The Opposite of Everyone: A Novel

by Joshilyn Jackson

  Trick question. I deflect. “Depends. What color did you pick?”

  Her brows knit. “I think green?”

  “Then that’s not weird,” I say.

  “Well, but, I had to sleep inside a drawer under your bed.”

  That makes me smile. Sometimes Candace can be funny. “Okay, that is weird.”

  “I wish, though, I wish it could be true,” she whispers, even lower, and her eyes on me are so intense. We are not talking about her dream now. “Do you think your mama would ever be a foster?”

  “I don’t think they let people who went to jail be fosters, is the only thing,” I say.

  It is far from the only thing. But it is the only thing that it feels safe to say.

  “But they’ll let her have you back, so she can’t be dangerous to kids,” Candace argues.

  But I am Kai’s, by right, I want to say. I was born to her, and we share blood and history. We got a judge who made exceptions and bent rules based purely on the force of the bond he saw between us. And who the hell are you?

  It’s true, but it’s a truth that would burn and blister if I let it touch Candace. I don’t want to remind her of all the ways that we are different. Chief among them, I belong to somebody. I say nothing, until Candace answers herself.

  “Anyways, I was mostly wondering if she would like it, not if they would let her. Like if she was that kind of person who would want more kids.”

  This subject is too dangerous. I change the conversation. “You know we’ll still see each other, you and me.” I am feeding Candace the same spoonful of crap Joya tried to serve up sweet to me. Still, I have to try. Candace owns a weapon that can only be used once, but if she’s losing everything anyway, what’s to stop her?

  Kai must never know I am the one who made the 911 call, that I cost her her freedom. And Dwayne, too, whatever that was worth. He mattered enough for her to ask me if I had gotten any letters from old friends, three calls in a row after I sent the poem. He never wrote me back at all. The fourth call, she didn’t bring it up, so I asked, What happened, with, you know, that poem about Rama and Sita? There was a long silence, and then she said, Rama who? I don’t remember any Rama in our story. She never mentioned Dwayne again.

  “But what if you live far though?” Candace asks, plaintive.

  “Kai will get a car, or a boyfriend who has one. She always did before.”

  Candace leans in even closer and talks fast, low, her words a nervous tumble.

  “I was thinking, though, what if I ran away. There’d be a fuss right at first, but no one would stay bothered about it. They’d be looking for me at my mama’s anyhow, and after a while, they wouldn’t look at all.”

  I see where this is going, and I talk fast to nip it down before it sprouts. “You’re a kid, Candace. People freak out about missing kids.”

  Candace and I both know this isn’t wholly true. Kids like Candace don’t get the kind of press the missing children of middle-class or rich folks get. On the other hand, Candace is blond and big-eyed and thin—all the things TV likes. There could well be a little stir.

  She says, “I won’t cut out right away. I’d make Shar and Karice be my friends, until everyone forgets about you and me being tight. Then I’ll run away and hide until they quit looking. Then I’ll come to where you are.”

  I have to work so hard to make my face stay bland and kind. Inside, I recoil from the intensity of pleading in those lamp-like golem eyes. I want to pinch some sense into her skin. Her plan is impossible, a fantasy, but Candace is not very connected to how the world works when it doesn’t line up with her wishes.

  “We’ll have to think about that, Candace. Kai’s parole officer will be coming by our place. Parole officers can show up anytime, and you have to let them in. If they see you, they’ll send her back to prison, and then you’re back here, anyway.”

  Candace pulls her bottom lip in and munches at it. After a little thought, she says, “Yeah. But so are you. Maybe forever. She wouldn’t want you back, after that. If they took her to jail again, and it was your fault, I bet she wouldn’t even come back for you. She’d be so mad.”

  Oh damn, she is crafty. She is pressing on the blackest bruise I have inside me. I make myself smile. “I’m not saying no. I’m saying we need to think it through. Be slow. And anyway, I bet we can work it out for you to visit, for sure.”

  “How long of visits?” Candace asks. “How soon?”

  Just then, from downstairs, I hear the sounds of Kai’s arrival. The knock. The clap of Mrs. Mack’s old-lady shoes on the linoleum as she goes to answer the door.

