deep into the grays, here. Perhaps this wasn’t all that different from what Kai had done for Julian. For the first time I wondered if Julian had grown up knowing he was adopted. I thought so, from the way he’d talked about his family. Birdwine’s boy hadn’t. Had Caleb been abandoned or stolen, saved or released? It didn’t matter, because Birdwine was shaking his head no.

“Not unless he needs bone marrow or a kidney,” Birdwine said.

“Well, the gods be with him if he ever needs some liver,” I said, and Birdwine winced. “Yeah, low blow. But you know it’s true.”

We had reached my building now, and I let go of his hand and turned to face him. My back was to the wall. He faced into the gold light that streamed out from the lobby doors.

Birdwine said, “When I started AA, I made a promise to myself. I thought, if I could stay sober for a year, get my chip, then I’d go and meet Caleb. I told myself that, then, I’d be worth meeting. I started the trust fund, so he’d know he mattered the whole time, right? If I could just get that year chip, I kept saying.”

I shook my head. “That’s a lot of pressure to put on a recovery.”

“Yeah. I got to ten months once. When he was nine. Even started planning out what I would say to him, how to approach Stella . . . Woke up two weeks later, down in Mexico.” He shrugged, a rueful gesture, and then said, “I’ll tell you one good thing that came out of our breakup, if that’s what I can call it. Whatever that was in my kitchen, when you saw his picture. I gave it up. The whole idea. Meeting him is a fantasy. I could get ten years sober, and I still won’t go and see him. I’d have to tell the kid his mother’s a cheat and a liar and his dad’s a thief. If I wasn’t going to blow his life up like that when he was three, I don’t see how I can do it now, when he’s a teenager. When it’s time for college, or before, if something happens and he needs it, I’ll turn the fund over to Stella. She can explain it however she wants.” He bent to look at me. He put his eyes so close to mine it became hard to focus. “I’m not telling you this because of us. I’m not now going to try to get a year chip with you as some kind of messed-up prize at the end of it. I’m done with that kind of deal, and I’m done with drinking. For what that’s worth. I’ve said it before, but this time there’s no conditions. I’m just done. I hope—I believe—I mean it this time.”

“I hope so, too.” Even if he failed again, he would not stop trying. I knew he wouldn’t, because I knew him.

He threw up his hands and said, “And you know I fucking love you. So?”

I looked into his right eye, then his left, back and forth.

“Why do you love me?” I knew what I wanted, but on his side, I didn’t want it to be because I could be so bad for him. I didn’t want to be a pretty fist that he could bang himself into. I leaned against the wall, my head right by the keypad. “If we’re going to take a run at this, it has to be more than good sex and your masochism.”

I wasn’t sure he was going to answer. I wasn’t sure he had a reason, and he could be so hard to read. But then he smiled.

“Because everyone on this shithole planet says a lot of pretty words to make themselves look good while they do awful things,” he said. “You’re the opposite.”

It was a good answer. A good thing to say. I peered from one eye to the other, back and forth, harder than I had looked into Clark’s eyes, or the gun’s. Birdwine’s left one was rimmed in black and violet, still swollen. I watched his pupils expand as I leaned up. There was a fair amount of crazy present, sure, but in the darkness of his eyes I saw myself reflected clearly. I was real to him. He saw me all the way down to the bottom and knew every awful thing I’d done. More—he knew all that I was capable of doing, and yet he looked at me like I was something worthy and good.

“Come upstairs,” I said. There was a promise in the words that spoke to more than sex. I thought it was implicit. But he only waited, silent. He didn’t even blink, until my own eyes felt dry and itchy on his behalf. Finally I added, “Yes. Okay. Yes. I fucking love you.”

“Oh yeah,” he said, and punched the entry code in for my door. I didn’t think I’d ever given it to him, so he must have watched me key it in and remembered, damn the man.

We were silent and untouching in the elevator. We waited, and it felt right to wait until we were in my place. There we had a door to close behind us, and no walls. We went up the stairs to the loft, and we had each other there with Henry dozing on the dresser, purring to himself.

