The Opposite of Everyone: A Novel

  “She’s fine,” Kai tells him.

  “Poor kid. Middle school is hell,” he says. He leans in and sets two dollars down on my roach spray–smelling blanket. “If you want, you can bike up to the Dandy Mart. Get yourself a Coke and Pop Rocks. Would that make you feel better?”

  “Maybe in a little. Give us a sec,” Kai says. She waits until he leaves before she lies down beside me. Her voice is soft from sweetness, not from whisper. “I’m going to tell you something that happened a long time ago. A very long time ago, but it’s happening right now.” That’s how Kai begins her bedtime stories. It’s her way of saying once upon a time.

  As she speaks, she curls in even closer. I am enveloped in the familiar smell of pot smoke and fresh orange peel. I still to listen. I think she’s going to tell the story where Kali fights the Red Seed Demon. Every time, Kai tells it just a little different, but it is my favorite; in every version, Kali wins.

  Instead, she tells me a Ganesha story.

  A long time ago, right now, Ganesha has a saddle mouse. That mouse carries the feasting god, carries his big belly, his heavy elephant’s head, and all the lunches that Ganesha tucks inside himself for later. The mouse wears a little red saddle and a silver bit. He carries Ganesha to the market, to the temple, to weddings and funerals, to sickbeds and to celebrations. Now he’s carrying Ganesha home from a feast. The god lolls on his little mouse’s saddle, holding his round stomach, so full of feast that he is groaning.

  At the crossroads, Ganesha’s mouse meets a rat scuttling home with a small bag of rice bound to his back. The rat eyes Ganesha’s mouse, strapped into the saddle, staggering under all that god.

  The rat says, “You poor thing! How can you carry the weight?”

  And the mouse says, “What weight?”

  I wait, but that’s the end. My eyebrows knit together. I’ve heard a hundred iterations of this story, too. In most, they don’t meet a rat. They meet a cobra, who scares the mouse into bucking Ganesha off—it’s slapstick, and very funny. I have not heard this version before.

  I hate it, instantly. I will never come to like it any better. I hate it because I understand it. She is telling me to settle into this life. To accept it, as I have accepted every other role she’s handed me.

  But in Asheville, I started making a Paula of my own. Asheville Paula was competitive and smart. She liked horses and lining up her reading stickers in a careful row. Paulding County Paula is only starting, but I already know I’m not going to be good at accepting things, especially a life that smells like roach poison. I already know what it feels like to hit a girl hard enough to make her give her breakfast egg back. The story Paulding County Paula wants is Kali shredding Red Seed Demons, winning against all the odds. Instead, I’m being told to lose so endlessly that losing becomes normal. To duck my head down and become Fatty-Fatty Ass-Fat for my whole life here. After a little while, Kai’s story tells me, I won’t even notice it.

  I couldn’t do it. I don’t think I even tried.

  It’s not easy to imagine the Paula Vauss I’d be today, if we had stayed in Asheville. It’s close to impossible to picture the woman I’d be now if I had listened to that story, tried to learn the finer points of eating shit. Maybe I would have fallen off the world. Maybe I’d simply be a sweet and gentle soul.

  Maybe I would have grown up with a brother.

  Now I wondered, when Kai told me the story of Ganesha’s little mouse, did she know she was pregnant? Did Ganesh—no, Julian—exist yet? Perhaps he was a single cell, busily becoming two. He’d kept on growing, though. Now he was a full-grown godling, sitting on my chest, caving all my ribs in.

  Birdwine came back from the lobby, closing my office door behind him. He’d gathered up Julian’s abandoned papers while I lay here picturing elephant-headed gods and demon wars instead of Google’s recommended beaches. Not very soothing, really. No wonder I was still flat on my butter-soft leather sofa with my chest constricted and my bare feet propped up on a stack of decorative pillows.

  “Did anyone see you?” I asked.

  “Verona was back at her desk. I acted like this was my stuff, like I’d dropped it,” he said, holding up Julian’s folder. “How’re you doing?”

  I wasn’t sure. I stared over my toes at the built-in shelves, assessing. Strange that I remembered that old nickname given to me by the mean girls in the bathroom. I hadn’t wasted hate or even thought on them for years. I never went back to that school or saw them again. I never had to learn to bear that weight.

