The Opposite of Everyone: A Novel

  Birdwine’s eye was swollen almost shut. I got up and checked his freezer. Both ice trays were dead empty. There was a bag of store-brand frozen peas, though. I brought them over.

  “Hold these,” I told him, smacking the peas against his eye. He grunted, but he managed to get a big paw up and hold them in place. He smelled like old sweat and older bourbon, with the copper tang of blood just under that.

  When I tried to turn away, he grabbed my wrist with his free hand. He stared up at me with his one good eye bleary and mumbled out a string of urgent words.

  Between the smashed lips and the quarts of liquor, it took me a moment to parse out the meaning, but then I got it:

  I don’t give two shits about Stella.

  He held my gaze, and I didn’t think that he was lying.

  “Well, what do I care,” I said, but my voice had softened, and all ye gods and little fishes, it sure seemed like I did.

  Not in my usual take-it-or-leave-it way, either, though he seemed like my type, on the surface: easygoing, fucked up enough to be forgettable. I hadn’t forgotten him, though, had I? Funny, I’d always told myself he was an expendable convenience, but looking back, my actions told a different story. I’d even stalked his ass to get him back into my orbit. I’d treated him like he was Nick or William: quality stuff.

  Now here I was, smacking him in the face with peas, mad to find him looking at his ex on social media. Almost like love were an open option. Almost like I wanted Birdwine to myself, in my life as well as in my bed.

  Well, not in my bed tonight. Not drunk and stinking. Not with my little brother hovering, as uncomfortable here in Birdwine’s shithole as he had been in Oakleigh Winkley’s Buckhead mansion.

  “Paula?” Julian said, back already. He looked at Birdwine’s grip on my arm, how close our faces were, and upped his disapproval game; he went from rabbit all the way to prim religious auntie. “I think the extra sheets are dirtier than the ones on there.”

  I straightened up and shrugged off Birdwine’s hand. Changing the sheets had been busywork, anyway. Birdwine was so foul we’d likely need to burn the whole bed in the morning. Even so, I couldn’t help remembering that back when Birdwine and I were a thing, he always had clean sheets around. He’d had good motivation, then. So was he sleeping by himself these days? I didn’t like how fiercely glad the idea made me.

  I started levering Birdwine to his feet. “Give me a hand?”

  Julian came and braced his other side, and we walked down the hall, toward the bedroom. It was a familiar path for me with Birdwine. I’d never once thought I would walk down it with an overly protective baby brother along.

  Birdwine leaned on us heavily, favoring one leg.

  “Birdwine, where’s the Hana file?” I asked him.

  He slurred out a few words not even I could translate and shifted his arm down, resting his hand companionably on my ass.

  “Don’t even think about it,” I said, and he cackled that weird drunk laugh again.

  “Issa dammmmm goodass,” Birdwine said.

  Julian’s mouth set in an even tighter line.

  “I know,” I said, and left his hand where it was. If Kai’s picture could be believed, I’d have this ass for quite a few years yet, but it had been underappreciated of late.

  We helped him maneuver through the door, aiming right at the bed.

  “Dump him facedown, in case he pukes,” I told Julian, who did not react. He might be naive, but he had been to college.

  We timbered Birdwine over, and he crashed onto the mattress. He spoke into the pillow, saying the clearest thing he’d said so far. “Get in with me.”

  Julian looked appalled, but I grinned outright to see there was a living ember down in Birdwine, sparking to me still.

  “Not even a little tempted,” I told him. “But try me again after you roll around in bleach.” I meant it, too, though he might not remember in the morning. On his end, this could all be nothing more than drunk.

  I looked at his wrecked eye. The corner of his bloody, swollen mouth. All the damage he had taken, walking his face into some other guy’s fist, repeatedly, while his own rough hands were as blameless and unbruised as any baby’s. I thought then, No, he’s still in love with me. When it came to love, I was the walking incarnation of fists, served in a convenient female package with a nice ass. He’d meant it just as much as I had.

  I pulled the blanket out from under his feet and draped it over him. Julian waited behind me, his discomfort so thick that I felt it rolling off him in waves.

  Birdwine’s breathing had changed to deep and stentorian. The sound of it called Looper, who came jingling in to leap up into the bed. He flopped at the foot.

