Many of the residents who call the picturesque Sterns Valley home are Amish. They tend their small dairy farms quietly. Barefoot Amish women can be seen hanging laundry — blue, gray and white — on clotheslines, Amish children can be seen trundling reel lawn mowers back and forth on the lawn or weeding enormous vegetable gardens, while Amish men are usually in the fields or barns. They coexist peacefully with their non-Amish neighbors, many of whom are also dairy
farmers, while others work as teachers, small-town bankers, insurance salespeople. Others eke out livings as housecleaners, Adirondack guides, handymen. A typical rural mix.
To a casual passerby, it’s an idyllic scene, rural upstate New York at its pastoral finest. Dig deeper, though, and secrets reveal themselves.
A wooden sign nailed to a telephone pole at the intersection of a nameless dirt road and Route 274: life begins at conception. Another wooden sign nailed to a fencepost at the intersection of two also-nameless roads a mile north of the first sign: save mallie’s life. And a third, on a stick driven into the soft earth in front of the Sterns Town Hall: what would mallie
want?
Mysterious signs, to be sure, at least to those who don’t know the story of Mallie Williams, who grew up here and is now hospitalized 20 miles south in Utica, New York. But one would be hard-pressed to find a soul here who doesn’t know Mallie Williams, and not just her story, but Mallie herself.
“Of course I know Mallie,” said Edwina “Eddie” Beckey, when a reporter approached her in the aisle of the Sterns pharmacy. “She’s one of my best friends. I grew up with her.”
When asked her opinion of the controversy raging in the media and in the courtroom, however, Eddie refused comment. “Enough people have said enough s — t about Mallie,” she stated. “I’m not about to let you take something I say and twist it into something else and then put it out there for the whole f — — -g world to see.”
Others were not so reticent.
“Mallie was a good student,” said Harold Chelms, former biology teacher at Sterns High School, where the student body numbers 500 total and draws from a 15-mile-wide radius of surrounding towns and countryside. “Well liked. She loved birds. Really had a thing for birds.”
“Smarter than she ever let on,” added Kathleen Dominguez, whose teaching duties are split between art and Spanish. “You know that old saying ‘Still waters run deep’? That was Mallie.”
“She’d already gone through a lot,” said a coffee-drinking patron at Crystal’s Diner, the town’s only eating establishment. “Her dad died when she was nine and her mother was way overboard into her church, if you ask me. The whole church thing, if you’re religious, fine, but don’t shove it onto others, you know? Especially your kids, which is what Lucia tried to do. Not fair this had to happen to Mallie now too.”
He pointed at a large plastic jar next to the cash register. Mallie’s face, unsmiling in a tattered photo taped to the front, stared out. “We try to help,” he said, “but nickels and dimes and dollar bills aren’t going to do a hell of a lot. Even though they waived all the hospital and rehab fees. Felt sorry for her, I guess.”
A woman came from behind the counter bearing a fresh pot of coffee and refilled the patron’s coffee mug. He emptied three packets of sugar into it and added cream. “It kind of feels like it’s beyond us, now,” he added. “Once the lawyers get into it, you can kiss your ass goodbye. That’s my feeling anyway.”
When a reporter asked the woman behind the counter if he could ask her a few questions, she just shook her head and retreated into the kitchen.
And so it goes, here in a place where, it can reasonably be assumed, no one ever expected to be a regular feature on the nightly news. A place where protesters can still, after all this time, occasionally be found marching in circles on the village green, placards and signs held high. A place where long-simmering beliefs regularly erupt into impassioned debate, if not outright shouting matches. A place where that third sign, what would mallie want? attains a haunting power, given that its subject is unable to speak for herself.
“Right for her?” said the anonymous coffee drinker at Crystal’s, before he refused to say anything else. “Or for them? It’s easy to talk for someone else if you don’t think they’re ever coming back, isn’t it?”
Good question. For in some ways the fate of the young woman thus far has had little to do with her and everything to do with religion, politics and the intersection thereof. Google the name Mallie Williams and take your pick of hundreds of articles, opinion pieces, photos and letters to the editor.
“You could spend the next week glued to your computer screen and you wouldn’t get through half of them,” said Ms. Dominguez, the teacher. “But you know what? You’d never get to Mallie. Mallie the girl, the person, she’s nowhere in any of those articles.”
The only one who could answer these questions and that other one — what would mallie want? — remained unable to communicate for nearly a year and a half. But that, readers, is about to change. For the central figure at the heart of this tragic story has awakened.
Part Two
William T.
It had been three days. They sat on the porch, watching the sun as it dropped below the pine woods across the field. Somewhere out there was Mallie, behind the wheel of the old truck she’d learned to drive in.
“You heard from her?”
“You know I haven’t, William T.”
“I call and I call but it goes right to voicemail.”
“That means the phone’s turned off. Either that or she’s talking to someone else.”
How Crystal knew this he didn’t know, but she was attuned to the modern world; it was she who had taught him how to use the computer. This was as bad as when Mallie was in and out of consciousness. No, it was worse than that, because at least then they knew where she was. No, it was better than that. For God’s sake, she was alive again.