  Just above my toes, on the third shelf down, I saw my own familiar cream-colored envelope, addressed to Kai’s PO box in Austin. I hadn’t wanted it in my loft, but I hadn’t thrown it out or shredded it. I’d brought it here, the voided check with her note on the back still nestled inside it. The red words on the outside, Return to Sender, matched my pedicure.

  The envelope was the only flotsam on shelves that had been meticulously staged by our decorator to reflect what she called “Lawyer Luxe.” I’d left this thing propped against the leather-bound books, a macabre souvenir from a funeral after-party I had never thrown. For the first time, this struck me as weird. No, past weird. Downright crazy. I’d set it there and then grown myself a great big blind spot all around it.

  I tried a deeper breath and found my lungs were mostly working. Birdwine took the chair closest to my head, his face set to careful neutral with a twist of wry. My shoes sat side by side on the coffee table in front him, my suit jacket draped beside them. Birdwine shoved them toward the center to make room for Julian Bouchard’s blue folder, restuffed and primly closed.

  “Are you, what, conscious?” Birdwine asked.

  “I didn’t faint,” I said, testy.

  “I know,” Birdwine said.

  “I’m not a fainter,” I said.

  My chest was tight, but my heart still seemed to be inside it, attached to everything that mattered and doing its job, so I sat up. Mistake. I was instantly dizzy, and Birdwine teleported to the sofa’s edge beside me, easing me back down flat with his hands on my shoulders.

  I looked down at his hands, then said, “Did you unhook my bra?”

  “Yeah, but it wasn’t to help you breathe or anything,” Birdwine said, very serious. “I was copping a feel.”

  “Oh. Fine then,” I said. I hadn’t even felt him unhook it as he carried me. Very smooth. His hands stayed on my shoulders, and I was barefoot with my bra hanging open under my white silk shell. After a second, it got weird. He was working with me again, but he was careful to keep a lot of air between our bodies. He let go of me and went back to the chair.

  “Did Julian come back?” I asked, hoping that he wouldn’t say, Yep. He’s waiting in the lobby with his mouth stretched open wide like a hungry baby robin.

  “I didn’t see him,” Birdwine said.

  Good. I needed to lie here quietly, in a room entirely innocent of surprise brothers, and get my head around it.

  Eventually, I would have to face him. Give him his folder back. I would have to look into those familiar eyes set in a baby-cheeked face, as smooth and pale as Percy Bysshe Shelley’s, and apologize. That fuzzy-headed boy-child had come to me with his hand out, hoping I could tuck a lovely mother in it, close his fingers soft around her. I didn’t have that. I didn’t even have her ashes in a jug up on my mantel. All I had for him was this envelope.

  She’s dead by now, I could tell him. I have this note. You want to bury it or burn it?

  “I ran him off,” Birdwine added, rueful.

  “You think?” I said, half smiling. Birdwine had stepped in to fight for me when I was down. Then he’d caught me up and carried me. Some of the hard, clear lines he’d kept between us felt bent at crazy angles. I wasn’t sure where it was safe to step. I tried a cautious “Thank you.” It sounded stilted, maybe because I felt so raw it was as if all my skin had been peeled off and put back on inside out. I tried again. “Thanks for having my back.”

  He said, “De nada. I feel bad I sca
red the kid. But in the moment, I was sincerely expressing my true feelings.”

  “What all did he bring?” I asked, glancing at the folder.

  “I didn’t study his file, Paula,” Birdwine said, and now he sounded stilted. “I wouldn’t go snooping in your personal business.” One line redrawn, but then he quirked his eyebrow and softened it by adding, “Not unless somebody hired me to.”

  “Ha ha,” I said. “I wasn’t accusing you. I’m just saying, when an ex-cop, a trained investigator, gathers up a sheaf of papers, he might notice things. You can’t turn your eyes off, Birdwine. You can’t make your brain not think.” I scootched down and got my feet up a little higher on the stack of throw pillows. Pressed together, my feet hid the returned envelope entirely. “Did you see anything, purely in passing, that makes you think the kid’s legit?”

  Birdwine shook his head. “Legit your brother? You tell me. Did you notice your mom having a baby a couple decades back?”

