The Opposite of Fate (ARC)

by Alison McGhee

  Half her. He was half her. Half her and half Darkness. She could never get away. Her body had grown a creature from darkness and there was no getting around it, no going back.

  “It’s one more thing I had no say in, Zach. One more huge, enormous thing. Are you asking me just to accept this too, on top of everything else?”

  “Not accept. Fight,” Zach said. His voice was soft now. “You have to fight the forces of darkness, Mallie. Right?”

  “But he’s still out there. That man is still out there. What he did is never going away. He’s still standing on the roof. He’s Darkness.”

  “Thaddeus isn’t.”

  “Put yourself in my place, Zach. Time and Pain and Darkness and me and now a baby? It’s not a solvable problem.”

  “Expand it. Make it bigger. That’s one way to fight them off.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me before now?”

  “I was afraid to,” he said, and she could see in his eyes that it was true. “I was afraid that if you knew, you’d hate me. Hate him. Reject both of us.”

  He reached over and took her hand.

  “Try to put yourself in my place, will you, Mal? William T. and Charlie, it was like they all wanted the baby gone. Like they hated him because of how he came to be. They were consumed by it. But they saw only half of him. Like the half that was you didn’t exist. Like you didn’t exist.”

  The air in the cab was close and hot and suffocating. She rolled down the window and let the cool air rush in.

  “It felt like if I had Thaddeus, I still had you,” he said. “It was the only way I could still be with you, Mallie.”

  She pulled her hand out of Zach’s and placed it on her belly, above the hidden silvery scar.

  “How could it possibly feel like you were with me?”

  “Because it felt like something of you was alive and would still be in the world, no matter what happened to you. Like the future was still open, in a way. Still an unwrapped fortune cookie.”

  The box of cookies was right there, hidden in the darkness behind his seat, but he didn’t know that.

  “Zach, do you think we cursed ourselves by not opening any of those fortunes?”

  “Hell no!”

  He sounded like himself just then, like the Zach who had decreed on their very first date that they would not allow themselves to be influenced, or persuaded, into one direction over another. That their futures were theirs alone to decide. She reached out and touched the dark curl of ink rising up from his shirt.

  “You got a tattoo,” she said. “What is it?”

  For answer, he pulled up his T-shirt. A bird, dark wings spread, talons extended, rising up from his heart in a spiral of feathery wind, heading skyward.

  “Fight,” he said. “You have to fight.”

  knock, knock.

  who’s there?

  duncan.

  duncan who?

  duncan cookies in your milk makes them soggy.

  damn, m.w. that’s a good one.

  i’ve got more. knock, knock.

  who’s there?

  imus.

  imus who?

  imus get out of this place.

  what place are you at?

  montana.

  you talk to him?

  yes.

  and?

  i’m coming home.

  After she told Zach she had to stop talking, that it was too much right now, that she would call him, she drove to the Sleepy Inn motel and sat in the parking lot. She thought about his tattoo. She thought about the dark birds hidden in the women’s bodies at the shelter. She thought about the birds that waited for nightfall so they could spiral up into the sky and float on the wind to a future home. She thought about the day when she was a child and darkness flew from the sky and huddled into a dense and moving mass on the tree by William T.’s garage. A small black cloud on the surface of the earth, shimmering and quivering with power, small flutters and sighs and low chirrups erupting from deep in the throats of the birds. She had looked at it and seen something strange, something mysterious, something that made no sense.

  A tree eaten alive by darkness. A tree, her tree. She tore toward it. Get away from there! she had howled, and, Don’t you dare hurt them! The tree was swarmed and crawling and she would not let them hurt her hummingbirds. Full-speed and shrieking, she had run at them, and at the last second they had lifted off, a swarm of them, fled into the sky above the broken-down barn.

  You had to fight. You had to fight the darkness with what you had in you to fight.

  “I did it!” she had said to William T., that day of the dark and quivering tree. “I scared them off!”

  She had turned in triumph to the porch, where he was standing, watching her.

  “You did, Mallo Cup,” he had said, and shook his head in admiration. “You sure as hell did, kid.”

  To this day the tree was still there, green and living. The humming­bird nest had been unharmed. The only way to stop the darkness from growing and growing and growing inside you, from taking over your heart and your soul, was to run toward it. Shout and wave your arms and run. She had turned Darkness into a man on a roof, and she could either keep him up there or, if she couldn’t stand it any longer, make him jump. She was doing what she had to, so that she could go on living and not be eaten up from the inside. She would push out darkness and pull in light.

  In the single math class she took at Mohawk Valley Community College, the professor told them that given the size of the universe — a vastness so vast that it was beyond the comprehension of human brains — it was a certainty that the world as they knew it, all its inhabitants and events, everything that had ever happened to anyone throughout the millennia, would eventually be replicated elsewhere, in another world that was the mirror image of theirs. To people who were the mirror images of them. Who spoke like them, lived like them, loved like them. Could they even begin to comprehend such a thing? It almost hurt his brain to think about, he had added.