  I should stay here, at least another minute. I should reassure Candace, soothe her. But I hear Kai’s voice, her present voice, not crackling through a bad connection while I press the old phone against my ear. I hear her living voice lighting up the room below me. I can’t help it. I scramble over Candace, my knee jamming into her stomach so that all her air puffs out. I launch off her as if she is an object. I run. I don’t even look back, bounding down the stairs to see my mother.

  She stands at the bottom, a brightness in the common room. She makes the gray slab walls, the deflating beanbags, and the sagging navy couches fade away. There is only my mother wearing sunshine-colored paisley: orange, yellow, gold. Her hair has grown out longer, falling way past her collarbones and over her small breasts. Her face is tipped up to mine and smiling.

  I leap at her from the last two stairs, right into her arms.

  She says, “Oof,” and she is laughing.

  She spins me and her dark hair swings around us, her skirt wraps my legs.

  It doesn’t matter that her body feels different, softer and spongier around her middle. It doesn’t matter that she smells different, too, the acrid stench of cigarettes over cheap shampoo. Her arms are still her arms. Her crying eyes on me are still her eyes, even spilling tears.

  “You’re so pretty! You’re so pretty!” she keeps saying. “You’re so tall!”

  There is nothing that can touch me in this moment. Nothing. Mrs. Mack leaves without me noticing, like she’s been teleported from the room.

  Kai’s brought a Tupperware with her, and it’s banging me in the back as we hug and clasp and almost dance together. It’s the pancakes, the ones with orange rind in the batter. They are cold, and the syrup has soaked through and made them soggy. The butter has congealed. We sit side by side on the navy loveseat and eat them with our fingers anyway. Kai can’t stop touching me. Can’t keep her syrup-sticky fingers off my face, my hair. She’s quiet, but I whisper and plan for both of us, talking with my mouth full. Not about the past, or even much the now. Today I only talk about our brightest nexts, and she leans in, rapt. I am the storyteller now, telling her a future that is half pretend, half hope, certain and glorious. Kai can’t stop crying and smiling. Tears leak the whole time, but it is sweet, for all that. The sweetest hours that I have known in literally years.

  Time has never moved so fast. I want to slow it, make it stop, stay here in the common room with some old cartoon running silent on the shared TV and Kai’s long leg pressed against my own.

  “I’ll be back for dinner Monday night, remember,” Kai says, feeling it, too. “And then again on Wednesday, and again, and again, until one day very soon, I’ll take you home.”

  I beam at her, and past her, I spot Candace. She has crept out to crouch at the top of the stairs with her shoulders in a hunch. Her chin rests on her knees, and she peers down at us. Her eyes shine as pale and blue as any bitter winter. In that glance, I feel joy teeter on the cusp of ruin. I see the end of everything.

  It was perhaps three seconds of my life, that look. Then Candace crab-walked backward, out of sight, and I turned back to Kai. But that moment when our eyes met, it stayed with me.

  I learned in that span how certain time is. It marched forward always, with me in it. Sometimes it dragged, sometimes it flew far too fast, but it was always moving. It would always move, inexorable, until it brought me to the wo
rd, the bullet, the breath that ended it.

  It brought me to this alleyway. To Oakleigh’s husband.

  I stared into that small black hole, and Clark’s pupils behind it were two more small black holes, exactly the same. All three held the promise of a crazy blankness. His hand shook and tightened, time so slow that I could see the flex of every tiny muscle in his fingers. The light glinted off the blond hairs on his hand. They were like live filaments, electric, and so beautiful.

  All I could say was “Wait, wait,” in that futile way that people do. Wanting one more second.

  He waited.

  Clark was a gym body, with civilized white teeth. He’d been pushed beyond his edge, but he was new to violence. He hesitated, and I had time for one more thing.

  In this brief stay, I could say Wait again, or Please, or No, but it wouldn’t stop him. I could see this wasn’t personal. He didn’t care that I would not find Hana. That I would not be there to watch over Julian. That I’d never tell Birdwine that here, inside the gun’s dark eye, I saw his flaws and all his failures clearly, and knew they did not change how dear he was to me, how necessary, good, and worthy.

