The Opposite of Everyone

by Joshilyn Jackson

  So the rich man, growing angry, is even more determined to impress her. He sends his other guests away, and then he brings, with his own hands, a single silver dish. Inside it, layers of delicate pastry are stuffed with nuts and honey.

  He says, “This is the honey of the dark bees, who are striped in blue and have human hair. Their sting is instant death. A thousand men died to collect a jarful, drop by drop. Here. I’ve had it all made into this sweet for you.”

  Parvati smiles and says, “I thank you, but this is too rich for me.”

  Ganesha’s trunk curls round his mother, and he plucks the sweet from Kubato. He stuffs the whole thing in his mouth, pan and all, and swallows.

  “Still hungry!” he cries. “Oh! I am so hungry!”

  I sit in a resentful hunch in the bedclothes. I let her tell it to the headboard. I let her tell it to my packed underpants and her own coat.

  The rich noble takes them through the kitchens, outside, to the silos behind his house, and he says, “Here are my storehouses, built to feed my kin when famine comes. I have enough grain and oil to feed my whole household for seven years. No matter how poor the harvest, those I love will be fat and fed.”

  Ganesha rushes into it, wild, stuffing all the bags and jars and crates into his mouth, swallowing all that he sees, until there is not so much as a grain of rice left on the dirt floor.

  “Still hungry!” Ganesha bellows.

  Kubato is beginning to feel desperate, but his pride is so great, he says, “See this fertile field? I own it. I own every field, in all directions, all the rice and the grasslands where the lambs are grazing, and the forests full of game, and every river. I even own the sea and all the fish in it.”

  So Ganesha opens his wide mouth—­

  “That’s not how it goes,” I tell my mother. She is stretching it out, adding another layer. Before Ganesha eats up all the storehouse grain, Kubato is supposed to cry and quail and beg Parvati to help him, lest he be forever ruined. Then Parvati takes the fruit and crackers from her basket, and feeds Ganesha a bite from her own hand. He is sated at once, and curls up in her arms and goes to sleep.

  “Shh, I’m telling it,” Kai says, weaving in the doorway.

  “I know this story,” I tell her. “Give Ganesha the cracker and let me go to bed.”

  “He doesn’t get the cracker,” Kai says. Belligerent. “You don’t know every end of every story.”

  So Ganesha opens his wide mouth, and begins to swallow up the farmlands and the forests, slurping up all the lakes and rivers, and when they are dry he begins to suck the salty brine out of the ocean, washing down all the fish and squid and kelp.

  Even as he eats, he’s moaning, “Oh, I’m hungry. Oh, I’m hungry!”

  “Give him the fucking cracker, Kai,” I tell her, throwing back the sheet and climbing out of bed. I stand before her, furious, in my camisole and underpants.

  “Ganesha ate the whole world up, and all the ­people, up, he ate them,” Kai says. She’s lost the rhythm of it. “The rich man was all naked in space, floating, and he said, ‘You see that sun? That sun is my own mango. I could bite it open if I wanted to.’ ”

  “That’s not even the same story,” I say, almost yelling now. “Hanuman tries to eat the sun like a mango, not Ganesha!” But she is talking over me.

  “So Ganesha bit the sun in half and ate all halves, and still he’s hungry, and he ate Saturn.”

  Now she’s just making shit up.

  Tomorrow’s clothes are draped over my footboard. I grab the jeans. “Where’s Parvati, huh? She hasn’t even said the world was too rich, and Ganesha already ate it.” I sit on the edge of my single bed just long enough to yank my jeans on. “She didn’t even turn down a bite of the sun. Maybe the sun’s too buttery for her, huh? You skipped that. You’re drunk, and you lost Parvati.”

  “Ganesha ate her ass already,” Kai says, and then laughs. A slurry, drunk laugh, while I root under the bed to find my clogs. She takes a fast, mad drag, then talks through smoke. “He ate up his own mother, and the rich guy says, ‘I don’t even care about that sun. Space is fulla planets, I’ll pick me out another.’ ”

  I have my clogs on, and I shove past her, heading for the door.

  “That’s not how it goes,” I mutter as I stomp out.

