The Opposite of Everyone: A Novel

by Joshilyn Jackson

  I solved it two decades later, when I got out Kai’s Ramayana for Julian. I’d pulled the footlocker down from the top shelf of my closet, then realized I couldn’t remember the combination. Hell, I couldn’t remember the last time I’d opened it. I tried my birthday, the day that Jimi Hendrix died, and a host of my old zip codes. I got so frustrated that I rattled the lock, then let it go with a spiteful, sideways jerk.

  The cheap thing popped right open in my hands. I stared at it stupidly for a second, and then I started laughing. I closed the lock again, then I pulled and jerked at it, trying to re-create the angle of that sideways tug. It took me less than a minute. Damn that Candace. Joya and I had wondered if her giant bat ears let her hear the tumblers or if she’d been an international jewel thief in another life. I could have changed the combo to the infinite solution for pi and Candace still would have rummaged as she pleased.

  Now Kai’s illustrated Ramayana sat on my breakfast bar with my other childhood souvenirs, and Julian was on his way. The braided bit of horse’s mane was gone, likely unraveled long ago, but everything else was laid out like a mini-museum of mother relics. The exhibits were pitifully few, but that hadn’t stopped me from straightening and reordering them nine times. He was a solid twenty minutes late.

  If he showed, this would be our first face time since our disastrous introduction in my office, when I’d freaked out and Birdwine had threatened him. We’d messaged back and forth a little more on Facebook. I’d told him about getting his file from Worth, the expurgated version. So expurgated it was like a novel boiled down to haiku, but I’d attached the scanned-in pictures of Hana with our mother at the duck pond. He’d responded, Wow. Then an hour later, That’s a lot to process.

  No shit.

  These interactions gave me no real sense of the kid.

  This morning, his message read: I keep looking at the pics of Hana. What should we do?

  I messaged back, I gave Birdwine a plane ticket to Austin, my AmEx card, and carte blanche. He’ll find her.

  Is he in Austin now? What can I do to help? Julian pressed, so I told him everything I knew. It wasn’t much.

  Birdwine had checked in with me yesterday, after he visited Kai’s tiny apartment on Bellman Avenue. Her boyfriend, Dave Tolliver, still lived there. He thought her last name was Redmond, and that the kid was named Hannah Redmond. On February nineteenth, Kai and Hana had packed most of what they owned into his old station wagon and disappeared while he was at work.

  This was a classic Kai breakup move. She’d abandoned everything that didn’t fit in the back of the wagon. I had Birdwine pay Tolliver for the car—it was only worth about twelve hundred dollars. In return, Tolliver gave Birdwine everything she’d left behind. He had four big boxes in his storage locker in the basement, mostly books and mail and photos, held hostage in case Kai resurfaced. Birdwine had sorted through it all piece by piece, reading the story in the lines between notes from her doctor, empty prescription bottles, scribbled phone messages, photographs, unpaid bills, and, of all damn things, a pamphlet about cancer. I tried not to imagine some chilly, white-jacketed stranger handing Kai a trifold glossy about the thing inside her that was killing her.

  Instead, I told Birdwine, “When we moved like that, sometimes there was another man.”

  “Maybe not this time,” Birdwine said. “It’s bad. How much detail do you want?”

  “Keep it dry, like it’s any other case,” I said. The mere idea of the pamphlet—that such a thing existed—had almost undone me.

  There was a silent moment on the phone, then Birdwine said, “But it’s not any oth—”

  “Please,” I said. The single syllable came out sharp, staccato as a gunshot. “Bare bones on this, Birdwine, from here on out.”

  “Okay. So. The cancer started in her lungs. She’s had emphysema for years, and by the time she figures it’s more than that, it’s everywhere.” Birdwine fell right into his regular rhythm. I knew his hands would be rolling in that way he had when he laid out a hypothetical. His voice was brisk, almost clinical, like I wanted. “Liver, bones, brain. She’s starting to have delirium, delusions. Her decision making is impaired. She’s on some heavy-duty medication, acting weird, and someone calls DFPS. That’s Texas-speak for child protective services. Dave says it wasn’t him, and I believe him. He had it pretty bad for Kai—he didn’t even call the cops about his car. Could have been someone from a homeschool playgroup Hana went to. I don’t think there was another man. They bolted because DFPS spooked her.”

