The Opposite of Everyone

by Joshilyn Jackson

  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.

  Once I breathed through the shock of seeing her, I knew why he’d picked this close-­in shot. It showed only the collar of what looked like an embroidered top in thick brocade. Austin in July was ninety degrees and about as humid as Venus; this photo had been taken in November, when Julian hired him. He didn’t want to risk me noticing that in this “brand new” photo, Kai was dressed for Austin’s mild winter.

  “Oh, look at her,” I said, and moved to close. “These are from—­Monday, you said?”

  Worth nodded. “I got them late Monday night.”

  “That’s amazing!” I said. I let my fond smile go wide, wider, until Worth was seeing all my teeth, and damn but it felt good to let them out. I had forgotten how much I loved to step in close, to cut sugar from my voice. “A genuine miracle. Considering my mother died last winter.”

  There was a long pause. Worth swallowed, and his face went red all around his white mustache. His whole face looked like Christmas morning.

  “Well, now, wait. I said I got them Monday, but who knows when my guy in Austin—­I mean, no. Maybe I—­” He floundered into a silence.

  “Hey, Worth?” Birdwine asked, still not looking up from ­People. “As a competent investigator, did you happen to suss out what Ms. Vauss here does for a living?”

  I gave a self-­deprecating shrug and said nothing. I didn’t have to. Birdwine had launched the word lawyer into the room. Another ten seconds passed, and a silent torrent of other implied words came rolling in behind: Lawsuit. Damages. Charges. Fraud.

  I reached across the desk and plucked the file up. Worth fluttered his hands after it, but didn’t quite dare to try to snatch it back.

  I said, “I believe this belongs to my brother, Mr. Worth, and you’re done working for him.” I slid the picture of Kai back inside and tucked it into my outsize shoulder bag. I started to turn away, but then paused and turned back. “One more thing. You clearly haven’t lifted a finger on this case since November, and yet Julian’s gotten bill after bill from you. You’ve bled the kid for around four hundred dollars every month. Isn’t that interesting, Birdwine?”

  “I’m riveted,” he said. He set the magazine down and stood up, fast, filling up his half of the room. “Hey, Paula, do you feel a refund is in order?”

  Worth blinked, his mouth opening and closing like a gigged fish’s. He said, “Well, I could, I mean—­”

  I spoke over Worth. “In fact, I do, Birdwine. I’ll take a check, Mr. Worth, which is nice and trusting of me, considering. Ten thousand’ll cover it.”

  He boggled at the amount. “That’s a helluva lot more th—­”

  “I’ve added in some interest,” I said. I’d sized up his clothes, his office space, his fictional assistant, and I thought 10K was doable for him. Barely. It ought to cut him plenty deep. “It’s what we’ll call a fiscal apology. A very reasonable fiscal apology. Considering.”

  Worth had gone white. “I won’t be extorted.”

  “Extorted?” I interrupted, and the last vestige of the sweet, blinking daddy’s girl was gone. “This is a goddamn gift.” I walked slowly around the desk toward him, the clack of my heels on his scratched hardwood timed to be a drumbeat of vicious punctuation. “If it takes you more than sixty seconds from this moment to put that check into my hand, I will revoke the offer, and I will take my brother as a client, and I will destroy you.” The closer I got, the more I let my real face, the one I hid behind expensive lip gloss and good manners, out. Out and open and toothy. “This is straight-­up fraud. I’ll call the cops and get your ass charged and convicted, and that’s mostly to set the foundation for my civil case. I will have your license, and your business, and your future. If you’re lucky, the judge won’t give me your nut sack, tied up in a big pink bow. But I’ll be asking for it. Believe it.”

  There was a second of dead silence. Worth stared into my raw and naked face, and then he wordlessly opened his desk drawer and got out his checkbook. I looked to Birdwine, and I found him looking back.

  Really looking, seeing everything that had come roaring joyfully out from behind my civilized demeanor. The air sparked between us. My teeth caught my own bottom lip, so badly did I need something to bite. We were together in this moment, him and me, held in the music of this victory, the song caused by the scratch of Worth’s pen against the paper check.

  It was hard to drag my gaze away, but when I did, I saw Worth was writing my name in the line by Pay to the order of. I rapped my knuckles hard against the desk.

  “Do you think I need a cut of my brother’s tender little pennies?”

  Worth paused, then voided the check and started writing a new one, properly, to Julian.

  Birdwine’s gaze had not shifted. I could feel it on me. When I looked back, he was grinning. I was not pretty in victory, but Birdwine liked it. Birdwine had always liked me this way, and how had I forgotten? Birdwine liked it plenty. I felt his gaze on my skin, and it had gone as hot as Worth’s had gone cold.

