knock, knock.
who’s there?
annie.
annie who?
anniebody ready to hear a new knock-knock joke?
damn, m.w. that’s a hell of a joke. where’d you hear it?
william t.
no shit? not sure i’ve ever seen that man smile.
Oh, but William T. had smiled. He used to smile all the time. He’d had a hundred and more knock-knock jokes, back when she and Charlie were little. Now they were coming back. But the William T. of her childhood, bellowing with laughter at every one of his knock-knock punch lines, was not the William T. of today. She sat on the bed, the phone warm and glowing in her hand.
She was already living in a future world. A world she’d been dropped into, a fate she hadn’t chosen, in which a man she barely knew had given her a new nickname, and a man she knew better than almost anyone had turned grim and laughless. It was hard to remember fun. It had been a long time since she’d done anything but regain her strength. What was fun? Eating soft-serve from the Kayuta. Driving at night with the windows down. Playing Sequence with Charlie and Zach. Eating dinner with Charlie and Zach. Putting on music late at night and dancing in the living room with Zach while Charlie played DJ. She loved to dance. As if Beanie could read her mind, a little dancing-woman emoji appeared on the screen, and then he was gone.
She wanted to dance. She wanted to move. She wanted to work. She wanted to walk into the massage room and stand at the head of the table and feel the power of her own muscles and intuition to draw out the tired in another human being, to pull out the stress and tension and let it dissolve in a quiet room. She didn’t want to be one of the women at the clinic, bruised and raw and hurt. She spread the fingers of her left hand and flexed them.
Charlie’s name suddenly blinked up on the screen and she snatched up the phone. He spoke before she could say anything.
“I’m sorry, Mal.”
“For what?”
“Not picking up. Not texting. I didn’t know what to say. I still don’t.”
She was struck again by how much deeper and older his voice sounded.
“It’s okay.”
“It’s not. Amanda called. She told me she saw you in Utica. She told me to call you. She told me you looked sad when she said my name.”
“I am sad. I miss you.”
“Well, I miss the way it used to be.”
“It still feels like it is that way to me. Every day I wake up and remember that it’s not. But in my head Mom is still alive and you and me and Zach are still in the cabin.”
There was a pause, and then his voice came in a rush. “Mal. If I could, I would go back in time. I would make it so none of it happened in the first place. I would make it so nobody would know our names the way they do, and all those jars with your picture on them wouldn’t exist, and there would be no baby out there. And Zach would still be Zach, not the asshole he turned out to be.”
“Charlie. Don’t call him an asshole.”
“Why not?” His voice was shaking. But the word made her flinch. It was not possible to think of Zach Miller and the word “asshole” at the same time. She was caught between her brother and her boyfriend, the two she adored, and suddenly she was exhausted.
“How did you make it through this, Charlie?”
He barked a joyless laugh. “I didn’t. All I did was get the hell out. I applied to Braxton and they gave me a full scholarship and I just . . . left. And I’m going by “Charles” now. But that’s as far as I’ve gotten. I haven’t made it through anything.”
“That makes two of us then.”
She pressed the phone to her ear and pictured her brother, wherever he was in Pennsylvania right now, with the glowing screen of his phone pressed to his own ear. Charlie didn’t say anything for a minute. When he spoke again, his voice was soft. He sounded like himself. He sounds like the Charlie you remember, she corrected herself. But he’s changed. He’s in a new life too.
“You know what I think about, Mal?”
“What?”
“The nights you and Zach would be dancing and I’d be sitting on the couch playing DJ. That’s what I think about the most.”
“Yeah,” she said, “me too.”
She was afraid to keep talking because she might cry. And she didn’t want her brother, there in his new life, to hear her crying. They were good nights, those nights at the cabin in Forestport when the future seemed wide open. It was too hard to think that those nights were over now, too disorienting to picture the cabin empty and dark, Zach and Charlie far away, so she didn’t. Instead she conjured up the feeling of Zach’s arms around her, their bodies moving together, her little brother searching his playlist for the next good song. The rule was that any song he played, they had to dance to, and they did. Smokey Robinson was Charlie’s favorite. Any Smokey song. The three of them, the cabin with the strings of white lights they draped around the walls, she and Zach swaying around the room, each holding a beer, Charlie smiling to himself on the couch, calling up the songs.
William T.
It wasn’t easy, teaching yourself how to waltz. He tried watching some of the dance shows on television, but they were too intimidating. He wasn’t some former celebrity trying to make a comeback with his dance moves, nor was he some teenager hoping for a showbiz break. He was a sixty-five-year-old man trying to learn how to waltz so that he could surprise his girlfriend with something that was new. Something new and uncomplicated and good. A good thing that had nothing to do with Mallie. A thing that would not drive her insane, if in fact he was driving Crystal insane. Charlie had told him that he needed to get his life back and he was trying to get his life back.
Practicing the waltz was easier on the weekends when Crystal’s nephew Johnny was visiting from his group home. A cord wrapped too tight around his neck at birth had given Johnny cerebral palsy, a slowed mind, few words. And an army of people who loved him and who he loved back. Crystal had raised him from infancy, and from infancy, Johnny had loved the color red. On Johnny weekends, everything red came out in force: red crayons, red throw pillows, red bowls and red spoons, red Popsicles. He sat at the table now, eating oatmeal out of a red bowl with a red spoon. William T. held his arms out
to him.
