The Opposite of Everyone: A Novel (29 page)

I step into her line of vision, but it is as if I am a moving spot of Teflon. Her gaze slides away, unable to pause or stick. She gets up, weaves her way to the stripe of kitchen on the back wall, and starts cutting up the apple for me.

I don’t remember my mother ever looking straight at me again.

I’m sure she must have. There had to be times when, by sheer chance, her gaze and my body intersected. It was not a large apartment. But in my memory, her eyes wore out the air around me, year after relentless year. To an outside observer, I doubt that much would have changed, but I knew. I’d been locked outside her story, and the longer I stayed out, the more guilt and fury worked their way under my skin like backward shrapnel, slow-digging their way deep into the meat of me.

So I remade myself into a creature built to plague her. Paula the slut, the scrapper, the petty criminal, the rebel. I’d come home at four
A.M.
, stinking of boy and beer, and still she looked just past me. She never told me to be any different, the jagged scrape of a thousand guilt and fury slivers rasping on my bones became background music, an ever-present hum. Once I moved to Indiana, I remade myself again: the woman who made good to spite her mother. I let my checks tell that tale for me. The amount on them growing larger with the years, but asking the same angry question. Six months ago, she finally answered:
I am going on a journey, Kali. I am going back to my beginning; death is not the end. You will be the end. We will meet again, and there will be new stories.

Classic, cryptic Kai, speaking just off point, her words sliding over me and past me like her gaze. Why couldn’t she say,
Hey, sorry, but I’m dying, and I’m coming to Atlanta. Do you want your little sister?

Now the only new story I had was the four-month-old police report that pinged on Birdwine’s radar. In it, an ancient eyesore of a Buick with a crumpled hood and a long scraped side came driving in wild loops through Morningside. One good wife of the neighborhood saw the sketchy car pass by, out of place on her street. She also clocked a kid in the backseat, and noted how erratically the female driver wove from curb to curb. She did nothing. Not until the second time it passed, and she worried that her neighborhood was being cased.
Then
she called the cops.

A cruiser was dispatched, but by the time it arrived, the Buick had already wibbled off the road and banged into an evergreen in some upstanding citizen’s front yard. The accident happened two blocks down from the lot where our old apartment used to be. If Kai was looking for it as the last stop on her Past Lives Tour, she was out of luck. The whole house had been torn down, and a faux craftsman with three thousand square feet of living space had been crammed onto the lot.

The driver—Karen Porter from New Orleans, according to her ID—was groggy and disoriented. She’d whanged her head against the steering wheel. She and her child were taken by ambulance to Grady Hospital, where they ascertained that the concussion was the least of her problems. She was in the end stages of lung cancer that had spread all through her—brain, bones, and beyond. The child was treated for a sprained wrist and released to DFCS. The woman remained, drifting in and out of consciousness with limited lucidity. She died six days later.

I’d accepted that Kai was dead. I’d wept and wept in Birdwine’s arms as we stared out at my city’s skyline. But if this woman was Kai, then my mother had already been cremated; Adult Protective Services, unable to locate a living relative, had done it at the end of May.

That info came from Birdwine; he’d followed up on the woman while I tried to get a bead on the kid. He thought DFCS would be more open to inquiries about a ten-year-old girl-child from me. I was a female blood relative and upstanding member of the bar, while he was a fired former policeman, emphasis on
man,
with less than a week sober. Fair enough.

I spent the better part of two business days poking my way through endless automated menus, only to get a person who would transfer me to another person, who inevitably sent me back into the menu or, if I lucked out, into a voicemail. I recorded a honey-throated message whenever I got the option, building up a solid legion of inquiries.

Julian, new to red tape, got frustrated fast. He’d quit at the suburban Mellow Mushroom and was both interning for me and looking for another job in midtown. He’d completed his transfer application to Georgia State and was sending me endless links to real estate listings in good school zones that had yards and at least two bedrooms. They all had carriage houses or basement apartments, too. The implication was I’d have a brotherly built-in renter, close enough to help with after-school care. He wanted the both of us to storm DFCS in person, locked and loaded.

