The Opposite of Fate

by Alison McGhee

  “. . . Mallie? It’s . . . me.”

  Zach Miller. Her heart stampeded in her chest. Around her, in the parking lot, people entered the diner, left the diner, opened and shut car and truck doors. Engines revved to life and tires crunched on gravel. Blinkers blinked left and right, flashing silently in her rearview mirror. There was noise in the background of the message, noise and static. Banging, of pots, maybe, and indistinct voices.

  “Mallie, I’m so sorry. I should have called you earlier but I didn’t know what to say. I still don’t. Everything is complicated.”

  She clutched the phone to her ear while the voicemail played itself out and then she bent over the steering wheel. It felt as if he were there in the truck with her. She pressed play on the voicemail again and listened to his voice, indistinct, hesitant, but his. She pressed play again. And again.

  William T. had told her that Charlie had left the cabin and moved in with him and Crystal after it happened. So Zach had been alone. She pictured him in the hospital room, driving back and forth from their cabin in Forestport by himself, throwing tennis balls for Sir by himself, eating by himself, by himself, by himself. Panic suffocated its way up her throat and fogged her head.

  My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?

  Long ago, the Sunday-school teacher’s eyes had filled with tears when she told them about the crucifixion and the resurrection. “Can you feel God’s love for you?” she used to say, and hands around the small yellow-painted room would rise. “He loves you so much.”

  Mallie’s hand had stayed down. The story had meant nothing to her. It still meant nothing. What was God and where was God and what was heaven and where was it? She hated the idea of the heaven portrayed in the paintings on the old Sunday-school wall, with the angels and haloes and golden harps, a place where light streamed down from an endless unseen sun.

  Where, in that heaven, was Zach Miller’s hand holding hers? Where was the cabin where she and Zach lived, where on summer nights the crickets were wild, their song rising from the woods and the creeks that ran behind it? Where was their old bed that sagged in the middle, quilts and pillows piled high? Didn’t heaven hold anything familiar? Her heaven had been right here on earth, lost now in all the days that had passed since the night of the shining sidewalk.

  She had known Zach Miller since she was five years old. Her earliest memory of him was from school Picture Day. The school secretary stood at the head of the line of children, a basket full of cheap plastic combs on a stool next to her. The Olan Mills photographer ducked under an umbrella-like canopy by his camera, which stood on a tripod. His butt stuck out, which they all wanted to laugh about but didn’t. Second graders, first graders, and Mallie’s kindergarten class, three separate lines, everybody single-file.

  “Next,” the secretary would say, and put a finger under each of their chins, tilt their head up and look at them appraisingly. Sometimes she nodded and gave a little push, and that child advanced to the white backdrop and sat on the stool and smiled when the Olan Mills man said, “Cheese.”

  Most of the time, though, the school secretary tilted her head and squinted.

  “One second,” she said, and she would pick up a comb and turn the children into sober, formal versions of themselves. They bent their heads and submitted. But that day, one week into kindergarten for Mallie and second grade for Zach, Zach Miller didn’t.

  “No.”

  “Just a quick comb.”

  “No.”

  “Excuse me, Zach” — all the teachers knew the Miller boys’ names; they were a legendary family, multiple branches extending throughout North Sterns — “but your mother would want you to look nice for the photo.”

  “No, she wouldn’t.”

  Mallie was in the line right next to his, so she saw the whole thing. He tilted his head back and looked up at the school secretary — way up; she was a big, tall woman — and held her gaze.

  “Of course she would. No mother wants her child looking like a ragamuffin in his school photo.”

  “My mother doesn’t care about stuff like that.”

  Everyone was watching at that point. Even the Olan Mills man poked his head out from behind the big black-draped camera to check out the back-talking second grader.

  “Every mother cares about stuff like that, Zach.”

  “Not mine.”

  His eyes. That’s what she remembered most from that day. They were small children, so those eyes of his had been in the world only a short while. Like hers. But in her memory his eyes were dark hazel, like green-flecked smoke, and completely steady on the secretary’s. Zach Miller was fearless. All of them, all the little kids waiting in line behind both of them, could feel it. They watched as the secretary hesitated. She finally lowered the comb and nodded at him.

  “Okay. Go on, then.”

  She smiled the kind of smile that didn’t mean happy. Her smile was the period at the end of a drifting sentence, an I’m lost kind of smile.

  When the pictures came back, Mallie snuck a peek at Zach’s photo. He was sitting in the seat across the aisle from her on the school bus. Zach looked exactly the way he always did, gazing out from behind the clear pane on the front of the packet, whereas she looked like a scrubbed, intimidated version of herself. He saw her looking, reached across the aisle and touched her face in her photo, through the glassine window.

  “I like your picture,” he said.

  “You do?”

  “Yeah.”

  That was all he said. But he looked at her and smiled. Zach Miller in that Batman T-shirt, those hazel eyes the color of the foothills in March, calm even back then. She and Zach were small and then they weren’t and they were children and then they weren’t, and where was he now? Had he given up on her? Had the fact of the baby, how it had come to be, that it was in the world, driven him away?

