I shook my head. “She was in prison the year he was born. If she had any babies, she didn’t think to mention it.”
“I see,” Birdwine said, and the nice part was, he did. He’d heard Kai stories over the years. Enough to get she hadn’t been June Cleaver. He touched the top of the folder. “Purely in passing”—he paused to clear his throat—“purely in passing, I saw adoption records. So he is looking for his birth mother.”
“And it’s Kai,” I said, more statement than question.
Birdwine spread his hands, like an apology. “I didn’t see anything to shut the idea down.”
If I really felt uncertain, I had an easy way to check. My best friend was a geneticist. William was on paternity leave for another month, but I could go by his lab with Julian. We’d give them blood or hair or spit into a cup.
The problem was, I didn’t feel uncertain. It wasn’t only the timeline, or the birth certificate with Karen Vauss on it, or the fact that his birth name was Ganesh. Sure, when I added those up, the answer came out brother. But it was more than that. I could see my mother in the lines of him.
Julian was my half brother, and I had changed the course of his whole life. That meant I couldn’t pass him a couple of sweetened-up Kai stories with a hot drink and a cookie, pat his head like he was Cindy Lou Who, and send him toddling back to his adoptive family. I owed him more than that.
His existence shifted history. His birth, his loss, remade my mother, and recolored all her choices. Every story I had told myself about her—about us—had a different meaning and a different moral. I hadn’t cost her twenty-two months of freedom and a boyfriend. I’d cost her a child.
Birdwine wasn’t done yet. “I’ll tell you what really bothers me. I saw stuff printed on Worthy Investigations letterhead. Tim Worth is a vulture who shouldn’t have a PI license. When he gets a missing person’s case, he digs up everything he can in a day or two—and it’s usually a lot. He’s very good. But then he hands out the info in little drips, billing all the while. He’s had this kid on a string since last November.” He caught my questioning glance and chuckled, busted. “I noticed—purely in passing—that the letterhead was dated.”
What awful timing, I thought. For all of us. On January fifteenth, I’d mailed the last check Kai had ever cashed. A good investigator could have found Kai for Julian last year. Julian could have bypassed me entirely and met Kai before she died. Probably before she even knew that she was sick.
Birdwine started talking again, rolling his hands the way he did when he was laying out a hypothetical.
“So the kid’s about to slip Worth’s hook, and Worth gives him you as a stopgap. Hoping to get another month’s bill in. Ten to one Worth’s known exactly where your mother is since the day after he took the case.”
“My mother isn’t anywhere,” I said. I relaxed my ankles and let my feet drop apart. The envelope appeared between them, coy and closed. I pressed my big toes back together, playing footy-peekaboo with a war telegram. Playing baby games with a paper body in a paper bag. Birdwine looked at me askance, and I suddenly thought, What the hell? I tried it out. “I think Kai’s dead.” It sounded weird, even to me.
“Oh, I’m sorry to— Wait, what?” He’d reacted to the inherent sadness, but he floundered as the phrasing struck him. “What do you mean, you think she’s dead?”
I waved a hand at the envelope. “She sent me a note last winter. It’s right there, if you want to read it.”
He got up and went to get it. As he scanned it, I could see his mouth was filling up with questions. They rolled around, as unwieldy as if he’d stuffed his cheeks with marbles. The first one that got out was “You didn’t go to see her?”
“Nope,” I said. “Turn it, there’s another sentence in the margin.”
Birdwine spun the check and squinted at it.
(Obviously I don’t want you to come here)
He looked back up at me, his heavy-lidded eyes gone even sadder. “Jesus, that’s harsh. You think she meant it?”
“If not, she could have told me. My address and phone number were printed on every check. Meanwhile, I haven’t had a phone number for her for more than a decade. I don’t even know what name she was using. For eight months, I mailed her checks to a PO box in Austin. Before that I mailed them to other PO boxes in other states. I didn’t move or change jobs. She knows where I am, if she wants me.” I stopped, and Birdwine raised his eyebrows at me. He’d heard it, too, the way I’d used the present tense, resurrecting my mother via grammar. “Knew. Wanted,” I corrected. “She’s dead enough.”
“You don’t sound sure,” he said.