The Opposite of Everyone: A Novel

by Joshilyn Jackson

  Here in the West, Kai has told me many times, we think of Kali as a dark goddess. But the name I gave you—Kali Jai—it literally means “Hail to the Mother.”

  I let her tow me toward the door as she sings my theme song in her fat, low voice, and it occurs to me that even if I discount the blue skin and the long red tongue, the skirt of human hands and all the weaponry, it’s still a strange damn name to give your baby. Hail to the Mother?

  Kai is the mother. The translation of my given name is actually something close to “Yay for Kai.”

  I glance over my shoulder as Kai fumbles open the back door. The deer in the kudzu have wound themselves all the way around us. The movement in the leaves is now enough to draw Dwayne’s attention.

  “Hey, hush there a sec, babe,” he says. He is too late.

  They come out of the blue darkness in a swarm. I am surprised by how many of them there are, how fast they move. They are large, real men, bulky in their vests. I can’t tell what is them and what is only the moving dark around them. Their long, black-clad arms are made longer by the guns they hold, and they yell in an untidy chorus, telling us to be still, to get down, to be on the ground.

  My heart swells. I am frozen, both jubilant and sick with dizzy terror. I willed them to come, and they did. I willed a way out, and the way came creeping up from behind us, through the woods, past the rusty shed. They came as Kai sang, “Jai Kali, Jai Kalika!” as if my own name was the signal.

  We will have to move, now. I have a vague idea that the police get to keep crime houses for themselves. Too bad on Dwayne, but River’s dad took a bust for pot, and he only got six months. Dwayne’s done two years before, for B and E, and before that he did some stints in juvie. Six months is nothing—but it’s very long in Kai time. She’s rarely single for half that, and by the time he’s out, we’ll be other people and long gone.

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa!” Dwayne is yelling, his hands up.

  “Get down,” yells the closest cop.

  Dwayne is sliding off the sofa to the ground, but Kai clutches me and screams something so close to my ear that the word is lost in the outsize, blasting sound of it. She jerks me backward, into the house. Outside I hear the cops yelling in protest. She locks the door, then runs for the master bedroom, pulling me along.

  “Stop,” I say, but she keeps pulling.

  This isn’t how it’s supposed to go. Tick got arrested once in the Dairy Queen, and that was the end of Kai and Tick. When the cops came in, she put her hands flat on the table, one on each side of her Peanut Buster Parfait.

  She said, “Keep still, they don’t want us,” to me, and she was right.

  But now she slams the bedroom door and locks it. She runs to the bedside table and pulls the stash of Hervé’s pills out of the drawer. I forgot about the pills she stole, still tucked in her bedside table. Her fingerprints are all over the Baggie.

  “I don’t think you should—” I say, but she’s already running for the bathroom.

  I stand rooted, listening to a fearsome banging, then a crash; someone has kicked down the back door. In the bathroom, I hear the toilet flushing. Kai is going to get in trouble. I run to the window. It is dark in here, but light has flooded the back porch, and I can see Dwayne has been rolled to his belly. His hands are bound in silver. I hear my black army crashing around inside the house, men moving from room to room, yelling “Clear!” in firm, decisive voices.

  The toilet is flushing again, and I hear Kai cussing at it. I hear wood splintering, and I back up, away from the window, away from the locked door. I press myself against the wall. Kai runs out of the bathroom to me, wraps her arm around me.

  “It’s okay,” she says, but it isn’t.

  The door is forced open. Men run at us, armed and yelling. Now hands are pulling us apart. A man shoves Kai to the ground, and this is wrong. I am being pulled back, away from my mother. I resist, dig in my heels, and I find myself lifted. I become a podgy sack of thrashing, mad potatoes.

  They are doing it wrong. When I biked down to the Dandy Mart and called 911 from the pay phone, I told the operator to leave us out of it. What is your emergency? she asked, and I told her the emergency was Dwayne. My mom’s new boyfriend grows so much pot. Thirty-two Laraby Lane, in Paulding. He tends it, and he sells it for his job. Him, not us. My mom and me only just moved here. These men don’t seem to know that. They only know Kai ran when they said stop. As I am carried bodily from the room, I see my mother crying. She is being handcuffed, and I did this. I made this be.

