The Opposite of Fate (ARC)

by Alison McGhee

  “I don’t remember that.” And it was the truth. The only knock-knock jokes William T. recalled telling were from long ago.

  “Oh, you did, though,” Beanie said. “You used to whisper them to her. Like you were hoping she’d wake up and say, ‘Who’s there?’ ”

  Mallie

  She pinned her hair back and put the wig on.

  “Nice,” the motel clerk said.

  “Does it look natural?”

  “If you wanted it to look natural, you wouldn’t have dyed it like that, would you? I mean, blue-green hair?”

  But his voice was kind, and he smiled. She got in the truck and drove to her mother’s church, Faith Love, next to a Friendly’s ice cream and across the street from a While U Wait oil change. To the left of the steps was a fake cemetery of tiny white crosses. A lit-up sign listed times for Sunday and Wednesday services, and the sermon topic for that week: who does the grateful atheist thank?

  The church was little and white and tired-looking. She stood at the foot of its painted bright-green steps, trying to picture her mother and the congregants filing in and out. How could something so small have wielded so much power?

  Lucia had joined the church in Mallie’s first year of high school, when Charlie was in third grade. She began driving down to services every Wednesday and Sunday, took adult Sunday-school classes, took turns leading Bible Study every Friday evening. Mallie had been in favor of all this churchgoing at first, because it was clear that the church brought comfort and relief to Lucia. Once, at Lucia’s urging, she had gone to a Sunday service with her mother. The minister talked softly, then loudly, then softly, about how Jesus had died for them, and how once they felt that, truly felt it — that kind of encompassing love — their lives would never be the same. Heads had nodded throughout the congregation. Mallie remembered the scarf her mother had knotted around her throat that day, orange and bright blue, like a parrot.

  For a second, she missed her mother so fiercely that her knees buckled and she sank to the first step of the church.

  It was awful to think that she hadn’t been with her mother when Lucia died. She hadn’t been there to hold her mother’s hand, Charlie on the other side of the bed holding the other one. The three of them had not had a chance to come together, to find peace with one another, after the years of drifting apart. Mallie looked up at the closed doors of the church. A cross hung above them. That Jesus had died for them and their sins had always felt wrong to her. Like cheating. Weren’t people supposed to take care of their own sins, by not committing them in the first place or atoning for them afterward? Had Jesus died for the man who raped her and left her for dead?

  The first year or so of Lucia’s newfound religion hadn’t brought much change to their family. Mallie and Charlie had always been a united front, each more important to the other than their mother. When that had started, Mallie wasn’t sure, but maybe in early childhood, after their father died. He had been the one who intuitively understood each of them. He had been lightness and laughter, whereas Lucia’s personality was heavier. Solemn. Those had been the days of invention and escape: the Once Upon a Time game, the Questions game, the endless knock-knock jokes from William T.

  As Lucia’s faith deepened, though, things changed. Mallie thought of them as the Don’t years. Don’t forget to thank the Lord before you eat. Don’t forget to say your prayers before bed. Don’t dress immodestly.

  “Don’t dress immodestly, Mom?” Mallie had said. “Are you kidding me? Have the Amish rubbed off on you that much?”

  “Don’t take the name of the Lord in vain, Mallie.”

  “Good Lord, Mom. I didn’t even mention the word Lord. Until right now.”

  The look on Lucia’s face, grim and prim simultaneously, made her want to scream. What was her mother turning into? “Lord!” Mallie said. “Lord, Lord, Lordy Lord Lord.” And watched as her mother steepled her hands together, lowered her head and began to pray for her daughter.

  “It’s like a scene out of a mockumentary,” Mallie said to Zach later. “Next she’ll be telling me to save myself for marriage.”

  Which is exactly what Lucia did, a week or later.

