“Do you have any of the guy, the one she sent the poem to?” he asked.
I didn’t. I had no pictures of any of Kai’s boyfriends, I realized. Not directly. In the pictures I’d chosen to keep, the boyfriends were present only as objects in the background, setting tone. Here was Kai folding into a pretzel on Eddie’s purple yoga mat. Kai drinking chicory coffee at the café under Anthony’s apartment. Four different pictures of Kai and me on Hervé’s horses.
“Sorry,” I said. “I don’t think I do.”
Julian’s head cocked to the side, and he looked so wistful. “It’s okay. Maybe it’s better. I’ve already lost three parents this year. That’s weird, huh? Even if I hadn’t been adopted, I still would have ended up an orphan.”
But not an only child, I thought.
If I had never dialed 911, we would have grown up together. I tried to imagine it—a world where Kai never went to prison, and I didn’t land in foster care. Where I never learned to hit hard before I could get hit, and where I had a baby brother. I would have fed him, rocked him, read to him—all the things much older sisters do. People come to love the thing they serve, and so I would have loved him. Who would I be, if I were sitting by Ganesh instead of Julian?
It didn’t matter. That was a world that never happened, and now here I was with this sad boy, each of us folded up alone inside our separate histories and sorrows. I felt I should do something. Hug him? Pat his shoulder? But I wasn’t touchy-feely by nature, and he was grieving his adoptive parents more than the mother that we’d shared. To be fair, I was having a hard time learning how to grieve for her myself.
“It’s weird to think that I was born in prison,” Julian said. “I’m sure I’m not processing it right. Or at all. It feels distant. It’s like hearing your great-great-grandfather was a bootlegger or a pirate. It’s fascinating, but really fictional. I mean, I had my own mom and dad, you know?” He shook his head and half turned to me. His eyes had gone very red. “I do get that it’s real life for you.”
Then he did the thing I couldn’t manage. The kid leaned in and hugged me. A real hug, committed. I stiffened up—I couldn’t help it—but he was clearly a dog person, so I didn’t pull away. It went on for several seconds, Julian patting at my back like he was burping me.
I stared over his shoulder at the collection of items from my footlocker. There wasn’t much there. I tried to be still, feeling his heart beating inside him. Awkward as the contact felt, the kid was larger and more alive than my whole childhood. My childhood barely took up half the breakfast bar.
My cell phone started ringing on the charger in the kitchen, and I almost leaped backward, relieved. Julian ducked his head, embarrassed.
“Oh, sorry, I—”
“No, no, it’s fine. But I should get that. It could be Birdwine.”
He sat up straight, nodding, and I went around the bar to answer it, still feeling faintly surprised at the sound. Half a year ago, that jangling ringtone had been a near constant noise, announcing calls from partners, friends, employees, opposing counsel, clients. Not long ago, I was so used to the feel of a Bluetooth in my ear that I sometimes fell asleep in it.
I picked up the phone and looked at the screen. It wasn’t Birdwine. The screen said OAKLEIGH WINKLEY.
How unexpected. I’d programmed her info in back when Nick first signed her, thinking I’d be sitting in on most of her proceedings. Instead, I’d botched it and lost her. Now, not even a week later, she was calling me.
I held my finger up to Julian and said, “I have to take this. It’s a client.” I’d said those words a thousand times, but it had been a while. They felt good and familiar in my mouth. I slid the green bar sideways and said, “Paula Vauss.”
“Oh, good, you’re there,” Oakleigh said. Her kittenish lilt had quite an edge to it today. “It rang five times at least. I was so sure I was going to voicemail.”
“Hello, Oakleigh, what can I do for you?” I said.
“I might be in some trouble? The police want to talk to me. A man just called me, a policeman,” Oakleigh told me, and I recognized the edge then. It wasn’t bitch. Oakleigh was experiencing fear, and she wasn’t used to it. I’d welcome her to the club, except I didn’t want to be in one with Oakleigh. “I could call that other lawyer, my new divorce one, but I don’t think he does things with police. Then I remembered Nick saying you did, like, crime things, like, for charity?” I almost smiled, because that was so like my partner. He’d been impatient and then angry about my string of destitute criminal clients, but not so angry that he wouldn’t spin it to make us look good: Paula’s pro bono exemplifies our firm’s commitment to giving back. Oakleigh was still talking. “He said that’s why you missed my deposition, so I dug your card out of my purse—”
“Why do the police want to talk to you, Oakleigh?” I asked.