We were so careful with each other. We had to be. We touched softly in deference to all the ways that we were wounded, working around each other’s bruises and ruined places. This was not our usual sex. It was a delicate, new thing, and as we moved together, I could see Atlanta’s skyline spread out before us in an electric dazzle, as if the city had set itself alight inside the blackness strictly for our pleasure.

He stayed put after. I never wanted anyone to stay, but I did not want him to leave me. Not tonight. He folded himself around me, dozing, but I didn’t sleep. I was thinking of my mother. I was thinking that she had looked down the barrel of her own gun, in those medical scans. When the doctor told her,
Weeks, if you are lucky.

She’d started bringing Hana to me, but she’d come the long way, trying to find a way into a future through our past. She had
counted
on being lucky.

In the darkness, with Birdwine’s arms around me, I knew that Kai was dead. Nothing else would have stopped her from delivering my sister. I’d known her death was probable; I’d assumed it was imminent and inevitable the day I got my check back, and Birdwine’s find at her Austin apartment had confirmed it. But now I knew it in the bones of me.

Kai’s time had already run out, and she would never reach my door, never take my hand, never say some asshole mystic shit like,
Look here, Kali Jai, you have a little sister. I named her after Hanuman, the monkey god, because she is much stronger than she knows.
I was crying quietly, but Birdwine must have felt the shaking in my body. He pulled me closer and I felt his face press into my hair.

Was this what forgiveness looked like on the other end? It was too hard for her to forgive my part in our unraveling because so much of it was her fault. Her whole life was like a loaded gun, left cocked with the safety off in the middle of the table. As a child I had picked it up, and played with it, and cost her Julian. His absence had wrecked us.

She hadn’t changed, though. As soon as she got off parole, she was on the move again, trusting fate to back her plays, no safety nets in place. Even when she learned that she was dying. She should have brought Hana straight to me.

Maybe it was the only way she could bring herself to come, traveling my little sister through the best parts of our shared past. Perhaps she’d needed to remember who we’d been to one another, back when she’d spin me on her feet, and I’d yell,
Dance me, dance me.
When the smell of orange peel and campfire smoke in her dark hair was my greatest comfort. When the two of us were all that was unchanging in the world.

That’s the Kai I wept for, and released.

When I woke up, Henry was smack dab in the middle of Birdwine’s abandoned pillow, floppy and dense with sleep. I could smell coffee brewing downstairs, and I heard the soft clatter of hands on a keyboard, so Birdwine had not gone far. His shirt was still on the floor, a dark green T from a local brewery. It was size XL and soft with age. I pulled it over my head and went to the railing.

Birdwine, barefoot, in only his jeans, was dwarfing my office chair, peering deep into my laptop with a steaming mug beside him on the desk.

“Bring me a cup of that?” I called down.

He looked up at me, and I’d never seen his olive face so pale.

“What?” I said, instantly tense. “I mean for shit’s sake, what now?”

“I think I found her.” He turned to the screen and touched it, then looked back to me. “It’s a police report from four months ago. I think this might be Hana.”

“What?” I said. “How?”

“I wanted to work, but I didn’t want to leave with you asleep. I couldn’t pick up where Julian and I left off, not without my notes from home. I might create a gap and miss something. So I started at the other end. Paula, I think I found her.”

“Where is she?” I asked, my hands so tight on the railing that my nail beds had gone pale.

“Here,” he said, and he waved one hand out at the cityscape. The sun was coming up, drenching the skyline with new light. “I think she’s right here in Atlanta.”

CHAPTER 12

C
andace is sitting on the hood of an ancient, low-slung Chrysler that is parked in front of our place. Mine and Kai’s. I am walking home in air so humid it feels thick with moisture, fresh off the school bus, when I see the shape of her from a long way down the block. Her shape does not belong here. She’s leaning back, braced on her hands, swinging her feet off the front edge of the car to kick the bumper. She’s so foreign, so invasive, that she stands out in brighter colors than any other object in my view. She’s as comfortable as if she had been born right here on this road. As if it were hers, and she belonged here, my ruin on skinny legs.