  “That train left the station a while ago,” Mallie had informed her mother, and then watched as Lucia turned away in sorrow or revulsion — it was impossible to tell. For God’s sake, her mother had been barely nineteen when she gave birth to Mallie. And she had adored Mallie’s father, Starr. Surely she had had fun when she was young. Why turn to such a restrictive religion, so full of rules and judgment, at this point in her life? It was a few months later that both Mallie and Charlie, unable to stand what felt like their mother’s rigidity and harshness, moved into the cabin in Forestport with Zach.

  And yet her mother had found some kind of comfort, however unfamiliar to Mallie, in her church and her version of Jesus. Mallie wanted to understand that, if she could. She walked up the steps and pulled open the door to the church. Immediately inside was a little vestibule with bulletin boards on either side. Notices of church meetings, quotes from Scripture, photos from church picnics and celebrations.

  And her. Mallie Williams.

  There she was, in a special photo box that someone had nailed right into the cork bulletin board. That graduation photo and another photo of her in a hospital bed, bandages wrapped around her head and tubes snaking around her face and neck and arms. She’d never seen that one. William T. must not have seen it either, or he would have printed it out and stashed it in his cardboard box.

  pray for our mallie and her unborn baby, read the caption beneath it.

  Slam.

  She hit the box with the flat of her hand. She pounded it with the side of her closed fist, then tried to pull the whole box off the wall. No. No. You don’t get to see me like that anymore. The box stayed firmly on the wall, and there was the sound of hurrying footsteps. She turned then and tried to pull open the door. Yanked and yanked until a voice behind her said, “Miss, what are you —” and she shoved at the door instead and it opened. There was a hand on her shoulder, a hand that must have belonged to the voice, but she slapped it and spat, Get your hand off me. She took the steps two at a time and then she was back in the truck, tires spitting gravel.

  Hassan’s Superette appeared a few blocks away. William T. used to bring her and Charlie down to Utica for the brewery tour when they were little, and afterward he had brought them here. Hassan’s hadn’t changed. There was the row of tall glass candy jars where she used to buy sticks of root beer candy, twenty-five cents apiece. The money had come from William T., who would pay them a quarter apiece for small chores: sweeping the front porch of his house, picking peas and beans from his garden, polishing the banister with an old T-shirt.

  “Child labor! I could be arrested for this!”

  Mallie used to laugh when he said that but it had scared her. If William T. got arrested, what would they do? He was family. At night, if her mother and Charlie were asleep but not her, she used to look out the window into the darkness, up the hill in the direction of William T.’s house, to make sure that his always-on porch light was

  still on.

  A television mounted high on the wall behind the counter was muttering in a background-noise sort of way. Ads. A green lizard inclined its head and danced across the screen. A shiny car roared up a mountain road and came to an instant stop at the edge of a cliff. A bottle of beer was yanked out of a cooler, beaded with condensation. Then a news anchor’s mouth moved inaudibly against his fake-tan skin. Closed-captioning appeared across the screen below a photo — her graduation photo — self-correcting as it jerked along: “Assault victim Mallie Williams was recently released from long-term rehabilitation, raising questions once again about the identity and whereabouts of her assailant. New questions are also being raced . . . raised about the rolls . . . role of the Faith Love Church in the initial struggle over laggard . . . legal guardianship o
f Miss Williams. And the possible . . . ultimate question of all — What would Mallie have done, had she been awake to make the decision — remains unanswered. Miss Williams is unavoidable . . . unavailable for comment.” The news anchor shook his coiffed head and pursed his lips, and then the screen cut to a commercial for erectile dysfunction.

  “Help you?”

  Hassan must have asked the question several times already because he was glaring at her from behind the cash register. She hadn’t moved from the doorway. Some people changed when they got older, as if they exchanged one body for another one, a shorter, slumpier, worn-in version. But Hassan was aging in place. His dark eyes and cropped black hair were exactly the same as she remembered. It felt as if she were hiding something, standing there with the blue-green bob pulled over her head. You are hiding something, she reminded

  herself.

  “Sorry. I used to come in here when I was a little kid and it’s weird to see it again after so long.”