  “Then Ganesha farted Saturn out, but he just re-­ate it,” Kai says. She’s followed me into the den, and I hear her sloshing wine into a glass behind me.

  I slam the door and walk off into the darkness. Out in the night, there’s bound to be a boy who’s waiting for me. There is always a boy waiting for me. Lots of them, actually, and all I have to do is choose. And be back by sunrise, so I can leave with William.

  Kai is asleep when I get home. Or at least, her door is closed. Inside her room, it stays quiet. She sleeps through my leave-­taking. She never got to give Ganesha that bite of fruit and cracker that sated him, that let him sleep. Now, she never will.

  She will never say, You didn’t know, or You were just a kid, much less own up to her part in our downfall. I will never say, If you live a life shaped like a loaded gun, your kid is going to come along and shoot it, and then forgive her anyway. She will never get to yell or cry or hit me or beg for mercy.

  Like all true stories, my mother’s ends midbeat. It has no moral, and no epilogue, and I don’t believe in reincarnation. Any bird that shits on me or sings outside my window now is only that: a bird.

  Time runs in only one direction, and I run with it, driving toward my little sister.

  The foster mother, Mrs. Beale, lives on a narrow road clustered with tiny 1950s ranch homes. They are square and evenly placed, like rows of teeth. I look for the house that holds Hana. I am not a coward, but I’d pay my own hourly rate to have Birdwine here to back my play—­double that for Julian. He is a ­people person and a natural smiler. Ye gods and little fishes, how he’s worn me down and won me over. He’s bounced and wept and hugged his way into the middle of my life, until his physical proximity is a pleasure as invisible as Henry’s. He will do the same with Hana, I have little doubt. But not today. Today, I am going alone, into a situation that does not play to my strengths.

  Hana’s therapist thinks that this is how we should begin, given that Hana thought she was an only child a week ago. Julian and I can empathize with that; we do not want to overwhelm her. It’s me instead of Julian because I knew the mother she lost. Also, her first decade on the earth looked a lot like my own freewheeling, Kai-­centric childhood. Dr. Patel says Hana is open to meeting us. She’s only been with Mrs. Beale for a few months, and she’s been grieving. She’s not deeply embedded where she is.

  I am to be warm but not pushy, Dr. Patel told me on the phone. Be polite. Be interested. Don’t initiate physical contact. Engage the kid, and let her come to me.

  This is my preferred approach in any case; I’m a cat person. But it’s good to have my instincts confirmed, and it was good for Julian to hear all this. He may yet need an intensive ten-­steps-­leading-­up-­to-­hugging workshop before we phase him in.

  I see the house, number 115, ahead on the right. This redbrick saltine box with black shutters and white trim is the closest thing Hana has to home territory. She has a room here, at any rate. She has a door, and the right to close it behind her. There’s a bright coat of fresh paint working hard to spruce up the sagging porch.

  Three ­people are sitting on the porch swing, Hana between two adults. She doesn’t look much different from the picture taken back in the winter. I’ve never met the other two, but age and ethnicity tell me Dr. Patel is to Hana’s left, and Mrs. Beale is on the right.

  Hana is slumped in a podgy little hunch. Her hands are clasped in her lap, and her legs are crossed at the ankles. Her feet do not touch the ground.

  Her expression is blank and demure, but this girl and I, we have the same shape mouth. I recognize the way she�
��s set it, like she’s got a ball of mutiny in there, and she is rolling it around to get a thorough taste. She’s not half as placid as she looks. My spine prickles.

  She glances at the car and then back at her hands, fast. I can feel my own mouth reshaping itself to match hers. This expression feels familiar. I know this face. I wore it exclusively for weeks, when I first arrived at the group home. I was half girl, half crustacean, impenetrable. It doesn’t bode well.

  Early days, I tell myself. No one has said this will be easy.

  My hands are hot and sweaty on the wheel. I turn the car off, and I blow on my palms to cool them. I’ve faced down rabid lawyers, angry judges, juries predisposed to hate me, and stayed as bland and warm as fresh boiled custard. Hell, I’ve faced down crazy-­ass Clark Winkley and a gun. Yet now my hands are wringing wet and shaking. I rub them fast down my jeans; no spooky black suits today. I’m wearing flats and my favorite shirt, a pumpkin-­colored knit thing that is pilled and soft with age. My hair is tethered in a loose braid, and I’ve painted on a friendly rose-­pink mouth.

