The Opposite of Everyone

by Joshilyn Jackson

  “Bitch, get off the phone,” a female voice says on the other end of the line, so loud it crackles.

  Joya and I startle at the interruption. We are huddled side by side on the floor of the pantry with the old phone set to speaker, our heads cocked to listen to my mother’s story.

  We look at each other wide-­eyed, and then Kai is back.

  “It’s okay. Rhonda’s talking to that rude woman about manners. Oh, wait—­one more second.”

  We hear muffled, angry conversation through the speaker.

  Joya hugs herself and whispers, “Shit, your mama can tell a good story.”

  “Yeah,” I agree.

  My mother’s stories do not have a Disney version; if they’re spooky, then she tells them deep-down spooky. Maybe too spooky if she is going to be this far away, fighting about phone time with a mean-­voiced lady who might be dangerous.

  “I’m back. We have a few more minutes,” Kai says.

  Joya asks Kai, “Is that the end of the story?”

  “No,” Kai says, at the same time I say, “Yes.”

  I don’t want my mother to gain a mortal enemy because I kept her talking. I want her safe. Also, I like it when the Red Seed tale ends here. If it were nighttime, and Kai were tucking me in bed, she would now say, Each of those demon-­dandelion tufts is a wish for you. Close your eyes and make them. I’d be fast asleep before I ever finished wishing.

  I don’t like Kai’s favorite end, where Kali, drunk on demon blood, cannot stop dancing. She’s so wild and mighty she begins to crack the earth itself. She cannot be stopped. The armies quail, and all seems lost, until her lover comes. He lies down directly in her path, and when her bare foot touches his chest, she stops at once. Lest she crush his precious heart, Kai says in that version, and that’s my cue to make a puking noise.

  “Do you have time to finish?” Joya asks, ignoring me.

  I shoot Joya an irked look. She’s supposed to be sitting outside, guarding against Candace’s big ears. But then Kai started to tell “The Red Seed,” and I invited her in. I thought Joya should hear it, especially since a new kid has moved into our cabin. Kim is a hulking girl with heavy, scowly eyebrows, and she’s posse’d up with Shar and Karice. The odds have shifted against the Gotmamas. Shar is giving Joya stink eye every time their paths cross. Shar still owes Joya plenty for her earlobes, and Joya’s mama has completed rehab and moved into a halfway house. Shar is running out of time to pay her back.

  There is power in my mother’s tales, and this story is a mighty call to rally; I wanted Joya to have a share. “The Red Seed” is the story I hoped for the day those Paulding County white girls named me Fatty-­Fatty Ass-­Fat. If Kai had told it that day, I might have gone back to school with bells on my wrists, ready to take on the world. Instead, Kai told “Ganesha’s Mouse,” and I called 911.

  “She needs to get off the phone, before she gets in trouble,” I tell Joya, loud enough for Kai to hear me plain.

  “But I want to hear the end,” Joya says.

  “Every story has a thousand ends,” Kai says. She sounds calm, or maybe she’s just tired. “I could tell you an end that even Paula doesn’t know.”

  “Oh, please?” says Joya, and now my interest is piqued. I like to stop when Kali wins the battle, but Kai likes romance. There is no third ending that I know.

  “Long ago, right now,” Kai begins, “Kali has a newborn boy—­”

  “Wait, she what?” I say.

  I’ve never heard a tale where Kali is a mother. She’s The Mother, sure, the one who burns the ancient forests down. After, from the charred ground, the new grass grows in sweeter and greener than ever before. But I can’t imagine Kali as some mommy, using two of her many hands to change a diaper while the human bones tied to her wrists rustle and scrape.

  “She said Kali had a baby. Shut it,” Joya says, and Kai begins again.

  Long ago, right now, Kali has a newborn boy. But Kali is drunk on the Red Seed’s blood. She dances her victory so violently against the earth that the big bells at her waist sound like artillery. Her finger bells ting so high they hurt the ears, and the bells on her wrists bark and clang. She dances so hard, the world begins to crack at its foundation. The cities shake. The oceans churn and foam.

