The Opposite of Everyone: A Novel

by Joshilyn Jackson

  I told him to stand down. I stayed sugar-sweet and patient, even when I got disconnected after a solid half hour spent on hold. I was casting a wide but very gentle net. If this was Hana—and I hoped it was—I wanted her caseworker already thinking well of us, predisposed to see us as an asset. I promised him if no one got back to us by Monday morning, I’d take the afternoon off. We’d go to the DFCS offices and run a good cop/bad cop, pitching tents and hissy fits as needed, hurling lawsuit threats and bribes around, whatever it took, but to let me try the sweet road first.

  It was almost lunchtime on Friday when Verona poked her head into my office. She looked spooked.

  “It’s a woman from Social Services,” she said, eyes wide.

  She knew how important this call was—the whole firm did. I’d invited Nick out for a drink on Wednesday, and I’d leveled with him about all that had gone down with my family situation in the last half year. Nick was more than forgiving; he was downright supportive. As well he should be. We went way back, and I’d literally taken a beating—almost a bullet—for the firm. It didn’t hurt that Winkley v. Winkley was unfolding beautifully, both in terms of the settlement itself and the good publicity. Oakleigh adored my sorry ass; I’d turned her life into a big fat bowl of roses. She was an asshole, sure, but she was my asshole, and Nick all but glowed, rhapsodizing about the referrals she’d give her spoiled, rich friends when it came time for their inevitable divorces.

  As a bonus, Nick was an incorrigible gossip, so I’d only had to plop my fresh and steaming guts out on a table once. The tremble in Verona’s voice as she told me who was on the phone was testament to how fast and thoroughly he’d spread the word.

  I hit Save on the motion I was writing and set my laptop aside, saying, “Super, put the call through.”

  “No, not on the phone,” Verona told me in a hushed, dramatic whisper. “There’s a woman here. Right here. In the lobby. Now.”

  I felt the little hairs on the back of my neck rise up. I knew enough about government agencies to guess this wasn’t usual. I kept my face neutral, though, and said, “Super, send her back,” with the same inflection I’d used when I’d thought it was a call. I didn’t want to encourage Verona, who was acting as if this were reality TV and she’d bagged a juicy cameo. Ye gods, these millennials.

  “She doesn’t have an appointment,” Verona said. “I offered her some coffee, and I ran to tell you.”

  “It’s fine,” I said. “Just bring her here, then go push back my conference call.”

  I came out from behind my desk while I was waiting and took a quick peek in the outsize mirror hung behind the sofa. My hair was sleek, and I hadn’t eaten off my lipstick. I looked professional, and by the time Verona returned, I also looked pleasant and calm. Relaxed mouth, eyebrows down, easy in the shoulders.

  “Sharon Watson here to see you,” Verona said, ushering in an attractive black woman, heavyset and tall, about my age.

  I hadn’t left anyone of that name a voicemail. Curiouser and curiouser. Ms. Watson wore an inexpensive navy suit and a string of pearls that were too large to be anything but costume. She had on pearlized earrings, too, flat and wide like silver dollars. Her navy pumps were sensible but flattering, much like her short haircut.

  “Thanks, Verona,” I said, dismissively enough to be definitive. She backed out, slowly. I waited until my door closed all the way before I stepped toward the woman with my hand out. “Hello, I’m Paula Vauss.”

  She took it, saying, “Oh, I know who you are. And you know me.”

  I didn’t, though. Not until she smiled at me. Her mouth stretched wide in her pretty face, showing me a huge wall of slightly overlapping teeth. Then I knew her.

  “Hello, Shar,” I said, cool as I could manage it. Twenty years older, with a different last name, but it was Shar. She was my past, rising around me, and she was also impossibly here and now. She was exactly herself, but taller, stouter, and wearing braces on her big teeth, the transparent kind. They hadn’t quite finished their job yet, but that didn’t stop her from grinning wide, enjoying my shock. I had to work hard to make my voice not tremble as I asked, “You’re with DFCS?”

  “Yes. A lot of us end up doing social work,” she said. I wasn’t sure who us was. She must have seen it on my face because she clarified. “Former foster kids. When the system works, we tend to want to pay it back.” She gave me a long, scraping look, from my blowout to my bitch heels, and then cast another, even louder speaking glance around my office. She put those big teeth back on full display and added, “Not you, though, huh.”