  Clark had fallen over some edge or another. He was tumbling, and I could not call him back with the concerns of my inconsequential life, or make him see the fine web of connections he was cutting. I wasn’t real to him. Another debt I owed to Candace, this clarity: his acts against me had nothing to do with me, and any sentence of my story was only that—a story. So in the small space of his hesitation, I forgot myself, and told a piece of his: “Oakleigh’s got something on you.”

  His chin dipped down, and I had bought another breath, though the tension in his finger on the trigger did not abate. The gun’s black eye looked into my left eye, exactly. I tried to see past it, see him, but it was so hard. So hard to look at anything but that silly, silvery gun.

  “What?” he said, as if he hadn’t heard me right.

  “She has something that will ruin you.”

  The tension in the finger eased. His neck elongated. I had his interest.

  “Tell me,” he said, “or I am going to shoot you.”

  He was going to shoot me anyway. I could see it in the lines of him.

  I said, “Footage. You’re right outside a bar. You’re giving Oakleigh footage of yourself, shooting her lawyer.”

  It was so hard to look away from the gun’s black eye. But I made myself. I made my eyes cut away over his shoulder, to the kinder gaze of the tiny security camera stationed over the door into McGwiggen’s.

  He glanced back, reflexively, a half turn of his head to look where I was looking. As he moved, I moved with him, ducking down and stepping forward. I felt so slow, like I was trying to sink into concrete, trying to get under the gun’s trajectory.

  His hand jerked, and I heard a huge roar, so close it deafened me. I was dazzled with the muzzle flash. I didn’t know if I was hit. I couldn’t tell. I didn’t even know if I was living, until I felt the bone-deep jarring when I slammed my heel into his instep.

  He screamed, and I heard the champagne pop of a second shot, muffled by the endless echo of the first shot in my ears. Already my knee was coming up. Already my hands were reaching for his eyes.

  I heard the clatter of the gun falling away, and then his hands were scrabbling at my throat, grasping for purchase, and we were animals. Animals each trying to be the living one when it was over. My knee connected hard with his balls, and he bent to it. My nails dug into the meat of his pale face. Someone was bellowing, a tearing scream of sound, and I could feel the way the noise ripped at my throat from the inside, so it was me.

  His grip released, his body choosing flight for him, his nature rising as surely as mine had. I could feel wetness and skin jammed in my nail beds, and I dug and ripped. He shoved me, his fists double hammers that banged into my chest. I felt my hands tear from his face. I was thrown backward, airborne, into the trash cans. I slammed into them and two of them tipped over and spilled in a great clatter of metal. I fell between them.

  I heard my voice still blaring, and when I got my head up, he was scrambling away in a slow staggering run, crouched over his balls. I kept screaming, a banshee’s wail, a howling. I didn’t see how the people inside hadn’t heard me. I should be bouncing back off satellites in space.

  Even as I thought it, the smoked glass door burst open, and it was Wes, with his eyes bugging in his broad, young face. Grace was right behind him, too, another bartender. She was a tough girl with almost as much ink as she had skin space. I had to make the unearthly sound coming out of me stop, on purpose, like I was turning off a bad song on the radio. Wes stared wildly around, then took off down the alley after Clark. Clark saw him coming and sped up, still hunched over his balls, running away.

  I sprawled between the overturned cans, and my feet were bare. He’d thrown me right out of my shoes. My hands started running up and down my body of their own volition, trying to find out if I had holes in me. I touched my face, my hair, my neck, my chest. Down the alley, I heard a clatter and another scream. Wes had tackled Clark.

  My throat hurt inside from the rasping yell, and my chest hurt where his fists had hit me. My whole body hurt where I had smashed into the cans and then the ground. I sat up anyway. The gun was lying near me, shiny as a toy. I saw my shoes there, too, one on its side, one upright. Grace was kneeling by me now, though I hadn’t seen her move.

  She said, “Oh my God, Paula, we saw you on the feed. Billy called the cops.” Billy was the bar back.

  “Am I bleeding?” I croaked at Grace. “Do I look shot or bleeding?”