  The bravest soldier snatches up her tiny son and brings him to the battlefield. He creeps as close to Kali as he dares and sets the baby gently on a pile of Earth’s fallen soldiers. Then he runs. The bodies are cold, and the baby is naked. He is unhappy to find himself alone and so chilled. He opens up his tiny mouth and wails, a bare scrap of sound.

  But Kali hears. She stops dancing, and her bells fall still. In the silence, everyone can hear the baby cry. She goes to him, running quick and light. The oceans calm, and the Earth shivers back together, knitting at the seams. She lifts the baby up and sits down on the heap of corpses. She begins to nurse him, rocking and singing. The bells chime sweet and quiet with her gentle movements. All around her, the white chaff of the demons begins to settle, landing in drifts like new snow. It blankets the carnage until all the world is covered, remade fresh and faultless. The only colors come from Kali and her son, nestled together on a white hilltop.

  Kai stops speaking, and it is very quiet. This is the right way to end the story for the Gotmamas. This is the end where you are cold and all alone, and your mother comes and gathers you up. Even Joya’s eyes have pinked. She breathes out a sigh, and then, outside the pantry, we hear a muffled sniffle.

  I recognize the sound; it’s that damn Candace, come to steal more of my conversations. Her allergies have betrayed her. Either that, or she’s feeling some emotion that she has no right to feel. Joya is up in a flash, leaping out of the pantry with murder writ large on her face. I hear Candace retreating at full gallop, hollering, “Wait, wait, wait, wait, no, no, no!” and the pounding of their feet as they race across the rec room.

  I take the phone off speaker, and in the quiet, I can hear Kai’s breathing has constricted.

  “Mama?” I say. I rarely call her Mama anymore. Not since she was with Hervé, and I got used to saying Kai. I wouldn’t have called her by that name if there was a chance in hell that Candace was nearby to hear. It is a sacred word to me and Joya. “Mama, are you crying?”

  “No, baby,” my mother lies. She’s good at it, but no one’s that good. There is a pause, and I clutch the phone hard, leaning into it. I am so attuned to her breathing, to the quality of her silence, that I can sense her bringing herself in hand. Miles apart, I feel my mother’s spine straightening, and it straightens my own. I feel her sad mouth willfully re-form into a smile. When she speaks again, her voice is brisk and cheery. “Baby-­mine, my phone time’s more than up. I love you. Take care of yourself, and I will see you soon. So soon. These last few months will go by in a blink.” A lie, but such a good one. In that moment, she makes herself sound so sure, we both believe it.

  I hadn’t seen my mother for a year and a half. I’d had a birthday, grown three inches, and started my period. She had shrunk, emptied of my brother. Ganesh was truly gone by this time, already remade into a Julian.

  Had she seen the baby? Held him? Nursed him? When they took him from her body, did they have to say he was a boy, or had she already known it, the way she knew I was a girl?

  You had such a female energy, she always said.

  Odd to think of myself that way, small and blind and tethered to her. In that time before memory, everything I touched was hers. I heard her voice from the inside, with no idea that she was a separate person. Back then, she had simply been the world.

  This boy sitting in my passenger seat began his life there, too, in my abandoned room. When Kai told the new ending to “The Red Seed,” had he been the baby she imagined? I didn’t think so. By the time she told that story, she’d already sent him to the parents she had chosen, carefully, using Kai-­centric criteria.

 
The Bouchards had been solidly middle class—­a kindergarten teacher and an insurance agent—­because Kai didn’t trust the rich. In love, because Kai was big on love. A mother with a medical condition that precluded bio kids and pushed their name down on adoption waiting lists, so Kai’s boy would likely be their only, the single son that they revolved around. I glanced over at him, earnestly reading in the passenger seat. I took in his smooth pink cheeks and his curls. His eyes were wide and bright. He looked like the poster boy you’d pick to represent whole milk, or organic peaches. No baby had ever been set down in a place less like a battlefield.

  We came abreast of a southern-­style colonial McMansion, and my GPS announced we were at Oakleigh’s. I pulled in, glad to see my car was the only one in the long drive. The cops weren’t here yet, and it was a good thing, too. I needed to get my game face on. All the way to Oakleigh’s, watching my half brother trying to decipher the mud-­thick legalese of the internship agreement, I’d been thinking of Hana and of Kai’s story of the Red Seed.