  Worth ripped the check out of the book and held it wor
dlessly toward me.

  I took it, and in lieu of good-­bye, I said, “He’s going to take this to the bank on Monday. There’s not a god above the earth or under it who can help you if it bounces.”

  His eyes twitched in their sockets as he ran some calculations in his head. Finally, he gave a faint, propitiating headshake, and I knew it wouldn’t bounce. I could see how much it hurt, though, and that hurt made the air taste sweet against my tongue.

  I walked out, and Birdwine followed, closing the door gently behind us. The old, familiar rush from the win was roaring through me. I’d missed this high, missed feeling there was no soft place on my entire body. I was made of bone and teeth and iron blood.

  I backtracked down the filthy hall, and when I came to the empty office, it was the toothy, rock-­hard me that paused, that turned back to face Birdwine. I was hungry for a vulnerable pulse point, for any soft place I could set my teeth. I looked at him, and I didn’t see one. Birdwine wasn’t scared of me or soft at all. His face had set in an expression I had not seen since he quit me. We’d been working together again on my pro bonos, but he hadn’t looked at me like this. Not once, though he knew I was quite often up for some nostalgia with my exes.

  I put my hands flat on his chest. I could feel his heart, thumping fast, a huge reverberation in the broad span of his chest. My hands pushed him toward the open door, and he went through, as though my push had sent him. But it hadn’t. Birdwine was a mountain, not some small, soft thing that I could move. My push sent him because he wanted to be sent. I kicked the door shut behind us, and then we were alone. I reached for him, and found him already reaching, too. He picked me straight up off the floor, right out of my shoes.

  I swarmed up him as he dragged me, wrapping my legs around him, my skirt riding up onto my hips. I grabbed deep fistfuls of his hair. He brought my naked face up to his face. Eye to eye, I breathed his breath in for a single blinding-­hot second, and then our eyes were closed and our mouths were open to each other. His hands were on my hips now, grinding me into him, and I would have paid ten thousand dollars, cash, to have us both animal naked, with no cloth blocking our bodies at their most essential points.

  I rubbed my cheek down his, tucked my face into his neck and bit at him there, running my tongue down to where it met his shoulder. I whispered words into his skin. “Let’s go to your place.”

  The second after I spoke, I knew I shouldn’t have. I should have let it happen, fast and sweet, right here. We should have crashed around the room, knocking down the flimsy cubicles. We should have had each other in the wreckage.

  As it was, I felt him forcefully relax his grip.

  “Just like old times,” he said. He took a shuddering breath and set me on the desk. He pulled back, and I let him go. His eyes were open again, and almost angry. When he spoke again, it came out flat, not mad at all. Almost matter-­of-­fact. “We won’t work out, Paula. If we start, we’ll hit the same wall we hit last time, and you’ll break my fuckin’ heart again.”

  It was like being punctured. All the sex ran out of me. Now I saw the grime streaking the carpet, the peeling paint. I smelled burnt cumin. It was that last word, again, that got to me.

  I hadn’t known he’d been in love with me. Was that what he meant, when he said we’d hit a wall? That he had loved me? When he quit me, citing lack of communication, I’d assumed I’d done something to piss him off. When he stopped taking my calls, I’d assumed I’d pissed him off a lot. My focus after that was fixing our working relationship. I didn’t give my personal relationships with men a lot of brain space. I specifically looked for relationships with men that didn’t require any.

  “Birdwine,” I said. “I didn’t know I broke your heart.”

  The very words tasted strange. They weren’t the kind of words I said, but we were friends now, and I had started this. I’d reached for him first, and I had kicked the door shut. He deserved acknowledgment.

  I should have answered my phone when Remi called me back last night, should have had him over for some auld lang syne. Instead, I’d called the ghost of an old love into this filthy room. I’d killed it a year ago, before I knew it existed. I found I didn’t like it any better dead. This was not my kind of haunting.

  I stood up, and I was instantly horrified at the crunchy feel of the carpet on my bare feet. I hurried to slide back in my shoes. While my back was to Birdwine, I straightened my clothes, smoothing down my skirt and then my hair. When I was more or less put back together, I turned to face him. He was standing quiet and calm by the desk. One big hand was rubbing at his temple, never a good sign. His hair was crazy rumpled, and I had a flash of what it had felt like fisted in my hands as I yanked on it, desperate to get him closer.

  I dropped my gaze. We were supposed to be finding my dead mother. We’d agreed to try a friendship—­a thing I deeply needed at this juncture. What the hell had I been thinking?

  Truth be told, I hadn’t thought at all. I had wanted; I had acted.

