The Opposite of Everyone: A Novel

by Joshilyn Jackson

  I sat up and shoved her shoulders, hard enough to tip her over. “Screw off, lesbo. I don’t need a prison boyfriend.”

  Candace is a weedy white girl who cringes when I talk to her, sidles up and sits too close when I ignore her. She’s a mouth breather, snuffling from allergies, and the raw, chapped skin under her nostrils skeeves me out. She smells musty, too, as if someone filled her up with damp laundry and then forgot her.

  Candace popped back up, blinking, the whites of her eyes pink and glistening with histamines. “I’ll give you two dollars.”

  I pinched her arm, hard enough to make her suck her breath in. Hard enough to leave a mark. She crouched lower and took it like it was her due, ducking her head down. If she were a dog I’d have seen her naked belly about then. She was new, but I had a reputation. I let her go and rolled away to the wall, turning my back on her. She stayed where she was.

  After a minute, the sniffling got to me. I scooted over, making room on the edge of my bed. “Don’t get handsy. I want that money first thing in the morning.”

  She climbed in and pressed herself into my back. We slept huddled together like cold baby animals.

  If I am caught forwarding Kai’s messages, her sentence could be extended. I could be here longer. The state would push to terminate Kai’s parental rights. If we’re caught, no family-friendly judge will be friendly enough to overlook it.

  Even so, I say to Kai, “I don’t know his address. But I’ll mail it if I can get it.”

  It is not a yes, but it isn’t a no, either. It is I’ll try. I’ll try lands me firmly on the righteous side of Maybe.

  I open the pantry door to find Candace standing close on the other side of it. She jumps back, bug-eyed. She must not have heard me hang up. I’d thought about snitchy prisoners, or someone on the line with us, but eavesdroppers on my end had not occurred to me.

  “What are you doing?” I say, mean-voiced, trying to remember how much I’ve said out loud.

  “I came across to see if there was snacks.” Candace has gone about as fetal as she can while still technically standing. I push past her, and she falls in beside me, her dry, pink lips turning up at the corners. “I wasn’t listening to you talk with your mom about the mail or nothing.”

  I spin and grab her wrist in my other hand, squeezing her hard enough to feel her bird bones grind under my fingers. She yelps, and I step in very, very close. My growth spurt has given me an inch and change on Candace, and I use it.

  “You don’t want to start with me. We sleep in the same room, you understand?” I say it like I hope she will start.

  She swallows and her shifty gaze slips sideways, but she nods. The second she breaks, I ease my grip and smile at her, all sweet. Sugar after slaps, because slaps don’t seem to last with Candace. Maybe she’s too used to them? I need to be careful with her now, at least until Kai’s Ramayana comes. At least until I decide what I should do with it.

  My mother mailed that poem twenty-three years ago, and I still had it. The dark blue ink was faded, and the paper was dry and ratty at the edges, but it was still legible. I’d kept it all these years in an army surplus footlocker at the back of my walk-in closet, on the highest shelf, behind my boot boxes. It floated in other bits of wreckage from my disordered childhood: a tarnished anklet made of bells, the antique glass doorknob I stole from Hervé’s house, three strings of Mardi Gras beads.

  Now it was inside my briefcase. I’d dug it out right before I left to pick up Birdwine. I planned to drop by Kinkos and scan the pages. I wanted a digital copy for myself because I’d decided I should offer the original to Julian. It was rightfully his—a love poem by his mother, maybe to his father, written while he was in the womb.

  “How’d your chat with the kid go?” Birdwine asked. It was the first thing he’d said since a grunty “Can we stop for coffee?” when I picked him up. I’d pointed to the cup I’d gotten him at Starbucks on the way, and he’d put his face in it.

  “I don’t know. Weird. Stilted. I invited him over this weekend,” I told Birdwine, talking over the GPS as it ordered us into a small parking lot. I parked in front of a strip of stores that couldn’t live up to the word mall: Chinese take-out, a tattoo joint, a quickie mart with milk and Lotto. “He’s coming to the loft, but maybe I should take him out for tapas or to a steak place? Neutral territory.”

  “Play it by ear,” Birdwine said.