  That baby on Kai’s battlefield was me. In reality, I’d been all gangly limbs and bitchiness, with a rash of pimples on my forehead and my hip near permanently cocked at an insolent angle. But to Kai, I had been the beloved thing heard crying on a heap of corpses, tiny and cold. She had signed away the baby in her belly; I was all the baby she had left. She wanted to come for me and save me. I would fill her empty mother’s arms, saving her right back.

  I’d never understood that story fully, not until the boy she lost asked me what I’d do with Hana when I found her. Julian, wise in the ways of the nuclear family, had seen the situation from angles that did not exist for me. What the hell would I do?

  My half brother stole a nervous peek at me as he flipped to the last page. I didn’t have his frame of reference, especially for the word family. When I was a kid, family meant me and Kai, freewheeling through a revolving cast of lovers and friends who ultimately did not matter. I hadn’t owned baby dolls or Barbies, but sometimes, when I was small, I had played house with Kai. I would be the mommy and feed her with my spoon. I must have thought that one day I would be a mother. Then I made the 911 call that put a crack in us. The crack spread and widened until my family fell into two parts, me alone, and her. I’d never tried to make another.

  I was halfway through my thirties, and biology had yet to trouble me with even a mild urge to reproduce. I couldn’t imagine that it would. I’d always joked that if my biological clock went off, I’d skip the snooze button and yank my whole alarm system out by the roots.

  But the need to find Hana had hit me like biology. It was that basic, and that unreasonable. I wanted to find her in the same way that a starving person wants a sandwich, or a person underwater swims straight upward toward the air. All I had to do was think her name, and the world reversed. I’d know what it meant to be the lost girl, swamped in a wash of feeling much too strong to be mere memory. My heart would race, beating out the call to find her, find her, find her.

  It was hard to see past it, because urges to breathe or eat or nurse the crying baby yell too loud for logic. They come from deep down in the most primitive portions of the brain. Julian had jerked me right into reality simply by asking the question. When Hana was found, what the hell was I going to do with her?

  Raising kids was not remotely in my wheelhouse. Hell, I didn’t even have a place to put her; I lived in a radically open space specifically designed for single residents. The lack of walls declared I was a loner louder than a thousand closed doors could. I had no room in my life, literally, no den or extra bedroom, that would allow for any kind of family.

  Julian was still reading, drinking in every word. This was the same kid who had wandered the city with all his most important papers stuffed in a file. He had thrown them on my floor and then galloped off in a panic. Well, he was impetuous and emotional, but he’d been Raised Right, in the southern sense. He knew to put his napkin in his lap, to open doors for little old ladies, and to read contracts before he signed.

  “It’s an intern form,” I said. “I need you to sign it mostly so privilege applies here.”

  “Yeah. And this is a really good idea,” Julian said without looking up. “Today feels like good practice.”

  “Practice? For what?”

  “Like, so we can learn to work together,” Julian said. I opened my mouth to tell him this was only for today, but he was still talking. “We’ll have to, when we find Hana.”

  I tried to make a noncommittal noise, but it came out like a hum in the midst of being strangled. He’d reset the angles, again.

  He’d said we, as if he already had a place inside my nonexistent plans. As if he had the right to shape them. But he wasn’t in my tribe, much less in Hana’s.

  This kid had grown up in suburbia, with a mommy and a daddy and a bike and probably a dog named Duke or Fido. He had three-­quarters of a Berry College education and no frame of reference to imagine the world that Hana and I came from. He’d never set a toe into the places Birdwine would be looking for her. All we had in common were my mother’s genes, diffused by different men and scattered into each of us. He was demanding a piece of a kind of pie he’d never smelled or tasted.

  He handed me the signed form. “Ready,” he said. He sounded downright perky.

  I couldn’t think about this now. He was right. I had a job to do that was the very opposite of the lunacy he was proposing. I vivisected families; this orphan was asking how we could create the very thing that my life’s work was deconstructing. I shook my head at him and got out of the car, walking toward the job I understood.

