“What’s going on, William T.?”
“We’re going to get you packed.”
“Packed.”
“Then we’ll walk out of the room like normal. Like we’re going for a normal stroll, like usual, up and down the hall. Then we’re going to head down the stairs, one flight, then out the side door to the back parking lot. If anyone stops us, say that you just want a little fresh air. You’re of sound mind and body, after all.”
“Fresh air.”
“Right. Then we’ll get in the truck and head up to Sterns.”
“Sterns.”
She listened to herself, repeating his words like a parrot. He squeezed her hands as if he were glad she understood, but she understood only that he was trying to act calm when he wasn’t. She did as he asked. Jeans and T-shirt and toothbrush and hairbrush, he put them all into a little Hassan’s Superette paper bag. He pushed the door open and she followed. Beanie was down the hall next to a utility cart, unscrewing a thermostat cover.
“Beanie,” she said, and raised her hand. He nodded, then shifted his gaze to William T. She felt William T.’s fear, even though she didn’t know what he was afraid of.
“M.W.,” he said. “That’s what I’m going to call you from now on.”
“I’m going for a walk,” she said. Her voice was wobbly. “Out back” — she pointed at the side door — “to get some fresh air.”
Beanie tossed the screwdriver from hand to hand, lightly, without looking, his eyes moving from William T. to her and back again.
“Keep working on your stand-up, Beanie,” she said. “I mean, it can only get better.”
William T. took her hand and they started walking. They were almost past Beanie when he reached out and touched her shoulder.
“M.W.,” he said. He held up one finger and reached for a pen from the utility cart. He scratched something onto the back of a scrap of sandpaper — a phone number — and handed it to her. “Text me. I’ll practice my material on you, okay?”
William T. was urging her toward the stairwell. He pushed open the stairway door and she took the steps one at a time down to the first-floor landing, and then through the door beneath the big red exit sign. Outside. The air was sweet, it was sweet, it was sweet. Spring air, crisp and blue and full of promise.
Yank. “Mallie. Keep walking.”
“Oh. Sorry. It just smells good, is all.”
He pointed in the direction of a blue truck with owen drywall stenciled on the side in uneven white cursive. The r and y and w in drywall were smaller than the other letters.
“You got a new truck?”
“Burl had a friend who retired. I bought it off him.”
“Burl!”
She stopped right there in the gravel, halfway to the truck. Another person she loved, alive and in the world. Burl, William T.’s oldest friend. William T. gave her a little push. A keep-walking, act-natural, don’t-attract-any-attention push. They climbed into the truck and William T. turned the key in the ignition. The gearshift numbers had worn off, but she watched his hand moving on the knob and recited the gears to herself, the way he had taught her to do back when she was fifteen and learning to drive stick. Something in the rearview mirror flashed and she squinted to see what looked like a TV news truck.
“What’s going on, William T.?”
William T. glanced in the rearview mirror. “Don’t know.”
She twisted around to see, but they were already too far away. “Looks like a news crew.”
At that, William T. shuddered. It was the tiniest motion — a shiver that lifted his shoulders and rippled through him instantaneously — and she wouldn’t have caught it had all her senses not been on high alert.
“I think you do know what’s going on, William T.”
He kept his head straight ahead and his eyes on the road, driving like the perfect, conscientious driver he had never been. As if any minute he could be pulled over and have to explain himself, so best follow every rule. He was not going to say anything. She gave up and leaned back into the ripped seat of the cab and turned her head to the window. The sights of Route 12: the Utica floodplain, Denny’s, gas stations and auto repair shops, AmericInn on the left, La Quinta on the right, and then they began the slow climb out of the tattered city. William T. clenched the steering wheel and hunched forward. His Jim Beam cap was set perfectly straight on his head. She didn’t speak again until they were heading down the biggest hill on Glass Factory Road.
“You’re driving like an old man, William T. An old man wearing a hipster cap.”
