“I was surprised,” she says.
I wonder if that means she was not surprised when the cops came for Tick at Dairy Queen. Did Kai make a 911 call of her own? For one wild second I am full of hope. I could confess, and she would understand because she’d done it, too. But the words die in my throat. Tick started sweet, but he got meaner, especially toward me. If she got him busted, it was for both of us, not her alone.
DFCS contacts my grandparents, but they won’t come and get me. Kai hasn’t spoken to them since I was three or four, when she traded blond Joe for Eddie, a guy she’d known in high school. Eddie was mixed race: black and something Asian with a dash of Cherokee. My grandparents told Kai to dump him or get out. We got out. My only memory of them is dim and sour, anyway: Gramma staring at me as we toted bags to Eddie’s car, calling after Kai, You’ll end up with another just like this one.
Maybe Gramma meant it literally, but that didn’t matter. When they arrested Kai, I had no idea where Eddie was, and though he’d been nice enough, he’d never acted like a father. I didn’t give his name to my caseworker, and I guess Kai didn’t, either.
I ended up in a group home in east Atlanta, while Kai pled guilty in exchange for a reduced sentence. Twenty-two months, with time served, short enough so that DFCS didn’t bother to start the paperwork to terminate parental rights.
It was also more than twice the length of pregnancy. I hadn’t known until today that she took my nascent baby brother with her off to prison. I’d cost Kai a life with her second child.
The day I called 911, I was a child myself, unable to predict the consequences. Dwayne and Kai were the adults, and they both regularly indulged themselves in felonies and misdemeanors. They’d both done time before, and their choices made it likely they’d do more, some day or another. Yet that intellectual understanding didn’t change the way I felt, when I thought of how our lives unfolded, after. Had Kai known she was pregnant when she took that deal?
The answer was likely in Julian’s folder, currently sitting closed on my onyx dining table. Through the wall of windows, I could see Atlanta’s skyline reaching up toward blue, untroubled skies. It was a solid ninety degrees outside, and my open loft was hard to over-air-condition, but I could not stop shivering. I changed into a hoodie and a pair of jeans so old and faded they were as soft as pajamas. Then I went downstairs to breach the file.
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.