  When she tried to think about the baby, tried to imagine it as a living, breathing being, there was only emptiness. It felt as if she were on the bank of a great river and the baby was living his life on the other shore. Out of sight, out of hearing, out of feeling. But shouldn’t she feel something? Shouldn’t she sense the baby somehow, if not the presence of him, then the loss of him?

  She put her hand over her stomach again, the place where the baby had grown. The place where they had opened her up and taken him out. If she were on the massage table, one of her own clients, she would put her hands on her stomach in just this way, and her body would speak to her. Not in words, but in feeling. In memory. In history.

  What if the baby were Zach’s?

  At the thought, all the emptiness instantly filled itself in with sound and laughter and crying and a baby’s face, asleep and awake and smiling. A baby’s hands. A baby waking in the night with her and Zach next to it. A refrigerator covered with photos that looked like a miniature Zach, who on his school Picture Day, wore jeans and an old Batman T-shirt that was probably a hand-me-down from one of his cousins. Just then her phone buzzed and she picked it up with shaking hands, her heart racing again.

  But it was Beanie.

  knock, knock.

  She didn’t text back. The screen went dark while he waited, then leapt to life again.

  who’s there?

  She watched the familiar words appear on the screen and heard William T.’s voice saying them, the way he had said them so often to her and Charlie when they were little. Beanie wasn’t waiting for her to respond. He was telling the joke one-sided.

  howard.

  howard who?

  howard you like to hear another knock-knock joke?

  In her head, William T. could barely get out the punch line because he was already laughing. He had always laughed harder than anyone else at his knock-knock jokes. It was his laughter, rather than the joke, that had made her and Charlie laugh. Now she pictured Beanie, telling jokes to his daughter. Beanie
would be a good father.

  The custody hearing after Lucia’s death had been closed and confidential, according to William T. and Crystal, and the baby had been placed with foster parents. Were they good parents? If they felt sick at the thought of how he had come into existence, did they suppress it? Was that part of their training? She already knew how William T. felt about the baby. His repulsion was clear from the way he stiffened and turned away at the mention of him. How did Charlie feel? Crystal? Zach? None of them could feel the blankness that she did. She had lost time, but no one else had. Even if they’d wanted to, there had been no way to press pause and wait for her. No matter how much they loved her, they had moved on without her. She would always be behind, behind, behind.

  She clicked the phone off and sat there in the truck. Everything used to be easy, didn’t it? She and Zach were easy, she and Charlie were easy, she was easy in her life and so was everyone around her. It couldn’t have been smooth, all of it, but when she looked back now, it all seemed that way. Images bathed in golden light. Late nights with Charlie smiling over his playlist, she and Zach swaying around the living room with their beers. Their bodies doing what the music told them to do. She pictured Zach holding their imaginary baby against his chest, dancing him around the living room. It was a dream she hadn’t known she had, until now. Herself a mother, Zach a father, their baby whoever he would be. Crystal had told her once how, when Johnny was a baby and crying all the time, she used to waltz him around the trailer in the middle of the night.

  “It soothed him,” she said. “Not much soothed him back then, but that did.”

  “Do you still dance, Crystal?”

  “No. I wanted to take lessons once, with William T. But he said he was too big and clumsy to dance. So I didn’t bring it up again.”

  “Maybe you could dance by yourself?” Mallie offered. She hated to think of Crystal not dancing. Not doing something she loved to do because she didn’t have a partner to do it with. But Crystal had just smiled and shrugged.

  William T.

  The phone in his pocket buzzed and chirped like a trapped bird.

  “William T.?”

  Zach again. William T. pressed the phone against his ear and ordered himself into neutrality. No anger. No blame. He would be Switzerland.

  “Hi, Zach. You talk to her yet?”

  Silence. Was Zach still there? It was impossible to tell with these tiny phones. There was no definitive click of a conversation ending, the other phone replaced in its cradle. There was only dead air.

  “I left her a message,” Zach said.

  A message? A message wasn’t enough. Switzerland, he reminded himself. The boy — the man — was talking again.

  “William T., I need to talk to you. Remember how none of us knew if she would ever come back? Remember how they told us that she was going to be like that for the rest of her life?”

  “Of course I remember. Why bring it up now?”

  “Because it factors into something you don’t know, William T., which is that before I moved to Montana I tried to get custody of the baby.”

  “The baby?”

  “Yes.”

  Zach Miller with a baby? A baby whose biological father was a demon? What the hell had he been thinking? He nearly snapped out the words but stopped himself in time.

  “But it wasn’t your baby.”

  “I know that, William T. We both know they tested my DNA, seeing as Mallie was my girlfriend. But when she didn’t die and they decided to make her go through with the pregnancy, I tried to get custody instead of Lucia.”

  Exclamations and questions and objections thickened his tongue and he couldn’t get the words out. The image of Zach Miller roaring around in his truck with a baby in a car seat next to him sprang into his mind.

  “What about a car seat?” he heard himself say.

  “What are you talking about, William T.?”

  “A baby has to have a car seat. You can’t adopt a goddamn baby without a car seat. They won’t even let you leave the hospital until they make sure the car seat’s properly installed. They watch you like a hawk, Zach.”