  I felt my own smile starting to go sharky. I hadn’t seen Shar since she was thirteen years old, but she was still an instigator.

  I resisted her bait. I wasn’t going to throw down with my pro bono work, metaphorically unzipping and then calling for a ruler so we could measure our respective virtues. Not only because I would surely lose against a woman whose life’s work was in Social Services. It was more important to understand why she had come here; I thought she’d taken the potshot to get a rise or a feel for me, so her visit had to do with Hana. This could not be a simple case of auld lang syne. Not with this timing, and the Shar I remembered had not been remotely sentimental.

  I kept my voice sweet and said, “Apparently not. Please, sit down.” I waved her to the sofa instead of the client chairs, and I took a seat on it beside her. I didn’t want the desk between us, which could read as adversarial or patronizing. She sat very straight, but I thought that was due to good posture, not a fighting stance. I was having trouble reading her. Hell, I was having a little trouble processing, period. “Your last name is changed. It used to be . . .”

  “Roberson,” she said.

  “That’s right. So you got married?”

  “I sure did.” Shar had a satchel purse with her, large enough to double as a briefcase. She’d dropped it by her feet when she sat down. Now she fished her phone out of a side pocket and pulled up a picture to show me. In it she stood arm in arm with a tall, broad-faced black man with a mustache and a comfortable belly. Three boys of varying sizes clustered around them. “You married, Paula?”

  “Nope. Never married, no kids,” I said. I couldn’t tell if this was another gauntlet, but it was not an arena where I’d ever felt competitive.

  “Well, looks like you’re doing all right, in your own way,” she said, chuckling.

  That threw me. It sounded good-humored—almost kind—and I was still looking for her angle. The last time our paths had crossed, we had been mortal enemies. Of course, we had also been children.

  “Are you here about my phone calls?” I asked. But that was too indirect. “Are you here about my sister, I mean. I don’t remember leaving you a message.”

  “Well, I’m about the only one in Fulton County who hasn’t heard from you. You left a lot of messages,” she said. “I’m a supervisor now, not a caseworker, but you’re a former foster kid, trying to find a younger sibling in the system. You know that’s going to rate high as watercooler talk. Once I heard your name, I had to see if you were the same Paula I remembered, even though the case isn’t under my jurisdiction. I found your picture on your firm’s website. I knew it was you like that.” She snapped her fingers. “You got even taller, but your face is exactly the same. I thought, Look at that! Another one of Mrs. Mack’s girlies, making good.”

  She was chatting at me as if this were a social call. Perhaps this was the necessary small talk people did before they got down to it? Nick was so much better at this part. It was not my bailiwick, but I gave it my best try.

  “I remember that. Mrs. Mack calling us her girlies,” I said.

  “She was good to me,” Shar said. “I don’t think you knew her like I did. You had a mama coming for you, and she didn’t try to get in between that. She was different with us on the adoption track. Especially the ones like me—I’d been suspended three times for fighting. Not like I had sets of perfect parents lining up to bid. She kept up with me even after I
aged out. She was my oldest son’s godmother, before she passed.”

  “Oh. I’m sorry for your loss. It sounds like she was lovely to you,” I said, awkward and formal. Shar still looked expectant, maybe wanting the nutshelled version of my life in return, post–foster care. Instead I asked another question. “You keep up with anybody else, from back in those old days?” As I spoke I heard how far I’d sunk into the rhythms of her speech. You keep up, without the word do at the front. That wasn’t how I talked now.

  I wondered if my presence was pushing her diction back in time as well. Her accent was on the spectrum common to professional women of any race here in Atlanta, similar to mine, but this was a matter of sentence structure. The rhythm of her story was a song straight out of the time we’d spent together. Back when we were Mrs. Mack’s girlies, as Shar had styled us.

  “Me and Kim stayed tight,” Shar said. “She had a kid when she was young. A girl. Twelve now, and a pistol. Kim got married to a good man, though, a couple years back. They have a baby boy. He’s the fattest little thing. So cute. Looks like he’s made out of pudding. Got all those little knee fats and elbow fats. Makes me miss those baby days. Not enough to go back to them, mind you.”

