And poor William T. The media must have tracked him like a bloodhound. She would have been able to figure that out from the locks on the door alone, the changed home phone number, the existence of a cell phone — William T.? A cell phone? — and the way he looked around before he got out of his truck, before he walked into a place like the diner, the way he had jumped to his feet at Burl’s late-night knock. It must have been hard on him, watching her head out alone in the Datsun. No, not hard. Awful. Panicky awful.
How that night had happened, every step of it after she got out of the truck and walked down the shining sidewalk, was a series of questions without answers.
Maybe she had gotten tired of waiting for Charlie. Maybe she’d decided to go for a walk in the rain while she waited. She had walked down the sidewalk. Her truck had been found parked in front of the apartment building where the party was, where she must have parked it, because it was still locked and the key had been in her pocket.
She remembered the sidewalk, gleaming with rain under the streetlight, and a rainbow swirl on the street. Exhaust, or oil, or a combination of both. She must have stepped over the sidewalk cracks because she always did, so as not to break her mother’s back if she could avoid it. Seen the rainbow swirl on the street beneath the streetlight at the end of the block and stopped to admire it. Then what?
Then nothing.
Then nothing, nothing, nothing, nothingnothingnothingnothingnothingnothing, on and on an endless nothing, until a touch on her arm and the sound of a familiar voice. William T. Jones, who insisted she had said something about dark birds. The invisible dark birds that lived inside a person and ate away at their soul? Or real-life dark birds? Like the ones that had appeared to her when she was a little girl. She had come across the young willow next to William T.’s garage, quivering and quaking with darkness against the reds and yellows and oranges of its neighbors. She had stood and stared at the tree, convulsing against a blue September sky, until she realized that birds had engulfed it and blotted out its original shape.
This had happened just as William T. was beginning to teach her about birds, when she was obsessed with the hummingbirds that flitted to the feeder that hung by his porch. She was full of questions about birds, migratory birds, in particular. Soaring birds like raptors, birds that depended on thermals to lift them and carry them away, migrated during the day. Most land birds that migrated long distances, like thrushes and sparrows, tended to lift off at night. They sometimes congregated in a single tree, waiting for the wind, waiting for a signal, waiting for a flicker of something only they could understand, until they lifted off en masse.
She had stood watching that tree made of birds, filled with wonder and then horror, because it was the hummingbird nest tree.
“William T.! William T.!” she’d screamed, but she hadn’t waited for him to hear her and come running. The nest was in danger and she ran straight at the tree, windmilled her arms and screamed at the dark birds. “Leave those babies alone!” She had watched as they whooshed into the sky, a hovering cloud that vanished down the valley.
And now she herself had flown away to a motel on the outskirts of north Utica and gotten herself a room.
In the past year and a half, the blinking e in the neon sign of Crystal’s Diner had been replaced. A stretch of Route 274 had been repaved. There was now a handicapped ramp winding along the walk to the front door of a little green house on Elm Street. The people she loved looked the same, but older. Careworn. Lines at the sides of Crystal’s eyes fanned out wider, and two grooves ran from the sides of William T.’s nose to the corners of his mouth. Her brother, Charlie, was now Charles. Zach had moved to Montana.
Once upon a time there was a girl
who was the same, except that she wasn’t.
William T.
The day Zach Miller had taken off, he had pulled into the driveway and left the engine running and the door open. He walked straight up to the porch, where William T. was waiting. For what, he didn’t know, but he had woken up with the sense of something invisible changing then and there, and out to the porch he had come to wait until he knew what it was. Zach’s truck shook slightly, there in the driveway, as if it were being held on the gravel against its will.
“William T.,” Zach said. “I came to say goodbye.”
So this was the something invisible. Something else William T. didn’t want to happen — Zach Miller leaving — was happening. Another thing he couldn’t stop.
“Where you going?”
“Away. I can’t stand not being with her and I can’t stand what they’re making her do. They keep insisting this is what she’d want but they don’t know shit. This is what they want.”
William T. had felt himself nod against his will. But did Zach think the nodding meant that William T. was giving him his blessing to abandon Mallie? Because he wasn’t. Zach turned to the truck and whistled. Out came Sir, bounding onto the porch, dancing and nosing William T.’s legs in the delighted way he always greeted him.
“Can you and Crystal take care of Sir?”
“You’re not taking him with you?”
“I don’t know what kind of life it’d be for him, wherever I end up.”
Words pushed up against the back of William T.’s throat, battling to get out. What more kind of life could a dog want than a life with Zach, who, along with Mallie, had taken care of him since the night they had hauled him out of that dumpster? What the hell was wrong with Zach that he couldn’t see that? You can’t just abandon the creatures who love you, he tried to say, but the words wouldn’t come out.
“No?” Zach said, and William T. nodded. No. He and Crystal couldn’t take Sir. Not because they wouldn’t want him and didn’t love him. But because Sir was a symbol of Zach and Mallie, their past and present and future. Taking Sir would be messing with fate, somehow. Zach leveled his hazel gaze at William T. and waited, but all William T. could do was shake his head.
