“What did you say to them?” William T. said. “Why would they believe some random person who wandered in, claiming a jar of cash?”
“The truth. That I was there on behalf of Mallie Williams. The
minute I said her name, they all started asking about her.”
“How much is in here, anyway?”
“Thirty-seven thousand, six hundred and ninety-two dollars.”
“Jesus H. Christ! That’s a lot of money.”
“It is,” Burl said, and his laugh transported Mallie to a wedding in Sterns, years ago, where he had sung the bride and groom down the aisle. Burl’s tenor, his famous Welsh tenor, was sustained inside that laugh. Sometimes she and Zach had driven past his house after supper and heard him singing, his voice drifting down the lawn from the garden, where he must have been weeding. Zach had turned to — No. No Zach.
“With the medical bills all pro bono and now this, she’ll be able to get quite a ways away,” Burl said now, and at that William T. glanced up sharply.
“What are you talking about?”
“I just figured she’d be going somewhere. To get away from all” — he waved an arm in back of him, as if to encompass the entirety of the Mohawk Valley — “this. Wouldn’t you? What shape’s the truck in?”
“Good. But —”
William T. and Burl stood there, talking back and forth over the cottage-cheese container. Crystal had disappeared into the bathroom.
“Tires? Engine? You had the transmission checked? What about the brakes?”
“Slow down now, Burl. Yes, the truck’s in good shape.”
“Good. She’s got a getaway vehicle and now she’s got money in her pocket.”
“She can’t ever get away, Burl.”
But Burl shook his head. “Sure she can, William T.” He was suddenly a Burl thinner and sterner than Mallie had ever known he could be. “She can get away from here. From them. From us. From the ghosts. You think you’d be helping her by keeping her here? Not so.”
“Burl,” Crystal said now, coming back into the room, “it’s late.”
Mallie stood up and put her hand out to stop them. All of them talking over her. William T.’s words about her in relation to the cheese-stealing gull of her childhood — poor defenseless kid — came back to her, and she was suddenly angry. She looked from one to another, needing to say something, but what? What did she have to say?
“Wait a minute, all of you. Where’s Sir?”
That was what came out of her mouth. Burl and William T. and Crystal looked at one another, then back at her.
“Sir?” Burl said, and the studied way he said it made her angrier.
“Yes. Sir, our dog. Where is he?”
“What brought Sir into your head?” William T. said.
By the way he said it, Mallie could tell he was trying to buy time. Where her dog had gone must be another question he wasn’t ready to answer. Was Sir dead? He couldn’t be. Sir was young. Look at the way they were all staring at her. Burl was still standing at the door, turning his cap over and over in his hands.
“Tomorrow then,” he said finally, and then he was gone.
She waited until the silence was unbearable and William T. and Crystal were forced to look directly at her.
“Sir,” she said. “Where is he? And what was Burl talking about, that I could get away from ‘them’?”
Nothing. They just stood there. Anger flushed bright through her. Enough of this.
“And why did Charlie say it was his fault? What’s his fault?”
William T.
There would never be a good way to tell her everything, or anything. But there had to be a better way than this, every question and every answer a struggle. Burl appearing at the door so late, the shock of it. William T.’s first thought had been that it was far too late for Burl and Crystal to start one of the endless games of Bananagrams that they had been playing ever since Mallie had been taken to the hospital. But of course he hadn’t shown up to play Bananagrams. Like everyone, he had come for Mallie.
The things she was asking about were still unbearable to him. Charlie, for instance. He hated thinking about it, how when William T. had finally gotten to the scene of the assault, driving like a madman from Sterns to Utica, he had found the boy screaming, still drunk, and unhinged by the sight of his sister before the ambulance had taken her away.
And Sir. On an already wretched day nearly a year ago, Trish the dog sitter had called, talking so fast and wildly that William T. hadn’t recognized the garbled voice on the other end of the line.
“Is this about Mallie?” he said. “Whoever you are, are you calling about Mallie?”
He managed to make out a “No” from the choked voice. He looked at the clock on the nightstand: 1:45 a.m. “Look,” he said. “Whoever you are, I can’t understand you. I don’t know if you reached the number you meant to call.”
Crystal flicked on the lamp and bent her head to his so she could hear too.
“Sir’s gone,” said the voice, and then he knew it was Trish. Crystal took the phone from him. He tried to follow the conversation.
“Trish? . . . Where did he go? . . . When did you realize he was gone? . . . Is there any way he could possibly jump over that fence?”
But she was shaking her head, answering herself even as she asked the question, because Trish’s dog fence was eight feet high. William T. knew this because he had helped Trish’s husband sink the posts. No dog could jump over that fence. He reached out and took the phone back.
“Someone must have taken him,” he said into the receiver. Next to him Crystal had pulled her knees up to her chest and wrapped her arms around them. She was a held-together ball of worry.
“I’m so sorry, William T.,” Trish said. Trish was unflinching, tough with her husband and her kids, who were grown now and far away, but everything inside her dissolved when it came to dogs.
