She regards me over her candy paddle, her mouth corners turned up to a sly and waiting angle. Her mouth is full of sugar and ideas.
“How?” I say at last.
“I’ll whisper it,” Candace says. She knows how to milk a quid pro quo.
My mouth sets, but I hold myself still as she closes that last inch between us, pressing in close. I can smell faux grape on her breath.
“Write him a long, long boring letter, like about what you saw on TV, and talk on a lot about how you’re working on a poem for a school project. Then you put the poem in, but you recopy it.”
“Mmm,” I say, noncommittal, leaning away.
She leans with me, propping her head on my shoulder so that her pointy chin digs at me. “If it’s in your writing, and if you burn up the original, they can’t trace it to your mom at all.”
Dammit, it’s a good idea. Candace is such a mouth breather, I forget how crafty she can be. I owe her now, so I don’t kick her back to her bed when the candy is gone. I turn my back and she presses herself against it. She is out cold in two minutes, limp and still as a corpse.
She never sleeps like this in her bed. She cries and kicks her feet, saying, No no no, and I don’t like it. Listening to her moan and beg makes me feel queasy in my stomach. I wonder if I cry out in my sleep, as pitiful as Candace. I have my own bad nights, when I dream that 911 call.
What is your emergency, the dream-operator asks, and I see cop cars already zooming past the Dandy Mart, hundreds of them, zigging fast like a long line of black roaches. I don’t have one! I don’t have one! I yell, already too late. I see red light, like firelight, rising from behind the kudzu. I hear my mother screaming, and that always wakes me up. I could never, even in my dreams, un-tell the story that I told that operator.
Now Candace is so hard asleep that her head is sweating like a baby’s. I can feel it dampening my T-shirt. I stay awake much longer, crammed against the wall in a bed that is gritty with spilled sugar.
By morning, I have decided. I go to Mrs. Mack, and I squeeze out some tears. I am Kai’s child, and I know to start with true parts: “He always called me Bossy Pony, and he helped me with my math.” The true parts are a foundation that let the lie stand tall and strong: “I know he’s not really my dad, but he’s the only daddy I’ve ever known.” And then on top of this structure, I set the thing I’m angling for: “If only I could write him. I want to know that he’s okay.”
Mrs. Mack gets his address for me, even gives me stamps. It’s easy.
I follow Candace’s plan exactly, mailing Dwayne a long, dull letter that includes the poem, masquerading as a school project. I can’t send the drawing. I lack the talent to reproduce it, and the original is way too traceable to Kai. I won’t risk a TPR. Dwayne will know the poem is from her, anyway. She tells stories from the Ramayana all the time, and the poem reads like hers.
Destroying both the originals would be safest, but my mother wrote the poem, and she drew her own familiar, absent face on Sita. I hide them in the very bottom of my footlocker and change the combination on the lock. Again. Not that it keeps Candace out. It’s a mystery, how she keeps breaking in.
I solved it two decades later, when I got out Kai’s Ramayana for Julian. I’d pulled the footlocker down from the top shelf of my closet, then realized I couldn’t remember the combination. Hell, I couldn’t remember the last time I’d opened it. I tried my birthday, the day that Jimi Hendrix died, and a host of my old zip codes. I got so frustrated that I rattled the lock, then let it go with a spiteful, sideways jerk.
The cheap thing popped right open in my hands. I stared at it stupidly for a second, and then I started laughing. I closed the lock again, then I pulled and jerked at it, trying to re-create the angle of that sideways tug. It took me less than a minute. Damn that Candace. Joya and I had wondered if her giant bat ears let her hear the tumblers or if she’d been an international jewel thief in another life. I could have changed the combo to the infinite solution for pi and Candace still would have rummaged as she pleased.
Now Kai’s illustrated Ramayana sat on my breakfast bar with my other childhood souvenirs, and Julian was on his way. The braided bit of horse’s mane was gone, likely unraveled long ago, but everything else was laid out like a mini-museum of mother relics. The exhibits were pitifully few, but that hadn’t stopped me from straightening and reordering them nine times. He was a solid twenty minutes late.
