“What’s going on here, kid?” Birdwine asked.
Julian talked over him, saying, “I thought that you would look a different way.”
He scrabbled through his scattered papers, then picked one up and held it out to me.
I took it. It was a birth certificate issued in Georgia, but not from a town I knew. The lines had been filled in by hand, and it was a copy, so it was very hard to read. It certified the live birth of a male child, six pounds, nine ounces. The first name started with a G. Maybe Garrett? The last name was easier to read, maybe because it was so damn familiar. The last name was Vauss.
My lungs tightened a notch, and my gaze jumped around on the page, hunting for the mother’s name.
Karen Vauss.
“Paula?” Birdwine said, from somewhere very high above us.
The certificate was twenty-three years old. So this kid had been born when I was twelve. When I was in foster care. My heart stuttered, straining forward like an impatient horse hoping for the cue to canter. If this pale, unlikely boy was truly Kai’s, then he’d been born while she was incarcerated, just like me.
That gives us at least one thing in common, I thought, and had to jam my mouth shut to keep a crazy laugh from getting loose.
It was possible. Kai had called me while she served her time, but I never got to visit. If this boy was Kai’s—the whole ragged story of my childhood teetered on the edge of reinvention, waiting to retell itself. If this boy was Kai’s, I’d cost her so much more than I’d ever known. The ocean roar was starting up again in my ears, and this was going to be a bad one. This one was going to make my earlier freakout look like the gentle fluttering of tummy butterflies.
“You’re hunting for . . .” I couldn’t bring myself to say your mother. It was only a letter away from our. Our mother. I didn’t want to think those words. “You’re hunting Kai.” My voice came out so thick and slow.
He blinked. “Is that what she goes by? I hired a guy, a private detective, to find my birth mother. He hasn’t found her yet. He did find you.”
There are a lot of Vausses in the world, I thought. There are a lot of Karens. But my lungs, twisting themselves closed, did not seem to be listening, and my vision was getting furry at the edges.
The line for the father’s name was blank. That line was blank on my birth certificate, too. My body shuddered and my teeth banged against each other in a chatter. I tried to make out the letters of the child’s first name. Not Garrett. That was definitely an h at the end. Garreth? Either way, a yuppie name. Nothing Kai would choose, a calm, inner voice said, while my body gulped for tiny sips of air.
Then the letters resolved themselves. It wasn’t two r’s. It was a single cursive n. The boy child had been named Ganesh. What southern woman names a baby after Ganesha, a Hindu god with an elephant head? Who names a kid after the lord of luck and fortune?
But I knew who. The same mother who would name a kid for Kali. I threw the certificate away from me and lurched up to my feet. The earth spun, trying to tip me sideways.
Birdwine caught me around my waist, and the solid wall of him was the only thing that kept me standing.
“Paula!” he said again.
Ganesha was often in Kai’s stories as a feasting god, an eating god. One who could never be filled up.
Julian was standing now, too, coming at me, his mouth open, saying, “Do you know where I can find her?” and I could see that his green eyes were terribly hopeful and endlessly, endlessly hungry.
“You thought I’d look like you, is what you meant,” I said. The laugh got out. I could hear me laughing crazy from very far away. “When you pictured a sister, she was white.” The little Nazi had the grace to blush bright red.
“Sister?” Birdwine said. We both ignored him, even though his right arm was the only thing keeping me from puddling to the floor.
Julian said, “Oh, sorry, no. Well, yes. But I mean, it’s fine. I don’t care if you’re—” He floundered, not sure what I was, and I didn’t feel like helping him. I didn’t feel like anything, except for maybe throwing up or screaming. I couldn’t breathe, and my heart slammed into my ribs over and over, like it was trying to get out. Julian ended with “—you’re good.”
The darkness grew, coming in from either side, like those elevator doors closing. I saw Julian’s red face framed in the narrow opening between the black, his lips shaping that Oh, that sorry, and now I could see so much more that was familiar in his jawline, his broad forehead, his narrow build, his long-fingered hands. I saw my mother, manifesting in his shapes and colors. Was this what her note meant? Had she somehow sent him, to show me the true tally of my debt to her? I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t breathe at all.