I told him to stand down. I stayed sugar-sweet and patient, even when I got disconnected after a solid half hour spent on hold. I was casting a wide but very gentle net. If this was Hana—and I hoped it was—I wanted her caseworker already thinking well of us, predisposed to see us as an asset. I promised him if no one got back to us by Monday morning, I’d take the afternoon off. We’d go to the DFCS offices and run a good cop/bad cop, pitching tents and hissy fits as needed, hurling lawsuit threats and bribes around, whatever it took, but to let me try the sweet road first.

It was almost lunchtime on Friday when Verona poked her head into my office. She looked spooked.

“It’s a woman from Social Services,” she said, eyes wide.

She knew how important this call was—the whole firm did. I’d invited Nick out for a drink on Wednesday, and I’d leveled with him about all that had gone down with my family situation in the last half year. Nick was more than forgiving; he was downright supportive. As well he should be. We went way back, and I’d literally taken a beating—almost a bullet—for the firm. It didn’t hurt that
Winkley v. Winkley
was unfolding beautifully, both in terms of the settlement itself and the good publicity. Oakleigh adored my sorry ass; I’d turned her life into a big fat bowl of roses. She was an asshole, sure, but she was
my
asshole, and Nick all but glowed, rhapsodizing about the referrals she’d give her spoiled, rich friends when it came time for their inevitable divorces.

As a bonus, Nick was an incorrigible gossip, so I’d only had to plop my fresh and steaming guts out on a table once. The tremble in Verona’s voice as she told me who was on the phone was testament to how fast and thoroughly he’d spread the word.

I hit Save on the motion I was writing and set my laptop aside, saying, “Super, put the call through.”

“No, not on the phone,” Verona told me in a hushed, dramatic whisper. “There’s a woman here. Right here. In the lobby. Now.”

I felt the little hairs on the back of my neck rise up. I knew enough about government agencies to guess this wasn’t usual. I kept my face neutral, though, and said, “Super, send her back,” with the same inflection I’d used when I’d thought it was a call. I didn’t want to encourage Verona, who was acting as if this were reality TV and she’d bagged a juicy cameo. Ye gods, these millennials.

“She doesn’t have an appointment,” Verona said. “I offered her some coffee, and I ran to tell you.”

“It’s fine,” I said. “Just bring her here, then go push back my conference call.”

I came out from behind my desk while I was waiting and took a quick peek in the outsize mirror hung behind the sofa. My hair was sleek, and I hadn’t eaten off my lipstick. I looked professional, and by the time Verona returned, I also looked pleasant and calm. Relaxed mouth, eyebrows down, easy in the shoulders.

“Sharon Watson here to see you,” Verona said, ushering in an attractive black woman, heavyset and tall, about my age.

I hadn’t left anyone of that name a voicemail. Curiouser and curiouser. Ms. Watson wore an inexpensive navy suit and a string of pearls that were too large to be anything but costume. She had on pearlized earrings, too, flat and wide like silver dollars. Her navy pumps were sensible but flattering, much like her short haircut.

“Thanks, Verona,” I said, dismissively enough to be definitive. She backed out, slowly. I waited until my door closed all the way before I stepped toward the woman with my hand out. “Hello, I’m Paula Vauss.”

She took it, saying, “Oh, I know who you are. And you know me.”

I didn’t, though. Not until she smiled at me. Her mouth stretched wide in her pretty face, showing me a huge wall of slightly overlapping teeth. Then I knew her.

“Hello, Shar,” I said, cool as I could manage it. Twenty years older, with a different last name, but it was Shar. She was my past, rising around me, and she was also impossibly here and now. She was exactly herself, but taller, stouter, and wearing braces on her big teeth, the transparent kind. They hadn’t quite finished their job yet, but that didn’t stop her from grinning wide, enjoying my shock. I had to work hard to make my voice not tremble as I asked, “You’re with DFCS?”

“Yes. A lot of us end up doing social work,” she said. I wasn’t sure who
us
was. She must have seen it on my face because she clarified. “Former foster kids. When the system works, we tend to want to pay it back.” She gave me a long, scraping look, from my blowout to my bitch heels, and then cast another, even louder speaking glance around my office. She put those big teeth back on full display and added, “Not you, though, huh.”