If he showed, this would be our first face time since our disastrous introduction in my office, when I’d freaked out and Birdwine had threatened him. We’d messaged back and forth a little more on Facebook. I’d told him about getting his file from Worth, the expurgated version. So expurgated it was like a novel boiled down to haiku, but I’d attached the scanned-in pictures of Hana with our mother at the duck pond. He’d responded, Wow. Then an hour later, That’s a lot to process.
No shit.
These interactions gave me no real sense of the kid.
This morning, his message read: I keep looking at the pics of Hana. What should we do?
I messaged back, I gave Birdwine a plane ticket to Austin, my AmEx card, and carte blanche. He’ll find her.
Is he in Austin now? What can I do to help? Julian pressed, so I told him everything I knew. It wasn’t much.
Birdwine had checked in with me yesterday, after he visited Kai’s tiny apartment on Bellman Avenue. Her boyfriend, Dave Tolliver, still lived there. He thought her last name was Redmond, and that the kid was named Hannah Redmond. On February nineteenth, Kai and Hana had packed most of what they owned into his old station wagon and disappeared while he was at work.
This was a classic Kai breakup move. She’d abandoned everything that didn’t fit in the back of the wagon. I had Birdwine pay Tolliver for the car—it was only worth about twelve hundred dollars. In return, Tolliver gave Birdwine everything she’d left behind. He had four big boxes in his storage locker in the basement, mostly books and mail and photos, held hostage in case Kai resurfaced. Birdwine had sorted through it all piece by piece, reading the story in the lines between notes from her doctor, empty prescription bottles, scribbled phone messages, photographs, unpaid bills, and, of all damn things, a pamphlet about cancer. I tried not to imagine some chilly, white-jacketed stranger handing Kai a trifold glossy about the thing inside her that was killing her.
Instead, I told Birdwine, “When we moved like that, sometimes there was another man.”
“Maybe not this time,” Birdwine said. “It’s bad. How much detail do you want?”
“Keep it dry, like it’s any other case,” I said. The mere idea of the pamphlet—that such a thing existed—had almost undone me.
There was a silent moment on the phone, then Birdwine said, “But it’s not any oth—”
“Please,” I said. The single syllable came out sharp, staccato as a gunshot. “Bare bones on this, Birdwine, from here on out.”
“Okay. So. The cancer started in her lungs. She’s had emphysema for years, and by the time she figures it’s more than that, it’s everywhere.” Birdwine fell right into his regular rhythm. I knew his hands would be rolling in that way he had when he laid out a hypothetical. His voice was brisk, almost clinical, like I wanted. “Liver, bones, brain. She’s starting to have delirium, delusions. Her decision making is impaired. She’s on some heavy-duty medication, acting weird, and someone calls DFPS. That’s Texas-speak for child protective services. Dave says it wasn’t him, and I believe him. He had it pretty bad for Kai—he didn’t even call the cops about his car. Could have been someone from a homeschool playgroup Hana went to. I don’t think there was another man. They bolted because DFPS spooked her.”
The longer he talked, the more my heart raced, and my lungs had started to feel sticky. His story changed the odd parenthetical sentence written up the side of my check. (Obviously I don’t want you to come her
e). I’d thought it meant she didn’t want to see me, but the journey she mentioned in the first half of the note was literal. Perhaps she’d only told me not to come because she wouldn’t be there.
I said, “But Kai knew she was dying. It’s not like she’d take off on a pilgrimage to see the largest ball of twine. She must have had a plan for Hana.”
“Yeah, but what? Not one DFPS would approve of, or why go?” Birdwine asked.
I had no idea. Read in the light of dementia and heavy medication, Kai’s note read less like hippie-dippy mysticism, more like a dangerous combination of terrified and crazy.
“So what’s next?” I said.