  He nodded. No smile. He was a serious man. She walked over and picked a stick of root beer candy out of the glass jar at the far end.

  “Thirty cents, miss.”

  When she was a child he had called her “kiddo.” Now she was “miss.”

  “They used to be a quarter,” she said.

  “And now they’re not.”

  She dug down in her pocket and hauled out a bill.

  “A Benjamin? You’re kidding, right?”

  Heat flushed her face and she pulled out more bills. They were all hundreds, fifties, with a single twenty at the bottom of the pile. His face darkened but he said nothing.

  “Sorry. Someone gave me a lot of money.”

  “I can see that.”

  He held the twenty in one hand and rang up the root beer stick in the other. The drawer popped open and he stepped back a half-step just before it hit him, the exact way he had done when she was a child. Then she saw the plastic jar to the right of the gum display. help bring mallie back! every little bit counts! Hassan began briskly counting out ones but his tone softened when he saw her staring.

  “Local girl,” he said. “You hear about her?”

  Everybody knows her face now. Mallie touched her head, the blue-green wig, and shook her head.

  “She used to come in here once in a while when she was a kid. It was an awful thing, what happened to her. First she gets raped and then she gets pregnant from the rape and she’s in a coma and she almost dies and in the middle of the whole thing they force her to have the kid when she’s got no idea what the hell’s happening.”

  “But didn’t she . . . didn’t I hear . . . isn’t she . . . she’s okay now, right?”

  He shrugged. “It’s my opinion that once something like that happens to you, you’re not ever going to be the way you were before.”

  He picked up the jar. Coins rattled at the bottom of it.

  “Her friend came to collect the money but I’m still keeping the jar on the counter. It’s a neighborhood thing at this point. Something like what happened to her? After a while, everyone’s affected. She belongs to all of us now.”

  He held out the sheaf of ones.

  “No,” she said. “Put it in the jar.”

  That brought a smile. It changed his whole face, that smile, changed him from a stern, wary man into a person who could see something new that made him happy.

  “See what I mean?” he said. “God help her, wherever that girl is now and whatever shape she’s in; she belongs to you now too.”

  Mallie lay in the dark motel room, hands clenched on the blankets, little electronic lights blinking here and there: television, bedside clock, sliver of hallway light beneath the door. She looked up at the ceiling and wondered if birds were flying high in the night sky above the roof of the motel. On a late fall day long ago, when she was a child, William T. had pointed out a flock of geese winging their way south. They were sitting together on his porch drinking hot cider made from the windfall apples in Burl’s orchard, the ones he put through his apple press.

  “They’re on the wing, Mallo Cup,” William T. had said. “No upstate New York winter for them. Sayonara, suckers. That’s what they’re saying up there.”

  “But how do they know where to go?”

  “They’re born knowing.”

  “How, though?” she insisted, but he had no answers.

  After their day together in New York City, when William T. explained about migratory birds, she read about their patterns. That, when they were on the move, they would ride the wind higher than the highest skyscrapers. They swooped into the current and let it carry them above everything human-made. Everything nature-made too, but for the invisible wind itself. During migration, many of the birds were invisible too, but invisibility didn’t mean they weren’t there. They were there, high in the sky, higher than the Empire State Building, bound for somewhere they could not see but trusted was there.

  Some cultures believed that birds carried messages from the world beyond this one. Some believed that the spirits of the dead lived on in the bodies of birds. Was there a life before and after this one? Were the spirits of her mother and father somewhere in the world still?

  She fell asleep and dreamed that Zach Miller was walking toward her down a road made of sand, smiling. Something was in his hand and he held it out to her, waiting for her to come take it, but when she tried to walk toward him, her legs wouldn’t move. She tried to talk, but no words came out. Panic filled her and she tried to hold her arms out to him, to wave, to let him know she was on her way, but her arms were too heavy to lift.

  She woke drenched in sweat and crying.