“She’s in charge now, William T.,” Crystal said, as if she could read his mind. “It’s her life now.”
The words coming out of her mouth sounded tired, as if they had been used beyond their capacity. Maybe Crystal repeated them to herself, the way he said, Mallie, please call, over and over to himself. Willing the little phone in his pocket to buzz. They hated thinking of her out there alone in the truck, with the box of pain riding shotgun.
“I’ll tell you what I’m most afraid of,” he said. “That she wants it back.”
He expected her to ask what “it” was. Or to say that it was impossible; the baby had been placed by court order with a foster family and it was time to leave it alone, stop wondering and worrying. But she hesitated. Then, “I think about it all the time,” she said. Her voice was almost a whisper. “I torment myself about it. It’s in the back of my mind. I see a baby in the diner and I think about it.”
“Crystal, would you have wanted to keep it?”
“We couldn’t. We had no legal rights. You know that.”
“But if somehow we could’ve. If we’d kept fighting. If we’d kept on, if we’d made a stink about it, gotten more lawyers, different ones, found some way?”
She shook her head. No. The thought of it all — courts and lawyers and depositions and arguments — was too much. Even now, nearly a year later, it was too much.
“We were hanging on by a thread as it was, William T.”
Which was true. Reporters, pro-life protesters, pro-choice protesters, headlines and the phone that didn’t stop ringing until it did, which was even worse. And Charlie, angry and heartbroken. They had all dealt with so much. William T. pictured the little gray house in Utica, his secret trips to the playground, where he sat on the bench, inspecting every baby in sight.
“Listen, Crystal. Sometimes I go by the attorney’s house.”
She was still and small next to him but he felt her instant alertness.
“Whose house? Aar
on Stampernick’s? The attorney for the child?”
He nodded. “They’re foster parents too, you know,” he said. “My guess is that they’re the ones the judge assigned him to.”
The second Family Court custody hearing, after Lucia’s death, had been closed by order of the judge. Records confidential, no media allowed. But William T. had heard rumors that the attorney for the child, Aaron Stampernick, and his social-worker wife, Melissa, were the ones raising the baby. He had no way of knowing for sure. The one thing he did know was that the Stampernicks knew exactly where that baby was.
“Have you actually seen the baby, William T.?”
“No.”
“Good,” she said, with a vehemence that startled him. “William T., do not tell me where the Stampernicks live. And if you find out they are the ones who have the baby, don’t tell me that either. Don’t ever make me see that baby.”
“Why? Because you’re afraid that if you look at him, you’ll see the rapist?”
She stared at him, bewildered, and shook her head. “No. The opposite. What I’m afraid of is that if I ever saw that child, I would see Mallie. And I would want to take him and keep him and never let him go.”
When they took the baby from her, William T. and Crystal and Charlie weren’t allowed to be there. But the nurse, the kind one who had always liked the two of them, had left an anonymous voicemail from an unknown number the day before. This was a serious violation of HIPAA rules, and she had left neither name nor number, but, still, they knew it was her.
“They’re going to deliver the baby tomorrow via C-section,” she said. “The fetal heart tones have decreased, which means that the baby is in distress or Mallie is in premature labor. It’s kind of miraculous that the pregnancy’s made it this far, anyway. And since she’s uncooperative, she can’t deliver vaginally.”
“Uncooperative?” William T. had said to Crystal, after playing the message three times. “What the hell does that mean?”
“It’s a medical term,” Crystal said. “Not a reflection of personality.”
How she knew that, William T. didn’t know, but Crystal usually knew more than she let on. Neither of them slept that night. At dawn the next morning William T. made coffee and he and Crystal sat on the cool cement of the porch and drank it. They had woken Charlie but he had just stared up at them — “No” — and pulled the blankets up over his head.
At St. John’s they drove into the rear parking lot, the one used by employees. They sat in the truck, windows rolled up, and looked at each other in a What do we do now? sort of way. A gray unmarked door opened and the young orderly, Beanie, stepped out. He shook a cigarette out of a pack and put it to his lips but didn’t light it. He leaned against the building and kept taking the cigarette out of his mouth and putting it back in, going through the motions of
smoking.
“You think he’s trying to quit?” Crystal said.
Beanie suddenly looked in their direction, as if he had overheard. Impossible. They were too far away, and the windows were rolled up. But he was looking directly at them. After a minute he raised his hand.
“Does he want something?” Crystal said.
Beanie put the unlit cigarette back in his mouth. He pointed at them and nodded. Just once.
“I think he knows why we’re here,” William T. said.
“You think so?”
“Yes. I think he’s trying to tell us the surgery went okay.”
That was a guess. Back when William T. had still been allowed in the hospital, William T. and Beanie had never talked. Now they watched as he returned his cigarette to the pack and waved a pass in front of the door sensor. They sat there another while, not knowing what to do, and then they drove home, where another anonymous message was waiting from the kind, HIPAA-violating nurse. The surgery had been a success. Success? The word had no meaning in this situation. William T. had waited for the anger to gain force and traction, propel him forward, but he was too tired.