I am running, now, my body pounding toward her of its own volition. My heavy backpack bangs against my spine. I feel cold terror in my long bones, and violence is uncoiling as I come close and closer. She has a round sucker in her mouth. I see the stick poking out, see how it makes one cheek bulge.

The driver’s-side window scrolls down, and Jeremy, her dead-eyed boyfriend, leans his head out. He calls something to her, pointing down the road at me. She looks at me, and she stops swinging her hand-me-down tennis shoes with all the laces frayed, untied and hanging down in scraggles. She doesn’t try to get up or run or even back away. She waits for me, boneless and accepting.

That’s how I know it’s all already done.

Somewhere a chipmunk is yelling his staccato love song, and the sun is warm on my back. I run at Candace because I cannot go inside. I don’t know how I’ll ever go inside.

Candace looks at me with her bland, blank Candace eyes as I skid to a halt in front of her, dropping my backpack off in a shrug. I’m already slapping her before I hear it thunk onto the asphalt. I keep flailing at her face and head, palms open, but so intense and furious it’s like I have a hundred hands.

Her shoulders hunch, her legs curl up and in, her hands cover her face, but she doesn’t roll away. She bunches up like a hood ornament and waits for me to finish. She doesn’t understand; I’ll never finish.

“Hey, now! Stop, now!” Jeremy is yelling. He scrambles out of the car, but I ignore him and keep whaling away at her. I am crying and she is crying out. Her sucker drops onto the hood and rolls away. I see it as a splash of orange falling away in my peripheral vision. Then Jeremy wraps his arms around me from behind, pinning me to his chest. He pulls me back and off her.

“Stupid—stupid—” I hiss at Candace, too squeezed and clamped by Jeremy to scream it. She shouldn’t be here. They are not allowed to be here. I lash out with my feet, trying to kick her in the face as he drags me backward.

“Don’t hurt her!” Candace calls to him, uncoiling, worried.

We are frozen there for a timeless span, Candace watching with her flossy hair in a muss, her eyes stinging with tears. Jeremy holding me, my breath heaving against his restraining arms. He doesn’t let go until he feels the need to beat her leave my body.

What’s the point? It’s done.

Kai and I have been here less than a month. She came back from prison different, but hasn’t this always been her way? New location, new Kai. Always before, I changed myself to fit the narrative, the yang to her selected, shifting yin. But we are living under our real names now; her parole ties us to our true history. Karen Vauss sings less, tells fewer stories, drinks more wine than any Kai that I have ever known. Karen Vauss is too broken and world-weary to ditch parole and run.

I slacken in Jeremy’s arms, and I think,
I can do that with her.
I can be silent on the sofa and not deviate until Kai does. I can, and I will, because my ever-changing mother is the only presence in my life that has been constant. I wrecked it, sent us both to separate institutions, but I have her back now. I have to let her know that I can stare like a sad-eyed orphan at Marvin, if that’s what she wants. He owns the diner where Kai works. He’s started sending home bacon-stuffed biscuits for me at the end of her shifts, and one morning, soon, I know I’ll wake up and find him in pajamas and bare feet, eating them at our small dining table. I can back her play, if only she forgives me.

I swear this to myself, though I’m scared to see the Kai who’s waiting for me inside. The truth she knows now may have already changed her. Fine. I am making promises to every god who ever walked: I’ll be her match no matter what it is, when she forgives me.

Jeremy steps back from me, and I stand trying to stop crying in the road in front of the car. Candace clambers down off the hood and gets her sucker off the curb, inspecting it. She picks away a piece of grass, a bit of leaf. I can see my handprints all on her pale face.

“You should of took me with you,” she says, as if I could have, even if I’d wanted to. She puts the dirty candy in her mouth. Her eyes are wary and unsorry and something else. Something I can’t read.

“You should get off of my street,” I say, scrubbing my last tears away.

“You don’t own it,” she says, but not like it’s a dig. She’s stating a fact. “You don’t own nothin’ here.”

