The Opposite of Everyone: A Novel (23 page)

Birdwine stopped, his eyes gone serious and blank. If I’d had any lingering question that this was his kid, his face was answer enough. Birdwine’s good eye met my gaze, and his fingers moved to press against his temple.

I held out the mug with the daisies. After a second, he came over and took it. He leaned on a piece of counter catty-corner to me. He still didn’t speak. Neither did I. I used his own old cop trick. I was obvious about it, giving him prizefighter eyes, letting the silence build and charge. He took a sip, considering me over the rim of the cup. He knew what I was doing.

He said, “Okay. Let’s start with the kid.”

Oh, it was a good opener. His speaking first gave me the win—his way of saying he was sorry, after all. But it begged the question, which damn kid? We had a herd to choose from, he and I: my orphaned brother snoring in his Barcalounger, my missing sister, his abandoned son.

“Why don’t we start with yours?” I said. It came out sharp, accusing.

He’d given me the opening, but I could see he was regretting it already. “Really? Because I know where mine is.”

“Don’t worry, we’ll get to Hana when Julian’s up. He should be in on that conversation.”

“Okay. But I don’t want him in on
this
conversation,” Birdwine said, like a warning. He would talk about the boy, but he was setting a timer.

“Fine,” I said. I tried to sound impersonal, as if I was questioning a witness on the stand. “When did you last see your kid?”

He looked deliberately to the screen, then back to me. “One second ago.”

Okay, so it was a hostile witness. “In person.”

“When he was three.”

“How long ago was that?”

“Ten years.”

I had my next question locked and loaded, but his answer paused me. The timing was odd. Ten years ago, Birdwine started going to AA. It felt backward, to get in AA and then stop seeing your son. Most people started twelve-stepping so they
could
see their kid. I changed course.

“Why haven’t you seen him?” I asked.

“Wasn’t invited.”

“So?” I snapped. This was now the least impersonal cross-examination in the history of the justice system. “Do you need an invitation?” I amended.

“Yup.”

Birdwine was good at hostile witness. He’d give opposing counsel exactly what they asked for, and no more. But this was not a courtroom. This was the kitchen of a man I’d almost loved. I’d been ready to try at least, last night. Now I felt that sweetness like a bullet I had barely dodged.

“Why?” I asked, and it came out like a donkey’s bray, raw and angry. He didn’t answer and it only made me angrier. “Why won’t you explain yourself?”

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 this 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.