“I am an old man. Too old to know what the hell a hipster cap is.”
“You’re sixty-three. That’s not old.”
He opened his mouth as if he were about to correct her, then closed it again. He’s sixty-five, she thought. This was something she would have to keep remembering: a year and a half had passed. She was twenty-three now, and William T. was sixty-five.
They were passing the diner, not slowing, when she saw where they were. Her whole body jolted, the way it had when she remembered Zach Miller. “Hey!” she said. “It’s Crystal’s,” and he braked.
“Just for a minute,” he said. “One minute only, okay?”
He glanced up and down the street with the wariness that had become familiar to her. She reached over and put her hand in his jacket pocket, the way she had done when she was small, and he pushed his own hand into the pocket and held hers. Then he shouldered open the door of Crystal’s, eyes darting back and forth, and stood aside to let her in.
Specials were chalked onto the dusty blackboard behind the counter: tuna melt, New England clam chowder, cheese omelet with American fries and toast. Red twirly stools in front of the counter, red booths lining the walls. The coatrack where the farmers hung their jackets and once in a while their caps. The coffeemaker with its four burners, full pot of decaf and nearly empty pots of regular. An old couple in the far booth, murmuring over coffee and pie. A coloring book with a Batman page half-colored in red lay open in the booth that Crystal’s nephew Johnny always sat in when he was home for the weekend. Everything was the same as always.
Except for one thing.
help bring mallie back!
every little bit counts!
Her high school graduation photo was photocopied and pasted to the side of a lidded plastic container by the cash register that held crumpled dollar bills and change. William T. followed her gaze.
“Ignore that,” he said.
He tugged her away, back toward the door, but she broke loose and picked up the jar and stared at her photo. There she was, the way she used to be, her hair French-braided and a serious look on her face.
“Ignore it, Mallie.”
“But that’s me,” she said, “it’s me,” as if she were trying to explain something to him. The former Mallie kept revolving as she turned the big plastic jar around. Now she was there, now she wasn’t, gazing up at them both with no smile on her face. Then the door to the restroom opened and Johnny emerged. He closed the door carefully, the way he had been taught, and then turned and caught sight of them. His whole face lit up and his good arm reached out. Johnny. He was wearing a T-shirt with a red owl on it. Red, the color he had loved his whole life. He started toward them in his slow, lopsided way, but Mallie was there before he had taken three steps, her arms around him. He laughed his stuttery laugh into her hair. He smelled the way he always did, like cotton and pancakes and the almond oil Crystal rubbed into his arms and hands.
The storeroom door opened and Crystal eased through, an industrial-size can of baked beans in her arms.
“Mallie,” she said.
Her arms moved, as if she were going to set the big can of beans down on the prep counter, but she missed and the can fell to the floor with a big, hollow-sounding thunk. She shoved the little divider door between the counter a
nd the grill up and ducked beneath and then wrapped her arms around both Mallie and Johnny. Her grip was gravity, holding them to her until William T. interrupted.
“Time to go, Mallo Cup,” he said.
William T. had saved some things from Lucia’s house for her, like the cow creamer and the pig salt and pepper shakers.
“I knew you always liked them,” he said when he saw her pick them up from the shelf in their dining room. “When Charlie went off to Pennsylvania and they sold the house, I got to them before the vultures descended.”
Then he grimaced, as if he’d said something wrong. “The vultures,” maybe. There was a dark sound around the word, dark-bird word that it was, and she pulled a mental wall down around it. The little porcelain cow creamer was light and cool in her hand, and she focused on it instead. Lucia had given it to her when she was little. They had been at the Back of the Barn antique store off Route 12 and she had seen it in a locked glass case and wanted it. And when her birthday came around a couple months later, there it was: wrapped up in a puff of white tissue paper.
“Charlie took some things too. That green cap of your dad’s and one of your mom’s sweaters.”
