In the darkness, with Birdwine’s arms around me, I knew that Kai was dead. Nothing else would have stopped her from delivering my sister. I’d known her death was probable; I’d assumed it was imminent and inevitable the day I got my check back, and Birdwine’s find at her Austin apartment had confirmed it. But now I knew it in the bones of me.
Kai’s time had already run out, and she would never reach my door, never take my hand, never say some asshole mystic shit like, Look here, Kali Jai, you have a little sister. I named her after Hanuman, the monkey god, because she is much stronger than she knows. I was crying quietly, but Birdwine must have felt the shaking in my body. He pulled me closer and I felt his face press into my hair.
Was this what forgiveness looked like on the other end? It was too hard for her to forgive my part in our unraveling because so much of it was her fault. Her whole life was like a loaded gun, left cocked with the safety off in the middle of the table. As a child I had picked it up, and played with it, and cost her Julian. His absence had wrecked us.
She hadn’t changed, though. As soon as she got off parole, she was on the move again, trusting fate to back her plays, no safety nets in place. Even when she learned that she was dying. She should have brought Hana straight to me.
Maybe it was the only way she could bring herself to come, traveling my little sister through the best parts of our shared past. Perhaps she’d needed to remember who we’d been to one another, back when she’d spin me on her feet, and I’d yell, Dance me, dance me. When the smell of orange peel and campfire smoke in her dark hair was my greatest comfort. When the two of us were all that was unchanging in the world.
That’s the Kai I wept for, and released.
When I woke up, Henry was smack dab in the middle of Birdwine’s abandoned pillow, floppy and dense with sleep. I could smell coffee brewing downstairs, and I heard the soft clatter of hands on a keyboard, so Birdwine had not gone far. His shirt was still on the floor, a dark green T from a local brewery. It was size XL and soft with age. I pulled it over my head and went to the railing.
Birdwine, barefoot, in only his jeans, was dwarfing my office chair, peering deep into my laptop with a steaming mug beside him on the desk.
“Bring me a cup of that?” I called down.
He looked up at me, and I’d never seen his olive face so pale.
“What?” I said, instantly tense. “I mean for shit’s sake, what now?”
“I think I found her.” He turned to the screen and touched it, then looked back to me. “It’s a police report from four months ago. I think this might be Hana.”
“What?” I said. “How?”
“I wanted to work, but I didn’t want to leave with you asleep. I couldn’t pick up where Julian and I left off, not without my notes from home. I might create a gap and miss something. So I started at the other end. Paula, I think I found her.”
“Where is she?” I asked, my hands so tight on the railing that my nail beds had gone pale.
“Here,” he said, and he waved one hand out at the cityscape. The sun was coming up, drenching the skyline with new light. “I think she’s right here in Atlanta.”
CHAPTER 12
Candace is sitting on the hood of an ancient, low-slung Chrysler that is parked in front of our place. Mine and Kai’s. I am walking home in air so humid it feels thick with moisture, fresh off the school bus, when I see the shape of her from a long way down the block. Her shape does not belong here. She’s leaning back, braced on her hands, swinging her feet off the front edge of the car to kick the bumper. She’s so foreign, so invasive, that she stands out in brighter colors than any other object in my view. She’s as comfortable as if she had been born right here on this road. As if it were hers, and she belonged here, my ruin on skinny legs.
I am running, now, my body pounding toward her of its own volition. My heavy backpack bangs against my spine. I feel cold terror in my long bones, and violence is uncoiling as I come close and closer. She has a round sucker in her mouth. I see the stick poking out, see how it makes one cheek bulge.
The driver’s-side window scrolls down, and Jeremy, her dead-eyed boyfriend, leans his head out. He calls something to her, pointing down the road at me. She looks at me, and she stops swinging her hand-me-down tennis shoes with all the laces frayed, untied and hanging down in scraggles. She doesn’t try to get up or run or even back away. She waits for me, boneless and accepting.
That’s how I know it’s all already done.
Somewhere a chipmunk is yelling his staccato love song, and the sun is warm on my back. I run at Candace because I cannot go inside. I don’t know how I’ll ever go inside.
Candace looks at me with her bland, blank Candace eyes as I skid to a halt in front of her, dropping my backpack off in a shrug. I’m already slapping her before I hear it thunk onto the asphalt. I keep flailing at her face and head, palms open, but so intense and furious it’s like I have a hundred hands.