The Opposite of Fate

by Alison McGhee

  She stood on the other side of the car, her door still open, headlights still on. Alarm on her face. In that moment he knew how he had neglected her. How he had forged on alone, blind in his anger and the knowledge that he was helpless to change what they were doing and had done to Mallie. He had left Crystal behind. He had left Charlie behind. He had left them all behind, following his own obsessive routines — the baby, the playground, the box of pain — and forgetting that he was not alone in his sorrow. He looked at her now, his quiet Crystal.

  “I didn’t know what to do, Crystal,” he said. “And now I don’t know how to fix things.”

  She tilted her head and looked at him. Then reached into the car, turned off the headlights, and came to him on the steps. Her tread noiseless, as always, on the driveway. Crystal floated instead of walked, as if she weighed nothing. She sat down next to him, a wraith of a woman — she had lost weight and she did not have weight to lose — and he put his arm around her and pulled her to him.

  “I got stuck,” he said. “Didn’t I?”

  “Yes. Like a lot of us.”

  “No. I’m the one who’s stuck. I was holding her back, wasn’t I? That’s why she took off.”

  “You pulled her through, William T. Sometimes I think it was the sheer force of your will that kept her alive.”

  “But I have to let her go now. She’s back and I have to let her go. It’s her life now.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “I talked to Zach.”

  “How is he?”

  “He told me he tried to get custody of the baby initially, instead of Lucia, but they wouldn’t hear of it. Did you know about that?”

  He could tell from her tiny flinch that no, she had not known. She shook her head, a brief back-and-forth.

  “Why didn’t he tell us?”

  “Maybe he would’ve, but . . .” Her voice trailed off, so he finished for her.

  “But he probably thought I’d hate the idea. Which is why he didn’t bring it up with you either.”

  She nodded against his shoulder. He imagined the two of them, Crystal and Zach, discussing the idea of Zach raising the baby. Crystal would have listened without speaking. She would have absorbed everything Zach said. She would have let him talk through the whole idea, the reasons for and against, the ramifications, the various scenarios. One of those scenarios would have been “What would William T. think?” Clearly, Zach had known what his reaction would have been. Even now he could hear his own voice thundering forth with all the reasons why it wouldn’t work, the awful weight of history that the child, and by extension all of them, would carry on its shoulders. The force of his anger had made it impossible for Zach to talk about it with them. Sitting there on the porch, with Crystal tired and sad against his shoulder, he waited to feel the flush of fury at the idea of that baby in their lives forever, which, only a few months ago, would have flooded through him.

  But all that came was a feeling of regret, that he had somehow let Crystal down. That he had let Zach down. That he, William T., had missed something he should have seen all along, which was that his love for Mallie did not exist in a vacuum. They all loved her. They all wanted to do right by her. He had thought that he knew what was best for her, but had he?

  Mallie

  You could go a long way in upstate New York. A long, long way. What you had to do was stop thinking and just drive. No GPS, no map. Little frame houses and camps, some with propped-open doors and signs in the front yards.

  People said it was impossible to hide, in the age of cell phones and internet and voice and facial recognition, drones and security cameras and GPS software, but it wasn’t. The trick was to skim along the surface of the world. Have no permanent home. Not answer your cell phone. Stay away from computers. Give a different name when you checked in to a motel. Wear a wig. Use only cash. Leave no trail. Stand in a different way. Move in a different way. Consciously confound your body. If you had good posture, slouch. If you slouched, stand up straight. If you walked fast, stroll. If you slept on your side, turn on your back.

  pregnant? we can help.

  It was a homemade sign on a building just off the road at the far end of a long curve north of Saranac. The words were carefully painted, using a stencil, but the we can help slanted slightly downward. The parking lot behind the building was painted with wobbly lines, as if whoever was holding the can of spray paint had been unsure. A single car huddled next to the entrance as if it were scared to be alone. Mallie pulled into a far spot, where the road couldn’t be seen. In the distance came the whine of a semi as it downshifted.

  Once, before Zach, when she was new to sex, Mallie had been afraid she’d gotten pregnant. She missed her period and fear grew inside her. She had been barely sixteen at the time. She had driven to Utica, to a drugstore where no one knew her, and bought a pregnancy test: negative. She had bought another, and then another: negative. But her period hadn’t come and her fear had grown. What would she do? She would have an abortion. The answer was instant and immediate: drive to the women’s clinic in Syracuse and have an abortion.

  But in that time, in those three weeks of believing she was pregnant and despite knowing that she would choose an abortion, she had changed the way she lived. It was winter, and she had walked carefully on the ice. She had not drunk a single beer, even though it was a go-to-parties-and-drink-beer time of life. She had eaten leafy greens every day. She was sixteen, and if she was pregnant she was going to have an abortion, and still: instinct had made her act like a mother protecting the baby growing inside her.

  Then she had gotten her period, and the plan to abort had evaporated.

  Later came Zach, and with Zach came love and care and constant birth control and a lack of fear. Now she put her hands on her belly, took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. Took another deep breath and pushed it down through her fingers into the imagined blank space of her womb. Did the baby’s spirit still linger there? Was she somehow still connected to him?