“She loves those dogs more than she loves me,” her husband had told William T. once, in a resigned sort of way.
Some people distrusted their own kind and lavished all their kept-at-bay love onto the dogs that came into their lives. Trish was one of them. William T. had hung up and turned to Crystal. What to do? Tell Zach? He couldn’t bear the thought of it.
Let her come to things in her own time. That’s what the hospital social worker had told them, back when she first woke, after he’d asked her what “dark birds” meant. Let her lead the way, she’d said. Mallie looked up at them, another question on her face.
“Did they take my appendix out while I was sleeping?”
William T. frowned. “What? No.”
“What’s this from, then? This scar?”
She turned down the waistband of the pajama bottoms and showed them the silvery curve. Crystal paled. This? Now? Mallie’s eyes went from Crystal to him, and he watched her body go completely still. She turned the pajama waistband back up. She tucked the top into the bottoms and hitched them a little higher, then stayed put. Waiting. Crystal was the first to speak.
“You didn’t have your appendix out,” she said.
“You were out of it for a long time,” William T. said. “You couldn’t make decisions. And during that time there were people trying to figure out what was best for you. Your mother and her church and your lawyer and the judge and family and friends.”
“My lawyer? I don’t have a lawyer. And I don’t go to church.”
“Factions,” he said. He couldn’t look at her. He focused on the kitchen door and talked to it as if he were talking to her. As if he were reading from a teleprompter. “That’s the word for it, factions. Opposing factions. Your mother’s church was one faction. The parking lot was full of marchers. Pro and con. You had a lawyer to protect your rights. Or supposedly to protect them.”
He kept talking to the door. “Nobody knew what to do.
Nobody knew for sure what you would have wanted. Zach and Charlie and Crystal and me, we all thought we knew what you would’ve wanted and what was best for you, but the others didn’t agree with us.”
“William T., what does this have to do with the scar on my stomach?”
Crystal held up her hand. “Let me,” she said to William T., and she turned to Mallie. “The scar is from an operation.”
“What kind of operation?”
They sat there, Crystal’s eyes fixed on the floor and William T.’s on the door. Outside, the wind was a steady hum surrounding the house. Wind was invisible, but its physical force was audible. When Mallie was a little girl she had once taken an umbrella off the hook by his door and run out into a gale with it open above her head. She had stood on tiptoe at the top of the hill that led down to William T.’s broken-down barn and held on to the handle with both hands. A human bird waiting to fling herself into the wind and fly. When William T. came out of the barn, he watched for one second before he charged up the hill after her. It was a memory he’d never forgotten. The tiny creature she had been back then, holding tightly to both earth and sky, wanting up and away.
Now her hand was on her stomach, over the double thickness of cotton cloth, waiting for them to talk. He looked at Crystal, whose face was set, and dipped his head at her, as if to say, Just tell her. So Crystal did.
“Mallie, you were pregnant.”
Mallie opened her eyes, her face blank, and then looked down at her hands, laced over her belly. His heart clenched. Then, to his shock, she looked up at them and smiled. Her eyes lit up.
“Zach,” she whispered.
William T. turned to Crystal at the same moment she turned, stricken, to him. Neither of them had anticipated this, that she would have been happy, that she would have welcomed a baby with Zach.
“No, Mallie,” Crystal said. “Not Zach’s.”
An enormous grief rose within William T. as he watched her face change in an instant from delight to confusion.
“Not Zach’s?”
Crystal shook his head. Mallie rocked back and forth on the couch and William T. could feel her trying to put it together. Pregnant. Not Zach’s. Then her breath caught and broke and she reared up, shouting.
“No!”
She raced across the room and then wheeled around like a trapped animal looking for a way out. She spiraled her arms, knocking down the lamp, the aerial photo of the house that hung on the wall, Johnny’s stack of coloring books for when he was visiting, the salt and pepper shakers. She was a windmill come unmoored, wild and spinning and shouting one word over and over and over: NO.
She raced up the stairs and then slammed the door so hard that the old house shook on its foundations. The sound of her voice came from behind it, traveling down the upstairs hall, past Crystal who was now clinging to the banister, and down the stairs to the living room, where a wail made of no no no gathered itself and hung heavy in the air.
William T. didn’t think he would sleep, but sleep he must have, because when he opened his eyes, it was nearly dawn. Crystal had turned onto her stomach with the pillow over her head, something she did only after a bad dream. He eased out of the bed so as not to wake her and went downstairs, where Mallie was sitting on the couch in jeans and a T-shirt, crushing a throw pillow between her hands. How long had she been there? She looked as exhausted as he felt. Shadows under her eyes, a slumping look to her whole body.
“You want some coffee?” he said. Stupid. But she nodded. He put the water on to boil and measured out twice the grounds, then sat down next to her. They were silent for a while.
“William T.?”
“Yeah?”
“When you told me what this scar was from” — she placed two fingers over her T-shirt — “I was for a minute so happy.”
“Because of Zach?”