  Finally I said, “I don’t screw my friends, Birdwine. Not literally, not metaphorically. So that was an asshole move. I’m sorry.”

  I’d hurled my truly superior handbag onto the foul carpet in my eagerness. I picked it up now. I almost felt I owed the bag an apology, too.

  “De nada,” he said, though I wouldn’t have blamed him if he’d walked off to find a MARTA stop and blocked me on his phone. By the time I straightened up, slinging the bag over my shoulder, he’d stopped his hand from worrying at his forehead.

  “I’m not going to break your anything,” I told him. I couldn’t parrot that word back to him again. Heart. I didn’t want to keep putting it out there. I didn’t want to re-­invoke it. “Can we pretend this didn’t happen? Or chalk it up to the asbestos in this building? I got poisoned by asbestos.”

  That made him laugh. Just a little. “Yeah. Asbestos is a well-­known aphrodisiac.” When he spoke again, he was businesslike, but not cold. “Give me the keys. I’ll drive so you can go through Worth’s file. We can pick up looking for Kai right where he left off.”

  Now I did have a soft place. I felt my own heartbeat, pulsing in my throat. “Thanks.”

  I had to stay on the righ­teous side of any line he drew. Right now, that meant tossing the keys to him. He plucked them out of the air, and we left the filthy office and backtracked down the stairs, single file, to my car. It hadn’t been stolen, and it still had all its hubcaps, so I decided to call that another win. I added it to cutting Worth off at the knees, and for the day, I was still ahead on points. Maybe I’d stepped too close to the edge of this new friendship with Birdwine, but winning was my dear and oldest friend. I could get back in bed with winning full-­time, no complications.

  We got in the car, the air between us still a little charged. I ignored the awkwardness. We’d had too good a morning to end on something sour or shameful. I pulled Worth’s file out of my bag and held it up in Birdwine’s peripheral vision, and he smiled. He liked winning plenty, too.

  “Tell us, Vanna, what’s in the prize pack?” he said.

  “Stop by that Kinkos near your place. I want to scan the whole thing. You can have the hard copy,” I said. While we were there, I could scan my mother’s poem, too.

  I flipped the file open on my lap to find the photo I’d already seen. I turned it like a page and found a full-body shot of Kai in the same top, same river in the background. Her back was to the camera, and she was watching a little girl throw bread to the ducks. Her brocade shirt was long-sleeved, paired with old jeans. She looked good from the back, but this was not the right thing to point out: Hey, Birdwine, peep my genes. My ass could look this fine for another fifteen years.

  “Kai always said ducks were mean sonsabitches,” I said. “Yet here she is, hanging with a bunch of ’em.”

  Birdwine shot me a look, like, Really? We’re making observations about ducks now?

  “They d
o bite,” I went on doggedly. I didn’t want it quiet in the car.

  Though he’d not said it explicitly, I had no way to un-­know this fact: a year ago, Birdwine had been in love with me. What had he been thinking? If a fella was looking for love, I was the wrong road to go down. I was the road, in fact, that was crawling with barbed wire and bears and dynamite, marked with huge signs that said THERE IS NOTHING FOR YOU HERE.

  I sneaked a sideways look at him and found him pressing his fingers to his forehead again. Oh, right. Birdwine was an alcoholic; he had a known predilection for chasing after things that were bad for him. Things much worse than me. He kept on going back to something that would kill him.

  As if he’d read my mind, or at least my line of sight, he stopped his fingers pressing his temple. He placed his hand deliberately back on the wheel; he knew his tells.

  He said, “Yeah. I got my eight-­month chip last weekend.”

  “Congrats,” I said, although he’d said it as a warning, not a brag. He rarely made it past six months, and to my knowledge he had never gone a year. He was deep into a dangerous time.

  “Is it all pictures?” he asked, changing the subject.

  I flipped through more shots of Kai watching fat ducks getting fatter on the riverside.

  “No, there’s printer paper in the back. Notes, or—­” My voice cut out abruptly as I flipped to the next picture. Kai now had her arm around the duck-­feeding girl. I looked closer. My breath caught.

  “What?” Birdwine said.

  “Oh, shit,” I said. “Are you kidding me?”

  She was a pudgy little white girl, though her skin tone and her mass of dark hair said she might owe some genes to Mexico. I flipped again. The next shot was a close-­up. She was snuggled under my mother’s arm, and her eyes were spring-­green Kai-­shaped crescents that curved into narrow moon shapes as she smiled. I hadn’t needed the close-­up or the eyes to know. I’d already recognized the very shape of her, those long storky legs, that squashy middle. It had been my shape at her age.