“Yeah. It’s a self-portrait,” I said, going to the fridge. “The blue guy with the scimitar is one of her old boyfriends. Math says he might have been your dad.”
Julian leaned in close. “Well, if he was, I didn’t get his coloring.”
I popped the cap off two Cokes and came around to sit beside him, saying, “He went to prison on a drug bust. Kai had me send him a copy of this poem, and if you look, here, and here—” I flipped through the pages, pointed to a line that read, Sita’s belly, full like the moon with love and another that read, Sita waxed, love growing with each passing moon. “Plus, in the drawing, Kai has her whole lap full of lotus blossoms. See how she’s cradling them? Her hands, the way the thumbs and fingers touch? It’s a symbol of fertility. She was letting Dwayne know that she was pregnant.”
Joya had suspected that the poem was a code. Of course it was; Kai wouldn’t have risked TPR to send a mash note to a boyfriend.
“Holy crap,” Julian muttered. “Why would she do that?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Adoption laws in Georgia are tricky, and when she sent the poem, Dwayne was not established as your legal father. I think—best guess here—she didn’t want to name him as the father and give him paternal rights. Not unless he came up with some great plan. She was almost halfway through the pregnancy when she had me send this. Best as I can tell from memory and the dates on your adoption records, she was only a few weeks away from choosing the Bouchards and going forward with the adoption. Maybe she hoped he’d work some kind of miracle? In the poem, Rama saves Sita—he comes in with an army and another god, Hanuman, and he sets her free. I think, bottom line, she didn’t want to give you up.”
Julian digested that, then said, “You really think that this guy was my bio dad?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know. I think it served Kai’s interests to tell him he was, in case he could help her. You can explore that, if you like. Just pick a better PI than Worth. All I can tell you is, I mailed Kai’s poem, and I never heard back from him.”
We sat in a silence that was oddly wistful on his side, uncomfortable on mine. Kai had entered prison as full of luck and fortune as she’d ever been, but she came home empty. Under the ashes and the soured red wine, she’d smelled like loss. Her gaze was blank and distant. I’d gotten wild with boys and beer and petty crime, acting out, trying to recapture her attention. Anything to wake her up, make her eyes focus on me again.
I never knew what I had really cost her until this boy-child named after Ganesha showed up at my office.
Julian set the drawing to the side and reached for the stack of early photos. I watched over his shoulder, narrating as he flipped through. I pointed out teenage Kai posing with some other hippie wannabes, showed him the ranch home outside Dothan where she grew up with our shared, sour grandparents. Then I walked him through a string of photos of our gypsy life after we left Alabama.
“Do you have any of the guy, the one she sent the poem to?” he asked.
I didn’t. I had no pictures of any of Kai’s boyfriends, I realized. Not directly. In the pictures I’d chosen to keep, the boyfriends were present only as objects in the background, setting tone. Here was Kai folding into a pretzel on Eddie’s purple yoga mat. Kai drinking chicory coffee at the café under Anthony’s apartment. Four different pictures of Kai and me on Hervé’s horses.
“Sorry,” I said. “I don’t think I do.”
Julian’s head cocked to the side, and he looked so wistful. “It’s okay. Maybe it’s better. I’ve already lost three parents this year. That’s weird, huh? Even if I hadn’t been adopted, I still would have ended up an orphan.”
But not an only child, I thought.
If I had never dialed 911, we would have grown up together. I tried to imagine it—a world where Kai never went to prison, and I didn’t land in foster care. Where I never learned to hit hard before I could get hit, and where I had a baby brother. I would have fed him, rocked him, read to him—all the things much older sisters do. People come to love the thing they serve, and so I would have loved him. Who would I be, if I were sitting by Ganesh instead of Julian?
It didn’t matter. That was a world that never happened, and now here I was with this sad boy, each of us folded up alone inside our separate histories and sorrows. I felt I should do something. Hug him? Pat his shoulder? But I wasn’t touchy-feely by nature, and he was grieving his adoptive parents more than the mother that we’d shared. To be fair, I was having a hard time learning how to grieve for her myself.