The Opposite of Everyone: A Novel (9 page)

It waited for me, closed and prim, beside my laptop. I took a detour into the kitchen to get myself a beer, cracked it, and then sat and flipped the folder open. On top was the birth certificate Julian had showed me at the office. I launched my laptop’s calculator and checked the date of Kai’s arrest against his birthdate.

Just short of forty-one weeks. That meant that on the night of the police raid, he’d been no more than a blastula, secret to everyone except his busily dividing self. Did that make him Dwayne’s? Maybe, but his birth weight was under seven pounds. That was small for a late baby. Kai may well have crossed paths with some curly-headed prison guard or lawyer as she traveled through the justice system.

Here, at least, was common ground; I also had no father listed on my birth certificate. Sure, it might be that yoga dork Eddie. Kai knew him in high school, before she dropped out, and I doubt even my mother could have found a second Asian/African American/American Indian to love in the quasi-rural Deep South. But maybe not. Eddie had readily accepted that my dad was a Tibetan monk. Sure. Because what Tibetan monk doesn’t dream about his pilgrimage to Dothan, Alabama?

Come Christmas, Julian and I could mix whatever went in eggnog and play a round of Best-Guess Our Bio Dads. It wasn’t a traditional way to bond, but it could work if we put in enough liquor.
To murky origins!
I’d say.
And guys who didn’t want the job!
he’d warble back, and we’d clink our cups.

I turned the page, trying to get myself in hand. Julian and I had yet to have an awkward lunch, and I’d leaped nineteen steps ahead to an imaginary awful Christmas—a family-centric holiday I didn’t even celebrate. Not unless my office’s near-mandatory Secret Santa counted.

I started flipping through the other papers. They’d been scattered and shuffled back at my office, and now the forms pertaining to Julian’s adoption were mixed in with Social Security cards, car titles, birth certificates, and mortgage information on a house in the North Atlanta suburbs. This looked to me like the Bouchard family’s catch-all file for their important papers, the kind people keep in a safety-deposit box. Julian had brought the whole thing instead of copying the relevant pieces. Then he’d abandoned it on my lobby floor.

“These millennials,” I told Henry, who was padding down the stairs. He’d roused himself from his sunny nap spot on my dresser to come see what I was doing.

I began sorting the forms into linked piles on the table’s surface. Henry, who had a double share of that magic cat ability to exist in the least convenient space, jumped to the tabletop. He flopped down on top of the Bouchards’ marriage license. I ceded the territory and gave him a chin scratch, glad to have his heartbeat in the house. I found the original petition for adoption, and under that, the official termination of Karen Vauss’s parental rights. I had a hard time swallowing as I set that one aside.

I pressed the heels of my hands into my eyes. I needed to treat this like a job. Pretend this file was part of someone else’s lawsuit, random papers, telling me a stranger’s story.

Fine. This adoption had gone through Horizons Family Services, a private placement agency. They’d handled the complications caused by the birth mother’s incarceration. Ganesh Vauss left the hospital with Michael and Anna Bouchard two days after he was born, and the biological mother was returned to prison. The actual adoption took place six months later, after the paperwork and home visits had been completed through Georgia’s slow-grinding courts. At that point, a second birth certificate was created for Julian René Bouchard.

That got to me, again. The name Ganesh had been legally wiped away by a simpler one, chosen by a different woman and written on a new birth certificate. Gramma had demoted me down from Kali, and Julian’s adopted mother had performed the same function, though I hoped with kinder motives.

I’d found us a second point in common. We’d briefly been fatherless godlings from the same pantheon. We were just mortal strangers now: Julian and Paula.

I traced the letters of my brother’s second name, trying to imagine the preprison mother I had known giving up her baby.

Well, her back had been against the wall.

My grandparents might have taken Julian. He was a white grandchild, after all. But would Kai hand Ganesh to the same sour racists who had abandoned me to foster care? Or he could join me in the system, rolling the foster-parent dice. He’d be talking and toddling when she got out, imprinted on random strangers. He might get bad fosters, too, ones who would not hold him, who would let him cry. He wouldn’t even know that she was out there, loving him, coming to reclaim him. Adoption let her choose a soft place for him. It was one road out of a thoroughly shitty wood, and she had sent him down it.

