The Opposite of Everyone

by Joshilyn Jackson

  He shrugged, impassive. “I don’t see the upside, Paula.”

  “You don’t? Well, I do. At least I’d understand your choices, even if—­” I stopped myself. The rest of the sentence was stuck in my throat. I’d almost said, even if I can’t forgive them.

  Birdwine gave me a rueful smile, eyebrows raised. I tipped my head to him, acknowledging the hit. He was right. There was no upside.

  I dropped the line of questions and said, flat, “You should have told me. Before. When we were a thing.”

  “Oh, yeah. Because you’re taking it so well.” That sounded more like him than anything he’d said so far, and as he went on, I finally got why he had ditched me in the first place. “I don’t have a good bedtime story for a chick with abandonment issues.”

  “It was the truth, though,” I said. Understanding it did not make me less angry. I didn’t want a conversation, anyway. I wanted an apology; it would feel so ugly-­good to not accept it. “And you were supposedly in love with me.”

  “Yeah,” he said.

  “Then you should have told me, Birdwine, shit. I think I was in love with you, too.”

  “I know you were,” he said, so sad and sure and world-­weary all at once that the urge to hurt him, to pick a bruise and press my fingers hard against it or to bite, was almost overwhelming.

  I stepped to him, tall enough in my shoes to jam my lips against his swollen mouth, not carefully. Not carefully at all. He hummed the hurt of it against my skin, but his hand went to my hip, automatic, like a reflex. His mouth opened, surprised by pain, and his breath came out. I pulled it in, tasted old bourbon down behind the mint.

  I broke the kiss, but stayed close, eye to eye, so angry. “I’m not starting anything.”

  “I know,” he said, even though his hand on my hip had already pulled me closer.

  My lips twisted. “You should send that memo to your pants.”

  He flashed me that gap in his teeth, though the grin had to hurt. “You’re so damn romantic.” This close, I could smell the faded copper tang of last night’s blood.

  “You understand that was good-­bye.” I said it like a window closing.

  “Yeah,” he said. He dropped his hand and moved away to the coffeemaker for a refill. He didn’t speak again until his back was to me. “It’s not what I want, but I can’t change it.”

  I wasn’t sure if he was talking about the boy or me.

  It didn’t matter. Either way, the love was breakable. All love was. At my job, I helped dozens of ­couples who were staggering out of it, shell-­shocked or enraged. Many of them tore their kids in half and shattered that love, too. Even crazy Oakleigh with her murder-­kittens had loved Clark Winkley, once. Now he was risking a broken neck to worm across her roof to pee in her compact and scribble out her face in pictures. My clients, every one, had made promises in front of priests and rabbis and judges and all their friends and their relations. Made a home. Made babies. Then happily ever after cracked, and I came to break it open and divvy up its jagged pieces.

  There was something left between me and Birdwine, or I wouldn’t feel this way. I wouldn’t be closer to crying than I had been since—­I could not remember, and then I did. Since the last time I saw Candace. Some feeling for him was alive inside me, still, and I would have to break it. Fine. Breaking things was what I did best.

  I stepped back, but it wasn’t far enough. I backed all the way across the kitchen, and he stayed by the coffeemaker. So Birdwine and I had loved each other. So what. We’d each had a share in wrecking it—­he’d been too silent, and I’d been too cynical. Now here we were. He was still silent, and I was still cynical enough to know a hungry body could be fed on anything.

  “Are we back to emails titled ‘Here is the information’?” I asked. I didn’t want him to quit, now. The specific ways his life was wrecked made me want him on this case. It was like me and my pro bono work, getting my mother’s little avatars out of prison. No other PI on the planet would be this overinvested.

  “That’s what I said I wanted, all along,” he said, with no inflection. But then he quirked an eyebrow up and added, wry, “How lucky that it’s all working out for me.”

  It was his best and blackest kind of funny, and I would have laughed before. The job aside, Birdwine and I were over enough to have an after. After started now.

