The Opposite of Everyone

by Joshilyn Jackson

  “There,” Oakleigh said, tearing a check out of the book. She came across the room to join us, looking at the portrait. “Yes, you see? I shouldn’t have drawn on him like that, but at least I’d pulled it down and stuffed it in the closet. He wrecked my face and hung it right back up. I left it to show the cops.”

  She handed me the check and the contract, both signed. The O in Oakleigh was huge, and the rest of the letters were as curly and fat as anime bunnies.

  “Don’t sign things you haven’t read,” I told her, putting them inside my bag.

  She flirted up a dismissive shoulder and said, “I thought reading my contracts was your job.”

  “Fine. Next time I’ll put in a clause that gives me your immortal soul,” I said, and finally got a small smile out of her. I was giving her the benefit of the doubt by assuming that she had one.

  Julian’s gaze caught on the sofa and his face lit up.

  “Kittens!” he said, and went right to them. There were two, one black, one white, nestled up asleep in a fuzzy yin-­yang that I’d taken for yet another throw pillow.

  It wasn’t at all professional, and Oakleigh’s eyebrows shot to dizzying heights as Julian plopped onto her sofa and pulled them both into his lap. He looked up at me, grinning and oblivious, scratching at the black one’s ears. It burst into enthusiastic purring, and the white one yawned. Its eyes were bright blue. If Julian were my real intern or assistant, I’d be excusing us both and taking him outside to fire him right quick. But the sight of Julian snuggling fluffy baby things pulled me off my game. My heart rate jacked into that pulsing urge: Find her.

  I heard myself saying, “I would have thought you were a dog person,” and Oakleigh’s disbelieving gaze widened to include me.

  “Oh, yeah, for sure,” he said. “But who doesn’t like kittens?” He turned to Oakleigh. “What are their names?”

  She snorted. “I don’t know. Blackie and Whitey? I got them yesterday, after Clark broke in yet again.”

  Julian ran his fingernail across his pants seam. The black one heard the noise and pounced. Whitey had to see Blackie jump before he noticed the wiggling finger. He was probably deaf, like Henry.

  I didn’t quite have myself in hand, and I couldn’t see the connection between home invasions and getting kittens. “Wouldn’t a Doberman be more to the point?”

  “No, because Clark’s allergic to cats,” Oakleigh snapped.

  She was still bristling because The Help was plonked on her sofa, playing with her baby animals. The odd part was that I bristled right back at her, even though she was a client, and Julian was out of line.

  So this is what nepotism tastes like, I thought. I found I didn’t mind the flavor.

  “Oakleigh,” I said, sharp enough to reclaim her attention. “How allergic? Touch-­a-­cat-­and-­die allergic? Or cat dander makes him sneezy?”

  “How would I know? I never saw him go around cats. He was allergic,” Oakleigh said, as if she were speaking to someone who was very, very slow. “He didn’t carry an EpiPen or anything. He did say being around cats made him miserable, so when he kept breaking in and ruining all my things, I got some.”

  “What’s been ruined, other than the obvious?” I asked, glancing at the wedding portrait. I was skeptical that Clark had been in the house at all. I wouldn’t put it past Oakleigh to ruin her own things, hoping to make Clark look bad.

  Oakleigh flushed. “It’s crazy. I got my hair cut, and when I came back, the Picasso sketch was missing. I thought maybe he’d done it before, when he emptied the safe, and I hadn’t noticed. I changed the security code anyway, and I went out to dinner. When I got home, the alarm was still set, but half my shoes were in the bathtub. The shower was running. Nothing suede survived. That’s when I found my sketch in the liquor cabinet. I changed the code again, and then yesterday, I went to pick up a ton of dry cleaning. I’d forgotten about it in all the chaos, and there was a pet shop next door. I went in and bought these kittens. While I was gone he—­” She faltered, and her voice dropped to an outraged whisper. “I really, really think he peed into my makeup case. It’s made me crazy, wondering what else he may have peed in. I keep throwing out food, and I’m carrying my toothbrush in my purse now. So this morning, I went to Pilates, and while I was gone, he came and scratched my face out and rehung our portrait, and I don’t know what else yet. I’m scared to even look around. I’d left the dry cleaning draped over the banister. It was mostly his suits and his dress shirts. He must have grabbed it on the way out.”