She’s right. We are renters. Kai and I have the dim basement apartment of a three-unit house that is the biggest eyesore in the neighborhood. The rent is low, especially for Morningside, which is not our kind of place. It’s full of blond people who buy name-brand dogs and care about their lawns. But it’s safe, and the schools are good.

“We got to go,” Jeremy tells Candace, shifting uneasily from foot to foot.

He speaks only to her, as if the second I stopped hurting her, I stopped being relevant. I look only at Candace, too, as if he stopped existing when he took his arms away.

“I was going to call,” I tell her. It’s not true.

I’d hoped that once I was gone, Candace would forget me. She’s such a creature of immediacy, she might well busy herself blackmailing Shar and Karice to be her replacement friends, or swapping Jeremy for someone who had pot as well as candy. If that failed, I’d hope she wouldn’t be able to find me. I told Mrs. Mack and my caseworker and my guardian ad litem that I didn’t want them passing on my contact info, and they said I had that right. But Candace is so good at weaseling and snooping, one big ear pressed to any closed door she comes across, sugar-sticky fingers creeping through other people’s private things. She found me, and she had Jeremy get a car someplace, so she could get to me and ruin me.

I have myself in hand now. I’m done crying in front of her. I don’t even want to hit her more. Candace is a well with no bottom. I can throw endless sorrow or violence at her. I could even throw in love, if I had any to spare. She would take it all, disappear it down her blank, black mouth hole, as if it were the same. None of it would ever fill her. It would hurtle down and down forever, falling through her endless, hungry depths.

“Why are you still here?” I ask her.

Candace gives Jeremy a look, and he walks over and folds himself back into the driver’s seat. He closes the door and sits inside the car, dead eyes front. I watch the window scrolling up, his arm pumping as he works the crank.

Candace says, “We ran away. Jeremy’s driving me to California.”

I peer at him through the windshield, not sure what story this boy thinks he’s in. Romeo and Juliet? Bonnie and Clyde? Maybe slouchy boys like him don’t read, so he can’t see how bad it’s bound to end. Does Jeremy even have a license? I think he might still be fifteen, but I’m not sure. Even if he’s legal to drive, there’s no way he bought this car.

I thump the hood and say, “This is going to land you both in juvie.”

Candace shakes her head. “We stoled it off some Mexicans. Illegals don’t report.”

“I report, Candace,” I remind her, frustrated. It’s been her leverage, so how can she not see the irony? “I dial 911, and I report shit.”

In the wake of this threat, she only sidles closer. “You didn’t take me, but I’d still take you.”

“Take me where?” I ask, uncomprehending. “You mean to California?”

She nods, and I realize she is serious. She’s done her level best to trash my life, and her left ear is bright red from where I boxed it. Now she’s inviting me along on her road trip?

“I hope you die in California,” I say, so cold it barely has inflection. “No, I hope you die on the way and never get there.”

I grab my backpack and sling it back up on my shoulders. I step out of the road, walking away toward the house.

She calls after me, “You should’ve seen your mama when I told her. She slapped me, too.” That stops me. Kai in every incarnation is nonviolent. A word person. A charmer who’ll kiss puppies on the mouth. Candace follows me onto the patchy grass of the rental house’s lawn. “They got sea lions out there, did you know that? They sit up on the same beach as where the people go. I saw it on a video in science class. You can walk right up to them, and they don’t mind it. Don’t you want to see that? Don’t you want to get up close?”

I understand her then. She didn’t tell Kai for revenge or even out of meanness. She did it because I am a Gotmama, and she can never join my tribe. She’s done this thing to move me into hers. I am floored at how much ugliness can be alive inside simple pragmatism.

“I hate sea lions,” I lie. The Kai who lives in this house—Karen Vauss—is sour and insular, so I will be, too, and she will forgive me. I can’t see this new us on a beach.

Candace says, “Well, where I’m going, I’ll see lots of things.”

“I hate seeing lots of things,” I lie. Karen Vauss rarely leaves the house, so I won’t, either.

I walk away, heading around to the side door that leads down into our apartment.

“Hey, you want me to wait?” Candace calls after me, and there is a desperate edge now to her voice. “In case of you need that ride?”

