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.”