  “Good morning,” said Julian from the doorway. Looper was with him, lolling out a happy tongue. Julian seemed almost as eager, but he drew up short as Birdwine and I turned to him. Looper, oblivious, trotted through to squeeze out of his doggy door into the backyard. My brother’s human nose lifted, though, as if he smelled the fury and the pheromones that still charged the air.

  I said, “Birdwine, I don’t think you’ve officially met my brother. This is Julian Bouchard.”

  “Julian,” Birdwine said. He moved forward, impassive as a pile of bricks, to put his hand out.

  Julian shook it, looking back and forth uneasily between us. “Oh, sorry. I’ve interrupted something. I should have stomped more, coming in, but Paula said that you two weren’t a thing.”

  Birdwine answered, when I didn’t. “I’d say that’s a fair assessment.”

  I’d been too surprised by Julian’s directness. He stated the truth so baldly, even when it brought discomfort to the room. It was another way the kid was like me, but we didn’t get it from our slippery shared parent. Was it some odd recessive gene? Or had we each gotten it separately, from our fathers? Maybe Kai had had a type, after all.

  “Oh, sorry. You look like you might have a—­be a thing.” Julian was flushed, as pink-­cheeked as a maiden auntie who had caught her Pomeranians canoodling.

  “You came in at the end of the end of the story. You’re seeing credits roll,” I said, brisk. “Can we get to business? Show Birdwine the map.”

  “Map?” Birdwine said, turning to Julian.

  “You didn’t tell him? How could you not tell him?” Julian asked, then turned excitedly to Birdwine. “We know where Kai was taking Hana. I mean, we know where they’ll go next. I mean where they would have—­where they went. Or gone.”

  He’d wound himself around in the verb tenses, but Birdwine picked up on the meaning.

  “No, Paula didn’t mention that,” Birdwine said, shooting me an oblique look. It occurred to me that he was angry back. But with what cause? He could have defended himself, but he had taken a hard pass. He was still talking to Julian, though. “You picked up Hana’s trail from my file? How?”

  Julian looked to me, but I turned deliberately and went to get more coffee, saying, “Julian, why don’t you catch him up?”

  “Yeah. Okay. Well, last night, Paula figured out where Kai was going. Sort of,” Julian said, looking uncertainly back and forth between us. He got the map out of the file and spread it out on the kitchen table. Birdwine came to stand beside him, casually closing his laptop and moving it back, out of the way. As if it was convenience, and the boy pictured on the screen had nothing to do with it.

  Now Julian partially blocked my view, and I hoped the kid would hurry. Cold as the air was now between me and Birdwine, Julian could die of hypothermia if he got wordy.

  “You went to Austin, and you traced the car to Dothan, Alabama,” Julian said. He pointed at the line of orange highlighter, traveling their route via index finger. “That’s where Kai grew up. Paula was born there.” He trailed his finger along the line. “Next, they head for Montgomery.”

  Julian was taking too damn long already. I wanted out of this house, so I chimed in.

  “We moved to Montgomery with Eddie. Then we lived in Jackson, Mississippi, with Tick.” Julian kept track with his pointing finger as I talked. Kai and I had traveled all over, sometimes gypsy lifing it for weeks between boyfriends. We’d city hop, changing names and modes of transportation, especially if the relationship behind us had ended ugly. But thi
s route she’d taken with Hana ignored our brief pauses, the men who didn’t last or matter, all our winding roads. She’d taken Hana only to places where we’d lived a year or so. All the places where we’d had a home address and an approximation of a family. “New Orleans is where we met Anthony. You see?”

  “Holy shit,” said Birdwine, seeing.

  Julian said, “It’s her life. She was taking Hana on a tour, the main stops of her life, in order. Birth to—­something.”

  I said, “Next is Asheville with Hervé, and that’s where you lost her.”

  Birdwine was shaking his head. “Dammit. I should have texted you her movements.”

  I couldn’t fault him for this. It was standard to give a PI a list of known associates, but I hadn’t a clue about any of Kai’s current ­people or places. I’d been thinking about brain cancer, delusions, heavy meds. I’d imagined some crazy flight from Texas child protective ser­vices into a murky future—­not into our own ancient history.