  As we got out, I realized I should have let Birdwine drive, after all. Gentrification had tried and failed here, and this was his car’s kind of neighborhood. Across the street, Cape Cod bungalows in various stages of abandoned rehab sat in the shadows of huge Victorians that had been sliced into awkward apartments.

  Birdwine pointed to a door near the end, between a nail parlor and a tiny used-book store. It was covered in signs. The top one said OFFICE SPACE FOR RENT. Under that was a sign for Krauss & Spaulding, a ground-zero firm a bare half step up from a do-it-yourself divorce kit. The Worthy Investigations sign was next, the top edge covered by a hand-lettered piece of poster board that said MASSAGE! WAXING! TAROT! WALK-INS WELCOME! That one had an enthusiastic red arrow drawn on, pointing up.

  “Hooker?” I asked.

  “Oh yeah,” Birdwine said.

  Birdwine’s default setting was quiet, and he’d never been a morning guy, but this was overkill. It was as if he’d decided in cold blood to have this friendship, and now he was doggedly enduring it. If I didn’t know better, I’d guess he was hungover. I did know better, though. If Birdwine had started drinking yesterday, he’d be very busy still drinking right now.

  “I’m about to check you for a pulse,” I said.

  He rallied a little bit and said, “To be fair, I bet if you asked her to wax something, she would do that, too.”

  “One-stop shopping,” I said, to keep it going. Up the stairs we went.

  At the top was another door with multiple locks and a buzzer system. Someone—likely the hooker—had propped it open with a crumpled soda can. The narrow hallway behind it smelled like burnt Indian food.

  “How did Julian end up hiring Worth? This pit should have scared him right back to the suburbs,” I said.

  Even before Birdwine went digging in his financials, Julian’s cheap khakis had told me he couldn’t afford the day rates of some high-tech midtown outfit. But I could think of a half dozen small, ethical PI firms that smelled better, both literally and metaphorically.

  “I doubt he ever saw it,” Birdwine said. “Worth has a slick website.”

  I paused to look at him approvingly. “Hey, you got a synapse firing. Are you ready to wake up and work this guy with me?”

  Birdwine pulled a huge breath in through his nostrils, very loud, and shook his shoulders, like a bear rousing himself after winter.

  “I got your back,” he said.

  A directory at the top told us Worthy Investigations had the office at the far end. We passed an unrented space on the way, the door hanging wide open. It was a single large room with some flimsy partitions set up to make cubicles. No furniture except an unwieldy wooden desk. The floor was covered in deplorable blue carpet, stained and frayed.

  “This whole building feels like a murder zone,” I said.

  “It’s very Sam Spade. Philip Marlowe. Julian probably thinks this is what a gumshoe’s office should look like.”

  “Who says gumshoe?” I said, but my soft-faced surprise brother, with his Yoda slogans and his inspirational nature pictures, might.

  I continued down the hall, and Birdwine followed, narrating softly in a decent attempt at Bogart. “When she strode in on her long, spectacular stems, I knew that dame was trouble.”

  “Damn straight,” I said back, grinning.

  With Birdwine roused and ready now behind me, I felt like being trouble. It was a good feeling. More than good; it was downright delicious. Ye gods, but I had missed this. I hadn’t felt this alive since—well, since the Skopes depo. That was the day my check came back with Kai’s note.


  The door to Worthy Investigations was smoked glass. I could see lights on behind it. The detective was in.

  I put my nicest smile on, the one I saved for juries. I showed it to Birdwine and blinked, sweet as a fawn. I’d bypassed my suits for a casual short skirt and a raw silk T. I’d softened my makeup, too, pale glossy lips and no hard lines around my eyes. I hadn’t blown my hair out, and it swung in shaggy black loops down my back. People, white people especially, mistook me for a girl still in my twenties when I dressed down this way.

  “So I’m Bad Cop?” he asked, sotto voce.

  “I think so, yeah, but let’s read the room,” I said. Birdwine was good enough to adjust on the fly. He reached for the door, but I made a quiet tutting noise. “Ladies and Good Cops first.”

  Worth was sitting at a desk at the far end of a long and narrow room. He looked up as I came in, instantly making a big smile back at me. He was around fifty and in decent shape. His face was square-jawed, topped by a thatch of luxurious, prematurely white hair and a fat mustache. He looked like a dad from a 1980s sitcom, and his maroon tie and button-collar shirt leaned hard into the image.

