By then I’d calmed down a bit, and my lawyer brain was parsing all the ways I was going to screw Clark Winkley to the wall. Try to shoot me dead, would he? That opening salvo of a settlement agreement I had written earlier was looking like a kindness. I could fix that. Ye gods, how a jury would love this, though I doubted his lawyer would let this stinker go before a judge, much less a jury. They’d settle, fast, so Clark could focus on his criminal case, and my inevitable civil suit against him.
Birdwine said, “My car is in the deck across the road.”
“I’d rather walk,” I told him. “Work the kinks out.”
That made him draw back even farther, not sure how literal I was being.
We had to exit through the big front room, since the back alley was blocked off as a crime scene. I thanked Grace, Wes, and Billy, and I let Martinez know I didn’t need the ride after all.
Then Birdwine and I walked out into the night together. My adrenaline rush had long faded, but I hadn’t crashed. I felt only peaceful. I liked the feel of walking toward home as if I owned this night, as if I’d already run off everything in it that could hurt me. The sidewalk was cracked and jagged in spots, but so bright with yellow streetlights that it wasn’t hard to navigate. Traffic zoomed past, busy and impersonal, setting the hot air of late summer into gusty motion.
We walked from pool to pool of warm light. We had eight inches between us, and I couldn’t breach it. Julian, direct and sweet, would have already reached across it, and I wished then that I was more like him. I could feel that Birdwine was full of a sharp energy. Too much to contain, it leaked from his big body, prickling in the space that separated us. His feet banged down as if the earth itself had done something to piss him off. He was silent, and I wasn’t good at this. I didn’t know how to tell Birdwine how little knowing the worst of him had mattered in the face of a real ending.
Finally he spoke, and his voice was calmer, more under control, than his body language. “I am an asshole. But I’m not bad at my job.”
“I don’t think you’re bad at y—”
“Yeah, you do,” he said. “You must. You’ve seen my house. You know I’m always strapped. But I work my program, and when I’m on it, I’m very good. People hire me, Paula. People who don’t even want to sleep with me hire me.”
“Okay, okay,” I said, laughing a little. “You’re good at a lot of things.”
He got serious again. “I’m broke all the time because about a third of my income goes into a trust fund. For the kid. My son. For college or an emergency—whatever he might need. Not because of a court order. I decided I would do it, and I’ve stuck with it, ten years now. I’m not a shitty person.” He gave me a sideways glance and then amended, “I’m kind of a shitty person. But I’m not as thoroughly shitty as you think I am.”
We turned right, and we were walking toward my building now. When that gun was pointed into my left eye, I’d forgiven his past choices and accepted all his deep-scarred imperfections, whole. But him putting aside that money laid bare all I knew that was best in him. Some people might not have been touched by this, the sacrifice of money, but they had likely always had enough—and they definitely had not seen his house. I knew what it was to want. Kai and I had lived next door to homeless when I was little. I’d waitressed my way through junior college until I could get some scholarships. It mattered to me, that he’d done this.
“I don’t think you’re shitty,” I said. “You don’t owe me an explanation. You don’t owe me anything. Whatever happened with your kid, however that played out, it’s terrible and sad. You don’t live easy with it, though. That’s obvious. You did the best you could, at the time. You’re still doing the best you can with it. I know that without you saying, because I know you.”
He wouldn’t look at me then. Not at all. He reached across the space between us, though. He grabbed my hand, squeezing until my bones compressed, just shy of pain.
I had spent my whole life hungry for forgiveness. It had not come, so I didn’t know firsthand what he was feeling. But I had imagined it, over and over. I’d wanted it so bad. I’d wanted Kai—or anyone, anyone who knew the worst in me—to say that I was still dear, and good, and worthy.
I gave him this thing that I had always wanted, and it made him turn his face away from me. I saw his reflection in the glass wall of the building we were passing. The shadows made his eyes into black pits, and his mouth was twisting down. Then he put his head down, silent, and we walked on, our hands clasped tight together, for almost a block.