She hadn’t even told me she was pregnant, but I could see that this had been a kindness. I was in that group home, and the main thing that kept me from falling off the world was my unshakable faith that Kai would rescue me. How do you promise your preteen you’ll come for her, but by the way, you’re giving up her brand-new baby brother?

Henry stretched, working parts of his body onto two other stacks of paper. I shoved my chair back away from the table and let him. I wished I had ten cats, enough to cover every bit of history. I was failing on every possible level to keep professional distance. I could see fresh ways that I had ruined my mother’s life rising up from the white space in between the words. I should have given the whole file over to Birdwine. He could have sorted through it, extracted anything relevant, and presented me with bullet points I could digest in tiny, manageable bites. He could send it in an email titled “Here is the information
.
”

I might do better looking at Julian’s present. The farther his life moved from our shared point of origin, the less personal it became. Birdwine wanted to do a background check before I contacted the kid, but Google-stalking could hardly be considered contact. I angled my chair toward my laptop and pulled the computer toward me, grateful that a family of Smiths hadn’t adopted Julian and named him John.

A quick Facebook search yielded three pages of Julian Bouchards and near variations. Midway down the first page, I saw mine. His curly hair was longer in the photo, hanging in shags around his ears. His smile pushed his eyes into half-moon shapes in that unendurably familiar way.

I clicked the link. His cover image was an eagle soaring high over a canyon, of all damn things. He had lax privacy settings, and I could see some of his posts: a picture of Yoda’s face with that quote about try versus do, a tiny GIF ant carrying a huge crumb, a video of a pretty girl in Singapore playing something haunting on a hang drum. My surprise brother had romantic notions.

At the top of the page, Facebook was asking, “Do you know Julian? To see what he shares with friends, send him a friend request.” I hovered my mouse icon over the button. Clicking it would definitely count as contact. Also, the term
friend request
made me feel balky. It was so immediate, almost invasive. What if the kid started in with the super-poking and the endless Facebook game requests? Besides, I’d already embarked on a new friendship today. Birdwine was the first true enlargement of my tiny circle in literally years.

That thought let me laugh at myself.
Two new friends! Careful, Paula, you might rupture something.
This was a virtual, click-based relationship, and if Julian had any savvy, he’d see past it. He’d realize what big eyes I had.
The better to stalk you with, my dear.
If he accepted, it would likely be so he could reverse-stalk me.

Well, I wished him luck with that. Like every lawyer on the planet, I had a Facebook page, but it was strictly for professional use.

Even so, I found myself sliding the mouse sideways and hitting the Send Message button instead. When the window opened, I typed,
Hey. This is

Then I sat staring for three minutes, trying to decide between
This is your half sister
and
This is Karen Vauss’s other child
. Julian Bouchard, a mysterious young human, was by blood a member of my family. Such as it was. I’d avoided marriage, never wanted kids. My mother and I had abdicated each other, and Google-stalking Kai had been impossible. She’d lived off the grid, as if the Internet did not exist.

Every now and again, I’d run across people we’d known in our long, parole-inspired stint inside Atlanta. Some of them had stories and snippets about Kai, which I took with grains or teaspoons or whole oceans’ worth of salt, depending on the source. Kai was near fictional to me at this point, and she had given Julian away. He had a different mother. Anna Bouchard. I wondered what she might be like. A soft-voiced cookie baker? A brisk soccer mom? I was in no true sense a sister to him.

I decided on my name, direct and simple.

Hello, Julian. This is Paula Vauss. I apologize for my reaction to your visit. I was not aware that my mother had another child. I’m sorry to inform you that Karen Vauss and I have not been in contact for many years, and I believe that she is no longer living. I have hired a reliable PI to find what ultimately became of her. The one you hired is a con man; please do not contact him, and under no circumstances should you give him more money. I will share the results of my investigation with you ASAP.

