“Where’s that box?” Mallie said.
“What box?”
“The box that was on the table last night. Where is it?”
“The clippings,” Crystal said, looking sick. “William T. collected a lot of articles and clippings for you. But they’re not to, you shouldn’t look at them until —”
But Mallie was already digging in the back of the closet, a homing pigeon with unerring instinct. “No,” he said, “oh no,” and he lunged for it but too late. She upended the sagging box on the table: clippings, transcripts, those same two photos over and over and over, high school yearbook and high school graduation party. Power of attorney. Transfer of guardianship. Attorney for the child. Mental Hygiene Legal Service. Guardian ad litem. Medical reports. Family Court custody hearing. Many months’ worth of memory, messed up, turned inside out.
He should have burned them all up, because now look. Front and center before Mallie was the grainy photo full of shadows, the onlooker’s photo that had gone viral, of a girl’s body lying on the pavement. Dark pool beneath her head. Arms and legs twisted. Mallie looked up at him and he nodded, as if he were answering a question, which maybe he was. She stood on the other side of the table, surrounded by the wreckage of her life. Burning her up from the inside out.
“Where’s the truck?”
“What truck?”
“My truck. Burl said it was still here.”
William T. shook his head no. No, she could not get in that truck or any truck. She had just come back to the world. He would not let her go. It was too soon. She was defenseless yet. But she stood her ground. Her feet shifted. Maybe she could feel the clutch and gas beneath them, hear the turn and sputter of the engine. As if both she and the truck wanted to get going and be gone, be gone begone begone.
He crumpled before her, sagging the way the corners of the upturned box on the table sagged. Please don’t go, Mallie. Please. We just got you back. She stood there, waiting. His hands gripped hers but she dropped them. She flipped the cardboard box right side up again, scooped up handfuls of papers and photos and official-looking documents, dumped them back in and then plopped the box of fortune cookies that she and Zach had collected on top of it. She turned to him.
“Key?”
He shook his head but she arrowed the force of her will at him and it was too strong for him, too strong for anyone. He hunched his way into the kitchen. The smell of burned coffee was repulsive. He opened the silverware drawer and fished a key — her silver key on the old green carabiner, her same key and same carabiner that had not changed or disappeared in all this time — and handed it to her.
“It’s in the barn,” he said, the words reaching her when she was halfway out the door.
He grabbed the cottage-cheese container from the table and went after her. No one but he had been behind the wheel of Mallie’s Datsun since the night he’d backed it into the barn after it happened, thinking ahead to If ever a day came, please, God, let it, that Mallie would be alive and able to drive her truck again, then it would be easier for her just to pull straight on out. She wouldn’t have to back it out wondering if there was enough room on the left side, where he’d propped the ceiling up with two-by-fours. Now that day had come, but he hadn’t thought far enough ahead. He hadn’t imagined a moment when she would be full of rage, full of fire, wanting only to flee. He had imagined everything wrong. She had already flung open the double barn doors and was climbing up into the cab.
“Mallie!”
She turned but stayed suspended, one foot in the truck, the other on the running board.
“Take this,” and he handed her the plastic container. The cow smiled up from the lid. “It’s from Burl.”
“I know. I heard. I was there when you were talking about me. Sitting right there and you never even looked at me until I made you.”
She spat the words out. She tossed the container into the shapeless mess of cardboard boxes on the passenger seat, dredged the key up out of her shorts pocket and stuck it in the ignition. The engine sputtered to life and she looked at him with triumph.
“Mallie. Let me go with you. One of us should —”
“No. I’m not a defenseless little kid, William T. No matter what you or any of the rest of them think.”
She was adjusting the seat now, looking in the rearview mirror even though there was nothing to see; the rear of the truck faced the solid darkness of the back of the barn.
“Here, then.”
He dredged her old cell phone up from his pocket, the phone she hadn’t used since the night of the attack, along with its charger. He had paid for the service all these long months and kept it fully charged, never let it drop below 95 percent. As if a fully charged cell phone might help keep her alive. He dug down in his other pocket for the spare key and the slip of paper he carried there. The name of that little Montana town was scrawled on it. Coburn, a town he’d never been to, and below it the name of a restaurant he’d never eaten at. It was all the information he had, relayed to him by Zach’s cousin Joe a week after Zach left, when he’d gone up to Joe’s repair shop and begged, begged him to tell him where Zach was. He handed her the second silver key. Was this the right thing to do? He had no idea. Her life, her decisions. The other line the counselor had repeated.
“This is the spare. Keep this one in your pocket in case you lose the other. Or lock it in the cab. Either of those keys gives you any trouble, just drill out the ignition. Take it to any garage, wherever you are, and tell them to drill the goddamn ignition right out. Then you can stick anything in there — a screwdriver, a butter knife — and she’ll start right up.”