I felt my own smile starting to go sharky. I hadn’t seen Shar since she was thirteen years old, but she was still an instigator.

I resisted her bait. I wasn’t going to throw down with my pro bono work, metaphorically unzipping and then calling for a ruler so we could measure our respective virtues. Not only because I would surely lose against a woman whose life’s work was in Social Services. It was more important to understand why she had come here; I thought she’d taken the potshot to get a rise or a feel for me, so her visit had to do with Hana. This could not be a simple case of auld lang syne. Not with this timing, and the Shar I remembered had not been remotely sentimental.

I kept my voice sweet and said, “Apparently not. Please, sit down.” I waved her to the sofa instead of the client chairs, and I took a seat on it beside her. I didn’t want the desk between us, which could read as adversarial or patronizing. She sat very straight, but I thought that was due to good posture, not a fighting stance. I was having trouble reading her. Hell, I was having a little trouble processing, period. “Your last name is changed. It used to be . . .”

“Roberson,” she said.

“That’s right. So you got married?”

“I sure did.” Shar had a satchel purse with her, large enough to double as a briefcase. She’d dropped it by her feet when she sat down. Now she fished her phone out of a side pocket and pulled up a picture to show me. In it she stood arm in arm with a tall, broad-faced black man with a mustache and a comfortable belly. Three boys of varying sizes clustered around them. “You married, Paula?”

“Nope. Never married, no kids,” I said. I couldn’t tell if this was another gauntlet, but it was not an arena where I’d ever felt competitive.

“Well, looks like you’re doing all right, in your own way,” she said, chuckling.

That threw me. It sounded good-humored—almost kind—and I was still looking for her angle. The last time our paths had crossed, we had been mortal enemies. Of course, we had also been children.

“Are you here about my phone calls?” I asked. But that was too indirect. “Are you here about my sister, I mean. I don’t remember leaving you a message.”

“Well, I’m about the only one in Fulton County who hasn’t heard from you. You left a lot of messages,” she said. “I’m a supervisor now, not a caseworker, but you’re a former foster kid, trying to find a younger sibling in the system. You know that’s going to rate high as watercooler talk. Once I heard your name, I had to see if you were the same Paula I remembered, even though the case isn’t under my jurisdiction. I found your picture on your firm’s website. I knew it was you like that.” She snapped her fingers. “You got even taller, but your face is exactly the same. I thought, Look at that! Another one of Mrs. Mack’s girlies, making good.”

She was chatting at me as if this were a social call. Perhaps this was the necessary small talk people did before they got down to it? Nick was so much better at this part. It was not my bailiwick, but I gave it my best try.

“I remember that. Mrs. Mack calling us her girlies,” I said.

“She was good to me,” Shar said. “I don’t think you knew her like I did. You had a mama coming for you, and she didn’t try to get in between that. She was different with us on the adoption track. Especially the ones like me—I’d been suspended three times for fighting. Not like I had sets of perfect parents lining up to bid. She kept up with me even after I aged out. She was my oldest son’s godmother, before she passed.”

“Oh. I’m sorry for your loss. It sounds like she was lovely to you,” I said, awkward and formal. Shar still looked expectant, maybe wanting the nutshelled version of my life in return, post–foster care. Instead I asked another question. “You keep up with anybody else, from back in those old days?” As I spoke I heard how far I’d sunk into the rhythms of her speech.
You keep up,
without the word
do
at the front. That wasn’t how I talked now.

I wondered if my presence was pushing her diction back in time as well. Her accent was on the spectrum common to professional women of any race here in Atlanta, similar to mine, but this was a matter of sentence structure. The rhythm of her story was a song straight out of the time we’d spent together. Back when we were Mrs. Mack’s girlies, as Shar had styled us.

“Me and Kim stayed tight,” Shar said. “She had a kid when she was young. A girl. Twelve now, and a pistol. Kim got married to a good man, though, a couple years back. They have a baby boy. He’s the fattest little thing. So cute. Looks like he’s made out of pudding. Got all those little knee fats and elbow fats. Makes me miss those baby days. Not enough to go back to them, mind you.”