“Okay,” Zach said. “I’ll take him to Trish’s, then. She always told us if he ever needed a new home” — his voice trailed off. Sir was looking up at him intently, his tail moving back and forth in a searching way. Trish the dog sitter. Trish the dog lover.
“Mallie could still get better.”
There. Finally some words had come. He squinted up at Zach Miller. Damn the sun and its pitiless glare. Zach just looked at him.
“That’s a long shot at this point,” Zach said. “And even if she did, look.” He pulled his wallet out of his back pocket, flipped it open and held it out like an offering to William T., pointing to an empty slot in the wallet. “See that space? That’s where that photo was.”
“What photo?”
But even as he said the words, William T. knew. Mallie, dancing in the sun at her graduation party, the photo that was everywhere, that would live forever in the heads of strangers. So this was where the beautiful photo used to live, in the calm darkness of Zach Miller’s wallet.
“They stole it from you?” William T. said. Those bastards. Vultures, going into a grieving boy’s wallet and stealing the photo of his girlfriend. But Zach was shaking his head.
“I gave it to them.”
“No, you didn’t.” William T. handed the wallet back to Zach, Zach Miller, who was a profoundly private person, Zach, who would never give something so intimate to the vultures. “You wouldn’t do that.”
“I did, though. They were working on her and I was standing there and you were talking to the EMTs and they wouldn’t let me near her and they found out I was her boyfriend and they came swarming over and they asked me if I had a photo — they said it would
help —”
“How. How would it help.”
“They said it would. I figured the police, maybe? The investigation? I was too stupid to think it through, that they wanted her for their property like everyone else. And that if I gave the photo to them, it would
be there forever, for anyone who punched in her name.”
Zach stood in front of William T., not trying to apologize or excuse. That dark night on that dark street flung itself up in William T.’s mind, followed by the drive to the hospital and the fluorescent-lit hospital hallway that came afterward, where he had talked with the cops and then the EMTs, while Zach, a rigid shadow, had stood against the wall. He looked now at the young man before him, standing there with his arms at his sides, and his anger disappeared.
“It’s not your fault.”
“It’s none of our faults,” Zach said. “But when does it stop? That’s my question.”
He and Zach and Crystal had within months been turned into shadow people, the silent, off-to-the-sides witnesses, while their girl was fed upon by people who didn’t know her and didn’t love her, all with Lucia’s permission. Charlie had turned into a man, a fierce and angry man, when up until then he had been a reserved and gentle boy.
“I love her,” Zach said.
“I know you do, son.”
That — “son” — undid the both of them. William T. put his arms around the boy, who started to weep, the first time William T. had ever known Zach Miller to cry. After a while Zach got back into his truck, which had been shuddering impatiently the whole time, and disappeared down the road.
After dinner, William T. lowered himself onto the front step, the scent of cut wood rising from the pile next to him, and fished the little phone out of his pocket. The tiny screen glowed and he fumbled for the right button. A single push and her name came shining up.
He pressed her name and watched the green phone symbol light up.
It rang and rang and he sat there and let it. The night would come when she would pick up, wouldn’t it? When the “call fail“ symbol appeared, he slipped the phone back into the recesses of his pocket and sat there. The last time he’d spoken with Charlie — Charles — the boy had been impatient.
“William T., listen to me,” he had said. “Maybe you think you’re helping Mallie by spending every minute of every day worrying about her, but you’re not. All this worry and panic and darkness, it’s like a disease. It does her no good.”
“You turning New Age on me, Charlie?”
“Charles. And she’s tougher than you think. She’ll call if she wants to,” Charlie said. “She needs to get her life back, William T., and so do you, and so do I.”
The boy had changed. Was it Amanda’s influence? Amanda, with the dark cloud of hair and the many rings and the shy way that hid a core of steel; Amanda, who’d been his friend since elementary school; Amanda, who had become his sounding board in the absence of Mallie. Had Charlie and Amanda fallen in love? Because love could do that to a person, make you fierce and strong in ways you hadn’t known before. Now William T. looked up at the sky and arrowed his thoughts and sent them winging over the land to wherever Mallie might be: Bless her and keep her safe. William T. had given up on the idea of a benevolent God, because what kind of benevolent God would let such misery exist? He still believed, or tried to believe, that there was something beyond himself. Because he himself was not enough. That had been proven.
The kitchen door opened and then Crystal eased herself down onto the step next to him. He put his arm around her.
“What are you doing out here, William T.?”
“Talking to God.”
He sensed surprise travel through her body. “I didn’t know you talked to God.”
“I don’t even believe in God. But I talk anyway.”
She leaned against him and put her cheek against his so that they were looking up at the same angle. The stars were brightening now, as night deepened, and the Milky Way was visible, a dusty veil drawn over part of the sky. Headlights blinked and stuttered their way along Williams Road. There was a time, only weeks ago, when he would have assumed they were coming for them. For a statement, an update, maybe hoping he would get angry and start cursing on camera, the way he had in the beginning. Back then they had chased him down whenever a new crisis arose — Mallie’s pregnancy, the birth of the baby, the news of Lucia’s diagnosis — but now no one appeared in person. Dozens of unanswered messages left on the home voicemail, yes, but no cars. No television cameras. Maybe they were all afraid of him.