  I yell “No! No!” to an army that is by all rights mine, but the army doesn’t listen. They don’t know I was named for the blue-skinned goddess of destruction. They don’t know I am the force that set them into motion. No one knows. They see only the shortest girl in sixth grade, a roly-poly, too small to be taken seriously.

  “Baby?” Kai is yelling. She does not know, either. “Don’t worry. Just go with them. Baby? It’s okay.”

  I go limp and am toted off to my own roach spray–smelling bedroom. It is not okay. I called them, and now they are taking my mother. I have split the planet called Me and Kai in two, when I only ever wanted a way out of here, for both of us, together.

  A lady policeman sits with me, waiting for DFCS. At eleven, I don’t understand the difference between River’s dad, who had pet plants named Lydia and Jilly, and Dwayne, a longtime petty criminal with a basement greenhouse full of seedlings and mature plants growing tall back in our woods.

  The yard outside my window is a sea of red and blue lights. I called them, and they came and took my mother. Kai is fingerprinted and regressed back into Karen Vauss, a girl from Alabama with a juvie sheet and no visible employment history. She is charged with obstruction and destroying evidence.

  I am taken to a temporary shelter. It is loud and even scarier than middle school. My hands are fists. I keep them fists, in case.

  “Why did you run?” I ask Kai, crying on the phone.

  “I was surprised,” she says.

  I wonder if that means she was not surprised when the cops came for Tick at Dairy Queen. Did Kai make a 911 call of her own? For one wild second I am full of hope. I could confess, and she would understand because she’d done it, too. But the words die in my throat. Tick started sweet, but he got meaner, especially toward me. If she got him busted, it was for both of us, not her alone.

  DFCS contacts my grandparents, but they won’t come and get me. Kai hasn’t spoken to them since I was three or four, when she traded blond Joe for Eddie, a guy she’d known in high school. Eddie was mixed race: black and something Asian with a dash of Cherokee. My grandparents told Kai to dump him or get out. We got out. My only memory of them is dim and sour, anyway: Gramma staring at me as we toted bags to Eddie’s car, calling after Kai, You’ll end up with another just like this one.

  Maybe Gramma meant it literally, but that didn’t matter. When they arrested Kai, I had no idea where Eddie was, and though he’d been nice enough, he’d never acted like a father. I didn’t give his name to my caseworker, and I guess Kai didn’t, either.

  I ended up in a group home in east Atlanta, while Kai pled guilty in exchange for a reduced sentence. Twenty-two months, with time served, short enough so that DFCS didn’t bother to start the paperwork to terminate parental rights.

  It was also more than twice the length of pregnancy. I hadn’t known until today that she took my nascent baby brother with her off to prison. I’d cost Kai a life with her second child.

  The day I called 911, I was a child myself, unable to predict the consequences. Dwayne and Kai were the adults, and they both regularly indulged themselves in felonies and misdemeanors. They’d both done time before, and their choices made it likely they’d do more, some day or another. Yet that intellectual understanding didn’t change the way I felt, when I thought of how our lives unfolded, after. Had Kai known she was pregnant when she took that deal?

  The answer was likely in Julian’s folder, currently sitting closed on my on
yx dining table. Through the wall of windows, I could see Atlanta’s skyline reaching up toward blue, untroubled skies. It was a solid ninety degrees outside, and my open loft was hard to over-air-condition, but I could not stop shivering. I changed into a hoodie and a pair of jeans so old and faded they were as soft as pajamas. Then I went downstairs to breach the file.

  It waited for me, closed and prim, beside my laptop. I took a detour into the kitchen to get myself a beer, cracked it, and then sat and flipped the folder open. On top was the birth certificate Julian had showed me at the office. I launched my laptop’s calculator and checked the date of Kai’s arrest against his birthdate.