  Nothing.

  Shouldn’t she feel something?

  She was a mother, wasn’t she? Somehow?

  She thought of her own mother. Not the mother of her later years, the mother lost to the rules of her strict church, but the mother that Lucia had been when Mallie and Charlie were small. The mother who held their hands and walked them down the dirt road to the blackberry patch. Who made them macaroni and cheese and read to them before bed. Who tried to help them, as best she could, when their father died. Who took them to the Jersey shore. Who signed their report cards and drew smiley faces next to her signature. She had been proud of her children, hadn’t she? She had loved them. She had done the best she could.

  Mallie bent her head to the steering wheel. The later years were what they were — years of pain and confusion and sorrow — but the early years were what they were too. The early and the late, indivisible and eternal. Unsolvable equations.

  “Mom,” she whispered. Not “Lucia,” the name she had called her mother those last years, but “Mom.” “I hope you’re at peace now.”

  She lifted her head and her mother appeared before her. Right there, right in the air in front of the truck, here in this bleak parking lot in the high peaks of the Adirondacks.

  “Mom?”

  Lucia floated closer. Her hands were held out as if she wanted Mallie to take them. She was smiling. Her hair was long and brushed and her teeth were white and her eyes were clear and filled with love. When was the last time Mallie had seen her mother like that? Was she, Mallie, dying? Was her mother here to welcome her to whatever world lay beyond this one?

  Her mother shook her head, still smiling. She wasn’t dying. Her mother was not here to welcome her to that other world. She had come back from it to show her . . . what? That she was still here? That her spirit was whole now? That she loved her daughter? That things would be all right? That some connections could n
ot be broken? That there was a way to solve the unsolvable equation?

  Tap, tap.

  A woman standing outside the window smiled apologetically at how Mallie startled in fear. She made a roll-the-down-window motion with her hand, peered in at the box of fortune cookies riding shotgun and nodded, as if she approved.

  “Sorry,” she said. “Didn’t mean to scare you. Do you want to come inside? Can I get you some coffee or tea?”

  Mallie’s mother had vanished, replaced by a smiling unfamiliar woman here at the forlorn-looking pregnant? we can help place. At the top of the cracked gray cement steps and inside the door, was a linoleum floor, wood paneling, a waiting room to the right.

  “Are you cold?” the woman said. Her graying black hair was pinned back haphazardly with bobby pins and a single bright yellow barrette. She held out a lidded container of cookies.

  “They’re oatmeal raisin. Although I noticed you have enough fortune cookies out there to feed an army. Have a seat. What brings you here?”

  “I’m not pregnant, if that’s what you’re asking. I haven’t had sex in more than a year and a half.”

  The woman smiled. “Well, no sex in a year and a half is definitive. It means that pregnancy would be a miracle, wouldn’t it?”

  “It’s not always a miracle.”

  “It can be messy. Getting pregnant, especially when you didn’t plan to, can sure be messy. That much I know. For evidence, I present to you the existence of my two youngest kids.”

  “But you still think it’s a miracle?”

  “My kids? Well, sometimes it’s harder than other times.” She rolled her eyes in a motherish way, a way that Mallie could tell was a habit, meant to bring herself closer to the person she was talking to.

  “Don’t joke,” Mallie said. “This is a real question I’m asking. Do

  you think that life is always a miracle?”

  The woman paused. She took a breath and started to speak, then reconsidered and sat for a minute, thinking.

  “Yes. I do. I do think life is a miracle,” she said finally. “And I also think that miracles sometimes begin in messy circumstances, circumstances that no one planned on or wanted.”

  Somewhere in the building, a grandfather clock chimed. Such a formal sound in such a simple little place. The woman was quiet, waiting for Mallie to say something because it was her turn to say something and this was how conversation was supposed to go. How had it gone when she was unable to talk for herself? Had everyone talked back and forth right over her body, making decisions for her? Or had those conversations taken place somewhere else, in lawyers’ offices and courtrooms, in churches and at rallies, on television screens, where talking heads looked into the camera and talked sideways with other talking heads.

  Mallie pictured William T. and Crystal sitting on the couch in their house, holding hands and watching as Lucia and others decided her fate. She pictured Zach Miller driving west to Montana, escaping the scene of the crime, driving and driving and driving with the windows open and the wind drowning out his thoughts. The woman leaned forward.

  “Do you want to tell me about it? There’s no rush. I have all the time in the world.”

  “What if somebody raped you and you got pregnant and you were unconscious and you couldn’t speak for yourself and others decided you would have the baby and you had no choice in the matter? Is that still a miracle?”

  The woman shook her head, but it wasn’t a shake that meant No, that’s not a miracle. It was a shake of I’m sorry. Then the woman’s eyes filled with tears. “You’ve been through something awful, haven’t you?”

  Darkness + Time + Mallie + Pain. Yes. Something awful.

  Then the woman put her hand over her mouth. “Wait. You’re not her, are you? You’re not —”

  Mallie shrugged and met the woman’s eyes.

