The Opposite of Fate (ARC)

by Alison McGhee

  He had gotten the job right out of high school. He graduated from Proctor High School and he thought he’d go to Mohawk Valley Community College and get his associate’s degree, but no. He didn’t mind roofing. It was hard work. He was up on someone’s house all day, crouching along with the nail gun, nailing down square after square, and there was a rhythm to it. Hunched over, working at a slant, a couple or three stories above the ground. His back hurt pretty much all the time, but still. There was something about that kind of work that people who’d never done it couldn’t understand.

  He always wore a cap. A Yankees cap, usually. He had a bunch of them, a collection, that began with a single cap that his little sister had given him on his birthday a long time ago. Now everyone gave him Yankees stuff: caps and shirts and key chains and shot glasses. And so on. The thing was he didn’t really even like the Yankees. Too full of themselves. But it was too late to let everyone know that now. They’d look back on all these years and all their gifts and think, All this time and I never even knew? He didn’t want anyone to feel dumb. So he just kept quiet.

  Roofing was dangerous. How could it not be? He was way up there, and even though he nailed up the supports, they wouldn’t keep him up there if he fell. It was a long way to the ground. The nail gun itself was dangerous. When he first joined the crew, he’d put two nails right through the palm of his hand. He still had the scars. Little white knots.

  He lived at home. Once he got out of high school, the plan had been to live with Mack and a couple of the others in an apartment, maybe in Whitesboro, maybe even Clinton, but that fell through. Actually, those guys did all live together, over on Genesee in a triplex, but he didn’t hang out there much. Correction: he didn’t hang out there at all.

  When he was on the roof it was almost like he was in another world. Only twenty, thirty, forty feet above the ground but everything was different. The wind sounded different. Steadier. He was closer to the tops of the trees. Sometimes branches drooped over the roof and he had to ask the homeowners if they wanted them pruned back. “Prune” sounded better than “chop off.”

  He was closer to the birds. That there were so many birds at the tops of trees was something that surprised him when he first started out. Sometimes they hung out on the roofline, watching him and the rest of the crew, or they perched on the edge of a skylight. He hated skylights. They felt wrong to him. A roof should be solid, impenetrable. No light should come through a roof. A skylight reminded him of the soft spot on a baby’s head, something that scared him. He remembered when his little sister was born and he used to watch her brains pulsing up and down through that soft spot.

  “What if we drop her?” he had said to his mother. “What would happen to her brain?”

  His mother had laughed. “No one’s going to drop our baby girl.”

  He had been nine years old then, and his mother in her forties. She carried his baby sister around all the time, holding her like a football or propped up against her chest. His mother didn’t seem scared at all, and neither did his baby sister.

  But he was. What if he dropped her? He was afraid for a long time, until she started to crawl. Then things seemed safer, somehow, although when he thought about it, they weren’t safer at all, especially for a girl.

  William T.

  He was beginning to get the hang of it. His feet were finding the rhythm, and for the heck of it he had added a little arm swoop on the tricky quarter-turn.

  “Let me tell you something, Jonathan,” he said to Johnny, who was washing the kitchen table with the red sponge. All Johnny’s tasks took him a long time, and whenever he was home for a visit he went at them with patience and determination. “Not all YouTube videos are created equal. Thank God we found the Waltz Boss.”

  All the online waltz instructors, no matter where he found them, seemed to be male, which in a way made sense, because they led and their partners followed, but in another way didn’t make sense. Why shouldn’t the female lead? And what if the partners were same-sex? Did they take turns leading? That would be egalitarian, but it would also mean learning both how to lead and how to follow.

  “Who’s to say who should lead and who should follow? Know what I’m talking about, Jonathan?”

  Johnny looked up from the table and smiled. He was working on a hardened drip of candle wax. William T. began to hum “Moon River,” which, although he had never known it until now, was a waltz. Another factoid from the Waltz Boss: many well-known songs were actually waltzes.

  “One two three, one two three,” William T. sang to himself. “Moon river, wider than a mile.”

  He concentrated on the quarter-turns, dipping and swaying with his arms clutched around the couch pillow, imagining that he was dancing with Crystal. At one point he glanced up to see Johnny standing at the end of the table, smiling.

  “We’ll get there, Jo-o-o-na-than,” William T. sang, to the tune of Moon River. “We’ll dance across the room, someday.”

  At that, Johnny laughed, sponge in hand, soapsuds trickling down his arm. What would become of Johnny, when he and Crystal and Burl were gone from the earth? Who would watch over him? Would he understand, when the day came, that they hadn’t chosen to leave him but that this was just the way life worked? Crystal and William T. had taken care of him as best they could in their wills, and so had Burl. But wills were about money, which made things easier but wasn’t the living, breathing presence in Johnny’s life of the people who loved him.

  What more could they do but try, though? Just as they had tried with Mallie. They had fought the church, fought Lucia, fought the decision. But the baby had been born anyway.

  “What do you think’s going through Mallie’s mind, Johnny?” he said now. “What’s she thinking about the baby? You think there’s any chance she might try to get it back?”