  Dr. Patel stands up when my engine cuts out. She’s younger than I would have guessed based on the calm, low voice. She has a long, earnest ponytail, and her body language says she isn’t anxious. That’s going to be useful. Mrs. Beale looks like central casting sent over a white gramma type. She is generically kindly looking, from her soft gray bun to her brown orthopedic shoes. She puts a bracing hand on Hana’s shoulder as I get out, and I like her for it.

  Hana stays seated, staring intensely at her hands, which have begun to twist and squeeze each other as I come up the walk.

  Mrs. Beale stands, pulling Hana with her. Hana scowls, her gaze still down. She’s in a yellow dress, sprigged with flowers, and the color’s not doing her olive complexion any favors. She slouches, poking out her rounded tummy. She’s close to outgrowing this dress. The skirt is well above the knee, and her legs are skinny with knobby knees.

  As I reach the stairs, Mrs. Beale steps forward with a hand out, about to speak, but as she focuses on my face she stops. She looks puzzled for half a heartbeat, then she visibly blanches and recoils.

  “Holy shit!” she says.

  Shocking, coming out of that mouth. It is a sweet and elderly little mouth, crumpling in on itself, with her coral lipstick leaking into the wrinkles. The therapist and I both do a double take.

  Hana stares up at Mrs. Beale, too, then follows her stunned line of sight to me.

  “Hello,” I say. Hana’s eyes, very like my mother’s, are as disconcerting in her rounded face as they were in Julian’s the first time that I saw him. Now they widen and go blank with shock. Her mouth falls open. “I’m Paula Vauss.”

  Hana’s Kai-­style eyes have welled with tears.

  “No, you’re not,” she says. Her voice is soft and scratchy, as if she had a cold last week and is not quite recovered. But then two fat tears spill out, tumbling down both cheeks in tandem, and I realize her voice is breaking because she’s crying. “You’re Kali,” she tells me. “You’re Kali, and you’re real.”

  Then she is bounding toward me, and I barely have time to get my arms out of the way as she hurtles down the porch stairs and slams into my body. Her face smashes into my sternum, her arms wind tight around me, and my own arms enfold her of their own volition.

  “Excuse me,” her foster mother says, blushing deep crimson. “It’s just—­you really are real.”

  The therapist looks from Mrs. Beale to me, and then she says, “Holy shit,” too, very softly.

  I can’t answer at all. Something is happening to me. Or no, maybe it has already happened. It started when Hana’s body came so violently to mine. It’s animal and strange, how I can feel the shape, my own shape from long ago, her shape right now, imprinting itself on my legs and belly.

  I feel wetness, her tears and snot leaking through the knit to coat my skin, and it is as if I am holding a piece of me. It is me, and yet it is external, and itself. It has its own breath and heartbeat, but her biology is so entwined with mine in this endless moment, I cannot tell where she ends and I start, where my history leaves off and hers begins.

  “You’re real,” she says, a little muffled because her face is pressed against me. “Mama said. Mama told me you were real.”

  “Bet your ass I’m real,” I whisper, trying to understand this thing she’s done to me. She’s stepped right in and owned me, and yet, it does not feel like surrender. There is choice inside surrender. This is something much more basic.

  Over her dark head, I lock eyes with Mrs. Beale first, and then the therapist, still wearing their matching dumbfounded expressions.

  “Come in and see,” Mrs. Beale says. “You have to see this.”

  Hana releases me, but somehow my hand has found hers. We are separate, yet not. Our clasped hands are a cord running between us as she half pulls, half leads me inside. We pass through a den that died and got embalmed way back in 1987, down a dingy hallway, past a pink-­tiled bathroom.

  Then Hana throws a door open, and we are in a small room at the back of the house. She finally lets my hand go, almost embarrassed now, and my hand feels cold and oddly naked. I can still feel the shape of her hand in mine, but we are separated now, into our own selves.

  “This is where I sleep,” she says.

