I stepped back, but it wasn’t far enough. I backed all the way across the kitchen, and he stayed by the coffeemaker. So Birdwine and I had loved each other. So what. We’d each had a share in wrecking it—he’d been too silent, and I’d been too cynical. Now here we were. He was still silent, and I was still cynical enough to know a hungry body could be fed on anything.
“Are we back to emails titled ‘Here is the information’?” I asked. I didn’t want him to quit, now. The specific ways his life was wrecked made me want him on this case. It was like me and my pro bono work, getting my mother’s little avatars out of prison. No other PI on the planet would be this overinvested.
“That’s what I said I wanted, all along,” he said, with no inflection. But then he quirked an eyebrow up and added, wry, “How lucky that it’s all working out for me.”
It was his best and blackest kind of funny, and I would have laughed before. The job aside, Birdwine and I were over enough to have an after. After started now.
“Good morning,” said Julian from the doorway. Looper was with him, lolling out a happy tongue. Julian seemed almost as eager, but he drew up short as Birdwine and I turned to him. Looper, oblivious, trotted through to squeeze out of his doggy door into the backyard. My brother’s human nose lifted, though, as if he smelled the fury and the pheromones that still charged the air.
I said, “Birdwine, I don’t think you’ve officially met my brother. This is Julian Bouchard.”
“Julian,” Birdwine said. He moved forward, impassive as a pile of bricks, to put his hand out.
Julian shook it, looking back and forth uneasily between us. “Oh, sorry. I’ve interrupted something. I should have stomped more, coming in, but Paula said that you two weren’t a thing.”
Birdwine answered, when I didn’t. “I’d say that’s a fair assessment.”
I’d been too surprised by Julian’s directness. He stated the truth so baldly, even when it brought discomfort to the room. It was another way the kid was like me, but we didn’t get it from our slippery shared parent. Was it some odd recessive gene? Or had we each gotten it separately, from our fathers? Maybe Kai had had a type, after all.
“Oh, sorry. You look like you might have a—be a thing.” Julian was flushed, as pink-cheeked as a maiden auntie who had caught her Pomeranians canoodling.
“You came in at the end of the end of the story. You’re seeing credits roll,” I said, brisk. “Can we get to business? Show Birdwine the map.”
“Map?” Birdwine said, turning to Julian.
“You didn’t tell him? How could you not tell him?” Julian asked, then turned excitedly to Birdwine. “We know where Kai was taking Hana. I mean, we know where they’ll go next. I mean where they would have—where they went. Or gone.”
He’d wound himself around in the verb tenses, but Birdwine picked up on the meaning.
“No, Paula didn’t mention that,” Birdwine said, shooting me an oblique look. It occurred to me that he was angry back. But with what cause? He could have defended himself, but he had taken a hard pass. He was still talking to Julian, though. “You picked up Hana’s trail from my file? How?”
Julian looked to me, but I turned deliberately and went to get more coffee, saying, “Julian, why don’t you catch him up?”
“Yeah. Okay. Well, last night, Paula figured out where Kai was going. Sort of,” Julian said, looking uncertainly back and forth between us. He got the map out of the file and spread it out on the kitchen table. Birdwine came to stand beside him, casually closing his laptop and moving it back, out of the way. As if it was convenience, and the boy pictured on the screen had nothing to do with it.
Now Julian partially blocked my view, and I hoped the kid would hurry. Cold as the air was now between me and Birdwine, Julian could die of hypothermia if he got wordy.
“You went to Austin, and you traced the car to Dothan, Alabama,” Julian said. He pointed at the line of orange highlighter, traveling their route via index finger. “That’s where Kai grew up. Paula was born there.” He trailed his finger along the line. “Next, they head for Montgomery.”
Julian was taking too damn long already. I wanted out of this house, so I chimed in.
“We moved to Montgomery with Eddie. Then we lived in Jackson, Mississippi, with Tick.” Julian kept track with his pointing finger as I talked. Kai and I had traveled all over, sometimes gypsy lifing it for weeks between boyfriends. We’d city hop, changing names and modes of transportation, especially if the relationship behind us had ended ugly. But this route she’d taken with Hana ignored our brief pauses, the men who didn’t last or matter, all our winding roads. She’d taken Hana only to places where we’d lived a year or so. All the places where we’d had a home address and an approximation of a family. “New Orleans is where we met Anthony. You see?”
“Holy shit,” said Birdwine, seeing.
Julian said, “It’s her life. She was taking Hana on a tour, the main stops of her life, in order. Birth to—something.”
I said, “Next is Asheville with Hervé, and that’s where you lost her.”