“You want to try, Jonathan? Give it a whirl?”
Johnny laughed soundlessly at the sound of his proper name — Jonathan — and shook his head.
“You’d have to follow, because I only know how to lead. Correction: I’m learning how to lead.”
William T. turned the volume up as loud as it could go on the computer and pulled up The Waltz Boss’s channel on YouTube. The orchestra’s waltz music swelled through the tinny speakers. He plucked up a couch cushion, clutched it to his chest like a dance partner and copied the Waltz Boss’s motions as best he could.
“Did you know that waltzing originated with the peasants, Jonathan? True fact. The upper class favored the minuet. Or so says the Waltz Boss.”
The Waltz Boss was William T.’s favorite YouTube instructor. The sheer number of how-to-waltz videos out there had been overwhelming at first. But they were easily weeded out, beginning with voice. Too high or too low, forget it. The Waltz Boss, although he was rotund and barely five feet two, had a striking baritone voice. He also always wore a bow tie clipped to his T-shirt, and each lesson included a Waltz Fact of the Day. William T. waltzed his cushion dance partner around the table where Johnny sat with his oatmeal. The cushion was square and dense and not at all like a living person in his arms, but he persevered.
“Am I getting better, Jonathan? Has the Waltz Boss worked his magic on me yet?”
Johnny laughed through a mouthful of oatmeal. Johnny’s greatest laughs were both soundless and infectious, like now, when William T. started laughing in spite of himself. It felt strange to laugh, and wrong. How could he laugh when Mall
ie was somewhere out there, who knew where, and not calling him back? She needs to get her life back, William T., and so do you.
Start at the top of the box. Step forward with the left foot, then side with the right, then close with both together. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. If you could just keep going like that, back and forth in a single small box, the waltz wouldn’t be so bad. But no, you had to then rotate a quarter of a turn with every single combination.
“It’s harder than it looks, Jonathan. But as the God in whom I have no certainty exists is my witness, I will waltz your aunt Crystal around this living room and this kitchen or else. Or else, I tell you, or else.”
Johnny laughed while William T. danced on with the cushion in his arms. It was a workout, trying to learn to waltz with a burdensome couch cushion instead of a live human being. But he was getting there. Maybe.
“I’m trying, Jonathan,” he said. “I’m trying.”
He hadn’t spoken to Charlie since the boy had told him that Mallie needed to get her life back. And so do you, Charlie had said. I’ll talk to you later. He hadn’t, though. Neither Charlie nor Mallie had called him. Burl had taken him aside at the post office this morning.
“Look, William T.,” he had said. “Crystal told me that you go by the Stampernicks’ house sometimes. You’re going to drive yourself crazy with that. The hearing was a long time ago. The decision was made. And that baby will always be in the world. You have to come to peace with that.”
“How?”
“However you can.”
But the how eluded William T. It was hard to reconfigure your life. All the months that Mallie lay sleeping, he had been single-minded: Watch over her. Protect her. Don’t let them do anything else to her. But where did that energy go, now that Mallie was back?
“She doesn’t want to talk to you, old man,” he said out loud. Johnny looked up inquiringly. “Not you, Jonathan. I’m not referring to you. You’re a young man, remember?”
If Mallie had come back to the same world, maybe it would be easier to let go. But the cabin in Forestport was empty. Charlie was in Pennsylvania. Zach in Montana. And the baby somewhere in Utica. A familiar anger and sorrow washed through him. Had he messed it all up? If he hadn’t told them in the beginning that Mallie was his daughter, so he could watch over her, would it have gone better for them all? Maybe if he hadn’t lied, the court would have ruled in their favor. Crystal and Burl had told him over and over that he had done what seemed right at the time. That there was no going back. But the question still haunted him.
“Not everything comes down to blood and paper!” he had shouted in the courtroom on the day of decree. “Take your goddamn document and shove it!”
They should have listened to him. The lawyers and the judge and Lucia and the flock that surrounded her should have thought things over long and hard and answered honestly, from their hearts and their consciences instead of the goddamn letter of the law. Did any of them ever play it out in their minds, the way William T. did?
The image of Lucia Williams, pale and emaciated in her last days on the television news, swam up into his head, that look on her face when the reporter asked her about the decision to keep Mallie pregnant, about her impending death, about what would happen now to the baby. Surrounded by the Faith Love flock, several of them pressed close to her as if they would rather take the question. But the reporter had kept the focus on her.
“I’m sorry,” she had said.
“You’re sorry about what? That you decided against terminating your daughter’s pregnancy?”
“I’m sorry about fate.”
“The fate of your daughter? The fate of the baby? Your own fate?”
The reporter’s voice was tight and serious, as if much depended on the answers to these questions. William T. had sat forward on the couch, watching. Anger and frustration filled him. It was too late by then, wasn’t it? Hadn’t the future already been decided?