“So Charlie goes to school in Pennsylvania now?”
“It’s a prep school.” William T. pronounced the word carefully: p-r-e-p. “Braxton Prep. You know, a boarding school. With dorms and a cafeteria. That kind of thing.”
“I know what a prep school is, William T.”
She pushed aside the image of Charlie the way he naturally came to mind, living with her and Zach in the cabin in Forestport, where Charlie’s room was a loft above the kitchen with a space heater next to his blow-up mattress. She looked around the familiar living room of William T.’s house. He and Crystal had lived here ever since she could remember, half a mile up the road from the house where she and Charlie and their mother lived. Used to live.
“Of course you do,” William T. said. “He’s got one more year of prep school to go.”
Zach had built the cabin himself before his parents struck out for Alaska. He was eighteen the year he built it, two years older than Mallie. A senior in high school, he had worked on it evenings and weekends. I’m not leaving Sterns, he had told his parents. I’m not leaving Mallie. And they had not put up a fuss. Their dream of homesteading it in Alaska was not their son’s dream. Besides, no one put up much of a fuss when it came to Zach, Zach, who was no longer in the little cabin. Zach, who was now in Montana.
William T. had saved a few things from their cabin in Forestport too. Some of her clothes and books. And the box of possible futures. He must have searched for it, because the box of possible
futures wasn’t easy to find, stuck as it had been on a shelf in the cabin mudroom. Look at all the fortune cookies, tumbled together in the same white liquor store box that Zach had picked up from the alley the night of their first date. They had wandered out of the Golden Dragon, dazed from being in the presence of each other so long without interruption, away from school, away from other people, except the waiter, who had kept refilling the teapot next to the soy sauce. Dazed by all the secrets that had tumbled out as they talked — his parents and their plan to leave Sterns and homestead in Alaska; her mother, who had joined the Faith Love Congregation a few years back; his secret plan to build a cabin in Forestport on a woodlot his family owned; her brother, Charlie, and the Once Upon a Time game she had made up when he was little. Dazed by something they hadn’t talked about at all because they hadn’t needed to, which was the intensity of their attraction. He had insisted on paying for dinner, and when she protested, told her she could pay next time. Which made her go silent with happiness, because next time. He wanted a next time. Maybe a whole bunch of next times. She had picked up one of the fortune cookies and was about to tear open the cellophane wrapper when he put his hand over hers — the first time he’d touched her — to stop her.
“No,” he said. “Don’t open it.”
“Why not?”
“Because it might say something about your destiny. And don’t you want to be the master of your own fate? Or mistress, I mean?”
She had smiled and tilted her head, not sure what he was saying. He had taken the wrapped cookie from her hand and picked up his own.
“Tell you what — we’ll start a collection,” he said. “We’ll put these in a box, and from now on, every time we eat at a Chinese restaurant, we’ll take the cookies and add them to the box. We’ll call it the box of possible futures.”
All Mallie heard was from now on, every time we eat at a Chinese restaurant. She had felt the future unspooling before them, like a secret only the two of them would share. That moment came back to her now in a sharp pang of recognition, like a rock thrown. The box of possible futures, clunk. Her high-school-senior face on the side of that jar, clunk. Other fragments were like feathers landing: The oval shape of the ceramic space heater by Charlie’s mattress in the sleeping loft. The parrot-print pillows on the couch in their cabin. Charlie sitting on that couch hunched over his phone late at night, calling up song after song, reggae and blues and funk and rock, playing DJ for her and Zach as they danced around the living room.
She shut them all down, the images, and turned to William T. She needed to know about her mother.
“William T., was it awful for Lucia, the way she died?”
“Pancreatic cancer is bad, Mallie. It was fast.”
So it had not taken long. There were things he wasn’t saying about her mother — she could tell — but what were they? She was beginning to see that William T. would tell her nothing unless in response to a specific question, but what were the specific questions? This reminded her of another game she used to play with Charlie, the one in which you tried to figure out who the other person was by asking an ever-narrowing series of yes or no questions. Was it awful for my mother? Yes. Did she die fast? Yes. Did she think of me at the end? ___?___.
