I sneaked a sideways look at him and found him pressing his fingers to his forehead again. Oh, right. Birdwine was an alcoholic; he had a known predilection for chasing after things that were bad for him. Things much worse than me. He kept on going back to something that would kill him.
As if he’d read my mind, or at least my line of sight, he stopped his fingers pressing his temple. He placed his hand deliberately back on the wheel; he knew his tells.
He said, “Yeah. I got my eight-month chip last weekend.”
“Congrats,” I said, although he’d said it as a warning, not a brag. He rarely made it past six months, and to my knowledge he had never gone a year. He was deep into a dangerous time.
“Is it all pictures?” he asked, changing the subject.
I flipped through more shots of Kai watching fat ducks getting fatter on the riverside.
“No, there’s printer paper in the back. Notes, or—” My voice cut out abruptly as I flipped to the next picture. Kai now had her arm around the duck-feeding girl. I looked closer. My breath caught.
“What?” Birdwine said.
“Oh, shit,” I said. “Are you kidding me?”
She was a pudgy little white girl, though her skin tone and her mass of dark hair said she might owe some genes to Mexico. I flipped again. The next shot was a close-up. She was snuggled under my mother’s arm, and her eyes were spring-green Kai-shaped crescents that curved into narrow moon shapes as she smiled. I hadn’t needed the close-up or the eyes to know. I’d already recognized the very shape of her, those long storky legs, that squashy middle. It had been my shape at her age.
“Fatty-Fatty Ass-Fat,” I said to Birdwine. I sounded like I might be strangling. The shots were eight months old. In another year or two, her body would begin to change, that soft belly slowly shifting up and down into its proper places. Damn, but my mother had some mighty genes.
“I’m pulling over,” he said, and turned hard right into a gas station parking lot.
Birdwine shut the car off, and I shoved the picture into his hands. His face changed from curious to curiously blank. I couldn’t get a read on him at all.
“Paula?” he said. “Who is this kid?”
“I don’t know,” I said, but I knew one thing about her. “She’s Kai’s, though. Look at her. Apparently my mother drops a fucking baby every time I turn my back.” I scrabbled through the folder, scattering pictures and papers over the floor, searching for a name. Worth sat on this, too. “I’m going to sue that guy. No, I’m going to kill him. Take me back, I need to kill him, now.”
“Who is that little girl?” Birdwine said, and his voice had an odd urgency.
“She’s—Hana,” I said. I’d expected something like Lakshmi, or maybe Dharma. “Hana May.” And when I said the whole thing out loud, I got the reference. It was a feminization of Hanuman. The monkey god, impetuous but so intensely loyal, had always been a favorite of Kai’s. I kept reading.
Age nine, so she might be ten by now. Father unknown, although I saw Kai had a boyfriend. Big shocker there.
I’d found all this on a fact sheet Worth had made. This was all the info the asshole had been able to cobble together in a day, nutshelled, stuck in a file, and handed out in tiny bites to keep the money flowing.
“Where is she? Where is she?” Birdwine muttered to himself, scanning the paper over my shoulder. He looked sick. Sick as me, even. Sick down to the root of him. He jabbed his finger at the middle of the page. “There. An address.”
A real street address, not Kai’s PO box: 1813 Bellman Avenue in Austin. Unit B, so it was some kind of apartment. There was a number listed, too. I went for my phone, but Birdwine got his out first and started punching it in.
I needed to read Kai’s note again. I scrabbled in my bag, hunting for the envelope, and why did I have so many lipsticks? It had settled in the very bottom.
No, thank you. I have enough money to last me the rest of my life.
That was a joke. The cancer got everywhere before I noticed, so “the rest” will be quite short.
My hands shook. These pictures had been taken in November, and Kai looked good. A little older than she was, a little on the skinny side, but good. I’d gotten the note in February, and she’d written that she had Weeks, if I am lucky.
How lucky could one woman be? More than twenty weeks had passed, bleeding into months. So she had to be dead. Didn’t she? Surely she had made arrangements for her youngest child, knowing how short her time was.
Kai had moved fourteen times in the last decade—I had the list of PO box addresses to prove it. Worth hadn’t found so much as the father’s name, and he hadn’t written down Hana May’s last name. Was it Vauss? I saw on his sheet that my mother had lived in Austin under the name Kira Redmond. Had Hana been a Redmond, too? What was she now?
“It’s out of service,” Birdwine said, disconnecting. “No new number listed.”