  “I heard you had woken up.” The woman’s voice was a whisper. “Are you . . . how do you . . . what do you . . .”

  “How do I feel about the pregnancy?”

  “Yes. What would you have done, if you had been able to think for yourself?” The chatty-counselor attitude had disappeared and the woman rushed on. “Would you have carried the baby to term? Or would you have gotten an abortion? Now that you’re back, do you think you’ll try to —” She caught herself and stopped talking.

  “Get the baby back?”

  The woman looked away. Maybe she was thinking, trying to come up with the right answer. But what if there was no right answer?

  “What would you do?” Mallie said. “Would you still want a baby if its father was the man who raped you and left you to die? Would you feel like, Well, the baby had no say in the matter, it was just an innocent baby? Or would the thought of raising that baby make you sick?”

  The woman said nothing.

  “Say you did want the baby,” Mallie continued. “What about the baby himself? Would you think, He has a life with his foster parents, and how horrible to take a child from his parents?”

  Silence.

  “And what about the girl? Would you think about her? If you did, would you look at everything she already lost — her mother, her boyfriend, a whole huge stretch of her life, her privacy, the right to make up her own mind, the right to abort the baby or keep the baby or adopt the baby out — and would you think, That girl should get to do whatever she wants now? Whatever feels right to her at this point?”

  The woman said nothing for a long time. Mallie sensed her trying to collect her thoughts. Then finally the woman said, “Does something feel right to you at this point?”

  Mallie shook her head.

  What she was thinking about, when she left the small white building with the gray cracked cement steps, cookies in a plastic bag that the woman had insisted she take despite the army-feeding box of fortune cookies on the passenger seat, was her tonsils. What she had wanted to say to the woman at the pregnant? we can help place, was, “Have you ever had your tonsils out?” Because maybe then the woman would have understood what she was trying to say about pain, and the memory of it.

  William T. would have understood. She pictured him sitting on his porch steps, nodding. He would have put two and two together and known what she was really asking, which was, Did she remember, somewhere within, everything that had happened to her that dark night? In that moment, she wanted to talk to him. But the thought of his grim face, his worry, his hovering, exhausted her.

  Make up a story. Use your imagination. Solve the equation so that you can figure out how to live now, Mallie.

  The four known variables of the equation are A, B, C and D. A = Time and B = Pain and C = Mallie and D = Darkness. Put them together in different ways and see what happens. AB = CD. AC = BD. AD = BC. No matter how she worked the equation, the outcome didn’t change. Time x Pain = Mallie x Darkness. Time x Mallie = Pain x Darkness. Time x Darkness = Pain x Mallie.

  There was no way out. However she solved the problem, the answers would always be Mallie multiplied and divided by Time and Darkness and Pain. All her futures were the same: unbearable. But what if she used her imagination? In her mind, Ms. Bailey stood at the head of the classroom, telling her to solve the equation a different way. That every equation, no matter how confounding it appeared to be, wanted to be solved.

  She drove west, into the fiery rays of the sinking sun, and tried to puzzle her way into the heart of the problem. Mallie was the girl. Darkness assaulted and raped her and left her for dead. Time stretched on for sixteen months, while others made decisions for her. Pain was present then and now.

  None of these variables could be changed, but Darkness was the great unknown. Could she manipulate him so that something unbearable became bearable? Make him something you can somehow live with, she thought. Make him a young man. A boy, even. Twenty years old. Make him drunk? Make him strung out? Make him not remember what he’d done? Make him horrified when
he found out?

  If doing so would solve the unsolvable, then yes.

  Turn him into a real person. Give him a name, call him Darkness. Give him a job, make him a roofer. Give him a mother. Give him a sister, a little sister. Give him friends. Give him a dream, call it college, call it a trip to New Orleans, call it a girlfriend, call it kids, call it a future.

  Make him human, if making him human is what helps you live with what he did to you. If regret and self-hatred make him human, then give him regret and self-hatred. Give him a dark night on a dark street in upstate New York when it was raining and he did something he can’t ever undo. Give him shame. Give him self-hatred. Give him nightmares. Give him a life that is time and pain.

  Give him a life that gives you back yours.

  If A, B, C and D are constants, then:

  Time x Pain = Mallie x D.

  D lives in pain.

  And Mallie figures out a way not to.

  Part Three

  Darkness

  Every new job began with the starter row. Anyone on the crew could do it, but he was usually the one. If he put down the starter row and then the ridge shingles and the flashing around the chimney stacks and vents, he could look at a roof and know that he’d seen the job through start to finish. No one on the ground looking up could tell who did what, but that didn’t matter to him, because he knew. Nights he couldn’t sleep he sometimes eased out of the house and walked around looking at his roofs.

  That was how he thought of them: his roofs. He knew every house he’d shingled over the past two years. Most were within a couple miles of his house. His mother didn’t know he was out and walking around in the middle of the night. She wouldn’t like it. She was a worrier.

  It had taken him a while to learn how to use the air gun right. The compressor couldn’t be set too high or the nails would sink too deep through the shingles, and shingles were neither thick nor strong. Roofs might look tight and solid, but the look was deceptive.