  “Oh, now you show, you worthless sack of fur,” I said, and gave his ears a rumple.

  We backed out, Julian with his head down, peeking at me from under his flop of forehead curls.

  “What?” I said.

  He blushed and cut his eyes away. All he said was “Did you understand him? Where’s the Hana file?”

  “We’ll have to hunt for it. I’ll check the computer, but it could be a real file, made of paper. Birdwine kicks it old school. Why don’t you dig around?”

  We were back in the den now, and Julian said, “You want me to ransack a huge, crazy, drunk guy’s house.”

  I waved a hand at the shattered chair, the overturned table. “You think he’s going to know?”

  “Point taken,” Julian said.

  That made me smile. It was something I would say, and he’d used my inflections. I took him by the shoulders and aimed him at Birdwine’s desk in the corner.

  “Start there,” I said, and headed for the kitchen.

  I sat back down with the craptop and swirled the mouse to wake up the screen. Stella Martin’s Facebook page reappeared. It was still open to a shot of the whole family, posed on the deck of the beach house. My breath caught. Now that I wasn’t focused so wholly on his ex-wife, I saw it instantly.

  Which one of these things is not like the other?

  Blond Stella held hands with her weedy, ginger-headed hubs. I saw how their features and their colors blended in the three little girls. The boy towered in the middle, dark and barrel-chested.

  I clicked back two pics, to one where the boy stood tall and thick and sturdy in the surf, the littlest girl climbing up him like he was her own pet tree. I leaned in, studying his face. He had big brown eyes with heavy lids. His hair was thick and wiry, and his skin was olive. He was tanned, while the rest of the family was in various phases of turning pink and peeling. His teeth were very straight, but the front two had a gap in them.

  I knew that gap. I’d always liked it on Zach Birdwine.

  I did the math. The boy was big, but he had no hair yet on his chest, barely any on his legs, and he still had a round-cheeked baby softness to his face. As old as fifteen, maybe as young as twelve. Either way, before my time. Either way, his life span overlapped with Birdwine’s marriage.

  I sat back. It could not be so. I’d worked with Birdwine for almost a decade. We’d been lovers for more than half a year. Now we were supposedly friends. This was a large and toothy chunk of history to leave out.

  At a glance, his boy had landed in a good place, with books and beach vacations and a wild pack of adoring little sisters. The Hubs’s arm looked both possessive and comfortable, resting on the boy’s shoulder. The whole family had good body language in their pictures, actually, leaning in and turning slightly toward each other. They looked like a regulation happy family. On Facebook, at least.

  Was this why Birdwine had abandoned him? If so, it was a cop-out. The kid wouldn’t see it like that. Kind as Mrs. Mack had been, I hadn’t felt relieved or grateful when the state of Georgia spared me from the company of my mother.

  Julian appeared in the doorway, his face set in stress lines, holding a manila folder. “It was in his car.”

  As he brought it to me, I minimized the browser. Pissed as I was, I wouldn’t sell out
Birdwine by opening up his private life to Julian, who already didn’t like him. Also, I didn’t want to look at a happy family, posting happy stories that might even be true. I was here with some jagged ends from families that hadn’t worked.

  There were more of us. The world was full of us, the leftovers and the leavers, the bereaved and the broken.

  I said, “Good job,” and took the folder. Julian hovered over me, hands twisting.

  The top pages were Birdwine’s interview notes, scrawled in his dark, side-slanted writing. First up, an interview with Tolliver, Kai’s Austin boyfriend. Her sudden disappearance in the dead of night had baffled him. She hadn’t even told him she was sick, though by his account they’d been deeply in love. Sure they had.

  I glanced up at Julian, but he wasn’t reading. He was still twisting his hands, looking at me.

  “What’s eating you?” I asked.

  “I didn’t realize you two were a thing. You and Birdwine,” Julian said.

  “We’re not a thing,” I said, flipping another page.

  “Oh. Okay,” he said, with exaggerated disbelief.

  “Julian, stop hovering. We’re not a thing,” I told him, and the last sentence came out raw and angry. Mostly because bare minutes before I saw Birdwine’s cuckoo bird, dropped into some other fellow’s nest and left behind, I’d been considering him. Considering us, even.