  “He would have seen the kittens,” I said, watching them tussling in Julian’s lap. “Why would he take clothes?”

  “Well, the clothes were all still sealed up in those plastic bags. They looked fresh cleaned,” Oakleigh said. It was an interesting choice of words, to say they looked clean instead of simply saying that they were. She stared at the floor, and added, truculent. “Maybe he thought he’d better take them before they got all dandered up.”

  I quirked an eyebrow up. “You meant for him to take them.”

  “I didn’t say that,” Oakleigh said, now so disingenuous she might as well be scrubbing a toe against the floor.

  Julian shot me a puzzled look, but I was as adrift as he was. I noticed his navy-­blue pants were already showing white cat hair. I kept Henry brushed because so many of my clothes were black, and I still had to use a tape roller every time I left the house. But Blackie’s fur didn’t really show against the navy, I noticed, and then I understood. Oakleigh had picked these charming dander factories for their colors.

  “You ran the kittens through his clothes,” I said, surprised. Julian looked surprised, too. “You ran the white kitten in and out the sleeves of his pale dress shirts. And then the dark one, you ran him through the suits. How many times?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Kittens are silly,” Oakleigh said. “Can I help it if they like to play tunnels?”

  “Holy crap,” Julian said.

  “And then you bagged the clothes back up and hung them where he’d see them, and you trotted off to Pilates.”

  “I didn’t say that. But he shouldn’t have been messing with my things.” Her voice was prim and not without pride.

  Now I believed that Clark was breaking in. ­People in contentious divorces blame their spouses for rain and hangnails and the chlamydia they know damn well they’ve gone and outsourced all on their own. But they don’t lay elaborate kitten traps for the ex if they are the one doing the sabotage.

  If only she’d rehired me after the first break-­in! I’d have set up nanny cams and caught him peeing in her makeup. What a lever that would be in settlement negotiations. The kittens were a vicious return on his serve, more interested in hurting him than protecting her belongings. That put her a good six steps up the crazy stairs from standard divorce behavior. A BANK case was usually selfish ­people trying to keep the largest stack of goodies as they tore each other up. But she’d put Clark in the hospital. Had she known how much it would hurt him? Maybe. If so, it was crazy-­smart. If he’d wheezed himself to death on a fine coat of kitten dander, well. I’d like to see the DA that could get around reasonable doubt on that one.

  “Do you think I’m in trouble?” she asked, sulky and so twee it was almost baby talk.

  I shook my head. “Oakleigh, if I let you get arrested for revenge-­kittening, I will personally eat my law license and become a fry cook, okay? When the police come, look as demure as you can in that dress and let me do ninety percent of the talking.”

  “Is it legal to not mention that I let kittens play in his clothes?”

  “We’re not going to bring it up if they don’t ask. And they won’t ask that,” I said, distracted.

  So Clark wasn’t robbing her. He was gaslighting, moving and ruining all her favorite things strictly to drive her nuts. I was now quite keen to meet this shoe-­drowning, lipstick-­defiling fellow and see w
hat he looked like unembellished. The sheer, personal vitriol of his small-­minded attacks put him at least as high up the crazy stairs as she was. Also, he had a secret way in and out of the house, and he knew down to the minute when she left home.

  I said, “He’s got eyes on you. You get that, yes? His break-­ins happen fast, immediately after you leave.”

  “You think he’s been watching me?” It honestly hadn’t occurred to her. This supported my theory that she was only exceptionally bitchy rather than a criminal mastermind plotting the perfect murder via adorable baby animals. But it also resparked the ugly rage I’d seen earlier. “That bastard!”

  “We’ll report this to the cops, but I want to get my own PI in here to sweep your house for bugs.”