“William T., I keep thinking about what if she wants the baby,” Crystal said. “What then?”
He shook his head. If she wanted that baby, if she was going to try to get that baby, wrest it away from its foster parents, he did not know how he would cope. He did not have the strength it took to contemplate the idea of Mallie ending up with the child he had been so against from the beginning. Let alone what it would take from him to look at that baby and not imagine, every single time he did, how the child had come to be.
When Crystal had gone inside to bed, William T. opened up his phone to call her again but stopped at the sight of his outgoing calls: Mallie. Mallie. Mallie. Mallie. Mallie. Mallie. Mallie. Mallie. Mallie. Mallie. Mallie.
Jesus.
She needs to get her life back, William T., and so do you.
His life was worrying about Mallie and watching over Mallie and wondering what Mallie was thinking about at that very moment. Maybe Charlie was right and he was driving himself and everyone around him nuts. The image of Crystal by herself, dancing in the late-afternoon air of the diner’s kitchen, came into his mind. The Vienna waltz.
He opened up the search bar on the phone. Crystal had shown him how to use it, but goddammit, these tiny phones were a pain in the ass. He poked at the letters with his thick, slow index finger:
w and a and l and t and z.
Shouldn’t this phone be easier by now? Shouldn’t he have mastered at least the basics of typing on it? He kept on typing. how
and to.
How to Waltz Dance for Beginners.
Learn to Waltz.
How to Dance Waltz — Basic Beginner Routine.
How to Waltz — Swing and Sway.
How to Do a Waltz Ladies’ Underarm Turn.
Was it possible to teach yourself how to dance?
Mallie
When Mallie was four, after a series of infections, the doctors told her parents that her tonsils had to come out. All the ice cream you want, they had told her, all the Popsicles, all the ice chips. When she woke up, though, it was impossible to eat the ice cream and Popsicles they brought her. Her throat was on fire. It hurt even to open her mouth. All she could do was shake her head. There had been nothing between the memory of All the ice cream you want and the new memory of waking up with a fiery throat in a small bed next to a window.
But in all the years since they cut the tonsils out of her, had her body secretly carried inside it the memory of a slicing knife? And in all the months between the night of the shining sidewalk and now, did her body secretly know exactly what happened to it? What if every muscle and bone and artery and cell, somewhere way deep down, remembered?
The facts of the past were known. The reasons behind them weren’t. And now that she was back, neither was the future. Making up a story from it all was like solving an algebraic equation, which was something she used to love doing.
Their high school math teacher, Ms. Bailey, had told them to use their imaginations when it came to solving word problems, algebraic equations and geometry proofs. That there was more than one way to solve a problem, even if at first inspection, it seemed unsolvable. Everything could be resolved, according to Ms. Bailey, even if the solution was unexpected, ungainly and messy. No matter how hard it seemed, if they only used their imagination and their knowledge, they could figure out a way to make it work.
Pretend the problem is a mystery that doesn’t want to be a mystery, she had said. The problem wants to be known. It wants to be seen. It wants to be understood. Help it be not a mystery.
One late night two years into her practice at Northwoods Therapeutic M
assage, Mallie had explained her work to William T. in terms of stories and secrets. That everyone’s body contained them. That it was possible to understand those secrets and stories by the laying on of hands.
“The laying on of hands?” he said. “Isn’t that a religious thing?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know. I’m not religious. There’s a lot of hard stories out there, William T. — that’s what I do know.”
She had begun at that point to volunteer as massage therapist at the women’s shelter in Utica. Those women’s stories were the hardest, both to listen to and to ease. Violence and fear ingrained itself into muscle memory, even into bone, and the women were often afraid of even gentle touch. They had to learn how to re-enter their own bodies, how to inhabit their own skin, how to own themselves. How to shake off the dark birds.
That conversation with William T. haunted her. Her own body must hold an impossible story now. A dark bird had gained entrance to her. They waited everywhere in the world, invisible, ready to invade someone’s body and spirit. When a boy marched into a school spraying bullets, dark birds watched from above. When a man stood behind a pulpit and proclaimed to know the only truth, dark birds beat their wings over the congregation. When a man pushed a girl down on the pavement, dark birds were there, gathered on the man’s shoulders.
The piles rose around her on the bed: Time and Pain and Darkness and Mallie. An unknown man had robbed her and raped her and bashed her head with a flowerpot. She had been taken to the ER with a head injury. She had been unconscious far longer than expected because of a subsequent brain infection. She had been pregnant. Despite passionate arguments to abort the fetus, the pregnancy was allowed to continue. At thirty-six weeks the baby had been delivered via C-section and placed with her mother, Lucia, and, upon her mother’s death, and as a result of a sealed custody hearing, with unknown others. Months later, she had emerged from unconsciousness and begun her recovery. In all these things, she’d had no say in the matter. No choice. And it was too late now to have any choice. Wasn’t it?
The Opposite of Fate Page 11