  “Are you Tim Worth?” I asked, a little hesitant.

  Worth was already rising, saying, “I sure am! Please, come right on back. My girl isn’t in yet, sorry, but I made coffee. Can I get you a cup?”

  I was passing through his small reception area, and I didn’t think there was a “my girl.” The desk by the coffee station had a landline and a lamp on it. No computer, no plant, no family pictures. It looked like set dressing to me. Interesting that he’d made his imaginary assistant young and female and then used the possessive pronoun. My girl. I was nine steps into the room, and I was already getting a good bead on this guy. If I steamed him right, he would pop open, simple as a mollusk.

  I kept my tone uncertain and said, “No, thank you.”

  “What can I do you for?” Worth asked, mucking up the grammar with good-old-boy charm. He was attractive enough, if you liked the type or had daddy issues. I was innocent on both counts. Then his gaze shifted past me, and his smooth smile dialed down a notch. “Oh, hello, Zachary.”

  “Worth,” Birdwine said.

  The client chairs in front of Worth’s desk were low slung with sunken cushions. Worth must have read some How to Be an Asshole business book that had taught him about power seating. I stayed on my feet, stopping to the right of his desk, angling myself so I could see the room.

  Birdwine flung himself down onto the floral loveseat in reception. It creaked audibly under him. He spread his long arms over the back and relaxed into it, at ease. His presence made Worth wary, and he looked at me fresh, reassessing.

  His brow furrowed. “Wait a second. Do I know you from somewhere?”

  “I’m Paula Vauss?” I said, tilting it up into a question. “You gave my name and information to a client. Julian Bouchard?”

  “Oh, the bio sister, right.” He stayed standing, keeping his head higher than Birdwine’s and level with mine. “Half sister, I mean. Obviously.”

  I felt my smile trying to widen, getting just a little sharky. “Obviously.”

  Worth started talking, slowly, watching me the whole time, hoping to take my pulse. “I had you on my list to call this week, actually.” Sure he did. I kept my hands by my sides, my eyebrows up, letting my body language tell him I was open to him, or at least to his story. “I’m sorry the kid went ahead and contacted you.” Not as sorry as he was about to be. I wrinkled my nose, cutesy-wry. I could feel Worth’s gaze like a finger running all over my surface, hoping I had braille.

  I let a silence happen then, to play him. I’d been off my game for months, but here my game was, waiting for me. Old muscles I’d forgotten I owned were flexing, reawakening. It was a good, stretchy feeling. I let the silence grow.

  He was a manipulator, this one, and not bad. Good enough for the young or desperate or not-too-bright. But not great. If he were great, he’d have a better office space and “my girl” wouldn’t be a fiction. Good not great meant I could let the silence yawp open like a baby bird’s mouth, waiting for Worth to fill it.

  Birdwine knew this tactic—all cops did. He picked up an old People magazine and started thumbing through it, pages rustling in the silence. Worth fidgeted, looked away. He cleared his throat, and then he decided to go fishing.

  “That must have been quite a shock, meeting your brother. I hope that he at least was circumspect about it?” It was a solid approach, very safe. If Julian’s appearance had upset me, Worth’s tone of mild disapproval put us on the same team, but it wasn’t harsh enough to make me defend the kid. It was almost avuncular, like a kindly tutting.

  I took the cue, saying, “Not at all.” I leaned toward Worth, confiding. “He showed up at my office, during work hours. He claims to be my half brother, but I thought”—I glanced at Birdwine, inert and easy on the sofa, absorbed in some celeb wedding or baby shots.

  “I see, yes. You’re a woman of means, and your long-lost brother appears out of nowhere. You’re right to feel cautious,” Worth said, going right where I’d sent him. “So you—hired your own investigator?” He mirrored my sloe-eyed glance at Birdwine. When I responded with nonverbal agreement, rolling my eyes as if my assessment of Birdwine matched his, he took a risk and fished a little deeper. “Your mother couldn’t confirm Julian’s identity?”

