The Opposite of Everyone: A Novel (4 page)

It was more than a note. It was an epitaph. Or a poem. Or a threat. That was all I knew at first read.

I read it again, and saw what it did not contain. There was no absolution.

In fact, the whole thing seemed designed to make me angry. I hated cryptic missives, and mystic-ness, and condescension. Of course I damn well knew how karma worked, but I did not believe in it. I didn’t believe in reincarnation, either, or fate, or that time was any kind of wheel, and she knew it.

If I took all that crap away, I understood what she was saying. That my debt transcended even death. Hers and mine. We could both die and rot to dust, and my dust would still owe hers.

What I couldn’t understand was this: a thousand miles away from me, in Texas, my mother was dying.

This was information that I couldn’t process.

“My mother’s dying,” I told the cat, trying out the words. They were ashy and fine in my mouth, but I tasted truth in them.

Hearing it out loud, I still felt nothing. I felt so much nothing, swelling black and dense inside of me, that I couldn’t even blink. My eyes dried and itched. Time stretched into something endless.

A solid week had passed while my check worked its way to Texas and back. Kai might already be dead.

At that thought, a raw ease came into my shoulders, and at the same time, I had the gap-tooth, ugly feel of something missing, the urge to jam my tongue into the hole. My insides jangled at the dissonance. If she was dead, I didn’t belong to anyone but Henry.

The note took up the whole back of the check, but I noticed more tiny letters, running sideways up the margin. My numb fingers turned the little paper, and my dry eyes read. Eight more words were squeezed against the edge, clearly the last thing she’d written to me. Perhaps the last thing she’d write to me, ever:

(Obviously I don’t want you to come here)

My mother was dying, and she didn’t want me at her bedside.

“I’m fine with that,” I told her, or maybe I was telling Henry.

I was oddly glad then that my cat was deaf and couldn’t hear me saying this true and ugly thing. From far away I heard my own voice laughing because that was so stupid. Did I think a hearing cat would have understood the English? I laughed, and Kai was still dying, telling me not to come, and then I stopped laughing, because my body had stopped breathing.

Her absence coiled itself around my chest, my neck. It was pinching all my airways closed. I felt my ribs folding, squeezing inward to crush at my heart. My arm went numb, and I thought, very calm,
I’m having a heart attack
.

I lurched to grab my phone. My thick-fingered hand fumbled it and I watched it fall away. I noted with dry interest the spiderweb created as the screen cracked. I wasn’t scared. I was something worse than scared. I was blue and turning bluer. I was drowning in dry air.

Then I was on my knees, scrabbling to retrieve my broken phone. I got the number pad to come up, and for the second time in my life, I found myself dialing 911. To dial it again now was such black irony, and I had no faith that this call could save me.

I could feel my mother’s cord rewrapping my throat, leaching the living color from my skin. I slipped down sideways to the floor. My heart flopped and skipped. My arms and now my legs were losing all sensation. I could barely hear the woman on my phone asking, “What is your emergency?”

I wanted to tell her I was having a heart attack. I wanted to ask for an ambulance. But I couldn’t answer. Not that question. The last time I’d answered it, I’d begun the long, long process of killing my own mother. A process which was only ending now.

The voice inside my phone was talking louder now, calm and firm. “Hello? Can you speak? What’s the nature of your emergency?”

I had no air to answer. I didn’t even try. I pushed the phone away. It slid across the sleek wood floor, the disembodied voice inside still calling out. I turned away, turned toward the blackness, and there was karma, after all. I let everything that I deserved come at me. I let it come, at last.

CHAPTER 2

I
measure the years of my childhood by my mother’s boyfriends: Joe, a murky blond fellow in my baby memories of Alabama. Then Eddie. Tick. Anthony. Hervé. Dwayne. Rhonda. Marvin. Each knows a different Kai with a different last name and a different history, but she always keeps her story straight.