  “That’s my bad. I told you to call me only when you had results,” I said, but it was an icy absolution.

  Julian shifted his weight from one foot to the other, uncomfortable. “Do you think it’s possible she’s still alive?” he said into the silence.

  Birdwine shook his head, and his gaze on my brother was both sad and very gentle. “The guy who bought the wagon in Dothan said”—­he paused, but Julian still had that baby bird look on his face, like he was hoping to be filled with something lovely—­“that she looked like the walking dead. He barely recognized her from her picture. He said the Kai he met could have been November Kai’s grandma. I’m sorry.”

  Julian swallowed, looked away.

  Birdwine filled the silence. “From Dothan, they went Greyhound. In Asheville, they stopped taking the bus. She got a ride or bought another car. Not at a dealership. I checked all over. She could have found one on Craigslist or passed some junker with a For Sale sign in the window.”

  “Or stolen one. Or gotten a man to give them one,” I said.

  “Worst-­case scenario, they started hitchhiking. At any rate, I lost them,” he said, flipping through the notes I’d printed out last night. Kai was touring Hana through her past, but it had been my past, too. I’d written it all out for him and traced it on the map in blue. “But now, see, I know her destinations.”

  The search radius had narrowed from “anywhere in the world,” to a journey from fixed point to fixed point. She was visiting every city where there had been a different boyfriend, a different Kai, a different me. How expurgated or invented was the tour that Kai gave Hana? So far, the geography matched Kai’s real history, which in itself was shocking. The truth was not a story that my mother told.

  Julian said, “After Asheville, Kai moved west of Atlanta with Dwayne. Then downstate.” He flushed. “That’s where I was born. But Paula thinks she might leave that part out. The prison part, and the me part, too. So it was Asheville, to Paulding County—­”

  “To here,” I finished for him. There was no other destination possible. Kai didn’t know Ganesh’s new name, and she’d never left a lover without burning every bridge behind her. She’d meant to bring Hana here. “To me.”

  Birdwine was nodding. He remembered Kai’s note as well as I did. Death is not the end. You will be the end.

  She’d meant it literally, exactly as written. She’d had a plan for Hana, after all. To bring my sister to me. It was a desperate move, but all the gods knew that I owed her. I would have taken Hana in, no questions, had I truly been her journey’s end. She’d miscalculated, though. Somewhere on her wobbly path from Asheville to Paulding County to my place in Atlanta, my mother had run out of time.

  “I’m on it,” Birdwine said.

  “Great. Julian, let’s go. Your car is still parked by my office.”

  Julian was looking back and forth between us, bewildered. “But, wait, what happens now? We can’t go home. We’re so close!”

  “We’re closer,” Birdwine said. “But I’ve got a crap ton of phone calls and database searches to do now. Every hospital, every police department, every wrecking ser­vice along every route that she could have taken. A terminally ill woman traveling with a little girl will have left a footprint, but realistically, it will take days or even weeks of grunt work to find it.”

  “So you aren’t going back to Asheville,” Julian said, thoughtful.

  “I’ll be more effective here. My PI license gives me access to search engines that would blow your mind, kid, and I know how to work a phone. If that fails, then, yeah. I’ll run her possible routes in person, with pictures. I’ll canvass, asking everyone with eyes. I hope it won’t come to that.”

  I hoped not, too. I’d have to make a much more comprehensive list. Would Kai have taken Hana to the Dandy Mart, shown her the row of pay phones I had used to break our lives? Did places still have pay phones? Maybe they’d been ripped out, and all my mother could show Hana was the hole where they’d once been. That was the journey itself in a nutshell—­looking at the holes where we’d once been.

  “If it’s phone calls and computer stuff, I could stay and help,” Julian offered. “It will go faster with two.” He looked back and forth between us, eager.

  “What about your car?” I asked, buying time to think.

  Our shared mother had died indigent, traveling under a name only the gods knew. The narrowed search radius had upped our odds of finding out what had derailed them, but Hana’s fate itself was still in play. She was still that famous cat in its closed box, dead and alive at the same time. I wasn’t sure that Julian should be the one to open it.