It felt mean to tell the kid that Kai was dead in a letter—in a Facebook message, no less—but it felt even meaner to hold that information back. He must be anxious to hear from me. Especially since he’d abandoned his bank records, his Social Security card, his mother’s maiden name, and a host of other sensitive bits of info into my tender, total stranger’s care.

Reading back over my note, I knew the tone was too formal—downright lawyerly. It read cold, and cold was not at all what I was feeling. I was feeling nine kinds of freaked right the fuck out, actually, so maybe cold was better.

I tried to think of something kind to add, and came up with this:
I have some pictures of her and some of her belongings. I would be happy to meet with you at your convenience and share these things. I will answer any questions you might have to the best of my ability.

There. True, but not the whole truth. Polite, but not invasive. I clicked Send, and my little missive poofed into the ether.

I sat back in my chair, wondering when he might read it. Wondering how he might respond. I needed a distraction. My loft felt cavernous, as if the vibrant purples and golds in my modern artwork could not quite fill the high white walls today. The space felt hungry for another heartbeat. One that was larger than Henry’s.

I wasn’t seeing anybody on the regular. I had a cadre of local exes who were often game for friendly reminiscing, but I hadn’t been in the mood to return their calls. I’d had a metaphorical whole-body headache for almost half a year. Until today.

Something had reawoken in me earlier, in my office, there with Birdwine. I’d been working my way out of my bra, and I’d remembered the delicious feel of winding my body around a rough and willing male, naked and rampant. I’d felt a sweet unspooling low down in my belly, reminding me that I was made of bone and blood and warm flesh.

That energy was gone. All I really wanted now was human company. But maybe if I had some, my body would wake back up?

I got my phone and started scrolling through my contacts. Davonte picked up, but he was in Nashville, at a party, by the sound of it. Jack’s number was no longer in service. I got Remi’s voicemail, and then a woman answered Raj’s phone. Her voice got sharp, asking, “Who is this?” I didn’t know if she was wife, girlfriend, or wannabe, but I said something innocuous and hung up. Half my job came from the ugly carnage caused by cheating, and I’d never knowingly help a man break a promise to another woman.

It had only rarely been an issue. The postmodern cowboys I went for weren’t big on vows. When one of them got slung up, I didn’t hear from him, and if I did, I was done with him, anyway. I had a strict No Assholes policy, and I’d never met a cheater of either sex who wasn’t some stripe of asshole underneath the
He
doesn’t understand me
s and the
We drifted apart
s and the
She
won’t do that thing I need in bed
s.

It narrowed my pool—the world had never once been short on assholes—but not too much. Physically, I didn’t have a type. I’d dated short guys and tall guys; scrawny, thick, and ripped; red and yellow, black and white. I liked any charming fuckup who was passing through, promising good conversation, good sex, and zero complications. The world also had no shortage of fellas with commitment phobias who genuinely enjoyed the company of women—I just couldn’t find one this afternoon. Not unless I wanted to go out and pick a fresh one.

I didn’t. I’d given up on one-night stands in college. Too risky, and the sex was generally subpar. It could take weeks or even months to find and cultivate the kind of relationship I liked. I dropped my phone back on the table, frustrated.

With no work to keep me busy, the afternoon stretched ahead of me, unbearably long. And yet I had zero drive to go back to the office. Maybe I should have taken on that new pro bono, after all.

Henry rolled onto his back and air-paddled his paws at me, being charming but making a mess of my stacks. I picked him up and baby-cradled him, burying my face in his neck, smelling that good warm cat smell for as long as he would let me. After a minute, his affection plate got full, and he pushed at me until I let him down. I stared at the table full of papers. They stared back.

I’m not sure what I would have done had my iPhone not mercifully started ringing. I answered without even checking the screen. “Hello?”

“You call him yet?” Birdwine said, forgoing greetings.

“No,” I said, defensive.

“Bullshit,” he said. “Unless you emailed him instead?” I kept silent. Facebook wasn’t technically email. He was already laughing at me. “Busted. Damn, woman, I dug as fast as I could. Here’s the thing. I’ve been looking in the kid’s financials. I’ve got some concerns.”