“His name is Caleb. He doesn’t know I exist,” Birdwine finally said, picking his way along the broken concrete in the streetlight’s yellow glow. “I didn’t know about him until he was three. I mean, I did. I knew she was pregnant when she left me. She told me, straight up, that it wasn’t mine. I even let her hurry the divorce, so she could marry that Martin guy before the baby came. It’s his name on the birth certificate.”
That rocked me. Martin was the legal father then; in Georgia, his rights hugely outweighed Birdwine’s.
I swallowed, and said quietly, “Well, she lied. You pretty much cloned yourself. The guy she married, he knows?”
“Unless he’s stupid. He knows what I look like. I met him a couple of times back when he was screwing my wife.” To his credit, it was only slightly bitter.
Had Martin married Stella blind, knowing the baby might not be his? Not a gamble so much as a decision; he would love, no matter how the coin fell. Maybe that’s what true love looked like, at its best. It looked like this to Julian, an adopted kid who talked to me of teams and rescues. He was already on an apartment hunt, putting in transfer applications, changing his life for the sake of a lost girl who was a coin spinning in midair. Tonight, I wanted to be a little more like him. I didn’t mean to blind myself to how hard and hateful the world was; sweetness was hard to find and harder still to keep. I only meant to reach for it, anyway.
“How did you find out?” I asked Birdwine. He wanted to talk, and he had carried this by himself so long. I needed him to know we could talk, after all.
“Some asshole friend of Stella’s who knew us both back in the day. Bridesmaid in our wedding. She sent me a letter, saying she’d waffled and prayed, and she’d decided that I had the right to know. That was about ten years ago,” he said, and now he did sound bitter, a thousand times blacker and more caffeinated than when he spoke of his wife’s affair.
The timeline made sense to me, though. Ten years ago, Birdwine had walked into his first AA meeting. “And that’s when you saw Caleb?”
“Yeah. They’d moved to Florida by then. I drove down and staked them out. For more than a week, but they never saw me. You know how I am. Damn, Paula, they looked good. They looked happy. I would know, because I didn’t want them to be happy. I was hoping for a reason to storm in. But their first girl had just started toddling, and my kid, Caleb, I heard him telling the ice cream booth guy that he was a big brother. He couldn’t say th’s. He said it like, brudder, and he sounded so proud. Every other word he said was Daddy. ‘Daddy, look at me.’ ‘Daddy, pick me up.’ And Martin would pick him up. Stella carried the baby, while Martin rode my son around on his shoulders.”
“Shit,” I said. The bridesmaid had taken her sweet time growing a conscience. She’d waited three years after Stella’d made a judgment call, choosing Martin before the birth, when biology would give its testimony. There was no clearer way to tell a man you didn’t think that he was good enough for your kid, but I asked anyway, because he had to know that I would listen, and that the story would change nothing. “When Stella told you she was pregnant, you didn’t wonder? You didn’t do the math?”
His shook his head, a huge, shaking no that started in his shoulders and reverberated down through our clasped hands. It was a lie he told with his whole body, or maybe it was just denial, because the words that he spoke next were true:
“I wanted to believe her. I guess I decided to believe her. I was really, really bu
sy drinking. It was a relief, when she said she was sure.”
Birdwine lifted his free hand in a whatcha gonna do gesture that said he didn’t blame her.
Maybe I couldn’t, either. I imagined Stella, pregnant thirteen years ago. Married to the ruin I’d seen when he was bingeing. He’d been drinking every day back then, hanging on to his job by a thread. She’d met another man, reliable and sober. She’d cared enough about Martin to break her marriage vows. When she realized she was pregnant, she’d had the luxury of choosing. I’d seen Birdwine at his worst, so I got it. And really, what would I have done in her shoes?
It was the wrong question. I knew my stupid answer: I’d have chucked the steady ginger and rolled my dice with this one.
