“Sorry, this thing feels miserable. How’d you know to unhook it?” I asked him, trying to make the scene feel a little less Flashdance.
“My sister gets like you did, when she’s under stress,” Birdwine said. “She sheds anything binding and gets her feet up higher than her head.”
I pulled my bra out through an armhole and flung it over my jacket. It was a sleek, white, simple thing, meant to be invisible under silk.
“I didn’t know that, about your sister,” I said.
“There’s a lot you don’t know. We Birdwines play our cards close,” Birdwine said, and then he did look back at me, right into my eyes. “We’re great at poker.”
I had a cat-stretch kind of feeling in my belly then. One I hadn’t felt in quite a while. I propped myself up on my elbows, gratified to find the room didn’t swing around me and the nausea didn’t come back. I was all at once aware of how thin my silk shell was, how bare I was under it. Something about silk, it could feel more naked than naked. It would be nice, really nice, to get up and out of here. Grab Birdwine and take him someplace quiet before he got all his lines back into order. Not think about my surprise brother and all the ways he reshaped my past and grayed the future into something murky. Let the world spin on, unsupervised.
I remembered exactly how sweet and rough Birdwine could be. I remembered the way he would throw my body toward the bed, catch it on the way down, one big hand cradling my head to save it from the headboard. Birdwine was looking back at me, but I couldn’t get a read. He did play a good hand of poker, as I well recalled.
There was a quick double tap on the door—purely perfunctory—and then it swung wide open, and there was Nick. Worse, he had a client in tow. She was a bobbed, preppy forty-something in a prudish floral headband. I didn’t know her, which meant that she was new, or worse, a potential he was trying to land.
Nick was talking as he came in, but he stopped dead in the doorway and went silent when he saw me. The client’s momentum ran her into his shoulder. I jerked my feet down, scattering stacked pillows.
Nick’s mouth unhinged as he took in the scene. There I was, scrambling to sit up with bare legs, bare feet, and my bra on the table, very white against my black jacket. Half the couch’s little cushions were now scattered on the floor, and I could smell the faint electric crackle that had risen in me right there at the end, sexing up the air.
“Good God, Paula,” Nick said, nostrils flaring.
Over his shoulder, the client’s eyes had gone as round and wide as a bush baby’s. Ten to one she was some kind of dedicated Anglican. My luck.
“You’re driving down the wrong track,” I said to Nick, straight up, but his face and his assumptions didn’t change. He should know better. I’d never leave my door unlocked and roll a man around in here like an amateur. Not during business hours.
He was too pre-angry to think it through, especially today, when I’d no-showed at his meeting and we’d lost the client. Now Prudence Headband looked ready to rabbit out in Oakleigh’s footsteps. She put her hand over her mouth and her wedding set alone, heavy with diamonds, told me this was a client Nick would very much want.
Birdwine rose to his feet and came between us.
“Hey, Nick. Ma’am. Please excuse us. Paula’s had some awful news. Her mother died.”
His words hit the room like a second shockwave; I saw the client’s face trying to readjust itself, wobbling toward sympathy, but finally settling on puzzlement. Grief did not a bra on the coffee table explain, and Birdwine, thick and muscular in his workman’s boots and untucked, rumpled shirt, didn’t hit this woman’s demographic.
“Oh. I didn’t know,” Nick said. His voice had gone solicitous, but his gaze on me was chilly. He did know how long Kai and I had been estranged.
“Yes. It was quite a shock,” Birdwine said to Nick. I drooped sadly, letting my body language back his story. “I’m Zach Birdwine, Paula’s investigator. Please excuse my casual dress. I was on a stakeout until ten minutes ago.” He smiled his more formal, closed-mouth smile, stepping forward as he introduced himself to Headband. She relaxed a bit, shaking Birdwine’s hand and mumbling her name and some condolences in my direction.
Nick looked down to straighten the lapel of his jacket, which was beautifully tailored and did not need any straightening. Clearly a dead-mother story of dubious origin wouldn’t poof him out of his justifiable temper.
“I’m not handling it well, Nick,” I said. “I’m sorry.” I meant it, and on more than one level.
“And I’m sorry for your loss. We’ll definitely talk later.” Nick gave me a reckoning stare, unmollified.