“My ex—my almost ex. I mean, my husband. He’s in the hospital, or he was earlier this morning. He thinks I tried to kill him. He told the police I did, anyway.”
I blinked, nonplussed. Julian had perked up at the word police and was looking at me with his eyebrows up and questioning. I took a beat to formulate a careful question.
“Why would your husband think that?” I got the tone right. Calm and nonjudgmental.
Oakleigh made an angry huffing noise and said, “Oh, it’s his own damn fault. He’s been sneaking back into the house and doing things. Doing awful things, and now I’m missing spin class! But most of his clothes were still here, so—look, it’s really kind of complicated. And I don’t know when the police will get here. Can you please come over?”
“The police want to talk to you at home?” I asked.
Julian stood up, eyes very wide now, watching me like I was a movie with a twist. It was cute, so I shook my head at him, wry and wise, like this kind of thing was happening to me every other minute.
“Yes, I told you. They said they’d be by this afternoon, which in retrospect is super unspecific,” Oakleigh said.
I wasn’t alarmed. If Oakleigh had taken a shot at Clark or put bleach in his margarita, the police would not call and set up a polite appointment. They’d show with no warning, to see her fresh reactions. They would haul her ass in and ask stern questions in a box. This sounded to me like a dumb-ass domestic squabble—something any good divorce attorney could handle. On the other hand, getting Oakleigh Winkley back in our firm’s fold would be a coup. It would go a long way toward making things right with my partners, and I wanted that.
“Can you hold? I need to see if I can move my two o’clock,” I told Oakleigh. I hit the phone’s mute button without waiting for an answer.
“You have to go?” Julian said.
“I do,” I said, with genuine regret. I’d gone stiff when he hugged me, then bounded backward and away at the first opportunity. I didn’t want our time to end on that note.
“Oh, no! But we didn’t even get to Hana yet.” He kept bringing up Hana, but there was nothing to discuss. Birdwine would find her for me. He had to, and that was all. “I don’t have a shift at work until tomorrow. Can’t I wait here until you’re done?”
I felt an immediate internal balk. I couldn’t give this kid free run of my loft. It seemed more intimate and invasive than the patting. He would make nice with my cat and go through all my closets. Not that I would blame him. If he left me alone at his place, I would surely rifle through his drawers. We were curious about each other.
If he were five years younger, I’d give him forty dollars and drop him off at the mall or the movies until I was done with grown-up business. I wasn’t sure that would fly with someone in his early twenties.
I said, “You could come with me.”
“Really? To a police interview?” he said, his voice rising with excitement.
“Why not?” I said. Now he was practically bouncing on the stool, and what the hell. I hadn’t checked the calendar. It might well be Bring Your Puppy to Work Day. “You’d need to keep your mouth shut, but it won’t tak
e long, and I could take you out to dinner, after.”
“Yeah. Cool,” he said.
I found myself smiling, and I realized I actually wanted him to come. Part of it was injured pride. When we first met, I’d been shaking in the center of a full-blown panic attack. Today I’d started out scared into pure bitchdom, then ended stiff and almost weepy. I wanted him to see me more myself. I took the phone off mute.
“I can clear my afternoon,” I told Oakleigh, walking over to my office area. “But understand me: If I take this on, then I’m your lawyer, period. You ditch the new guy, and my firm handles your divorce.”
“Fine,” she said, so relieved she sounded downright eager.
“I’ll bring a contract over. You need to sign before you tell me any more about what you did or didn’t do.” I swirled the mouse to wake up my computer.
“Okay, wonderful. Hurry, please. The policeman said—”
I overrode her. “And I’ll need a retainer.” I started our standard client contract printing.
There was an awkward pause. “Well, but, my funds are limited. Clark’s being so unreasonable.” I let my own bored silence speak for me; this point wasn’t negotiable. “I could swing maybe twenty-five thousand? Is that enough? Just to start?”
“Fine,” I said, like I was doing her a favor. Money was so relative. In Oakleigh’s mind, a mere twenty-five thousand lying around spare was tantamount to being broke. I wondered what Julian would make of that. I started an intern form printing, too, while I had my work files open. I’d need to hire Julian for today if he was going to sit in on a client meeting. “I’m on my way. And Oakleigh, if they beat me there? Be sweet, offer coffee or tea, but stall the interview. Tell them I’m coming.” If anyone could turn a simple domestic into something serious, it was Oakleigh Winkley, swanning about all privileged and unsupervised with cops.