  A tiny red light blinked on the ceiling above her: the sprinkler system, ready to go off if there was a fire. Today was Thursday. Thursdays used to be her day to work at the women’s shelter. She had only to walk through the door of the shelter to be hit with the sadness and pain and fear that the women carried in their bodies. She had always felt so different from those women. It had been impossible to picture herself as one of them, as someone who had been through the fire and managed to emerge, a scarred and torn version of her former self.

  “Picture a place in your mind,” she used to tell them at the start of a session. “Think of a place where you feel safe, and peaceful, a place where nothing bad can happen to you.”

  Now, in the darkness, Zach appeared again in her mind. Charlie had said that Zach turned out to be an asshole. But she could not feel it. It made no sense to her. Zach was a Miller, and Millers were said to be crazy, but they weren’t crazy. What they were was wild, a quiet kind of wild. Millers weren’t meant for sitting still. Zach had worked days cutting and hauling giant pines for the lumber mill in Boonville, while she worked days and some evenings at the clinic and the shelter. They were building up their savings so they could head out once Charlie was grown. Bust their lives wide open, see what the future might bring. They were the masters of their fates, the captains of their souls, at least that’s what Zach used to say.

  She gave in and let herself remember a night with him, a Thursday night when she had driven back from the shelter. Up and over Glass Factory, up and over Potato Hill, Starr Hill, all the way to Forest­port and the cabin.

  When she had gotten home, she had leaned against the truck’s warm hood for a minute to feel the ticking heart of the engine, then walked up the wooden stairs and eased the door open so it wouldn’t wake either Charlie in the sleeping loft or Zach in their bedroom. The spidery red lines of the old stereo glimmered behind the bed. Brandi Carlile, still singing, even though Zach was asleep. She crossed her arms and pulled off her black T-shirt, her soft leggings.

  The cotton sheets were cool. She laid her cheek against Zach’s flung-out arm and breathed him in. When he slept, it was like every­thing in him soothed itself out into a single flowing current. As if anything that had broken or unraveled during the day wove itse
lf together again when he was asleep. He pulled her over and wrapped himself around her, as if he had been waiting for her in his sleep.

  When he was awake, Zach Miller moved lightly and fast, like he wasn’t bound to the same rules of gravity as most people. But at night, gravity pulled him back down, made him heavy and dark. The earth reaching up and claiming him for its own. He had swung his leg over her.

  “Too heavy?” he whispered.

  She shook her head against his. In the beginning, when they were first together back in high school, those long afternoons with the sun coming through the window and the sheets damp with sweat, he would sometimes push himself up on his elbows so that he was suspended above her, afraid that he was crushing her. But she would pull him down again. She wanted his full length stretched out on her, covering her.

  It was just the two of them back then, skipping school to be alone in his house while his parents were at work. Later, after Zach’s parents moved to Alaska, she and Charlie moved into the cabin that Zach himself had built. Some might say they were young, too young to be taking care of themselves like that, let alone her brother. But they weren’t.

  “Hey,” he said that night, that Thursday night when she returned from the shelter, and she flipped over so that her face was against his and kissed him. Soft. His body was still slow, but he was returning from wherever it was that sleep took a person.

  She stroked his hair back from his brow, there in the darkness where she couldn’t see him. It had been three years since they began living together. There was nothing she didn’t know about his body, his skin and muscles and bone. They made no noise. His fingers tugged her underwear down over her legs and then they were pressed together. He slept naked, something else she loved about him. Some might say they were too young to know for sure how they felt, but that too was wrong.

  Now, in the motel, she pulled the blanket tight around her like a sleeping bag and laced her hands over the silken silver scar. They had cut a hole in her and pulled a baby through it. She couldn’t think about it. But she had to think about it. She had to figure it out. None of it made sense but she had to make sense of it. She remembered one young woman at the shelter, her eyes staring up from the table, face and body rigid with worry. Two kids in the shelter, no family to turn to.