  I shook my head. “She was in prison the year he was born. If she had any babies, she didn’t think to mention it.”

  “I see,” Birdwine said, and the nice part was, he did. He’d heard Kai stories over the years. Enough to get she hadn’t been June Cleaver. He touched the top of the folder. “Purely in passing”—he paused to clear his throat—“purely in passing, I saw adoption records. So he is looking for his birth mother.”

  “And it’s Kai,” I said, more statement than question.

  Birdwine spread his hands, like an apology. “I didn’t see anything to shut the idea down.”

  If I really felt uncertain, I had an easy way to check. My best friend was a geneticist. William was on paternity leave for another month, but I could go by his lab with Julian. We’d give them blood or hair or spit into a cup.

  The problem was, I didn’t feel uncertain. It wasn’t only the timeline, or the birth certificate with Karen Vauss on it, or the fact that his birth name was Ganesh. Sure, when I added those up, the answer came out brother. But it was more than that. I could see my mother in the lines of him.

  Julian was my half brother, and I had changed the course of his whole life. That meant I couldn’t pass him a couple of sweetened-up Kai stories with a hot drink and a cookie, pat his head like he was Cindy Lou Who, and send him toddling back to his adoptive family. I owed him more than that.

  His existence shifted history. His birth, his loss, remade my mother, and recolored all her choices. Every story I had told myself about her—about us—had a different meaning and a different moral. I hadn’t cost her twenty-two months of freedom and a boyfriend. I’d cost her a child.

  Birdwine wasn’t done yet. “I’ll tell you what really bothers me. I saw stuff printed on Worthy Investigations letterhead. Tim Worth is a vulture who shouldn’t have a PI license. When he gets a missing person’s case, he digs up everything he can in a day or two—and it’s usually a lot. He’s very good. But then he hands out the info in little drips, billing all the while. He’s had this kid on a string since last November.” He caught my questioning glance and chuckled, busted. “I noticed—purely in passing—that the letterhead was dated.”

  What awful timing, I thought. For all of us. On January fifteenth, I’d mailed the last check Kai had ever cashed. A good investigator could have found Kai for Julian last year. Julian could have bypassed me entirely and met Kai before she died. Probably before she even knew that she was sick.

  Birdwine started talking again, rolling his hands the way he did when he was laying out a hypothetical.

  “So the kid’s about to slip Worth’s hook, and Worth gives him you as a stopgap. Hoping to get another month’s bill in. Ten to one Worth’s known exactly where your mother is since the day after he took the case.”

  “My mother isn’t anywhere,” I said. I relaxed my ankles and let my feet drop apart. The envelope appeared between them, coy and closed. I pressed my big toes back together, playing footy-peekaboo with a war telegram. Playing baby games with a paper body in a paper bag. Birdwine looked at me askance, and I suddenly thought, What the hell? I tried it out. “I think Kai’s dead.” It sounded weird, even to me.

  “Oh, I’m sorry to— Wait, what?” He’d reacted to the inherent sadness, but he floundered as the phrasing struck him. “What do you mean, you think she’s dead?”

  I waved a hand at the envelope. “She sent me a note last winter. It’s right there, if you want to read it.”

  He got up and went to get it. As he scanned it, I could see his mouth was filling up with questions. They rolled around, as unwieldy as if he’d stuffed his cheeks with marbles. The first one that got out was “You didn’t go to see her?”

  “Nope,” I said. “Turn it, there’s another sentence in the margin.”

  Birdwine spun the check and squinted at it.

  (Obviously I don’t want you to come here)

  He looked back up at me, his heavy-lidded eyes gone even sadder. “Jesus, that’s harsh. You think she meant it?”

  “If not, she could have told me. My address and phone number were printed on every check. Meanwhile, I haven’t had a phone number for her for more than a decade. I don’t even know what name she was using. For eight months, I mailed her checks to a PO box in Austin. Before that I mailed them to other PO boxes in other states. I didn’t move or change jobs. She knows where I am, if she wants me.” I stopped, and Birdwine raised his eyebrows at me. He’d heard it, too, the way I’d used the present tense, resurrecting my mother via grammar. “Knew. Wanted,” I corrected. “She’s dead enough.”