He heard his voice speeding up, sentences blurring together in a big word ball of advice. Advice advice advice. Stop, he told himself. He tossed the dark oblong of the cell phone into the box-within-a-box on the passenger seat. It landed in the fortune cookies.
“That’s your phone,” he said. “Call us. Call us, Mallie.”
The little slip of paper came last. He handed it to her without a word. She pushed it down into her pocket. She started to roll the window up but then hesitated, grabbed his hand and held it to her cheek.
“Thank you. For everything. For real, William T., thank you. But I have to go.”
“Where to?”
She just shook her head. She put the truck in gear and drove straight out of the barn and over the rutted dirt of the barn driveway. She paused at 274. Right or left? She had always been a girl who put on her turn signal, no matter where she was. Not this time, though. The red Datsun gleamed in the sun — William T. had polished it and polished it, waxed and buffed it until it barely looked like the same dusty truck that Mallie and Zach Miller used to rocket around the back roads in. She pulled out to the left, a dark shadow behind the wheel.
From the Box
Utica Tribune
Decision Made in Williams Guardianship Case
The court battle between Lucia Williams, mother of Mallie Williams, who has been hospitalized and unconscious since a brutal assault nearly five months ago, and former friend William T. Jones, longtime neighbor in the rural hamlet of North Sterns, New York, where Mallie Williams was raised, has ended. As expected, the court granted legal guardianship of her daughter to Lucia Williams.
Many had deemed Mr. Jones’s move for guardianship as both quixotic — it’s fairly rare that a judge, without compelling reasons to do so, would grant guardianship to a non-family member when a family member is ready, willing and able to assume guardianship — and disrespectful. But public opinion on the court decision remains divided, with about half of the respondents to our poll believing that Miss Williams’s mother was the obvious choice for legal guardian and the other half in favor of Mr. Jones, who had, in the words of another neighbor, “been part of that girl’s life, a father almost, since her own dad died when she was little. I mean, we’re all convinced tha
t her mother’s church is the one pulling the strings here.”
That observation was roundly denounced by the members of Lucia Williams’s church, who insisted that Mrs. Williams was not only “perfectly capable of making decisions on her daughter’s behalf,” but had the full support of her church community.
“She’s the girl’s mother,” said Carol Farigant. “She’s her only living relative besides her brother, Charlie, who is still a child. She is a woman of faith and strength, and this whole thing should never even have come up.”
“I don’t know this Jones character,” said another church member, who requested anonymity, “but this is wrong. Maybe he thinks he’s doing the right thing, but Mallie Williams has a perfectly good mother who is standing by her daughter. Everyone else should just butt out.”
Mr. Jones disagrees.
“B — — — t,” he said yesterday to a reporter who reached him at his home. “Those vultures never even met Mallie. They just want to use her as an incubator. As their pro-life poster child. They’re not pro-life. They’re pro-birth. And they don’t give a s — t about what Mallie would want.”
Ambulance driver interview from The EMT Diaries podcast, transcript excerpt
Do I remember her? Of course. You don’t forget something like that. I don’t forget many calls in general. It’s not like an office job, or what I imagine an office job being like. There’s routine in this line of work, but it doesn’t come from the calls themselves. They’re all different. You can’t predict what will go down on any given call.
My advice is to make your assumptions, sure, whatever, but be ready to revise on the spot. The homeless guy in the doorway in February, you assume he’s borderline hypothermic. Maybe malnourished, maybe an untreated mental illness, maybe drunk or strung out, maybe wearing all his clothes at once, layers and layers, maybe disoriented and exhausted. All these things you assume, and you’ll probably be right.
But not always. What if his appendix is about to burst? What if it already did? That happened once. That’s why you need to be ready to revise on the spot.
It was raining that night. I remember that too, because it hadn’t rained in a while and I was concerned about oil on the roads mixing with the water. Hydroplaning. Everyone laughs at me because I worry about hydroplaning, but it’s a real thing.
We got the call and I assumed that the girl was drunk. That’s a normal assumption. But about a block away I had a feeling that it was going to be worse, much worse. Sometimes you get a feeling like that. Over the years I’ve learned to pay attention to that.
She wasn’t conscious when we pulled up. Things were quiet. No sirens, just the light turning on the one car. The cops, they were quiet too. I think we all felt the same. I know that I was thinking of my own daughter. She’s grown now but it doesn’t matter. You always worry about them. It never goes away, the worry.
The darkness under her head, I knew it was blood right away. After a while you can tell the difference, even if it’s dark. Rain, car exhaust, street oil, blood: I can always tell.
We got her braced and loaded onto the stretcher and into the ambulance and then we were off. That’s when it got noisy. I flipped on the siren and I didn’t let myself think about the hydroplaning. We needed to get her to St. John’s as quick as we could.