“Yeah. Zach and me and a baby. It was like the future had already happened, even though I didn’t know it. Like fate. And any second Zach would walk in with our baby.”
She sounded bewildered.
“William T., do you think abortion’s wrong? Not legally, we both know it’s legal. But in your heart do you think it’s wrong?”
Where had that question come from? He opened his mouth to ask but then remembered that she was supposed to lead the way and he was supposed to let her say whatever she wanted on her own terms and in her own time.
“Wrong doesn’t have much to do with what I think about abortion.”
“What do you mean?”
He shook his head. He had never been able to articulate, even back when Roe v. Wade raged in the court and in conversations across the country, how he felt about abortion. It was not a wrong or right thing, it was not a moral issue to him. It was a . . . stopping of something that would have continued.
“I think it’s a mystery,” he said.
“How so?”
“I wonder where they go. What happens after” — he spread his hand slowly in the air before them — “they’re sent away.”
“Who’s they?”
“Them. The” — he hesitated over the word, because baby and fetus and embryo and all the other words had never felt right — “spirits. Spirits is as close as I can come to what I mean. The exact word doesn’t exist.”
She nodded. Her hand was still tight to her belly. “Most abortions happen early.”
“That’s true.”
“So was mine not an early one? Is that why they did it this way, through my belly?”
Over on the counter, the coffee was beginning to burn. He knew in that instant that forever after, when he thought about this conversation, how he had messed up, how they should have told her earlier, the smell of scorched coffee would come back to him.
“William T.?” she said. “Why do you have that look on your face?”
He turned away, helpless, to see Crystal standing at the bottom of the stairs, her hairbrush in her hand. She had heard the conversation, or the end of it.
“What?” Mallie said. “Is it the abortion? William T., you just told me you didn’t think abortions were wrong.”
“Mallie. You didn’t have an abortion.”
“You said last night that I was pregnant. That’s what this scar is,” Mallie said patiently, as if she were explaining something to a very young child or a very old person. “Remember?”
Her face darkened with another possibility.
“Wait. It died? The baby died and they had to take it out of me.”
The smell of scorched coffee filled his nose. He needed to get up and turn off the goddamn pot. No one was going to drink it now.
“Mallie,” Crystal said. “What we’re trying to tell you is that you didn’t have an abortion, and the baby didn’t die.”
Mallie looked from Crystal to William T., her face a puzzle. He could feel her thoughts churning on themselves: pregnancy, abortion, no, not abortion, dead baby, no, not dead baby. Crystal kept going.
“The baby was born early but healthy. It was a C-section. Your mother had custody and she was raising him when she died. Now he’s living with a foster family in Utica, or that’s what we were told, anyway. The custody hearing was confidential and closed to the media.”
Crystal’s words were calm and blunt. Exhaustion mixed with a kind of relief spread through William T.’s body. Now Mallie knew. She knew everything that they had dreaded telling her. He watched her head dip downward, the way it used to when she was small and working on a sheet of arithmetic homework. She was focusing, concentrating inward. He looked away because the tilt of her head, her neck, brought back to him the look of her in the emergency room, that first awful night. The dried blood, the brace that held her head rigid. Her closed eyes.
He and Crystal sat waiting for Mallie to look up. Waiting for her to say something. A long time passed. A minute? Five? Then Mallie leapt up from t
he couch. William T. reached out to her but words went silent in his throat at the look on Mallie’s face and the words she spat at them.
“You’re telling me that I was pregnant and then I wasn’t and there’s a baby out there that was in me but they took it out and that baby is alive and in this world?”
He nodded.
“A boy,” Crystal said, and she turned to William T. as if to make sure that was right, that yes, the baby was a boy. He opened his mouth to back her up, Yes, boy, but Mallie turned on them both.
“What about me,” she said. The words were nearly inaudible. “Did anyone stop to think what I would have wanted?”
Yes. Endlessly. They had thought and wondered and tried to figure out what it was that Mallie would have wanted, but in the end, in the end — the idea of telling her the entire awful sequence of events exhausted him.
“Because I would have wanted an abortion. One hundred percent.”
The social worker’s words came crawling back into his mind then, the words he had memorized and recited over and over and over again. Let her lead the way. She was leading the way now. She stood before them, her eyes on fire.
“Is that why Zach left? Because of the, the . . . because of it?”
“The baby? I don’t know.”
She flinched at the word baby. The baby, who was close to a year old now. A crawling, possibly walking child who lived near the playground, according to rumors, and was too young to know anything of his origins.
“When did he leave?”
“Zach left after the decision to proceed with the pregnancy,” Crystal said. She sounded as if she were reading from a legal article. “He was here until then. He was here the whole time” — she was trying to reassure Mallie, William T. could tell, trying to tell her that Zach had been there all along. Which was true, but only until it wasn’t. Zach was well and truly gone, with just that one phone call since. It’s complicated. There’s a lot to explain. No shit, Sherlock, William T. had thought, and waited for the explanations. But Zach had explained nothing.
The Opposite of Fate (ARC) Page 6