  “William T., are you crying?”

  “Hell no!”

  Hell yes, though. He was crying. It was stunning, the idea of Zach Miller trying to raise that baby. Who had he talked to? Had he filled out forms? Had he told anyone? Had he gone through some kind of foster-parent training? Images appeared in his mind one after another: Zach in a huge store, comparing car seats; Zach leaning over a Formica counter in a courthouse somewhere, filling out forms; Zach sitting in a classroom taking notes alongside other would-be foster parents; Zach in the hospital with deathly ill Mallie, whispering to her his plan to raise the baby; Zach with a bottle of formula, Zach with a box of diapers, Zach in the truck alone, driving off to Montana. Alone. Alone was the feeling that rose up in William T., and he brushed the tears away but they kept on coming.

  “I’m sorry, Zach,” he said when he could keep his voice steady again.

  “What are you sorry for, William T.?”

  “That I didn’t know.” That he had assumed Zach couldn’t take it any longer and just took off. Zach had been banned from the hospital, just like William T. and Crystal. And yet William T. had blamed him anyway. Blamed him for leaving Mallie alone, with the vultures and the flock as dark guards.

  “Yeah. I tried. I wanted that baby.”

  “But why?”

  Unspoken was He wasn’t yours and Half his DNA comes from a rapist and Could you ever raise a kid knowing he wasn’t yours?

  Zach answered all the questions, though, without William T.’s having to ask. “Because half of him is Mallie, William T.”

  His voice sounded tired. Old. Much older than twenty-five, which was his age. He was still talking. “I thought about names, even.”

  Names. A name was a thread that stitched a child to the earth. A name made a child definite. Against William T.’s will, a small boy began forming himself in William T.’s head. A small boy with dark hair like Mallie’s, a small boy with a wagon like the one Mallie used to have, a small boy fascinated by birds the way Mallie used to be, a small boy who liked red grapes, not green, cut into quarters, the way Mallie used to like them. A small boy in a car seat strapped into a car. A small boy holding a stuffed penguin to his cheek like the stuffed penguin Mallie had carted around everywhere when she was a small girl. A small boy who would swing between his parents’ hands while they all sang, Wheee.

  The child and the ghost of the child Mallie used to be hung inside William T.’s head, and it felt unbearable. It must have been unbearable to Zach too, but he had gone as far as thinking about a name.

  “Did you come up with one?” he said.

  “Yeah. Maybe. I talked to Lucia about it, even.”

  “Did not. I didn’t know you ever talked to her about it.”

  “We talked about a bunch of things.”

  Another thing that William T. had not known. He himself had cut ties with Lucia after she was awarded guardianship. He had been so full of anger and frustration at the wrongs he felt she’d inflicted on her unconscious daughter that he didn’t trust himself around her. Not even in the end, sick and dying though she was. It had not been Christian of him, but then again, he wasn’t much of a

  Christian.

  “The baby’s in this world, William T., like it or not. He’s part Mallie. You ever think about that?”

  “It’s part rapist too. You ever think about that?”

  “More than you can imagine. And I already told you: Don’t call him ‘it.’ ”

  William T. could barely wrap his head around the fact that Zach had wanted custody. From the minute the decree came down that the pregnancy would proceed, Zach must have been planning. Going back and forth, considering the options and the ramifications of the act. Zach was a Miller but he was not, unlike his
cousins and his parents, an impulsive man. Zach must have been working behind the scenes. He had been to see Lucia, which was more than any of the rest of them had done. The two of them had come up with names, a boy name and a girl name.

  “What happened, Zach? Did they laugh you out of the court? How

  far did you get?”

  “Not far. Big surprise — it turns out that a devoted grandmother has a much better shot at custody of her grandson than a twenty-four-year-old single man. When I said they should give me a shot, that I had been with Mallie for years, that I loved her, they just looked at me.”

  “You sound tired, Zach.”

  “I feel tired, William T.”

  “She’s back. Remember that.”

  “But I’m not the same person I was. None of us are.”

  William T. sat for a while at the kitchen table after they hung up. It was late afternoon and Crystal was at the diner, closing up for the day. Soon she would get in her car and make the five-mile drive north. How long had it been since he had sat on the porch and waited for her to pull into the driveway with a sense of happy anticipation instead of weariness? Not since Before, which was how he sometimes thought of it. The Before, when Mallie and Zach and Charlie lived in Forestport, and The After, when everything fell apart and they were thrust into the confounding world of medical intervention and politics and religion and legal rights versus what was best for Mallie.

  He forced himself just to sit. Feel the cement step beneath him, the air cooling as the sun sank lower in the sky. Breathe in the smells: cut grass, manure from the farm fields up the road, peonies in full bloom. When was the last time he had been aware of the scents of North Sterns in the early summer? Not since Before. The sound of tires humming on the macadam of Route 274 came floating on the air now, punctuated by crickets and the rustle of squirrels in the oak tree. Crystal, slight behind the wheel, not bothering to put on her blinker as she turned into the driveway, parked and shut off the ignition.

  “William T.? What’s wrong? Is Mallie —”