  He got out, too, following me to the wraparound porch. I forced myself to put aside his assumptions and focus. I rang the bell, smiling for the camera. I didn’t spot its small glass eye gleaming at me, but security cameras were what rich ­people had in lieu of peepholes. I could feel it, that faint electric charge that crept across my skin when I was being watched.

  Oakleigh jerked open the door almost immediately, scowling. Her glance took in Julian, his legal pad and pen held at the ready, and dismissed him as something secretarial. She skipped hellos and introductions and went straight to bitching, even as the door swung wide.

  “I don’t see why I have to talk to the cops. Clark’s the one who broke in here and started this. Can we make a counter-­thingy, and get him arrested? He’s trespassing, moving and ruining my things—­every day.” The lather of fear I’d heard in her voice on the phone was gone, transmuted into anger. Julian leaned back from the blast, eyes wide. She turned and stomped away, and we followed her into the vaulted foyer. “I changed the security code. Twice. What am I supposed to do now?”

  “Change clothes,” I suggested. Her dress was red, and tight, and very short, worn with black boots that came up past her knees. There was a lot of slim, tan thigh showing between her hem and the boot tops, and as we followed her in, I caught Julian looking. He blushed bright pink and looked deliberately away. To be fair, I didn’t know many straight men who could have kept their eyes trained purely up toward heaven.

  “I already changed. When I called you, I was in yoga pants,” she said, waving us forward. There was a sweeping staircase, and beyond that, a wide arch opened up into a great room. She angled to the stairs, climbed three steps, then paused and turned toward us. Almost posing. “Cops love this dress. Last month, it got me out of a ticket.”

  “Mm-­hm,” I said, hoping to all the gods we wouldn’t get a female cop.

  Then she turned to the wall and jabbed her finger at a patch of nothing. “Look at this!”

  “I see white paint,” I said. “This is Juli—­”

  “White?” Oakleigh interrupted, and now 10 percent of her rage was aimed at me. “It’s Polar Vanilla, which is a very warm cream. But can’t you see the square?” She jabbed at the wall again. Julian and I leaned in like a pair of paint-­shade critics, and then I saw the faint shift i
n the color. A small rectangular patch shone a little brighter than the rest, and there was a tiny nail hole at the top. “What you don’t see is my Picasso sketch. And you don’t see it because Clark took it down and stuffed it in the liquor cabinet to make me think that it had been stolen. What are you going to do about it?”

  Oakleigh was treating me like the help and Julian like furniture. Time to get my girl in hand. I made my face look blank and bored and held out my contract in two fingers. “Nothing, until you sign this. And I need that check.”

  She rolled her eyes, but she came down and snatched the papers, then held out a peremptory hand toward Julian. He passed her his pen. She turned on her heel and stomped through the archway, leading us into the great room.

  There a huge sectional sofa, ash colored and covered with an excessive number of black and white throw pillows, faced a fireplace big enough to roast whole pigs. Oakleigh walked around it to a Cheveret desk. She opened the drawer and pulled out a checkbook.

  Julian was looking around the room with his arms tucked close to his sides.

  “Relax,” I told him, sotto voce.

  He shook his head and whispered, “If I break a vase, I’ll have to sell my car to replace it.”

  Funny to see him so intimidated by this show of money. He’d been this way to a lesser extent at my office and my loft, but when I was growing up, the Bouchards’ suburban house would have looked downright ritzy to me.

  “Oakleigh doesn’t seem to mind ruined things,” I said quietly, pointing to the picture hung above the fireplace. It was Clark and Oakleigh’s wedding portrait.

  They stood together on a sweeping antebellum staircase, Oakleigh in a huge dress that made her look like a poufy haute couture meringue and Clark in a bespoke tuxedo. It was my first look at Oakleigh’s husband. Or bits of him, anyway. He was elegant and slim, with artfully tousled blond hair and a chiseled jawline—­pretty much what I’d expected. What surprised me were his devil horns, his Hitler mustache, and the blood-­red slanting demon eyes with slashed black pupils that obscured the top half of his face. Oakleigh herself had no face at all, just a jagged black scribble of ballpoint-­pen ink. Her whole head had been annihilated with such pressure that the canvas had rips and scours.