I pick up who I am on the fly, eavesdropping. Eddie the yoga teacher believes my father was a Tibetan monk who lifted up his saffron robes and broke all his vows for Kai, just once. My copper-colored skin is a shade too dark for Tick the skinhead, and though I have Kai’s light green eyes, they are set disturbingly aslant. My mother is long and pale—very beautiful, if you’re into the Irish thing. Tick is. Enough to pretend that he believes my dad was an Italian count she met while hitchhiking through Europe. Kai tells Anthony my dad was a blackanese yoga teacher, and shows him a picture of Eddie. Kai had me so young that Hervé asks if I’m her little sister. We go with it, and I get used to saying Kai instead of Mama.

Man after man rests his head in her lap and listens, rapt, as she spins us a new history. We are never from Alabama. Her parents are never their sour and earnest selves, one managing a hardware store, one hounding the bereaved with an endless stream of church-lady casseroles. We are better than the truth. Kai makes us better, changing us to orphans fleeing tragedy or runaways escaping a dark past.

Even my bedtime stories are spectacular: Old South folklore dipped in Hindu poetry and god tales. It is an odder alliance than a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup—
Oh no! You got your slutty blue god in my Bre’r rabbit! No, you got your racist rabbit in my sex god
—but she makes it true. On campfire nights, she blends in chunks of the Stephen King and Edgar Allan Poe books that she’s read to tatters.

As I get older, I try to parse my history, to separate what she says from what I see. Impossible. My story is a Frankenstein’s monster made of stolen parts, many too small to be sourced, the original morals melded or cut away entirely. Every year or so, she reincarnates, whole, and makes me a fresh self, too. The only constant in my childhood is us. We cling together through our every incarnation.

Now, somewhere out in Texas, she is dead.
Weeks, if I am lucky,
her note said. Kai has always been quite lucky—but five months have passed. By now there is no new Kai to be invented, no voice to tell me all the lives she lived while we were estranged. There is only silence and absence.

Small wonder, then, that yet another panic attack hit me when I saw my mother’s eyes. They were looking right at me, just outside my office building.

At first, all I saw was a white guy, tall and very young, politely opening the door for me. I looked up to say thank you, and our eyes met. His were spring green, crescent shaped, thickly lashed. My mother’s eyes, set deep in the face of a stranger.

They were so like hers. Identical. I had a hideous vision of this boy burrowing his way into the ground like a long, pale worm. I saw his eyeless face pushing itself down deep under the loam to find her missing body. I heard the Lego click as he pressed her stolen eyes into his gaping sockets.

My heartbeat jacked. I breathed in sharply and smelled campfire popcorn, patchouli, and hashish. I swayed and put one hand on the frame, dizzy, and then, dammit, dammit, it was happening again. It was as if Kai’s ghost had been waiting to ambush me in my office building’s sleek and modern lobby, and I’d sucked a wisp of her right up my nose.

The kid’s upsetting eyes widened, concerned, and he grasped my arm as if I were his papery frail auntie. He marched me to one of the ice-white benches near the elevator bay and plopped me down onto the upholstery. I leaned my elbows on my knees and lowered my head, trying to get air into my screwed-shut lungs.

This kid was nothing to do with me. He was a stranger in my office building’s lobby who happened to have a pair of spring-green eyes, but my stupid heart kept thundering around my chest cavity. I could feel it throbbing in my lips and ears and fingers.

It pissed me off. Granted, a person is allowed an episode or two when her mother dies, even if her mother had the parenting skills of your average feral cat. The firemen who responded to my silent 911 call had been very understanding. I didn’t begrudge myself the three more panic attacks I had in February and March—but they should have tapered off in April. They should have stopped altogether before the summer came. Instead, they’d escalated, becoming more frequent and more easily triggered. Now here I was, panicking in July, when I should have already finished up whatever stage four was and hit acceptance.

“Are you okay?” the boy asked. He was a long, narrow object with a prominent Adam’s apple and a mop of honey-brown curls.

“I’m fine,” I said.

I breathed in through my nose, counting slowly to four; when the attacks kept happening, I’d Googled what to do. I held the air in for the recommended two count. Just this weekend I’d gone booth surfing at an arts fest, and I’d lost my crap when I saw a rack of bright, Kai-style silk wrap skirts billowing in the wind. Not three days later, these crescent-shaped eyes had me freaking out like it was my new hobby.