  I was interested in spite of myself and all the context in the room. “What about Karice? Did you keep up with her?”

  Shar’s expression sobered. She shrugged in a way that didn’t mean she didn’t know. She knew all right, but she wasn’t going to talk about it. I could fill in the blanks: Karice was dead or missing or some known flavor of ruined. She, too, had fallen off the world.

  “Yeah, okay. Same with Joya,” I said. I repeated her own shrugging gesture back to her.

  In the wake of this exchange, I felt an understanding between us. The last time our histories had intersected, we’d been standing on the world’s cusp. We all had been. Gotmamas and adoption trackers, boys and girls, black, white, brown, and all colors in between. We’d all been abandoned, lost, or rescued, and therefore of one tribe, although we hadn’t known it. Shar and I had been among the Children of the Edge, too young to feel ourselves teetering. I hadn’t liked Kim, but I was glad to hear that she was well. I’d had no fondness for Karice, and Shar had hated Joya, but it didn’t stop the common ground from rising around us in the here and now. Shar and me? We’d both lost people we loved over the edge, and neither one of us had fallen.

  Although, considering that history, I couldn’t help it; my gaze twitched to those outsize pearl earrings. It was a fast look, barely a blink’s worth, but she busted me and laughed.

  “Oh, you want to see?”

  I did. I couldn’t help it. “Bet your ass,” I said.

  She slid the earrings off; they were clip-ons. The fissures were gone, but I could see a faint, neat scar in the center of each lobe, pointing straight down.

  “Plastic surgery,” she confided. “They had to excise the old wounds, and that hurt about as much as it sounds like it would. Expensive? Lord, yes. But I saved up and had it done when I was twenty. I never forgot you saying my earlobes looked like old-lady bottoms.”

  I looked down at my hands in my lap, rueful. “Well, I was kind of a turd.”

  “You and me and every twelve-year-old female ever born. It’s going to be a miracle if Kim doesn’t flat eat her daughter. I’m glad I had boys,” Shar said, still smiling. “I’m sorry about Joya, but at least your other friend landed on her feet.”

  It took me a second to realize who she had to mean.

  “Candace?” I asked. “I did not keep up with Candace.”

  Shar’s eyes widened with surprise. “You two were peas inside a pod.”

  I had no response that was both true and suitable for polite company, so I only said, “Last I heard, she ran away.”

  “Yes. She ran away a bunch of times, but she always came back. Candace and I aged out together. Well, it’s a long story, and I have afternoon appointments. But sometime, you should Google her. She goes by Candace Cherries now. She’s a little bit famous.”

  “In porn?” I said. I didn’t know what else it could be, with that name. It wouldn’t have surprised me, either, but “porn star” didn’t fit with Shar’s pleased tone.

  “Just Google her sometime,” Shar said, closing the subject, but she made no move to leave. Small talk was over, then. I felt my spine get a little straighter.

  “So this is about Hana,” I said.

  “ ’Course it is,” Shar said. “Once I realized it was you, I got what’s called a little overinterested. So tell me. Why do you think this girl is your sister? She’s a quiet type. Doesn’t say three words if one will do, but she told me she has no siblings, same as she said when she was interviewed at intake.”

  “Told you?” I said, leaning forward. “You’ve met her?”

  “I came here straight from meeting her,” Shar said, and instantly I was on my feet, going to my desk to get my laptop. “I didn’t tell her about you. I said I was a supervisor, checking on a few things. No sense in riling the child if she isn’t the girl you’re looking for. But if she—” She stopped talking abruptly because I’d brought the laptop back to her, open to one of the scanned pics of Hana feeding fat ducks on the riverside with Kai. There was a long pause, and then Shar said, “Well, I’ll be damned,” with wonderment in her voice, “that’s her.”

  “Are you sure?” I said. My voice was shaking now, in spite of my best efforts.

  “ ’Course I’m sure. I left that girl’s foster home at about eleven thirty,” Shar said.

  “So you’re really sure,” I said.

  My hands went numb. My face, too, as Shar nodded.