  She could still see the look on that professor’s face when he was talking about those other worlds. His eyes were far away and his voice was soft. Was this what had brought him to math in the first place, the giant ideas that numbers could express? The idea of an unseen world existing in an unknown realm, the idea of maybe finding that world someday? That professor was a formal, reserved man, but on that day, she had learned something about him, which was that he could turn soft and full of wonder. On that day, he had reminded her of William T. the day he took her to New York City, showed her the Empire State Building and told her about the birds that rose high in the sky above it on their migratory paths.

  Maybe the universe held universes within itself. Look up, and the stars shimmering down could turn, instantly, into pinpricks in the dark fabric of the ceiling. The floor of another world, a world that looked like this one. Another world where a girl sat on the cement steps of a library in a faraway town, watching a lost ant crawl determinedly toward nothing, or toward something invisible. A world where a baby who had grown inside her was alive and in this world, forever a part of her and Zach Miller and an unknown other.

  Like it or not. Want it or not. Choose it or not.

  She had had no choice in anything that had happened to her. She had been fought over by pro-choicers and anti-abortioners, by people who loved her and people who didn’t, people who knew her and people who didn’t, and this was who she was now: the living embodiment of opposing forces. The child was a child borne of opposing forces. You had to expand the problem, Zach said. You had to make it bigger. That was a way to fight. That was a way to keep going.

  “Mallie?” he had said, before he got out of the truck. “One hard thing?”

  Not the One Hard Thing game. Too much time had passed. The One Hard Thing game had been created to help her shake out the pain of other people, release
it from her fingers and hands. And now it was the people she loved, like William T. and Zach, who had to release the pain of her and everything she had been through from their own bodies. There was no way to un-connect yourself from the ones you loved or had once loved.

  “One hard thing?” he said. “Just one?”

  His voice was low and soft. He was willing her to play the game again. He was trying to fill in the long gap between them. Okay, Zach. All right.

  “Seeing William T.’s face when I first woke up,” she said. “Seeing how worried he was, how much older he looked. That was a hard thing.”

  He nodded. “One impossible thing?”

  “The thought that you were gone. That I had lost you.”

  “One good thing?”

  She shook her head. It was too soon to talk about good things. There were hard things and impossible things, but good? No. He sat there, waiting. She thought. Zach making pancakes on Sunday for her and Charlie — that came to mind. Zach pouring her a beer from the tap on the wall at The Tied Fly in Alder Creek. She and Zach dancing late at night in the living room to Smokey Robinson while Charlie played DJ. Zach floating next to her at the water park in Old Forge. These were good things. There were endless good things, but they were all from the past. You, she thought, you and me and our life. That was a good thing.

  Mister

  Sky, pole, sky, pole, sky, pole, sky, pole. Hum of tires, roar of wind. Away, away, away, away, toward what, toward what, toward what, toward what. What are you crying about, Mister? Too windy for you? Hang on. The window slid up and up, shut out the roar. Sky, pole, sky, pole, sky, pole. What are you staring at back there, Mister? You see some birds? Sky, pole, sky, pole . . . That’s right, Mister. Go to sleep. You too, Sir. Go to sleep. We have a long, long drive ahead of us.

  There was only the truck roof above him, not the ceiling in his room, the ceiling high above, dull white with the almost-invisible outlines of stars and planets, meteors and moons that glowed yellow at night. These are the constellations of you, Thaddeus. Sparrow and Hawk and Gull and Hummingbird. You’re not going to find them in any night sky. I made them all up for you. There were constellations of him here in the truck. He opened his eyes to a black night. Dark window dark sky dark blanket dark shape of his father in front of him. Pinpricks of light in the dark sky out the window.

  William T.

  He and Crystal stood under the mulberry tree at the far side of the playground. They had parked the truck directly under the tree, so that Johnny, who had fallen asleep stretched out on the backseat of the truck with both seat belts strapped around him, could sleep on. The windows were rolled all the way down, and it was cool. Johnny would be safe.

  It could be hours still before one of the others arrived. It was a long, long drive for them, all coming from different directions. William T. had thought they should all come to Sterns, meet at the house, but no. Neutral territory, Zach had said when he called to tell William T. that he and Mallie had talked, that he had told her everything, and that both Beanie and Charlie, who was driving up from Pennsylvania, were going to meet them there. William T. had not argued. He had listened and agreed. Switzerland, he told himself. Be Switzerland. This was part of what making amends was about.

  Crystal lowered herself to the base of the tree and pulled her knees up to her chest. William T. occupied himself by watching the roof of the house across the street from the playground, a sloping two-story, crawling with men shutting down the job for the day. Pallets of shingles lined up on the cement walkway, extension ladders leaning on both sides, and braces nailed onto the roof. Three men crouched near the roofline. The one nearest the edge stood straight up and stretched, just like the one he’d seen before. What was with these young men? Did they not know they could fall? Did this one not know how close to the edge he stood, how dangerous it was? Maybe he was too young yet to know how short life was, how fragile. How you had to protect it. The roofer was a heedless man, dark against the sky, and then he moved down the roof, down the ladder, lowering himself to the ground.