  “You don’t sound sure,” he said.

  “No. I’m sure. Her note says, Weeks, if I am lucky. So. The first two months were hard, I’m not going to lie. Every day, I wondered if my mother was off planet yet, or reincarnated as a lab rat or a meat cow—something suitably pejorative.” Or somewhere in pain, still dying inch by inch, still not wanting me to come. “Now, I don’t think about it.”

  Or when I did, I mostly felt a terrible relief. Truly terrible, like a person who’s been told they no longer have to carry the weight of their own gangrenous and rotting left arm. It smells, it hurts, it’s literally killing you—but it’s still the only left arm that you’ll ever have.

  “I would have found her for you,” Birdwine said.

  “I know,” I said, acknowledging it as a kindness. “But then what? Fly to Texas and let her kick me in the teeth in person? She’d kicked them plenty hard enough from a thousand miles away.” And yet, in this brave new world that held a lost Ganesha, how much could I blame her? I wasn’t sure yet.

  Birdwine still had the check turned sideways. He scanned the line again: (Obviously I don’t want you to come here).

  “Damn,” he said at last, and put the check back in the envelope.

  “Yeah, it’s hard to take in,” I said. “But I had years. Long before she died, she’d reinvented herself as a person who never had a daughter.”

  “No,” Birdwine said instantly, flat and certain. He put the envelope back on the shelf, leaning it against the books in the exact spot it had been in before. My feet, boosted on the pillows, blocked my view of it again. “A parent can’t just do that.”

  “Kai can. Look at what happened today, Birdwine. I’ve apparently got a brother, and she never even hinted he existed.”

  Or had she? The Kai who came home from prison was a different person. I thought it was because the terms of her parole pinned her to Atlanta for eight more years. She was legally bound to a history that had soured for her. I’d cost her almost two years of her life, her freedom for eight more, and Dwayne. But those things had only camouflaged the larger loss. Postprison Kai drank more, sang less, told fewer stories. She was no longer the Kai who’d cuddle up to me and whisper. She didn’t even fall in love much, dating stolid Marvin, who helped with rent and slept over every Tuesday. But sometimes, on afternoons when she was sad and drinking wine, she would still tell a Ganesha tale. Long ago, right now, baby Ganesha and his mother are playing in the river.
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  Birdwine waved a hand between us, shooing away the topic altogether, and came back to his chair. “I’m sorry for your loss.”

  “De nada.” I opened my feet to reveal the envelope. Now you see me. I closed them. Now you don’t. “You’re the first person I’ve told, actually,” I said, still surprised I’d said it to him. Maybe it was a matter of positioning. I was prone on the sofa and Birdwine’s chair was in the shrink spot, by my head.

  “You mean, that she’s gone?” I nodded, and Birdwine’s eyebrows went up. “But it’s been months.”

  “Yup.”

  Birdwine leaned forward in his chair toward me. “You didn’t tell anyone?”

  He sounded skeptical, and he came down hard on the last word. Maybe we should have had that relationship postmortem last winter, because he was asking me if anyone included my best friend, William. It usually didn’t. Back when Birdwine quit me because we “couldn’t talk,” I’d said that neither one of us was big on sharing. He’d laughed, a bitter sound, and said, You talk to William. I talk at my meetings. But you don’t know me, Paula, and you don’t want to. If you did, you wouldn’t like me much. We might as well go ahead and call it.

  I shrugged as best I could, prone. “I only told you. Just now.” Which was true. But the whole truth was, William and his wife were at home with their newborn son, after a pregnancy that had been touch and go from the beginning. I wasn’t going to heave big scoops of My Dead Mother or I’m Having Panic Attacks onto William’s plate. It was full, and Kai would still be dead when he emerged from brand-new-baby fog. “I’m pretty much on my own with this, Birdwine.”

  Birdwine looked like he was ruminating. I let him, and a small silence grew between us. I thought about rehooking my bra, but my chest still felt tight. Instead, I reached under my shirt and began working myself out of it while staying flat. I’d done it plenty before with Birdwine in the room. Back then, I’d done it under more cheerful circumstances. Hell, back then, I’d done it under Birdwine.

  Maybe he was thinking the same thing, because he looked away.