  “You think Clark’s filming me?” Oakleigh shrieked, with such instant panic that it set me wondering who she was screwing. I’d need to prepare if there was a chance Clark had a sex tape to spring on us in mediation.

  “I don’t think so. Calm down. If he had video in here, he’d have seen what you did with the kittens.”

  She didn’t calm at all, stalking back and forth in a lather. “So he has somebody following me?”

  “Maybe,” I said. He could well be watching her himself.

  I needed Birdwine, but I wouldn’t pull him off Hana’s trail for Oakleigh Winkley. Not even if Oakleigh were on fire and he had the world’s last extinguisher tucked in his front pocket. I wished instead that I had extra Birdwines, three or four, at least. Amazing to me that some ­people staggered through their lives with none. I would have to use Nick’s guys to do a bug sweep and figure out how he was getting past her security system.

  “How is he getting in?” Julian said. Bright boy, he had followed my same chain of thought.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “But we’ll find it. Then we can either close it down or put some cameras—­”

  “Screw that. Leave it open. Let him come. I am going to shoot him so much,” Oakleigh interrupted, whirling to face us. “This is still America. I can shoot anyone who breaks in, right?”

  Julian went very still, but I rolled my eyes.

  “Please don’t plot murders in front of me, Oakleigh. It will make it morally quite sticky if you do kill him and need me to defend you.” I spoke in a bored tone that told Julian I wasn’t taking her threat seriously. My firm passed the very ugliest of dissolutions to me, so death threats were de rigueur. I’d heard them by the hundreds, and I’d never had a client make good on one. Not yet, anyway.

  “It’s not funny,” she said, very screechy. As she spoke, she was stomping across the room, heading for the entertainment center. “We have two guns, one in the bedroom and one down here.” She jerked open a large drawer near the bottom and began pulling out old remotes and rolls of cable, dumping them haphazardly on the floor. Then she grabbed a wooden box out of the back. “Clark got them for me, in case anyone broke in when he was traveling. Well, it would serve him right if—­” Her voice cut out abruptly as she opened the gun box. It was empty. Her face went ashen and her eyes bulged like a pug dog’s. Love betrayed was the ugliest thing alive, and as we watched, she devolved into its lowest common denominator. When she spoke again, her face twisted and froze in a rictus of loathing, genuinely deadly. “That bastard. That bastard. He stole my guns!”

  We were now steps past regular, even for my cases. I rose and put propitiating hands out. “Okay, let’s calm down. Close that up. Pack the things back in the drawer. The police will be along any—­”

  She wasn’t listening. She was already running to the foyer. We heard her boot heels thundering up the stairs, no doubt going to check for the other gun. After another minute we heard her unleash a bloodcurdling string of curses, so it was missing, too.

  “Holy crap!” Julian whispered. “Is she—­”

  I waved it away. “This is a bit much, with the kittens and the urine and the missing guns. But I’ve seen worse.”

  I wasn’t sure I had, though, and I also wasn’t sure I would have spoken in such a reassuring way to, say, Verona. But Julian looked so worried, and he wasn’t truly an employee. He was something else.

  “She said she’d shoot him,” he said, still fretting.

  We could hear Oakleigh stomping back and forth upstairs, doing what sounded like primal scream therapy while wrecking a dresser with a hand ax.

  “I’m sure she would, if he were right in front of her this second, and she had that gun. They all mean it in the moment. But the moment passes, a thousand times out of a thousand and one.”

  “What about the thousand and first time?” he asked.

  “You read about those cases in the paper.”

  “Should we—­should you go up there?”

  I shook my head and sat down by Julian to wait comfortably and billably on the sofa until Oakleigh wore out her fit upstairs. The cops did not concern me. I had yet to meet the Atlanta cop who’d spend more than five minutes on any assault charge where the weapon was a kitty cat. When they came, I’d file a report about the break-­ins to have them on the record. Especially the guns. I didn’t like the guns. I liked them even less in Clark Winkley’s hands. A divorce this volatile, having either of them armed was a bad idea. There was always that thousand and first case. But at least the upstairs noises were abating.

