He’s been as good as a father to her ever since her own father died.
Blood or not, William T. is the closest thing to a father that the girl’s got.
He didn’t give up. He has never given up on that girl.
But no. Guardianship had stayed with Lucia. Which, in effect, meant the Faith Love Congregation, given Lucia’s devotion to it. They were all in cahoots, it seemed to William T. at the time, and it still seemed that way to him.
“Jesus H. Christ,” he had thundered finally, right there in court, with his attorney trying to shush him. “Who’s speaking up for Mallie here? You think she’d want this thing to continue? You think she wouldn’t terminate it the second she knew? Of course she would!”
Then came the months when he and Crystal and Charlie weren’t allowed back in Mallie’s room. Zach could’ve visited her but he hadn’t, at least to William T.’s knowledge. It was only Lucia and her henchmen, which was how he thought of her fellow Faith Love congregants. William T. had tried to train himself out of thinking about the whole mess, tried to learn how to redirect his thinking, distract himself, but he was no good at that kind of thing.
It was only after Lucia died and he was finally appointed guardian in Family Court — according to the terms of her will, the judge said — that things had changed. He had watched over Mallie every day, helped move her limbs, kept her muscles in motion. Willed her to wake up, willed her strength to return. All the while talking to her, talking and talking, because he had heard that hearing was the last to go. And if Mallie had to go, then she would leave this world accompanied by the voice of someone who loved her.
But she hadn’t left the world. She had returned to it. Deep inside his pocket his cell phone buzzed.
“Hello?”
“William T.”
His heart jolted. He knew that voice. Zach Miller.
“William T., is it true that she’s awake? That she left the hospital?”
Crystal watched him, eyes alert, waiting to see who was calling this late. William T. cleared his throat. Stay calm, he ordered himself. Be Switzerland.
“Yes, Zach. How did you know?”
Zach ignored the question. “Is she with you now? Is she there? Does she remember anything? How is she?”
William T. got up from the couch, Crystal’s eyes on him, and began wandering around the living room. Something to do instead of sitting in an inert mass on the couch. He and Crystal had vowed not to be angry if and when Zach called.
“She’s asleep right now,” William T. said. “I don’t know how much she remembers. Everything up until that night, I think. But nothing since then.”
“What about me? Does she remember me?”
“She remembers you.”
He let it stand at that. He didn’t tell Zach how Mallie had risen halfway off the bed at the thought of him. Or how she was shutting down the thought of him now, out of . . . confusion? Hurt? Bewilderment that he wasn’t there?
“Does she know anything about, you know, about —”
“She doesn’t know about everything. She’s been working full-time on getting the use of her muscles back. It’s been a full-time job. Look, Zach . . .” and he could hear his voice beginning to rise.
Crystal’s eyes snapped at him: Don’t get angry with him, William T.
“I know you’re pissed off, but it’s complicated, William T. There’s a lot to explain.”
“To whom?”
“Her. You. Charlie. Everyone. A lot has happened.”
Crystal was still on high alert, her eyes boring into him. She didn’t want him to scare Zach away. He took in a deep breath and let it out twice as slowly. Something Mallie’s physical therapist had taught him.
“She’s here, Zach,” he said. “That’s all I can tell you.”
After he hung up he hauled the box of clippings and photos — the box of Mallie — out of the back of the living room closet and began sifting through it again, even though he had long since memorized the contents.
“William T., why do you keep that stuff?” Crystal said. She hated the box, hated his sorting ritual. “It’s just a box of pain.”
“It’s a record of what happened. For Mallie, if the time comes.”
That had been his original intention, so that if and when she recovered, everything that had transpired in the absence of her mental capacity would be there in black and white. He wasn’t sure anymore, though. There were things in there that he himself couldn’t stand to look at, like the photo that accursed onlooker had taken of her and posted on his Facebook page for all the world to see. Her broken body, downloaded, copied, reposted hundreds of times. Burl had tried to hide that photo from William T., the day it came out. He had stood in front of the newspaper display at Queen of the Frosties, something awkward about his stance.
“Move aside, Burl.”
Burl had hesitated, then stepped aside. There it was, right there on the counter, her body splayed out on the pavement in the dark rain. Black stars had swarmed in front of William T.’s eyes and he gripped the counter to steady himself. Everything was public and everything was forever on the goddamn internet. If only he had been the one to pick up Charlie that night.
“You didn’t know Charlie needed a ride,” Crystal had told him, over and over. “It was happenstance. It was bad luck.”
But if William T. had been there, none of this would’ve happened. He should have been there instead of Mallie, good big sister driving all the way down to Utica to pick up her drunk little brother from a party. He should have been the one to park the truck on that dark night, but he hadn’t been. Dark nights everywhere, dark things happening, and where was the God that so many claimed existed?
Mallie
Outside, the wind had picked up. Leaves and branches of the maple tree brushed against the window in tiny scrapes and whispers. Wake up, wake up, we have something to tell you. The wind was westerly, steady and strong. In migration season, birds and insects would be high above the house right now, swept up on the invisible currents, themselves invisible to the human eye. Night birds, dark in the dark night. William T. was the one who had taught her about birds, back when she was a little girl. He had taught her about chickens, because he had a flock. He had taught her to say “gull” instead of “seagull” when she was a little girl.
