The Opposite of Everyone: A Novel

by Joshilyn Jackson

  Victory made my blood run fast, vibrating in my body as I danced barefoot to the pantry. Ye gods and little fishes, how I loved this high. I’d held it in back at the office, but now I wanted to pick up Henry, leap around with him until he was thoroughly alarmed. The musician I was seeing on and off had an out-of-town gig, but this British guy I used to date had texted me. I would text him back, tell him to swing by and help me make a dent in my best bourbon. We’d put this day to bed, hard and proper. I deserved to climb onto this joy, ride its bucking rhythms until I was wrung out and pleased and creamy through and through.

  “Asshole never saw it coming, Henry,” I told my cat, pausing my dance just long enough to scoop the tuna onto a plate.

  When Skopes first came in today, I’d smiled for him. I’d crossed my legs and swung my foot, calling his attention to a skirt that was cut too high to ever see a courtroom. I had on sleek black stilettos, their blood-red soles promising all kinds of carnage. His gaze bypassed their warning to crawl predictably over the bare skin of my legs.

  The conference room table was clotted with bodies: Nick and Daphne, Skopes’s lawyer, a court reporter. To me, they had all been gray shapes at the table, irrelevant and insubstantial. The only true color was the opposing red of Skopes’s power tie, the only light the faint glow of my laptop. It was booted up and open at the table’s foot, facing in to show Skopes and his lawyer my soothing screen saver—tropical fish drifting in and out of a reef.

  I spoke first, chanting the case number to begin the ritual that kicked off every depo. The court reporter swore Skopes in, and I asked him to state his name, his address, his birthdate for the record, giving him bored eyes. Letting his lawyer, Jeremy Anderson, give me bored eyes back.

  As we completed the formalities, I moved the cordless mouse I’d placed beside my stacked papers. On my laptop, the lazy fish screen saver vanished, revealing an image from Birdwine’s slideshow. Skopes stood in the bower of azaleas with his head tipped back and his eyes closed, his mouth yawped open and slack. It was color replacing color, light replacing light. Skopes didn’t notice.

  “Are you much of a gardener, Mr. Skopes?” I asked.

  “A gardener?” he said, and made a scoffing noise. “I have a gardener.”

  “Interesting. Does he tend azaleas?” I asked.

  At the head of the table, the court reporter’s hands paused for a hairline fracture of a second. He’d noticed the slides. Then he gave a shrug so infinitesimal it was practically internal. His hands resumed their rhythmic bobbing on the steno with the world-weariness common to his breed. Daphne Skopes and Nick stared blandly at him, as if shorthand typing was a fascinating sight, just as I had prepped them to do.

  “I don’t know the names of flowers,” Skopes said. These were not the kinds of questions he expected. He had good instincts, and they were telling him that something was amiss.

  “Please get to the point, or move off gardening questions,” his lawyer said.

  “Sure,” I said to Anderson. Then, purely to keep a rhythm, I asked Skopes, “Where did you go to college?”

  “Vanderbilt,” Skopes said.

  “And did you join a fraternity at Vanderbilt?”

  The slideshow finally caught Anderson’s attention. He made a faint, choked noise.

  “Do you not want me to answer that?” Skopes asked, turning to his lawyer. He saw Anderson’s face. Followed his line of vision.

  The room got very quiet.

  The slide changed.

  “Did you join a fraternity at Vanderbilt?” I repeated, as if nothing were happening. As if Skopes’s ugliest self weren’t on display here, in front of the wife he had bought for similar purposes, but with more socially acceptable currency.

  “You absolute bitch,” said Bryan Skopes in a flat voice.

  I wasn’t sure if he meant me, or Daphne, or the girl his eyes were on. The very young one, with magenta hair and baby cheeks. The one on her knees.

  The picture changed again. He was staring at it, at himself, trying to see a way around all that this was going to cost him.

  “You absolute bitch,” Skopes repeated, his voice still toneless, but now his face was washed with red.

  I kept my own face blank, perused the papers in front of me. “I’m not familiar with a fraternity called You Absolute Bitch. Would that be Psi Alpha Beta?”

  Skopes stood up. His forehead was beginning to look sweaty. I could see him measuring how these photos might play to a much larger audience. To his Rotary Club. His church. His father. The neglected daughters he believed he loved, just as he believed that he was a good person. These pictures told a truer story, and for this moment, he was the one tasting helplessness. He was flayed open, all his inner ugliness exposed to the air.

  “Give her what she wants,” he said. Anderson tried to speak, but Skopes cut him off. “Just give her what she wants.”

  My favorite words.

  Skopes thought he was saying them to his lawyer, or perhaps even to Daphne. He was wrong. Those words belonged to me.

  After today, it would devolve into paperwork. Nick and I would do a long billable dance with Jeremy Anderson, slicing up the fat financial pie. That was nice and all, but my meat was in this moment. This perfect, unrepeated moment when Skopes was exposed. When all the stories that he told himself were washed away, and he saw himself, true.

  Now I paused to set the dish of tuna on the floor. Henry wolfed at it. I grabbed the phone to text the Brit, and there, sticking out of the stack of mail, was the corner of a thick cream-colored envelope. I pulled it out, and saw my name and my return address engraved in burnt brown. Kai’s PO box in Texas was written in my spider-scrawl. It was the very one I’d tossed into my outbox in the last hour of Valentine’s Day. Now it had three red words in my mother’s handwriting, slanting across the front.

  Return to Sender.

  All thought stopped. All breath. My victory went bang out of my head. All my plans for the night went, too. My cat and my own hungers—gone. I couldn’t even hear the music.

  Some time passed. Maybe half a minute, maybe a few seconds. I couldn’t tell.

  This close, I could hear Henry making a low, overloud grumble in his chest that he felt as only a vibration. I heard him smacking up tuna. I turned the envelope over and saw the flap was sealed with Scotch tape. I hadn’t sent it that way.

  My hands felt swollen and clumsy. They trembled so violently that I could barely get it open.

  Inside, I found my check. She’d written VOID in the same red pen across the front.

  Finally, a different answer. But why now? I’d sent a check every month for almost sixteen years, repeating its endless question. I’d sent tiny checks while I worked my way through junior college up in Indiana. One week, I sent five dollars, and it wiped out my account. They got a little bigger when I got a full ride to Notre Dame and then Emory Law, larger still after I graduated and established my career. One hundred and eighty-some-odd checks had made their way from me to Kai over the years, one by one, each asking, Are we even?

  Her answer was to cash them. Without fail, even though my mother moved often and on the fly. Once or twice a year I’d get a change of address card, impersonal and cheery, shifting her mail from one PO box to a new one in another city. She always made sure to collect my check and cash it, though.

  The voided check trembled in my fingers. I turned it in my hands, and saw more words on the back in my mother’s left-leaning hand:

  No, thank you. I have enough money to last me the rest of my life.

  That was a joke. The cancer got everywhere before I noticed, so “the rest” will be quite short. Weeks, if I am lucky. 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. You know how Karma works.

  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. The
re 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 begr
udge 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.