“I can follow up with the mothers from the playgroup and DFPS, and I got a few known associates from Dave. I have your list of PO box addresses, so I know where she lived before. Dave gave me the tag number, and I can trace her that way, maybe. Anything you can think of that would put me in a direction?”
But there wasn’t. Not after fifteen-plus years of secondhand stories and silence.
“Birdwine,” I said, and stopped. I had two words stuck in my throat, pounding with the rhythm of my heart: find her, find her, find her.
“I got this,” he said, soft, calm, deadly serious.
It was as if he could feel my heart’s urgent drumbeat through the wires, as if it were driving him as hard as it drove me. He was all in on this search, as invested as if it were personal. Perhaps he had some motivation of his own, but I was too abjectly grateful to question it. I simply took it, and then braced my body for the bad part that came next: the wait.
I sucked at waiting, but I had no other options. Hana had disappeared deep into Kai’s world. I’d grown up there. Names, relationships, and identities were fluid. Adherence to the law was optional. There were no safety nets. There had been nothing to catch me when Kai went to prison. She had vanished, ill and drugged, and Hana could have landed anywhere in the whole country. Kai was almost definitely dead by now. Anyone, anything might have Hana.
The buzzer sounded, and the sound almost shuddered me right out of my skin. Julian was half an hour late. I punched the code to let him into the building, then started pacing back and forth, kitchen to front door and back. My heels banged the floor in a nervous tempo that had Henry sticking a disgruntled face over the sofa, wondering why I was vibrating the floors. The angle of his ears changed to alarmed as I stomped past again, and he ghosted back to the laundry room. He had a hiding spot behind the dryer.
Julian was taking so long to reach my floor, I wondered if he was using the stairs. I paced another circuit. Maybe he’d died on the journey through the stairwell, and I’d never see him again. That was the current theme in our shared gene pool. I walked to the front door and jerked it open.
There he stood. He was taller than me, but my heels were high enough to put us even. His eyes widened, and he startled like a deer. His hands flew up. If he’d been psyching himself up to knock, he hadn’t made it quite yet.
“Hi,” he said.
“Hi,” I said back. “Did you want to come in? Or knock? Or . . . ?” I meant it to be funny, but nervous on me often read belligerent.
“Yeah,” he said, but he made no move to step across my threshold. He swallowed audibly and scrubbed at the side of his face with one hand, like Birdwine fighting off a binge. “I need to say something first. I’ve been standing on your mat trying to decide how to apologize for the way things went when we first met. I should have realized you were my sister earlier.” The words kept coming in a tumble, as if he were a year-one kid in law school, botching his first overpracticed opening argument in front of a mock jury. “But I thought—I mean, I assumed—but not because I’m—”
“I have no idea what you’re saying.”
“All the way here I practiced, and then I sat down in my car, sweating and practicing, but I’m blowing it, huh?” He took a second, gathering himself, and then he looked me in the eye. “I’m trying to tell you, straight up, I’m not a racist.”
It caught me off guard. I’d forgotten that awkward moment; he’d assumed his sister would be white because he was. He’d apparently been dwelling on it, building it up in his head, and now he was being so relentlessly earnest it was both sweet and unsettling.
I said, “Glad to hear it,” to close the topic.
He must have taken it as sarcasm, though, because his skin washed pink.
“No, but I’m really not. It doesn’t matter to me that you’re—” He didn’t know quite what I was, and he floundered. To be fair, no one ever did. He finally ended with “—whatever you are.” I felt some hugely inappropriate laughter bubbling up and squelched it. I wasn’t sure what my face was doing, but it couldn’t have been good, because he babbled on. “I didn’t have that kind of mom and dad. Not at all.” His voice rose in pitch and volume as the words rushed unstoppably out. “I can see why you’d think that, because I went to Berry College, which is WASPy, I know, but my girlfriend there was black, and it wasn’t—”
“My last girlfriend was black, too,” I put in, to stop him talking. It worked. He froze.
“Oh, I’m sorry. I thought . . .” He trailed off and gulped and said, “I didn’t realize you were gay.”