“Yes, we should sit down together,” I said. “Maybe Monday? Right now I should go home and see to things.”
Not much he could do with a client in the room. By now she’d bought what Birdwine was selling and was giving me a look full of genuine sympathy.
“Of course,” he said. “Don’t worry. Catherine and I can get along fine without you.” The tone was proper, but he leveled his eyes at me, making the words into a threat. I looked back, and there was a lot of history between us. I’m not sure what he saw in my face, but his mouth softened and he added, “Go home. I believe your calendar is clear. You have a lot on your plate, sounds like, and you need to make some decisions about what you want.” He meant long term, but it sailed right over the client’s headband, as it was meant to.
She said to Nick, sotto voce, “Do you need to drive her? Or call someone? She shouldn’t be alone.”
“I’m taking her home, ma’am. I’ll call her people,” Birdwine said.
My people, that was a nice touch. My people consisted of friends with a brand-new baby, my pissed-off partners, a sudden brother, and an envelope. Still, that Old South phrase conjured up a vision of concerned aunties with casseroles, clucking neighbors bearing Bundt cake. It put Headband at ease to see the details of death being properly handled by a tall person with a Y chromosome and workingman’s boots. She could bustle right on back to her divorce.
Nick led her off, leaving my door pointedly ajar. He needn’t have bothered. Whatever bit of sex had started rumbling around in me was gone, reburying itself in the deep hole it had died in months ago. As for Birdwine, I wasn’t sure he’d even caught the vibe. His gaze on me was thoughtful, nothing more.
I stood up and put my jacket on, stuffing my bra into the pocket, then dropped my heels to the floor and slipped them on, too. I picked up Julian’s blue folder. I needed to return it to him, sooner rather than later, and I didn’t know when I’d come back to my office. After a second’s thought, I got Kai’s envelope off the shelf as well.
As I took it down, I had a sudden, strong urge to tell Birdwine Kai’s story about Ganesha’s little mouse. This happened a long time ago. It’s happening now. I turned the envelope over in my hands, once, twice, and then I understood. I wanted to tell Birdwine because I was living it. I’d been Kai’s mouse, saddled up and bridled, this whole time. When my check came back, I’d felt such relief, to be told that I could finally set her down. So relieved I failed to notice that I hadn’t actually done it. I was still carrying her, and the weight of her was breaking me.
What weight?
Kai and I stopped speaking the day I went away to college. She finished her parole and evacuated Atlanta before I moved back for law school, and yet I’d kept her corpse’s paper effigy sitting on a shelf for five months now. I was neglecting my business and letting my partners down. I was doing endless pro bono hours for young, nonviolent female criminals with bad boyfriends, as if I were the patron saint of dumb-ass girls. I couldn’t remember the last time I got laid, and I had panic attacks over bits of ghost I saw rising in silk skirts and green eyes.
And now Julian existed.
What weight?
I turned to Birdwine. “I don’t know what to do next.”
Those were not words I said a lot. I’m not sure I’d said those words in that order since I was old enough to vote.
r /> “I do,” Birdwine said. He stood up. “Go to Worthy Investigations and beat Julian’s case file out of Tim. Julian’s paid for the information in it a thousand times by now.”
He said it as if assuming I was going to help Julian, and that surprised me. Except for the very few inside my tightest inner circle, most people would put down money that my next move would be to lock my office door and screw Birdwine on the sofa. Or they might wager I’d go ambush Oakleigh Winkley, re-sign her as a client, and take her husband to the cleaners. Either one of those paths fit my reputation. Me helping Julian? It seemed like such a sucker bet that no one, right down to my barista, would be inclined to take it.
I hadn’t known Birdwine saw that far into me. While we shared a bed, or perhaps even before that, in the years when we’d been colleagues, he must have paid attention in his stealthy, watchful way.
I’d seen him as a professional asset, a buddy, and then a convenient bedmate. It was true to say I’d deemed him highly valuable, in all three capacities. After he quit me, I had certainly expended a great deal of irritating effort to get him back into my resource pool. But the whole truth was, I’d also seen him as too damaged to take seriously. A fuckup. Not my equal. And I wouldn’t have been sleeping with him if I saw him any other way.
