The Opposite of Everyone: A Novel (32 page)
Read The Opposite of Everyone: A Novel Online
Authors: Joshilyn Jackson
“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.
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.”
I think about it. “How about one from when I was little?”
“How little?” she asks.
“Very. Much littler than you, so it’s a story that happened a long time ago, but it’s still happening now.” She sparks to the words, the cadence of a ritual we both know. These words remind us that we have budded from the same strange vine. She leans in toward me, a little closer, without even realizing she’s doing it. “It’s the story of how I got my name. If I tell you, will you tell me how you got yours?”
She considers the offer, and then she says, “Tell me.”
A long time ago, right now, I was born,
I say to my little sister.
I was born blue.
I
want to thank you, first, Person Who Bought This Book. Because of you, I have a job I love. Because of you, the people in my head get to live outside of it. When I meet you, you talk about my characters as if they are old friends (or enemies) we have in common; I cannot explain how miraculous this feels. If you are one of those people who have put my books into the hands of other readers—either professionally as a god-called lunatic who loves books so much you hand-sell them or as a reader who picked one for book club or gave it to your best friend for a birthday—well. This book exists because of you. I hope you are happy about this. I am—happy and grateful and a little bit in love with you.
A wise, keen-eyed editor is a gift, so I owe my wonderful agent, Jacques de Spoelberch, an extra thank-you note for connecting me with Carolyn Marino. She is a Book Person down to the bone. I am lucky, lucky, lucky to be with her at William Morrow, where amazing folks like Liate Stehlik, Lynn Grady, Jennifer Hart, Emily Krump, Tavia Kowalchuk, Mary Beth Thomas, Carla Parker, Rachel Levenberg, Tobly McSmith, Kelly Rudolph, Chloe Moffett, and Ashley Marudas have this book’s back.
Three years ago, I started taking classes at Decatur Hot Yoga from the beautiful and excessively bendy Astrid Santana. She often begins class by retelling a classic Hindu god pantheon story, but her sentence structure and word choices and even some images come out of southern oral tradition. It is an odd and compelling blend. Because of Astrid, I started dreaming the stories, and then I began reading them. Paula and Kali intersected in my head, and the novel took a sharp turn east. I gave Astrid’s waterfall of long, dark hair and her smiling, crescent-shaped eyes to the character of Kai—if only Kai were half as kind and generous!
“I AM NEVER WRITING ABOUT YOU PEOPLE AGAIN! And by
you people,
I mean lawyers,” I wailed to litigator Sally Fox as I struggled with the threads of legal tangle in this book. She combed them out with endless patience over cocktails at Paper Plane, and I came to admire her as a person as well as a professional. She is a doe-eyed redhead, pretty and petite, and she will eat your liver raw on behalf of her clients. She hooked me up with Constancia Davis and Markeith Wilson, a pair of criminal lawyers who helped me plan my characters’ various crimes. Anyone eavesdropping on us at lunch is probably in therapy now.
Social worker Sarah Smith has been working with foster kids for years, and she came through the system when she was a minor. She was an invaluable source of information and ideas; I am grateful for her time and expertise, and I sleep a little better, knowing that some of the foster kids here in Atlanta have such a loving, warmhearted, courageous advocate on their side.
Sarah and all three lawyers know their stuff—any stupid mistakes are mine.
My community of writers makes me better and braver. I love them, even when they viciously make me cut a thousand precious, special-snowflake words. Especially then, actually. I list them in the order that I met them: Lydia “Knit, Ride, Dog” Netzer, Jill “the Medicine” James, Anna Schachner, either Sara Gruen and Karen Abbott or Karen Abbott and Sara Gruen (depending on who is telling that story), Caryn Karmatz Rudy, Reid Jensen, Alison Law, and the Reverend Doctor Jake Myers.
Thank you, beautiful family, for supporting me. If I am wings, you get all windsy; if I am a broken sorrow-puddle, you are gentle mops. I love you, Scott, Sam, Maisy Jane, Bob, Betty, Bobby, Julie, Daniel, Erin Virginia, Jane, and Allison.
Endless gratitude for the support and acceptance and grace I find at my big tent faith community at First Baptist Church Decatur. I would be a sadder, colder, meaner, scareder person and writer without it, and without the small communities that have formed me over the last decade and a half: Slanted Sidewalk, small group, STK, and the Fringe. Shalom, y’all.
JOSHILYN JACKSON is the
New York Times
bestselling author of six previous novels, including
gods in Alabama
,
A Grown-Up Kind of Pretty
, and
Someone Else’s Love Story.
Her books have been translated into a dozen languages. A former actor, she is also an award-winning audiobook narrator. She lives in Decatur, Georgia, with her husband and their two children.
www.joshilynjackson.com
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gods in Alabama
Between, Georgia
The Girl Who Stopped Swimming
Backseat Saints
A Grown-Up Kind of Pretty