  Just short of forty-one weeks. That meant that on the night of the police raid, he’d been no more than a blastula, secret to everyone except his busily dividing self. Did that make him Dwayne’s? Maybe, but his birth weight was under seven pounds. That was small for a late baby. Kai may well have crossed paths with some curly-headed prison guard or lawyer as she traveled through the justice system.

  Here, at least, was common ground; I also had no father listed on my birth certificate. Sure, it might be that yoga dork Eddie. Kai knew him in high school, before she dropped out, and I doubt even my mother could have found a second Asian/African American/American Indian to love in the quasi-rural Deep South. But maybe not. Eddie had readily accepted that my dad was a Tibetan monk. Sure. Because what Tibetan monk doesn’t dream about his pilgrimage to Dothan, Alabama?

  Come Christmas, Julian and I could mix whatever went in eggnog and play a round of Best-Guess Our Bio Dads. It wasn’t a traditional way to bond, but it could work if we put in enough liquor. To murky origins! I’d say. And guys who didn’t want the job! he’d warble back, and we’d clink our cups.

  I turned the page, trying to get myself in hand. Julian and I had yet to have an awkward lunch, and I’d leaped nineteen steps ahead to an imaginary awful Christmas—a family-centric holiday I didn’t even celebrate. Not unless my office’s near-mandatory Secret Santa counted.

  I started flipping through the other papers. They’d been scattered and shuffled back at my office, and now the forms pertaining to Julian’s adoption were mixed in with Social Security cards, car titles, birth certificates, and mortgage information on a house in the North Atlanta suburbs. This looked to me like the Bouchard family’s catch-all file for their important papers, the kind people keep in a safety-deposit box. Julian had brought the whole thing instead of copying the relevant pieces. Then he’d abandoned it on my lobby floor.

  “These millennials,” I told Henry, who was padding down the stairs. He’d roused himself from his sunny nap spot on my dresser to come see what I was doing.

  I began sorting the forms into linked piles on the table’s surface. Henry, who had a double share of that magic cat ability to exist in the least convenient space, jumped to the tabletop. He flopped down on top of the Bouchards’ marriage license. I ceded the territory and gave him a chin scratch, glad to have his heartbeat in the house. I found the original petition for adoption, and under that, the official termination of Karen Vauss’s parental rights. I had a hard time swallowing as I set that one aside.

  I pressed the heels of my hands into my eyes. I needed to treat this like a job. Pretend this file was part of someone else’s lawsuit, random papers, telling me a stranger’s story.

  Fine. This adoption had gone through Horizons Family Services, a private placement agency. They’d handled the complications caused by the birth mother’s incarceration. Ganesh Vauss left the hospital with Michael and Anna Bouchard two days after he was born, and the biological mother was returned to prison. The actual adoption took place six months later, after the paperwork and home visits had been completed through Georgia’s slow-grinding courts. At that point, a second birth certificate was created for Julian René Bouchard.

  That got to me, again. The name Ganesh had been legally wiped away by a simpler one, chosen by a different woman and written on a new birth certificate. Gramma had demoted me down from Kali, and Julian’s adopted mother had performed the same function, though I hoped with kinder motives.

  I’d found us a second point in common. We’d briefly been fatherless godlings from the same pantheon. We were just mortal strangers now: Julian and Paula.

  I traced the letters of my brother’s second name, trying to imagine the preprison mother I had known giving up her baby.

  Well, her back had been against the wall.

  My grandparents might have taken Julian. He was a white grandchild, after all. But would Kai hand Ganesh to the same sour racists who had abandoned me to foster care? Or he could join me in the system, rolling the foster-parent dice. He’d be talking and toddling when she got out, imprinted on random strangers. He might get bad fosters, too, ones who would not hold him, who would let him cry. He wouldn’t even know that she was out there, loving him, coming to reclaim him. Adoption let her choose a soft place for him. It was one road out of a thoroughly shitty wood, and she had sent him down it.

  She hadn’t even told me she was pregnant, but I could see that this had been a kindness. I was in that group home, and the main thing that kept me from falling off the world was my unshakable faith that Kai would rescue me. How do you promise your preteen you’ll come for her, but by the way, you’re giving up her brand-new baby brother?