“You can find gulls anywhere there’s a body of water, Mallo Cup,” he had said. “Lakes, for example. The Finger Lakes have their own gulls and they’re nowhere near the sea. It’s insulting to an inland lakes gull to be referred to as a seagull. Prejudicial. A pro-ocean, anti-lakes bias.”
Their mother had taken her and Charlie to the Jersey shore once, the summer after their father died. They spread their blankets and snacks on the beach and smeared on sunscreen and ran into the waves. Then they returned to the blanket to find an enormous gull taking off into the air with their package of cheese. Mallie jumped up, flailing her arms, trying to get the gull to drop the cheese, but it had paid her no attention. It flapped its way up and up and up into the air, lugging its heavy burden, and then it was gone. Their entire block of cheese! It had still been wrapped! She had told William T. about it when they returned from their trip.
“Sweet Jesus,” he had said, shaking his head. “And they wonder why people call them air rats. Gulls mate for life, they’re good parents, they’re smart as hell, but then they go and steal a poor defenseless kid’s entire block of wrapped cheese. Gulls, it’s hard to defend you when you do shit like that.”
Defenseless? Mallie hadn’t felt defenseless. It had been strange to hear that William T. thought of her that way. But he always looked out for her. When she was ten years old, her mother had refused to let her go on the school field trip to New York City. Lucia had glanced at the permission slip and frowned, as if it annoyed her. Shaken her head and brushed the air with both hands.
“But I’m in fi
fth grade,” Mallie had said. “The whole entire fifth grade is going. It’s the fifth grade field trip, Mom. To New York City.”
“No,” their mother had said, and that had been her only statement on the subject. “Too far away.”
Looking back, Mallie thought that maybe that was when Lucia’s strangeness had begun. Mallie’s father had been gone a year at that point, and Lucia had begun to harden in odd and unpredictable ways, ways that later would result in her adherence to the beliefs of her church and the flat rightness and wrongness of things. Mallie had not brought the field trip up again. The only person she had told was William T., and only because he had asked her why was she standing in the barn doorway when wasn’t it the big day? The day of the fifth grade field trip?
“But why?” William T. said when she told him she wasn’t allowed to go.
She shrugged. “Mom said no.”
The words of the school principal sounded in her head as William T. stood there frowning, his hands full of chicken feed. For some of you students, this will be the only time in your lives that you will visit New York City, the greatest city in the world. Make the most of it. And behave.
“It’s the fifth grade field trip, though,” he repeated, as if he weren’t sure she understood the implications. “Don’t you want to go?”
It was the sound of his voice, the bewilderment and the concern, that opened a door to a room inside her. This was the legendary field trip, the one that every Sterns Elementary student looked forward to, from kindergarten on. She was suddenly as bewildered as William T., the force of her longing washing through her.
“Mallie,” she remembered him saying, “aw, Mallo Cup.” The clatter of chicken feed hitting the heaved-up cement of the barn floor came to her ears and then he was picking her up in his arms, as big as she was, and hugging her.
“Tell you what,” he said. “I’ll take you to New York City. We’ll go on our own field trip.”
“Mom, though,” she had choked out, “my mom,” because if her mother hadn’t let her go on the huge chartered bus, the bus with the cushiony seats and the armrests and the bathroom in the way back that she had been looking forward to using, if only to wash her hands in the sink that the older students said was so tiny, so unimaginably tiny, then there was no way she would let her go with William T.
Her mother had let her go with him, though. Mallie didn’t know how William T. managed it, but the day came when he picked her up before dawn, a glazed doughnut wrapped in wax paper for her breakfast sitting on the passenger seat, and down to Manhattan they drove. They parked at Yankee Stadium and took the subway into the city. They ate lunch in Chinatown in a restaurant that had Chinese writing on the menu. They touched each of the giant lion heads outside the public library. They rode the ferry to Staten Island and back. They saw the Empire State Building.
“Look up at the skyscraper and tell me what you see, Mallo Cup,” William T. had said.
“Clouds. Blue sky.”
“How about stars? You see any stars?”
She shook her head. Of course not. It was midafternoon; why would there be any stars? He crouched next to her and pointed up at the blue sky.
“You want to know a true fact, Mallie? The stars are up there right now. We just can’t see them because it’s not dark. But birds are waiting, all over this city, and when it’s dark — as dark as New York City gets, anyway — they’ll rise up all around these skyscrapers on currents of wind. The higher they go, the stronger the wind. There will be thousands of them, so far above our heads that no one will see them. And off they’ll go, navigating by the stars.”
She had never heard William T. talk like that. He was not a man of poetry, the way her fifth grade teacher was. But he stood there on the street looking up, up, up at the Empire State Building, and she looked up with him, at the invisible stars and the invisible wind that would carry the birds away.