Being pissed about it wasn’t helping me calm down. I began the slow four-count exhale, one hand pressing my heart as if I was trying to reset it to its regular, calm beating.

The kid fished in the pocket of his over-shiny khaki pants and came out with a mini Hershey bar, the paper wrapper crinkled and its corners blunted by age. He held it out to me. I blinked at it.

“I always carry them. It’s a habit,” he said. “My mom was diabetic.”

“I don’t have diabetes,” I said, snappier than I would have liked. I was thirty-five, and this kid was somewhere in his early twenties. That hardly put me into sickly mother territory. Then I wished I hadn’t said it at all, because what was the follow-up?
It’s not diabetes—I’m just having a psychotic episode
. I took the candy from his soft, white paw and said, “I skipped lunch.”

It wasn’t the whole truth, but it was true. I unwrapped the Hershey bar and crammed it in my mouth. It was unpleasantly warm from the kid’s pocket.

“Thank you. I’m fine now,” I said, trying not to drool the melting chocolate down my front. My throat was so clamped I could barely get air down it, much less this waxy candy. He nodded, but he didn’t leave. The kid’s accent was light, but he was definitely southern; there was no stopping him from doing chivalry.

According to Google, I was supposed to go lie down someplace quiet, do the breathing thing, and imagine sunrise or a beach. I didn’t have time right now; an A-list client was quitting us. Nick had sent a frantic text a good half hour ago, asking me why the hell I wasn’t in the meeting.

I’d forgotten. I’d gone haring off instead to the DeKalb County Jail, chasing yet another pro bono criminal case. The potential client was female, very young, and guilty mostly of falling in love with a felon. Now she wouldn’t testify against him, and the DA was going to nail her to the wall. I’d been helping girls like this, two a year, ever since I’d passed the bar. Now I’d done five since February, back to back, neglecting my own practice. They were practically the only things I had been doing. There was no way I could take this new case on, but I’d texted the potential client’s name to Birdwine anyway, asking him to dig up info on my own dime.

I’d availed myself of plenty of free therapy back when I was in school at Notre Dame and Emory, so I didn’t need to peruse the stack of old
Psychology Today
s at my dentist’s office to know why I was doing it. These girls were living incarnations of my mother. Too bad understanding the roots of my compulsion didn’t stop me from having it, or from taking an early lunch hour and driving off to meet with yet another one. I’d forgotten my promise to sit in on Nick’s meeting. I’d parked by the jail, checked my phone, and seen the string of panicked texts he’d sent me while I was in transit.

I’d roared back toward midtown, tearing a hole in Atlanta traffic and almost murdering a tottery pedestrian, yelling at my phone to dial Nick. He’d answered, leaving the client in Catherine’s soothing hands long enough to give me a fraught, unhappy update.

Last quarter had been low, mostly thanks to me, since Nick and Catherine were billing as reliably as ever. This client we were losing was a BANK case. If the BANK walked, this quarter would dip even lower. I didn’t have time for another pro bono, much less a haunting or a breakdown or any other flavor of dead-mother BS.

Now the kid sank down beside me on the bench, waiting for me to either need an ambulance or be fine. His cheap pants and generic navy sports coat were out of place in our upscale lobby, but his body language was right. His spine was hunched, his brow was furrowed, and he worried a blue folder back and forth between his hands. Our small midtown building housed mostly dentists, therapists, and lawyers, so everyone who came here looked about this happy. Maybe his diabetic mom had good insurance, the kind that let him pay midtown prices to fix his cavities or his depression.

I tried another Google-approved deep breath, mentally consigning the kid to the void, along with pro bono cases and all damnable silk skirts. I had to focus. I needed to butter and bedazzle our BANK client back into our stable. I had to explain the missed meeting without admitting I’d wasted yet another billable hour driving toward yet another destitute criminal. Then, assuming I got to six
P.M.
without running into a henna tattoo or a beaded headband and freaking out, I’d go home. I’d scrub this day off my hide in a boiling shower. Maybe work some sudoku with Henry trying to lie down across my puzzle book.