  “See? She’s calming down.”

  ­“People don’t act like this,” he said.

  “Sure they do,” I told him, and was relieved that my protectiveness for the kid stretched only so far. I didn’t want him genuinely frightened, but I also couldn’t let his rosy worldview stand unchallenged. “All ­people have it in them. Don’t ever get divorced, Julian.”

  He chuckled, a nervous noise, releasing tension. “I’m not even married.”

  “That’s the only surefire way to avoid it,” I said. And then, because he’d asked me the impossible—­what we would do when Hana was found—­I added, “Making a family is a dangerous business.”

  He looked up from the kittens at me, clear-­eyed. “If you mean us, it’s not the same thing as this. Not at all. We’re looking for a little kid.”

  Damn, but the boy was direct. I considered him, poker-faced. Hana would be nothing like the blank slate of a baby, nor would she be a television ten-­year-­old. Real, live preteen girls were time-­consuming, irksome, and difficult at best. I knew, because I’d been one. The specific one we sought had a complicated history. Did he think she would run and hurl herself into our arms, as delighted as a rescue dog? We weren’t Kai. We weren’t anything to Hana. I was invested because I saw myself, my own childhood, in her, but she wouldn’t see herself in me. She wouldn’t have a thing in common with sweet, sheltered Julian. I had a hard time imagining what his childhood would have looked like, and I was an adult.

  “When you were growing up, did you have family dinner?” I asked him.

  His eyebrows knit. “Well, we had dinner.”

  “At a table?” I said. “With all three of you there, and you talked about your day or your plans for tomorrow?”

  “Yeah, but it’s normal to have family dinner.”

  “Mm-­hm. What did you do after?” I asked.

  “After dinner? I don’t know,” he said. “We read or watched TV. Me and my mom liked board games. What? That’s not weird.”

  “Do you think that’s what we’ll be like? You and me and Hana? Tuna casserole and Pictionary after?”

  “No,” he said, but then he added, “Not at first.”

  In those three words, I saw a whole imaginary future, cheery, tinged with pink, unfurling in his imagination. It bore no resemblance to what was forming in my mind: a lurching Frankenstein’s family, cobbled from dead pieces. The kid hadn’t seen a lot of ugly—­his reactions to Oakleigh’s fit proved that. He was not prepped for Hana, or for After, for a We. To be fair, I wasn’t either, but at least I had a realistic g
rasp on Now.

  “Julian, we might not find her at all. Even if we do, she’s not going to be some Brady kid in pigtails. She—­”

  “I know,” he interrupted, sparking to my tone. “I wasn’t raised by Care Bears, Paula.”

  “Okay, okay,” I said, light, trying to head off his temper. “But I’m guessing little birds show up to clean your dishes?”

  “No, they don’t,” he said, even madder. “And my mom doesn’t wear pearls to do the dusting, and”—­he faltered, and his eyes got all glossy—­“Didn’t, I mean. She didn’t wear pearls. We were just regular.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. It was a bad line of questioning for a kid who’d lost his mother so recently. Kai had chosen good parents—­they might even have been great ones, if they hadn’t gone and died on him. “I don’t mean to upset you, but what you’re calling regular is actually lovely and quite rare.”

  My words were meant to soothe him, but they had the opposite effect. A fat tear spilled down one cheek, and he set the kittens off his lap.

  “You think I can’t handle this? You think I’m too soft? Or too dumb? What?” His voice was thick and loud.

  I had no idea how the conversation had gotten so out of my control, so fast.

  “I think my client’s right upstairs, and I shouldn’t have opened the topic here,” I said, firm.

  He stood abruptly and walked past me to the mess Oakleigh had made. Blackie jumped off the sofa, following with Whitey in his wake. Julian knelt and began rerolling the cables with his back to me. I thought he was getting himself together, but then he turned to me and more tears were running down his face. His eyes looked so much older than the rest of him. He spoke again, low and quick, but with a great deal of intensity.