I looked back at my mother’s note. I am going on a journey, Kali. I am going back to my beginning . . .
The beginning. That could mean she was taking Hana to her parents. But I did not believe it. They were deep into their seventies, if they were even living, and PS, they were racist assholes. She’d given Julian away to keep him from them; she would not inflict those people on her third child. So what was the beginning? Damn Kai and her love affair with mystic, cryptic bullshit. Sometimes poetry was not the answer. I’d go so far as to say it never was.
“Death is not the end. You will be the end,” Birdwine read over my shoulder. “Did she mean to bring the kid to you?”
“If so, she botched it,” I said, so fraught I sounded furious. “I tend to notice orphans landing in my lap. Exhibit: Julian.”
“But she says she’s going to see you?” Birdwine said, pointing.
We will meet again, and there will be new stories.
“That doesn’t mean in this life,” I said, and read the final line out loud. “You know how Karma works. Kai believed in reincarnation.”
“She knew she was dying, though,” Birdwine said. “She must have had a plan for the kid.”
“I hope so, but . . .” I said. “This is one crazy note. They’d lived in Austin a few months when Kai was diagnosed. Can you find someone you’d trust so much, that fast? Someone to raise your child? What if—”
There was no good way to finish that question. What if had so many awful answers. I knew what happened to young girls when they were unmoored and left to the mercy of the world. The lucky ones grew tough in foster care. Others landed on their knees inside thickets of azaleas. Either way, their little-girlhood got used up. And those were the ones who lived. Others disappeared right over the edge of the planet, falling past the world turtle into an endless darkness. “Birdwine—”
“Don’t,” he said, three fingers pressing so hard into his temple that the skin went pale around them. “No need.”
He said it like he knew I was about to beg him. And I was. I was about to beg, and tell him that he couldn’t drop me off and put finding Kai’s corpse in his to-do stack. He couldn’t send me emails titled “Here is the information.” He couldn’t dive into the nearest bottle, either. It wasn’t about me now, or whatever misguided love he’d thrown at me once, or my questionable ability to keep my pants on. That was all crap. Hana made it crap.
A wild tide of feeling had risen in me, both new and horribly familiar. My family wasn’t only me. I hadn’t felt this way for almost twenty-five years, not since I sent Kai to prison. I hadn’t even felt this with Julian, a grown-ass man who’d had a second family all his own. It was a sudden doubling of myself that echoed in the very air around me. I knew what it was to be a child, and lost. I was from that tribe.
I had to make sure that my little sister didn’t permanently join it.
“This is something I can fix,” Birdwine said with odd intensity. I thought he was talking about us, saying even though our onetime love affair was wreckage, he’d help me make sure my sister was safe. But when I looked at him, I saw his gaze was set into the middle distance, and whatever he couldn’t fix—it didn’t seem to have much to do with me at all.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
He blinked and then refocused on the close-up picture of Hana.
“I mean, I’ll find her.” Those were to me the three sweetest words in all the English language. He looked at me and gave them to me again. “I’ll find her.”
CHAPTER 6
Kai’s Ramayana comes in a large orange envelope with a brad at the end. It’s only a few pages long, so she could have stuffed it in a business envelope if she didn’t mind bending the pages. She’s illustrated the margins, though, drawing an endless blooming vine of curls and spirals. This kind of envelope comes from the prison commissary, and it costs extra stamps to mail. Either she traded for it, or it’s courtesy of Rhonda.
Joya and I sit side by side on my narrow bed to read the Ramayana, backs to the wall. Joya’s small-boned and big-eyed, and with her hair in little braids she looks younger and sweeter than she is. She looks younger and sweeter than me, for sure, though she’s a grade ahead. We sit close, so we can read at the same time. It starts like this:
Just as the serpent’s wife is torn, from hearth and home and all true love,
And by the eagle’s claw is borne, away to places still unproved,
So Sita was torn from Rama. Her heart was low,
But the chains around her could not break her will.
She denied the demon that had found her, and was faithful still—
And though this happened long ago, it’s happening now.
Joya makes a fart noise with her mouth. “Why are moms so fulla goo?”