  He moved to sit across from me and folded his hands on the table. “Well, good. Because he’s a scary guy. And he clearly has some kind of substance problem.”

  “Oh, you think,” I said, flicking blindly through four more pages. “Drop it. It isn’t relevant.”

  “It will be, though,” Julian said. “When we find Hana. That guy, he isn’t— He doesn’t seem like he’d be good for a kid.”

  I felt a lightning stab of blue-bright anger. If he’d said it half an hour ago, I would have called him on it, hard. I would’ve snapped, Try not to be a privileged little shit. But between my embarrassing Goodnight-Sweet-Prince tableau at Birdwine’s bedside and this moment, I’d gone through a sea change.

  One look at Birdwine’s son, ditched down in Florida, and my loyalties had shifted, from history to blood. Julian, after all, was desperately trying. He was chock-full of hopeful plans, wanting to make a family for Hana. Birdwine had so thoroughly abandoned his own child that the boy didn’t even live in Birdwine’s conversation.

  Part of me wanted to take the folder right now, walk out, hand the whole damn thing over to a fresh PI. One I’d never met before. Preferably female.

  Even so, I couldn’t let Julian’s starry-eyed statement stand. I spoke as kindly as I could. “You think Birdwine’s not our kind. I get it. But, Julian, there is no our kind for you and me. Sure, as it turns out, Birdwine is an asshole. But that is my kind. This girl we’re looking for? She’s going to be my kind, too. You think this”—I waved my hand around, encompassing the wrecked house, the sketchy neighborhood, the feeling of unfriendly eyes on us outside—“would offend her tender sensibilities? Baby, you grew up with Little League and meals made off the food pyramid, but Hana comes from here, where people ditch other people, or use them, or eat them whole.”

  Julian got redder and redder as I talked, and so I shut up before he lost his temper.

  “I know,” he said, and he didn’t sound angry at all. “But isn’t that the point of a rescue? You take somebody out of where it’s bad. You bring them someplace better. Not perfect. No place is perfect. You bring them to the best place that you can.”

  I blinked, knocked off my high horse. Damn, but the truth had such a ring to it.

  Julian was right, again. I should take it as given that he had a better handle on the personal than I did. I couldn’t resurrect my mother, make her marry Hana’s mystery father the day before she was conceived, set them up in a cottage by a balmy sea. But we could find her. We could make sure she was safe and fed and cared for, because it was the least that she deserved. It was the least that any kid deserved.

  “All right. I hear you, but you need to hear me, too. Any plan we make assumes too much. You’re assuming we will find her. We’re assuming Kai is dead, and Hana isn’t. Also, she’s ten. She may already be embarked on some mad self-rescue of her own, bonding with someone, making herself a place. We can’t plan a damn thing from a base of total ignorance.” My words rang true enough to match his.

  “Okay. That means we have to focus on what we do have.” I nodded, thinking he meant the file, just as he added. “You and me. I think we’re starting to really be a team.” I stopped mid-nod, but he was already beaming at me, glowing like a piece of Muppet-headed living sunshine. This kid! He was so inclined toward nesting—and so sweet in the core of him. I couldn’t help but smile back, pleased he understood that I’d been genuinely trying.

  I broke eye contact before it turned into a love-in, though, flipping through more pages of interview notes. I skimmed, hoping something would leap out at me that could put us back on Hana’s trail. Near the bottom of the stack, I found the map.

  Time stopped.

  “What?” Julian said. I couldn’t answer. I was breathing so hard it was like I had been sprinting. I rummaged through my bag to pull my envelope out again, reread Kai’s final note.

  I am going on a journey, Kali. I am going back to my beginning.

  Tenderhearted Julian instantly came back to stand beside me, one hand on my shoulder, asking me, “Are you okay?”

  I wasn’t. Birdwine had drawn their route in highlighters, a bright orange line of color squiggling through the South. I ran my finger along the line, tracing Kai’s trajectory. Was every mystic-ass, pretentious line of Kai’s note literal? When had Kai ever been literal?

  “Look,” I said, though it was meaningless to Julian.

  “At the map? Why? Do you know where Hana is?” he asked, now with an urgency that matched mine.