I couldn’t predict his choices the way he’d just predicted mine; I’d been surprised when he’d stepped up for me in the lobby. It made me feel ashamed, especially since I couldn’t see much difference between us. Not these days. Maybe that was why I moved in closer and talked to him the way I only ever talked to William or my cat.
“In Kai’s old campfire stories, there were twenty-eight hells that roiled around in space south of the Earth. Very south, down at the bottom of the universe. Sometimes one broke loose from the pack, and it always made a beeline for Earth. I think I have at least four of those hells up my ass right now, Birdwine,” I said. My voice was low and shaking. I was scared and tired and I didn’t try to hide it. It felt like a relief, not to hide it. “I want to do right by this kid, but how can I? He’s looking for his mother.”
“Not just his mother. He did come here to meet you,” Birdwine said.
I made a scoffing noise. “So I can offer him an about-to-be-unemployed half sister with a bitch reputation and a fast-developing panic disorder.”
“When you put it that way . . .” Birdwine said, chuckling. “So find Kai.”
“She’s dead,” I said, sharp.
“I know, Paula,” Birdwine said, in a tone used for humoring lunatics. “I can tell by all the wheezing and shaking that you’re perfectly happy to leave it at that.” That made me smile. “Find out when she died and where she’s buried. You’ll feel better, and the kid’s a citizen. He’ll like having a place to plant Thank You for Giving Me Life daisies.” I nodded. That sounded like the least that Julian would want. Birdwine went on, “So, to bright-side it, it looks to me like Nick thinks you need some time off. I say we hit Worthy Investigations in the morning.”
That word, we, washed over me. In my own way, I had asked him for help twice now. This was Birdwine saying yes. He was offering something like a friendship, and all ye gods and little fishes, I could use a friend right now. His offer was a living thing between us, so new and pink and blinking that it made me nervous. I nodded, accepting it, and all at once Birdwine seemed as uncomfortable as I was.
“Pass me a legal pad,” he said. “The kid’s contact info is in the file, but give me a little time before you set a meet. I’ll take his Social down and do a quick background for you—just in case.” I got him one from my desk, and he spent a moment bent over the blue folder, jotting a few things down. Then he headed for the door, pausing in the doorway to look back. “Want me to pick you up tomorrow?”
I shook my head no. “Your car smells like a gym sock. I’ll get you. Nine o’clock?”
“Ten,” he said. “What are we, savages?” He closed the door behind him.
The workday was hours from being over. I should go find Nick and try to get right with him, or at least give the afternoon’s hours to a live file, doing something billable. I stood as if wavering, but I knew I was only delaying the inevitable. The double panic attack had left me too wrung out to concentrate on breaking up the fat estates of angry strangers.
So I gathered up my laptop, the note from Kai inside my returned envelope, and the blue file that Julian had abandoned, and I went home. I wanted to find out everything I could about my brand-new brother. After all, he’d just inherited the largest debt of my life.
CHAPTER 4
I incur my debt in Paulding County, Georgia, on a sweet spring night as my mother plays her mandolin and sings campfire songs. I am huddled and sunk into one of the ancient beanbag chairs on Dwayne’s covered porch. I have one of Kai’s sketchbooks open on my lap. I’m trying to copy the way she draws eyes, but it’s gotten too dark. The porch light is dead, so Kai has lit candles. I can’t concentrate, anyway.
I squinch my eyes to peer across the small yard, hemmed in by heaps of kudzu. It’s dirt and weeds, mostly, dotted with lightning bugs. They are all looking for true love, flicking their tails on and off in the gathering dusk. It’s hard to see past the candlelight, but it seems to me that someone is moving in the kudzu. Maybe it is only a deer. They come sometimes, hoping to eat some tender baby pot plants.
Is it a deer? I can’t tell if I want it to be a deer or not. I’ve been sick and scared down in my very pit for days now.
Kai, oblivious, is draped on the sagging back-porch sofa, her wrap skirt bunched up almost to her hips. She has her long legs draped across Dwayne’s lap, which makes her play her beat-up mandolin at an odd angle. The bug zapper backs her up with its irregular percussion. She’s not a great player, but her fat, lazy alto usually melts me into sleepiness. Not tonight.