Those images worked for me better than the recommended beaches. The worst of it seemed over. My heart was banging away, but I could no longer feel it in my eyeballs, and the dizziness was gone. I even got the candy to go down, though it left my mouth feeling dingy and coated.

I stood up, and the kid rose, too, turning to face me. His eyes dropped in that young man’s way that seemed almost inadvertent, sneaking a fast glance down my body. He immediately straightened his spine, making himself taller than me, and when his disconcerting eyes came back to my face, damned if he didn’t smile at me all hopeful. It was adorable, how fast he moved me out of the diabetic-mother category once I was on my feet. I had to smile back, though I’d pretty much been dead from the neck down for the last five months. Even if I had been on my game, this kid wasn’t in my league. He was cute, but he was practically a fetus. Also, it was a sucker bet that my suit was worth more than his car.

He knew it, too. He turned pink all the way to his ear tips and grinned, busted. Then he ducked his head and lifted one shoulder in a “worth a shot” shrug I couldn’t help but find engaging.

“Thanks for your help,” I said. “I’m fine now.”

“My pleasure,” he said.

I headed for the elevator bay, and he followed in my wake. My heart was still jangling, but I was on the back side of it, and I had to get upstairs. The BANK client, Oakleigh Winkley, was fat with money, but she wasn’t fat with much else. The more money fat, the less fat clients have of any other kind. In particular, I would never say,
Here comes Oakleigh Winkley, fat with patience.

I pressed the call button and the kid reached out and pressed it, too, three or four times.

“Oh, sorry. It’s just, it makes the elevator come faster, if you press it more,” he said, so earnest it took me a second to realize he was being funny. He didn’t talk like someone from Atlanta proper, though his southern accent was faint enough to peg him as suburban, not rural. “Hey, do you work here?” he asked, scanning the directory between the elevators. “Do you know where I can find Cartwright, Doyle, and Vauss?”

He said my last name wrong, as if it rhymed with house instead of loss.

“I own a good piece of it. You must be here to see one of my partners.” I’d already missed my only meeting today, unless I counted Birdwine. So there was that small mercy. The kid’s botched flirt had been charming, but I didn’t want to sit down and stare into his Kai-style crescent eyes across my desk.

“Oh, cool,” he said. “I’m Julian Bouchard?”

He said it like a question, as if he was wondering if I’d heard of him. I shook my head—I hadn’t—and was about to extend a hand and introduce myself when the elevator dinged and the doors slid open.

He stepped back, saying, “After you,” like a proper baby gentleman.

I got on and pressed the button, telling him, “We’re up on seven.”

Julian ducked his head in that engaging doglike way again and turned to face the closing doors. “Thank you.”

He looked too young to be married, much less divorcing, very much less able to pay our rates. His loafers had a man-made upper. We kicked kids like this gently down the food chain to cheaper lawyers, ones who specialized in dividing up hand-me-down furniture and debt.

The elevator dinged our floor, and as the doors slid open, I saw I’d caught our BANK, just barely. Oakleigh was in mid-storm-out. She clocked our human presence, but didn’t look up from her phone long enough to recognize me. She jabbed at the screen, her color very high, waiting for the breathing shapes in the elevator to get out of her way.

The very thought of dealing with this much pissed-off princess made me press my palm against my jangling heart again. I was filled with a sudden longing to let the doors slide closed between us before she saw me. I could ride back down to six. There was an office full of shrinks one floor down, the good kind that could write prescriptions. Surely there was a pill that could stop little pieces of dead mother from manifesting during work hours.

Julian waited for me to step out first, like a mannerly, pale duckling, fully imprinted and waiting to follow.

“This is my client,” I said to him, quick and sotto voce. “Head left, and we’re at the end.”

He opened his mouth to say something, but I was already stepping out, blocking Oakleigh’s path and readying a sharky smile. She tried to sidestep, still engrossed with her phone. I matched her, and her gaze finally fixed on me long enough to realize who I was.