The Opposite of Fate (ARC)

by Alison McGhee

  His mother. Beth. They would know.

  There was nothing he could do about any of it. It didn’t make sense to tell now. What would be gained? That was what he told himself. But the truth was that the reason he didn’t tell was he kept picturing the look in Beth’s eyes if she knew what he had done. How it had ended up the way it had, he didn’t know. He didn’t know. He didn’t know, didn’t know. How something that had begun so simply, with a few pills and a little money, then a few more and a little more money, then a few more, then a few more, then a lot more, and a lot more money, ended up with her on the pavement with her head dented in — it was like he had had nothing to do with it.

  He had made a mistake. A bad one.

  If he could tell her he was sorry, he would. If he could somehow transport his sorry into her, through the air, through the ether, by telepathy, in a dream, any possible or impossible way to let her know how sorry he was that what happened that night had begun with him, he would.

  The video played out in his head — beer, rain, church, dented head — when he was up on the roof, in the rhythm of the nail gun. When the sun beat down and he was moving steadily and slowly at a crouch, square to square. There were cliffs on the side of every roof. The gravity that held the house down, that held the shingles down, that held him down on the squares? That same gravity would pull him straight down to the ground if he misstepped.

  Guys fell when they were shingling. It was something that happened. A hazard of the trade.

  In another of the possible futures he imagined for himself, he looked down from the roof and saw a cop talking to Billy. Relaxed, no urgency, just a conversation. But Billy glanced up at him, there on the roof, and the cop did too. As if he were sizing him up, somehow. That was when he knew the jig was up. That somehow they had tracked him down. Then the cop started walking — ambling, you could call it; that was the kind of walk it was — across the scruffy grass where they dropped the old shingles and the rusted nails onto the tarp, toward where he was standing on the roof. And he pictured Beth’s face and his mother’s face and the questions they would have to answer and everything they would have to go through, and that was when he put his backup plan into action. Because the look on Beth’s face, that was the one thing he would not ever be able to bear. He got up and stretched the way roofers stretch, a half-crouch, and then he stood up straight and walked straight up to the ridgeline and then he ran down the slope and dove. Headfirst.

  He had played it out many times. There was one good thing about that possible future, which was that, cops or not, it could happen anytime he wanted it to.

  Mallie

  She sat on the steps of the Coburn Memorial Library, an apple and a bag of chips from the gas station next to the Sleepy Inn — forty-five dollars a night for a single — next to her. She was tired. Tired. Tired.

  A crow in the oak tree next to the library cried its harsh cry and she looked up as it spread its wings and flew off. Was it true, as William T. claimed, that she had always loved birds? Or had his own love of birds traveled into her and never left? It was his flock of lame birds, back when she was a child, that had opened her eyes to the fact that birds were everywhere, silent or loud, swooping down or soaring up, wings beating frantically or still and calm. From his flock she had learned about birds that were threatened, birds with broken wings and broken legs and broken spirits, which had to be approached with caution, so filled with fear were they.

  A shadow fell across the grass and the cool marble steps of the library. A hand was on her shoulder, and she knew that hand.

  “Mallie.”

  His voice. His hand. She should have gotten the wig out of the truck. She should have put it on. He lowered himself and sat next to her on the step. A white bandage was wound around the deep cleft between his thumb and index finger, and she stared at it because she couldn’t look at his face.

  “William T. told me you’d left and then when I heard about the girl who fainted at the restaurant, I just knew it was you,” he said. “I’ve been out looking. I’ve been looking all night.”

  “It’s morning now,” she said, and, “You hurt your thumb,” and then everything turned blurry and she leaned forward and rested her head on her knees.

  The words sounded polite and calm to her ear. They didn’t sound as if they came from the mouth of a suffocating person, a person with a torment of unspoken words churning and bubbling within.

  “I’m glad you have Sir,” she said in the same polite voice.

  “Mallie.” His voice was his but not his. Too quiet for him. Too, what? Unsure? Was that the word? She couldn’t look at him.

  “Did you know that my mother died? But Charlie and William T. and Crystal and Johnny are still alive. So that’s good.”

  She watched his hand, the one with the hurt thumb. The hand was draped over his knee now. It curled and flexed, curled and flexed. There were Band-Aids on two other fingers.

  “Like Burl,” she said, pointing. Paper cuts and Band-Aids. “Like a mailman.”

  “Like a cook. Cuts and burns.”

  “Burl’s alive too. He’s good. He said to say hi.”

  Burl had not said to say hi. There was no limit to the stupid things that kept coming out of her mouth. She didn’t know how to talk to him anymore. She reached out and pressed her thumb against the white bandage.

  “I’m sorry you hurt yourself,” she said. With every word, she hated herself more. But then he reached out and took both her hands in his and she fell against him, crying, and then his arms were around her and he was crying too. The steps of the library were cold beneath her. In her head, she kept hearing Zach’s and the girl’s footsteps approaching down the alley. She opened her eyes against his shoulder to see the curl of dark ink rising out of the hem of his T-shirt. The tattoo she had glimpsed last night. Zach had not had a tattoo when she knew him. Knew. Past tense. She turned her head so she couldn’t see the ink.