  Henry stretched, working parts of his body onto two other stacks of paper. I shoved my chair back away from the table and let him. I wished I had ten cats, enough to cover every bit of history. I was failing on every possible level to keep professional distance. I could see fresh ways that I had ruined my mother’s life rising up from the white space in between the words. I should have given the whole file over to Birdwine. He could have sorted through it, extracted anything relevant, and presented me with bullet points I could digest in tiny, manageable bites. He could send it in an email titled “Here is the information.”

  I might do better looking at Julian’s present. The farther his life moved from our shared point of origin, the less personal it became. Birdwine wanted to do a background check before I contacted the kid, but Google-stalking could hardly be considered contact. I angled my chair toward my laptop and pulled the computer toward me, grateful that a family of Smiths hadn’t adopted Julian and named him John.

  A quick Facebook search yielded three pages of Julian Bouchards and near variations. Midway down the first page, I saw mine. His curly hair was longer in the photo, hanging in shags around his ears. His smile pushed his eyes into half-moon shapes in that unendurably familiar way.

  I clicked the link. His cover image was an eagle soaring high over a canyon, of all damn things. He had lax privacy settings, and I could see some of his posts: a picture of Yoda’s face with that quote about try versus do, a tiny GIF ant carrying a huge crumb, a video of a pretty girl in Singapore playing something haunting on a hang drum. My surprise brother had romantic notions.

  At the top of the page, Facebook was asking, “Do you know Julian? To see what he shares with friends, send him a friend request.” I hovered my mouse icon over the button. Clicking it would definitely count as contact. Also, the term friend request made me feel balky. It was so immediate, almost invasive. What if the kid started in with the super-poking and the endless Facebook game requests? Besides, I’d already embarked on a new friendship today. Birdwine was the first true enlargement of my tiny circle in literally years.

  That thought let me laugh at myself. Two new friends! Careful, Paula, you might rupture something. This was a virtual, click-based relationship, and if Julian had any savvy, he’d see past it. He’d realize what big eyes I had. The better to stalk you with, my dear. If he accepted, it would likely be so he could reverse-stalk me.

  Well, I wished him luck with that. Like every lawyer on the planet, I had a Facebook page, but it was strictly for professional use.

  Even so, I found myself sliding the mouse sideways and hitting the Send Message button instead. When the window opened, I typed, Hey. This isr />
  Then I sat staring for three minutes, trying to decide between This is your half sister and This is Karen Vauss’s other child. Julian Bouchard, a mysterious young human, was by blood a member of my family. Such as it was. I’d avoided marriage, never wanted kids. My mother and I had abdicated each other, and Google-stalking Kai had been impossible. She’d lived off the grid, as if the Internet did not exist.

  Every now and again, I’d run across people we’d known in our long, parole-inspired stint inside Atlanta. Some of them had stories and snippets about Kai, which I took with grains or teaspoons or whole oceans’ worth of salt, depending on the source. Kai was near fictional to me at this point, and she had given Julian away. He had a different mother. Anna Bouchard. I wondered what she might be like. A soft-voiced cookie baker? A brisk soccer mom? I was in no true sense a sister to him.

  I decided on my name, direct and simple.

  Hello, Julian. This is Paula Vauss. I apologize for my reaction to your visit. I was not aware that my mother had another child. I’m sorry to inform you that Karen Vauss and I have not been in contact for many years, and I believe that she is no longer living. I have hired a reliable PI to find what ultimately became of her. The one you hired is a con man; please do not contact him, and under no circumstances should you give him more money. I will share the results of my investigation with you ASAP.

  It felt mean to tell the kid that Kai was dead in a letter—in a Facebook message, no less—but it felt even meaner to hold that information back. He must be anxious to hear from me. Especially since he’d abandoned his bank records, his Social Security card, his mother’s maiden name, and a host of other sensitive bits of info into my tender, total stranger’s care.

  Reading back over my note, I knew the tone was too formal—downright lawyerly. It read cold, and cold was not at all what I was feeling. I was feeling nine kinds of freaked right the fuck out, actually, so maybe cold was better.