  I looked up and into those eyes he had, my mother’s own.

  “She’s in my life,” I told him. “Hana’s somewhere in the middle of my life.”

  CHAPTER 9

  It’s better this way, I think, as the door shuts behind Joya. I’m not crying. What I feel is so far past crying that I can’t move, or it will get out of me and be a sound, and I don’t know what that sound is. I lie on the bed unmoving, but inside my skin, every atom is seething with a single thought: I want my mother. I want my mother blindly, like a newborn mouse. Inside the quiet shell of me, I churn and shudder. My body so badly wants to root and seek, attach, be warm and full.

  I hear Mrs. Mack and Shar, Karice, and Kim talking and banging the door as they get back from dinner. I don’t hear Candace, but that’s normal. She’ll be mincing along behind them, quiet. If she comes in this room right now, if she so much as looks at me with her wet eyes, I am not responsible for what I do to her.

  Then come all the happy sounds of Joya’s mama arriving. I listen, lying stiff and still, as Joya’s things are loaded up. I hear the thump of the bags and the grown-lady voices of Mrs. Mack and Joya’s mama talking. If I stand up, I’ll be able to see them from the window. Our room faces the drive. But I stay rigid on my bed, even when the car doors close. I don’t cry or move as I hear the engine start, when I hear them drive off, when she is gone away with her own mother.

  It’s long past midnight when I finally crack. Alone in my bed in the darkest part of night, I wake to find I am already weeping. My body bucks and rocks, and I have to smother the loud brays that I feel rising. I turn to the wall and push them down deep into my pillow. I hug my cool pillow to me, and it does not hug me back. I gulp and weep into the cloth anyway, biting at it, pressing close until I’m gagging on it.

  I roll away from the wall, sick, and find Candace’s bug eyes looking at me, six inches away. She’s peeping up over the edge of my bed, alligator style. I jerk back so fast it feels like I left all my skin behind, and a scream bangs its way up my throat. I snap my mouth shut, trapping it behind my teeth. I sit up and glare at her, letting the scream
out as a long hiss of breath. I’ve been startled out of puking.

  Candace doesn’t move, still crouching on her knees by my bed. I can see the whites of her eyes gleaming in the dim light from our clock.

  “You’re whoopin’ in your pillow so loud that I can’t sleep.”

  She says can’t so redneck. It sounds like ain’t with a c on the front. I don’t speak her brand of English any more than I spoke Joya’s. No one here speaks like me and Kai. No one wears colorful scarves or admits to playing the tambourine. Kai’s people eat sardines tinned in mustard and talk about The Tao of Pooh. They are all art-farts and petty criminals—light-fingered musicians, stoned painters, writers penning novels and bad checks. Even Tick, that racist asshole, was a poet. Kai’s tribe owns water pipes and finger bells the way regular Americans own coasters. We are gypsies among other gypsies, shifting in and out of love, towns, names, constantly in flux, reinvented by and for each other.

  No one here talks like me or gets my references or knows the songs I know. I don’t look like any of them. Even my bond with Joya was based on not belonging here.

  I scrub at my face with my hands, and all at once anything is better than being alone. I scoot back, making room for Candace. She rises up enough to rest her pointy chin on the bed’s edge, suspicious of the offer. It’s unprecedented. She’s always had to wheedle or bribe her way in.

  I press my back against the wall and say, “I’ll sleep better with you taking up seventy percent of my mattress than creeping around on the floor and goggling at me.” I try to say it tough like Joya would, but my throat is full of snot and my voice is trembly.

  Candace thinks about it, then slithers in under my covers. She lies on her back, looking straight up at the ceiling. “Yesterday, you wouldn’t’ve peed on me if I was on fire. You’re just crying over Joya.”

  “I’m not crying over Joya,” I said, and it’s true enough to sound true.

  “Well, why then?”

  I am not going to tell Candace, of all people, that I miss my mother.

  “Maybe because I’m going to get my ass kicked in the morning.” Candace’s eyes gleam, full of questions in the dark. “Shar, Karice, and Kim. They never got Joya. Now that she’s gone, they’ll come after me.” Just to be mean I add, “They’ll probably whip the shit out of you, too.”