  At the word “baby,” Johnny looked up again, smiling. He loved babies. If a family with a baby came into the diner, Johnny would shuffle his way over to their table and hold out a finger for the baby to grasp. He sometimes brought over a coloring book and crayons too, no matter that a baby in a car seat or sling had no use for a coloring book.

  “I know you like babies, Johnny,” William T. said. “I’m not anti-baby myself. But Jesus H. Christ, what a mess that would be.”

  Charlie’s words — She needs to get her life back, William T. And so do you — haunted him. And so did Burl’s: She can get away from here. From them. From us. From the ghosts. William T. didn’t want to be a ghost. He didn’t want to hold her back.

  Later, after he’d dropped Johnny off at the group home, he drove to the playground again. It was a kind of compulsion at this point. If that baby lived somewhere nearby it was a near certainty that it would come to this playground. He parked under the mulberry tree and went straight to the bench. Burl had told him he would have to come to peace with the baby being in the world, but who was Burl to dictate how William T. should live?

  Maybe it would be this way from now on, with the people he trusted most telling him to move on, to get over it, to be more help and less hindrance. The worst part was that Burl was right about one fundamental fact. That baby would always be in the world. Whether Mallie ended up with it or not, there was no way to avoid the fact of its existence.

  All the parents, all the children. Their voices blended together. Don’t throw sand. That’s not nice. There you go. Wait your turn now. Don’t budge the line. Give me a hug.

  “Mr. Jones?”

  A tall young man stood next to the bench and gestured to it, then said, “May I?” William T. nodded automatically, then flinched when he realized who it was. It was him. The attorney for the child. The man who had approved of Lucia getting custody, the man who had been present in the second, closed custody hearing upon her death, the man who knew everything. Aaron Stampernick. His thoughts crawled in a panic inside his head, the way ants did when their anthill was disturbed.

/>   The young man sat down and William T. started to get up, then sat back down. Had the attorney for the child seen him driving by their house all those times? Had he and his wife seen him from the porch that day? He had never been this close to Aaron Stampernick. The young man was looking intently at William T., as if he were sizing him up. As if he knew something about him.

  “I’m Aaron,” he said, and he held out his hand.

  William T. shook the hand. He was touching the hand of the man who had seen the baby, who had overseen its care, helped decide its fate.

  “William T. Jones,” he said, and the man smiled as if he had said something amusing.

  “Yes, I know.” He cleared his throat. “We, my wife, Melissa, and I, wanted you to know how sorry we are. We know how hard this has all been on you.”

  “No, you don’t.”

  Aaron Stampernick bent his head in a churchlike sort of bow. Anger rose inside William T. He could just picture him in church, he and his wife side by side, the baby on one of their laps, a bag of crayons and paper in case it got bored. No, the baby was too young to color. The baby was not even a year old yet. Coloring would come later.

  “You have no idea how hard it all was on me,” William T. went on. “On all of us, me and Crystal and Zach and Charlie. And Mallie. How hard it all still is. The way you and Lucia and the guardian ad litem and the attorney for Mallie — what a joke — and the judge acted as if you alone knew what was in Mallie’s mind.”

  His words spilled out, tumbling like Nine Mile Creek in the spring thaw. He was not being Switzerland. He was not calm. Aaron Stampernick stared at him and nodded. Why was he nodding?

  “What do you think would have been best for her, Mr. Jones?”

  Did he not see that this was a question that couldn’t be answered? What happened to Mallie never should have happened to her. This was where William T. always got stuck. This was why he went first to abortion: get that thing out of her. Because the fact of the pregnancy was the sum total of all the hideous events of that dark night.

  “My wife and I struggled with it, to be honest,” the young man said. “We used to go over it and over it.”

  “That church of Lucia’s had the answer,” William T. said. “They proclaimed it loud and clear.”

  “Not all of them. Not all of them were sure what the right thing to do was. Some of them contacted me.”

  “If that’s true, then you’re guilty of silence. You should have been more vocal about their concerns. You let her be led off like a lamb to the slaughter.” Biblical images from his childhood Sunday school rolled through his head, shepherds and stars and lambs and men in white robes with staffs.

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Jones. For your troubles and Mallie’s troubles and Zach’s troubles. And for Lucia’s troubles too. But I’m not sorry about how the baby situation worked out. He’s healthy and he’s happy and that’s something for all of us to be glad about.”

  Worked out? Not one thing had worked out. The young man was talking again.

  “Have you heard from Zach?”

  “Why do you want to know?”

  The young man sighed. It was a long, deep sigh and he didn’t try to hide it.

  “Because he’s a good man,” he said simply. “And I hope he’s all right. I understand he’s a private person and he needed to get away and start over, but still. I haven’t heard from him in a long time.”

  As if he had any right to ask about Zach. But something about Aaron Stampernick’s presence, his quiet, his lack of anger, had an effect on William T. He shifted on the bench so he could study the young man. He was older than William T. would have thought, maybe thirties instead of twenties, and thinner than he had looked across the parking lot that one awful day, or across the lawn that day last week.

  “I hope he’s all right too,” William T. said, surprising himself.