Dwayne leans over her legs, digging in the ashtray to find the second half of a joint. He lights it with his Zippo, then holds it for Kai. She pauses the song long enough to pull in smoke and hold it.
“There’s a hole in the middle of the sea,” Kai chokes out on the exhale, smoke streaming, and Dwayne laughs. He joins her when her breath is back. “There’s a frog on the bump on the log in the hole in the middle of the sea . . .”
She acts like this is just another chapter in our endlessly mutable story, Kai towing me as she moves from man to man. I never fought or even questioned it, because of the truth at the root of our shared life: Kai doesn’t love me like she loves the boyfriends.
Boyfriend love is the light on a bug’s back end, flicking on and off across a lawn. It begins with lies and kissing. It devolves into fighting and boredom. It ends with hasty packing and sometimes robbery. It is easily replaced by fresher love.
Me and Kai were always more than that. Me and Kai have been a single unit, made out of only us. I liked it fine, until Asheville. I had a life there, separate from hers, the way she had a separate life with Hervé. When Hervé called me a little shit, my heart sank because I knew his days were numbered. Within a month, it had cost him his girlfriend, his pill stash, his old Mazda, and all the cash in the house.
Here, Kai has us, and she also has Dwayne. I have us, and a school where I am Fatty-Fatty Ass-Fat. I get that we’ve burned Asheville, but I can’t stay here, in this place. I told her so. I tried, at least, but all she did was tell me a Ganesha tale. Now I am sick with waiting. My body is a twisted ball of rubber bands, each pulled tight and straining against the others. The deer that might not be a deer moves in the kudzu, and he has friends now. I sense them more than see them, a gathering of motion in the darkened woods around us.
“There’s a—” Kai pauses, mid-song. “I forget what’s on the frog.”
“Wart!” says Dwayne, cheerful and definitive and dead wrong.
Kai shakes her head no at him and looks to me. “What’s on the frog?”
It’s a fly. But I stay silent, hunched up, sitting as stiff as a person can sit in a saggy beanbag chair. I peer into the darkness, se
eking movement in the kudzu. Wind or deer or my deliverance?
“Wart! Wart! Warrrrrr!” Dwayne barks, wolf style, losing the final t on the end howl. He’s been drinking room-temp beer all afternoon, and he didn’t eat any of the hot dogs.
“Okay, weirdo,” Kai says, laughing, and starts up again, giving a wart the fly’s rightful place in the order of things. She leans her head back as she sings, and her deadfall of dark hair spills over the tall arm of the sofa. I stop studying the kudzu to look at her. Her body is a ribbon made of elegant muscle, small breasted, with a richly curved back end. Her bare legs stretch and flex across Dwayne’s lap, the skin as pale and smooth as porcelain.
I slump lower. I am shaggy-headed and squashy. Fatty-Fatty Ass-Fat. I take my globby stomach in my hands and squeeze. Kai sees me doing it as she finishes the verse. She sets the mandolin aside and smiles and sighs at the same time.
“Quit worrying at your puppy tummy. I had one exactly like it when I was your age. Very soon, you’re going to use that tum to make yourself some cute little boobies and a girl butt. You’ll like that puppy fat, as soon as it moves to the right places.” I scowl and let go of my gut, wrapping my arms around it instead. She’s clued in I’m unhappy, but she has the reason wrong. She didn’t listen. “Oh, the puppy’s mad because I talked about it getting boobies!” Kai says. She stands and holds her arms out to me. “Come here, Puppy-puppy.”
Her smile is stoned and kind and warm. Maybe the weaving motion in the kudzu is only deer. With my pretty mother smiling at me, holding out her hands, I want it to be deer. Mostly.
I go to her, and she tucks me close, enveloping me in her familiar scent, but the tension wrapping my bones does not uncoil. I keep my shoulders hunched against her hug, keep my arms wrapped around my own soft middle. I told her not to send me back. I told her.
She feels the stiffness in my body and drops a kiss onto my hair. “Grumpy puppy. There’s fun parts to growing older. Come inside and pick a color, and I’ll paint you on some grown-up lady toes, for practice.” She starts to sing again as we stand up, but not the campfire song. “Jai Kali, Jai Kalika!” Her smoky voice, singing my old baby name, is warm and sweet against my ear.