  The longer he talked, the more my heart raced, and my lungs had started to feel sticky. His story changed the odd parenthetical sentence written up the side of my check. (Obviously I don’t want you to come here). I’d thought it meant she didn’t want to see me, but the journey she mentioned in the first half of the note was literal. Perhaps she’d only told me not to come because she wouldn’t be there.

  I said, “But Kai knew she was dying. It’s not like she’d take off on a pilgrimage to see the largest ball of twine. She must have had a plan for Hana.”

  “Yeah, but what? Not one DFPS would approve of, or why go?” Birdwine asked.

  I had no idea. Read in the light of dementia and heavy medication, Kai’s note read less like hippie-dippy mysticism, more like a dangerous combination of terrified and crazy.

  “So what’s next?” I said.

  “I can follow up with the mothers from the playgroup and DFPS, and I got a few known associates from Dave. I have your list of PO box addresses, so I know where she lived before. Dave gave me the tag number, and I can trace her that way, maybe. Anything you can think of that would put me in a direction?”

  But there wasn’t. Not after fifteen-plus years of secondhand stories and silence.

  “Birdwine,” I said, and stopped. I had two words stuck in my throat, pounding with the rhythm of my heart: find her, find her, find her.

  “I got this,” he said, soft, calm, deadly serious.

  It was as if he could feel my heart’s urgent drumbeat through the wires, as if it were driving him as hard as it drove me. He was all in on this search, as invested as if it were personal. Perhaps he had some motivation of his own, but I was too abjectly grateful to question it. I simply took it, and then braced my body for the bad part that came next: the wait.

  I sucked at waiting, but I had no other options. Hana had disappeared deep into Kai’s world. I’d grown up there. Names, relationships, and identities were fluid. Adherence to the law was optional. There were no safety nets. There had been nothing to catch me when Kai went to prison. She had vanished, ill and drugged, and Hana could have landed anywhere in the whole country. Kai was almost definitely dead by now. Anyone, anything might have Hana.

  The buzzer sounded, and the sound almost shuddered me right out of my skin. Julian was half an hour late. I punched the code to let him into the building, then started pacing back and forth, kitchen to front door and back. My heels banged the floor in a nervous tempo that had Henry sticking a disgruntled face over the sofa, wondering why I was vibrating the floors. The angle of his ears changed to alarmed as I stomped past again, and he ghosted back to the laundry room. He had a hiding spot behind the dryer.

  Julian was taking so long to reach my floor, I wondered if he was using the stairs. I paced another circuit. Maybe he’d died on the journey through the stairwell, and I’d never see him again. That was the current theme in our shared gene pool. I walked to the front door and jerked it open.

  There he stood. He was taller than me, but my heels were high enough to put us even. His eyes widened, and he startled like a deer. His hands flew up. If he’d been psyching himself up to knock, he hadn’t made it quite yet.

  “Hi,” he said.

  “Hi,” I said back. “Did you want to come in? Or knock? Or . . . ?” I meant it to be funny, but nervous on me often read belligerent.

  “Yeah,” he said, but he made no move to step across my threshold. He swallowed audibly and scrubbed at the side of his
face with one hand, like Birdwine fighting off a binge. “I need to say something first. I’ve been standing on your mat trying to decide how to apologize for the way things went when we first met. I should have realized you were my sister earlier.” The words kept coming in a tumble, as if he were a year-one kid in law school, botching his first overpracticed opening argument in front of a mock jury. “But I thought—I mean, I assumed—but not because I’m—”

  “I have no idea what you’re saying.”

  “All the way here I practiced, and then I sat down in my car, sweating and practicing, but I’m blowing it, huh?” He took a second, gathering himself, and then he looked me in the eye. “I’m trying to tell you, straight up, I’m not a racist.”

  It caught me off guard. I’d forgotten that awkward moment; he’d assumed his sister would be white because he was. He’d apparently been dwelling on it, building it up in his head, and now he was being so relentlessly earnest it was both sweet and unsettling.