“Do you think you’ll ever meet him? Caleb. Maybe when he’s grown?” I asked. I wasn’t sure if that was right, but I didn’t see a clear right. We were deep into the grays, here. Perhaps this wasn’t all that different from what Kai had done for Julian. For the first time I wondered if Julian had grown up knowing he was adopted. I thought so, from the way he’d talked about his family. Birdwine’s boy hadn’t. Had Caleb been abandoned or stolen, saved or released? It didn’t matter, because Birdwine was shaking his head no.
“Not unless he needs bone marrow or a kidney,” Birdwine said.
“Well, the gods be with him if he ever needs some liver,” I said, and Birdwine winced. “Yeah, low blow. But you know it’s true.”
We had reached my building now, and I let go of his hand and turned to face him. My back was to the wall. He faced into the gold light that streamed out from the lobby doors.
Birdwine said, “When I started AA, I made a promise to myself. I thought, if I could stay sober for a year, get my chip, then I’d go and meet Caleb. I told myself that, then, I’d be worth meeting. I started the trust fund, so he’d know he mattered the whole time, right? If I could just get that year chip, I kept saying.”
I shook my head. “That’s a lot of pressure to put on a recovery.”
“Yeah. I got to ten months once. When he was nine. Even started planning out what I would say to him, how to approach Stella . . . Woke up two weeks later, down in Mexico.” He shrugged, a rueful gesture, and then said, “I’ll tell you one good thing that came out of our breakup, if that’s what I can call it. Whatever that was in my kitchen, when you saw his picture. I gave it up. The whole idea. Meeting him is a fantasy. I could get ten years sober, and I still won’t go and see him. I’d have to tell the kid his mother’s a cheat and a liar and his dad’s a thief. If I wasn’t going to blow his life up like that when he was three, I don’t see how I can do it now, when he’s a teenager. When it’s time for college, or before, if something happens and he needs it, I’ll turn the fund over to Stella. She can explain it however she wants.” He bent to look at me. He put his eyes so close to mine it became hard to focus. “I’m not telling you this because of us. I’m not now going to try to get a year chip with you as some kind of messed-up prize at the end of it. I’m done with that kind of deal, and I’m done with drinking. For what that’s worth. I’ve said it before, but this time there’s no conditions. I’m just done. I hope—I believe—I mean it this time.”
“I hope so, too.” Even if he failed again, he would not stop trying. I knew he wouldn’t, because I knew him.
He threw up his hands and said, “And you know I fucking love you. So?”
I looked into his right eye, then his left, back and forth.
“Why do you love me?” I knew what I wanted, but on his side, I didn’t want it to be because I could be so bad for him. I didn’t want to be a pretty fist that he could bang himself into. I leaned against the wall, my head right by the keypad. “If we’re going to take a run at this, it has to be more than good sex and your masochism.”
I wasn’t sure he was going to answer. I wasn’t sure he had a reason, and he could be so hard to read. But then he smiled.
“Because everyone on this shithole planet says a lot of pretty words to make themselves look good while they do awful things,” he said. “You’re the opposite.”
It was a good answer. A good thing to say. I peered from one eye to the other, back and forth, harder than I had looked into Clark’s eyes, or the gun’s. Birdwine’s left one was rimmed in black and violet, still swollen. I watched his pupils expand as I leaned up. There was a fair amount of crazy present, sure, but in the darkness of his eyes I saw myself reflected clearly. I was real to him. He saw me all the way down to the bottom and knew every awful thing I’d done. More—he knew all that I was capable of doing, and yet he looked at me like I was something worthy and good.
“Come upstairs,” I said. There was a promise in the words that spoke to more than sex. I thought it was implicit. But he only waited, silent. He didn’t even blink, until my own eyes felt dry and itchy on his behalf. Finally I added, “Yes. Okay. Yes. I fucking love you.”
“Oh yeah,” he said, and punched the entry code in for my door. I didn’t think I’d ever given it to him, so he must have watched me key it in and remembered, damn the man.
We were silent and untouching in the elevator. We waited, and it felt right to wait until we were in my place. There we had a door to close behind us, and no walls. We went up the stairs to the loft, and we had each other there with Henry dozing on the dresser, purring to himself.