  This was Hana, so Karen Porter was Kai. And Karen Porter was ashes. I’d known that Kai was dead, down to my bones, but this was so specific. Not just dead, but small, reduced to only that which would not burn. Ashes in a box. How Kai would hate that.

  At the same time, this was Hana, alive, and maybe even safe, and—I needed to go see her. Now. No, I needed to call Julian. Or— I didn’t know what to do next.

  I stared at Shar, suddenly helpless in the real and simple presence of a woman who had seen my missing sister not an hour ago.

  Shar reached out a hand and touched Kai’s face on the screen. “I remember her.”

  I blinked. “You saw Kai? But the mother in this case was—” I faltered.

  “Oh, God, no, I’m sorry,” Shar said, overloud, almost horrified. “No, no, Karen Porter passed. Months ago. I’m so sorry. I meant, I remember seeing her at Mrs. Mack’s. Years ago. When she came to visit you.”

  It was the second shock I’d had in as many minutes, but of course she would remember Kai. My mother had visited me four times a week while she worked on finding a job and getting us an apartment. That would stick hard in the memory of a girl like Shar. I couldn’t think about Kai now. Not with Hana found, living and so close.

  “So now what do I do?” I said.

  I didn’t mean the process, necessarily. I meant it more existentially, but Shar gave her shoulders a little shake and let her hand drop away from the screen. She dug in her oversize bag, pulling out a legal pad and a manila file. The tab said Hannah Porter, and she opened it up onto the coffee table. She got a notebook with a pen stuck through the spirals, too, and bent over the coffee table to write.

  “First, I’m going to give you some direct contact information,” Shar said, copying names and numbers and email addresses as she spoke. “I’ll talk to Hannah’s caseworker myself, get her to contact you ASAP. You’re going to want to call the guardian ad litem. This is him, Roger Delany. I don’t know him well. He’s new. But her therapist, Dr. Patel, is very good. I’ve worked with her for several years. She specializes in trauma, which considering Hannah has lost her mother—”

  “Her name is Hana,” I interrupted, not wanting to hear the end of that sentence. I knew what Hana had lost. I’d lost my mother, too, years ago, but also four months back, and again a few days past, weeping in bed with Birdwine. It had happened a long
time ago; it was still happening now.

  “Yes, that’s what I said.”

  “No, you’re saying Hannah, and it’s Hana.” My sister had been named for a god in my own pantheon, and her name would rhyme with Ghana, not banana. Shar stared at me as if I’d grown a second head, and I realized I had no idea what my face was doing. I’d lost control of it entirely.

  Shar said, dismayed, “Oh, hey, now! This is good news.”

  “How’s her placement?” I asked. My voice sounded thick, like I was choking.

  “Excellent!” Shar assured me. “I know Mrs. Beale. She’s a former schoolteacher, retired. Hannah is her seventh foster, and her only one right now.” I still couldn’t seem to stop the awful shapes my face was making, and Shar petered out. Her voice got cooler, a little more reserved. “It’s not permanent. Hannah is going on the adoption track. It was my impression that you were looking for this girl because you wanted her.”

  “I want her,” I said, immediate and raw. I think we were both relieved to hear the truth, ringing in those simple words as clear as bell song. “It’s just a lot. It’s very fast.” Damn Julian, the kid had been right all along, and I was not prepared. “I only have one bed. She’ll need a bed. And sheets. Sheets with whatever ten-year-old girls like on them, and I don’t know what ten-year-old girls like.”

  Now Shar was the one with an odd look on her face. I could not read it.

  She said, “It’s always like this, when a kid comes into your life. You’re not going to be a hundred percent ready. But we’re going to get you ready enough.”

  “When can I have her?” I said, changing lanes again, raw and abrupt.

  “Have?” Shar said, eyebrows rising. “That’s going to take a while. We’ll need to do the standard background checks, inspect your house, and give her time to work on the transition with her therapist. Most importantly, you two need to get to know each other. So have is going to take a little time. But visitation? If you call this lawyer, Delany, and you and I conference with the caseworker today, they can get you shoehorned into family court Monday or Tuesday. You could start visitation next week.” She looked at me, hard, and said, “If that’s what you want.”