  She isn’t crying anymore. So this is her room, and her sheets have simple flowers on them. This is her room, and I am all over it. My face papers the walls. I see at least fifty of me, me from every angle, my face atop my long, tall body. I am taped and thumbtacked from floor to ceiling, framing the bed and dresser, covering the closet door.

  I see myself on horseback, on cloudback, dressed in bones, dressed in a sari. I see all my expressions—­I am enraged and in love and sad and joyful and forty more things in between. I am flying and fighting and laughing and dancing. In some pictures, I am my copper-­colored self, and in some I am cerulean or navy. Sometimes I have two arms, sometimes four or six, and in one, I have an uncountable suggestion of a thousand arms, lined up one behind the other.

  Kai has drawn me for Hana, over and over. Not recently, either. Or at least, not only recently. Some of the pictures of me are so old, the paper is yellowed and cracking at the edges. The colors are faded or smudged.

  “Mama said that we were traveling to find you,” Hana whispers. She is looking at all the mes on the wall. “But she was sick . . .”

  I’m still spinning round, now recognizing that Ganesha is all over, too: round belly, elephant head, since Kai couldn’t know what Julian would look like. I touch a picture of him on his mouse, the saddle fading red in colored pencil, and I tell Hana, “He is real, too.” Kai is here as well. As Sita, as Parvati, as her own self, dancing in a long silk skirt of sunshine colors.

  Near the headboard, I see one of the newer pictures. My face on a Kali dressed in bells. I sit on a white hilltop, dandelion spores caught in my dark hair. Beside me sits a little monkey. A little monkey with my sister’s face.

  “‘Kali Fights the Red Seed,’” I say, and I hear Hana’s breath come out in a sigh.

  “You know that story?”

  I turn to her. “I do. I know a lot of Kali stories, and Ganesha tales, and even a few of Hanuman’s stories. I bet you know some I don’t, though. I bet I know some that will be new to you.” Hana’s eyes are wide and bright, her nose red from crying. I realize Mrs. Beale has moved down the hallway, out of sight. Dr. Patel has backed up as well. She is leaning in the doorway, giving us a little room. “You want me to tell you one?”

  Hana shrugs, but she sits down on the bed, and her knees are angled toward me.

  I sit down, too, far at the other end. She is recontained inside herself, but the set of her mouth has softened, and something has begun. It happened in that moment when her weight landed on my belly and her tears wet my skin. I can’t see the future, but it has already started.
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br />   In a few weeks, we will drive Kai’s reclaimed ashes up to Clay Creek in north Georgia, all three of us, and release her to the falls. Julian will want her interred, but Hana and I convince him better. Kai will never rest if she’s not moving.

  In a few months, I will for the first time in my life put up a Christmas tree, because Julian wants it so badly, and because Hana will be curious; she’s never had one. In two years I will see her side-­eyeing my body, running her hands worriedly across her own, and I will tell her, Oh, that’s just your puppy tummy, pretty girl. You’ll use it later on to make some boobies, and she will blush and tell me to shut up.

  In five years I will hear her crying in her bed, very late, and I will leave my husband’s warm and sleeping body to curl myself around her, and she will sob and ask why Jamie doesn’t like her anymore. Ten months later, I’ll pull her drunk ass out of the middle of a party and ground her for the rest of her life. I hate you, she will scream, and I’ll scream back, You’re welcome. Then I’ll hold her hair while she throws up.

  In eight years, Julian will help her write her college essays. In a brief sixteen, I will still have the ass to pull off pegged tuxedo pants; I’ll wear them to walk her down the aisle of that little Boho church she’s so attached to, and I should have seen that coming when I let in Christmas.

  When the preacher asks, Who gives this woman? I will dutifully say my line:

  Her brother and I do.

  It will be a lie. I will never give her away, not to anyone. She will always have the center of my heart.

  But I can’t see that from here. I only feel that something has already started, as we sit at opposite ends of a twin bed, our knees untouching but angled toward each other. All around us are the shared stories that have formed our lives.

  “A story. Let me think. Do you want one you know? Or a new one?” I ask her. I look from picture to picture. I know most of these. I heard them or I lived them.

  Hana peeks at me and then away. She shrugs, like she doesn’t care one way or another. But then she says, “Maybe one I don’t know.”