“I’m sorry,” Lucia had repeated. Then the flock shepherded her away and the same loop, that endless old loop, of dueling protesters in the hospital parking lot filled the screen again. The thought had come to William T. then that life was about more than protest. The idea appeared to him like a mirage, and he tried to grasp it, but it flew away. Lucia had died weeks later, when the baby was only three months old.
From the house he drove south, up and down the giant hills of Glass Factory Road. At the crest before the final downslope, a small fiery panic of Where is she? How is she? rose up within him. He gulped it back but there it stayed, a hurting lump in his throat.
“Why do you want to see Aaron Stampernick, William T.?” Crystal had said.
“Don’t you want to see him? He’s the one who caused all this. He’s the one who knows where the baby lives now.”
“He’s not the one who caused all this. That was the rapist. Aaron Stampernick was appointed attorney for the child and he most likely did the best he could. And no, I don’t want to know anything about the baby. That would only make it worse.”
He took his foot off the gas and let the truck gather speed on its own, heading down toward the Utica floodplain, spread out flat and marshy below. Was Crystal right? Which was harder, to know that the baby was in this world, breathing the same air that all the rest of them were breathing, but have no idea what he looked or sounded like, or to see him in the flesh and forever after carry around the image of his face?
William T. didn’t know. Maybe he was being dumb. Maybe he was playing with fate. Maybe he should just stop, but he couldn’t. This was his ritual.
He eased onto Route 12 south, past the turnoff for the mall and then onto the side streets that brought him to the Foothills playground. Busy today, a cool summer day. Parents and babysitters and babies and children all circled the equipment and the benches like bees in search of the last nectar. He sat down at the end of a bench in the shade of a mulberry tree and cast his glance around. Parents pushed their children on swings, an older couple was setting up a picnic on a picnic table, teenagers played Frisbee on the baseball diamond, toddlers stalked one another with plastic shovels in hand at the sand pit. A young man, his hand shading his eyes from the sun, half crouched to hold the hand of a small girl making her way to a bouncy-seat cricket.
The young man stood up and William T. saw his yellow cap. It was Beanie. Beanie, in that unnerving way that sometimes happened, must have sensed his presence, because he turned and met William T.’s eyes. When the little girl was settled on the bouncy cricket, he walked over and sat down by William T.
“My daughter,” he said, nodding toward the child. “Danielle. How you doing, Mr. Jones?”
“I’m all right,” William T. said cautiously. There was no reason he couldn’t be here at the playground. It wasn’t as if he were some kind of predator. He had every right to be here. Stop being so defensive, he silently lectured himself. Beanie was young to have a daughter. Was he married? Or was he co-parenting with a former girlfriend, as they did these days?
“How have you been, Mr. Jones?”
There was something preternaturally calm about the man, young as he was. Beanie must have seen a lot, there at the hospital, days and nights spent cleaning up after everyone who passed through those halls. He must have listened and watched and observed.
“Call me William T., okay?”
Beanie grinned. He was one of those people who, when he smiled, everything about his face changed. Everything about his being. It was a grin with magical, transformative powers that instantly eased William T.’s spirits.
“You talked to M.W.?”
“No,” William T. said. “She took off and she won’t return my calls.”
“How many times you called her?”
“Dozens. Maybe a hundred.”
“Ha,” Beanie said. “Maybe that’s why.” He tilted his head and looked at William T. in an examining way. “What are
you doing at this playground, anyway?”
“It’s on my way. I’m just taking a break.”
Beanie looked at him. Waiting. He knew it wasn’t the real answer. The man was a psychic ninja orderly. He was willing to wait as long as it took. William T. felt himself giving in.
“The real reason I come here is because I keep thinking I might see him. The attorney, Aaron Stampernick. He knows where that baby is. It supposedly lives close by. And the fact of its existence torments me.”
“Him,” Beanie corrected him. “Not ‘it.’ And the fact of his existence isn’t his fault. Right?”
“Maybe you haven’t heard that Bible verse about the sins of the father.”
“The sins of the father shall be visited upon the child. Yeah, I’ve heard it. He’s just a little kid, though, William T. Like my girl over there.”
“It’s a hell of a lot more complicated than that. What if Mallie wants him back? You ever think how unbearable that would be?”
“It’d be hard. Hard, maybe. Not unbearable.”
But Beanie was wrong. William T. could not get his mind around the idea of that child in their midst. That child with its genes. Child born of pain and cruelty and violence. He thought back to the days when Mallie and her brother were small, how he and Crystal had welcomed them into their lives. How they had played games with them — those mind-numbing childhood games of Candy Land and Chutes and Ladders and Mouse Trap — and told them jokes. Or William T. had told them jokes, anyway, mostly knock-knock jokes.
“You remember telling Mallie knock-knock jokes in Saint John’s?” Beanie said suddenly. Jesus H. Christ, was he reading William T.’s mind? William T. shook his head in denial. Beanie was unnerving.
“You did,” Beanie said. He chuckled. “I used to come in there to mop and there you’d be. ‘Knock, knock, Mallo Cup, knock, knock.”
The Opposite of Fate (ARC) Page 12