The Opposite of Fate (ARC)

by Alison McGhee

  “Think of a safe place,” Mallie had told her. “Where nothing bad can happen to you.”

  “I don’t have a place like that,” the young woman had said.

  “Make one up, then,” Mallie had told her, and waited, her hands cupped beneath the woman’s heavy head, until her face relaxed and her eyes went soft. In the end she must have dreamed up a place where she could truly feel safe, because by the end of the massage, the young woman had fallen sound asleep.

  Mallie had never had to make up a place where she felt safe, because she had Zach. Zach Miller had been the place where nothing bad could happen to her.

  William T.

  The little phone buzzed deep in his pocket and he dropped the armful of birch he was holding. The chunks scattered, one narrowly missing his foot.

  “Mallie?”

  A man on the other end cleared his throat and said, “It’s Zach.”

  Dust motes danced and twirled in the golden air of the last rays of the sun, slanting through the door of the storage barn. A large spider skittered away from the orderly row of wood he had stacked in the last hour. The boy’s voice sounded lower than it should. He’s not a boy, William T. reminded himself. It had been more than a year since he had last seen Zach Miller. All this flew through his mind in an instant, as a dark arrow of fear rose inside him. Why was Zach calling? Beyond the faint static of the connection he heard a bark, a loud woof that ended in an upward yip.

  “That dog has a bark like Sir’s,” he said.

  A pause, and then: “It is Sir.”

  “It can’t be. Sir disappeared from Trish’s.”

  “I took him. Which is something I should have told you a long time ago.”

  “You couldn’t have taken him, Zach. You were in Montana when he disappeared from Trish’s.”

  William T. sounded teacherlike to himself, as if he were explaining a geography problem to a not-bright student. Here’s Montana, see, and here’s Sterns, and there’s a very long distance between the two places. But Zach was talking again.

  “I took him when I went back,” he said. “When Mallie had the, that . . . operation.”

  Zach must be talking about the C-section. William T. saw the day clearly in his head: A cool day in June. The hospital employee parking lot with him and Crystal, Beanie watching from the back door. No Zach. Unless he had hidden himself away. Stay calm, he told himself. Be Switzerland.

  “You were there? Why?”

  “Because. Someone needed to be there. Someone who knew her, who knew who she was.” The boy’s voice turned hard on itself at the end of the sentence, angry, but he kept going. “I was in the woods behind the hospital.”

  “Just standing there?”

  “Yes. Until I knew it was over.”

  “But Crystal and I were there.”

  “I know.” Zach’s voice was quiet, laced with apology. So Zach Miller had been there at the same time, he had seen William T. and Crystal, but he had not come forward. Switzerland, he told himself. Zach was talking again, as if he could hear William T.’s thoughts.

  “And when I knew it was done, I drove up to Trish’s and I waited until it was late and all the lights were out and then I went through their back door into the dog yard and I took Sir.”

  “What do you mean you went through their back door? How?”

  “Broke in. Kind of, anyway. Trish keeps the key under the welcome mat.”

  William T. felt the ghost of a smile flit across his face. The whole valley knew that Trish kept a key under the welcome mat. His free hand began to peel the parchment bark off a piece of white birch. Zach Miller had returned. He had been there, watching from the woods.

  “How’s Sir?” William T. said. An inane question, but a neutral one. He was trying not to judge. He was being Switzerland.

  “Good. He’s good.”

  Screw Switzerland. Anger rose up in William T. and he couldn’t hold it back.

  “Look, Zach. Why didn’t you tell us you had him? We loved that goddamn dog too.”

  “I know. I’m sorry. I punched in your number a bunch of times. But I kept imagining the sound of your voice if you picked up and it would’ve made me too sad. When I left home I had to shut it all down, William T.”

  Too sad didn’t sound like Zach Miller. Zach Miller was not a sad person. But it had been a long time, William T. reminded himself, and none of them the same people they had been. He held the phone to his ear with one hand and began chunking wood onto the stack with the other. A steady, even row, cross-hatched on either end. He had been stacking wood his whole life. Repetitive motion neutralized anger and brought calm.

  “Have you talked to her?” he said. “Since she left?”

  “Since she left? Isn’t she with you?”

  “No. She took off a week ago in the Datsun.”

  “How can she be gone? Can she drive? Does she have —”

  “Her brain is fine, if that’s what you’re talking about. I told you that already. She gets tired. Maybe a little confused sometimes. Who doesn’t?”

  Chunk. Chunk. Chunk. The orderly row of wood grew higher. Zach was silent on the other end of the line. Not that it was a line. Cell phones had no lines. They had, what? William T. didn’t even know. He wondered if the endless television loop from the early days of the vigil played in Zach’s head the way it did in his: the protesters in their circles, the billboards with Mallie’s smiling face receding behind grim black letters: my heart was beating at 9 days and so is my baby’s. fingernails at 19 days. let me live!

  “Zach, how are you?”

  What he meant was how was Zach Miller, really, in his heart and soul? How was he surviving, in the midst of the ghosts that swirled around them both? But Zach must have understood, because he answered right away.