I don’t turn back. I barely hear her, because I will not need that ride. I am thinking to myself,
My mother knows,
and so the worst already happened.

I open the door and look down our dark stairwell.

I could put my game face on and lie. Right now, it is my word against Candace’s. Kai won’t want it to be true, and nothing helps a lie float like a hopeful listener.

I hear the shit car starting with a huge chugging noise. Its muffler is dead or dying. It is the roar of another lost girl on the move, hoping to go far enough to get up close to sea lions. Or past that, into the ocean. Or past that, right off the edge of the world.

I’m so relieved to hear her going that I know I won’t lie. Lies and California are not real. The only real way out is through the truth.

So the unthinkable has happened—Kai knows I broke our lives. Now I have to go downstairs uninvented and see what happens next.

I walk down with a changed future only a few steps before me. It is a wall of white without Kai’s handwriting on it. What if Kai hits me? She’s never hit me. She’s never let a boyfriend hit me, either. If she does, I’ll take it, like Candace did. I have earned it. I’ve earned any acts of penance that she might require, and at the end, I will be forgiven.

I want to be punished, actually. It would feel good to bow to it and say,
This is what should happen now.
When the awful part is done, she will fold me in her arms. She will say,
Baby, baby, we will be okay
. Not today, but one day, when I am fully punished and forgiven, she will say these words to me. I know she will, because us, together, is the driving repetition of our incarnations.

The stairwell is dark, and it is even darker in the large room beyond. It’s a combination den and dining room with a kitchen running in a strip along the back wall. It only has windows on one side. They run in a narrow horizontal line up by the ceiling, and it’s been raining on and off all day. The sun is behind a thick blanket of clouds. I peer into the dim light, seeking her.

I have been mostly happy here, in this small span of time.

She is sitting on the sofa. She’s been drinking wine, the purple Kool-Aid-colored kind that comes in a big jug with a round ring for a handle. I can smell its thin, acidic tang. A juice glass sits on the coffee table, a few bright dregs staining the base of it. She’s holding a cigarette that has burned down to the filter and died without her noticing, a tube of untouched ash perched between her fingers.

I set my backpack down by the front door, and Kai starts at the sound. She sits up straight, and the long ash breaks and crumbles. The big pieces fall and scatter down her front, while some dusty bits drift slower in a gray and weightless haze. Her eyes seek me and find me, tearstained and sweaty from the exertion of beating Candace. Her eyes meet mine.

I think she tried hard not to believe Candace. Maybe she succeeded, but not all the way. She reads the confirmation on my face. The truth has such a power to it, and it’s already been spoken in this room.

There is a beat, a single breath that lasts a century, and then there is nothing for me in her expression. No thought, no feeling. Her eyes roll slowly in their sockets, past me, to look into the darkness of the stairs behind me.

The world’s very tilt changes. I feel it. The whole planet shifts under my feet. The ground is water, and the ocean is the sky. Everything that was once moored now floats. I am drifting, too, helpless in a sea of stories with no current and no wind.

“Mama,” I begin, but she talks over me.

“Oh, hello, baby,” she says. Her eyes have become chips of green rock. Her pale face shines, expressionless, like carved marble glowing in the darkness. “Do you want a piece of fruit?”

“Mama,” I start again. “I’m—”

“There’s bananas, or I think there’s still an apple,” she says, cutting me off again.

She notices the filter in her hand and sets it in the ashtray, which is already bursting with a hundred stubbed-out Camels. When we first moved in, there was a dank green basement smell, mossy and thick. Now, the whole place reeks of stale smoke. She brushes at the scattered ash that’s graying out the colors of her skirt, then gets a new cigarette from the pack and lights up. Her gaze slides over me again, and this time it settles on the kitchen.

“Kai,” I say, urgent.

I want for her to come at me. I need her to. She could slap me, hard and openhanded, as many times as I slapped Candace. More. She could squeeze me tight enough to shove the breath from me. I want her to scream and flail, to be a raging storm. I want her to be anything that has a chance of being over.