She hadn’t lived with her mother since her senior year in high school, when Lucia had chosen the church over her children. It had felt that way, anyway, to both her and Charlie. Lucia had moved to Utica, where both job and church were, and Mallie and Charlie had moved in with Zach.
“Mallie, you must be so tired.”
That was Crystal. She led the way upstairs to the spare room, straightened and cleaned for her. Quilts and towels, a pair of old cotton pajamas on the bed. Crystal kissed the top of her head, as if she were a child.
“Sleep tight,” Crystal said, and, “You too,” Mallie said, like a normal person, even though nothing was normal. The conversation between her and William T. downstairs just now hadn’t been normal. The way they had left the hospital hadn’t been normal. Nothing was normal. A year and a half, a year and a half, a year and a half: the words danced and jabbed the corners of her brain like hummingbirds dipping in and out of flowers. And every day was another day gained, or lost, to the equation. She pulled the mental walls down around the thought.
The pajamas smelled like sun and wind, and the smell of sun and wind brought Zach Miller sweeping back over her. She had to keep him closed off too. No to all the disappeared time, no to Zach, no to thoughts that she didn’t have the strength to think about. For now.
William T.
Downstairs, William T. and Crystal turned the television on low. He was sure the news would have broken the story, and he was right. There it was, the same canned loop they’d used a year and a half ago, back when the story was a mainstay: hospital entrance, parking lot, separate raggedy circles of marchers with their same old signs, that same hefty fellow in the parka stumbling over the sidewalk curb, hoisting his homemade sign back into the air. A few seconds of this, the narrator intoning, “We return to the ongoing story of Mallie Williams, who for a year lay sleeping,” and then, suddenly, everything was new.
“We are pleased to report that Miss Williams has, contrary to initial predictions, made a full recov
ery,” hospital spokesperson W.
Albert Froehler read from a piece of paper.
Shouted questions from invisible reporters: Does she remember anything? Has a lawsuit been filed? Has the perpetrator been caught? Have the parents been informed?
W. Albert Froehler did not respond to any of the questions. He kept reading.
“Miss Williams’s recovery was made possible by her own immune system, aided by a team of skilled health-care professionals, including doctors, nurses, physical and occupational therapists” — What about psychologists? She’ll need a whole team of them, won’t she? shouted one of the more aggressive reporters, but she was ignored — “and she has now left the hospital.”
Left? Where’d she go? Are you saying she can walk on her own? Talk on her own?
W. Albert nodded. “She is fully cognizant, in full possession of mental and physical capacities. St. John’s is humbled to have played a part in her recovery, and we wish Miss Williams the best as she returns to the joys of ordinary life.”
He lowered the paper, turned and walked away from the reporters, back into the hospital. William T. flicked the television off and turned to Crystal. “ ‘The joys of ordinary life’? What kind of horseshit is that?”
If he had been granted guardianship from the beginning, most or all of this could have been avoided. Not there was a chance of that, given that Lucia was her only living relative besides underage Charlie. They had all watched Lucia get sucked into that church and its harsh rules and doctrines, watched as the members tightened their grip on her, watched as she pledged her allegiance to it even in the face of Mallie and Charlie’s resistance. It had felt like duty to William T. to try for guardianship, but what a mess the whole thing had turned out to be. All the money he’d spent on that attorney, and in the end there was no chance. The judge had awarded guardianship to Lucia on the recommendation of Mallie’s attorney and the independent court evaluator, without, it seemed, even a second thought, even though William T. and Charlie and Burl and Lucia’s non-church colleagues from Forever Home and Crystal — even Crystal, who hated talking to strangers — had filed up to the judge one after another:
The Opposite of Fate Page 4