  “It happened so fast, didn’t it? You and her. The baby.”

  He didn’t say anything for a while. Maybe she hadn’t spoken out loud. But then he answered.

  “Is that how it feels to you? Fast?”

  There was something careful in his voice. Careful was not something she had ever heard from Zach Miller. She was sitting right next to him but he couldn’t see the huge black bird beating inside her chest, trying to spread its enormous and powerful wings against the cage of ribs. Fly away, dark bird. Swoop and wheel over this sun-bleached town. She willed the bird to stop. Stop trying to open its beak inside her chest and send that wild caw clamoring out. Zach was talking again.

  “I can’t imagine what it’s like,” he said, “to be you now.”

  There it was again. That careful tone, as if he were looking for words that wouldn’t hurt, wouldn’t upset. She lifted her eyes to his shadowed face. It was him but not quite him, in the same way that Charlie and William T. and Crystal were themselves but not quite. The same way she herself must not be quite the same.

  “I’m trying to figure out how it feels to be me now,” she said. “Everyone looks older, somehow. William T., especially. It’s been hard on him.”

  “It was hard on all of us, Mallie. On everyone who loved you.”

  “Loved?”

  The past tense of love. His face stiffened but his eyes didn’t budge from hers. Now he was Zach again, Zach who never looked away.

  “Mallie, I have to talk to you. I should have talked to you before, but when I called the rehab unit they said it might mess you up, it might set your recovery back. That I should let you lead the way.”

  “How would talking to you mess me up any more?”

  “It might hurt you more.”

  “More than everything else already has?”

  “Shhh. Please, Mal. Look, I have to ask you something. If you had known you were pregnant, would you have wanted the baby?”

 
“The rape baby?”

  He winced. The word rape, probably. It was a hard word. A bad word. A harsh crow caw of a word.

  “The Darkness baby,” she said. That sounded better. “ ’Darkness’ is what I call him. The rapist. Remember Ms. Bailey? In math? I made an equation: A and B and C and D. The problem has to be solved so that the dark birds can’t get me. So that I can keep on living.”

  “Mal, I don’t really know what you’re talking about. You made up a math problem about someone named Darkness?”

  His voice was patient, as if he were talking to a child, or to a girl he used to know who wasn’t the same person anymore. Who maybe had not come all the way back from wherever she had been. Who was still recovering. She plowed on.

  “It was the only thing I could change. I gave him a name and a job and a sister and a mother. I made him a roofer. I made him an addict. I picture him standing on roofs. I made him hate himself.”

  “He should hate himself. He tried to kill you, Mallie.”

  “He didn’t kill me, though.”

  He held her against him and pushed his hands through her hair. Behind her ears, back from her face, over and over. A brush made of fingers.

  “I gave them that photo,” he said, “the one from the party, and then it was everywhere. And they thought you would never recover. That’s one reason I came out here. Because that life we had, Mallie? It was gone.”

  She sat still and waited for words to catch up inside her. That life we had. Zach was looking away. He was thinking. He was trying to figure something out. She could tell.

  “You didn’t answer me,” he said. “Would you have wanted to keep that baby?”

  “No.”

  Her answer was flat and hard. It came out of her without her thinking, and she was glad, because that flat, hard no meant that somewhere inside of her, she was fundamentally clear about something.

  “No,” she said again. It was a good word. It felt good, coming out of her mouth. “No. No.”

  “Okay,” he said, and then he was quiet for a time. She kept her head down on her knees, her eyes on the step below the one they were sitting on. An ant was crawling past her foot. She could shift her heel half an inch and crush it to death, and no one would ever know.

  “So you would have had an abortion?”

  “Yes.”

  “Would it have been a hard decision?” Zach said. That careful tone in his voice. “Would you have had to think about it at all?”

  She shook her head. The ant was still trundling along. Where was it going? You’re shit out of luck, ant, she thought. No anthill anywhere near. The ant had lost its way. It was depending on migratory ant instincts, if there were such a thing.

  “Why are you asking me about this?”

  “Because it’s important,” he said. “And I didn’t have a chance to before. I spent a lot of time trying to figure out what you would have wanted. You and I never talked about things like that.”

  “We never had to.”

  “But what if, Mallie? What if you and I had gotten pregnant?”

  “That would be different. We would have a baby.”

  Something low and flickering jumped in his eyes then, a small flame that he turned off instantly.

  “As simple as that?” he said.

  She nodded. “Yes. As simple as that. If you knew —” But she stopped talking, because that moment, those few seconds, when William T. and Crystal had told her what the silver scar on her belly was from, and her heart had leapt with a wild excitement, was flooding through her. She didn’t trust herself to speak. Because look at the way it was now. Look at Zach, living here with Sir and a chopstick-hair girl and their baby.