  I said, “Glad to hear it,” to close the topic.

  He must have taken it as sarcasm, though, because his skin washed pink.

  “No, but I’m really not. It doesn’t matter to me that you’re—” He didn’t know quite what I was, and he floundered. To be fair, no one ever did. He finally ended with “—whatever you are.” I felt some hugely inappropriate laughter bubbling up and squelched it. I wasn’t sure what my face was doing, but it couldn’t have been good, because he babbled on. “I didn’t have that kind of mom and dad. Not at all.” His voice rose in pitch and volume as the words rushed unstoppably out. “I can see why you’d think that, because I went to Berry College, which is WASPy, I know, but my girlfriend there was black, and it wasn’t—”

  “My last girlfriend was black, too,” I put in, to stop him talking. It worked. He froze.

  “Oh, I’m sorry. I thought . . .” He trailed off and gulped and said, “I didn’t realize you were gay.”

  “I’m not,” I said, and then I was laughing. I couldn’t help it. “I’m screwing with you.”

  His eyes got even wider, and he sputtered, “Well, I’m not homophobic!” He looked ready to burst into tears on my welcome mat, and what was wrong with me?

  “I’m sorry, it’s not funny,” I said, though I was still grinning. “It’s just—look at my suit.”

  His gaze dropped to my jacket for a second, and then he looked back to me, confused. “It’s, um—it’s a really nice suit?”

  “I know, right?” I said. I’d dressed like I was heading into a particularly bloody deposition. I’d blown my hair out and put on matte red lipstick. “I’ve gone Full-Dress Bitch on you. Look at these shoes. The only word for heels this high is vicious. And you’re a wreck, and none of this is helping.” I turned to the side and kicked the shoes off, and stepped down, barefoot.

  I hadn’t been nervous, I realized. This kid carried the weight of my life’s largest unpaid debt, and I was terrified of him. I hadn’t recognized it, because terror wasn’t one of my usual modes of operation. But I’d dressed to battle monsters. I’d even laid the relics of our shared heritage out in regimented rows, the way a prosecutor lays out evidence. Now, as he trembled in the hall, I was a little calmer, like a lady who realizes the little garden snake might be more afraid of her than she is of him. Maybe.

  I said, “Let’s restart, okay?” I took my jacket off and draped it over the table by the door. Garden snakes could be charming little animals, given half a minute and some hospitality. This was a simple meet. All I had to do was figure out what he wanted, and then give it to him. It wasn’t that different from my day job, and—the last six months aside—I was very good at that. “First, I don’t think you’re racist or homophobic or any other -ist or -ic. I don’t have a sense of you at all. So come in, and let’s change that.” I stepped back to let him enter.

  “Thanks,” he said. He still had worried eyebrows, but he no longer looked like he might vomit. He stepped awkwardly in and paused, his breath catching as he saw my wall of windows. “Wow. That is a view!” He looked around, taking in the way the high ceilings, the stark white walls, and the clean lines of my furniture acted as a backdrop for the boldly colored abstract art I favored. “Your place is really, really nice.”

  Meanwhile, I was studying him. He had enough familiar features to give me déjà vu: my mother’s eyes, wide brow, and length of bone. He even had paler, hairier versions of my long-fingered hands. It was disconcerting.

  I looked back up to his face and found he was now examining me just as intently. He blushed and shook his head. “Oh, sorry. This is weird. We have almost the same nose.”

  He was right, though I hadn’t seen it until he said so.

  “Weird as hell,” I agreed, because it felt that way, even though it was actually exactly how biology worked.

  Another awkward pause, and he said, “Any more news from—I forget his name. The spooky guy you sent to Texas?”

  “Birdwine. Not yet. But he will find her,” I said, very brisk, and changed the subject. “Speaking of PIs, when we went to see the one you hired, I asked him to rethink his life choices. He issued you a refund.”

  I had Worth’s check tucked in my skirt pocket, and I pulled it out and passed it to him.

  His eyes widened as he clocked the amount.

  “This is more than I—”

  I was already waving that away. “Call it damages. I would have taken his ass to court and made him pay more, if I thought he had it.”