  A child was making his way across the grass, staggering in that toddler way, with his parents close behind. They headed toward the baby swings, the kind with the bucket to lower a child into so they would be safe. Safer. The baby’s father picked him up and lowered him in and the boy looked down to angle his feet into the holes at the right angle, like he knew exactly what to do. The father grabbed the back of the bucket seat and walked backward holding it until his arms were extended and the boy was above his head.

  “Ready?”

  “Ready!”

  The man let go. The little boy sailed through the air, laughing. He threw his head back and his hair blew back.

  “Push!” he cried, and his father pushed and his mother watched and smiled.

  At the base of the tree, next to William T., Crystal slipped her hand around his calf. He looked down and saw that she was smiling too. Another child was perched at the top of a slide, frozen, unable to launch himself down the long silver river. Another played with a bucket and crane that dipped into the sand and out again, into the sand and out again. He rubbed his eye with a sandy hand and then started to shriek. Children.

  Sun filtered through the leaves of the big mulberry as William T. watched. Voices floated toward him. Parents curved into the shape of the benches they sat on, legs crossed, heads tilted back to the warmth of the sun or turned lazily to one another. If you could see words coming out of mouths at a playground, then the words between parents sitting on benches would spiral up into the air like slow circles puffed from a cigar. Nothing was hurried at a playground, except for the once-in-a-while screech that propelled a parent into action. Like the sandy-handed boy, still yelling about his eye, his eye, his eye.

  Shhh. Shhh, it’s okay.

  William T. leaned against the mulberry tree and watched. The great heart of the truck was still ticking even though he had turned off the engine minutes ago. What would the baby look like? He was nearly a year old now. Beginning to walk? Beginning to talk? A sentient being.

  William T. waited. He adjusted the brim of his Jim Beam hipster cap, whatever a hipster was. He was a man in his sixties, an almost-father to fatherless Johnny, an almost-father to fatherless Mallie. He thought of the way Crystal had looked at him the night he told her that he kept driving down to Utica, bent on catching a glimpse of the Stampernicks, maybe even a glimpse of the child, rumored to be living with a foster family nearby. And she had said she never wanted to see that baby, never behold his face, because she was afraid that if she ever saw that child, she would see Mallie in him and want to take him and keep him and never let him go.

  But William T. didn’t know anymore if blood mattered, in the end, when it came to love. Look at Crystal, the woman he loved but was not related to. Nor was he related to Zach, or Johnny, or lonely Burl, or even his girl Mallie. None of them shared his blood or his DNA or a single human being related to him, and did it matter? It did not. Did he have it in him to be an almost-grandfather? Could he somehow learn to love this small boy?

  You had to fight the darkness with everything you had. Fight the dark birds with other birds.

  Bring it on, he thought then. Which was something Mallie used to say to Zach, laughing, goading him, teasing him: Bring it on. He, William T., would bring it on. He would fight the darkness and he would keep on fighting.

  Maybe there was traffic on the thruway. Maybe they were each exhausted and had stopped to rest before continuing. Maybe Charlie had turned around and gone back to Pennsylvania. Maybe Beanie had been called in to work. Maybe the baby needed a diaper change. Johnny was still asleep and Crystal was still sitting at the base of the tree, her eyes closed. She was patient in a way that William T. was not. He looked around, checking the perimeter, and that was when he saw Charlie’s little Civic pull up and stop on the far side of the baseball diamond. He watched as Charlie and a girl — who the hell was sh
e? He squinted until the girl’s dark cloud of hair gave her away as Amanda, stretching her long arms skyward. Charlie must have detoured to pick her up on the way. He bent low and examined his front tire. Stood up and kicked it, experimentally. Was the tire going flat? Did he have a spare? William T. was the one who had taught him how to change a tire; did he need help? He was ready to help, if need be. He had not taken good care of Charlie — Charles — in his time of need. He would make amends now.

  Charlie and Amanda stood up and sauntered — that was the word for it, William T. thought, sauntered — along the sidewalk toward the swings. Charlie was grown now, William T. realized. Filled out the way boys often did in their twenties, even though he was only seventeen. He had had to grow up fast and hard. William T. resisted the urge to follow the boy, catch up with him, because it seemed right to hang back.

  Now a small bright spot of yellow appeared by the slide. Beanie was here. William T. tried to remember if he’d ever seen Beanie without that hat. Was he hiding something beneath it? Did he have a terribly scarred skull or something? Probably not. Maybe Beanie didn’t feel dressed without his hat. Or maybe someone had given it to him, someone he loved. William T. watched as Charlie sat down on a bench by the swings and Beanie lowered himself onto the little sidewalk curb by the sand pit.

  William T. scanned the perimeter of the playground. It was second nature now. When you had been on guard for a long time you tended to stay vigilant. It seeped into your bones. Sweep your eyes around a parking lot, around an auditorium, around a store. Stay on the lookout.

  Some people would do anything for publicity. They were the ones who had gotten a boy to hand over the hidden photo of his girl, gotten the old guy in the Jim Beam cap to spill his guts on video. Even though she had come back to life, even though she was Mallie, and back in this world, William T.’s guard was still up. After you’d had a microphone stuck in your face a few times, you learned to put a wall up. And once up, walls were hard to take down. Maybe he would never quite be able to relax again.