  She sat on the steps and saw Zach and the girl and the baby’s life as a braid, three strands together, stretching out in a straight line here in this small Montana town. She saw them laughing and talking and cooking and eating and walking and hiking and working and sleeping. She saw their possible futures: A house and a car and closets filled with jeans and shirts and fleeces and boots. A kitchen with a dog bowl. A child’s school photos magneted to the refrigerator. School conferences and school performances and school basketball games and cross-country meets. The three of them at the top of a Montana mountain in winter, goggles and helmets and skis and poles. Christmas trees and Fourth of July fireworks. Birthday cakes. She saw it all, images and sound clips whirling through her mind as she sat there on the steps of the library. They were ants on the surface of the earth, a planet spinning. Away, away, away. Toward what, toward what, toward what.

  “That’s what we all wanted too, Mal — an abortion — but no one listened to us. We had no legal rights. But is it true that you wanted to see the baby? That’s what William T. said. Is it true?”

  She nodded. “I’m trying to fill in the blanks. Because I don’t feel anything when I think of him.”

  “Does that mean you don’t hate him?”

  “I don’t know what I feel.” Panic clawed up inside her again and her heart beat wildly. He had left her. He had taken off. He was sitting here but he had left her alone in the hospital all those months. “Zach, you took off! You left!”

  “I know.”

  “And now you have this new life. A girlfriend. A baby. I saw you!”

  A fire blazed inside her. She was a girl they figured would die, and then she was a pregnant girl they thought would never come back. And somewhere in there, Zach had taken off.

  “You saw us?” he said. “When?”

  “Last night. In the restaurant. You and her and your baby.”

  “No, Mallie. No. It’s not what you think. I don’t have a girlfriend. The girl you saw is Caroly. She works in the restaurant.”

  “Don’t lie to me.”

  “Mallie, listen. Please listen. I don’t have a girlfriend. But the baby is mine. They all help with him, Caroly and the cooks and the servers. They help me take care of him. His nickname is Mister. It takes a village, you know that saying? Well, they’re the village.”

  There was a wild undertone in his voice, climbing and falling under words that made no sense. What the hell kind of name was Mister? A dumb name. A stupid name. Mister.

  “They’re the goddamn village,” he said again, and his voice was clogged with something he wasn’t telling her, but what? She put her head on her knees and prepared to wait as long as it took for Zach to calm down, to un-confuse himself, to tell her what was going on in a way that made sense, so that the pieces would fit together and she would understand what he was talking about.

  “The baby is him, Mallie. The baby.”

  The shock of it, when she finally understood what he was saying.

  William T.

  Dear Charlie,

  I am not an alcoholic but I am doing Step Nine anyway.

  My focus on Mallie caused me to lose sight of you and what you needed during that time. You were just a boy who was traumatized by what happened to your sister, and I forgot that. I did not do right by you in your time of need. I will reach out to you, Charlie, and I will listen to what you have to say. I will even learn to call you Charles if that is truly what you prefer.

  Sincerely,

  William T.

  Dear Burl,

  I am not an alcoholic but I am doing Step Nine anyway.

  I did not see how hard you were trying. I was sometimes mean to you, and I ignored the jars you made and worked to get inside all those stores because I thought they were a bad idea. The truth is that it hurt to look at the jars, but they were not a bad idea. You have worked hard, Burl, and I stood in your way. I thought I knew better than anyone else. I thought I loved her more than anyone else. From now on I will give you the credit you deserve, Burl.

  Sincerely,

  William T.

  Dear Zach,

  I am not an alcoholic but I am doing Step Nine
anyway.

  I thought it was my way or the highway. I thought everyone should handle what happened the way I handled it. I was so angry when you took off for Montana that I let my anger blind me to what was happening with you. The truth is that you know her better than anyone. The truth is that I should have trusted you were doing the only thing you could. From now on I will listen to you, Zach.

  Sincerely,

  William T.

  Dear Mallie,

  I am not an alcoholic but I am doing Step Nine anyway.

  I was so undone by what happened to you that I did not see my anger wasn’t helping you. I wanted to take care of you and keep you safe, which meant that I did not respect that you are in charge of your own life and must do what is right for you. I forgot that you have the right to choose your own path. I am still not doing a good job at this. I promise that I will try harder.

  Sincerely,

  William T.

  Dear Johnny,

  I am not an alcoholic but I am doing Step Nine anyway.

  I am sorry that I have not seen you fully for what you are in the world, and how you have influenced the lives of those who love you. I promise that I will not take you for granted anymore.

  Sincerely,

  William T.

  Dear Crystal,

  I am not an alcoholic but I am doing Step Nine anyway.

  I am sorry that I let my fear and worry about Mallie turn into an obsession. I am sorry I neglected you. I am sorry that I have not shown you that you are the most important person in the world to me. I am sorry that it took me so long to learn how to waltz.

  I love you, Crystal.

  William T.

  He stacked the notes one on top of another and placed the pen next to them. A personal pile of amendments to his personal William T. Jones constitution. Deep in his pocket, his phone buzzed.

  “William T., she took off. Have you heard from her? Do you know where she is? I told her about the baby and she took off. She said she had to go to the bathroom and she went into the library and I waited but she never came back out and I went in and they said she went out the back door and I don’t know where she is and has she called you?”