“Just hurry,” she said, and we hung up.
I got the forms and went to the door, where my jacket and shoes were waiting, glad that I’d gone full-court bitch this morning, after all. I could be ready to walk in three minutes. Julian followed me.
“It should be interesting,” I told him as I got back into uniform. “At the very least, we’ll learn the proper shade of nail polish for a police interview.”
He smiled, a little bit uncertain. Well, he hadn’t spent quality time with Oakleigh Winkley. An hour with her, and he would get the joke.
“I’m glad. I was so interested in the pictures, you know, I got distracted,” he said.
“From?” I said, smoothing down my skirt.
“Hana,” Julian said, like it was obvious.
I shot him an irked look. “I told you. Birdwine—”
“Is finding her, I know,” Julian said. “That’s great, but then, what happens after that?”
I was grabbing my bag, turning toward the door, but his question froze me in my tracks. Everything after find her was a blank, and her present was distorted by the lens of my own past. Thoughts of Hana sent me back in time, back to when I’d been the lost girl.
I found that I could not imagine an after. How could I? Hana was suspended in the now, like Schrödinger’s cat. She was both alive and dead, safe and scared, hungry and well fed, sleeping easy and crying in the dark. I’d been blind to even the idea of Hana’s future. I’d only seen her teetering in an uncertain present.
Julian’s simple question set me reeling, and I understood that Hana and I, we were not the same. I’d been a Gotmama, a loved girl with a lifeline. When my mother was taken, it was only off to jail. I’d had total faith that Kai would come for me. What faith could Hana have, once Kai was dead and gone? Hana was stuck wherever Kai had left her, with whatever brain-addled arrangement Kai had made—or failed to make.
Hana didn’t know that I existed, much less that I was looking for her. She didn’t know that anyone was looking. Hana wasn’t like me. She was like Candace, Shar, Karice—every lost girl in the world who felt herself unvalued and unsought. She had no way to know that somewhere in the world, right now, her name was being called.
CHAPTER 7
A long time ago, this happened, and it’s happening now. Raktabija, the Red Seed Demon, arose against the Earth. He came to burn it and warm his great red feet among the cinders.
The armies of the Earth rose up, swords lifted to protect their mother. They ran at him, and they cut him in a thousand places, all at once. The Red Seed fell, and the army cheered.
But even as the armies celebrated, the Red Seed’s blood was soaking into the earth, and the earth is such a fertile mother. From every place even a drop had touched down, another Raktabija sprang up, full grown, swords drawn, so that the thousand cuts became a thousand demons. The armies of the Earth fell back, with a host of Red Seeds now assailing them.
They fought so bravely, all Earth’s sons, but it did no good. Each time they cut a demon down, the blood would spatter. Each drop would spawn another from the soil, and another, and another, until the armies of the Earth were outnumbered. Their bodies lay in heaps upon the ground, and soon they would all be destroyed.
It was then that Kali came. She came not because she had been called by men; all human beings call out to their gods, and very few get answers. Kali came because the heart of Earth herself was groaning.
The demons were afraid when they saw Kali, until they realized she had no swords. Only bells. How they laughed and pointed, to see a champion so armed. She had tiny bells tinging on her fingers, larger ones chiming on her wrists and ankles, and great, deep bells roaring as they hung in a cinch around her waist.
They laughed, but they did not laugh long. Kali began dancing to the music of her bells, and as she danced, she let her long tongue unfurl from her mouth. It snapped like a whip, keeping time. It whirled like a dervish. Her tongue did its own dance to the tintinnabulation of the bells, and it was redder and faster than all the legion of the Great Red Seed.
The armies of the Earth rallied, and began to cut the demons down. Kali danced among them, whipping and whirling her red tongue, lapping blood from the air before it could fall. She licked up every drop, so by the time each demon died, he was a husk, as empty and transparent as a plastic bag. The drained bodies of the Red Seed were so light, so empty, that they flurried in the air as Kali’s feet danced through them. Earth’s armies reaped and mowed, and Kali drank and drank, until all the Great Red Seed was only dandelion fluff, riding the winds in swirls and eddies.
“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.
The Opposite of Everyone: A Novel Page 14