  “I’m trying to figure it out, William T. What I should do.”

  “About Mallie? Jesus, Zach” — he could hear the tension surging in his voice and he fought it back down — “she loves you. There’s no one who means to that girl what you do.”

  “She’s in the dark about a lot of things, William T.”

  “Like Sir?”

  “Like Sir, yeah.”

  There was a tone in the boy’s voice — he’s not a boy, William T.

  reminded himself — that made him uneasy. Did he have a new girlfriend? Zach Miller was a young good-looking boy — man, he reminded himself, man — with a big heart, and he had gone a long, long time without Mallie and without the hope of Mallie. Don’t ask, William T. told himself. Don’t say a word. And he didn’t. He didn’t think he could bear it if Zach Miller had fallen in love with another girl.

  “Does she talk about the baby, William T.?”

  “No. Not to me, anyway. She knows she had one. She knows it was adopted. She knows it’s with a foster family somewhere in Utica.”

  “Him, William T. Don’t call him ‘it.’ ”

  Who are you to tell me what not to call that baby, William T. thought, when I’m the one who can’t get the fact of him out of my head, when I’m the one who keeps driving down there and driving back, but again he kept quiet.

  “Call her, Zach. If there are things she’s in the dark about, like you say, then she deserves to hear about them from you.”

  The rules:

  Drive past the little gray house and look once, casually, the way anyone might glance at a house he was passing.

  If no one was going into or coming out of the front door, then drive around the block and turn down the alley. William T. knew which garage belonged to the little gray house — white with green trim — and he could putt past and take another casual glance.

  If there were no signs of life either front or back, then he had to drive on down to the end of the alley, take a left and drive straight out of the neighborhood.

  Those were the rules William T. ha
d made for himself. But no rule said he couldn’t drive as slowly as he wanted, and today he crawled along, no more than three miles per hour. No one was going into or coming out of the back door. He crept by the garage, the small, tired backyard with its flowerbed filled with marigolds and weeds, a laundry-less clothesline, a sandbox covered with a small blue tarp. The chain-link fence sagged in one section. It was an ordinary house on an ordinary block that belonged to an ordinary attorney for the child and his social-worker wife.

  Should he break his own rule? Should he go around the block and the alley one more time, just on the off chance?

  “No,” he said aloud.

  But he did anyway. And there they were.

  Aaron and Melissa Stampernick were unaware of anyone but the child between them. Each held a hand. One, two, three, wheee. William T. could still feel that motion in his own hands, from long ago. The abrupt tug of muscles in his arms and shoulders and the weight of a small body swung up into the air.

  Tiny. Slight. Pale. Overalls and a hat. William T. could not see the color of the child’s eyes. He rolled down the window as if he were an ordinary man who wanted some fresh air, when what he really wanted was to hear the child’s voice.

  “One, two, three . . .” Aaron and Melissa singsonged, then, “Wheee,” came the small voice in response.

  He put his foot down on the gas and drove away. He’d seen them. And one of their foster children. Aaron and Melissa Stampernick were also religious, deeply so. Christians. He knew that from the newspaper articles. But had that stood in Aaron Stampernick’s way when it came to the baby they’d made Mallie give birth to? It had not. What about the separation of church and state? Didn’t their religion, and Lucia’s, prejudice them against making a fair decision? William T. thought so, and he had made his thoughts known. But “it’s not a crime to be religious,” he had been reminded. “Many people are religious.”

  Now he’d seen the Stampernicks close up. Aaron Stampernick knew where that baby was living. It was maddening, watching him and Melissa coming out of their house, swinging a child down the steps, knowing that they held information William T. needed but were bound by law not to give it to him. Did no one understand that he, William T. Jones, needed to see that baby? Even once. Just to settle his mind.

  Him, William T. Don’t call him “it.” Zach’s voice, stern on the phone. Beanie’s voice at the playground. It? Him? Everything was too complicated. Was he, William T., in the wrong? He pictured the cardboard box that he had tossed all those clippings into, the indistinct slump of it in the closet, the psychic weight of his obsession. Did he in fact have some kind of borderline mental illness, an illness that kept him doing the same thing over and over, with nothing to show for it?

  But maybe he did have something to show for it. Because Mallie had come back to the world.

  How did you let go of things that kept eating away at you? How was it possible to let go of his anger, and his grief, and his worry? Should he even try to let go of those things? He thought of Burl, who every time William T. saw him seemed light and happy, proud of all the money he had raised for Mallie and glad that she had taken off on her own. “She needed to get out of Sterns,” he had said to William T., “and none of us should hold her back.”

  He thought of Crystal, so quiet next to him on the porch. Dancing alone in the kitchen of the diner. Would he ever get good enough at dancing to waltz her around the living room? Big, clumsy man that he was. Was he holding her back? Holding all of them back?

  Mallie

  She put on the wig, checked out of the motel in the late afternoon even though it was paid through the following morning, and headed north on 12, then right onto 28, into the Adirondacks, ticking off the towns and the signs as she drove.

  Thendara. Old Forge. Inlet.