  The young man nodded and got up off the bench. He stood in front of William T. and the sun shone off his sandy hair. “You’re a good man too,” he said. “I’m sorry you had to go through this.”

  “Have to go through this,” William T. corrected him. “For the foreseeable future.”

  “Not necessarily. Everything changes.”

  Aaron Stampernick reminded William T. of Burl. Set on moving ahead, letting the past be the past. Maybe that was the way he had to be, given the fact that as attorney for the child, he had been legally obligated to oversee the care of the child of a rapist. Maybe, given his situation, Aaron Stampernick had to believe that everything would change, and for the better. The young man held out his hand and William T., after a moment of hesitation, shook it.

  Mallie

  When she had worked with women at the shelter, she sometimes closed her eyes. It was easier to channel energy through her hands that way, easier to find the knots, the crunchy places, as her teacher used to call them. When her fingers found those places, a story came with them. Vigilance, fear, trauma, all held in the silent body of the woman on the massage table. Images sometimes stole into Mallie’s mind as she worked: A car or a bed or a kitchen or a couch. A baby, a child, a man. A silent story that directed her fingers and guided her touch, a story that helped her draw the tension out of the woman on the table, a story that helped bring her calm and peace.

  If she could bring peace to others, maybe she could bring it to herself. If not with her fingers, then with her mind. Maybe she could once-upon-a-time herself to some kind of resolution.

  She thought about her Therapeutic Massage for Trauma Survivors textbook, how it described all physical bodies as keepers of stories, and how trauma survivors were often unaware of the stories trapped inside their own bodies. Maybe they shut down the memory of those stories because of the violence inherent in them. Maybe they did so instinctively, for reasons of survival. But when the immediate crisis had passed, it was crucial for survivors to unearth these experiences and learn how to absorb them into their present and future lives. Otherwise there was a chance they wouldn’t be fully present in their bodies. This might manifest as difficulty in sexual relationships, emotional and even physical numbness, an inability to recall the events surrounding the trauma, and a higher rate of depression.

  Back in class, Mallie had studied the text dutifully, written papers and passed her exams. She and the other students at that point practiced massage only on one another, and under supervision. It was only when she began working with the women at the shelter that the idea of a story trapped inside a body became real. Sometimes, under her fingers and palms, a knot would gather and then recede, gather and then recede. The muscles and blood and tendons and bones of the woman’s body were trying to bring something to the surface. She could sense it. In the beginning, it was almost impossible to release whatever was trapped. Call it trauma, call it tension, call it story: whatever its name, it was lodged far and deep.

  It was Zach who had helped her come up with the idea of the dark bird.

  “What if you pictured it — everything that had happened to the women — as if it were an animal?” he said. “Some kind of animal that attacked them?”

  “And then do what?” she said. “Imagine I was fighting off the animal?”

  “Maybe. Why not?”

  She tried. A snarling dog with a vicious bite, a crocodile erupting out of a swamp, a rattlesnake’s fangs. None of them worked. The imagined noise and motion and ferocity distracted her from the silent stories trapped inside her clients’ bodies. It was only when she pictured their pain as a bird — a dark, hovering bird — that she was able to draw it forth.

  The man she had named Darkness was alive in her mind now, but he kept morphing. He wouldn’t stay put in the story she had constructed for him: roofer, meth-head, self-hatred. He kept spilling out. A life was growing up around him. She saw him standing on a roof. She saw him talking to his mother and his sister. She saw him wandering the aisles of Hassan’s Superette. She sa
w him bent over a row of shingles on the steep pitch of a tall house next to a playground. She saw him dreaming menacing dreams, reliving the crunch of the clay pot on her skull. The story had taken on its own life.

  “Something hard, something impossible, something good,” Zach used to say when she came home from a night at the shelter. “Go.”

  It was a routine they had started back in the beginning, when she was new to massage and would come home wrung out from the tension and suffering of the women. She hadn’t yet learned how to shake it off. The body memory these women held inside them was invisible and everywhere, and in the beginning, remnants would attach themselves to her.

  Their teacher had warned them of this.

  “Everyone in the world is connected,” she had said, “and sometimes that connection can be dangerous.”

  People who cut hair, people who gave massages, therapists who talked others through their haunted pasts: all were at risk. You had to figure out a way not to get stuck in others’ pain, the teacher said, and there was no one way to do it. A haircutter might set up a mirror at a certain angle, so that her clients’ stories would refract off it and not be absorbed by the haircutter. A therapist might follow a ritual after each session — wash her hands, splash water on her face, open a window and breathe in the outside air.

  “It’s tricky for those of us who give massages,” the teacher said, “because our skin is literally connected to another’s skin. We absorb others’ experiences and we have to figure out how to release them not only from the client but from ourselves.”

  “Look, Mal,” Zach had said after a few weeks. “You got to figure out a way to stay sane here, or this is not going to work.”

  She had lost weight. She was pale. In her dreams she couldn’t make her legs work, she couldn’t scream; she couldn’t get away from nameless and faceless men who were trying to hurt the women she worked on. She had nodded — yes, she needed to figure it out, but how?