  He stared at the check, his lips pressed tight together with some feeling or another. He finally said, “I can’t tell you what this means. Really. When Mom got sick—” He stopped and shook his head.

  “Forget it,” I said. Birdwine had been right about the kid’s fiscal hole; this meet that had me so on edge might have a very simple ending.

  He started to put the check in his wallet, but then paused in the middle of tucking it away. “Oh, sorry, but the check is to me—do I need to pay you some? I mean, you went and lawyered at him.”

  So much for simple. He needed every dollar there and more, especially if he wanted to go finish up at Berry. Yet here he stood in my half-million-dollar loft, staring at a white sofa that had cost more than the amount on Worth’s check—a sofa that I’d bought to match my cat—offering me a percentage. If the kid was playing me, he was a virtuoso.

  “You got the friends and family rate,” I said. His smile sparked at the word family, and dammit, it was possible I liked him. It felt uncomfortable and way too personal to like this kid I owed, this kid wearing manly versions of my nose and my hands. “Can I get you some coffee? Or a Coke or something? Or it’s after noon, you want a beer?” I could have used a beer myself, because it was now clear that whatever we ended up being to each other, he wasn’t a problem that could be solved whole, today.

  “I’d love a Coke,” he said.

  He followed me left toward the kitchen, but paused when he saw all the things I’d spread out on the breakfast bar. “Oh, wow.” He went right to Kai’s Ramayana and picked up the drawing, peering down at Sita. “Did she draw this?”

  “Yeah. It’s a self-portrait,” I said, going to the fridge. “The blue guy with the scimitar is one of her old boyfriends. Math says he might have been your dad.”

  Julian leaned in close. “Well, if he was, I didn’t get his coloring.”

  I popped the cap off two Cokes and came around to sit beside him, saying, “He went to prison on a drug bust. Kai had me send him a copy of this poem, and if you look, here, and here—” I flipped through the pages, pointed to a line that read, Sita’s belly, full like the moon with love and another that read, Sita waxed, love growing with each passing moon. “Plus, in the drawing, Kai has her whole lap full of lotus blossoms. See how she’s cradling them? Her hands, the way the thumbs and fingers touch? It’s a symbol of fertility. She was letting Dwayne know that she was pregnant.”

  Joya had suspected that the poem was a code. Of course it was; Kai wouldn’t have risked
TPR to send a mash note to a boyfriend.

  “Holy crap,” Julian muttered. “Why would she do that?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Adoption laws in Georgia are tricky, and when she sent the poem, Dwayne was not established as your legal father. I think—best guess here—she didn’t want to name him as the father and give him paternal rights. Not unless he came up with some great plan. She was almost halfway through the pregnancy when she had me send this. Best as I can tell from memory and the dates on your adoption records, she was only a few weeks away from choosing the Bouchards and going forward with the adoption. Maybe she hoped he’d work some kind of miracle? In the poem, Rama saves Sita—he comes in with an army and another god, Hanuman, and he sets her free. I think, bottom line, she didn’t want to give you up.”

  Julian digested that, then said, “You really think that this guy was my bio dad?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know. I think it served Kai’s interests to tell him he was, in case he could help her. You can explore that, if you like. Just pick a better PI than Worth. All I can tell you is, I mailed Kai’s poem, and I never heard back from him.”

  We sat in a silence that was oddly wistful on his side, uncomfortable on mine. Kai had entered prison as full of luck and fortune as she’d ever been, but she came home empty. Under the ashes and the soured red wine, she’d smelled like loss. Her gaze was blank and distant. I’d gotten wild with boys and beer and petty crime, acting out, trying to recapture her attention. Anything to wake her up, make her eyes focus on me again.

  I never knew what I had really cost her until this boy-child named after Ganesha showed up at my office.

  Julian set the drawing to the side and reached for the stack of early photos. I watched over his shoulder, narrating as he flipped through. I pointed out teenage Kai posing with some other hippie wannabes, showed him the ranch home outside Dothan where she grew up with our shared, sour grandparents. Then I walked him through a string of photos of our gypsy life after we left Alabama.