Later, in an anthropology class at Mohawk Valley Community College, she had learned that in some cultures, dark birds were said to appear when someone died. They gathered in trees or on rooftops. They were messengers. When the dark birds settled on the tree, it was too late.
How many nights had she slept away in St. John’s before she woke up to William T.’s hand on her arm? 365 = one year + 120 = another four months = almost 500. It was too hard to think about. Was her mind, William T.’s mind, this very house filled with dark and silent and ravenous birds? If so, they would have to be fought off. You couldn’t let them take what they wanted — whether a block of cheese or your sanity or your peace of mind — and just fly away with it the way that ravenous gull had flown away that long-ago day on the beach. You had to fight. That much she knew.
William T. and Crystal were talking in low voices below, and she got out of bed and went downstairs. An old cardboard box, wearing out at the corners, sat on the table in front of William T. He and Crystal looked up, surprised at the sight of her, and William T.’s arm shot out and lay flat on the box, as if he wanted to keep it safe. She sat down opposite them and put her hands on the table. They were the suspects and she was the cop.
“Listen,” she said. “Something happened to me before I was in a coma. And it wasn’t like a stroke or a heart attack or something. Someone hurt me. Didn’t they?”
William T. nodded. Reluctant. On guard. The two of them glanced from her to each other, cautionary looks, trying to talk without words. Mallie could feel it.
“A man?”
William T. nodded again.
“Who?”
“We don’t know. Nobody does.”
“The police?” A squad car appeared in her head, light turning and flashing, turning and flashing. A cop with a gun and a uniform.
“They don’t know either. The evidence never linked up to anyone specific. No one in the known database.”
“So it was a robbery? He mugged me?”
“Yes,” Crystal said. “He grabbed your handbag.”
But neither she nor William T. said anything else. Their silence was anguished. Silent birds massed in the heavens, waiting and watching. Mallie could feel them. She felt in that moment the way she sometimes had when working with one of the women from the shelter, that a dark story was hidden inside the body. Only this time it was her body. She tried to picture a man coming down a sidewalk after her.
“Did he beat me up too?”
“Yes,” Crystal said.
“Anything else?”
Crystal nodded. Yes. Something else.
“He raped me,” Mallie said. It wasn’t a question. Crystal nodded again and William T.’s jaw clenched, but they both stayed silent. The man on the sidewalk morphed into arms and legs, a battering ram of a man.
“Did he try to kill me?”
“That’s what the police figure, yes.”
Then came a shadow, looming at the porch door.
Knock, knock, knock.
Crystal took Mallie’s arm, urging her to the couch while William T. menaced his way to the door. It was far too late for visitors. Mallie could feel William T.’s tension, feel his thoughts: No one should be out, no one should have driven into the driveway without him noticing, no one should be on the porch. Damn the wind that drowned out the sound of car tires. Damn the branches clattering on the roof. He glanced back at her.
“Don’t worry,” he said. But it was him she was afraid of, the grimness on his face. A hand on the shadowy other side of the door pane knocked again. Then the hand came up and waved, and a face loomed in the shadows. Burl. Burl!
William T. unlocked the door — something else that was new since she had last been here, both a deadbolt and a chain — and the waiting wind blew the screen door open. Burl pushed his way in.
“Mallie,” he said. He hastened past William T. to kneel by the couch and grab her hands. “Welcome home.”
He looked so happy. Burl was a lone
man, long divorced, no children, no brother or sister, parents dead a decade ago. Beneath his Agway cap, his face was shiny, as if he’d just come back from a jog, which was something Mallie couldn’t imagine him doing. She barely had time to register this new Burl, because he stood up and waved something in front of them all. A thirty-two-ounce plastic cottage-cheese container with a smiling cow on the lid.
“The hell’s that?” William T. said.
“Open it.” A smile spread across Burl’s face and suddenly Mallie could imagine Burl as a young man. “It’s not cottage cheese,” he added.
William T. pried open the lid and dumped the contents on the table. Two stacks of twenties, folded and rubber-banded. Another stack of fifties, rolled up and rubber-banded. And more: three rolls of hundred-dollar bills.
“Money!” Burl said. “It’s money. For Mallie.”
Money? For her? Burl looked at her and grinned. But William T. strode forward, frowning, and it came to her in a flash: the plastic container next to Crystal’s cash register. There must be other plastic jars next to other diner cash registers all over upstate New York. Uneven slots in their lids, each one probably sawed by Burl with the Swiss Army knife he always kept in his pocket.
help bring mallie back!
every little bit counts!
“The jars,” Burl said, beaming. “I collected the money from them all. Drove around and emptied every single jar. Then I went to the bank to get bigger bills.”
Mallie closed her eyes and pictured them, help bring mallie back jars on counters for a hundred miles in any direction. For all she knew, there might be jars as far north as Massena, as far south as Yonkers. Burl, a mailman, must have driven around after work and on Sundays, plotting and mapping the best routes. He would have factored in the opening and closing times of each location. His car appeared in her mind as if she were looking down at it from a helicopter, crawling around the byroads of upstate New York, a shoebox filled with bills and coins on the passenger seat.
The Opposite of Fate Page 5