  Fly-tying. Shear Madness. Taxidermy. Deer hides.

  At a bend in the road just north of Inlet was a bar with little white lights strung up around the windows and door and pickups and old cars parked here and there in the gravel lot. A man with a dish towel in hand, bartender, from the looks of him, stared out the window as she passed. The wig, maybe. Its unearthly blue-green color.

  Twilight was approaching, the time when deer waited just beyond the shoulder of the road to cross. Mallie slowed and kept watch for the shine of their bright eyes. She drove one-handed and slipped the other one under her T-shirt, over the scar. Over the space that stayed stubbornly blank in memory, even though it had happened to her. Had they given her a drug? Was anaesthesia involved? Or maybe they just cut into her and lifted the baby out. Maybe they thought that because she was unconscious, it wouldn’t hurt.

  Zach’s cousin Joe once had emergency surgery after a car hit him when he was changing a tire by the side of the road. The surgeons had removed his lacerated spleen and part of his intestines, which necessitated lifting some of his internal organs out of his body and then replacing them when they had finished. But once your insides were displaced and then returned, your body could not ever be the same. That’s what Joe said. Strange pains came and went. Food felt different once it was eaten. He felt hungry and not-hungry in unfamiliar ways. Even the way he walked had changed.

  “I don’t care if everyone says I look just the same,” he had told Zach. “I’m not just the same.”

  Even if you had not had your insides displaced and rearranged, and even if you hadn’t been living in limbo for a year and a half while the world went on around you, you couldn’t remain the exact same person you had always been. The difference between Mallie

  and other people was that others had been conscious through the process of changing. She pictured herself in that hospital bed, unaware of the world revolving around her, coming into light and turning away from light. And her clinging to the surface like everyone else, carried into darkness and carried out of darkness.

  A little diner appeared in the distance. She put on her blinker and pulled in and made sure her wig was on straight. That diner smell of pancake syrup and a hot grill and frying hamburgers and wet-mopped floors and flannel and coffee and butter. Booths with two adults crowded in on each side, tables with tired parents and two or three kids bouncing on the chairs. Each tabletop held a miniature jukebox. Don’t look at the cash register, Mallie; don’t check to see if there’s a plastic jar there, but she looked anyway: No jar. No photo of her former self, staring out at the world.

  “Sit wherever you want, sweetheart,” said a voice behind her. “Coffee?” Without waiting for an answer, the waitress flipped a mug right side up and filled it from the pot in her hand. Then she fished a quarter out of the deep pocket of her apron and put it on the table, nodding at the little jukebox.

  “Here you go, honey. Play yourself a few songs.”

  The waitress was a honey sweetheart darling kind of person. Three for a quarter. Three songs. She flipped through the selection and punched in the numbers for Johnny Cash, Hank Williams, and Glen Campbell. These are for you, William T. Music filled the tiny booth — “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry,” which was William T.’s favorite song — and she pictured Hank’s voice swirling up into the sky and over the miles to North Sterns. Hovering in the sky above the house where William T. and Crystal might already be asleep.

  “I grew up listening to these guys,” the waitress said. She was back, her order pad in her hand. “In this very diner, as a matter of fact. That jukebox is older than I am.”

  “Did you ever go away?”

  “Once. I started college at MVCC, down in Utica. I didn’t like being away from home, though.” The waitress lifted her shoulders and dropped them in a What can I say? sort of way. “I know it’s not my business, but are you okay? You look kind of sad.”

  Mallie reached up and touched her wig. Was her real hair showing? Did the waitress recognize her? Everybody knows her face now.

  “Can I ask you something?” Mallie said. “Do you have any kids?”


  “I do. Three of them.”

  “Did you want them?”

  “If by wanting, you mean were they planned, then no. My husband and I are not poster children for contraception.” She laughed. “But do I want them now? Yes. Even if I want to kill them sometimes. Which I don’t. That was a joke.”

  “Do you believe in abortion?”

  “No. I don’t believe in abortion.”

  Mallie looked down at the paper menu, which doubled as a place mat. Hank was still singing above the clinking silverware and grill sounds of the diner. The waitress touched her arm.

  “For me, I mean. I don’t believe in it for me. But sometimes it boils down to a bad choice and a less-bad choice. You know what I mean? It’s a hard, hard thing.”

  A bad choice and a less-bad choice. A hard, hard thing. The space beneath the scar was still empty and blank. The waitress finally said, “Do you know what you want, honey? If not, the special’s a good choice.”

  Ham steak with peas and biscuits. The waitress returned with the plate, a long oval with a green border, and the low hum of conversation washed up on the shore of the booth and lulled her. When she scooped up the last bite of peas, the waitress brought over a piece of pie on the house, strawberry-rhubarb with a cloud of whipped cream. Mallie ate that too, then she added up the bill in her head, including tax and a big tip, and left some of Burl’s cash under the empty coffee mug.

  Back in the truck, she felt around for the little black phone, invisible in the bottom of the box of fortune cookies. Her link to the people who knew her. Three missed calls from William T., along with one unheard voicemail.