  I dropped my lashes so he wouldn’t see the flash of interest light my eyes. According to Birdwine, Worth’s modus operandi was to quickly gather as much info as he could, then parcel it out in drops over long, fat, billable months. If he found Kai back in November—that must have been prediagnosis. Did he not know she was dead? If not, I had a nice trap, made and waiting for me. I put a little bait into it.

  “My mother I are estranged,” I said. “And I wouldn’t ask her about Julian even if we were on speaking terms. She’s not what I would call an honest person.”

  Worth came around the desk, closing the distance between us. He lowered his voice, hoping to speak below the range of Birdwine’s ears. “So you hired outside help.” I nodded assent and he said, in a near whisper, “Why him?”

  “Mr. Birdwine did some work for my firm. But in this matter . . .” I whispered back, letting the sentence trail off, incomplete and unsatisfied.

  Worth leaned in closer, touched his chest. “Well, now you’ve come right to Julian’s source. That should have been your first move, really.” He was casting himself as Daddy Worth, here to helpfully clear up a small confusion over Julian’s legitimacy. I wanted to know if Julian was a con man, out to fleece me, or if he was really the brother who had been put up for adoption. Daddy Worth knew, and Birdwine didn’t. I kept my eyes wide and accepted the role of Girl Who Needs Papa to Explain the Situation.

  I said, “I wanted to ask you why Julian came to me. Julian doesn’t seem to know where my mother is living. You found me, and, well”—I glanced at Birdwine and dropped my voice again, but not low enough. I wanted him to hear—“follow the money. It’s the one thing Mr. Birdwine told me that makes sense. It couldn’t have taken you long to get from me to her. I send her a check every month.”

  Birdwine snorted. “I said it wouldn’t take a competent investigator long. Is your mother hiding near his ass? Is he allowed to use both hands?”

  I pursed my lips as if the salty language had offended me, then looked to Worth as if to say, Do you see what I’ve had to put up with? Worth gave me a disapproving headshake, and now here we were, allies. Damn, but Birdwine could work a room.

  “Well, of course I found her,” Worth said, nice and loud for Birdwine’s benefit. “It’s simply poor timing that you came to me instead of the other way around. I followed your checks to Austin soon after I told Julian about you, but I like to be thorough. I wanted to confirm before I got Julian all riled. You’ve seen yourself how impetuous the boy can be.”

  “Confirm? You met my mother?” I said, and let my skepticism show.

  “No, no. We PIs have
a network. Those of us who are in good with our colleagues do, at any rate.” Another gimlet glance toward Birdwine. “I had a local guy in Austin do a drive-by. He sent me confirmation, some pictures. I’d planned to contact you this week, and then bring you and Julian together in a much less stressful way.”

  I smiled, both for him, encouraging, and to myself, because I had this asshole now.

  “Pictures?” I said. “Oh, could I . . .” I mirrored his body language, leaning in and touching my own hand to my chest. “My mother and I are estranged, as I said. We haven’t been in the same state for years.” I let that painful truth sit baldly in the room for just a moment, rock solid. The truth was always best. It had such a ring to it. A single good truth could support whole flocks of half-truths and misdirections. I trained sweet, lamp-lit eyes on Worth. “I’d very much like to see the pictures that your colleague took this week.”

  “Oh, certainly,” he said. “I’ve got a couple printed out, if you’d like to have one?”

  “Thank you. I would,” I said breathily.

  Worth turned to the file cabinets that stood by the wall behind him and opened the top drawer. He finger-walked his way through the B’s and pulled his Julian file. He flipped through, finally pulling out a single thick sheet of photograph paper. He set the closed file down on his desk in front of him and leaned across, passing the picture to me.

  It was Kai. As I looked at her, the air got heavy, as if the truth I’d set down earlier in the room had built up into a barometric pressure: I hadn’t seen my mother, not in years.

  In this photo, she was what? Fifty? She looked older than fifty, and very thin. Maybe from the sickness, hidden, but already spreading through her body. Maybe just because she was a smoker and a natural ectomorph. She was sitting outside, in the sunshine. It was a close-in shot, head and shoulders, with what looked like the river behind her. She still had her waterfall of dark hair, but I could see thick streaks of silver running through it. She’d grown a network of lines around her eyes and her jawline had softened. Her mouth had a set of parentheses deep-scored around it, though, as if she’d spent more time smiling than I would have guessed.