“I’m not,” I said, and then I was laughing. I couldn’t help it. “I’m screwing with you.”
His eyes got even wider, and he sputtered, “Well, I’m not homophobic!” He looked ready to burst into tears on my welcome mat, and what was wrong with me?
“I’m sorry, it’s not funny,” I said, though I was still grinning. “It’s just—look at my suit.”
His gaze dropped to my jacket for a second, and then he looked back to me, confused. “It’s, um—it’s a really nice suit?”
“I know, right?” I said. I’d dressed like I was heading into a particularly bloody deposition. I’d blown my hair out and put on matte red lipstick. “I’ve gone Full-Dress Bitch on you. Look at these shoes. The only word for heels this high is vicious. And you’re a wreck, and none of this is helping.” I turned to the side and kicked the shoes off, and stepped down, barefoot.
I hadn’t been nervous, I realized. This kid carried the weight of my life’s largest unpaid debt, and I was terrified of him. I hadn’t recognized it, because terror wasn’t one of my usual modes of operation. But I’d dressed to battle monsters. I’d even laid the relics of our shared heritage out in regimented rows, the way a prosecutor lays out evidence. Now, as he trembled in the hall, I was a little calmer, like a lady who realizes the little garden snake might be more afraid of her than she is of him. Maybe.
I said, “Let’s restart, okay?” I took my jacket off and draped it over the table by the door. Garden snakes could be charming little animals, given half a minute and some hospitality. This was a simple meet. All I had to do was figure out what he wanted, and then give it to him. It wasn’t that different from my day job, and—the last six months aside—I was very good at that. “First, I don’t think you’re racist or homophobic or any other -ist or -ic. I don’t have a sense of you at all. So come in, and let’s change that.” I stepped back to let him enter.
“Thanks,” he said. He still had worried eyebrows, but he no longer looked like he might vomit. He stepped awkwardly in and paused, his breath catching as he saw my wall of windows. “Wow. That is a view!” He looked around, taking in the way the high ceilings, the stark white walls, and the clean lines of my furniture acted as a backdrop for the boldly colored abstract art I favored. “Your place is really, really nice.”
Meanwhile, I was studying him. He had enough familiar features to give me déjà vu: my mother’s eyes, wide brow, and length of bone. He even had paler, hairier versions of my long-fingered hands. It was disconcerting.
I looked back up to his face and found he was now examining me just as intently. He blushed and shook his head. “Oh, sorry. This is weird. We have
almost the same nose.”
He was right, though I hadn’t seen it until he said so.
“Weird as hell,” I agreed, because it felt that way, even though it was actually exactly how biology worked.
Another awkward pause, and he said, “Any more news from—I forget his name. The spooky guy you sent to Texas?”
“Birdwine. Not yet. But he will find her,” I said, very brisk, and changed the subject. “Speaking of PIs, when we went to see the one you hired, I asked him to rethink his life choices. He issued you a refund.”
I had Worth’s check tucked in my skirt pocket, and I pulled it out and passed it to him.
His eyes widened as he clocked the amount.
“This is more than I—”
I was already waving that away. “Call it damages. I would have taken his ass to court and made him pay more, if I thought he had it.”
He stared at the check, his lips pressed tight together with some feeling or another. He finally said, “I can’t tell you what this means. Really. When Mom got sick—” He stopped and shook his head.
“Forget it,” I said. Birdwine had been right about the kid’s fiscal hole; this meet that had me so on edge might have a very simple ending.
He started to put the check in his wallet, but then paused in the middle of tucking it away. “Oh, sorry, but the check is to me—do I need to pay you some? I mean, you went and lawyered at him.”
So much for simple. He needed every dollar there and more, especially if he wanted to go finish up at Berry. Yet here he stood in my half-million-dollar loft, staring at a white sofa that had cost more than the amount on Worth’s check—a sofa that I’d bought to match my cat—offering me a percentage. If the kid was playing me, he was a virtuoso.
The Opposite of Everyone Page 13