We were so careful with each other. We had to be. We touched softly in deference to all the ways that we were wounded, working around each other’s bruises and ruined places. This was not our usual sex. It was a delicate, new thing, and as we moved together, I could see Atlanta’s skyline spread out before us in an electric dazzle, as if the city had set itself alight inside the blackness strictly for our pleasure.
He stayed put after. I never wanted anyone to stay, but I did not want him to leave me. Not tonight. He folded himself around me, dozing, but I didn’t sleep. I was thinking of my mother. I was thinking that she had looked down the barrel of her own gun, in those medical scans. When the doctor told her, Weeks, if you are lucky.
She’d started bringing Hana to me, but she’d come the long way, trying to find a way into a future through our past. She had counted on being lucky.
In the darkness, with Birdwine’s arms around me, I knew that Kai was dead. Nothing else would have stopped her from delivering my sister. I’d known her death was probable; I’d assumed it was imminent and inevitable the day I got my check back, and Birdwine’s find at her Austin apartment had confirmed it. But now I knew it in the bones of me.
Kai’s time had already run out, and she would never reach my door, never take my hand, never say some asshole mystic shit like, Look here, Kali Jai, you have a little sister. I named her after Hanuman, the monkey god, because she is much stronger than she knows. I was crying quietly, but Birdwine must have felt the shaking in my body. He pulled me closer and I felt his face press into my hair.
Was this what forgiveness looked like on the other end? It was too hard for her to forgive my part in our unraveling because so much of it was her fault. Her whole life was like a loaded gun, left cocked with the safety off in the middle of the table. As a child I had picked it up, and played with it, and cost her Julian. His absence had wrecked us.
She hadn’t changed, though. As soon as she got off parole, she was on the move again, trusting fate to back her plays, no safety nets in place. Even when she learned that she was dying. She should have brought Hana straight to me.
Maybe it was the only way she could bring herself to come, traveling my little sister through the best parts of our shared past. Perhaps she’d needed to remember who we’d been to one another, back when she’d spin me on her feet, and I’d yell, Dance me, dance me. When the smell of orange peel and campfire smoke in her dark hair was my greatest comfort. When the two of us were all that was unchanging in the world.
That’s the Kai I wept for, and released.
When I woke up, Henry was smack dab in the middle of Birdwine’s abandoned pillow, floppy and
dense with sleep. I could smell coffee brewing downstairs, and I heard the soft clatter of hands on a keyboard, so Birdwine had not gone far. His shirt was still on the floor, a dark green T from a local brewery. It was size XL and soft with age. I pulled it over my head and went to the railing.
Birdwine, barefoot, in only his jeans, was dwarfing my office chair, peering deep into my laptop with a steaming mug beside him on the desk.
“Bring me a cup of that?” I called down.
He looked up at me, and I’d never seen his olive face so pale.
“What?” I said, instantly tense. “I mean for shit’s sake, what now?”
“I think I found her.” He turned to the screen and touched it, then looked back to me. “It’s a police report from four months ago. I think this might be Hana.”
“What?” I said. “How?”
“I wanted to work, but I didn’t want to leave with you asleep. I couldn’t pick up where Julian and I left off, not without my notes from home. I might create a gap and miss something. So I started at the other end. Paula, I think I found her.”
“Where is she?” I asked, my hands so tight on the railing that my nail beds had gone pale.
“Here,” he said, and he waved one hand out at the cityscape. The sun was coming up, drenching the skyline with new light. “I think she’s right here in Atlanta.”
CHAPTER 12
Candace is sitting on the hood of an ancient, low-slung Chrysler that is parked in front of our place. Mine and Kai’s. I am walking home in air so humid it feels thick with moisture, fresh off the school bus, when I see the shape of her from a long way down the block. Her shape does not belong here. She’s leaning back, braced on her hands, swinging her feet off the front edge of the car to kick the bumper. She’s so foreign, so invasive, that she stands out in brighter colors than any other object in my view. She’s as comfortable as if she had been born right here on this road. As if it were hers, and she belonged here, my ruin on skinny legs.
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