  “I’ll get it later,” Julian said. “Although I need to borrow a charger. My phone is—­it’s almost out of juice.”

  “I could use the help, but I can’t begin to guess what we’re going to find,” Birdwine said in cautious tones. He understood that Hana was a coin spinning in the air.

  “I’m not stupid. But even if Hana’s had a hard time, finding her can’t be anything but good news,” Julian told him, bristling. “She’s alone right now, and we’re her family.”

  I fought the urge to trade a speaking glance with Birdwine. I was off his team. I said gently to Julian, “We know we’re her family. But—­”

  He turned to me, eyes overly bright. “When we find her, she’s going to know it, too. Last night, after you fell asleep, do you know what I did? I got on your laptop, and I started filling out a transfer application to Georgia State. I trolled Craigslist, too, looking for roommate ads here in Atlanta. I want her to know that even before I met her, I was changing my life for her. That I wanted be a real big brother to her, before I ever saw her face, or anything.”

  I recognized the righ­teous temper. This boy truly shared my blood. Then I did look to Birdwine. It was inadvertent. I found him looking back, thinking the same thing. I turned away, fast. It would be too easy to fall back into our old rhythms, especially as we worked to find my sister. I could feel our connection, tenuous but living, under all my anger. It would take more than simple rage to kill it. I couldn’t join up with him for anything, even a simple try at giving Julian an out. The kid wasn’t going to take it, anyway.

  I’d been trying to feed Julian reality in little sips, but the idea that we could get this close and not retrieve a Hana who was alive and well, one who wanted to be in our family—­it was a bitter gulp, and it would not go down. This kid, who had recently lost his parents, was not ready for any more losses. Even imaginary ones. Hell, when he was asking for a charger, he wouldn’t even say his phone was dead.

  Birdwine tried again. “All I’m saying is, you need to be prepared. This story might not have a happy ending.”

  “I’m not looking for the end of a story,” Julian said, firm. “I’m looking for a little girl.”

  Whatever Kai-­created train wreck was raging toward us, he was bound and determined to sta
nd in the middle of the track with his arms spread wide. No, more than that. I was waiting to get hit by what was worst, and Julian was planning for a best. I was bracing myself for impact, and he was actively preparing for a future.

  Maybe I was getting schooled, again.

  For the first time, I indulged in Julian’s game of what if. Best case, Kai had taken Hana to her bio dad, and he was a happy, invested, stable sort. I thought that was about as likely as finding her cheerfully colonizing Mars. Real best case, she was living with some kindhearted friend or lover Kai had picked up on the road or in the foster care system with a decent placement. Worst case? She’d fallen hand in hand into the black with Kai and Joya; there was no plan needed for that contingency. Next worst case? She was living on the streets, or someone in the range of indifferent to awful had made her into baggage or prey.

  In every case but “magic, loving bio dad,” if she was alive, then I was going after custody. So why wasn’t I making best-­case plans, like Julian? There were things I should tack onto my to-­do list: Look for a house in a good school district. One with walls, that said I have room for you. Call a meeting with my partners, let them know all the ways my life was about to change.

  “Fine,” I said. “I’m going in to work. I have a difficult negotiation starting up on Monday, and I have to go in prepped. If”—­I stopped myself and looked deliberately to Julian—­“when we find Hana, I’ll need some time off, so I need to bank goodwill with my partners now. Julian, can you send me updates, every hour on the hour?”

  Julian grinned at me. “Absolutely!”

  I spent the day drafting a settlement proposal for Winkley v. Winkley, and I was in quite a mood. It was weighted so heavily in Oakleigh’s favor that it was not a true proposal. It was the opening salvo in a war, and it promised that the war itself would be long and dark and bloody. When Dean Macon saw it, he might well crap his pants or recuse himself.

  Julian kept me in the loop, texting me all day. Perfect. I wanted my fingers on the pulse of the search, but I didn’t want to hear from Birdwine. Not even a four-­word text. Not even a sorry-­faced emoticon. Not until whatever sweetness I had discovered at his bedside was ashes, cold and light, easily blown away by any wind.