It was a clay pot of some kind. I remember thinking that’s what he must have bashed her head with, because there it was, right on the sidewalk, the bottom broken. Like someone took it by the neck and swung it against her skull.
I remember looking at the broken pot and looking at the blood and thinking I needed to make sure they kept as much focus on potential head injuries as on everything else. Because there was a lot of everything else.
Everything that happened after that, what all they did to that poor girl while she lay there unconscious, the way they fought over her like she was some kind of prize when she couldn’t even speak for herself? Sickens me.
Do I remember who? The brother? Of course. I wish I didn’t. The way he stood there screaming. And the older gentleman, the one who got to the scene while we were loading her in? Him too. It’s one of those things I wish I could get out of my mind, that look on his face. That sound that came out of his mouth when he saw her lying there. That’s her father, I remember thinking. That would be me, if it were my daughter.
That he turned out not to be her father surprised me completely. But later on, when the story kept unfolding, it was clear that in his heart she was his daughter. Family doesn’t have to be blood to be family.
Everybody knows her face now. For a while there you couldn’t get away from it — TV, newspaper, online, billboards, you name it. She’ll always be frozen in time that way. But when I think about the whole mess, to be honest, it’s Mr. Jones I think about. You could see on his face how much he adored her.
I can still hear the sound he made when he saw her.
Central New York Daily
Area Woman Assaulted, Left for Dead
(utica) A 21-year-old woman waiting for her brother outside a party on Hawthorne Street was robbed, assaulted and abandoned nearby early Saturday morning. Police responding to an anonymous 911 call at approximately 10:30 p.m. confirmed that the woman, whose identity has not been revealed pending notification of family, was sexually assaulted and beaten by a blunt instrument.
The woman’s handbag was found a few blocks away, her wallet missing. Based on further evidence, police hypothesize that the woman fought back and may have attempted to follow the assailant, who then drove a blunt object against her skull.
“A flowerpot,” said Derek Hattering, who lives just down the block from the scene of the assault. “From my front step. Whoever it was picked it up and bashed her head in. Broken pottery all over the place.”
The woman is currently in intensive care at St. John’s. The hospital did not release any further information.
“This is an open and ongoing investigation,” said Utica Police Chief Bruce Koloskey. “We encourage any witnesses or anyone who may have information relevant to the case to come forward.”
Central New York Daily
Rape and Assault Victim Identified
(utica) The identity of the young woman assaulted on Hawthorne Street in Utica last Saturday was released by the Utica Police Department. She is Mallie Williams, who grew up in North Sterns, New York, and now resides in Forestport, New York, a rural township north of Utica.
“With her next of kin’s permission, we’re releasing the victim’s name in hopes of gathering more information that will aid us in our ongoing investigation,” stated Utica Police Chief Bruce Koloskey. “As of this morning, no witnesses have come forth. We encourage anyone with any information to call our tip line.”
Miss Williams is still in intensive care at St. John’s in critical condition. Her prognosis is unknown.
Mallie Williams
10/10/2014
11:14 PM ED to Hosp Admission
MRN: 93648915
Description: 21 year old female
Encounter # 1305041041
Center
ED Provider Notes by Darleen Fitzgerald Connor, MD
at 10/10/2014 11:58 PM
Author:
Connor, Darleen F
Service:
Emergency Medicine
Author: RESIDENT
Filed: 10/11/2014 1:09 AM
Note Time: 10/10/2014 11:58 PM
Note Type:
ED Provider Notes
Status: Signed
Editor: Connor, Darleen F, MD (Resident)
St. John’s Hospital
Emergency
Department Attending Supervision Note
Chief Complaint: Blunt Force Trauma, Sexual Assault
History of Present Illness
Mallie Williams is a 21 y.o. female with a PMH of N/A who presents to the emergency department after being both sexually assaulted and assaulted with a blunt force weapon.
Patient is unconscious. Patient was found unconscious and bleeding and transported to the ER via ambulance. Patient sustained blunt force trauma to the back of the skull with accompanying traumatic brain injury. Extent of injury and possible brain damage unknown. No spinal fracture. Regular heartbeat. No shortness of breath. Bruises and abrasions to pelvis. Slight gush of vaginal fluids, slight vaginal bleeding. Patient is not on blood thinners.
Patient’s father, William T. Jones, reports no unusual medical history and no previous hospitalizations.
Discharge Medications:
Allergies: Patient’s father reports no known allergies.
Active Medical Problems: Mild refractory psoriasis. Beyond that, there is no problem list on file for this patient.
PMH: History reviewed. No pertinent past medical history.
PSH: History reviewed. No pertinent past surgical history.
Social History:
History
Substance Use Topics
Smoking status:
Not on file
Smokeless tobacco:
Not on file
Alcohol Use:
Not on file
Family History: No family history on file.
The Opposite of Fate (ARC) Page 7