The custody arrangement had already been in place before the baby was born. Mallie’s attorney had done what her guardian ad litem suggested and recommended custody go to the child’s grandmother Lucia. The Family Court custody hearing, with Aaron Stampernick, Mallie’s attorney, Mallie’s guardian ad litem, and Lucia all present, was, in William T.’s eyes, a mere formality.
Custody. What did the term mean, exactly? “The control or care of a person or property” was the first dictionary definition, but there were other, darker definitions as well, such as “the state of being detained or held under guard.” Slogans and signs and billboard images from the past months ran through William T.’s mind.
a parent is the one who raises you
adoption is an option
i was born not under your heart but inside it
William T. kept picturing how the documents had tumbled out of the box when Mallie upended it on the table. Everything that had happened to her, around her, above her, while she lay sleeping — it was all in there. Piecemeal, scraps, fragments, parts of a whole that people who didn’t know Mallie had woven around her.
He remembered the first time, long ago, that she had ventured to his house on her own. It had been early morning, and he was sitting on his porch with a cup of coffee, watching an unfamiliar machine make its slow way up the hill in his direction. Some new Amish contraption? It was still far enough away that, whatever it was, it posed no threat, and he watched with interest. The kitchen door opened and Crystal joined him, the coffeepot in her hand.
“What is that thing?” she said, squinting.
“That I cannot tell you. I’m taking a wait-and-see approach.”
“It looks like a giant lame bird. Maybe it heard about your lame bird sanctuary.”
It was about a quarter of a mile away and they both kept their eyes trained on it. Another few seconds and then, all at once, the slow labor of the creature on the road resolved itself in William T.’s vision and he jumped up and off the porch.
“It’s Mallie Williams,” he said to Crystal.
Down across the lawn and then down the road he went. He could still run in those days — almost fourteen years ago now — and it took him only a minute to reach her.
“Mallie? Mallie?”
She looked up and smiled. Nine years old, pulling her little brother in the wagon behind her, all the way from their house, a full half-mile down the hill. She was wearing overalls and the Mao cap she wore all the time back then because her father, Starr, who had died only months before, had loved China. It was the Mao cap that got to him most. That and the fact that Charlie, wrapped in a blanket and sitting in the wagon, seemed perfectly content. Her face was flushed from exertion.
“Hi, William T.”
This was in the early days of her conviction that otherwise, people would confuse them, seeing as they shared the name William, partly anyway. Which had made him laugh out loud — big, rough man that he was and scrawny little girl that she was — but she had persisted. Mallie Williams was nothing if not persistent. And now he was known only as William T., even to Crystal.
“What are you doing out on this fine summer morning?”
Instinctively, he kept his voice calm and conversational. He smiled down at her, this little girl who had so recently lost her father.
“We’re coming to visit you.”
“Well, I’m glad to hear that. It’s very neighborly of you. Want to hop in the wagon and I’ll pull you the rest of the way?”
She looked up at him and back at the wagon, considering. A car appeared from around the bend at the bottom of the hill, and he positioned himself between the road and the wagon. Best to put something, even if it was just his big body, between the oncoming car and these two little kids.
“You could keep your brother company,” he said. “He’s sitting by himself back there.”
That was the right
thing to say. She frowned and nodded — there should be no lonely brothers in this world — and he picked her up and set her down behind Charlie and tucked the blanket around them both.
“Your mother know where you are, Mallo Cup?” he said, and looked back to see her not looking at him. “No?” She shrugged. This was before most people had cell phones. He pictured Lucia, frantic in the house, calling around to see if anyone had seen her babies.
“She’s still asleep,” Mallie said. “We decided to go on an adventure. Right, Charlie?”
“Right, Charlie,” the boy echoed.
“Once upon a time there was a sister,” Mallie said, and, “Once upon a time there was a brother,” Charlie echoed.
“I’m teaching him the Once Upon a Time game,” Mallie explained to William T., who had never heard of the game but nodded anyway. Mallie was known for making up games, and he approved. Games were a good distraction from grief. So were knock-knock jokes, his personal specialty.
William T. pulled them up the hill, the wagon wheels rumbling behind. Crystal was waiting for them in the kitchen, having already called Lucia to tell her the children were safe — Mallie was right; she had been still asleep — and she and William T. made them some scrambled eggs and toast. Afterward, Crystal taught Mallie how to make hummingbird nectar.
“It’s a four-to-one ratio of water to sugar,” she said. “Bring it to a boil and let it cool.”
The four of them had sat on the porch and watched the hummingbirds. They were like giant bees, thrumming and buzzing, long beaks dipping in and out of the bright-red feeder. It was birds from that point on, with Mallie Williams. With Lucia’s permission, she walked up the road whenever she wanted, always with a new bird fact in hand. Did he and Crystal know that some cultures viewed birds as the spirits of recently dead? Or as harbingers of death? Did they know that hummingbirds could hover upside down? That they had to drink more than their own weight in nectar every day? That every night when they were asleep they slipped into a torpor?
The Opposite of Fate (ARC) Page 9