  “No,” she said. “No, but God, your hair is so fucked up.”

  I was in shock, I realized then, because I started laughing.

  Grace said, “Who is that? Are you dating him?”

  I shook my head, and the world swung all around me. “That was the thousand and first guy.”

  Down the alley I could hear Wes yelling, “Stay down, asshole!”

  Grace helped me up, and we peered down into the dim light. Wes was sitting on Clark’s back, grinding his bleeding face into the pavement. Clark flopped like an angry flounder under Wes’s bulk. Standing deepened the throb in my left hip, but the pain seemed distant and unimportant. An interesting fact that I was noting. Inside me, my blood rushed in circles, every vein part of a racetrack, all my red cells jostling to be first and fastest.

  “Are you okay?” Grace asked.

  I was better than okay. There were no holes in my good body. I had won. I had seen him running. I was seeing him held down now, right now, the blood in streaks of red all down his face, and oh ye gods and little fishes, it was good.

  Billy came out the glass door then, eyes wide, mouth panting. He took in the scene, then ran to help Wes.

  “Come inside,” Grace said, and tugged me toward the door.

  I took one sideways step, a lurch almost, away. I realized I was heading down the alleyway to kick Clark in the head. But Grace put her arm around me, catching me and stopping me. I clutched her, weaving, and my hand left red smears on her shirt. His blood had painted the tips of my fingers.

  She took me in and made me sit in the office. A few minutes later, I heard sirens coming, and that sounded good to me as well. It sounded like order, like my old good friend, the law, wailing on a righteous pathway to me, through my city.

  McGwiggen’s back office was a white-walled, windowless hole that I suspected had begun life as a closet. I was waiting there when Birdwine burst in, wild-eyed and panting. He took in the scene, me sitting in the only chair, a wheeled black cheapo thing in front of an IKEA desk that housed an old computer.

  “Hi,” I said, hoarse from that weird bellowing. I’d never been so glad to see him.

  “Oh, hi,” Birdwine said, drawing up short. He wavered there, uncertain, then shoved one catcher’s mitt of a hand through his wild hair as he tried to get himself in hand. When he spoke next, it came out elaborately casual. “So, you know, I’m he
re to rescue you. Ta-da.”

  That made me grin, but as soon as I could make myself look serious, I told him, “I’m sorry I called you an asshole.” I wanted to take it back before the building collapsed in on us, or the sun went nova, or some final, tenacious chunk of Skylab fell out of space and killed me. That message I’d left, angry and unforgiving, could not be the last words I ever said to him. He looked puzzled, so I added, “On your voicemail? I called you an asshole.”

  “Oh, right. De nada. I got your message, maybe fifteen minutes ago. I heard that man talking as you hung up, and there was something in the tone. I knew it had gone all kinds of wrong. I called you back, four times, and it kept going to voicemail. So I came down here, already wound up, and the lot was full of cop cars. People were saying your name, talking about gunshots, an attack. You calling me an asshole has fallen pretty far down on my list.” He looked sick, in fact, recounting it. “Grace told me you were back here, gave me the twenty-second version. Are you really okay?”

  “You should see the other guy,” I said.

  “I’d like that very much,” Birdwine said darkly.

  I slid my feet into the neon-orange Crocs Grace had loaned me from her locker. The cops had bagged my shoes. Then I stood up, wincing, and we looked awkwardly across the small space at each other. “Do your rescuing services extend to an escort home?”

  That set him back. He looked at me, eyebrows beetling suspiciously, trying to get a read on me. All at once, he was so wary that it broke my heart for him. But all he said was “You can leave?”

  “Yeah, I was waiting for a uniform to drive me,” I said.

  An EMT had cleaned my scrapes and looked me over, but I didn’t let him get too handsy. I was fine, barring a spectacular set of deepening bruises from landing in the trash cans. A tech had collected samples from under my nails, while a detective named Martinez took an abbreviated statement, probably because I had been drinking. He wanted me to come down to the station tomorrow to give a longer one, and so they could get more pictures. They had a better witness in the tapes anyway. The hallway’s camera showed Clark following me out. The alley camera got most of the fight, and they’d retrieved the gun, too.